The summer of 2024 was a momentous one for Scott D’Amore, both personally and professionally.
Ahead of a milestone birthday, a series of events would lead to the Windsor, Ont. native and veteran pro wrestling booker to make a decision that would change the landscape of the industry – both in Canada and beyond.
Two years later, D’Amore is now at the helm of a thriving Maple Leaf Pro Wrestling as it prepares for its biggest show to date on Oct. 3 at Toronto’s Mattamy Athletic Centre, the grounds of the former Maple Leaf Gardens. Building a company he considers uniquely Canadian, D’Amore hopes to be on the precipice of something truly transformative for wrestling in this country.
In February of 2024, Anthem Sports, the parent company of TNA Wrestling, announced the departure of D’Amore, Anthem’s president and the head booker of TNA.
The news came as a shock to the TNA roster and the industry as a whole. In his role for nearly seven years, D’Amore helped dig the company, once the second-largest in North America, out of a creative hole and spearheaded its rebranding back to the TNA name after years as Impact Wrestling. The dismissal came only weeks after the company’s well-received Hard to Kill pay-per-view, its most successful PPV offering in years.
In the weeks and months after his exit, D’Amore laid low.
“It had been six-plus years of my life that had been fully dedicated to rebuilding that brand and I had been a strong believer in the rebrand and fought a long battle uphill to get it back to being TNA Wrestling,” D’Amore told TSN.ca. “And then just as we get that accomplished, finally, I’m kinda left with an abundance of time on my hands. So, I just took a bit of a break and tried to figure out what was going to be next. You lick your wounds, as they say, you sulk for a little bit and just kinda decompress. Then you say, “Okay, what’s next?’”
With his decades in the business and the relationships he’s cultivated during them, D’Amore would have no shortage of options had he desired to join another promotion. But that didn’t really interest D’Amore at the time. He had become accustomed to a particular kind of work environment.
“I had conversations with various people and there’s certainly lots of great opportunities in the business out there right now,” D’Amore said. “The creation of AEW sorta changed the landscape in so many ways for the better, not just in AEW, but for the business in general. And I looked at those things, but ultimately, at this point, it’s been quite a while since I’ve reported in or done stuff other than working for myself. Even in my time at Anthem, one of the great things was so much autonomy to what we were doing. There were parameters set and spirited debate about those things, but once it came to the day-to-day, I was really leading the charge. And the idea of going back to working in a place wasn’t something that appealed to me.”
What did appeal to D’Amore was investing in the health of the Canadian wrestling industry. On his 50th birthday on Aug. 8, 2024, D’Amore announced the launch of Maple Leaf Pro Wrestling. Citing inspiration from the iconic Bret Hart, D’Amore hoped to create a foothold for Canadian talent in an industry that often leaves performers from north of the 49th parallel at a disadvantage.
“There needed to be a development pipeline for Canadian talent to be able to go out there,” D’Amore explained. “Because there is an inherent advantage to being American in this business. It’s just so U.S.-based and the idea of Maple Leaf Pro was to create that – to a create talent scouting, development and showcasing pipeline that took it from soup to nuts, whether you had never been in a wrestling ring before but it had been your dream, or whether you’re one of the very talented independent wrestlers out there who are just looking for some guidance or opportunity…. so the idea was to build something, something truly Canadian, as a platform that could showcase not just Canadian talent, but the very best in the world and really have a focus on Canada and, in essence, being the CFL of wrestling. This is our league that’s going to feature great players, great athletes, from all over the world, but it’s also going to make sure there’s a ton of Canadian representation and development going on.”
If the Maple Leaf Pro name seems familiar, it should be. It comes from Maple Leaf Wrestling, the National Wrestling Alliance territory based in Toronto and run by Frank Tunney from the early 1930s to the mid-1980s. Based at Maple Leaf Gardens, Maple Leaf Wrestling featured top Canadian names like “Whipper” Billy Watson, Billy Red Lyons and Sweet Daddy Siki, as well as top international talent such as Ed “The Sheik” Farhat, Gene Kiniski, Lou Thesz and Terry Funk.
In the late-1970s, Tunney entered into an agreement with Jim Crockett to send much of his top talent to Toronto from Mid-Atlantic Championship Wrestling. That resulted in the likes of Ric Flair, Ricky Steamboat, Roddy Piper and Andre the Giant working the territory on a regular basis. The NWA World Championship would change hands in Toronto on four occasions.
Maple Leaf would end its run in 1984, a year after Tunney’s death. His nephew, Jack Tunney, entered a partnership with Vince McMahon Jr. with Toronto effectively becoming a new territory for the World Wrestling Federation’s national expansion. Moving forward, shows at Maple Leaf Gardens were billed as WWF events. Jack Tunney went to work for McMahon to head the company’s Canadian office, as well as serve as a figurehead authority figure on its TV programming.
Years later, D’Amore would acquire the rights to the Maple Leaf name, as well as its pre-WWF video library. Instead of simply resurrecting that name for his new venture, D’Amore decided on putting a new spin on it. It would acknowledge history but forge its own path.
“If you go look it up, we registered a bunch of different IP as potential names, but ultimately, we thought that Maple Leaf Pro Wrestling gave us a fresh coat of paint, a fresh twist on the Maple Leaf name,” D’Amore said. “And it gave us the MLP initials, which we think stand out and are a little bit different and distinct. So it gave us the opportunity to pay homage to the past, and have it be a big part of what we’re doing, but to also say, ‘Hey, we’re new!’ We’re not restarting up a company that ceased to exist in the ‘80s.”
Beginning with a two-night Forged in Excellence event in the fall of 2024, MLP has now run 30-plus shows. Maple Leaf Pro shows have featured a mix of exciting young Canadians like Mo Jabari, Sheldon Jean and Aurora Teves, established Canadian names like Stu Grayson and Pierre-Carl Ouellette (PCO), and talent from partner promotions from across the world including AEW, New Japan Pro-Wrestling and CMLL among others. Global superstars like Konosuke Takeshita, Andrade El Idolo and Mistico have all worked MLP events.
“I think with our partnerships, we’ve been strategic with whom we partner with and having these types of partners has really helped give us legitimacy and give us access to the very best talent in the world,” D’Amore said. “And it’s allowed us to flesh out some really amazing cards.”
The company’s next giant leap forward came this past summer with the launch of MLP Mayhem, a weekly one-hour show airing on Wednesday nights on TSN. To make the product look as slick as possible, D’Amore brought aboard an all-star team of well-known industry vets like Keith Mitchell, Kevin Sullivan and Tim Wahlberg, who have had decades of experience making TV with WWE, WCW, TNA and AEW.
Filming its initial events as what D’Amore called a proof of concept, the MLP partnership with TSN came to fruition after some stop-and-start talks over the course of months finally got over the line. An official announcement was made in the spring ahead of a July debut.
“There’s certainly other places you could go for distribution, but this is TSN,” D’Amore said of the deal. “This is the home of wrestling. This is where I used to watch Stampede Wrestling every week. This is where you saw RAW and where you saw Nitro. This is the wrestling home in Canada and, as it’s been deemed for years, TSN is ‘The Sports Leader’ here, right? Whether it was Michael Landsberg on the TSN SportsDesk desk at night or whether it was Off the Record, whether it was Gino [Reda] and all the guys, this is where you went for sports in Canada. So we really wanted to forge ahead and build a relationship with TSN and we were lucky to get that done at the turn of the year and that’s why we sit right now being very honoured, very grateful and very excited to be part of the TSN family airing weekly on the network.”
Having a one-hour show is both a blessing and a curse. While both WWE and AEW have multiple hours of programming, MLP is forced to be judicious with the way its minutes are expended. Does that limit expanding storytelling opportunity? Perhaps, but it also forces D’Amore and his crew into finely tuning their editing to come up with the most compelling hour possible.
“With pro wrestling, so much of it is storytelling,” D’Amore said. “It’s weaving those stories into the weekly show. One of the things with a one-hour television show is that it’s so fast-paced and it’s so competitive. Every single minute is so valuable and so important because those 44 minutes of wrestling content are over before you know it. As opposed to a two-hour or three-hour show, we really have to be diligent about how we’re spending every minute. The amount of time that we sit there and look at something and go, ‘Well, that’s two minutes – can we do it in 90 seconds? Maybe cut it down to 60?’, like those types of things really keep us on our toes and keeps us hyper-focused on what we’re trying to accomplish in the most efficient way to accomplish that.”
What everything on Mayhem is leading up to right now is Toronto and the sold-out Northern Rising on Oct. 3.
After months on the shelf with a knee injury, MLP Canadian Champion “The Walking Weapon” Josh Alexander has returned and will take on interim champion Stu Grayson to unify the promotion’s top prize. The MLP Canadian Women’s Championship will also be on the line when Priscilla Kelly defends against Nikki Storm. Rohan Raja is set to vie for Andrade’s AEW National Championship.
But the match that has fans abuzz is the main event where Canadian wrestling legend – and D’Amore’s friend and former roommate – Adam Copeland meets former TNA World Champion Steve Maclin.
The match will be a dream come true for “The Rated-R Superstar.” Copeland was a fan himself before he was an 11-time world champion. In fact, it was at Maple Leaf Gardens where Copeland attended his first-ever wrestling event. But by the time he became a wrestler, the arena no longer hosted events and his desire to perform there appeared to be an impossible pipe dream. That changed with his return to competition in 2020 following a nine-year retirement due to spinal stenosis.
“This isn’t just cool that Adam gets to do this childhood dream,” D’Amore said. “This isn’t just cool for me that I get to call back a roommate of mine from 30 years ago when me, Adam and Jay [‘Christian Cage’ Reso] moved to Moncton, N.B. and lived in this little dingy apartment while we wrestled seven nights a week for the first time in our lives. All of those things are cool, but it’s also such a mega, mega event for wrestling fans to have Adam Copeland. Every time he comes back to Toronto, it’s a huge deal. We saw it at Scotiabank [Arena in 2023 and 2025]. We saw it at Coca-Cola [Coliseum] when he and Christian had that amazing match [in 2024].
“He’s had all these great moments and he’s going to continue to have great moments in Toronto. But I think even the fans understand how special it is to have Adam come back and wrestle in a building that he dreamed about wrestling in. For a long time, he didn’t even think it would be a possibility. He’s joked about how he started thinking, ‘I’m going to have to run a wrestling show there’ to have a chance to wrestle there.”
While D’Amore acknowledges that Copeland, somebody who signed with the WWF only five years after wrestling his first-ever match, wouldn’t have been a beneficiary had an MLP existed when he was coming up, he’s certainly well aware of the kind of difference for Canadian wrestling it will make.
“I think Adam truly understands what this opportunity means for Canadian wrestling, what it means for Canadian wrestlers, what it means for Canadian fans to have a company to call their own,” D’Amore said. “This is such a wonderful event and a special moment because he’s not just doing something that allows him to fulfill his dream, he’s literally laying the foundation for the current and next generations to be able to achieve their dreams. To me, that’s truly amazing and special.”
Though the focus for MLP is squarely on Northern Rising, D’Amore knows there will be a day after. As big as his plans might be, D’Amore is cognizant of moving ahead conscientiously. Too much, too soon for what is still a nascent company could be enough to derail all of the company’s momentum and positive growth.
“As much as we’ve taken great leaps, we also need to be careful to not overstep and grow too fast,” D’Amore said. “I think the fact that we can be seen nationally, coast-to-coast, on television in less than two years [is big] and I think in 2027 we’ll look to start getting out to more markets. I think, obviously, the goal is to eventually to either be A. coast-to-coast or B. be supporting other people as they do events coast-to-coast.”
To that second point, D’Amore envisions a future where MLP talent can help anchor shows across the country the way that MLP’s partner companies do now for them.
“Maybe there’s a world where MLP Mayhem grows to such a big product on TSN where our [homegrown] wrestlers become star wrestlers and, obviously, [we will] graduate some of them onto the AEWs and other bigger leagues, but our stars, our Canadian talent, become big stars,” D’Amore said. “There are so many good independent wrestling promotions out there, coast-to-coast. So maybe [our guys] go out there and [these indies] bring in a Stu Grayson or a 1st Faction (Brent Banks and Sheldon Jean). Maybe they bring in a Michael Allen Richard Clark or Mo Jabari. Maybe, as these people grow into being television stars, MLP can provide some of the talent to bolster their own events in their individual towns and areas in the same way our relationships with AEW and CMLL, et cetera, allow us to bolster our MLP events.”
But whatever does happen for D’Amore and MLP, the aim will remain the same. At the heart of the endeavour is a love for wrestling, especially the Canadian variety. That will be the guiding hand behind everything.
“The goal is about healthy growth and sustaining that growth for Canadian wrestling,” D’Amore said. “It doesn’t even have to be MLP-centric. MLP wants to be supportive and helpful to Canadian wrestling. We have a vibrant scene. We want to build it out to be even more vibrant.”
