Meet South Carolinian Wrestler Billy Brash
labor strikes, sunsets and Shealy's BBQ
Last July (as many loyal readers know) I travelled through Southern USA via buses and trains, interviewing different people along the way. Slowly I’ve begun to share these interviews in my newsletter. I interviewed North Carolina environmentalist and writer Mallory McDuff, Texas public transit advocate Hexel Colorado and plenty more.
This week I’m sharing a little interview with a high school friend who I knew back in the day as Blane Ellisor. Blane is now known to many people as pro wrestler and entertainer, Billy Brash.
Blane was in the year above me at White Knoll High School, and I always thought of him as a mischievous country boy who drove a big truck. (He might not have actually driven a big truck, but he definitely had friends who did.) We played guitar together sometimes. Once we played Pink Floyd’s “Wish You Were Here” in front of our classmates in the common area at school. I have kept in touch with him over the years just through social media, so it was nice to see him in person after more than a decade.
On my trip I asked each person I interviewed a standard set of questions, to help me learn about people and place.
Blane describes himself as loud, funny and easy going. Home for him is Columbia, South Carolina. He likes Columbia best when school’s out and the students aren’t around. He loves the river and that you’re half an hour’s drive from lots of great places.
”It is one of the best little cities; it's so quiet,” he says.
For Blane the worst thing is the traffic when students are in town.
He goes to social media to get the news like a lot of people I know. A local controversy with Blane was the UPS labor strikes. They affected him personally as he works for UPS when he’s not wrestling on the weekends.
“I actually just recently needed an early morning job and became a supervisor,” he says. “It's one of those things where management isn't allowed to be in the union. So with the strike coming up, I was wouldn't have any choice but to be forced to come in and scab. So it was a moral dilemma of whether I work or whether I stand or lose a job, because it's automatically fired, whether I do the right thing or not. So it's one of those things like ‘how much do I need this money? ‘But luckily, that was that was settled.”
UPS reached an agreement with its workers and fortunately Blane didn’t have to make a decision. The labor strikes weren’t just happening in South Carolina either, it was a national situation and story. You can read a little bit more about the 2023 UPS Union Strikes here.
His favorite restaurants to eat in Columbia are hole-in-the wall barbecue places including Shealy’s which I vaguely remember from my childhood.
He told me about a nice sunset he saw while working the airport.
“We had one the other morning a couple of weeks ago. We had a real bad storm and then once the the dark clouds parted, that nice crisp morning sunrise comes up. It's just real beautiful out there because there's no trees, nothing. You get the big wide open skies,” he says.
He wishes the rest of the world knew what a nice (affordable) place Columbia is to come visit, and that it also has college football and a national baseball team.
“We have great museums. The river’s here. You have a good national swamp right down the road,” Blane says. “And then you're an hour and a half from the food capital of the world (Charleston) and an hour and a half to Charlotte which is another one. Three hours from Atlanta, another major place.”
Blane talked with me about his alter ego Billy Brash.
I remember several boys I grew up with talking about wrestlers all the time, and, even as a child, I could not have cared less. As an adult, far away from my hometown, I find it fascinating watching Blane’s Instagram and seeing the “fights” and drama he’s getting into on the weekend. It’s a cultural thing that so many people (often southerners) enjoy, yet I know so little about it. I wish I’d recorded more and drank less that fateful July day so I could share more of our conversation here. I guess I’ll just have to follow up next time.
After our beers we walked along the river and talked. It was a nice way to spend the short time that I had back on my old stomping ground.
You can read a little bit more about my time in Columbia in my original notes. I’m not done writing about it.
It was so special to catch up with Blane that day. I hope we don’t go as long between drinks in the future.
(I just looked up this phrase “long time between drinks” to make sure I was using it correctly, and turns out it was first used in conversation between Carolina governors in the 1840s. HA!)
Here’s what I’ve been reading/learning about this week.
- This is an article from 2018 but entirely relevant to today from the HBR. It’s called Ego is the Enemy of Good Leadership.
- This NYT opinion piece on thinking for yourself when it comes to politics. A paragraph I particularly liked:
”But it’s up to each of us to scrutinize the beliefs we’ve absorbed from our social milieu to ensure that our values and political commitments are what we truly think they should be — that our beliefs are based on sound reasons rather than brute social forces.”
- This article in The Conversation from ten years ago by Newcastle professor Philip Dwyer on violence. More on him and this topic soon, hopefully!
- Tasmania’s MONA gallery in HOBART made international news last week with its controversial “women only” art exhibition. I first read about it here, in the Washington Post.
- Also, I’ve been reading a little bit lately about the current crisis in Haiti. All you have to do is Google it to get up-to-speed. It’s not happy reading.
I was waiting for your cameo appearance in a wrestling🙈🤠