Kip Sabian Recalls Backyard Wrestling Days, Recognizing That Will Ospreay Was Special Early On

– During a recent interview with Fightful’s Sean Ross Sapp, AEW wrestler Kip Sabian breaking into professional wrestling through the backyard wrestling scene in the UK and coming up alongside Will Ospreay. Sabian revealed how he recognized that Ospreay was a prodigy at the time. Below are some highlights:

Kip Sabian on how he began wrestling in the backyard with Will Ospreay at 17 years old: “17. I started way back when. My initial dipping my toes into pro wrestling was actually in Ospreay’s children’s backyard. Again, a young teenager/child at that point. I used to travel to his on weekends, I would get a train which is about two hours, but we were talking about the other day. I found a route that I could take that meant I didn’t have to pay for the last part of the trip. So I would like I’d get a train from where I was in Norwich, I’d get it all the way to London, but I’d stop early at Stratford. I’d hop on an underground line, hop on a different underground line, and then hop a fence. So I didn’t have to pay for that part of the trip. I said, ‘Every couple of weeks we’d go in backyard.’ Was some of the best, but talking of prodigies, Will back then.”

On what it was like with backyard wrestling at the time: “I had my backyard company that I was a part of. To be fair, I think the organizational skills of backyard wrestlers in the UK back then was probably way more organized than pro wrestling in the UK back then, I think, to be honest, like independent wise. Like we had storylines, we had individual federations and we would occasionally come together for what we would call an ‘inter-fed.’ So it would be like my group of backyard wrestlers, Will’s group of backyard wrestlers—the original Forbidden Door.”

On seeing that Will Ospreay was special: “Kelly Sixx, who’s a UK wrestler, he used to wrestle better than me. It was his group. We’d all meet together and do this like the Forbidden Door of backyard wrestling back then. Me and Will just hit it off and I got to watch him progress from being a teenager into the pro wrestling prodigy he is today. Then Nick is probably the only other person I’ve ever felt that about, you know what I mean? Where you can just tell that someone’s special. You can find some of my old stuff somewhere. There may be a couple of things out there.”

Kip Sabian was in action at last Sunday’s AEW x NJPW Forbidden Door, teaming with Killswitch. They lost to the recently reunited Christian Cage and Cope (aka Adam Copeland).