Before he was “The Cleaner,” before he was “The Best Bout Machine,” before he was AEW and IWGP World Champion, before he was even Kenny Omega, he was just Tyson Smith, a wrestling fan from Winnipeg.
The Canadian wrestling icon returns to his hometown on Wednesday night for a live edition of Dynamite at the Canada Life Centre as AEW begins a swing through Western Canada. The tour culminates in Apr. 12’s Dynasty pay-per-view at Vancouver’s Rogers Arena where he will compete against Maxwell Jacob Friedman for the AEW World Championship in the main event.
You can catch AEW Dynamite LIVE on Wednesday night from Winnipeg at 8 p.m. ET/ 5 p.m. PT on TSN2, the TSN App, and TSN.ca.
For Omega, Wednesday night is a chance to go back to where his pro wrestling journey began as a child.
“The WWF, at the time, they would probably come to Winnipeg at least once a year for a house show,” Omega told TSN.ca. “They even did it a couple times when they came to a place called the Red River Ex. It’s like a local fair that comes around once a year, so they would sometimes do outdoor shows for the Red River Ex and I would like to go to those. Of course, being a child, I could never afford tickets for that, so that was always the easiest way to make me the most excited birthday boy was to give me WWF tickets. It would always be my dad, my grandpa and myself and those are always great memories, to go to those live shows with them because they got into it.”
While the wrestlers created cherished moments for him on those nights, it’s the 42-year-old Omega who will renew the cycle himself on Wednesday. A new generation of Winnipeg fans might be coming to their first-ever show with Omega taking to the ring to help construct core memories for them. It’s something that’s not lost on Omega.
“That blows my mind because I still sort of feel like I’m trying to do well by the people who came before me,” Omega said. “I don’t want to embarrass myself for the sake of the rich heritage and traditions of professional wrestling that we have seen in Winnipeg. So for me now where I’m in this position where people might actually look at my performance and say, ‘I want to do what this guy does’ or ‘I’ve already decided do it and I like what he’s doing and I’m going to use this as a reference piece or as study material.’ That part really blows my mind because I’ve yet to see myself in that light. But I do accept the responsibility of it and I think that’s why I take my position within the company very seriously.”
That Omega is still an active competitor at all is a minor miracle in itself. In December of 2023, a bout of diverticulitis stopped his career in its tracks. There was a very real chance that his quality of life could be compromised and, had he not seen doctors when he did, his life itself would have been in jeopardy. After surgeries and a lengthy rehab process, Omega made his return to action in January of 2025. Since then, he’s performed on a regular basis.
But if you ask him how he physically feels right now, it’s not such a straightforward query.
“It’s almost a loaded question,” Omega said. “What’s crazy is that I got so used to feeling so bad that bad was kind of the normal and that if anything was even encroaching upon something more positive, I felt like, ‘Wow, boy, do I feel great! I can just take over the world right now. I’m feeling fantastic.’ But that wasn’t really an actual good, good feeling. It was just somewhat better than having to stay overnight in the hospital. A slight absence of that does not necessarily equal great and that I should be in that heavyweight title picture.”
Omega was already meticulous with his diet and training, but in returning to the ring, he was forced to become even more dialed into everything he put into his body and the condition in which he kept himself. He credits those around him for assisting in his recovery.
“I was very happy and fortunate that I had a whole support structure around me, whether it be my boss or my physio people, the trainers at AEW, who made sure to always monitor my condition and say, like, ‘Hey, something’s a little off. Do you feel off in this way?’” Omega said. “And if I said yes or no or what have you, we would then tackle it from there. So there was a point in time when I thought, I think I should be getting better as long as I just hunker down and go for it. That was actually the time I needed to take a step back. So being kind of tactful about this, being smart about it and not pushing too far, too soon really helped me to feel the way that I do now, which I do believe is actually light years beyond where I was at before.”
Widely considered to be one of the finest performers of his era, Omega’s time away from the ring made him contemplate his future. In those 13 months off, he says he thought long and hard about what his comeback might look like, if there was even to be one.
Knowing that the standard he set for himself – with classic matches against the likes of Will Ospreay and Tetsuya Naito and his generational rivalry with Kazuchika Okada – was as lofty as they come, Omega had no interest in returning as a shell of his former self.
“I don’t want to be someone who’s hanging out just because he wants a paycheque,” Omega said. “And I don’t want to take anybody else’s well-deserved spot, either, by holding on too tightly to that. As we move forward with professional wrestling, and in all sports, the level of athlete gets better and better and better, whether it be naturally or due to advanced training methods or what have you. So I would feel undeserving of a spot if I were holding people like that back because of my condition.
“And there’s also so many odd jobs and things that need to be done behind the scenes in AEW that it’s not like I wouldn’t have any value within the company at all. There’s always something to do, but I don’t feel like I need to steal that main-event spot or I need to hold on to it until you pry it from my cold, dead hands, not at all. I would love for the memory of Kenny Omega, in ring, to be one that people can look back with fondness, rather than, ‘Well, Kenny was pretty good, and then, boy, he just kinda stunk up the joint for years after that.’ I don’t want that to be what comes to people’s minds when they think of my career. So I’d rather just back out with a little bit of honour before that happens.”
That it looks like Omega hasn’t missed a beat since his return will come as no surprise to anybody who’s watched him compete recently. Over the past few months, Omega has performed in well-received matches against Bolton, Ont.’s Josh Alexander and Andrade El Idolo. Last Wednesday night saw an end to a dynamic feud with Swerve Strickland that set up the title match with Friedman.
“I do feel lucky that I’ve had somewhat of this second lease on my wrestling career in AEW,” Omega said. “I didn’t know if I would be able to step up and do main event-level matches and here we are. I’ve had a number of them recently and I felt like I can handle it. I can handle that workload and, as luck would have it, it coincides with this Canadian tour. It’s great that while I do feel healthy enough to perform and have these matches that people can enjoy live, that I’m able to do it in Canada now, too. So lucky timing, but not for an absence of hard work.”
Omega now shifts his focus to his program with Friedman, another AEW mainstay, but one with whom he has a very limited history. The two men have wrestled just once in the past, in the fall of 2023. Omega considers the current champion to be one of the finest performers in the world right now.
“Max is the blueprint for what a superstar actually is,” Omega said of the 30-year-old Long Islander. “He loves hearing the sound of his own voice, but it just so happens that when he does speak that, it conveys a large, profound message. He knows what he wants to say, how to say it, and he knows how to get a reaction when he does say it.
“So, Max is already ahead of the game, though he’s so young in the sport. And people could look at his strength being his mouth and his weakness being the wrestling, when in reality the wrestling is almost just as good as how well that he speaks. He’s developed into quite a champion and, unfortunately, champions can sometimes be bad people, so you may not enjoy Max on your TV screen. But champions as bad people sometimes fuel that foil to them, which will be the ultimate good. So hopefully with Max being that insufferable of a human, it will hopefully only result in more cheers for me when I take him down a peg or two.”
Omega has held the company’s top title on one previous occasion. He captured the AEW World Championship from Jon Moxley in December of 2020 in a match that served as a heel turn for his character. He would go on to hold the belt for nearly a year before dropping it to Adam Page.
Along with Nick Jackson and Matt Jackson of The Young Bucks, Omega is one of AEW roster members who are also executive vice-presidents of the company (the now departed Cody Rhodes was the fourth EVP). He insists that his now five-year world title drought was not a conscious decision meant to show people that he didn’t intend to use his real-life position to influence his booking. If anything, Omega says, that wasn’t even a consideration.
“I wouldn’t say that was at all on the forefront of our minds,” Omega said. “I think where all three of us were at, myself and the Bucks – and if we’re going right back to the beginning, I could even mention Cody’s name to a degree, as well – was that we really wanted to shine a spotlight on the people who may have not have gotten a chance to be on live television otherwise. So, we’ve seen wonderful stars and people who are being enjoyed and have fanfare all around the world – people like Orange Cassidy or Toni Storm or even like a Darby Allin. These are people – who knows? – who may have never gotten a shot with WWE. But I don’t feel like that means that they don’t deserve the superstardom, that they don’t deserve the fanfare.”
Omega says that turning the lens on themselves would have completely defeated what they set out to do with AEW’s inception in 2019.
“In lieu of us putting ourselves in positions to assume that glory, I think we were all very just focused on [the idea of] let’s find the people who deserve the eyeballs and let’s shine the spotlight on them,” Omega said. “Let’s develop our roster. Let’s set ourselves apart from the pack and let’s have this crew of incredibly talented individuals who no one will question should they be on TV or ask ‘Why is he or she on my TV?’ We wanted to create this atmosphere, this environment, where when a match comes out on the screen, you know why they’re coming out and that you’re either excited for one person to win or you really want one person to lose. That was always our focus in the beginning because sometimes you don’t know a star until you really get to know them. I think that’s why we tried so hard in the beginning to create people who are now accepted as household names within AEW.”
If AEW represents the second half of his wrestling legacy, the first half was made in Japan. He developed into a superstar during his two decades in the country, including a nine-year run with New Japan Pro-Wrestling.
It was in Japan where Omega became inextricably linked with Kota Ibushi, his partner in the Golden Lovers, first teaming together in DDT Pro Wrestling before jumping to NJPW. Now an AEW talent himself, Ibushi is currently sidelined with a severely broken leg incurred in an October match with Alexander.
A physical specimen whose impressive physique belies his 43 years of age, Ibushi was initially given a two-year recovery time to return to action following his injury. This past February, he required a second procedure on his leg to reattach a screw to the metal plate inserted during his initial surgery. Despite the setback, Omega says Ibushi is raring to return and sees parallels between what he’s going through right now and his own recovery.
“I almost feel like I need to be the person who stands in the way of him recovering too fast,” Omega said of Ibushi. “When you find yourself behind the 8-ball or [think] that you’re losing time or think maybe people will forget about who I am if I don’t come back right this moment, you push yourself too hard, too soon, even though he has this incredible DNA where an injury that would take someone a year and a half or two years to heal, he can somehow heal that in four or five months. We’ve actually just seen that just now with Ospreay [returning after just a seven-month absence] and his broken neck. The recovery that he’s made in such a short amount of time is nothing short of miraculous.
But Ibushi is very much cut from the same cloth, where he heals very fast and it just makes him hungrier to want that that spot back. But he does, by the same token, need someone to kind of rein him in a little bit. Regardless of how good you feel, regardless of how quick it’s been, let’s make sure we do this by the book because I want everyone to come back as close to their 100 per cent as they can. There’s no, there’s no need to settle for a 50 or 60 if you can take a little bit more time and get to a 70, 80 or 90, right?”
Just as Omega is synonymous with the Golden Lovers, he is with the Bullet Club, as well. Formed in 2013 by Fergal “Prince” Devitt (now known as WWE’s Finn Balor), “Machine Gun” Karl Anderson, Simi “Bad Luck” Fale and Tama Tonga, the stable became a pop culture juggernaut in both Japan and abroad.
The familiar black-and-white Bullet Club T-shirt became ubiquitous at wrestling shows all over the world. Serving as NJPW’s top heel faction for years, Bullet Club became the home of many of the company’s top gaijin performers, including the Jacksons, Rhodes, Jay White and A.J. Styles among others. Omega, who joined the faction in 2013, succeeded Styles as the group’s leader, a position he held from 2016 to 2018.
But all good things must come to an end. This past January at New Japan’s New Year’s Dash show, The Unaffiliated, a stable led by current IWGP World Champion Yota Tsuji that featured the remnants of Los Ingobernables de Japon, merged with Bullet Club War Dogs, the last of the faction’s subgroups still standing, as Unbound Co. The new stable meant Bullet Club was effectively put to bed after nearly 13 years.
For Omega, Bullet Club represents not only fond memories for himself, but a moment in time for the pro wrestling industry as a whole.
“For me, it was an enormous opportunity to be surrounded by people who I considered friends, people who I respected, cared about and we were given the ball and a lot of creative leniency and freedom to sort of explore who we wanted to portray, who we wanted the world to see when we went out to perform,” Omega said. “In Japan, especially, where you have something that is historically very martial arts-based, they just hope that you show fighting spirit. They hope that you show your heart, and they hope that you show that you’re willing to make the physical and mental sacrifices of being the best that you can be. But the Bullet Club allowed for that tiny little bit of North American influence, the Western influence, of showmanship. And as much as I love the Japanese style, especially the Japanese Strong Style of professional wrestling, I never once thought that we needed to abandon the showmanship aspect of professional wrestling completely.”
Omega likens the rise of Bullet Club to another phenomenon in Japan that came to prominence towards the end of the 1990s and into the early 21st century.
“In mixed martial arts, my favourite promotion of all-time to watch is Pride because you had both a mixture of the greatest athletes and the greatest fighters, but you had some of the greatest personalities, as well,” Omega said. “I think that probably even works is a great comparison too. When Bullet Club was at its peak, when The Elite [Omega’s subgroup with the Jacksons, Rhodes and Page] was at its peak under the Bullet Club umbrella, it really kinda did sorta feel like Pride where you had this force, who wasn’t recognized beforehand as the globally dominant professional wrestling force, but you did have something that sorta became pop culture.
“You had wrestlers from other promotions, WWE for example, they would go out and they would watch in their spare time and they would say, ‘Yeah, what these guys have, they do have something special. They have something worth watching.’ And then you’d see some of the New Japan athletes like the Good Brothers [Anderson and Doc Gallows], Shinsuke Nakamura or A.J. Styles, you’d see this incredible interest generated from WWE to pick those guys up. So it sort of allowed us to rise to a level that maybe we didn’t even see capable of from ourselves. But now looking back at it, like, boy, we really did make a difference, and it’s a cool memory and a very cool feather in our caps.”
With his legacy well established and no longer in question, what fuels Omega now isn’t further accolades or additional title reigns to tack onto his list of accomplishments. Omega says he’s still around for what comes next – or more accurately, who comes next. He believes his job now is to help usher in a new generation in AEW.
“I would say much like the early days of AEW, what I had hoped for myself was to aid in the next generation,” Omega said. “So whoever is to rise above, coming out of me stepping back again, I sort of feel like that’s the reason why I’m active right now. I’m active now as a placeholder for whoever really wants to just grab it and go for it. And in lieu of me, it will be that person. And my hope is that I’m buying enough time for the next megastar in the company to step forward and say, ‘Hey, look at me. I’ve got something special. What do you guys think?’ And I’m hoping they take that ball and that they run with it. I think that’s the reason why I’m in it right now.
“I can’t say that I have any more selfish goals in the company. I mean, I feel like becoming champion would be great because there’s a lot of influence that comes with that and I do want a positive light shined on our company and I do feel like as a representative, I can provide that and it’s a great story too. It’s a fun one, yeah, but ultimately, I do want to make sure that whoever is next, from here on in, that they’re ready to go, and that there’s not this – I don’t ever want there to be this situation where we have dead air in the company and we don’t have anybody [ready]. And I don’t think we ever will have that, but sometimes you can’t write for that. Sometimes you have to just hope for the best and luck into it. But that’s kinda why my efforts are so concentrated today, it’s that I want to make sure that in the pursuit of me becoming champion again, that there are all these other guys, girls, and everything between, chomping at my heels to want that spotlight, as well. And that when they do get it, that they have something to say, they have something to show, and that the world takes to it just as well, and just as nicely as they’ve taken to me.”
When it is finally time for Omega to go, you might not even notice he’s gone. His retirement is unlikely to look like John Cena’s recent yearlong farewell tour that ended this past December or Styles’ high-stakes final match at January’s Royal Rumble. During his recovery from diverticulitis, Omega says he spent a lot of time thinking about how his exit from the business would play out.
“I think my retirement will be the kind that happens and you haven’t even realized that it’s happened,” Omega said. “Eventually, I’m just going to start showing up less and less and less and before you know it, I’ll be a fleeting thought and someone might go, ‘Hey, remember that Kenny Omega guy?’ And people might say, ‘Yeah’ or maybe they’ll say, ‘No, who was he?’ and I’m fine with that. I’m totally cool with that. I’ve always been a very private person, and it makes me feel awkward and kind of like embarrassed when the spotlight’s on me too much. I know it sounds very odd, but I really do feel that way, especially with retirement, too, because it’s such a finicky subject.
“But I do think that when I’m gone, I’ll just sort of slowly fade out of it. I never want to say that I’m done, done, done because one of the greatest professional wrestlers to ever do it, Terry Funk, he sorta retired like 14 different times. I don’t want to be that guy… so I’d rather just not say it, and if I stop showing up, so be it.”