REAL NAME: Francois Poirier
BORN: February 11, 1970 in Joliette, Quebec
5′ 9″, 168 pounds
To call Frank Blues a student of the game would be a bit of an understatement.
As a teen in the 1980s, he started out wrestling at a high school gym on a gymnastic mat with one rope held in place by a badminton post.
Frank Blues. Courtesy NCW.
“It was dangerous, but that was what we did,” said Blues in a July 1998 interview with SLAM! Wrestling. “Mainly we learned by ourselves.”
The fanaticism he and his friends shared grew into a small, local promotion in Quebec that existed without an actual wrestling ring until 1991, when Phil Belanger bought former Montreal-promoter Ludger Proulx’s ring.
A short-while later, Quebec’s Northern Championship Wrestling was founded with Belanger as promoter, and Frank Blues as one of the co-owners, assistant booker and the company’s first champion.
His first match in an actual ring was on April 11, 1991 against Phil Belanger.
From there, Blues wrestled more than 300 matches across La Belle Province, for a variety of acronyms like the WTA, SWA, ICW.
His wrestling days ended in June 1998 at ChallengeMania XI though, coming full circle to another match with Phil Belanger.
Three concussions in 1997 alone proved to be too much.
“It was a really hard decision to make, because it was getting too dangerous. All of them were hard ones [concussions],” said Blues, who also broke his left ankle in 1995.
“All of them [concussions] were different ones. One was a bump from the top rope, the other was a superplex, the first one was a clothesline. Actually the first one we’re not sure really, because I ended the match and I really don’t know what happened, but I’m pretty sure it was a clothesline. And the other one was a chair shot.”
He modeled his style on “Rick Martel in his babyface days.” Blues, who owns more than 800 wrestling tapes, also loves to watch Rick Steamboat, Owen Hart and thinks that ECW’s Chris Kanyon is “highly underrated.”
Some of his biggest feuds were against Dream Killer, Golem The Giant, Iceman and Phil Belanger. He’s held the NCW Quebec title three times, and the NCW tag titles with Iceman also on three occasions.
“I was a babyface all my career, which was something I really wanted to do,” he explained. “I always gave my 100% all of the time. The most important thing for me was to please the crowd no matter what happened. I had fun all those years, and I hope that some day I can be back.”
He regrets that he never got to showcase his skills on a bigger scale, but knew that his size did not work in his favor.
From here on in, NCW can expect Frank Blues to keep involved as a special referee on “big shows” and as a commentator for the TV show, in rotation on CTRB-TV Berthier on weekends.