It’s a sad day for professional wrestling fans – especially for those in Burnaby.
The Bollywood Boyz - Harvinder and Gurvinder Sihra – announced on Twitter that they had been “fired” from the WWE after five years.
The brothers, who went to Moscrop Secondary School, were part of a purge of wrestlers as the WWE didn’t renew their contracts.
“All the bumps, torn ACL’s, dislocated shoulders - it’s all been worth if for the last 5 years,” the brothers said on their Twitter account. “And how ironic, we finished our last match with a shoulder hanging out of socket. It’s fitting we got fired while showing up for wrestling training - we love what we do, with a passion.”
Many fans tweeted their appreciation for what the Bollywood Boyz had done, especially for representing India and Canada.
“Representing India meant more to our parents than anything,” they tweeted. “It made them so proud.”
In February 2020, the Sihra brothers - who wrestled under the ring names Sunil and Samir Singh - paid a visit to their old high school to speak to the students about what it was like to work hard and achieve their dreams.
For the brothers, professional wrestling was an escape to another world, they said. (Read the full story of their visit here.)
“Besides hockey, that’s all we really watched,” Gurv said. “We watched it as a family. It wasn’t just the two of us watching, dad, mom, the whole family.”
The duo practiced wrestling moves in the Moscrop lunchroom and told their friends they wanted to be stars on WWE, the biggest professional wrestling promotion in the world.
“Everybody used to laugh. They thought it was so far-fetched,” Harv said.
“We faced a lot of hardship, obstacles, especially being smaller guys trying to survive in a big-man world,” said Gurv. “Most wrestlers that you see are six-foot-five, 200-plus pounds.”
“You can’t take no for an answer,” Harv told the Moscrop students.
Besides determination, the brothers stressed the importance of hard work and resilience.
“You take your failures and you use them to your advantage,” Gurv said. “You learn something from them.”
- With additional reporting by Cornelia Naylor
