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For the first year-and-a-half of Sylvain Grenier’s WWE career, he never heard more than a few speckled cheers among a steady chorus of boos. But all that changed on May 31, 2004, when he and Rob Conway captured the World Tag Team titles in his home province the Quebec.

Backstage before the match, he and Conway pondered the reaction they would receive, especially considering the caliber of their opponents, Edge and Chris Benoit. As soon as they stepped through the curtain, though, their question was answered with a load roar. Part of this warm reception had to do with a certain object that they waved in the air feverishly.

Unlike the last time he’d competed in Montreal, where he’d displayer the blue, white and red Tricouleurs of France, Grenier opted to carry the blue-and-white Quebec flag down to ringside – a presentation that turned the hot Montreal crowd against the Canadian-born edge and Benoit. “The reaction was a surprise,” Grenier says. “It just blew the roof off, and when you’re in there, you don’t really realize the extent of it right away It’s not until you watch the tape the day after and it gives you goose bumps that you realize everything that just happened.

“But it was so much fun, and I even hat the liberty to go into the crowd and celebrate with the people,” he says. “You know, I’m from Quebec, and obviously hockey is a big deal there, so it really felt like I had just won the Stanley Cup or something of that caliber, because the people were so into it and reacted to absolutely everything. It was just amazing.”

Although Grenier had already won the World Tag Team Championship with René Duprée a year earlier, he considers this victory to be the biggest of his career, and a moment that almost never happened due to an injury he suffered toward the end of 2003 that nearly ended his career.

At first, doctors diagnosed Grenier with a fractured neck, but after a few more months of continued soreness and tingling, they realized that he had ruptured two of the discs in his spine. His specialists suggested surgery to repair the damage, but Grenier opted to rest his body and put himself through intense rehabilitation. Fortunately, his body reacted well, and he was cleared to return in mid-March.

“When you get injured, you feel like it’s like the end of the world,” Grenier says. “You don’t know what’s gonna happen, or if you’re ever gonna come back. I was really scared about my health, but while I was sitting at home, I realized a lot of things. While I was watching the show, and watching old tapes, I was looking for things that I was doing wrong so I could change them, correct them, and make myself that much better.”

In his second year in WWE, Grenier has improved noticeably in the ring, and his aptitude has made him one of the fastest-rising stars on the Raw roster. Grenier, who followed sports-entertainment from his childhood years, never considered a role in the industry until a chance meeting with another French-Canadian icon.

While golfing in Florida, Grenier met WWE’s first Intercontinental Champion, Pat Patterson, and the two immediately hit it off. About a year later, Patterson invited his young friend to attend a live event in Montreal, and it was there before the show that the Brooklyn Brawler, Steve Lombardi, took note of his massive frame and chiselled good looks.

“The Brawler saw me and asked me to come into the ring so he could show me what wrestling is all about,” Grenier says. “So I went in there, ran the ropes, and then got manhandled, but he showed me some simple stuff. After about 20 minutes, he said, ‘Kid, you’re a good athlete,’ and he went to talk to Pat about me, pat asked me if I liked wrestling, and I told him how I’d liked it since I was a kid, but never wanted to bother him about that.”

Just like that, Grenier was hooked, and a few months later, he took a weeklong seminar at Dory Funk Jr.’s school in Florida. Right away, he realized that sports-entertainment was the career for him. He returned to Montreal, where he saved money to enrol in a full-time wrestling school. A short while later, he began four months of training under the watchful eye of former WWE star Rocky Johnson, who taught Grenier the fundamentals of competition, mic work and ring psychology. Grenier returned to Montreal, and about a moth later, he was offered a contract and sent to Ohio Valley Wrestling, WWE’s developmental territory.

“I was really lucky with that break,” Grenier says. “Of course, being French helped a lot, but I was also very athletic from playing tennis, as well as both baseball and hockey at a junior lever. Also, my background from TV commercials and modeling also helped me with being in front of the cameras every day, and because I did a lot of modeling in Europe, I began traveling at a really young age, so it helped me adapt to the busy schedules we follow today.”