Dismissing wrestling because it’s fake is like criticizing King
Lear for being inaccurate history. Those who do so miss the point.
When skilled wrestlers get together, they jam like musicians, pairing
the physical abilities of a gymnast with the responsive skills of an
improv comic. And like an actor playing Lear, the men and women who
step into the ring are motivated by a desire to tell stories about
characters who are larger than life and to put on the kind of shows
that make people want to shout. “It’s a cool feeling to go out in front
of 10,000 or 15,000 people and have them in the palm of your hand and
to be able to stand them up and sit them down,” says Ken Wayne, former
wrestler and founder of the “Nightmare” Ken Wayne School of
Professional Wrestling.
Wayne can list wrestling moves like he is reciting the alphabet:
standing arm drag, hip toss, body slam, locking up, grabbing roll,
alligator roll, hitting the ropes, gut wrench take-down, top
wrist-lock, bottom wrist-lock, hammer-lock, full Nelson, and so on.
Everything in wrestling, he insists, is derived from these and a few
other essentials.
“I have guys come in here and ask, ‘What kind of gimmick can I be?'”
Waynes says. “I say, ‘Shut the fuck up. Learn your craft, and you can
be any kind of gimmick they ask you to be.'”
In a metal shed in a grubby corner of West Memphis, Arkansas, Kevin
Charles, a stout man in his 20s, stoops to pick up a broom. He surveys
the large empty room around him and the wrestling ring at its center,
then with a feline grace at odds with his lumpy physique, he dives
under the ropes, springs to his feet, and begins to tidy up the place.
He dances his broom around the mat with studied purpose and meditative
calm. Friday nights are fight nights at the school. The audience is on
the way, and everything has to be perfect.
Charles, a New Orleans native, is a bartender and National Guardsman
who enrolled in Wayne’s school because he’s always dreamed about flying
off the top rope. He didn’t know if he was the kind of guy who could do
it, but now he believes he is that kind of guy.
He also understands now that when a match is over and the bright
lights dim, the loud threats crossfade into collegial laughter. “Humble
or stumble” is the wrestling fraternity’s guiding principle.
For every student like Charles, there are eight or nine who don’t
make it past the first week of training. Wayne, the son of Memphis
wrestler-turned-promoter Buddy Wayne, blames himself for the dropout
rate. “I anticipated about a two-thirds percent quitter,” he says, a
Kool 100 smoldering in the ashtray near the freshly cracked beer on his
desk. “It’s more like about an 80 or 90 percent quitter. I probably run
a lot of people off because I tell them exactly what it is they’re
getting their ass into.”
Wayne grew up with a wrestling ring in his backyard and has done
just about everything you can do in the business. He’s built rings,
hauled rings, and broken them down. He’s wrestled solo as a
bleach-blond brawler and alongside Danny Davis as half of a scrappy,
masked tag team called the Nightmares. He grew up on the road with his
dad, riding from town to town and from dressing room to dressing room.
He knows what it’s like to hold a championship belt over his head and
to take four Darvons and not feel relief because he wrestled with
cerebral fluid on his spine.
Wayne says he never imagined running a wrestling school when he got
out of the business in 2005. Eight months after retiring, he faced the
realities of being 46 years old, unemployed, and not knowing a thing in
the world but wrestling.
“I didn’t retire; I just quit,” Wayne says. His skills were
slipping. He hurt more than ever, and he could no longer fool himself
into believing that fact wasn’t reflected in the quality of his
bookings. Increasingly, he was matched against wrestlers who were, in
his opinion, poorly trained or not trained at all.
“I didn’t want to be one of those guys who are the last to know that
they should have retired a few years ago,” he confesses. “And I didn’t
want to have a career-ending injury. What sense would that make?”
Wayne never became a WWE superstar, but for a smaller-than-average
wrestler who came of age in the 1980s, when giants were all the rage
and masked marvels were out of style, he pieced together an impressive
26-year career that took him across the United States and Canada and
into Puerto Rico — where air conditioning is scarce and blood is
absolutely expected.
Jonathan Postal
Ken Wayne
“I’ve done all this,” he insists. “I can teach these kids a whole
lot more than just how to do a bunch of holds. They need history. It’s
essential that you know where you came from. And they also need to have
a philosophy.”
Wayne’s school maintains a small but diverse student body of
athletes, nerds, flamboyant personalities, and everyday Joes. At one
end of the spectrum, there are wrestlers like Wayne’s son Eric “3-G”
Wayne, who bills himself as a “third-generation wrestling superstar,”
and 25-year-old Kevin “Kid” Nikels, a 220-pound construction worker
with a bald head, a shoulder covered with tattoos, and the roar of a
Viking berserker. Self-effacing backstage, Nikels describes himself as
a “strong style” wrestler who doesn’t mind getting knocked around.
In the opposite corner are saucer-eyed beginners like D.J. Stegall,
an excitable, pint-sized fanboy of 19 who works for his father at a KFC
in Batesville, Mississippi.
Between the extremes, there are intermediate grapplers like Charles
and boy-next-door-type Dan Jones, an electronics repairman for
Walgreens, who wrestles under the name Dan Matthews.
All of Wayne’s students do have one thing in common: They grew up
obsessed with TV wrestling. Most of them associate watching wrestling
with happy memories of family life. They have nearly identical stories
about bounding off their living-room sofas to put an elbow drop on dad
or a sibling. “Hit him in the balls,” Nikels says with a laugh,
remembering a particularly effective off-the-couch strike against his
old man.
Nikels is a graduate trainer at Wayne’s school. He describes
wrestling as therapy. “Sometimes you have a bad day or you’re stressed
out,” he says. “But once I come in here and get started wrestling, it
goes away. You think about throwing this guy or punching him in the
head. You take out your frustrations and forget about what’s bothering
you outside the room. It’s like going to the doctor’s office.”
Jonathan Postal
Kevin Charles
Nikels originally wanted to be a rock star, but he didn’t have the
guitar chops. “So I figured I should work on getting big and learning
how to wrestle,” he says, describing a period when he trained three
days a week, went to college full time, worked construction full time,
and hit the 24-hour gym after hours. “I got used to sleeping only two
or three hours a night,” he says, rubbing his head bashfully and
laughing at his obsession.
Hard work has paid off for both Nikels and Eric Wayne. Both have
been called into auditions for the WWE and have received positive
feedback. The younger Wayne says he left the audition feeling like he
and Nikels already possess the skills they need to go all the way. “But
you’ve got to stand out,” he explains.
“The WWE is the top notch, so you’ve gotta be top-notch too,” Nikels
adds.
Both take this to mean they need to be bigger, or at the very least
more ripped.
“You have to look like an athlete,” Eric Wayne says. “If you’re 185
pounds and ripped to shreds and you can actually wrestle and you don’t
trip over yourself getting in the ring, chances are you might be hired
and get to the big show.”
“Size is a big plus, but it’s not the be-all and end-all,” says
Bruno Lauer. Known to Memphis wrestling fans as Downtown Bruno and to
WWE fans as bad-guy manager Dr. Harvey Whippleman, Lauer sits with a
beer in his north Mississippi clubhouse beside an action figure that
looks just like him. Nearby is the WWE women’s championship belt that
he won by dressing up in drag and taking on the KAT in a special
snow-filled ring.
Jonathan Postal
Lauer, a referee and occasional adviser at Wayne’s school, is the
picture of contentment. Today, the self-described “dried-up 120-pound
redneck” works outside the spotlight as head concierge for the WWE, a
gig he describes as “head gofer.” He is thrilled to have beaten the
odds and made a 30-year career in professional wrestling. Lauer
stresses the importance of charisma and credits his own unlikely
longevity to “heart.”
“To paraphrase Gene Hackman’s Coach McGinty in the greatest movie of
all time, The Replacement, [I owe my 30 years in the business
to] heart. Tons and tons of heart,” Lauer says.
“Everybody says professional wrestling is fake,” Eric Wayne says.
“They say we know how to fall and we pull our punches. My reply is,
I’ve knocked out people’s teeth; I’ve broken their orbital bones; I’ve
shattered their knees.”
The young wrestler isn’t bragging and is remorseful for what he
views as an unfortunate combination of poor judgment, circumstances,
and bad luck. He worries that a reputation for being careless and cocky
could hurt his chances for advancement. “When you start wrestling, your
dreams and aspiration are ‘I want to make it to the big show. I’ll do
whatever’s asked of me,'” he says.
“There’s an expression they have backstage [at the WWE],” Wayne
adds. “They say, ‘Humble or stumble.'”
“I’m going for it,” Dan Jones declares during a break in his
Monday-night training. At 31, Jones is old for a wrestling student. He
knows he’s only got about 10 years to see if he has what it takes to
make it in the WWE.
“[My wife’s] the one who told me to go do it,” Jones says. “She saw
how depressed I was just sitting on the couch watching [other people]
do it. She said go do it. Get it out of your system.”
Jonathan Postal
Bruno Lauer and Kevin Nikels
Charles is younger and less driven than Jones. He’s open to the idea
of a professional career but also enjoys wrestling for its own sake.
“You’re not only performing athletically, you’re putting on a show for
the fans,” he says. He calls the complex relationship between wrestlers
and their audience “a new level of professionalism that you really
can’t find anywhere else.”
On Fridays, a little before 7 p.m., a “$5 Admission” sign goes up
near the door, and Wayne’s secluded school on Jefferson Street is
transformed into the high-tech home of New Experience Wrestling
(N.E.W.), a weekly promotion that showcases the school’s graduates and
experienced students.
Wayne and his wife, Debra — also a second-generation wrestler
— stand backstage, working out the show’s technical details.
“Today’s wrestling business, on a national scale, is called ‘sports
entertainment,'” he explains, wondering aloud if fans might be
attracted to a more competitive approach, blending older and newer
styles of wrestling. “We want to show off the athletic abilities of our
performers,” he says.
N.E.W. events also help Wayne’s students learn how to perform in
front of a television camera and provide opportunities for training in
operating audio, video, and computer equipment.
Jonathan Postal
Dan Matthews
As fans take their places in a double row of folding chairs, two
announcers banter, testing their microphones. Camera operators check
their video equipment. Backstage, the wrestlers psych each other up for
the show.
There aren’t more than 30 people in the audience, but when the
lights come up, the N.E.W. wrestlers go at it like there are 30,000
people in the seats. It’s another chance for Eric Wayne to prove he’s a
superstar who isn’t careless; another opportunity for Kevin Charles to
live his dream and for the undefeated “Kid” Nikels to prove he’s still
the baddest man in the building and worth the thousand-dollar bounty on
his head. It’s a big show. They all are.
What most people call bleeding, wrestlers call “getting color.” And,
like the costumes and the trash-talking interviews, it’s all part of
the show. But there is nothing premeditated about the color drawn
during Matthews’ brawl with “Golden Boy” Greg Anthony, his fourth
official fight in front of a paying audience. And the blood was nothing
compared to the distraction of seeing his wife on the front row,
calming their small children, who couldn’t understand why Daddy was
taking what appeared to be the beating of a lifetime.
Jonathan Postal
Debra Wayne
After the match, an upbeat Matthews tells his instructors he won’t
be available for regular training on Sunday evening because he needs
some family time. “It’s my anniversary weekend,” he says
sheepishly.
Ken Wayne voices his approval. “You don’t want to miss your
anniversary,” the twice-married “Nightmare” cautions.
“Well,” Matthews says, walking out into the school’s parking lot,
past a maze of forklift pallets, mountains of sawdust, and shattered
lumber, “my anniversary is actually today.” The other wrestlers laugh
and nod their heads knowingly.
“I’m here at the ‘Nightmare’ Ken Wayne School of Professional
Wrestling, because, basically, it’s my life,” D.J. Stegall says, prior
to a Monday-night class. He might as well be speaking for everyone who
has ever found his way to Wayne’s school and stuck around for more than
a week. Stegall says he’s no longer bothered that people taunt him
because of his small stature, and he doesn’t care what anybody thinks
about his decision to go into the ring.
“I’m not in it for the celebrity status,” Stegall says. “My goal is
to be considered a great wrestler. Whether I get to the WWE or not,
whether I’m wrestling in front of five people or 500 or selling out
Madison Square Garden, I want you to look at me and say, ‘That guy’s a
great wrestler.’ I’m in this for respect and to do what I love.”
Jonathan Postal
