Blood Fever
Homeless Jimmy's among a cast of twisted characters
helping two
Picture this: You've just spent 10 minutes being
thrown through panes of glass, onto a bed of nails, and into barbed wire.
You're bleeding profusely from the forehead, and your clothes are torn,
exposing many smaller cuts all over your body. The beers you drank earlier help
to dull the pain, but they also thin the blood and make it flow more freely.
Now in a semiconscious state, you are grabbed by your 250-pound assailant, who
picks you up and throws you on top of a table. As you lie immobile, he sets up
a ladder, climbs it, wraps his own torso in barbed wire, and jumps. The table
breaks in half, and you're out for the count, with a few more lacerations
across your stomach to show for it.
Now imagine that this is how you make a living.
If your memories of wrestling primarily center on
Hulk Hogan teaming up with Mr. T. to punch some evil foreigners in the face,
you've got a lot of catching up to do. Over the past decade, wrestling has
become all about "attitude": Heroes of today include Stone Cold Steve
Austin, who flips the bird and drinks beer while driving; The Rock, who frequently
describes all manner of objects that you can "stick up your
candy-ass"; and Mick Foley, best known for being thrown off a 16-foot cage
into a table, and having his ear torn off while wrestling in Germany. And these
are the mainstream guys, employees of the gigantic Connecticut-based World
Wrestling Federation (WWF). In an effort to compete, the smaller organizations
have taken things to an insane level. During the early '90s, former wrestling
manager Paul Heyman took over Philadelphia-based Tri-State Wrestling
Association, and rechristened it Extreme Championship Wrestling (ECW). Taking
his cues from
Officially debuting in July of last year, Xtreme Pro
Wrestling was created to fill the West Coast appetite for extreme wrestling.
Founded by porn mogul Rob Black and a 21-year-old UCLA business grad named
Kevin Kleinrock, this upstart promotion has become the fastest-growing
wrestling organization in the
What's different about XPW is that, for an
organization that's been in existence for such a short time, it's already
managed to attract some top-name talent. Former WWF stars Shane Douglas and Chris
Candido have made appearances. A number of disgruntled ECW employees have
relocated to the West Coast just to join the promotion. Sabu, nephew of
old-time wrestler The Sheik and a man billed as "homicidal, suicidal,
genocidal" -- and possibly the hottest free agent in professional
wrestling earlier this year -- is now working for XPW. And several high-profile
celebrities from the world of heavy metal have made their presence known at
events. Rather than playing high school gyms and national guard armories, as
most start-up wrestling organizations do, XPW began putting on shows at such
locations as the Ventura Theater and the Palace in Hollywood, the latter
traditionally a venue for hard-rock acts and dance clubs. After selling out
these locations repeatedly, XPW has already gone on to bigger things: It made
its first appearance at the L.A. Sports Arena in April, and is planning to hit
Strongbow Stadium in Bakersfield. Obviously, the demand is there. But many
would certainly wonder exactly who this kind of thing appeals to.
An informal survey of the crowds at the Ventura
Theater and the Palace reveals a none-too-surprising answer: About 90 percent
of the audience are boys in their mid-to-late teens, the very demographic to
whom heavy metal and porn are likely to be most appealing. Most of them seem to
understand the amount of showmanship involved, and show as much respect for the
villainous characters as they do the heroes. Other fans seem to have less of a
handle on the distinction between wrestling and reality: While a long line of
devotees waited to get into the February show at the Palace, two cars driving
down Vine Street. nearly crashed into one another, prompting chants of
"E-C-W! E-C-W!" from the crowd, which would typically react in such a
manner after seeing a particularly high-risk or violent maneuver at an ECW
event.
But this stuff's fake, right? It is professional
wrestling, after all, and most of us learn that it's not exactly on the level
at about the same age we realize there's no Santa Claus. But just because the
winners are predetermined doesn't mean that everything you see is phony. As
Canadian wrestling legend Bret "the Hitman" Hart puts it in the
documentary film Wrestling With Shadows, "It's far more real than people think."
Porn star and cult hero Ron Jeremy, who initially
agreed to appear at XPW shows as a favor to his friend Rob Black, went in
thinking no one really gets hurt. But as he told New Times, his opinion quickly
changed. "I see them banging each other with chairs, figuring, oh yeah, I
use those rubber props in movies, let's feel this chair, and I'm going
"Fuck, it's the real thing! It's thick!' And I see them use this barbed
wire table last time, I'm saying, "Yeah, probably use rubber barbs. Let's
check this out.' I feel it, it's fuckin' sharp!" Jeremy, who has done some
live stunt work in the past, has gotten a couch dropped on him twice at XPW
shows. That part was rehearsed. But he's not likely to do anything more
serious. His previous stunts may have looked all right when he did them on
camera, but, he says, "You know, it was still faked...it was still show.
These guys don't really fuck around. Now, see, you can get away with it from
the stage. But if you're going to have an audience surrounding you...you really
have to do the real deal, you know?"
Rob Van Dam, the top fan favorite of rival
organization ECW, has been injured in the ring many times, to the point where
he simply deals with some of his wounds by using superglue (a tip he learned
from his friend, current XPW champion Sabu). He'll tell you that wrestling
wasn't always this dangerous, but that fans now know more about the business
than ever, thanks in part to insider leaks (some real, some speculative) that
regularly appear on the Internet, so you can't fool them. "They just
watch, they just wait for a wrestler to slip up and they wait for a wrestler to
not hit another wrestler hard enough with the chair. Just something they can
boo, just something so they can chant "You fucked up, you fucked up.' That
puts a lot of pressure on us to perform, and it's something that I appreciate
'cause I think it makes everybody better."
And while wrestlers of yesteryear would likely punch
a reporter in the face who asked them about whether or not their sport was
"real," Van Dam will simply set you straight: "Wrestling is more
real now than it's ever been. It's real for the fact that when I'm in the ring,
I have to hit my opponent with a chair so hard that everybody in the back row
can hear the echoes of that smack. I have to hit him so hard the chair folds
around his head. Most of the crowd's not even gonna like it."
Even the nonwrestlers involved in the presentation
are at more risk than ever before. As XPW's head referee Patrick Hernandez told
New Times, "We don't pull any punches here. My referee partner, he's
gotten a black eye...I screwed up my shoulder a couple of times, and you know
you get your bumps and bruises, especially with the wrestlers." What irks
him most about people who say it's all fake is the insinuation that anyone can
do it. "For anybody saying that wrestling's fake or whatnot, hey, we have
a school. We've got a school with 10, 15 students, and yet these guys are in
here huffing and puffing, sweating up a storm, and they're getting their bumps
and bruises."
A quick glance around the XPW locker room at the
Ventura Theater reveals the reality of the situation. In one corner, there's
John Kronus, a Mohawked barroom brawler with a permanent "what are you
looking at?" facial expression, drinking a beer, smoking a cigarette, and
complaining of a headache, possibly because the six or seven deep gashes on his
forehead never get a chance to heal before he reopens them. Meanwhile, Homeless
Jimmy selects the weapons he's going to get hit with later in the evening, while
donning the ratty old plaid shirt he's worn at every show -- a shirt that is
heavily stained with his own blood. Upstairs, a wide-shouldered brawler (and
recent ECW defector) named Axl Rotten demonstrates to his opponent for the
night, a former Hollywood set laborer named Supreme, how to maul someone's face
with a fork without putting his eyes out. Lest anyone doubt these fighters'
commitment to pain, Supreme's bald head is covered in both deep cuts and
tattoos, while Axl's right arm features a series of raised scars so large you'd
swear he'd been mauled by a panther. Axl also makes a point of letting
front-row fans touch his weapon of choice -- an ax handle wrapped in barbed
wire -- just so they know it's for real. Supreme tends to eschew the weapon approach
in favor of wrapping himself in barbed wire, or simply diving from a
second-story balcony onto a table. And no, those aren't special breakaway
tables, although they're not the most expensive kind in the world, either.
Patrick Hernandez estimates that XPW spends about $400 per month on this
particular furniture item at Home Depot.
For those of us who don't like being hit on the head
with chairs, the motivations of the participants aren't always easy to discern.
Unlike with the WWF, celebrity status is unlikely (ECW's TV show on The
Nashville Network faces imminent cancellation, and XPW only airs on
small-scale, independent stations), the damage to one's body is obvious, and
even though XPW will soon be taking steps to test all its wrestlers for HIV, there's
still the risk of disease transmission when close contact combines with open
wounds. WWF wrestler/author/actor Mick Foley may have made it big, but he is
one of a very few who ever made it to the top, and as soon as he attained that
level, he stopped taking as many risks. It's probably not the money -- many of
XPW's wrestlers work additional jobs, and while no one would reveal their
individual salaries, Kleinrock suggests that the "talent" generally
makes only around three times the money of other local independent wrestling
organizations -- organizations that pay "somewhere between gas money and
25 bucks" per night -- with bonuses for the extreme weapons matches.
Is it masochism, plain and simple? When Barry W.
Blaustein, director of the wrestling documentary Beyond the Mat, accused Mick
Foley of being masochistic, Foley responded, "I'm not masochistic, 'cause
I don't go around with my hands above a flame to see how much pain I can
take." XPW brawler extraordinaire John Kronus put it to New Times in far
more basic terms: "I am a brawler...it's fun and exciting. Like, you know,
people jump off buildings, bungee, fly planes, drive cars -- it's all a rush.
That's it. It's a rush." You get the sense that if Kronus weren't doing
this for a living, he'd probably be beating people up for fun.
Supreme, who teaches the next generation of
bloodthirsty brawlers at XPW's Van Nuys training school, The Asylum, simply
says of the hardcore matches: "I love it. I think it's great."
Neither he nor Kronus is too concerned about the long-term effects. Supreme
just calls the pain something he deals with, while Kronus professes to have no
problems because he knows what he's doing. "You gotta know what you're
doing," he explains. "If you don't know what you're doing, then you're
gonna get fucked up, basically." Following a thumbtack-ladder match, in
which a ladder was used both as a weapon and as a means to grab a bag of
thumbtacks suspended above the ring, "White Trash" Johnny Webb, who
also works in XPW's offices adjacent to The Asylum and edits their home videos,
told New Times, half-sarcastically, that seeing your favorite football team
lose is worse than the pain of a deathmatch. And Mark Radulich, a 23-year-old
XPW trainee with a shaved head and the nickname, among his coworkers, of
"Fester," has been hit in the head twice with a guitar as part of the
show, and brushes off concerns about being slammed through a flaming table,
because "the flame goes out when you hit it."
Blaustein, meanwhile, has seen the damage this kind
of thing can do to older wrestlers. His film chronicles in great detail the
injuries of 53-year-old Terry Funk, a man cited as a role model by most of
today's extremists, whose knees are in constant pain and who, by normal
standards, shouldn't even be walking. Mick Foley, with whom Blaustein became
good friends, is only in his 30s, but he experiences occasional memory loss,
and aches and pains normally found in men 20 to 30 years older. After two years
on the road with different wrestling promotions, Blaustein believes that,
despite the bluster, wrestlers do feel the pain of their injuries...but not
until long after the fight. "They are addicted and love that crowd
reaction," he says, "and some of them will go to any means to get
that reaction from the crowd. Even putting their own bodies at risk, their
lives at risk."
Many of XPW's wrestlers are still in their 20s, and
get so high on the adrenaline rush during matches that they claim not to feel
any pain, but some of their own colleagues have doubts. "The Real
Deal" Damien Steele, a former stand-up comic and personal trainer who
takes chair shots but eschews the sharper objects, calls a deathmatch "a
horrible, horrible match," and admits, "We have guys who just love to
get thrown off a building and land in a big box of glass, and those guys are
closer to the masochist spectrum"
And don't even think about health insurance. No less
an authority than Minnesota Governor Jesse Ventura has been trying for years to
unionize wrestlers so that they can get health benefits, with no success. None
of XPW's wrestlers has been seriously injured yet -- it's a mystery how they
avoid it, and it's likely that somewhere down the line they will be -- and
Kleinrock insists that if an injury were to occur, the company would try to
help out. But essentially, there's no system in place, no safety net. Which is
why just about any wrestler you talk to will tell you to get a college degree
to fall back on if you're even considering going into the business.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Darren McMillan, better known as Dynamite D., knows
all about the insecurity of the extreme wrestling business. A 30-year-old Cal
State Northridge graduate in business administration and marketing, McMillan
now works for American Binding Products, selling customized office products to
banking and finance companies. When he's not working his day job, however, he's
flying around the XPW ring as "Mr. '80s," a zebra-Spandex clad
comic-relief character who extols the virtues of bands like Poison and Ratt,
and utilizes such moves as the "Michael Jackson crotch-grab legdrop"
and the "Talk to the hand." He seldom wins a match against his more
thuggish opponents, but he gives it his all every time, and never fails to
entertain the crowd.
Dynamite began wrestling in 1989 for a local
organization called Slammer's Wrestling Federation, headed by an old-school
veteran named Verne Langdon. Langdon ran wrestling the way it used to be run:
no "story lines," no flashy costumes, no admission that anything was
staged, just a straight line-up of matches, with an occasional feud revolving
around the championship belt. He also ran his shows no matter what: Every
Thursday would be a show day, whether it was Halloween, Thanksgiving, or
Christmas. Dynamite D., who had wrestled for Langdon for five years and been an
instructor at the Slammer's training gym, made the mistake of asking for
Thanksgiving off one year. He asked three weeks in advance, and was granted it,
but was told that he wouldn't be working for Langdon again afterward.
Six months later, with nowhere else to wrestle,
Dynamite, along with wrestling fans nationwide, was captivated by the popular
"NWO (New World Order)" storyline that was unfolding in Ted Turner's
Atlanta-based World Championship Wrestling (WCW), which was the top wrestling
organization in America at that time. The story was that a couple of former WWF
wrestlers were staging an "invasion" of WCW, and in the process
turning the popular Hulk Hogan into a hated villain as he joined the uprising.
Of course, in WCW, all the wrestlers participating in the angle were actually
under contract and only playing at being disgruntled, but it inspired Dynamite
to get together some other friends who had been fired by Langdon and charge the
ring during intermission at a Slammer's show. Confronting Langdon face-to-face,
Dynamite announced the formation of the "Dynamite World Order," and
demanded to be rehired, figuring that Langdon could either turn the incident into
a great angle, or simply ignore it. Instead, the veteran promoter closed up
shop the very next day. Perhaps Langdon was just being a sore loser, but he may
have realized that today's wrestling trends were passing him by.
Following this incident, which Dynamite refers to as
one of his greatest accomplishments, he formed a new promotion, Southern
California Championship Wrestling, along with two avid young fans: a would-be
promoter named Kevin Kleinrock, and an aspiring referee named Patrick
Hernandez. Helped along at the start by guest celebrities like former WWF stars
Yokozuna and Honky Tonk Man, SCCW was soon nurturing local talent like
"White Trash" Johnny Webb, Damien Steele, and Skullcrusher, who would
go on to become Homeless Jimmy. Then, in early 1998, they received a phone call
from Rob Black.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Black, with his blond dreadlocks, footlong goatee,
and barbed-wire tattoos, could almost be a wrestler if he were to gain a few
more pounds. As is, he resembles the lead singer of any number of death-metal
bands. But it wasn't always this way. Once upon a time, Rob Black looked the
part of a porn mogul, clad in a black leather jacket, with slicked-back hair
and a mustache. A second-generation pornographer, Black had wanted to be in the
adult movie business from an early age, and managed to carve out a successful
niche with Extreme Video, which later became Extreme Associates. Eventually he
wound up marrying Lizzie Borden, one of his female leads ("Now she films
people having sex," he says). But he had more than just porn on his mind.
"My brother runs an adult bookstore that advertises on a New York radio
station that does some promotion with ECW," he told New Times. Turns out many
of the organization's wrestlers were big fans of Black's work. Before long,
Black got a meeting with ECW head Paul Heyman. "We talked about doing some
cross promotion -- I was going to advertise my tapes on his videotapes, and his
tapes on mine. We gave him Jasmin [St. Claire] for some TV shows and a
pay-per-view, and were supposed to get going on an Internet thing and video
distribution in Brazil." In fact, in some of Black's older productions,
like Jane Waters' The Pornographer, he can be seen wearing an ECW T-shirt and
cap. He even produced some Extreme Associates T-shirts that parodied Stone Cold
Steve Austin's famous "Austin 3:16 says I just whooped your ass"
slogan. Suffice it to say that the "Extreme Associates 3:16" T-shirt
describes doing something else entirely to someone's rear end.
But the association didn't last. A rift formed
between Black and Heyman's money man/business mouthpiece Steve Carole. Carole,
a former Penthouse video employee, was also a pornographer, and had tried to
sell one of his movies to Extreme Associates, but according to Black, "it
sucked." Then a national TV deal for ECW was put on the table by the
Nashville Network, at which point Heyman, in an attempt to look more
respectable, disavowed all connections to Extreme Associates. ECW has since hit
Black with two lawsuits, one over the use of the word Xtreme, and another over
the signing of Sabu, whom they claim was still under contract to them. But the
real reason behind these suits, if you ask Black, is that "There has been
bad blood since then, and Paul has wanted to get at us. Steve Carole has a
vendetta against us."
Still, Black may have been soured on one particular
organization, but his love for wrestling remained. "I run my adult company
like pro wrestling, so an actual wrestling company is a natural step," he
says. "If you like pornography, generally you like wrestling. If you like
wrestling, you like pornography," although he notes the irony that, in
recent years, more people have been willing to admit that they like pornography
than wrestling. Both feature performers with larger-than-life pseudonyms and
physiques, and while porn features unusual sex techniques with names like
"the Fish-Hook" and "the DVDA," wrestling features
elaborate pain-inflicting maneuvers like "the Piledriver" and
"the DDT." Even while he had been working with Heyman and Carole,
Black had had the notion to strike off on his own. "I had been working
with some guys from a local wrestling company and had been tossing about the
idea of starting my own company, but was waiting to see what would happen with
ECW. When Paul bitched out, I decided to go ahead full force."
That local company was SCCW, which Black had learned
about from a flyer he picked up at a WWF show. A handshake later, Black and Kleinrock
were in business. SCCW shut down, and in July 1999, XPW debuted at the Reseda
Country Club. Boasting a talent roster that included SCCW talent, porn stars
like Borden and one-time world gang-bang "record-holder" St. Claire,
disgruntled former ECW employees like Big Dick Dudley and Chris Candido, and
some of the best production values that Rob Black could afford, Xtreme Pro
Wrestling made the biggest national debut -- in terms of publicity and
promotion -- of any wrestling organization since ECW came to prominence. A year
later, after moving its monthly events from the Palace to the L.A. Sports
Arena, the company is finally turning a profit, thanks in part to aggressive
marketing tactics that not only target traditional wrestling fans, but also
porn fans (via the Extreme Associates connection), sci-fi and comic book fans
(XPW regularly has a booth at the monthly science fiction and comic book
conventions held at the Shrine), and rock fans (former Danzig bassist Josh
Lazie left his position with the heavy metal high-rollers in order to becoming
an XPW promoter, and he uses his rock connections to sign on special guests
like Korn singer Jonathan Davis and Slayer vocalist Kerry King).
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Given the elaborately budgeted presentation that is
a typical XPW show, which always features a large video screen and a giant
chrome "X" symbol wrapped in barbed wire, one might expect the XPW
corporate headquarters to be more lavish and conspicuous than it actually is.
Instead, it's a generic one-story building near the Van Nuys airport, one of
many in a large lot that consist mostly of warehouses and stores selling
airplane parts. The only indication of what lies inside is a restricted parking
sign in the front lot reading "Violators will be smacked." Indoors,
the building resembles an unoccupied house -- white and minimalist, with a
large room in the back divided into cubicles. The building's garage, meanwhile,
is stacked to the ceiling with adult videos; Black has yet to divide his empire
into separate buildings.
It is from this nondescript edifice that all of
XPW's ideas and operations emanate, from the heads of five individuals: Black,
of course, whom Kleinrock refers to as "supreme overlord of
everything," is one. Tom Byron -- an "icon of the adult film
industry," according to Kleinrock -- who still works as a porn star but is
also business partners with Black, is another, and will often come up with
wrestling ideas which are usually, in Kleinrock's words, "so impactual
[sic]...when he finally has something to say, it's always an important point.
He's actually contributed a lot to character development and character
stuff." Immediately under Black and Byron is Kleinrock (official title: vice
president of operations), who handles most of the business and P.R. for XPW.
Then there's Josh Lazie, the vice president of administration, who describes
himself as "the bad guy...when you come to my office, you know you're
probably in trouble. I talk to all the wrestlers, I'm pretty much the
go-between between all the wrestlers and Rob, and I run the locker room."
Because of his history as a rocker, Lazie also coordinates the special guests
and music clearances, and is working on doing some original wrestler theme
music down the line.
Last, but by no means least, is "White
Trash" Johnny Webb, who not only wrestles in hard-core matches and helps
train the newer guys, but is also the editor of XPW's home videos and cable TV
show. Webb, who has a quick tongue and naturally aggressive personality, also
provides a good deal of creative input (he takes some credit for coming up with
the Homeless Jimmy character). However, interviewing him over the phone proves
immensely difficult, as he immediately assumes his wrestling persona, refusing
to identify himself, acting belligerently defensive in response to questions
about his drunken, in-ring redneck stylings ("Oh, so now I'm an alcoholic,
is that what you're saying?"), and then claiming he doesn't remember anything
about the previous weekend's show. He defines his own behind-the-scenes role
fairly succinctly: "If anyone has a bad idea, I let 'em know "Hey
idiot! No one wants to see that!'" Still in character, he claims that he
never wanted to be involved in wrestling, that he was duped into thinking he
was going to be employed as a stuntman: "For the record, I hate this
business; I've been trying to get out of it for seven years."
Black, Byron, Lazie, Kleinrock, and Webb are by no
means the only XPW employees to work out of the office: Ring announcer Kriss
Kloss dubs his commentary onto the TV and video programs here; Damien Steele's
gigantic biker sidekick Jake Lawless has been spotted painting the walls, and
Homeless Jimmy works the front reception desk, his multiple welts and cuts
sticking out more than the mere proverbial sore thumb. And the XPW offices also
house the Asylum, XPW's training school, which opened its doors last September.
Here, $3,000 buys you a year's worth of hands-on training from the likes of
Damien Steele and Supreme, mostly for aspiring grapplers, although courses may
soon be offered for would-be valets, managers, and referees. Lest anyone think
those professions are any less dangerous, be warned: This is extreme wrestling,
so everybody -- not just the wrestlers -- has to learn to take their bumps.
Even Black's wife, Lizzie, isn't immune; when New Times caught up with her, she
was preparing to be power-bombed through her first table in the following
couple of weeks, and was nervous about breaking her neck. "It's hard,
because after a couple of days you get sore and you get bruises. It's the
hardest thing I've done," she says. Not that she's averse to difficulty.
"I love it more than porno!"
XPW's Asylum is a far cry from traditional schools
like Stu Hart's infamous "Dungeon" up in Calgary, Alberta, Canada,
where tough-as-nails "old schooler" Hart would initiate his new
students by seeing just how much pain they could take. Part of the reason for
that approach was the nature of wrestling back in Hart's heyday -- it was never
let on that it was anything but absolute reality, so the students couldn't be
allowed to know either until they were ready. And anyone who signed up with the
idea that it was fake was going to quickly feel the agony of a fully-applied
submission hold.
Nowadays, wrestling is more blatantly
"showbiz" than ever before, as today's top stars frequently talk
about their "character" and "story lines." Although weapons
and barbed wire may surround the ring in the cinderblock-walled room in which
XPW's classes take place (Damien Steele likes the area to look as real as
possible for the new recruits), they aren't used -- not until the more advanced
classes, anyway. And while Steele may play the role of aloof, arrogant rich boy
in the ring, and demands that his students yell out "sir, yes sir!"
during training, he's nothing if not supportive, and certainly doesn't place
his students in painful deathlocks in order to teach them a lesson -- not that
New Times witnessed, at any rate.
Still, he does have to impress upon some of the
trainees that it isn't as fake as they might think. For one thing, the ring may
have some give to it, but it's still a hard surface. "Wrestling,
regardless of what maybe their dad told them, or their friends told them, is
probably the most physical endeavor they'll ever encounter," says Steele.
"And it's gonna be a hard year, and it's gonna be physically demanding,
and it's gonna take a huge time commitment and effort, and we want students to
come in here and learn, and paying their dues financially isn't enough. They
have to pay their dues in the ring." A lot of what he teaches is basic
physical fitness: push-ups, sit-ups, jumping jacks, all the usual warm-up
exercises. From there, the students go on to learn forward and backward rolls,
how to fall correctly, and maybe even a couple of basic moves like the
collar-and-elbow tie-up. Students also get to work as crew and security at XPW
shows. But will Steele teach you how to take a barbed wire shot to the back?
"Probably not, because that's nothing you need to teach," he says.
"You basically go out there, and some guy throws you into barbed wire and
you bleed."
Supreme says his students tend to be a little
crazier than Steele's, mostly coming from the backyard wrestling scene, an
underground phenomenon in which untrained teens set up rings in their backyards
and hold their own extreme hard-core matches, often for broadcast on the
Internet. Supreme, a man billed in XPW as "a walking chamber of horrors,"
actually has to tell some of these guys to tone it down. "I tell them you
can't go out there acting crazy, not knowing what you're doing. You could
seriously injure yourself or someone else."
Kleinrock emphasizes this point. "[Backyard
wrestlers] have really got to be careful, especially if they actually want a
career in wrestling. It's more than just putting moves together. Sending WWF or
WCW or even XPW a tape of yourself beating up your best friend in the backyard
with a lightbulb or ladder or barbed wire is not gonna sell you to that
company." As promoter, Kleinrock actively makes sure that XPW promotes as
many traditional-style matches as there are hard-core matches, because, as he
puts it, "I wanna see everything." And it should be noted that Supreme
doesn't get cheers from the fans simply for hitting his opponents with barbed
wire: He gets cheers from the fans for wrapping himself in barbed wire, then
somersaulting off the top rope onto a wooden table. And the man has not
sustained one serious injury yet, in the six or so years he's been doing this.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
If you're a guy, specifically the sort of guy who
turned away from wrestling in the early '90s in favor of no-holds-barred Ultimate
Fighting; the sort of guy who made Gladiator the no. 1 movie in America two
weeks in a row; the sort of guy who thinks Metallica sold out when they cut
their hair; if you're that kind of guy -- and many of us are, to some degree --
there's an undeniable appeal to the XPW shows. Violent wrestling matches
interspersed with lesbian string-bikini lap dances? Why did no one think of
this before?
However, like anything else unwholesome and fun, XPW
is looking at several hurdles in its path. Although Kleinrock says he hasn't
faced any major public criticism of the product ("I wish!"), on the
East Coast, New Jersey Governor Christine Todd Whitman recently got a bill
passed to ban extreme wrestling, which she calls a "blood sport." WWF
head honcho Vince McMahon immediately expressed his support for the bill,
distancing himself from his lower-budget competitors even as he continues to
co-opt their techniques -- among his most popular wrestlers are the Dudley
Boyz, two violent, camouflage-wearing Southerners who like to throw women
through tables.
Even ECW, a company with the words
"extreme" and "wrestling" right there in the name, quickly
distanced themselves also, claiming they don't fall into the same category as
the local promotions targeted by Governor Whitman. This being an election year,
and sex and violence being perennial easy targets, XPW may face trouble if the
media latches on (similar political sentiment a few years ago managed to get
Ultimate Fighting banned in most states). Meanwhile, ECW has been hitting Rob
Black with numerous lawsuit threats, which his partner Kleinrock finds ironic,
given that ECW used to complain about larger companies "picking on
them."
But for now, at least, XPW fans need not worry about
the shows they love being toned down. Black cites a recent WWF show in which a
78-year-old woman went topless (she was actually wearing a specially
constructed latex bodysuit, but none of the fans knew that until afterward),
and proudly insists "We'll go further, just you wait...If we can't get
arrested for it, we'll do it. We'll deal with everything from incest, to rape,
to I don't know what." At a recent show, for instance, one of the
wrestlers was afflicted with a bad case of nerves, and vomited over his
opponent after being kicked in the stomach. When Black realized that the
wrestler could duplicate the feat night after night, a new gimmick was born.
Webb, who may or may not be kidding, says that he'd like to see a .357 match
one day, in which the first wrestler to grab a gun gets to shoot his opponent.
He's also looking forward to a "Smell in the Cell" cage match with
the puking wrestler, known only as J.N.
The only time taboos count is when they hurt the
bottom line. Ever the capitalist, Black has a simple philosophy: "Whatever
we can show, whatever the fans will keep paying and coming back [for], that's
the line. If you keep doing something and nobody's coming? Then the line has
been drawn that they don't want to see it. As long as you keep pushing the
envelope in the shows, and doing these on-the-edge things, and people continue
to come and just sell out the venues that we're going to, then you know, we're
gonna keep bringing 'em that brand of entertainment." He has recently been
talking to some people in Japan about doing "an exploding ring
match."
Despite the tough talk, though, there are signs that
XPW will occasionally pull back. The racist skinhead character Maxx, for
example, has been put on "indefinite hiatus" since his debut. And one
of the most potentially controversial characters, Messiah, is a devout
Christian in real life and is very careful about the way his character phrases
things. As he puts it, "It's a fine line, because I'm not going out there
saying I'm Jesus...These fans started doing it. It wasn't something I started, and
that's on them. I'm not telling anybody to worship me, I'm not telling anybody
to bow down before me, I'm not telling anybody that if you worship me you're
gonna go to the kingdom of heaven. It's not like that. It's just me trying to
get them away from XPW and what XPW stands for, and trying to make them go to a
better place."
That's what he professes while in character, anyway.
In real life, XPW just released a line of Messiah T-shirts bearing the tag-line
"Holy S**t!" Messiah, who works at a steakhouse when he's not
slamming people into thumbtacks, also notes that most XPW fans are able to
differentiate between performer and persona, saying that if "you give 110
percent, the fans'll recognize that, and they'll reward you with that. I mean,
they might boo you and they might cheer you during the match, but once you go
out to put your stuff in your car or something, they're the first ones up there
that wanna shake your hand, and get an autograph, and say "Good
match.'"
But the line can be a tricky one sometimes. During a
show at the Palace that spilled out into the crowd, a group of angry fans tried
to attack Damien Steele, who says that sort of thing had never happened to him
before. And when the following month's main event ended with star wrestler Chris
Candido having to go to the hospital, many fans didn't leave or clear the way
for medics because they thought it was part of the story line. Thankfully for
Candido, his injury turned out to be nothing serious, and he was able to
wrestle again two days later.
Having established himself as a player in the worlds
of porn and wrestling, Black is still looking to expand. In the future, he
says, "I'd like a professional football team." Adds Webb: "We'll
get all the porn guys together: Bob Guccione, Larry Flynt, Rob, everyone, and
they're gonna buy a team." So will they wrap themselves in barbed wire
too? Maybe. As Black puts it "They're never gonna win -- they'll get
disqualified -- but they'll have good cheerleaders." Say what you will
about the man, but he certainly knows his audience.
But XPW are going to have their hands full for a
while. Now that a market for extreme wrestling has been shown to exist on the
West Coast, longtime rivals ECW have moved in.
"They came out here to try to show the people in
California that they are the real masters of extreme wrestling," says
Black, "and they are not, because their product sucks now, and they only
have one good guy -- Rob Van Dam." Nonetheless, ECW's "Heatwave
2000" event, broadcast on pay-per-view cable from the Grand Olympic
Auditorium on Sunday, July 16, was the East Coast organization's first
California show, and a quick sellout. It was also an incursion into enemy
territory that did not go unnoticed: During the main event, XPW's Kristi Myst,
who had a front row ticket, got into an argument with ECW's Francine. It's
unclear who started it, but when fellow XPW talents who also had tickets moved
in to back Kristi up, the ECW locker room emptied, with ECW grapplers targeting
specific XPW wrestlers -- proof, according to Kleinrock, that the whole thing
was an ambush. A parking lot brawl ensued, with several of XPW's ring crew
getting badly beaten. ECW tried to cover up the whole affair on the live
broadcast (their Web site's description of the event reads simply, "A fan
tried to touch Francine, but was taken out of the building"), but XPW had
gotten notice on national TV, which they followed by filing charges and a
lawsuit. Ironically, ECW tried similar publicity tactics some years back at a
WWF event.
Can the two companies both claim a piece of the
California action, or is a very nasty fight to the finish on the cards? The
real deathmatch is about to begin.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------