Scrappy competitors Flood and “Miracle” Mike James are tangling in a
tag-team match with the cocky Mr. Showtyme and Robert Britton.
It's a heated contest, with a variety of hard-hitting, hellacious maneuvers:
Spin kicks, top-rope splashes and a ‘‘DDT'' — where one combatant drops
the other's head directly on the mat.
Yet this isn't a glitzy WWE event with fireworks, television cameras and screaming fans. In fact, there aren't any fans at all. These men are students, learning the ropes of the often violent, yet consistently popular athletic exhibition that is pro wrestling.
Which soon becomes obvious when the melee is cut short by their instructors.
“The match fell apart,” advises head trainer Steve Islas.
“You guys should have had an ending in mind,” adds fellow trainer Lawrence Tyler.
GOING TO SCHOOL
Professional wrestling — call it fake, predetermined or scripted —
whatever it is, isn't easy. That's a lesson that the students of the Impact
Zone Wrestling training school, a tiny facility that shares space with
the Hot Pink strip club on the Tempe-Phoenix border, learn on a daily basis.
“I'm going to be really sore tomorrow,” says Flood in his civilian identity, Nick DeMichael, 19, of Tempe.
“You never really appreciate a wrestler until you actually get involved with wrestling and see how tough it is,” says Jay Garland, 22, of Laveen, who wrestles as Mr. Showtyme. “It's not as easy as people think it is.”
It's also not just learning wrestling moves and holds. To be able to pull off these maneuvers convincingly, exercise and weight training is required.
“I'm 6 foot 2,” says Garland. “When I first started I weighed in at 165. I'm around 193 right now.
“You have to do cardio to stay in physical shape because, believe it or not, once you walk out that curtain, you're out of breath. The adrenaline and everything like that is overwhelming.”
For $250 a month, anyone can try their hand at becoming a pro wrestler, and it's not necessarily the people you'd expect. The school, which is essentially a ring in a room, attracts men and women, most without the muscular physiques traditionally associated with pro wrestling. Some are skinny, some are chubby, some are lanky blonde girls.
Student Cynthia Garcia, 18, of Chandler, whose ring moniker is “Tommi Kyle” and who works at the overtly domestic retail merchant Michael's during the day, gets picked up by her adopted parents, as if this were tennis practice or piano lessons. Her parents admit that they were surprised by her choice at first — could you take it seriously if your daughter told you she wanted to become a pro wrestler?
“I really didn't think she was serious; it caught me off guard,” says her mother, Maria Oliver. “But we've been very supportive.”
Although giving wholehearted support while your daughter is being tossed around by buff men isn't always easy.
“I still flinch,” says her father, Paul Oliver.
In an industry where women (like recent “Dancing with the Stars” competitor Stacy Keibler) are used as little more than eye candy, Garcia wants to leave her mark in the ring — and maybe some bruises on her opponents.
“She doesn't want to be known as one of those girls that walk around in bikinis,” says her mother. “I think that's a great attitude.”
William Vest, 23, of Chandler, who performs as the masked “Lucha Reigns,” is another atypical candidate, at 5 feet 10 inches and an ectomorphic 140 pounds, far below the dimensions of superstar performers like the 6-feet 3- inch, 260-pound WWE champion John Cena.
“All of the time I've been told I'm too small for it, that just makes me want it even more,” says Vest.
RING MASTER
Impact Zone Wrestling and its training school are the brainchild of
owner and head trainer Steve Islas, a 14-year veteran with WWE experience
who still performs as Navajo Warrior.
“The school was something I wanted to do because I never really had that much one-on-one while learning,” says Islas. “I wanted to tell people how to make those contacts that my trainer didn't help me get.”
It's paid off for former IZW students Jack Bull and Mike Nox, who are currently under WWE contract and working in their developmental league Deep South Wrestling. For Valley-area wannabe wrestlers, the school is as big of a break as they can hope for.
“Our Impact Zone Wrestling shows, we use that as our platform for our students, when we feel they're ready to perform in front of people, we put them on those shows,” says Islas, adding that the process usually takes nine months to a year from first signing up.
“Once they excel on those shows, we move them to other independent promotions across the country.”
Islas, calm and eloquent, is not the kind of person immediately conjured to mind when you think of a pro wrestling teacher. Aside from his stocky build and long hair, he seems like he could just as easily be teaching high school geometry instead of waist-locks and take-downs. Far from the more stereotypical disciplinarians one would associate with wrestling schools.
“The horror stories you hear, those are the kind of trainers that want you to come in, pay your money, then they want to break you and send you on their way,” he says.
Islas takes the aspirations of his students seriously: “Me and my trainers, we want to help them get as close to achieving those dreams as possible.”
Some people show up to the school thinking they can reach those lofty goals right away.
“The people who want to be big stars, in their mind they see ‘Stone Cold' Steve Austin or the Rock or Triple H, and say, ‘Oh, I could do that, that's me,' ” says Islas.
“The peo ple with the stars in their eyes right away are the ones that usually drop by the wayside the quickest, because they don't realize the amount of work it takes just to get to a level to be able to perform in front of people,” he explains.
Although a positive approach is employed, sometimes the trainers have to lecture their students, as was the case after the aforementioned tag team match.
“You guys don't look like you're pro wrestlers,” trainer and IZW champion Lawrence “XXX” Tyler says to his pupils. “I'm not saying this to be mean, I'm saying this so you can get better. Anybody can wrestle, but to be really good takes talent.”
The impression is that a student has to really “want it” to succeed.
“It has to be dug into you, almost like the military. You have to teach serious discipline and how to take pain and punishment,” says Tyler.
The students seem to understand the need for constructive criticism.
“They've got to be negative to get you more motivated,” says DeMichael. “That only makes you that much better the next time you have to go out and do it.”
CASUALTIES OF WAR
Professional wrestling is fake, but it's also dangerous. Injuries,
sometimes resulting in paralysis, happen at every level. The lifestyle
itself takes a toll, as the persistent pain associated with the in-ring
action has frequently led to substance abuse problems, which have resulted
in early deaths of many performers, such as WWE star and East Valley resident
Eddie Guerrero, who died in November at age 37.
For the local performers, who might have to miss work at their day jobs with an injury, or not have insurance to cover an incident, the burden is perhaps greater. One performer had to come up with a different reason for an injury, as the insurance company wouldn't cover pro wrestling-related mishaps.
“Bumps and bruises, that's a daily thing. The most serious injury we've
had here is a torn ACL,” Islas says. “No broken bones, luckily.
“But there have been cases where people that have been learning pro
wrestling at different schools, they've had deaths.”
No amount of preparation can make you injury-proof.
“You can be well-trained and still have accidents happen, especially when you're putting your body on the line,” says Islas. “Everything we do, from a simple fall, there's a chance of getting hurt — land wrong, break a leg, concussion — anything could happen.”
“The hardest thing about the sport is that you do a lot of stuff that's almost like committing suicide,” Tyler says.
“There's so much pain involved that people don't know about; an amazing amount of pain,” he adds. “Your knees hurt, your shoulders hurt. It doesn't usually happen right away, but over time, the ring always wins.”
Garcia, the victim of the knee ligament tear, didn't let it set back her dreams.
“Doctors told me if I tore it again, there's a possibility that leg might not work any more,” she says. “There's screws in there, and I have to wear a brace every time I wrestle.
“I'm going to keep coming back here until I can't walk anymore.”
Garland, currently the IZW Western States Champion, is no stranger to injury. “I jumped off the middle rope to do what's called a fist drop, for some reason my left knee popped, I could feel it and I could hear it,” Garland details. “Anytime I move it a certain way, it sends a sharp pain through my knee.”
Garland, who is also training to become a police officer, doesn't have a lot of options in dealing with the problem: “I don't have health insurance, so it's going on a year since it's happened, and I still haven't had it looked at.”
PASSION FUELED
If professional wrestling is dangerous, fake and something that is
dismissed by society as a whole as lowbrow entertainment at best and violent
and sexist at worst, why would these young people, given the relative low
chance of making it to WWE, risk their health to be a part of the business?
“This is something that I wanted to do since I was 8 years old,” says three-year veteran Shawn McGrath, 29, of Chandler, a bill collector by day and the cocky IZW “heel” performer Shawn “Bad Seed” Osborne by night.
McGrath is an unlikely candidate for a professional wrestler: An Arizona State University graduate with a degree in nutrition.
“When I was going to college at ASU,” says McGrath, “I wasn't the best student in the world; I really didn't want to be there in the first place. I started thinking about what I really wanted to do to make me happy.
“It always came back to professional wrestling.”
As could be expected, this choice met some opposition from his family.
“My mom, she didn't believe me that it was going to happen until the day I moved, and she did everything in her power to stop me, because she didn't want to see me get hurt.”
In recent years, she's accepted his surprising career path. “She's still very concerned as far as me being injured,” he says, “but she knows this is what I love to do, and she respects the fact that I've gotten this far.”
McGrath cites pro wrestling as helping him to release the frustrations associated with his day job, and also credits it for improving him as a person.
“You wouldn't believe how much it's helped. I used to be a really high-strung guy, really angry,” says McGrath. “Once I got into wrestling, once I'm out of the ring, I'm just a really calm, level-headed dude.”
This deep connection to the sport and level of commitment isn't unique to McGrath; in fact, it seems to be a prerequisite to endure the process.
“You want it so bad, you're willing to go through all the pain you've got to go through,” says Vest.
Islas sees that desire in almost all of his students: “I think, for the most part, it's the love of wrestling, as a fan watching it, saying, ‘Man, I really wanna try that,' wanting to be able to say, ‘Hey, at least I gave it a shot.' ”
BIG TIME
Although the universal goal of the wrestlers involved seems to be making
it to the big stage, performing for thousands of fans, they already have
attracted a following. A small but vocal and usually capacity crowd of
about 100 people shows up to the biweekly IZW shows at The Sets, a bar
and occasional concert venue in Tempe.
The shows aren't big on polish and flash, but offer wrestling fans an alternative to the increasingly over-the-top WWE programs, which often focus more on backstage shenanigans and elaborately ridiculous story lines than in-ring action.
“These guys, they're just starting out, but they give it their all,” says Jared Bals, 29, of Phoenix, a regular attendee at the shows for the last six months.
Professional wrestling: Sometimes brutal, sometimes tasteless, and, yes, fake — but it's hard to deny the passion and work put in by the performers.
“You have to appreciate it for what it is,” says Tyler. “It's art. It's art with pain.”
Wrestling Live
What: Impact Zone Wrestling
When: 7:30 p.m. Tuesday, March 28
Where: The Sets, 93 E. Southern Ave., Tempe.
Cost: $7
Info: (480) 829-1822 or impactzonewrestling .com
Wrestling on TV
WWE Raw (10 p.m. Mondays, USA) WWE Friday Night SmackDown! (7 p.m.
Fridays, UPN)
WWE Saturday Night's Main Event (occasional, premiere show 7 p.m. Saturday,
March 18, NBC)
WWE A.M. Raw (10 a.m., Saturday, USA)
WWE Wrestlemania 22 (6 p.m. Sunday, April 2, annual pay-per-view event)
Total Nonstop Action Wrestling iMPACT! (midnight, Saturdays, Spike
TV)