By the time this week is over, I will have conducted morning show interviews with Carthage president F. Gregory Campbell, Apollo astronaut Al Worden, pediatrician and TV host Dr. Yvonne Bohn, New York Times reporter Tim Clavin, and Wintersilks founder Frank Farwell. Talk about a group of heavy hitters! But the heaviest hitter of them all, literally if not figuratively, is professional wrestler Danny Inferno – one of the guys featured in a fascinating and as well as poignant documentary airing tonight on the National Geographic channel: “Slammed: Inside Indie Wrestling.”
First of all, look at all of the bewildering elements in that paragraph. Greg Berg talking with a professional wrestler? National Geographic presenting a documentary about professional wrestling? And the afore-mentioned documentary being poignant? I wouldn’t blame you for wondering if my head had been slammed with one too many metal folding chairs.
But no, I really did interview wrestler Danny Inferno about a documentary that really is airing on the National Geographic Channel (tonight) and it really is a poignant documentary. Really!
I actually am rather inundated with overtures from National Geographic to do interviews about both their books and their television programs – and there really aren’t enough hours in the day for me to do them all. Suffice to say that everything they do is high quality and it spans far more than used to, and I eventually find myself having to pick and choose those books or programs that seem to offer something out of the ordinary. That’s the main reason my eye was drawn to this special about professional wrestling, and once I had watched the preview DVD I knew that this was a program worth talking about (and blogging about) and worth watching, even if you have never had the slightest interest in professional wrestling.
On second thought, it probably does help if you have watched at least a little bit of pro wrestling over the years and have ever stopped to wonder just how this “sport” operates and what it likes to be a part of it. I watched pro wrestling a lot as a grade school, junior high and high school student, which doesn’t exactly square with other aspects of my life and persona, but it’s true. There was something about the non-stop action and the high-stakes drama both inside and outside of the ring that had me hooked… and for a long time (longer than I care to admit) I was fully convinced that everything that happened was completely authentic: that Baron von Raschke’s fearsome Iron Claw really did inflict unimaginable agony and that when “The Million Dollar Man” Ted DiBiase applied his sleeper hold, his opponent really did lose consciousness . . . and most of all, that these wrestlers were desperate enemies of each other, even outside of the ring. And I still vividly remember both my mom and dad trying to convince me – as they also did with roller derby – that all of these combatants went out for dinner together when the matches were done and the fans had gone home. And much as I respected both of my parents and their intelligence, I knew they were dead wrong about this. In fact, I’d never heard anything more stupid than the thought that Dr. Ken Ramey and the Interns (just to name some bad guy wrestlers I remember watching long ago) later that night would share a booth and a cordial dinner at Perkins with one of the wholesome good guys like Mike George or the Chicago truck driver, Bull Bullinski. The thought was ludicrous to me – as was the notion that these wrestling matches were choreographed and scripted with the results pre-determined / and the vast majority of the “pain” inflicted and received completely fake. Of course, at some point (let’s just say it was well ahead of me earning my masters degree) I did begin to catch on to the fiction of it all, and grudgingly conceded that my folks had been right on the money when it came to the artifice that was at the heart of professional wrestling.
Of course, professional wrestling is still around – although it has lost some ground to mixed martial arts and related competitions which are pretty much authentic athletic contests rather than scripted entertainment – yet providing a fair amount of pageantry and entertainment in their own way. It’s proven to be a threat to pro wrestling- if not so much to the top organizations like the WWE, than to the second-tier, “minor league” wrestling groups that play in small towns and small venues, often for rather small crowds, and almost never with television cameras present. The wrestlers that are part of the “sport” at this level are usually young up-and-coming wrestlers desperate to break into the next level… or long-time veterans who have never quite had what it takes to ascend to the big time…. or a few older wrestlers who did taste the big time, only to lose it and are dying to have it back again. The venues are far from glamorous, with the promoter and a couple of the wrestlers having to do everything – include setting up the ring, the chairs, etc. This is about as far from the big time as you could possibly be.
And yet the guys that do it seem to love it – or at least that’s what we see in this special, which takes us behind the scenes in ways that I would never have dreamt possible. We meet several different wrestlers who are part of this particular second-tier organization (which nevertheless has the grandiose name of International Wrestling Superstars) – and are shown candid moments from their lives away from the ring. The guy I interviewed, Danny Inferno (actually Danny Gimondo) was a two-time New Jersey state wrestling champ in high school whose professional career actually took him to the WWE before he was abruptly let go – without explanation. We see him at a point in his career when he is trying with all his might to regain his previous stature. One look at his stark apartment is all we need to know that this guy has fallen several steps from his glory days- but he’s so earnest and well-spoken and thoughtful that we really root for him to regain what he’s lost.
Another wrestler on whom the cameras focus is a dazzlingly handsome young man named Michael Paris, who has done some modeling- but it is wrestling that he really wants to do. At one point, we meet his mother, a mail order bride born in the Philippines who was brought here by her American husband – and who is struggling to make a living since his death. Her son seems fully sincere when he says that his dreams for wrestling stardom are all about giving his mom a better life after all she has sacrificed for him. He’s someone who has the brawn and athleticism to succeed but has a ways to go with the whole matter of fashioning a character and becoming that character more convincingly. In one of the poignant scenes of the special, we follow a number of wrestlers who are essentially auditioning for a promoter named Jim Crockett for his “Ring of Honor” series – and part of the process involves doing a one-minute promo of themselves – as though they were speaking into a television camera, introducing themselves to the masses. Of the aspiring wrestlers we watch do this, most are painfully inept (you get the feeling that none of them has ever acted in a play or maybe even read out loud) and yet they’re willing to give it a shot. Michael probably rates a B or B- in this regard, but he’s such a nice guy with so many other talents that we find ourselves rooting for him to perfect this final piece of the puzzle.
We also meet a wrestler by the name of J.B Smoothie who – at a glance – does not look like a wrestler at all and not really even an athlete at all. He’s not exactly frail but by no means the kind of imposing physical specimen that comes to mind with pro wrestling. Like so many of these men, he has a day job – and his is selling and servicing vacuum cleaners. But then there is this other side of his life, when he is wrestling professionally. By the way, he’s the chief Ring Guy, which means that he bears most of the responsibility when it comes to setting up the ring for that night’s matches, and tearing it down afterward. Smoothie is a perpetual loser, which is to say that 99% of the time he is scripted to “lose” his matches – and typically in rather lopsided fashion…. although once in a while the promoter will give him a match in which he gets to do a bit more in the ring besides get flattened. In the documentary, he is supposed to be in a tag team battle against two huge African-American wrestlers who are built like sumo wrestlers. But these two guys are billed as the African Terrors or something like that, garbed and made up to look like the stereotypical savages from the heart of the continent – not uttering a word of English – and seeming to represent barely contained brutality. Just before the match, the promoter gets a phone call from the wrestler who is supposed to be Smoothie’s partner, saying that he’s not coming – evidently an all too common problem at this level of the business – and the match has to be quickly re-scripted as a two-against-one match that will of course be even more of a mismatch. And we watch a few moments of this pre-match conversation as they map out some of their moves. . . and after the match is over, we see them backstage chatting and laughing – the “African savages” suddenly sounding like two normal American guys, and nice guys at that. (They’re basically recapping the match, and at one point one of them makes sure that JB hadn’t been accidentally hurt by anything that had happened in the match.) And suddenly I am seeing that scenario of the wrestlers eating together at Perkins playing out before my eyes – and I’m reminded all over again of how right my mom and dad were about all this, all those years ago.
Anyway, this documentary is about a bunch of guys doing what they love – even though it’s a struggle and a far cry from the glory for which they have dreamt. That extends to the promoter who is practically a one-man operation, to the point of printing and cutting his own tickets, hanging all the posters himself, making all of the bookings himself, all with the hopes of surviving these rough financial times. But he loves this business enough to give himself over to it with the kind of energy and whole-heartedness that is truly inspiring.
I find it roughly akin to a singer with dreams of singing Aida at the Metropolitan Opera but who instead finds herself singing the part of the Priestess with the Tulsa Opera – – – and then will work temp jobs for Kelly Services for two months until the next gig comes along. And it’s just as true for the singer dreaming of the Grand Old Opry in Nashville but instead finds themselves singing in a dark and largely empty bar on the outskirts of Lincoln, Nebraska – hoping against hope that this is somehow going to lead to something bigger and better. That latter example was the wife of my voice teacher at UNL. Dr. Grace called me into his office one day to ask a special favor of me. As a gift to his wife, he had arranged for her to sing two performances at the bar that her mom and dad owned – covering all the various expenses – and he asked me to play piano for her. I was not exactly within my musical comfort zone playing songs like “Tracks of my Tears” and the like, but I am actually so glad that I agreed to do it. I will never forget what it felt like to be on that stage with Mrs. Grace (I wish I could remember her first name) as she sang for those sparse and only intermittently interested crowds with such admirable gusto (and with some real beauty, too.) I have no idea what ever became of that dream of hers, but there was something very moving and inspiring (if also a little sad) about those performances at that modest little venue that might as well have been a million miles away from the Big Time – wherever that was. But maybe the size of the crowd and the intensity of the spotlight – or the impressiveness of the paycheck – doesn’t matter all that much when you are doing what you most love to do.
“Slammed: Inside Indie Wrestling” airs Wednesday night on the National Geographic Channel.
pictured above: Wrestler and vacuum cleaner salesman J.B . Smoothie is with the African Terrors, recapping the match they’ve just completed, in which Smoothie was squashed by one of the giants in a high-flying move that left him so injured that he had to be assisted from the ring. What’s cool about this special is how National Geographic’s cameras follow him out of the ring and into the backstage area (invisible to the audience) at which point Smoothie suddenly needs no more assistance, and in fact is laughing and high-fiving his colleagues. Frankly, I’m astonished that this wrestling organization would permit this kind of candid exposure of the backstage reality of professional wrestling- except that Danny Infero said in our interview that they believed that NG intended to treat them and what they did with respect. . . and their trust proved to be well placed.