Here’s the inside dope about the fantasy world of professional wrestling: It’s all real.
Well, almost.
Sam DeCero, who has trained hundreds of would-be Hulk Hogans at his wrestling school in the gritty, blue-collar neighborhood of South Deering, acknowledges that the names are made up. And so are the gimmicks, those bits of costume, mannerism, appearance and biography that make DeCero’s students – the Polish Crippler, for example, or Vito “Two Fingers” Fontaine – not just wrestlers but full-blown characters the crowd can relate to.
But when it comes to the matches themselves, DeCero swears, cross his heart, that they are as real as anything.
“Nothing is choreographed – here, at least,” DeCero says, as he sits wide-shouldered and thick-armed behind his desk at his Windy City Pro Wrestling school. “When Mike Anthony and Brendan Bishop (two Windy City stars – one, a bad guy; the other, a good guy) wrestle, neither one knows if he’s going to come out on top.”
DeCero wears a gold crucifix on a gold chain around his neck. His hands, beefy but supple, are clasped sedately in front of him on the desktop. At 38, he looks as if he could easily get back into the ring, and, as the emcee of Windy City Pro Wrestling’s weekly television shows, he’s hinted in recent weeks of doing just that.
“Nothing is planned. There is no fake blood in this business. When the guy gets beaten over the head with a chair or gets run into the ring post and he’s bleeding, he’s really bleeding.”
Many non-believers would find that hard to credit. They see pro wrestling – whether by DeCero’s newcomers or the major leaguers of the World Wrestling Federation – not as a real sport but as a form of ritual dance. Or perhaps a soap opera in tights and high-lace boots. Or the embodiment of heavy metal music.
Yet even scoffers can’t scoff at the dreams of DeCero’s students. Those are as real as dreams come.
“This is all I’ve ever wanted to do,” says 23-year-old Donny Bean, a DeCero student for five years. He fights under the name “Bad Boy” Brett Sanders. “Sometimes you have to sacrifice other things for what you want to do, whether it’s job security or whatever, just like an actor or model. You’re doing something more than the everyday guy who has an everyday job.”
Real, too, are the payoffs. Maybe not in money so much, but in something almost as good to an end-of-century American: television exposure.
The 305-pound Willie Richardson breaks into a wide grin as he says, “I debuted on TV about two weeks ago!” During the day, Richardson is a cable television installer. In the ring, he’s “Da Bomb.” “I did so-so (in the match). But I was so excited when I saw it on TV.”
And the pain is real.
During last Thursday’s class — even experienced Windy City wrestlers take class, just as ballet dancers do — DeCero ran the group of 15 men through a particularly grueling move. And he told the 6-foot-8-inch Polish Crippler, known in real life as Mark Nowak, a three-year veteran, to show the newer students how to do it correctly.
From one corner of the ring, Nowak ran at full speed to the other, leaping to place his right foot on the second highest rope, right near the ring post.
In a split second, his momentum carried him to the top rope, where he landed with his two feet on either side of the post. Then, holding his balance, he instantly pushed off, spun, arced his body out over the canvas and — stretched out to his full extension — came down flat on his chest, stomach and legs from a height of at least six feet.
It was a wonderfully athletic, almost balletic, move. And, in a match, it would have been spectacular. Nowak would have come down on his opponent in what would have appeared to be a bone-jarring body slam. The opponent would have groaned and rocked back and forth in apparent pain, but somehow would have rolled out of the way to fight some more.
This time, though, with no crowd present, it’s Nowak whose bones are jarred. He gets up favoring his right knee.
“Are you OK?” DeCero asks.
Nowak nods yes.
” ’cause I need you to wrestle Friday. If you’re not OK, sit down for a while.”
“I’m OK,” Nowak says.
Pro wrestling seems to be a growth business in the U.S., with dozens of schools — including one just for women — in operation around the nation, often with names such as School of Hard Knocks and The Monster Factory. Another Chicago-area school is the World Wrestling Association Training Center, operated by Mike Bonomo in Manteno, just outside of Kankakee.
But wrestling isn’t for the faint-hearted or the weak-willed. And neither is DeCero’s training.
For one thing, it’s not cheap. Enrollment is $2,000 in a lump sum, or $2,500 on the installment plan. On top of that, there are dues of $40 a month.
In return, DeCero provides unlimited training — usually, students take one or two classes a week — and he guarantees that, once trained, they’ll get to perform as real pro wrestlers in front of real pro wrestling crowds (and be paid $50 to $500 a match, depending on their star quality).
DeCero can make such promises because he sponsors 40 to 45 shows a year and because his training facility, a former commercial garage, doubles as a television studio. In addition to events at local park district fieldhouses, the Rosemont Convention Center, the International Amphitheatre and the Wisconsin and Illinois state fairs, DeCero’s wrestlers perform at their home ring once a month.
Six times a year, those performances, comprising as many as two dozen matches, are videotaped and repackaged into half-hour shows, each with one or two matches, for use on Windy City’s weekly television shows: at 6 a.m. Saturdays on WJYS-Ch. 62, and at 8:30 a.m. Saturdays and 8 p.m. Tuesdays on Chicago Cable Channel 25.
For $10 a ticket, as many as 140 fans gather around the Windy City ring, hollering for their favorites, holding up signs to deride the anti-heroes, and even mixing it up with the wrestlers.
At one recent match, Donny Bean, normally the most softspoken of men — many of DeCero’s wrestlers are soft-spoken — was strutting around the ring as “Bad Boy” Brett Sanders. He was proclaiming his plans to annihilate his opponent when he heard some negative feedback from someone in the crowd.
“The Bad Boy doesn’t respect you!” Bean shouted, pointing his finger at the offending fan. “You shut your mouth, you stinky hillbilly!”
The crowd loved it.
Bean says the Bad Boy the crowd sees is someone deep inside himself. “I can project it out of myself in a way that I can’t project it in my regular life,” he says. “I can be larger than life. I’m just myself, like to the 10th power when I get mad. You’ve got to have it in your heart.”
Sam DeCero explains it by quoting one old-time wrestler: “You know what this business is all about? The good guy — this is why the people come to the arena and buy tickets — is the hero. The bad guy, he’s like the tax collector. The people in the crowd take all their frustration out on the tax collector.”
Then, DeCero adds his own words: “If you’re going to be a good guy, you have to make people the happiest they’ve ever been, and the bad guy, I tell them, you’re going to get people so angry they’re going to swallow their hot dog whole.”
As a wrestler, DeCero was a good guy (as Slammin’ Sammy Darro), and then a bad guy (as Super Maxx, part of a tag team with Mad Maxx).
He came to wrestling as a boy of 4 or 5, taken to matches by his parents, held on his father’s shoulders to better see the ring. They would always get as close as possible, close enough to see the sweat on the muscles of the behemoth battlers.
“To be close enough to touch Dick the Bruiser — it was like a dream come true,” DeCero recalls. “Little did I know that one day I’d wrestle Dick the Bruiser.”
As he grew up, DeCero papered the walls of his bedroom with posters of the wrestling heroes who seemed so exotic, so mysterious.
“You never knew where they lived. Nobody knew where they came from. They could be living next door to you. Let me tell you something: When I got my driver’s license, I would drive around the Amphitheatre neighborhood, hoping I’d see the Crusher sitting on his porch.”
DeCero was a skinny teenager who played the kettle drum in his high school’s band. But by his early 20s the wrestling bug was too strong to ignore. DeCero put on weight and muscle and, in 1981, began studying with “Macho Man” Randy Savage, a course of training that required him to drive each weekend to Lexington, Ky., for classes.
A year later, he was working for his former idol, Dick the Bruiser, and his career was well under way.
In 1987, a back injury — suffered outside the ring, when he fell off a truck — ended his career. Groping around for a way to stay in the business, DeCero opened his school.
None of DeCero’s 72 students, all but three of whom are men, travels as far as he did to train, but many have long drives nonetheless to the Windy City facility at the far edge of Chicago near the Indiana border. Nowak, for example, lives in Schaumburg. Richardson is from the West Side.
George Nottoli, who lives on the Far North Side, spends his day running his family’s Italian grocery store on Harlem Avenue near Elmwood Park before driving cross-city to wrestling class.
The 35-year-old Nottoli has played rugby since college at St. John’s University in Minnesota and is president of the Lincoln Park Rugby Club. But when he heard about the Windy City school earlier this year, he knew what he had to do.
“I like the entertainment part of it,” he says. “When I play rugby, I’m not a showboat because it isn’t part of the game. In rugby, if you showboat, I’ll probably knock you down on the next play. But it is part of wrestling.”
Nottoli, whose ring name is Vito “Two Fingers” Fontaine, knows that the odds of going very far — of getting to the major leagues of the World Wrestling Federation — are against him.
But the flame of hope still flickers.
“I’m one of the oldest rookies. If I was a young guy, I’d definitely be trying to do that. I’m just going to try to be the best I can be. If something happens, great, I’ll take it. I would love to do it.”
The love is real.
