Jeffo Historical and Cultural Corner, Jeffo for UOTY 2017

[Jeff Hardy 18]

Come parte della mia campagna elettorale per il titolo di UOTY 2017 apro questo topic dove vorrei contribuire all'emancipazione del lettore medio di TW, con video, articoli o analisi a carattere storico o culturale.

Vorrei proprio partire con un bellissimo articolo del New York Times Magazine (tengo a precisare come io mi dissoci dal comportamento del Presidente USA nei confronti della cultura e un comportamento così fascio e dittatoriale non ci sarà qui sul forum) datato 2 gennaio 2000 in cui David Hajdu ricorda la figura di Gorilla Monsoon morto nel 1999:

http://www.nytimes.com/2000/01/02/magaz ... -noir.html" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;
The Lives They Lived: Gorilla Monsoon, b. 1937; When Wrestling Was Noir

By DAVID HAJDUJAN. 2, 2000

The first time I saw the face of Evil, I was 8 or 9. It was a little after midnight, and I had sneaked out of the bedroom and felt my way into the basement, where my father kept an old black-and-white TV with a cracked wooden cabinet in his workshop. I clicked it on in the dark and froze in terror at a sight I had never seen upstairs before bedtime: a human monster, repulsive in a one-piece bodysuit, twirling a man over his head, cackling demonically. He was Gorilla Monsoon, the announcer said with a suitable tremor, and for some time I thought he existed only on a broken TV in the basement at night.

I wasn't far off. In Monsoon's prime during the mid-1960's, professional wrestling was a dark and filthy, crooked, seedy, low-budget venture on the fringe of mainstream entertainment. Many bouts were staged for several hundred fans (and often fewer) in V.F.W. halls and high-school gyms, and even those that were televised could be seen only once a week after prime time on low-wattage independent stations. In his two-decade career, Gorilla Monsoon fought some 8,000 bouts. He was, like the dime-store novelist Jim Thompson or the crime photographer Weegee, a master practitioner in a disreputable American pulp milieu; he occupied the same world of lowlifes, transients and grifters; and his performances provided a similar kind of raw and harrowing thrill.

At a time when professional-wrestling events were measured by the bulk of their participants (''10 exhibitions involving weights totaling 4,871 pounds''), Gorilla Monsoon, weighing in at 401, was duly revered as ''heaviest of all.'' He virtually created and best embodied the role of ''the heel,'' the bad guy in the ritual morality drama that wrestling became during his era. It was just a role, of course; college-educated and a onetime high-school teacher, the private Robert Marella remained an articulate and demurely mannered gentleman. When he spoke about his profession, he did so with reverence and none of the gutter bravura of its more recent practitioners. ''For those who believe in our sport, no explanation is necessary,'' Monsoon said. ''For those who disbelieve, no explanation is satisfactory.'' Not quite St. Augustine, but the same line of reasoning.

The only time I met him, at an event in a Midtown Manhattan steakhouse about 10 years ago, I asked him what he thought of the transformation pro wrestling had undergone since he left the ring in the early 80's. Reinvented for a generation of kids with cable TV and video games in their bedrooms, the World Wrestling Federation and its imitators ballooned, steroid-style, into a glitzy jillion-dollar industry. ''It's comic books,'' he said matter-of-factly.

But what was wrestling in his day, I asked -- literature? ''I don't know,'' he responded softly. ''But we were more serious. People really thought I was the Devil incarnate. Now it's all a joke.''

Without getting too sentimental about Evil, I think he had a point.



Inoltre spammerei la pagina Facebook culturale del mio blog dove faccio più di queste cose
https://www.facebook.com/jeffoexperience/?ref=bookmarks" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

[RowdyRousey]

Ciao, ti rispondo io perchè mi dispiace vedere il topic con 0 risposte. Devi solo capire che non interessa un cazzo a nessuno, buon proseguimento

[RobLP]

Ciao, ti rispondo io perchè mi dispiace vedere il topic con 0 risposte. Devi solo capire che non interessa un cazzo a nessuno, buon proseguimento

[Saimas]

Ciao, ti rispondo io perchè mi dispiace vedere il topic con 0 risposte. Devi solo capire che non interessa un cazzo a nessuno, buon proseguimento

Magari è domenica, eh.

O magari molti leggono e non hanno bisogno di commentare ogni virgola, in questo mondo dove tutti si sentono il dovere di dire la loro anche in argomenti di cui nulla capiscono, eh.

[PepsiPlunge]

In realtà io l'ho letto e mi è piaciuto, specie l'ultima parte dove Moonson parlava del wrestling Era Gimmick come "fumetti" che mi ha offerto uno spunto di riflessione mentre ero in bagno.

Semplicemente, che dire?

[Impreza]

"Guardate quello che prova a condividere le sue conoscenze con noi poveri stronzi. Ora lo mando a cagare perché sono superiore "

Poi magari provate a lamentarvi della scopa in culo

Comunque son passato, ho messo like e prossimamente cercherò di dare una lettura approfondita

[Lollo_78]

Trovo questo tipo di Storie sempre molto interessanti, great job Jeffo

[Mario Mancini]

"Guardate quello che prova a condividere le sue conoscenze con noi poveri stronzi. Ora lo mando a cagare perché sono superiore "

Poi magari provate a lamentarvi della scopa in culo

Comunque son passato, ho messo like e prossimamente cercherò di dare una lettura approfondita

Scusa (rio) non capisco questo tuo plurale maiestatis.

[Impreza]

Niente, è solo una brutta abitudine.

[RowdyRousey]

Su, non fate i mestruati con una persona onesta. Più che altro ti ho fatto ottenere 8 risposte e i complimenti, quindi carissimo opener, puoi ringraziarmi nel discorso che terrai da UOTY 2017

[Nicolasblaze]

L'articolo è molto interessante - così come il topic. Fa sorridere che nel wrestling si guardi sempre indietro e si dica "eh, prima la gente si appassionava davvero". Anche io ne sono colpevole, e non ho neanche la scusa dell'età che valeva per Monsoon.

Lui ha avuto i suoi momenti discutibili - nel processo steroidi cercò di convincere giudice e giuria che i match erano tutti veri - ma rimarrà apprezzatissimo, più come voce e mente (di un'era che quindi amava poco) che non come atleta (non per carenze, ma per ovvio impatto storico).

Già che ci siamo, rilancio. Qui sotto c'è una serie in due parti di articoli sulla scena backyard nella Florida del sud, parliamo di 2001, quindi prima del wrestling indipendente come lo conosciamo adesso. Questi due articoli, che seguono le vicende di una federazione backyard estrema e le motivazioni che spingono due ragazzi a buttarsi sulle puntine di fronte ai compagni di scuola, sono stati pubblicati da Bob Norman sul New Times di Broward-Palm Beach.

Sono un po' lunghi, ma scritti bene (ci sono un paio di inesattezze ma niente di tremendo) e non scelgono il commento facile e moralista sulla scena backyard, che è un fenomeno oggi pressoché estinto ma in effetti molto importante nel wrestling americano anni 90-primi anni 00.

Parte prima:

Spoiler:

Backyard Bloodbath
THURSDAY, APRIL 5, 2001 AT 4 A.M. BY BOB NORMAN

The sickly sweet smell of blood fills the dimly lit bathroom where John Ulloa sits dazed on a closed toilet. The silky red fluid gushes from a gash in his forehead, creating a stream that flows over his cheekbone, past his mouth, and drips like a leaky faucet from his chin. It has already dried onto John's short, spiked black hair and his ears. His wife-beater shirt and shorts are soaked in it. The 16-year-old boy, who is short, thin, and naturally muscular, struggles to keep his eyes open as his older brother, David, silently limps over with a brown bottle of peroxide. David takes off the cap and, without a word, pours the liquid over the straight, surgical-looking three-inch slit at the top of John's forehead, just below the hairline. As the peroxide does its job, John's legs shake in pain. "I'm dizzy," mutters John, who goes by the name Kid Suicide when he performs. "But I don't think I want to go to the hospital."

After nearly 30 minutes of applying pressure to the cut to slow the bleeding, John walks out to his back yard, where his club, Extreme Fuckin' Wrestling (EFW), continues its show under the bright Saturday-afternoon sun. His friends slam one another on a homemade wooden stage, which is laden with barbed wire and tacks. The boys leap from the roof and crack their faux opponents over the head with real metal chairs and garbage cans. They crash through burning tables and whack their fellow wrestlers with a barbed wire- wrapped baseball bat. They dive from rooftops and ladders to the ground below. The EFW members are not alone: About 40 kids, all of them yearning to see savage beatings, lounge on the grass to watch.

The barbaric show takes place in what seems a wildly incongruous setting: John's solidly middle-class neighborhood in Coral Springs. Surrounding the bloodletting are large, well-kept homes with an average worth of about $150,000, and bordering the rear of the yard is a wide canal that cuts past swimming pools, freshly painted gazebos, and orange trees.

With his head wrapped in a makeshift white bandage that turns redder with every passing minute, John watches the final competition, the "death match." It features his buddies, Giovanni "Psycho" Torres and Jason "The Sensation" Jelonek, and doesn't disappoint the fans. There's plenty of blood, a bed-of-nails stunt, body slams, and a 12-foot dive, the highest in the club's short history.

But the February 24 show ends in an almost surreal outburst of unscripted violence as the raw, sadistic longings of the crowd and the pumped-up showmanship of the wrestlers collide. Police are called to stop the mayhem. An ambulance arrives and takes John to the hospital as a "trauma alert," which is code for a potentially critical injury. He initially tells the medics his cut was caused by a blow to the head from a folding chair. Later he admits the truth: He cut himself with a razor blade to make sure the crowd and the ever-present EFW video camera got their fill of blood.

EFW is one of hundreds of backyard wrestling clubs that have sprouted up across the country in the last couple years. The participants, who mimic their pro wrestling heroes, say they love the audience reaction and long for stardom. But what distinguishes EFW from the other clubs is that it is truly extreme. Kid Suicide, Psycho, and their compatriots have broken numerous bones and repeatedly been knocked unconscious. Why do they go so far? The answer may lie not in their back yards but inside their homes.

John's obsession with backyard wrestling began, predictably, in front of the television. At about the age of ten, he and David, who is a year older, started watching the World Wrestling Federation. Soon they moved on to Extreme Championship Wrestling, which might be considered the WWF's foul-mouthed, hell-raising, jail-bound cousin. Soon they were idolizing ECW stars such as Mick "Mankind" Foley, Rob Van Dam, and Spike Dudley, all of whom are renowned for spilling buckets of their own blood. The two brothers and Giovanni, who goes by Gio and lives next door to the Ulloa brothers, soon began imitating their heroes and dreaming of staging a show of their own.

At first they practiced simple things like headlocks and fake punches. Then they graduated to various moves, such as body slams, suplexes, and pile drivers. Next it was on to the props of pain. John experimented with razor blades. David practiced taking staples in his head. Gio had thumbtacks stuck into his forehead. They all took shots to the head from metal chairs and learned a trick: If they popped the metal to invert the curve of the seat, it would pop back into place upon impact with a skull to make a louder thwack. To perfect their falls, or "bumps," they slammed one another to the ground relentlessly. The secret to avoiding injury, the boys say, is to spread out the impact as much as possible so the arms and shoulders, instead of the backbone and ribs, take most of it. The same theory applies to the high dives. They jump straight out and flip into the air before landing on their backs. Tables are usually positioned below, and crashing through them shortens the free fall and cushions the impact with the ground. John and Gio, the only EFW wrestlers who venture high dives, started from heights just a couple feet up, then graduated to a 6-foot ladder, then to a rooftop, and now to the 12-foot ladder, which is akin to leaping from the backboard of a regulation basketball hoop. It's equal to dives of some of the top pro wrestlers, who rarely leap from heights of more than 15 feet. John says he doesn't know how high will ever be high enough.

After years of fooling around with such techniques, the EFW held its first show last year, on February 13. Since then they've held about ten more performances, each a little more hard-core than the last. In addition to the founding threesome, EFW has a few other regulars: Jason, a tall and thin 17-year-old who prides himself on how much punishment he can take; Edwin Lebron, who at 18 weighs more than 200 pounds; and Rich Teixeira, a 17-year-old who gives EFW some major heft with his 340 pounds. Another half-dozen teens orbit EFW but haven't wrestled much. Several quit after their first show, unable to take the abuse.

As the EFW grew, an amazing thing happened: People began coming. So many, in fact, that the wrestlers began charging admission, earning more than $200 at a show that drew nearly 100 spectators. John says his performances provide two things he never before had at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School: attention and respect. "Now I'm living it up at school," he says in his smooth voice. John doesn't just talk about wrestling; he sells it. "They say, "You're crazy, man.' I mean, I'm small, but people respect me now. They treat you different. Even gangster kids. They like to watch us, and after the show they have, um, gratitude."

David says the teens who come to watch their performances crave blood and destruction. "They aren't really normal," he says of the fans. "But I like how the crowd goes, "Ooooh' and "Ahhhh.' That's why we do this. Our fans are ghetto. They're bloodthirsty, our fans. They just want someone to get killed."

EFW always has someone on hand to videotape the proceedings. The wrestlers say they'll cherish the tapes forever -- and they hope to sell some of the footage to companies that market the ghoulish stuff. A similar video titled The Best of Backyard Wrestling, for instance, is currently being advertised on cable television for $19.95 a pop. The members of EFW have also created a Website touting their feats.

In addition to making some money from EFW, John dreams of owning a wrestling ring; practicing in a bare back yard is akin to playing basketball on dirt with a volleyball and a peach basket. But a decent ring would cost them about $1500, far more than they can pay. So last fall, when they forged a loose partnership with a Hollywood-based backyard group called Hardcore Champion Wrestling (HCW), they were ecstatic. HCW is the best organized of Broward County's backyard wrestling clubs (there are at least four of them) and has a ring.

It was, however, a doomed marriage from the start, the backyard equivalent of the Hell's Angels crashing a kiddie party. HCW forbids cursing at its shows, while EFW thrives on profanity. HCW doesn't care for bloodletting, bans self-cutting, and employs just a touch of barbed wire, which is mostly for show. Thumbtacks are a rarity.

"EFW has no wrestling techniques," says 16-year-old Nick Mayberry, a wrestler and HCW promoter. "They just hit each other with weapons and go nuts out there. They beat each other senseless and fly off things like they're crazy. Someone always winds up hurt really bad or in the hospital. They think they're gonna get famous, but they're just gonna get killed."

After a few practice sessions and a show last fall, a staple gun terminated the relationship between the two clubs. When Rich shot a thick, half-inch steel staple into David's forehead, HCW banned EFW for life. The stunt was actually a mistake; Rich was supposed to hold the gun away from David's head so it would make only a partial puncture wound and protrude from his head. In the heat of the match he pressed the gun flush against David's forehead. John removed the staple from his brother's cranium. "It took everything I had to pull that thing out," he says, smiling at the memory. Describing the incident, David states the obvious: "It felt like a sharp object entering my skull."

All the EFW veterans have lengthy injury lists and scars all over their bodies that make them unabashedly proud. In addition to the forehead slashing and about 130 shots to the head, David says he's cracked his sternum, tailbone, shoulder blade, and jaw, as well as a few fingers and toes. He's received medical attention for precious few of those injuries. Instead he lived with the pain until, after a few weeks, it subsided. Both his jaw and sternum now make hideous cracking noises if he moves them in a certain way.

"I don't think they healed right," John says. "Pain is no object to me at this point. If you can get past the stinging, I mean, what is pain? It's nothing. You disregard it or whatever."

Jason was knocked unconscious last year when another wrestler slammed him with a folding chair. He's also been hospitalized with a gashed head and recently ripped open his knee when he fell badly on the bed of nails. The other wrestlers sometimes gibe him when he lapses into a stutter or has a memory lapse. Those chair shots to the head, they laugh, don't come without a price.

Gio has potentially the most lasting injury of all. He suffers from bilateral knees -- they've taken so much abuse from his falls that they are curved in a way that suggests deformity. He takes medication for the condition and says doctors have told him he will require surgery in a few years.

The bone-crunching pays off, they say, in larger crowds, who push the wrestlers to new extremes. "Everybody just loves violence," David surmises. "I don't know why, but I know they'll always love it. Our fans just want to see us kill each other."

His penchant for blood notwithstanding, John doesn't have a lot of teenage vices. He spends most of his time at home, doesn't like to fight outside the choreographed backyard performances, abstains from cigarettes and drugs, and seldom touches alcohol. Such distractions would only get in the way of his all-consuming dream of becoming a wrestling superstar. Unfortunately school seems to be another such distraction. His academic performance has declined as his interest in wrestling has risen. He has a D average. School isn't so important when stardom beckons.

John's mother has a dream, too: She wishes she could ship him off to military school.

Carolyn Lister is a 42-year-old single mom who speaks of John with nervous laughter that hints at helplessness. She says she has tried to keep the kids from breaking their bones and slashing their skin but has been unsuccessful. She's overwhelmed by the testosterone, by the boys' wild energy. "Oh, if I'd only had girls!" she exclaims before letting out her laugh.

Lister, as it turns out, is no stranger to the sometimes violent vagaries of young men. While living in Connecticut some 20 years ago, she married a man she now characterizes as an abusive alcoholic. "I fell in love with the wrong guy. He hit me over the head with a bottle, and that was about all I could take," she says. "I took a flight to Fort Lauderdale to be back with my mother and father."

After divorcing she quickly married a Colombian immigrant named Oscar Ulloa, who had a good job as a maintenance technician and a promising future. Ulloa was stable and calm, she says, and they had two sons in successive Augusts, David in 1983 and John in 1984. David, who has blond hair like his mother, was born without a right leg. Wearing an artificial leg kept him from playing most sports but hasn't slowed him down much in backyard wrestling, where he manages to hold his own.

Nothing, meanwhile, could slow John, who has black hair and the dark complexion of his father. "When Jonathan was born, he had a certain scream and a way about him," his mother recalls. "He had to get the attention from the get-go, that one did. It's not like he doesn't get attention at home -- he wants attention from the world. He's a showman, that one."

His motorcycle-riding father is also something of a thrill seeker, and some of John's fondest memories include riding with his dad in a dune buggy. In recent months John and his father have been bonding on a paintball shooting range, where they play war games together. "I love extreme sports, anything that will get the adrenaline pumping," says John. "That's just the way I grew up."

While John was destined to crack his own bones, it was his home that broke first. Three years ago, just as John and David were embarking on adolescence and wrestling was overtaking their imaginations, their parents split up. "He had a midlife crisis and decided to enjoy other things," Lister explains of Ulloa. Her husband (they've yet to divorce) says he left because of a lack of trust. Whatever the reason, both parents agree the split has caused a complete breakdown in parental authority. "I always gave the love and the kisses and fixed boo-boos," Lister says. "My husband always did the disciplining. I always sent them his way. He left at the worst time, when they really needed a fatherly influence, a man."

Asked whether he could stop the wrestling, Oscar Ulloa replies, "It's not my house; I don't live there. I just try to talk to them, to make them understand [the dangers]. At least they are off the streets."

For all her apparent exasperation, Lister sees some value in backyard wrestling; she's even encouraged it by purchasing the boys a trampoline to use as a makeshift ring. "They say in life, you go after what you want," she philosophizes. "When you really want something, you pursue it, and this is something they really, really want. They are so dedicated. It only goes too far when there is an audience to push them. All that bleeding."

Lister says she had no idea the kids were going to have the February 24 show in her back yard and says she just happened to be getting her hair done that day. John has another story. He says his mother knew about the show and left the house because she didn't want to be held responsible if police were called. John, while idolizing his father, clearly holds some deep bitterness toward his mother. "My mom is usually out with her friends, so she's not around much at all," the boy says. "We always make our own dinner. My dad doesn't like it, so he tries to be here. Everybody always says my mom is not really a good mom."

Lister fervently denies her son's claims and counters that she devotes her entire life to her children. Her only parental sin, she says, may be spending too much time in Internet chat rooms in the evenings. "I don't even date anybody," she explains. "I'm lucky if I sit down on the computer and talk to people that way. Since my husband left, my kids are my world."

But that world sometimes seems about to implode. John, she says, is becoming increasingly aggressive. He demands to have his own way, and if he doesn't get it, he storms about the house, banging on walls and occasionally breaking things. "He's never struck me, but it's getting to that age where I'm afraid of him," she says. "I guess it comes with the territory when you have boys."

Hence her dream."If I had the money, I would send Jonathan's butt to a military school," she says. "That's where he belongs."

John, however, is bent on staying in one place: his own back yard.

On February 24 a racially mixed crowd of about 40 teens gathers in John's back yard. Girls in loose-fitting T-shirts over bikini tops lounge on boys' laps as a CD player rips out Nirvana, Kid Rock, and Metallica. A teen named Parker Tindell is there to videotape the show, which he sardonically terms "an adventure in boredom."

EFW's set consists mainly of a large plywood wall, which the wrestlers have set up next to the screened enclosure around the pool. Other than that, there's the stage, the barbed wire, the thumbtacks (they've purchased 1000 for this show), and their other torturous trappings. A half dozen tables wait to be smashed, and a can of lighter fluid is on standby. There is no parent here, no authority figure; just kids and their tools of destruction.

To open the show, Kid Suicide is scheduled to wrestle his brother, who goes by Extreme D. David begins the damage when he slams John's head with the garbage can. As the younger boy falls to the ground in mock pain, David staggers around, exhorting the crowd. With the spectators diverted, John deftly pulls out a razor blade and slices his forehead. He knows instantly he's gone too deep, but he isn't about to stop the show.

In the next few minutes, as the blood starts dripping down John's face, David pummels him with the barbed wire- wrapped baseball bat. Then David does the unthinkable: He takes the barbed wire in his hands and presses it against John's forehead, right across the cut. David didn't want to do it, he says later, but it was scripted, and John would "hate" him if he didn't follow the plan. Blood is now spurting out of John's head. But that doesn't keep John and David from climbing the ladder to the top of the screened enclosure over the pool, which is a little more than eight feet high. Two tables are stacked below. John, pretending that he's been thrown, dives onto the tables, breaking them in half. As he lies motionless on the ground and blood pools in the grass beside him, the crowd is loving it. A spectator screams, "Holy shit!" John, who landed well and isn't in much real pain, loves to hear it; he knows he's succeeded in making the crowd believe that he's seriously injured.

David slowly climbs back down, and soon the brothers are body-slamming each other, hard, on the wooden stage, leaving dozens of tacks stuck into their arms and back. David finally pins John, ending the match. John then staggers over to the video camera. It looks as if a can of red paint has been poured over his head.

"Intense," Parker mutters from behind the camera.

"Film it!" John orders.

"You just spit blood on me," replies Parker, while dutifully videotaping.

Then John stumbles past his family's pool, which is filled with green, murky water. He enters his house and walks across the bare cement floor of his family room, which his mother has been planning to tile for weeks. From there he stumbles into the bathroom, where he can bleed in relative peace. Other than his brother and a few other teens, the house is empty. Lister doesn't see her son until later, at North Broward Medical Center's trauma unit, where doctors stitch his head back together and nurses stick him with IV needles to replenish his fluids. She's told that John lost about a gallon of blood.

But now, as he sits on the toilet with the blood still flowing, John rests. His performance is done.

The show, however, has just begun.

E parte seconda:

Spoiler:

Backyard Bloodbath, Part 2
THURSDAY, APRIL 12, 2001 AT 4 A.M. BY BOB NORMAN

Editor’s Note: This is the second and final installment of a series on a group of Coral Springs teenagers who make up Extreme Fuckin’ Wrestling. The first part focused on 16-year-old John Ulloa, who started the enterprise and whose back yard was the setting for the February 24 show featured in this story.

Giovanni "Gio" Torres climbs the rungs of a 12-foot ladder and stands at the top, towering above a small crowd in John Ulloa's back yard. The 40 or so spectators call out for Gio to jump; they want to see him dive onto his friend, Jason Jelonek, who lies on a table below. The crowd's objective is clear: to see someone hurt.

Gio, a 16-year-old Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School junior who stands five foot seven and weighs about 125 pounds, needs courage. He already has thumbtacks stuck into his head, but that's no problem; the tacks sting only for a moment as they enter the skull. The dive, which he calls a "Senton Bomb," could break his neck. The ground is hard, and he has never jumped from such a height. Gio masks his fear with an inscrutable, determined expression as he surveys the scene. In his mind he pictures a huge man with a beer in his hand. Always a beer in his hand. He imagines the man is watching him from behind a darkened screen next door. The image fills Gio with hate, and that emotion inspires him to leave the security of the ladder, dive out, flip in the air, and crash onto the boy on the table.

The man is his stepfather.

Gio, who goes by "Psycho" when he wrestles in the back yard, lands badly. Only his neck and head strike Jason, yet the impact is enough to break the table. Though he intended to fall squarely on his back before springing to the ground, he instead tumbles violently into the dirt. After lying flat for a moment, he knows he is really hurt. But he doesn't stop the show. Instead he calls to the referee, a bespectacled teen named John Summers, and quietly asks, "Did it look good?"

"Yeah," Summers replies.

It feels good to hear that, good enough to dull for at least a moment the terrible pain spreading through his chest.

Gio finished the February 24 wrestling show, but he hasn't breathed easy since. The pain was constant for two weeks. He still doesn't know why it hurts so much. He wonders whether he cracked a rib or bruised a lung, but he'll likely never know because his mom, Maricela Crofts, so hates his backyard stunts that she refuses to take him to the hospital when he gets injured doing them. She wouldn't even ferry him to a drug store for an Ace bandage to wrap around his chest. He had to borrow one from a friend.

"He got hurt, like, once and I told him, "That's it, if you go over there and you get hurt, don't come crying to me, because you have to learn to deal with it,'" Crofts explains in a thick Puerto Rican accent. "The police have to stop them from doing this before someone really gets hurt."

Crofts wants the cops to stop Gio, because her son refuses to quit. He's as dedicated to backyard wrestling as his buddy and next-door neighbor, John. And like John, Gio saw his family break up years ago. His mother and father divorced when the boy was about ten years old. A year after the split, his mom married William Crofts, who is now 53 years old and retired from Lucent Technologies. Gio has grown up in the couple's beautiful, middle-class Coral Springs home, which has a large and expensive boat in the driveway. He's still growing -- at just five feet seven, he expects to get a little taller. His lips bulge over the braces he wears, and his shoulders and chest have been expanding since he recently began lifting weights. Gio is on the high-school wrestling team but is academically ineligible to compete. He desperately wants to be a full-fledged member of the school team and says he has maintained a B average this year (up from a D last year) in pursuit of that goal. But he concedes that his ventures with Extreme Fuckin' Wrestling are largely to blame for his scholastic woes.

Gio loves the backyard grappling; it's the fighting inside his house that disturbs him.

"[My stepfather] would drink, and he would snap at my mom," Gio says. "Other times he just yells at her and threatens her and throws her out of the house."

William Crofts declined to comment for this article, and Gio's mother says only that such things don't happen anymore. The worst incident, Gio says, occurred on the night of December 30, 1996. "I was in my room, and I heard all this yelling and crap, and I walked out there," he explains. "They were out on the patio, and my dad was drinking beer. He threw my mom in the pool. And then he started yelling at her and said, "Get out of this house!' I've seen him push her, and it pisses me off. But what can I do? I was only five foot two then. He's six foot, 500 pounds."

Gio manages a smile at his exaggeration. His stepfather actually weighs 220 pounds, according to a Coral Springs Police Department arrest report from that night. Gio's mother complained to officers that her husband threw her into the pool, then into the Jacuzzi, then against a wall, and then grabbed her by the hair and shoved her into her daughter's room. William Crofts was arrested for domestic violence and later, his wife acknowledges, was sentenced to probation. (Although the arrest report details the incident, New Times could find no record of the case in Broward courts.)

To try to stop Gio from backyard wrestling, his mother and stepfather threaten to exile him to Orlando to live with his father. But the boy says that just makes him angry. And it makes him want to be more hard-core. "I don't like [my stepfather], and that's why I keep doing the backyard stuff," Gio says. "He keeps getting on my nerves. That's why I get the 12-foot ladder, build a bed of nails, and stick the thumbtacks in my head." He pauses a moment before adding, "That and because I love wrestling more than anything else."

All the EFW members collect wrestling action figures and hang posters of their heroes. Each of them has read Have a Nice Day, the autobiography by Mick Foley, one of hard-core wrestling's original stars. But their love of backyard wrestling is no mere hobby; they want to do it for a living and dream of someday attending a professional-wrestling school to begin the climb to stardom.

Only Rich Teixeira, however, comes close to fitting the traditional image of the professional-wrestling behemoth. Gio and John, who from a distance appear almost like twins, are short and thin. Most pros weigh more than both of them put together. But there is one wrestling star who gives them hope, who is cut in their mold, whose very existence helps to keep them going, and his stage name is LSD.

Extreme Championship Wrestling's Li'l Spike Dudley stands five foot seven and weighs a mere 140 pounds. Dudley, whose real name is Matt Hyson, says he overcame his diminutive dimensions by taking extreme punishment in the ring (he's renowned for bleeding buckets), by diving from obscene heights (he claims his highest dive is from 25 feet), and by training for many years. Now 30 years old, Hyson went to a pro wrestling school in his early twenties and soon began traveling the country on the lowly independent circuit, in which ambitious beginners often perform in poorly attended shows for scant wages. He worked three years before landing his gig at ECW; in this league he has perfected his wrestling persona: a half-witted, burned-out druggie who wears denim suspenders over a tie-dyed shirt. In the past few years, Hyson has realized the EFW members' dreams of good pay and a TV gig. He says he can earn $3000 a night for pay-per-view performances, and while declining to provide a specific amount, claims his annual pay is six figures.

Though Hyson's success story gives EFW members hope, the pro wrestler is not optimistic about the kids' wrestling success. Young wannabes send backyard videos to the ECW every week, and those usually end up in the trash, Hyson says. "They give the business a terrible name," he says of extreme backyard wrestlers. "There is an art form in doing it safely, and these kids have no regard for that whatsoever. We think they're idiots. When I was a kid, we would wrestle around on cushions, but not anything like these guys. They're going to get hurt."

Despite all his training, Hyson has suffered a slew of injuries. Like John, he often cuts his own forehead with a razor blade to amp up the bleeding. "There are subtleties to how far and deep you go with the blade," he cautions. "I've probably had stitches 15 to 20 times, and half of them were not self-inflicted."

He also blew his knee out and once required surgery after flying into a rail outside the ring during a high dive. He claims he was the first wrestler to take a staple gun to the head. "There's a little difference though," he says when told of the boys' adventures. "It wasn't real. There weren't any staples in the gun."

Hyson knows that, as much as he may try to dissuade youngsters from hard-core backyard wrestling, he has helped to inspire it. "My story in the ring is David and Goliath," he says. "I appeal to the children, to the little guy. I'm probably the smallest pro wrestler out there other than the midgets. Any guy who can relate to the underdog can relate to Spike Dudley."

While he knows kids are imitating him, he doesn't feel any responsibility for the dangerous stunts. "It's a show, and if you can't grasp that, then you got bigger problems than pro wrestling," he says. He then mentions Lionel Tate, the 14-year-old Fort Lauderdale boy who was recently sentenced to life in prison without parole for killing a six-year-old girl while imitating pro-wrestling moves two years ago. Tate's actions can't be blamed on pro wrestling, Hyson asserts: "I never went into a backyard and killed someone mimicking something I saw on TV."

Hyson's disdain for EFW dissipates a bit when he hears that small crowds gather for their shows. "Is that right?" he asks with a note of surprise. "Well, that's tremendous. More power to them."

Hyson is definitely wrong about one thing: The EFW members care deeply about the "art form" of pro wrestling. And they have some genuine wrestling skills (especially John and Gio). The members carefully plan and choreograph their matches, have a championship belt, and predetermine who will win it. But unlike the pros' performances, EFW shows have a raw, unpolished feel and exceedingly long and awkward lulls between moves. And far too often they make mistakes, which usually prove to be gory and sometimes downright frightening.

That brings us back to the February 24 match with Gio, Jason, and Edwin.

The match begins with Jason goading the crowd, which has already been warmed up with John's copious bleeding. Wearing sliced-up denim shorts and a white T-shirt, Jason greets the spectators with an Italian salute -- a stiff hand flick under the chin. To make sure they don't miss his point, he shouts: "Fuck you!"

Then comes Gio, who stalks about in the manner of a caged animal. Next Edwin Lebron, whose wrestling name is "Havoc," jumps into the fray, and the bloodletting begins. The beginning of the performance features hard body slams onto a makeshift wooden stage littered with hundreds of thumbtacks. The tacks drive into Jason's back, hands, arms, and legs -- a friend later counts 250 holes in his back, which looks as if it has been attacked by a swarm of killer bees.

Jason then slams Gio's head into the tacks. Gio rises to reveal several thumbtacks in his forehead. Blood trickles down his face. Gio is the only member of EFW who takes tacks to his head this way. It's one of his specialties.

Seeking a little blood revenge, Gio grabs some barbed wire, wraps it around Jason's head from behind, and pulls in the manner of a shoeshine. But the metaphorical shoe is Jason's forehead, and the rag is a strand of barbed wire. Jason's head is cut, and Gio's mission is accomplished; there is more blood. Jason counters by grabbing a can of lighter fluid, dousing a table, and lighting it on fire. Then he picks up the smaller boy and slams him through it. The fire goes out.

Then it's time for Gio's 12-foot dive. Edwin lays Jason, who pretends to be stunned in the classic, cheesy style of pro wrestling, onto the table while Gio climbs the ladder. After a moment of hesitation, Gio, with his stepfather in mind, makes his leap and has a miserable landing. The crowd shouts its approval, and one fan throws an orange at Gio, perhaps in an effort to get him back on his feet.

After a minute on the ground, the boy overcomes the pain. He grabs the orange and throws it at Jason. The crowd laughs. Gio and Edwin then hang Jason upside down from a lower rung of the ladder. Gio leans the bed of nails against Jason's chest, and the crowd loves it.

"Oh shit!" shouts one onlooker.

"Yo, just hit the bitch, yo!" hollers another.

Gio takes a running, diving leap into the back of the bed of nails, compressing them into Jason's stomach. The problem is that Gio doesn't fake it well, and the impact is obviously weak. The lame stunt ends an otherwise memorable EFW match.

The show is officially over, but there's one more bloody fight to go -- and this one is unplanned.

Gio isn't the only EFW member who pictures his father at strange times. Rich does, too, but he does it when he's enraged.

Rich Teixeira is a 17-year-old, dirty-blond-haired boy who carries his 340 pounds on a six-foot-one frame. His size alone intimidates, a fact that pleases him. "I've been in fights since I was little," he says. "That's just me. I've always been bigger than anyone else, and I have always felt I have that little bit of power. It's a power trip."

But something else drives him to violence, he says: his father. Rich moved to Florida from New England with his mother, Regina Teixeira, last March because, they say, his dad threatened them. They also say Rich's father is thousands of dollars behind on child-support payments. Rich contends he feared his dad until his parents divorced when he was about 11 years old. (Despite extensive efforts New Times was unable to reach Rich's father for comment.)

"I know I hate my dad," Rich says. "My mom says he hit me with a closed fist, but I don't remember that. I do remember him beating me with a belt to where I couldn't walk up the stairs. He had a cow whip and used to threaten me with it. A couple of times, he hit me with it. And he had these ninja swords he used to threaten me with, too."

Rich says that, no matter how hard he tries to forget his father, he can't do it. "When I get angry, I start seeing pictures of my father everywhere," Rich says. "I get flashbacks of him beating me as a kid." Before Rich came to Florida, his anger spilled over in high school. He fought another student in the hallway, and the other kid suffered a concussion in the fracas. Rich was convicted of assault, sentenced to probation, and is now undergoing therapy to help him cope with his anger. He says backyard wrestling provides him with an ideal relief valve. "I'm played out on the fighting and violence," he says. "I hate it. All I do now is wrestle."

Rich, who was an honor student in middle school, now ekes out a C average, "just enough to graduate," he says. He attributes his scholastic decline to smoking cigarettes and drinking beer. He says he'll either attend community college or join the army. Like all the EFW kids, Rich has endearing qualities. He's smart, acutely sensitive, and cares deeply about his friends. When something goes wrong during a show -- like the time he accidentally staple-gunned David's forehead or when John seriously injured himself with the razor blade -- Rich is usually the only crew member who shows emotion. At these times he becomes distraught and seems to cry, but with a boyish machismo, he denies shedding tears. "It's a family," he says of EFW. "That's the way most of us look at it. I needed to get friends down here [in Florida], and these guys are like family to me."

At the end of the February 24 show, however, a member of his real family flashed in his mind: his father. And that was not a good thing.

EFW members have a fitting plan for the end of the performance. In the spirit of blending sex and wrestling that works so well in the professional ranks, they are going to propose the girls in the audience participate in a wet T-shirt contest. But Rich has something else on his mind: that orange. He and his friends work way too hard on the craft of wrestling to be pelted with fruit. So Rich confronts the crowd member who he believes tossed the offending piece of citrus, a skinny, dark-complexioned 15-year-old named Frankie. Soon, the two of them square off in the middle of the backyard.

"Fuck you!" Rich yells.

"Like I fucked your mama last night," Frankie shoots back.

Rich gets in Frankie's face.

"Wop!" Rich yells.

"What the fuck are you?" says Frankie, backing off a bit.

"I'm 340 pounds of person who will beat the shit out of you!" Rich replies, his head shaking in rage and his massive belly bumping Frankie backward. Rich then exhorts Frankie to hit him, to provide Rich with an excuse to beat him into the ground.

Some in the crowd seem to believe this is all still part of the show. They laugh and watch in anticipation, perhaps of a body slam onto a bed of thumbtacks. Rich, too, is still caught up in the excitement. He's demonstrative and wild, much like his pro-wrestling idols. Later he admits he was still pumped up from the show and wasn't really prepared for what followed: Frankie, dancing around and appearing understandably nervous, looks away for a moment before shooting a stinging right to Rich's jaw.

Rich, stunned from the blow, stumbles backward. Frankie runs. But the smaller boy winds up cornered between a pool enclosure and a plywood wall. (Almost two months later, Rich will still be a bit hazy about the events that ensued. All he will remember seeing are images of his father.) What the crowd sees is Rich storming up to Frankie, wrapping his huge hands around the boy's neck, and lifting him off the ground. Frankie doesn't breathe. His tongue is forced from his mouth, his feet shake helplessly a foot above the ground, and his eyes roll back into his head.

After a few seconds, Rich lets Frankie fall to the ground like a rag doll. A friend of Frankie's then throws two vicious punches to the same spot over Rich's left eye. Rich falls like a redwood tree straight back into a large bush. The bush doesn't stand a chance; it is broken into pieces.

Frankie gets to his feet and runs onto the street. Rich, as if rising from a dream, stands up and follows him. Blood flows from above Rich's eye. Out on the driveway and street, the two shout taunts at each other.

"I'll lay you out, you fat bitch!" Frankie repeats over and over.

Then three police cars pull up and Frankie escapes down the street. The mere presence of the cops acts as a sedative; the threat of violence recedes. The spectators disperse, and medics arrive. Coral Springs police officer Brian Tarbox finds John; the self-inflicted razor blade wound has reopened, and blood drips down his chin.

Tarbox says there's little he can do to stop the kids from wrestling, so he focuses on John's parents' liability. "Do you know if somebody gets hurt doing this 'rassling thing, their parents are going to own your parents?" Tarbox asks John.

The boy just nods.

"How old are you?"

"Sixteen," John answers.

"Plenty old enough to know this is stupid."

On their radios the police call in medics to treat John and Rich. "This is the stupidest thing I've ever seen," Tarbox mutters. Gio stands quietly in John's front doorway. "I can hardly breathe," he says to one bystander. "I think I may have to go to the hospital."

Officer Rex Kirkpatrick of the Coral Springs gang unit arrived in a bulletproof vest. He announces to EFW members milling about outside: "This is over. You do realize that don't you? You can't do this ever again."

The boys nod.

Medics soon determine that John needs emergency medical care. In addition to the cut, he also has a hematoma on his forehead, likely from a chair shot. The EMTs wrap a collar around his neck, lay him on a backboard, and load him into the ambulance. Rich's mother arrives and tells the police about her son's problems: the threats, the lack of child support, the probation, and the anger.

Finally John's mom, Carolyn Lister, comes home. In a blue spring dress over a bathing suit, she appears to have been at the beach. (She said later that she was getting her hair done.)

"You need to get control of your kids," Tarbox admonishes her.

Lister tells the officers she has tried to no avail. John has taken over the house, she complains.

"Has he hit you?" Tarbox asks.

"No, but he's thrown and broken things," she says.

Before heading to the hospital to see her son, Lister complains the authorities simply don't understand. For her, backyard wrestling isn't a troubling trend, it's an inevitability. So she calls for official regulation. "I just wish the city would get a place where they could do this under some kind of supervision," she says. "They could use fake blood."

In the end Tarbox decides not to arrest anyone. He says he hates what he sees, but since it's all consensual and takes place on private property, he's powerless. With no victim there's no crime, and he believes charging Lister with child neglect is unwarranted.

Though the bloodbaths continue, the Coral Springs Police Department has managed to slow them down. They've been called to John's back yard, mostly following neighbors' complaints, a half-dozen times in the past couple years. Indeed EFW doesn't charge admission anymore because cops threatened to arrest the wrestlers for running an unlicensed business.

The February 24 show went further and got uglier than planned. The wrestlers didn't want the police to come. John didn't want to lose a gallon of blood (though he was determined to lose a cup or two). Gio didn't want to injure his chest. Rich didn't want to get in a fight or gash his eye. He's still a bit hazy about the fight and says he was in a sort of trance when he was holding Frankie by his neck. "All of a sudden, I thought, What am I doing?" Rich recalls of the moment before he let go.

Of the three injured, just John went to the hospital -- and only because the medics gave him no choice. Gio's mom refused to take him there. Rich's mother took him to the emergency room, but after waiting a couple hours, they left in frustration. Rich ultimately opted for butterfly bandages, and now both he and John boast thick scars, lifelong mementos from the show.

Of all the wrestlers, only Rich resorted to violence in the chaos following the show. The others called for order. It's not about hurting anyone, they say. People get hurt only when they screw up. It's about the craft of professional wrestling in its rawest form.

But they won't be practicing that craft before crowds in John's back yard, Lister promises. She says the February 24 debacle led her to ban shows on her property. EFW members say that won't stop them. Just moments after the police left John's house, Jason was already plotting the group's next move. "We won't be able to do it here," he said with resignation, "but we have a great place out in a field where we can have our next show."

It's scheduled for April 21.

[The Inquisitor]

Certo che per essere un piedistallaro che smerda e odia il 90% degli altri utenti, poverifessi, tieni comunque particolarmente a questi riconoscimenti puttanata... Chissà perchè

[TheLastMan]

Non frequento molto questo forum,ma quanto è triste aprirsi un topic auto celebrativo ed elemosinare consensi alla propria pagina facebook "culturale" ?
ma che senso ha?

mi auguro che l'autore abbia meno di 16 anni

[123]

Non frequento molto questo forum,ma quanto è triste aprirsi un topic auto celebrativo ed elemosinare consensi alla propria pagina facebook "culturale" ?
ma che senso ha?

mi auguro che l'autore abbia meno di 16 anni

ti sei perso il periodo quando ad ogni intervento spammava il suo blog con tanto di articoletti.
comunque piuttosto voto ankie come uoty.

[PepsiPlunge]

Non frequento molto questo forum,ma quanto è triste aprirsi un topic auto celebrativo ed elemosinare consensi alla propria pagina facebook "culturale" ?
ma che senso ha?

mi auguro che l'autore abbia meno di 16 anni

Sei proprio un geniaccio eh