Wednesday, August 22, 2007

Pro wrestling's future can be found in Los Lunas

Local group works to keep 'sport' alive

Toby Smith

Los Lunas On a warm summer night, behind a gray, doublewide trailer, a half-dozen men are pushing thumbs into eye sockets and unscrewing heads from shoulders.

If you think professional wrestlers-- those thickset fellows in loincloths and patella-high black boots-- just magically appear on TV one day, without knowing a move, you're mistaken.

Pro wrestlers have to be trained; they have to practice what they're taught. You can't just chomp freely on someone's shoulder, or jump feet first atop a guy's sternum, or whack him over the noggin with a steel folding chair-- unless you know what you're doing.

It's a craft, pro wrestling. It's a skill. Toe holds take time.

If you haven't noticed, for some time professional wrestling in New Mexico has been dead as a stump.

Yet here in rural Valencia County, among the alfalfa patches and the chainlink fences, professional wrestling is experiencing a comeback.

They call themselves, this new, indie band of body slammers, the Legends and Amateurs of Wrestling, or LAW.

If you can't get your mouth around that title, there's a subgroup that's catchier: Pain Inc.

By whatever name, this is a collection of 20-something males, several of them longtime friends. There's a mail carrier, a private detective, a construction worker and a Wal-Mart manager, among others.

Most of these fellows were athletes in high school. Before that they were kids parked in front of the tube, lapping up the Hulk and Cactus Jack.

These days the pals wrestle, rehearse and run a training academy, showing youngsters the best way to deliver a karate chop to the windpipe.

Gotta start somewhere

"I've dreamed of doing this since I was 8," says Joe Singer, who manages Chili's Bar & Grill in Los Lunas and wrestles under the cognomen "Hobo Hank."

Singer lives in the doublewide with his wife, Lisa, and 2-year-old daughter, Chelsea. Most of the family's backyard is taken up a 16-by-16-foot ring that Singer bought on the Internet for $5,000.

"I've seen kids build their own ring in their yard, or try to learn in their bedroom, which they've lined with pillows," Singer says. "All they do is hurt themselves."

Thus, a year ago, in an attempt to do things correctly, Singer installed a regulation ring.

"I'd like to bring wrestling back to New Mexico, like it was in the early '70s," he says.

When they aren't tutoring kids in the ring, Singer and his buds often head to Amarillo to wrestle in matches.

"Nobody wants us in Albuquerque," he says.

In West Texas, Singer usually is accompanied by Adam Montoya, a former Valley High School heavyweight wrestler, now known as "Mosh Pit Mike," and C.J. Patterson, a 6-6, 300-pound galoot who goes by "The Widow Maker."

This spring, Montoya and Patterson won a world tag team championship in Amarillo. They've got a belt to prove it — a gold, hubcap-sized buckle attached to a black strap robust enough to tow an ocean liner.

"We all dream of joining the WWE," says Sean Apodaca, who wrestles as "Nick A Demus."

"But ya gotta start somewhere."

London town

From the 1950s through the late 1970s, pro wrestling in Albuquerque enjoyed unrestrained popularity.

Almost from the moment it opened in 1957, the Civic Auditorium, which sat just east of where Lovelace Hospital Downtown now stands, put a hammerlock on the sport.

Matches at the Civic, which was always packed, were run under the watchful eye of a bearded, platinum-haired, promoter named Mike London.

London, a South Dakota farmboy, was born Harold Russ Anshutz. He left home early, wrestled for dollars and took a new name. In the '40s, London settled in Albuquerque, where he ran restaurants and saloons. Soon he brought in such stars as Gorgeous George and Haystacks Calhoun to the Ice Arena, then Andre the Giant to the Civic.

Not long before the Civic was torn down in 1986, London quit promoting. He died in 1989 at age 80.

After the Civic's demise, ball, the auditorium's ring wound up in Belen. Coincidentally, many of the Los Lunas gang learned to wrestle in that ring as teenagers.

Athletes who entertain

Mike London used to promote matches on Indian reservations across New Mexico. Today, pro wrestling does not even occur at Indian casinos, which might seem a natural venue. Boxing and cage fighting take place in the casinos-- but never wrestling. Simply, no one wants to gamble on wrestling.

Explains Joe Singer, "Our endings are predetermined."

Predetermined? Goodness.

"The guys on TV, us guys in New Mexico, we're athletes who entertain," Singer explains.

Here's the point: Even athletes who entertain, who take direction and choreography, can get hurt.

"I've blown my knee out wrestling," says Carlos Gallegos. "Broken a hand, broken a collarbone."

"Fractured my ankle," reports Sean Apodaca.

Steroid cloud

If truth be known, Mike London got out of wrestling because he saw the sport being taken over by bodybuilders and steroids.

Steroids — used by wrestlers to turn their guns into cannons-- still form a black cloud over wrestling. This became clear earlier this summer when, according to police, WWE star Chris Benoit strangled his wife, smothered their 7-year-old son and then hanged himself in the family's home in Georgia. Toxicologists found steroids in Benoit's system, and authorities found prescriptions for anabolic steroids in his house.

"You don't see steroids much on the independent circuit that we have down here," says Carlos Gallegos. "You mostly see it with the flashy wrestlers who are on TV."

Wrestling, say the men of Pain Inc., is only in the news when something bad happens.

"The media only focuses on the negatives in wrestling," says Gallegos. "Hey, 90,000 people saw Wrestlemania. Millions more saw it on TV."

There are many positives in wrestling, says Singer. "I've wrestled in 175 events, and one half of those were fundraisers."

Until someone in New Mexico gets a Mike London-like passion for wrestling, the Los Lunas group continues to train and be ready. Says Joe Singer, "We practice everything, again and again."

Including smacking someone on the head with a folding chair.

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