By Leonard Crist
Here’s something you don’t usually want to say to a professional wrestler.
“So this is fake, right?”
Even though pro wrestling impresario Vince McMahon let the cat out of the bag in the late 1980s in an unsuccessful attempt to avoid regulation by a state athletic commission, there remains a strong element within the spandex-clad community that hangs onto “kayfabe,” or “fake” in pig Latin, wrestling lingo for not breaking character, even after the show.
In the year 2009, many pro wrestlers still take umbrage with being called mere actors or stuntmen. They don’t appreciate the suggestion that they aren’t athletes, that wrestling isn’t sport. Sure, they acknowledge, showmanship is involved, but so is a high tolerance for pain and a high level of athleticism.
I attended several local independent wrestling shows in recent months, hoping to explore those intersections between fake and real, sport and entertainment, tradition and modernism.
What I found was an industry striving to remain relevant — and financially solvent — but possibly shooting itself in the foot by not fully embracing a modern view of what professional wrestling could, or perhaps should, be.
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Most wrestling shows in the Mahoning Valley are produced by Championship Wrestling Experience. The CWE is the brainchild of Kyle Tererri and Nick Volinchak. The two life-long wrestling fans started CWE in 2007, putting on small shows featuring independent wrestlers from around the region, and, occasionally, bigger name stars like Jake “The Snake” Roberts.
I first met Tererri, 25, of Canfield, over coffee at a café in Boardman. After a few warm up questions, I got straight to the point: Just how scripted is wrestling? He took an audible breath that carried the connotation that this was not a topic he really wanted to deal with.
“Less than you think and more than I’m gonna go on the record and say,” Tererri said, an odd answer for a secret that’s been not very secret for about two decades.
Some of his answers drifted into kayfabe territory — a common occurrence even with wrestlers who seem comfortable talking about the real aspects of this fake sport.
Later, I pressed him on the issue again.
“Fake…” He drifted off, sentence unfinished. He breathed in, pondered his words. “The athleticism…” He stopped again.
The mat isn’t soft, he diverted, not like a trampoline at all, despite what some people think. And there isn’t time for choreography, he said, as most wrestlers don’t meet up until a couple of hours before they wrestle.
Finally, his defense broke down a bit. “Wrestling has a real knack for mirroring society,” Tererri said. “The point of it is to tell a story. You give people an escape from reality, but tell a story that parallels things that are actually going on — people are going to identify.”
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I caught up with Tererri about a week later, several hours before a CWE show in Austintown at the Wedge nightclub. Providing visual testimony as to how small his organization is, Tererri was putting the entire ring together by himself, carrying large metal beams, interlocking them, occasionally dropping them, until the familiar shape of the squared circle was discernible.
After about an hour of working by himself — with the occasional assist by me — one of his partners, Joey Buffone, showed up and helped finish the assembly. Buffone and Tererri then started to talk about the troubles CWE has had with finding sponsorships and support from the local community.
“Basically with the popular opinion of wrestling currently, you should hear some of the phone conversations we’ve had with some people,” Tererri said. “Some people are at least willing to listen before they call you names and throw you out. Other people just hear the word wrestling and they see red.”
“It’s basically just trying to get accepted,” Buffone said. “I mean, you’ve got a lot of people who don’t know what wrestling is. They think wrestling is the stuff you see on TV. We’ve got local guys wrestling in the local community. Why wouldn’t you want to help?”
“A lot of people aren’t ready to sit down and give it a serious consideration and see it as a legitimate business,” Tererri said.
In recent years, the Mahoning Valley has seen a sort of resurgence in cultural nightlife, from bands, to art, to theater. At the coffee shop, I asked Tererri if he saw CWE as part of that movement.
“I don’t think we’re a recognized part of it,” he said, adding it should be.
I didn’t say anything at the time, but I couldn’t help but thinking that the reluctance to market local wrestling in a manner similar to local theater or rock concerts, to fully embrace the artifice of it all, was perhaps one of the reasons wrestling was having trouble being accepted in Youngstown.
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Just before bell time, I caught up with Nick Volinchak, the CWE’s co-owner with Tererri. While Tererri serves as a behind-the-scenes promoter, Volinchak appears in the shows, conducting in-ring interview segments with the wrestlers. Volinchak is also CWE’s booker, which means he decides who wrestles who, in addition to writing the scripted portions of the show.
It’s his wrestling character who answers my first question, not the real Volinchak. I have to ask him to please drop kayfabe. But aside from getting him to spell his real last name for me, he provided very little in the way information that couldn’t apply to both his character and real life.
Such blurring is not uncommon in wrestling. As many wrestlers I talked to said, their in-ring characters are just amped-up versions of themselves.
“The best way to develop your character is to magnify yourself by a million,” said wrestler Justin Silvestri, 27, of Austintown, who goes by the ring name J.C. Slick. “I’m pretty calm and quiet, but I like to say that I have an alter ego, which would be J.C. Slick. And he is loud. He’s obnoxious. He’s cocky. He thinks the world owes him something. He’s God’s gift to everything.”
Though Silvestri was quite open about the behind-the-scenes aspects of wrestling, wrestler Hobo Joe wouldn’t even break character long enough to give his real name. A sample exchange: How did you develop the Hobo Joe character? “I smelled bad, so I ran with it.” Tererri insists Hobo Joe is a “surprisingly intelligent guy.”
And while a slavish dedication to kayfabe might seem harmless enough, it can reach absurd levels. The BBC reported last year on WWE wrestler Kofi Kingston, who’s wrestling gimmick is a Bob Marley-like Jamaican. However, Kingston, real name Kofi Sarkodie-Mensah, is of Ghanan descent. When asked in a legitimate interview with a BBC reporter about his roots in Ghana, he denied his nationality. His family was reportedly quite upset.
One CWE wrestler who has no problem differentiating fantasy from reality is Justin Nottke. Nottke, 24, of Lorain, who wrestles as “The Mega Star” Marion Fontaine, approaches wrestling from a fundamentally different way than most in the business. Rail-thin, with a hilarious mustache on his upper lip (and a tattoo on his bicep of the Batman logo with a mustache on it), Nottke’s performance as Fontaine has all the dripping comedic irony of a Will Farrell character. Outside of wrestling, the college educated Nottke is a graphic designer and does freelance rock photography.
“I guess I’m trying to make it hip,” Nottke said. “Trying to do something a little bit different.” He said one of his primary goals is to make his opponent laugh. Here’s a guy who’s not that worried about kayfabe.
Back at the coffee shop, Tererri said he’s not quitting his day job any time soon. But for now, CWE is surviving.
“Pro wrestling has a knack for surviving,” Tererri said. “There’s always gonna be pro wrestling.”
(Some interviews in this story were conducted alongside Michael Bury, who wrote a different story about the CWE for The Yo Magazine.)
