 Ric Drasin's American Wrestling Federation |
Ric Drasin watched "The Wrestler," the Oscar-nominated movie about an old grappler taking the most real of risks for the most unreal of sports, and knew the scarred body on the screen could have been his.
A couple weeks later, sitting in his Van Nuys backyard next to the ring where he trains young wrestlers with Hulk Hogan-size dreams, Drasin rolled up the right leg of his black warm-up suit to show off the eight-inch surgical scar that wraps his thigh, knee and shin in a sleeper hold.
In the movie, viewers are left up in the air about how the Mickey Rourke character's story turns out. But in real life, Drasin will tell you exactly how his competitive career as "the Equalizer" ended - painfully, in a Huntington Beach high school gym, in one of the small professional wrestling shows that entertain diehard fans all over Southern California.
"I was wrestling Cincinnati Red," Drasin said of that night in 2001, when he was 57 and a veteran of 5,000 matches across the United States and Canada. "He fell on me, my leg got bent, and I thought my (right) knee popped out of joint."
The crowd of 400 was loud enough that fans couldn't hear Drasin ask his opponent to pull on his foot to try to yank the leg back in line. But the midmatch ringside therapy brought no relief. And the bout had seven minutes to go.
The two huge men tumbled out of the ring, where they engaged in a brutal brand of time-wasting, Cincinnati Red making a good show of bashing the fallen Equalizer with a chair and a baseball bat.
"The crowd thought I was hurt," Drasin said, the twist being: "I was."
As their allotted time was running out, they climbed back through the ropes and the Equalizer pinned Cincinnati Red for a dramatic victory.
Drasin's injury turned out to be a complete tear of his right quadriceps muscle, and after he ripped the other quad in a tumble at home and needed operations to rewire both legs, the former bodybuilder and sometimes actor admitted to his wife that it was time to hang up the wrestling tights.
Randi Drasin, Ric's wife of 19 years, watched "The Wrestler" with him and said: "That was his life up there."
If so, he's not alone.
It seems as if every pro, ex-pro and would-be pro wrestler - brute or diva, babyface or heel, from L.A. or from parts unknown - identifies with something about the film's Randy "The Ram" Robinson, the fictional former main-eventer from New Jersey who craves the adrenaline of the arena and daydreams about a return to the big time.
Overshadowed by the dazzling World Wrestling Entertainment events on national television, unknown to all but a circle of fans connected by word of mouth and the Internet, these theatrical athletes toil in the sport's minor leagues for little or no money in shows staged in rented gyms and community centers and American Legion halls.
Saturday, starting at 8 p.m. at American Legion Post 308 in Reseda, the promotion group Pro Wrestling Guerrilla will put on a card for which the big draws are former WWE tag-team champion Paul London, Japanese-based Karl "Machine Gun" Anderson, and the Necro Butcher, who played The Ram's foe in the staple-gun match in "The Wrestler."
Marc Letzman, a former masked wrestler who is a PWG co-founder and carries the tongue-in-cheek title of "commissioner of food and beverage," said he expects about 400 fans to pay $20 apiece for a seat Saturday and 200 to buy $15 copies of the DVD online.
If 400 sounds like a tiny crowd, compare it with the paid attendance of 110 (at $11 per adult ticket) at an Empire Wrestling Federation event held Sunday at the Knights of Columbus Hall in Covina, where Ryan Taylor defended his EWF American championship after his "manager" bopped the popular Damien Slater on the head with a crutch.
And 110 might sound like Wrestlemania compared to the show in Tennessee that actor Luke Perry remembers attending with his son Jack.
"There couldn't have been 15 people there," said Perry, who takes 11-year-old Jack to wrestling lessons in Drasin's backyard ring. "We were in our glory. It was straight out of the ('Wrestler') movie."
Perry (of "Beverly Hills 90210" fame) said he has always loved pro wrestling.
"It's athleticism and acting," Perry said. "It's all good."
Local shows are called the "independent circuit" to distinguish them from the WWE spectacles, although "independent" can be a misnomer since many smaller promotions fall under the banner of the National Wrestling Alliance. Some fans prefer the indie circuit because they can get closer to the action, and the wrestlers - unrestricted by the short time slots between commercials at major WWE events - are able to develop story lines with their larger-than-life actions in the ring instead of with their scripted bluster at the microphone.
"You can be in the last row of an indy event and yell out to a heel (bad guy) or a fan favorite, and expect him to respond to you," said Caesar Espinoza, 39, a Van Nuys resident who works for a financial-software company.
And, said NWA Pro general manager Marty Lurie, indy wrestlers aren't necessarily less skilled than WWE stars.
"The guys in WWE have got to come from somewhere, and they've got to go somewhere (later)," Lurie said.
And the local characters, real and concocted, can be just as colorful.
Drasin's students at his backyard school (AmericanWrestlingFederation.com) include Fernando Barrera, a chunky 25-year-old from Northridge who works at a movie post-production house and is training to make his pro-wrestling debut in March. Barrera was born without most of a right ear, a negative he is turning positive by developing a ring backstory to explain it.
"I'm an outcast, 'The Rogue,' and I travel all over, fighting for acceptance," Barrera, who claims to own 3,000 wrestling videos, said of his mat persona. "In one of my matches, my ear got torn off. Ever since, I (try to get revenge against) the rest of the world."
Another Drasin student, Nikki Tsugranes, 28, of Van Nuys, is a middle-school biology teacher who moved from Brooklyn to train, and now performs in small events as the "New York Knockout."
"Once, I said to my trainer, 'I'm going to quit,'" Tsugranes said. "He said , 'No you aren't.' I was back in a week. It's just the adrenaline. You feel like a superhero."
Small promoters in Southern California battle higher costs for advertising (most rely on fliers), building rentals and marquee wrestlers' travel.
Jesse Hernandez, who, like Drasin, used to wrestle at Los Angeles' Olympic Auditorium, said he spent only about $1,800 to put on a six-match show with a paid attendance of 110 on Sunday in Covina. He owns his own ring, and most of the performers have been students from his San Bernardino-based School of Hard Knocks (EmpireWrestlingFederation.com/Empire.htm).
"I make enough (profit) to have a meal at Denny's," said Hernandez, 58, who wants to pass his knowledge to new generations. "I do these shows mostly to let my students learn to work a crowd, so they get better and move up to bigger promotions."
The Knights of Columbus hall is big enough for a ring and about 250 folding chairs - none of which, amazingly, was used as a wrestling weapon Sunday. Most of the fans were Latino, many of them children, and it was hard to tell who believed all the violence was real or whether that mattered.
In an Empire Wrestling Federation title match, Black Metal kept his belt when Vizzion was disqualified for using the proverbial "foreign object." The referee, easily distracted as usual, didn't notice that Vizzion grabbed the object only after Black Metal pulled it out of his mask and dropped it.
Even if much of it is choreographed mayhem, the holds, throws and acrobatics of pro wrestling can leave real bruises or worse. In Sunday's lone women's match, a popular ski-bunny type named SnowCal Chloe was pinned by "Queen of Scream" Aiden Riley after SnowCal Chloe was slammed to the mat by Riley's manager while Riley distracted the ref with a fake injury.
Outside the dressing room, SnowCal Chloe - the ring alter-ego of bodybuilder Jennifer Thomas - dabbed the very real blood from a scrape on her forehead while Riley limped past on what looked like a legitimately gimpy ankle.
"Wrestling is too hard to be just a hobby," said Thomas, who aspires to the WWE.
Tell it to Ric Drasin, who has a story behind every scar and stiffness in every joint.
Wrestlers, trainers and promoters disagree about whether the success of "The Wrestler" could draw new fans to the region's indy promotions. Some hate the film's emphasis on the sport's dark side. But most say they love its stark portrayal of their shared commitment.
Said Hernandez: "You find a little bit of ('The Wrestler') in all of us."
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