'Here's the real life of a wrestler," says Darren with a smile, pointing to an empty packet of paracetamol on the dashboard of his van. "These things are everywhere. There's so many of them in this van. All down there," he gestures at the glove compartment, "there's more and more pills. All legal things, by the way."
Darren is a 27-year-old professional wrestler. It's a couple of hours before tonight's Irish Whip Wrestling show, in which we will see five wrestling matches, including a tag-team match and a three-way title bout. Two championship belts will be contested. There will be personal vendettas, cheating, crowd participation; and a 270-pound muscleman in a pink dress will dance on the Kilkenny flag.
But right now we're sitting in the car park outside a bleak-looking community centre in Jobstown, which is where the stars of Irish Whip Wrestling – Ireland's answer to the multimillion-dollar American wrestling franchises – will be fighting tonight. Darren wrestles under the name of Mad Man Manson: a wildman who enters the ring in a straitjacket and who, if nobody is there to do it for him, sometimes bounces his own head off the corner posts. He also drives the van which carries the dismantled IWW wrestling ring between venues.
Irish Whip Wrestling was set up by promoter Simon Rochford in 2002. "As a kid I always wanted to be a wrestler," Rochford says. "Couldn't be a wrestler, so I set up a wrestling promotion, a wrestling school." It was the first of its kind in Ireland, the only place teaching wrestling not the technical way (the sport that's in the Olympics) but the pro way: with Spandex costumes, superhero names, entry music and elaborate, good-vs-evil storylines. The world of Hulk Hogan, pictured on a billion schoolkids' lunchboxes.
For some, wrestling has something of an image problem. It suffers from the drug abuse that saw ex-WWE star Chris Benoit murder his wife and children in an episode widely publicised as "'roid rage", and the industry was portrayed in the recent Mickey Rourke movie The Wrestler as a haven for washouts and misfits.
But Rochford cares about his sport, passionately. "People are very prejudiced towards wrestling," he says. "People laugh down the phone at you. As if you don't know it's not real. They don't give you a chance." He is growing heated. "I don't like cricket, but I wouldn't laugh at someone else for liking cricket."
Tonight, the audience at the community centre is made up primarily of children: mainly little boys. There are some mums and dads and a smattering of unaffiliated young men. They file into the hall excitedly and scramble for the plastic chairs. The music booming from the speakers is quieted as the announcer Eamon D'Arcy, a diminutive young man in a suit, bounds into the ring.
"Are you ready for some Irish Whip Wrestling action?" he shouts, and the echoey PA bounces around the sports equipment and community quilts lining the walls. He announces the first match: Bingo Ballance versus Vic Viper. Rock music plays, and the boyish, muscular Ballance does a lap of the crowd, slapping palms, before rolling under the ropes. Viper stalks into the hall, masked; then takes a dramatic stance on the edge of the ring, throws back his hood and sprays green venom from his mouth.
Wrestlers are divided into good and bad characters, sometimes known as 'faces' and 'heels'. Some wrestlers are always one or the other; others, like Mad Man Manson, can do both. "Sometimes you get booked as a good guy, sometimes you get booked as a bad guy," he says. "It depends on what the show needs."
It's the job of the 'booker' to construct the show in a way that will keep the crowd entertained. This is Simon Rochford's role. "You create a story that goes the whole way through it," he says. "As if you're watching a drama unfold." As well as the fights, he says, there are various other gimmicks available. You might stage an interview with the fighters before a bout, "to show why they're having the match" – adding drama to proceedings by setting up grudges against each other.
Variation is important. "You want it different all the time," Rochford says. "It's like if you have fishcakes for a starter, and then you get fish stew – you're bored of it. So you have high-flying characters, then you have heavyweights. You mix the whole thing up." The whole process, in fact, is something of an art form. "It's like with musicians, when people say, 'Do you write the music first or the lyrics?' You envision the story you want to tell, and then you pick the wrestlers that are going to work in the story."
And, of course, you decide who's going to win. The results are an essential part of the melodrama which sustains the sport, and as such couldn't be left to chance. "Good guy always wins, bad guy always cheats," says Manson – which, barring the odd upset, is a pretty fair assessment.
In the ring, good guy Bingo and bad guy Vic are giving it socks. A middle-aged man starts to shout: "Vic is dead! Vic is dead!"; a chant that is enthusiastically taken up by the junior members of the crowd. "Shut up!" says Vic. "Shut up!" He leaves Bingo alone for a moment and comes to threaten the six-year olds who are chanting at him. Giggling, they lose their nerve and scatter.
The wrestlers clash in a series of heavy impacts, running across the ring and throwing themselves onto each other off the ropes. It's violent, but there's also a balletic grace to the way they work together in the moves. Current IWW champion Mandrake describes wrestling later as "like dancing, but with punches to the head".
So how 'real' are the blows being exchanged? Mad Man Manson explains: "It's where you hit them, and what you hit them with. For example, your back is really just a big slab of meat. Someone could hit your back as hard as they want and it's not going to properly hurt you. You don't hit people in the nose because the nose is so fragile. You don't hit people in the mouth, the eyes. But you've got a big chest, abs, thighs – all these things are big muscles and it's not as bad."
Do you ever pick up injuries in the ring? "These three teeth," he says, baring them, "they're all fake. That was a match with Vic. We were doing a chain match – which is where you have a chain around your neck, and you're chained to the other wrestler. It's a really good visual, people go crazy for it. And at one point he slammed me on the back of my head, and the chain just flipped up and hit me in the teeth. And I saw them shatter and go round the place."
What do you do in a situation like that? "Well, we would talk in the ring. The crowd can't see. So he got me in a pin and said, 'Are you alright?' And I said, 'Yeah, we'll just finish off the match.' Five minutes wasn't going to make any difference. So the ref picked up my teeth and put them in his pocket and we continued."
More than dental incidents, however, all the falling on knees and elbows and backs takes its toll – hence Manson's stash of supermarket painkillers. "Both my elbows have bone chips, both my knees have bone chips. I've slipped a disc, I've broken fingers and hands." ?
Back in the hall, Vic seems to be getting the upper hand over his more popular opponent. He catches Bingo in a chokehold, an elbow around his neck, cutting off blood to the head until he lies apparently unconscious. The ref rushes over. He lifts Bingo's arm into the air, and lets it fall lifeless to the canvas. He does it a second time. (Three drops means a knockout.) He lifts the lifeless arm one final time, lets it drop – but two inches from the canvas, the arm stops. The hand forms a quivering fist. Bingo makes his comeback – and short work of the heel Vic.
In the dressing room afterwards, the two men, blotched red and dripping sweat, hold a quick debrief on how the match went. They meet with friendly congratulations from the other wrestlers. The atmosphere in the room is jovial as men lace knee-high boots, struggle with reluctant leggings, and lather on fake tan.
Some costumes are more mysterious than others. Big Vito is an enormous American with a fierce demeanour and a gravelly voice. "When you write about me," he says sternly, "it's Big Vito – Toughest Man to Ever Wear a Dress." He later enters the ring in a pink slip, to the strains of 'Dancing Queen', and mocks his opponent ('Mr GAA' Conor Hurley) by doing a hip-swinging Macarena shuffle all over a Cats shirt.
Wrestlers are "ridiculously friendly", says Manson. "Everyone's best mates, pretty much." The only real competition, he says, is for who gets pride of place on the merchandise table that accompanies every show. Selling posters and DVDs is one of the only ways wrestlers at this level can make any money. "There's a lot more real fighting happening on that gimmick table than there is in the ring," he says. "Everyone wants their stuff in the front."
Even Mandrake, the current IWW champion – and Simon Rochford's best bet to make it to the big league – isn't able to make ends meet in the ring. "Really, to make a proper living, you need to be working for one of the big companies Stateside," he says. "So you pay your dues, you sacrifice, you travel long distances to shows." Is going to America an ambition? He is sober. "Yep. That's definitely an ambition. That's number one, that's gold."
What's he doing at the moment? "I'm studying to be a personal trainer. You've got to have a Plan B. If you're in the ring, you fall wrong, something happens – that's it. That could be the end of it."
His colleague LA Warren (28) is studying psychology in college. "By next year I'll have my FETAC, which is health and community services. So hopefully I'll have a bit more money then to go back over to the States with." He spent some months working for a US promoter, trying to break the big time; on one occasion he drove 2,400 miles for two shows over 46 hours.
Warren features in the next item on the card, in which he is to defend his Zero-Gravity Championship belt against British challenger Joel Redman. He huddles with Redman in a corner, discussing possibilities for the match.
How much of a wrestling bout is predetermined? Only some, according to Manson. "A lot of people think that wrestling's all planned out backstage," he says. "But if it was all planned out, you wouldn't be able to read the crowd. So, if you do a move and they really like it – do it again. You learn over time how to adapt, and understand what they're looking for in a show."
But the planning of the matches is still a tender point for some. Doug Basham is an American who made it to the WWE, wrestling in front of arena crowds – but now, at 36, has been brought in to the Jobstown Community Centre with the IWW boys to provide a little star power. He's fighting in the main event tonight, a three-way bout, and beforehand he hunkers down with the other two wrestlers. There is muttering of 'pins' and 'saves'. What are they discussing? "Stuff," he says. "Just… stuff."
How does it feel going from the WWE to this? He is philosophical. "This is going back to my roots. I started wrestling in front of small crowds. And then I worked my way up to WWE which is huge, 12,000 to 20,000 people. But coming back, it was not a problem. As long as people go home happy,
I did my job."
What are his ambitions now? "I want to travel abroad, go to different countries. Not just to wrestle, I want to go and experience the culture. I like to go and visit the castles and cathedrals, and I got a shitload of pictures of all that stuff. A few weeks ago I went to a cathedral that was built in the seventh century. Just going and seeing the beautiful artwork on the ceilings, and the stained glass… That stuff really interests me because I'm a huge history buff."
As he speaks he is donning his costume for the match. Before pulling on his leggings, he rubs Ibuprofen gel liberally onto his knee joints. "I had a few injuries along the way," he says. "But I got a few more years left in me. I'm not ready to quit yet."
So what keeps the men coming back to wrestling, in the face of poverty, bodily deterioration, and half-empty community centres? "When you go out through the curtain," says Doug, "it's an adrenaline rush. And that's why we do it. You want that same feeling every time you go out."
Mad Man Manson agrees. "There's nothing like the buzz of being in the ring," he says. "Having people cheer or boo for you, having people believe in what you do. You and your partner in the ring – he's your enemy on the night, but you're working together to create something brilliant. And the live crowd energises you. A lot of my friends have been in their job for five years, they're buying their houses or they're getting married. But some people have something in them that they have to get out, or they'll just go crazy I think. And this just happens to be the thing I have to get out of me. There's no way I can live without it at the moment."
He pauses, sitting in his dilapidated van. "And at the end of the day, someone's got to do it," he says. "If I wasn't there, there'd be a guy with no one to fight."
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