Issue 11
Pro Wrestling Guerrilla
By Emily NagisaPhotos By Nikolaus Jung
Pro wrestling is quintessential American entertainment. It is an offshoot of Vaudeville and burlesque: lowbrow shows made by the common folk, for the common folk. The fans are notoriously bloodthirsty. Hardcore matches—in which wrestlers cut each other with hidden razor blades and carpet the ring with thumbtacks to induce bleeding—get the audience in a frenzy. Wrestling shows are over-the-top pantomimes with ongoing storylines. Cartoonish characters explore racial tensions, gender relations and sexual dynamics, with no political correctness. Some call pro wrestling blue-collar ballet. Vince McMahon, the godfather of the industry and the owner of World Wrestling Entertainment (WWE), calls it “sports entertainment.”
In 2003, Pro Wrestling Guerilla (PWG) debuted on the Southern California indie scene. SWINDLE explores four prominent members of this promotion—and flings back the black curtain to expose the labors of love behind the personas, and the art behind the spandex.
Joey Meehan
Joey Meehan, 25, wears Jimmy Eat World hoodies and is so nervous that his arms barely swing from his slouched shoulders when he walks. He’s got that wavy long hair and a scruffy, handlebar-like moustache. When he is not in the ring, he comes across as a shy, nerdy guy.
Joey “Magnum” Ryan—Meehan’s wrestling alter ego—wears pastel hot pants, bandannas and aviator shades. He oils himself in the ring and makes spread eagle poses on the ropes. His tag line is “Who wants a mustache ride” and his entrance is signaled by an altered version of the Magnum P.I. Theme song. He is sleazy, sexual and rude. He makes his ringside entrance to a cacophony of boos—and he loves it.
Joey’s transformation from Meehan to Magnum wasn’t easy. He started wrestling after he graduated from high school. When he was a rookie at the School of Hard Knocks, a pro wrestling training school in San Bernardino, Meehan was so painfully shy that he couldn’t speak out in the ring. To cover it up, Meehan says, he was put into “more of a gothic-type gimmick—a character where you didn’t have to act out.”
It was years before he fell upon the Magnum P.I.-inspired Joey Ryan, a character that he says is “like myself, with certain parts of my personality turned way up.” (The Rock explained his wrestling character in a similar manner: it is just Dwayne Johnson with “the volume turned way up!”) Ryan embodies everything Meehan is unable to express. Everything that is “Magnum” collects inside him, untapped between performances—until he unleashes it in one big torrent for his ringside entrance. It is remarkable to see—like watching Dr. Jekyll turn into Mr. Hyde. Ryan pumps himself up, grimacing and breathing through his teeth. He stands straighter; his head turns down like an animal ready to charge. He seems bigger, stronger. His hair even seems to puff into intimidating lion’s mane.
Ryan is a “heel,” the industry term for a bad guy. His character basks in the taunts he elicits from the crowd. People yell out: “Joey you suck!” “Pervert!” and “Shut up, Joey!” The Rock was a heel. Hulk Hogan started out as a heel. A brilliant heel character can take a wrestler all the way to the top, and Ryan seems to have the charisma to pull it off. He appeared as a “baby face”—the industry term for a good guy—on WWE’s Velocity in 2005 in a match against Sylvan, a Nordic male model type of wrestling character. During the match, Ryan had the whole arena chanting his name.
At the beginning of his career, Ryan wrestled for various independent promotions, sometimes driving for nine hours to perform in a single match. There were times when he got paid in hamburgers instead of cash. But he has since taken the reigns on his career.
In 2003, Ryan, along with five other prominent Southern Californian independent wrestlers, created their own indie league. Disco Machine, Excalibur, Scott Lost, Super Dragon, Top Gun Talwar and Joey Ryan became the joint owners of Pro Wrestling Guerilla, and built it into one of the most popular independent wrestling promotions in the country. WWE and MTV’s Wrestling Society X have featured wrestlers from PWG. The Human Tornado—a former PWG World Champion—played El Snowflake in the Jack Black movie Nacho Libre.
But life in PWG—like in any other indie promotion—is tough. Ryan says the wrestlers are paid at each show, but performances are spaced out by weeks. Many wrestlers fly in from all over the country and abroad. They often fly home right after the show. Most work full-time jobs and don’t have health insurance. During intermissions, the wrestlers come out and sell their merchandise and pose for pictures with the crowd. DVD and T-shirt sales bring crucial revenue for PWG.
For his day job, Ryan works as support staff at a mental health and addiction medical treatment center in South Pasadena. Recently, he says, he scaled his hours down to part time. He is starting to make a real living through wrestling.
Jade Chung
Jade Chung, 22, is one of only two female performers in PWG. She is a “manager”—traditionally the eye candy who paces ringside, distracting the referee and interfering at opportune moments to help her wrestler win. The other woman in PWG is Candice LeRae, a pale, blond aerial specialist who manages the Human Tornado.
Chung is half Vietnamese and half Chinese, and was born and raised in Canada. She grew up watching the WWE—then known as the World Wrestling Federation. “My Dad is the one who got me into watching wrestling,” she says. “Everybody in my family watched it.”
At the age of 12, Chung became a model. She was booked at runway fashion shows and flown out to Vietnam where she graced covers of fashion magazines. But her old love of wrestling crept back into her life when she was in high school. “I had a couple of friends who were training [to be wrestlers],” she says. “They just debuted in Toronto.” She went to their shows. “At first I didn’t think about joining,” she says. “I just went to have fun.” But two female wrestlers she met at these shows, Beth Phoenix and Tracy Brooke, encouraged her to give wrestling a try. So, Chung did. She trained during her summer vacations from high school.
In 2003, she made her debut in Michigan with Border City Wrestling as the manager for “The Franchise” Shane Douglas, a veteran big time wrestler who performed through the ‘80s and ‘90s on WWF, Extreme Championship Wrestling (ECW) and World Championship Wrestling (WCW)—all companies that are now under the WWE. Douglas now performs on the cable wrestling show TNA.
“[Douglas] was perfect all around,” Chung says. “He [embodied] wrestling: promo, facial expression. After every match, he’d tell me what was good, what was bad and what I needed to work on.” Soon, Chung was booked at shows in New York and Philadelphia, eventually performing for Ring of Honor, an indie wrestling promotion that is widely considered the East Coast’s best.
About a year and a half ago, Chung came out to California to visit an aunt who lived in Orange County. “I loved it out here, so I stayed,” she says. She heard about PWG, and approached the promotion to see if she could join. “Joey gave me a shot,” she says.
To support herself, Chung works in a Vietnamese restaurant 10 hours a day, six days a week. She travels frequently to perform in wrestling shows—and she says she has not been able to train as much as she would like. Still, she says, “People try booking me for wrestling.” But she doesn’t feel ready to move on from managing. “I’m not trained enough. I don’t want to wrestle yet because I don’t want to hurt my opponent.”
Scott Lost, with whom Chung is currently paired with, says, “She understands matches and is one of the best managers I’ve seen.” Scorpio Sky, whom Chung formerly managed, says, “She can do some pretty crazy things. There are a lot of girls who are great wrestlers. Obviously, there is the whole eye candy thing, [but] the guys still put on spandex to go out there. A lot of girls are out there to see the wrestlers, too.”
So why aren’t there more female wrestlers on Southern California’s indie circuit? Lost says, “There are very few women in California who want to get involved in wrestling.” For every PWG show, several wrestlers are flown in from out of town to perform—all of them men. Perhaps it is a reflection of the intrinsic sexism in the wrestling audience and industry, that female wrestlers are seen as less entertaining— less able to carry an entire match—than their male counterparts. Chung’s ambition is to develop into a successful wrestler. But in the meantime, she takes her position seriously. She studies tapes of other managers, and views her role as an integral part of the wrestling performance. She designs her costumes to reinforce the characters of the wrestlers she works with.
Recently, she has been paired with heels, and her seething, villainous ringside act intimidates and elicits vitriol from the crowd—proof of a successful performance.
www.jadechung.com
Scorpion Sky
When Scorpio Sky makes his entrance, he basks in the roar of the crowd—usually filled to capacity at various gymnasiums and auditoriums on the outskirts of Los Angeles. When he was a baby face, the crowd cheered. When he was a heel, they booed. Either way, the reactions were proof that he embodied the persona he constructed. He gestures his lean, muscular physique, stares back at the audience and makes his way dramatically to the fight.
Scorpio Sky, 23, known as Schuylar outside the ring, is a bit of an enigma. Raised by a single mother in Montclair, California, he acted in high school plays like A Midsummer Night’s Dream, in which he played Nick Bottom. He was a peer counselor; he learned to operate suicide prevention hotlines; and he was in a violence prevention group that mediated fights on campus.
Paradoxically, this model citizen dreamed of becoming a professional wrestler. He was 18 when he started training at night, and his pain threshold became super human. Schuylar has taken so many hits, he says, “I could be hit by a chair and bounce back quicker than a regular person.” But even in this violent sport, he is practical. Unlike most other wrestlers in the independent promotions, he buys health insurance.
When he is not wrestling, Schuylar is soft-spoken and somewhat guarded. This may be why he debuted as a masked character who specialized in acrobatic, technical moves— he could lose himself in the anonymous choreography. In the early days, he wrestled for numerous independent promotions throughout Southern California. Dino Winwood was his manager for a time, and he was embroiled in storylines with Quicksilver, Top Gun Talwar and Super Dragon. Talwar and Dragon are now part owners of PWG, and Winwood and Quicksilver—along with Scorpio Sky—are prominent players in the promotion.
The masked Scorpio Sky was a baby face, but after a while, he says, “I wanted my character to be killed and destroyed so I could come back as something else. I wanted to let out something else that was inside of me.” In 2005, Scorpio Sky was stripped of his mask during a match with Scott Lost. Schuylar withdrew from the ring, and went soul searching.
He followed his idol, Muhammad Ali’s travels to Africa. “I went to Zaire,” he says. “That’s where Muhammad Ali fought George Foreman.” It was a spiritual journey. “I figured out what I wanted to do.”
He returned to L.A. And PWG with a new wrestling character—an homage to Ali that was “the opposite of my masked persona. He spits out tough rhymes, wears the boxing robe and is very confident and arrogant.” Sky teamed up with Jade Chung, and they made their ringside entrances like two comic book villains: Sky strutted and preened. Jade flipped her hair and hissed at the crowd. The announcer would say, “Every young girl’s fling, every old woman’s dream. The one and only King of Sting—Scorpio Sky!”
But then very suddenly— unexpectedly—last January, Scorpio Sky lost a “Loser Leaves PWG” match and bowed out of the league. “I came to a point where it was like, ‘What next? How do I keep myself fresh?” he says. For the fans, questions loomed: Was he leaving the promotion for good? Would he come back as another character?
In the meantime, Schuyler is moving up. Like Joey Ryan, he is part of MTV’s Wrestling Society X, in which he plays a modified version of his Ali-inspired Scorpio Sky character. (Unlike at PWG, he makes his entrance alone, brandishing his high school award plaques.) And just last March, a masked wrestler claiming to be Scorpio Sky made his appearance at a PWG show. He was smaller and thinner than the Sky who left in January. Schuylar won’t confirm or deny the existence of this new character in public.
Schuylar’s wrestling personas are a way to explore the extreme parts of his personality—the heel and the baby face. But when he changes into his civilian clothes, he is the same approachable, upright citizen who grew up in Montclair. Schuylar leaves the arrogance and the spitting of tough rhymes in the ring. The enigma, however, remains.
www.myspace.com/scorpiosky
Scott Lost
After a PWG show in La Habra, California—an inland suburb on the outskirts of L.A. County—about 20 wrestlers and crewmembers descended upon an all night diner. Scott Lost tucked into his lumberjack breakfast and asked, “Do I have a footprint on my face?” He distractedly rubbed his cheek, which was sore from a boot to the face he received during that night’s match. Without noticing the oddity of the question, Joey Ryan replied, “Yeah.” Scorpio Sky ambled over to their table and began planning a group trip to downtown Los Angeles’ garment district to purchase fabric for new wrestling costumes. For a spectator, this was a quietly exciting scene. It was like catching a group of superheroes out of costume on their down time.
Scott Lost, 26, got his wrestling name because of his legendary poor sense of direction. He is a man of two great passions: pro wrestling and comics. He grew up in San Diego in a household where watching the WWF was a family ritual. “I was [the middle child] and not really getting attention in high school,” Lost says. “Now I get tons of attention. If you’re doing something spectacular in the ring, or able to do things that other people can’t do, you get a thrill. Nobody wants to be average in their life, and I feel like wrestling is something I could be great at.”
When he was a child, he created his own superheroes and drew comics every day. He still does—his current work, 2nd Shift, is about aspiring young superheroes who work ordinary day jobs to make ends meet. It is semi-autobiographical.
“At first they were young teens aspiring to be like X-Men,” he says. “The leader generates his power from the sun and works at ‘Fish World.’ I relate to him the most. My very first job was at SeaWorld, so he will work at all the places I worked. It’s called 2nd Shift because the first shift is their job, and their second is being a superhero.”
During his first year of studies at Southwestern Community College, Lost says he was suddenly gripped with the “urge to write a [wrestling] match.” He called over a few friends and performed the match on a trampoline. It developed into a backyard wrestling league called Trampoline Wrestling Organization (TWO). Ryan Rufio joined TWO, and one day his girlfriend brought over a flier for Ultimate Pro Wrestling (UPW). Lost and Rufio were sold right away.
“As soon as we saw people in the ring about our size,” Lost says, “we went and started training.”
UPW’s wrestling school, Ultimate University, is known for producing world-class pros—many of who go on to the WWE. Scott Lost and Rufio attended together, and became a tag team called the Lost Boys. They built momentum, but, according to Lost, Rufio eventually “lost the drive” and quit the sport. Lost then teamed up with Paul London, a wrestler from Texas. When London “moved up”—he is now featured on WWE’s SmackDown— Lost teamed up with Joey Ryan and began performing regularly for PWG. Today, he is teamed with Chris Bosh and managed by Jade Chung.
Lost’s signature moves include the Superman Spear, in which he flies at his opponent with his body completely horizontal. It looks like something straight out of Street Fighter. He recently injured his knee while running across a wall “Matrix style,” and one of his old wrestling moves was jumping off the top rope to elbow drop his opponent while brandishing an opened umbrella. Lost’s wrestling style is rooted in this kind of aesthetic—video games, kung fu and comic books.
Lost now pays the bills as a night manager for a lost luggage delivery company for airlines. The rest of the time, he wrestles and draws comics—passions that allow him to exist in the realm of fantasy. “[People say], ‘Just stop wrestling and concentrate on work.’ ‘Why are you doing this?’ You’re asking me to give up on my dream to come do this crappy job,” he says. “Going after your dream is worth the risk.”