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Colorful chaos: Area wrestlers featured in new league, TV broadcast

Posted: Jul 8th 2012 By: mikeiles

JOPLIN, Mo. ? When Barry Linduff was a kid, he loved watching professional wrestling on TV. Some of his fondest memories are of watching the larger-than-life, colorful characters doing ?superhero things? and making noise.

?As a kid, I thought, ?What is this? It?s no cartoon,?? Linduff said. ?Those were real people doing those things. I had to watch. I became a fan of it from that point.?

Linduff does more than watch, these days. He trains, studies, practices and more so that he can enter the squared circle and be one of those colorful characters doing superhero things.

Linduff is ?Mr. Saturday Night? Michael Barry, a member of Genetic Perfection alongside ?All That? Alan Steele, who is a distant cousin. The two are the tag-team champions in the Traditional Championship Wrestling league, a new league that just landed a broadcasting deal on KSN and with a Memphis, Tenn., channel.

Now Linduff can watch himself on TV every weekend.

But getting to that point hasn?t been easy for any of the wrestlers in the league. It?s taken years of work and training to get to their dream -- as well as risking an injury that could halt their pursuit of that dream.

Larry Mitchell, of Aurora, has already been in several plays at Missouri Southern State University. He is also an athlete -- he played quarterback on his high school football team and ran track.

Professional wrestling is the perfect mix of athletics and acting, he said. After being released from the U.S. Air Force with a medical separation, he decided to pursue

?This was something I wanted to do as a kid,? Mitchell said. ?When I got back from the Air Force, I wanted to do something out of the ordinary.?

He researched how to get in and went to a training center, where he met Linduff. For the last four years, the two have trained together and wrestled at TCW and other events.

Linduff started his pursuit more than 11 years ago. Never stopping his wrestling-watching habit, he attended major events such as WWE?s Wrestlemania in Houston. Seeing 68,000 people glued to a 20-by-20-foot square

?What if I wasn?t smart enough to know that I can?t do something?? Linduff said. ?What would keep me from trying it? The guys I was watching had to start somewhere. I didn?t want to be 60 or 70 and have regrets, thinking I should have tried it.?

Neither Linduff nor Mitchell had illusions about whether the sport was real -- they both knew that the storylines were imagined and the results were scripted. They also knew the stuntwork and athleticism behind pro wrestling was very real.

The level of work still surprised both of them, though.

Linduff got his start and eventually met of the first wrestlers trained by Harley Race, the legendary wrestler who earned success from the WWE, WCW and NWA. Those connections led him to Sonny Myers, a former NWA champion who was in the business for about 60 years.

Earning his stripes was a long process for Linduff, who said Myers made absolutely sure his students had a passion for wrestling.

?He would have people train for six weeks with no mats, just falling on concrete, running, squats and cardio,? Linduff said. ?If you didn?t have a passion for it, you were out the door.?

Linduff said that once Myers realized he wasn?t going to leave, Myers started him showing the basics, as seemingly trivial as the proper way to step through the ropes. Linduff said he?s still learning some of those little things.

He trains six days a week with stretching and weightlifting. He studies Brazilian jujitsu for extra agility, and occasionally works out during his lunch break from his job as a graphic artist for The Joplin Globe.

Mitchell also keeps up a similar workout schedule, hitting the gym for eight to 12 hours a week in between his shifts as an employee at PowerHouse Gym.

Controlled chaos, colorful characters

A wrestling match is best compared to a movie based on a popular book. Like ?Harry Potter? or ?Lord of the Rings,? the end of a match is known to the wrestlers ? but they don?t know how they will get there.

Wrestlers know who will ?win? a match before stepping into a ring. The win is scripted, but nothing else is.

That?s where the training comes into play, Mitchell said. The moves they are doing are dangerous, but can be even more so when the two have a miscommunication, or don?t pay attention.

?Everyone is trained differently, and if you?re going in with someone who doesn?t work like you, you have to communicate on the fly,? Mitchell said. ?If you think he?s doing something he?s not, someone can get hurt.?

Take a simple exchange: The bad guy throws the good guy into the ropes. The good guy bounces off of the ropes and charges back toward the bad guy.

Bad swings his arm, Good ducks underneath and runs into the ropes for another rebound. Bad throws himself on the ground trying to trip Good, but Good just leaps over.

It?s an exchange that seems mundane and takes less than five seconds to perform. But it?s also a drill that wrestlers run while training, so that they get the motions down precisely. Each guy must do their proper action at the proper time.

Linduff said though all moves appear to be one person inflciting pain on the other, about 80 percent of those moves require equal effort from both.

?Think of it as a really painful dance routine,? Linduff said. ?High impact moves are a little trickier, such as aiming off the top rope.?

Colorful characters

The space between those moves is filled with different parts of Mitchell?s and Linduff?s personality.

Linduff?s Mr. Saturday Night is a self-professed egoist who really believes he?s helping the world. He?s a know-it-all jerk who will gladly help one realize that he?s a know-it-all jerk, Linduff said. He said he studies some of the greats such as Ric Flair, Ravishing Rick Rude, older Shawn Michaels, ?Mr. Perfect? Curt Hennig into Mr. Saturday Night.

Mitchell?s Lars Manderson has seen several variations, including a lawyer and a stripper. He develops his character with techniques such as the Stanislavski method and other things he learned from theater, he said.

?The character development I?ve learned from (MSSU) has been amazing,? Mitchell said. ?Every one of my characters has to walk and talk a different way. It has to be an entirely different repertoire.?

Both Mitchell and Linduff said they think about character development constantly, thinking of things they can do to add to their matches.

?You?d be surprised at the intense amount of character study we do,? Linduff said.

Fighting future

All that work is paying off for Linduff and Mitchell. The two are featured on ?TCW Wrestling,? a weekly TV show featuring TCW athletes. KSN started broadcasting the show in June.

The league features a traditional style of professional wrestling that eschews some of the bloodier, more shocking and not-so-family friendly aspects of other leagues. It also features some of the great names from yesteryear, including ?Beautiful? Bobby Eaton, ?Hacksaw? Jim Duggan and Disco Inferno.

Linduff said that the league?s focus on a high-quality show with good production and investment into good equipment were some of the attractive things about joining the league. He said that the league, co-owned by Matt Riviera and Brian Thompson, has been the first organization to surpass promises made to him.

?There?s been some shows where I didn?t want people to know that I was wrestling, because I knew it wouldn?t be good,? Linduff said. ?It has all the same reasons that I watched as a kid. There?s a reason those old WCW videos are best-sellers, and the new stuff doesn?t do so well.?

The exposure that Linduff and Mitchell gain in TCW might also help gain entrance into the big leagues of pro wrestling, such as the WWE. Linduff has already taken part in a few WWE auditions.

But Linduff said he?s patient. At 30, he knows he?s breakable, so he?ll keep working carefully toward his dream.

Mitchell also said he would keep pressing forward with wrestling, despite the lingering threat of injury.

?I have a better chance of behing a Hollywood actor than making it in wrestling,? Mitchell said. ?I don?t fill my head with illusions of grandeur. But I can?t go in thinking I?ll fail, because then I will.?