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Family man and body slams: Quapaw native moonlights as professional wrestler

Posted: Oct 22nd 2017 By: Nathan Mills - JoplinGlobe.com

By day, he's Barry Linduff — 35-year-old husband, father and marketing professional at Downstream Casino. By night, he's Flex Zerba — a stereotypical 1980s gym rat who gets his jollies throwing around his co-workers.

Though the worlds sound quite different, the skill sets — minus the co-worker tossing — sometimes cross paths.

"Nobody is going to market yourself for you," Linduff said. "Nobody is going to get you over but yourself. It kind of goes hand in hand. If you know how to market yourself, then you can at least have a decent grasp on how to market other things because in the end it's all about trying to have your finger on the pulse of what other people want."

Tonight, however, Linduff will be performing as Zerba as he battles Dak Draper for the National Wrasslin' League Kansas City Championship in the main event of the company's Sunday Special show at 6 p.m. at Joplin's Memorial Hall.

Training and travel

Linduff said he first discovered wrestling somewhere between the ages of 6 and 8.

"I don't think I ever grew out of that phase, you know?" he said. "Ten-, 12-year-old kid watching wrestling every week, watching these — I can remember flipping on the TV and seeing these larger than life characters, and I'm like, 'Whoa, this is like a cartoon, but they're real.'"

He remained a fan in some capacity until 2001, when he was able to attend WWE's flagship event, Wrestlemania. Wrestlemania 17, held April 1, 2001, is generally regarded as one of the best in the event's history, and it inspired Linduff to start training to become a wrestler himself.

After graduating from Quapaw (Oklahoma) High School, Linduff started college at Missouri Southern State University. It was there he began his journey in wrestling. He said he remembers being in Reynolds Hall on the MSSU campus between classes and going into a chatroom online to ask about wrestling schools in the area.

He was directed to a school in Tulsa, where he got his feet wet for the first time. Linduff would go on to St. Joseph to train with Sonny Myers, a primary rival of Orville Brown, the first National Wrestling Alliance World Champion, in the early days of the promotion.

While training and in the early days of wrestling, Linduff continued to juggle his other responsibilities, including performing as a cheerleader at MSSU.

"I would try to navigate college Monday through Friday, then go up to St. Joe and train," he said. "... Essentially, it was just try and get as many bookings as I can from as many people as I could — reputable promoters or not — and just try to get the ring time."

That strategy was validated later when Linduff attended a camp held by Tom Prichard, a trainer with WWE. That mindset has taken Linduff all over the country to wrestle, including a stint at Ohio Valley Wrestling, which was a developmental territory for WWE in the 2000s. Though he was never under contract with WWE, Linduff said he learned plenty from Rip Rogers and others working at OVW, even if he sometimes felt out of his depth.

"I walk in the front door, and Rob Conway's there," Linduff said. "He's training and he's asking some 400-level questions to Rip Rogers, and I'm just like, 'What am I doing here?'"

Conway, a former WWE Tag Team Champion who Linduff wrestled years later in an NWA Tag Team Championship match, was there rehabbing an injury, and conversations like the one he overheard between the wrestler and trainer changed the way Linduff looked at wrestling.

"You can teach anybody a suplex," he said. "You can teach anybody to do any amount of moves that they want to do, but where to put them and where to turn your head at the right moment to connect with the crowd — you can't really teach connecting with the crowd; you can just learn how, you know, if you've got it in you how to turn it up."

Settling down

The grind of traveling as a wrestler can make it hard to start or maintain a family as many of these performers are on the road several dozen if not a couple hundred days a year.

"In many ways, wrestling is a young man's game," said Chris Gough, NWL director of operations and a former WWE writer who has worked with Linduff for the better part of a decade. "You get into it, and you burn trails everywhere. You're going to every different city. You're making very little money. You're hoping to make gas money. I mean, this is what a lot of people spend their lives doing for a long time."

"In my 20s, it was lose every relationship you were in," Linduff said. "Every one of them imploded in miraculous fashion because you're gone doing this. In your 20s, you think you're invincible."

But soon, Linduff met Ryan, the woman who would later become his wife. He almost instantly introduced her to his lifestyle, bringing her on one of their first dates to a show on which he wrestled.

"I was wrestling (WWE Hall of Famer) Jerry Lawler. ... We lock up, and he goes, 'Hey, check out the blonde in the third row.' I was like, 'King, she's with me.' And he stops the lockup, and he goes, 'Really?'"

The relationship progressed, and Barry and Ryan were soon married. They now have a 4-year-old daughter, Baryn.

Introducing his wife early to his life as a wrestler has helped them maintain their relationship long term. It's a balancing act Linduff has to keep in mind at all times.

"If it were me, I'd be wrestling all the time," he said. "There are times where I have to go, 'Ah, I need to sit this one out. I've got to mow the lawn or I've got to fix something at the house.'"

When they can, though, Ryan and Baryn will tag along. These trips have led to some wild experiences, including receiving parenting advice from Jake "The Snake" Roberts; Baryn being complimented by Ata Johnson, mother of Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson; and Baryn achieving some social media notoriety for receiving the famed "too sweet" hand signal from one of its originators, WWE Hall of Famer Kevin Nash.

"I think my kid got more followers than I did in one epic night," Linduff said. "... Made me a proud dad."

Still, as fun as these trips can be, Baryn prefers when her dad is at home, often trying to stay up late to wait for Linduff to return from his performances. Fatherhood has made him realize he no longer dreams of working the 300-days-a-year road schedule of a full-time wrestler.

"Not quite as fun as it was in my 20s," he said. "Maybe I'll just sit at home and play with my daughter."

Flex Zerba

The Flex Zerba character was borne from Linduff's early wrestling. The big, bright colors and bigger, brighter characters of the late ’80s and early ’90s provided a groundwork for what Zerba would become.

"Everything that was good about ’80s photos of wrestlers is what I'm trying to bring back," he said.

Think neon colors. Think Zubaz pants. Think fanny packs. Think super thin tank tops. And think personality louder than all those things. That's Flex Zerba. And in many ways, it's also Barry Linduff.

"I'll give him a crumb, and he'll make a cake out of it," Gough said. "That's just how he is. ... He's a guy that can do a lot with a little. He's a guy that I give a lot of rope to because he'll find a way to make it entertaining."

Zerba started as one half of a heel — bad guy — tag team known as Swoll Patrol. An injury forced Linduff's partner to take some time off, however, and the Zerba character began to undergo some changes.

"The promos were so crazy and out there that people kind of dug it," Linduff said. "... People could see that I was having fun. You can't fake that. You can act however you want as a certain character, but wrestling fans get a bad rap as being stupid and slow and uncultured, but they're pretty smart. They can tell when something is legit. They can feel it."

Now, Zerba is a babyface — a good guy. And tonight, he aims to take down the NWL's baddest bad guy in Draper.

NWL

Though he has worked several tryout matches and as an extra for WWE, Linduff counts his biggest successes as coming in the past few years wrestling for Traditional Championship Wrestling and the National Wrasslin' League.

TCW had a regular TV presence before it folded, and that experience prepared Linduff for the work he's doing now as Flex Zerba with NWL.

NWL airs its weekly program on a handful of stations across the region, including KSNF-TV in Joplin. The show airs right after "Saturday Night Live" each week.

At 6 p.m. tonight, the show's main event has Linduff's Flex Zerba going up against NWL KC Champion Dak Draper with the Championship on the line. The company's first show in Joplin, Linduff said, drew about 400 fans — and that was before the NWL show started airing on local TV. This will be NWL's second show at Memorial Hall, a venue chosen for its rich history of holding professional wrestling events.

"I remember the first couple months (into my wrestling career), thinking, 'Man, if I could work just one time at Memorial Hall in front of my family, I could call it good,'" Linduff said. "We had some smaller shows at Memorial Hall, and I achieved that. And I didn't appreciate it when I was younger because I experienced Memorial Hall so young into my career. I just kind of always assumed that I'd always have that opportunity. ... Then the tornado happened, and then Memorial Hall gets used for other purposes for a good chunk of years and unable to access it and unable to hold shows there and promote it. It kind of was like, 'That sucks. The older I get, I don't know if I'll get that opportunity again.'"

Wrestling for one of the company's top championships at Memorial Hall in front of his hometown crowd is "the pinnacle of what you set out to do," Linduff said.

"We have a great product and local roots, so it seems like a natural (fit)," he said." "People all the time want something to do in Joplin, and we're trying to provide it to them.

"Just come have a good time," he continued. "I wouldn't be doing it at 35 if I wasn't having a good time."

Want to go?

Flex Zerba will take on NWL KC champion Dak Draper in the main event at 6 p.m. Sunday at Memorial Hall.

Tickets: $10 general admission; $30 ringside.

Details: nwleague.com.