Work Bonding at Extreme Championship Wrestling
Matty Kerr is co-creator with John Brancaccio of The Working Experience. He is also a filmmaker and published author. Listen to our podcast on iTunes and Spotify and visit our website: theworkingexperience.com for videos, merchandise and more. You can also find us on Facebook, Linked In, Instagram, and Twitter.
The following is a true story. Look for the full account in our upcoming book about The Working Experience.
After work bonding can be fraught with peril. On the whole, if one were to actually analyze the data, it probably does more harm than good.
There is a bar at First Street and First Avenue in Manhattan that is literally where the homeless go to drink. In 1997 or 1998, it was rated “Worst Bar in New York City”, which is really saying something.
It was around this time that, for reasons that have never been made clear to me, my college friends Chris and Jim were drinking there, at which time they saw on the 1980’s era TV that was bolted to the wall behind the bar, an ad for tickets to an Extreme Championship Wrestling match. Extreme Championship Wrestling (ECW), which was banned for being too violent, involved wrestlers cutting each with glass, becoming wrapped up in barbed wire, slamming ladders into each other, falling from the rafters, and just beating each other bloody. It was the hardcore porn of professional wrestling, way more insane than the WWE or All Elite Wrestling. The matches were somewhat choreographed but it was insane, sort of like snuff films.
In a sort of foggy haze, Chris wrote down the number to call for tickets. At the time, he was a manager at a financial firm, a boiler room type place with guys in their twenties, Type A personalities, lots of testosterone. His boss was like a football coach, big into team building and, after Chris mentioned this to him for some reason, thought it would be a great idea for Chris to bring his team to the ECW match so they could bond. I can only think Chris’s manager had no idea what ECW was or he never would have sanctioned this escapade. (As a side note, Jim had called me, along with our friend, Tony, and asked if I wanted to go. The only reason I agreed was because I had no idea what ECW was. ) Whatever the case, he gave Chris the money for six tickets.
They really should have just gone to a strip club.
The whole thing was shady from the start. Chris called the number from The Worst Bar in New York City, which turned out to be a tire shop in Yonkers, NY and was instructed to go to the parking lot of a strip mall where he was met by a man in a windowless van who actually sold him the tickets, and most likely would have sold him meth, guns, and a human being if Chris had wanted. This was only a prelude of things to come. The whole venture should have been junked then and there.
The venue was an Elks Lodge on Queens Boulevard. I met Jim and Tony across the street because the crowd outside was the dregs of humanity, a crowd of meatheads just looking to fuck someone up. I was terrified to look anyone in the eye. I have been to my share of heavy metal and thrash metal concerts, Slayer and the like, and this crowd was definitely further down on the evolutionary scale. Lots of denim, camouflage, missing teeth, unshaven. A lumpen mass of humanity. Nasty, brutish, ignorant, stupid, prehistoric…one could scarcely wonder what these people did when they were not at an ECW match.
“Yo the Undertaker is gonna fuck shit up!”
“I don’t fuckin’ care, man. This shit is real!”
The place was late in opening the door so we stood across the boulevard and watched the violence that seemed to be brewing. This may have been done on purpose by the promoters to get the crowd hyped up, which was working. Some of these geniuses were trying to scale the wall and get to the upper windows, to what end I don’t know. Most of these folks did not seem to be into planning for the future.
We saw Chris and his five work buddies walk up to the building They were all pretty amped up and drunk; they actually had been to a strip club beforehand and been drinking for a couple of hours. One of them kept yelling, “I don’t give a fuck man! This shit ain’t fake. This shit is for real!” I have always thought of people who work in the financial sector as being very conservative and very boring; the types who go out for dinner and martinis and listen to Billy Joel and play golf on the weekends. That stereotype is really not true. A lot of these folks are often one or two steps removed from the work class and are trying to claw their way up. Very chest thumping, aggressive types. They were quite friendly with me but that is because I am friends with Chris. All in all they are not quite my type of folks. Under other circumstances they may very well have seen me as a target.
The doors finally opened and the crowd surged inside, where they were selling ECW merchandise and dollar drafts of some shitty beer. The last thing that this crowd needed was alcohol. In fact, most of that crowd should never be allowed to consume alcohol.
The city really should have just sealed the place up and gassed it.
The matches started and it was chaos. The crowd really gets into it with people shrieking at the wrestlers, giving them the finger etc. The wrestlers will sometimes kind of come into the crowd and go after someone. The spectators might start punching each other and throwing chairs. It is goes very quickly from fake to all too real. I tried to keep away from the ring so as not to catch a chair in the teeth or get caught up in a brawl.
For a time it was somewhat entertaining to watch these large men fall from twenty foot ladders through folding tables and into barbed wire but blood and pain are not my thing. I found it to be getting tedious and I had to work the next day so I was planning my exit during some lull in the action. At some point, Shane Douglas, one of the main wrestlers, was in the ring with a microphone making announcements and doing a promo spot for their TV channel. The crowd was relatively quiet and then Douglas suddenly dropped the mic and grabbed his head. He got out of the ring and disappeared, leaving the crowd somewhat bewildered as to what the deal was. Was this part of the act?
Here is the condensed version. One of Chris’s work friends, Darryl, had been throwing quarters at the ring and one had hit Douglas in the face, right above his eye, hard enough to draw blood. They looked at the security taped and seen Darryl throw it. Security then came in and grabbed Darryl and dragged him downstairs to the lobby. Once down there, Shane Douglas came out. While Darryl was being held by the security guards, Douglas punched him in the face. Douglas is around 6’4” and at the time probably weighed close to three hundred pounds, much of it steroid pumped muscle. Darryl is lucky that he didn’t get his skull fractured.
I had had no idea that Darryl had been throwing quarters or that he had been grabbed by security. Another of Chris’s work friends, Myles, came up to us and said, “Get everybody, he hit Darryl. Get everybody.” Chris had already gone down, and I saw Jim and Tony going so I went down as well. By that point, Darryl’s face was a bloody mess and Chris and another were holding him back from attacking a security guard who he apparently thought hit him instead of Shane Douglas, who had left by that point.
He was screaming, “You motherf$%king ________________!”
If the scene up top was nuts, the scene in the lobby was surreal. No one from upstairs was being allowed to come down. It was me, Tony, Jim, Chris and Chris’s friends along with the security guards in the lobby. Shane Douglas wasn’t there but some of the other wrestlers were coming out to see what was going on. These were very big men whom I had just been watching beat each other bloody. I started thinking that they were going to put two and two together and think that we had had something to do with the incident. We could hear the crowd stomping and yelling upstairs and Darryl was still screaming and the exits were closed and the situation was very tense. I honestly thought that at some point one of the wrestlers would come after one of us and put someone in the hospital. These were large, jacked up men whom I had just seen beating the shit out of each other. I would be no match for them.
No wonder there had been an ambulance stationed outside the Elks Lodge. That should have been a tip off.
Then the NYPD showed up. They didn’t burst in and starting whaling on everyone but they did come through the door with helmets on and some had shields, batons at the ready. It was intimidating but I can’t say I blame them and their presence gave me a sense of relief. They stood around for a while, along with us and the wrestlers and Darryl still yelling. I pressed myself up against the wall and made myself as inconspicuous as possible. It wasn’t clear if we were allowed to leave so I decided to remain in place. Finally, a sleazy looking guy in a bad suit and greasy hear appeared and he huddled with the police captain of the squad. They left and came back and Darryl was arrested. I don’t know if the captain saw the footage and determined that Darryl was actually guilty of a crime or if a few dollars passed hands but Darryl was placed in cuffs and hauled out. Myles got so mad that he punched the wall; it was later determined that he had fractured his hand.
A side door finally opened and Tony, Jim and I managed to make our exit.
Chris had to go into work the next day and explain the situation to his boss. Darryl had to take some time off from work to let his eye heal and sort out his legal issues. (I’m not saying Shane Douglas should have hit Darryl but Jesus, what do you expect from a guy who gets cinder blocks broken over his head for a living? A calm, rational conversation?) Myles had to have his hand tended to. I am sure that Chris’s boss didn’t see that one coming. However, it certainly was a bonding experience, at least for Jim, Tony and me, one I will never, ever forget.
