You are here /wrestling
/features
/Lacing Up
Lacing Up

Justin Farren

Main

BLAH

LACING UP #2

Background: This column is a continuing journal of my entry into the world of professional wrestling. I am 28, living in central Florida, employed full-time, pursuing a childhood dream.

I'm sitting at work, discussing my plans of becoming a wrestler, two training sessions under my belt, with a few of the guys at work.

"Yeah you should call yourself Justin Case"

"What? That's gay. I want to wear a mask, that makes no sense, they don't know my name's Justin"

"What about the Net Prophet and you could carry a keyboard?"

"You're a fucking buffoon, Andy"

I always liked the masked wrestlers. I loved their colors, and my favorites growing up, were the Medics, Mil Mascaras, the Spoiler, Mr. X, and of course, El Santo. Their colors, designs, and outfits, bright, loud, and flamboyant. Character expression without having to be a character on your own.

I've never been good in front of audiences, my eyes always watered when I gave school speeches, or oral reports. My cheeks brightened up each time in debate, but I knew I had the tools and ability to be a performer on some level.

I was always the little fast guy who made enough jokes to piss off the big bully enough to chase him around the schoolyard, laughing the whole time. You know, the guy who everyone hangs out with, but the girls don't actually date, because he's too little, and just a TAD BIT too annoying to be mature enough to be seen as a girlfriend of.

"I could be your partner, and call myself 'Spider Monkey Greg"

"What?"

" I could have a finisher called the cling, and just cling on their legs."

"That's a great idea Greg. We're talking about me, and what I'm gonna call myself."

"What about Justin O'Minute, and you could do all your matches really fast"

"How about no, Andy?"

My brothers and I got the trampoline from our aunt and uncle Donna and Cliff, from LA one summer, when I was 12 and he was 10, and it was huge. It was about 16 feet long by about 8 across. Kevin was the youngest, at 8 and he could fly. He did backflips, gainers, dives off the garage and bounced from the tramp to the ground like he was born on it.

Me, I was afraid to do all but the most basic maneuvers....never ever trying a backflip, no, not once. When we started watching wrestling again, during the big 80's boom, we made the inevitable transition from goofing on the trampoline, to actually wrestling each other, pretending to be all our favorite jobbers.

We never really got into being JYD and the Hulkster. We were more the Rusty Brooks, SD Jones type of guys. The jobbers were interesting, because we knew so little about them. It was more fun to pretend to be the Moondogs, with ripped jeans anyways. The Moondogs were real, and weren't supermen. Ski masks and you were a wwf masked jobber, the Gladiator (Ricky Hunter wearing the same exact singlet he wore when he was a face) Mr. X (referee turned wrestler Danny Davis, of course) or the ring rope walking Spoiler.

We also made up our own gimmicks. I was, among others, Jack "The Javelin" Flash, ex-Canadian Football League star, Pretty Boy Poof, an Adrian Adonis-like prima donna, and the insane black eyed Psycho, who sprayed bug spray (off the corner of my mouth) to show just how insane he was. We had them all, Pink Shiek, Sgt Guts, Coconut Somoan, the Blue Demon (Aunt Dixie made a sweet mask for that character of cousin Todd's) even the babyface Fantabulous Ones, played by my cousin Troy and little brother Kevin. The perpetual faces in peril, if you will.

We'd have our own cards, and taped with the kids from the migrant workers in the audience, cheering for us, sitting in folding chairs, at a cost of fifty cents per kid (We paid them, not the other way around). Our ropes were for show, complete with turnbuckles and posts. If you wanted a cage match, you just moved the ring near the fence, and filmed from the other side. The camera man doubled as the ref, and had to run away from the camera to make counts, when it was time to take it home.

"Are you going to wear spandex, because, yuck."

"Yeah of course. I'm not going shirtless, if it makes you feel any better."

"Good call."

"I want to wear a mask though. Why be a wrestler if you're not going to be a masked wrestler?"

"You could wear a velvet mask and be the masked pimp."

"I like Gran Naniwa's mask and outfit. He's kinda my build....I could do that. He wears like a crab mask thing."

"You could be like, Y2K, and be a bug"

"What about a lice, nobody likes lice, I could be Mr. Lice. I should be Mexican, I could be Humanos Los Pijohos, or Hombre Pijohos"

"Ahaha, El Pijohos!"

"Yeah you could throw Old Bay at the audience"

"What the fuck are you talking about Andy?"

"You know like a crab, like crab seasonings."

I had Jeonga draw up some pictures to send to a designer I had found on the internet, at Highspots.com and gave her sketches of a lot of really colorful Luchadores and Michinoku Pro guys I liked a lot. Guys like Juventud, Psicosis, Gran Naniwa, Super Delfin, and the like. These are the sketches she put together.

I had gotten a really kick ass picture of a louse from some website called Lice-Rid and she used that as a template for the mask. I hadn't even taken a suplex let alone ran the ropes, and I already had a gimmick and gear designed.

Maybe I was getting ahead of myself, maybe I was putting the cart before the horse, but to me, when I sent off that order to be designed, that was the first real commitment I made to myself, that I was going to see it through to the end. I'd ordered it, spent 300 bucks on boots, mask, and gear, and there was no turning back. I was going to wrestle, under a mask, in stuff that I helped design, and that was that.

In the back of my mind, I had thought about working out. I was 5'11 241 lbs. Fat. Irish. Athletic but in a John Kruk way, not in a Barry Sanders way.

I had a ways to go. A long ways. At least I had my boots paid for.

Justin
special to [slash] wrestling

Mail the Author

BLAH

Main

Design copyright (C) 1999, 2000 Christopher Robin Zimmerman & KZiM Communications
Guest column text copyright (C) 2000 by the individual author and used with permission