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Body Slam U.   

In the unregulated world of pro wrestling schools, the demise of
Berkeley's Brian Ong probably wasn't negligent -- merely inevitable.

BY SUSAN GOLDSMITH
susan.goldsmith{at}eastbayexpress.com  

>From across the state, young men flock to this nondescript Hayward
office park, hoping to become stars. They are not actors or models
yearning to break into the film business. No, these are regular guys:
plumbers, morticians, and short-order cooks who share a powerful
dream. They are here to learn how to have toasters smashed into their
foreheads, be thrown from ladders, and hurled onto their backs. Their
curriculum is about making spectators believe they are hurting someone
or getting hurt, and the delicate art of working the fans into a
caveman-like frenzy.

Welcome to Body Slam University. 

The students at All Pro Wrestling Boot Camp, one of the nation's
premier schools for aspiring professional wrestlers, don't seem to
care whether they do the damage, or whether it is inflicted upon them
-- they just want to be part of pro wrestling, a blockbuster business
that draws a million-plus fans to its events every year. They shell
out $6,000 for APW's nearly yearlong program and work extremely hard
at it. Their professors, mostly current or former pro wrestlers, have
paid their dues in the ring and bear significant scars -- one has a
six-inch gash, now healed, from getting hit on the head with a metal
chair. Another has difficulty walking because he's been slammed with
shovels covered in barbed wire one too many times.

Sounds like a deterrent, but they flock here nonetheless. Students
like Brian Ong of Berkeley, who began hearing this strange siren song
as a child, and signed up for All Pro Wrestling's training two years
ago. In his e-mail application, the 27-year-old Northern California
native said he was "actively working out to compensate [for a] lack of
height," which at five foot seven was hardly impressive in the
professional wrestling world. "It's been a dream of mine to have the
millions chant for me, or even have them boo me," he added in the
essay section. "I like suicidal, homicidal, and genocidal aerial
moves."

That last bit was Brian's homage to his favorite wrestler, Sabu, a man
known for his extreme acrobatics and insane stunts, which earned him a
broken neck and numerous other injuries. One wrestling writer
described Sabu as a guy whose "body is covered in scars from wrestling
in fire, on barbed wire, and putting his body through more punishment
than most humans could take."

Brian, of course, spent his days differently. He worked as a file
clerk at the consulting firm Deloitte & Touche, although he hoped this
was only temporary until he could make his living as a wrestling star.

It was temporary, anyway. In May 2001, four months into his boot-camp
training, the 185-pounder was killed in the ring, shortly after being
tossed on his back by his seven-foot-three, four-hundred-pound
sparring partner. The men were learning how to do a move called a
"spinebuster," but they performed it incorrectly. Ong's head slammed
into the mat and he died from a massive brain injury.

Brian's parents, Norman and May Ong, didn't learn of their son's
obsession until the night he died. They didn't even know he was
enrolled in the school where he'd been spending at least two nights a
week for months. In legal testimony, Brian's younger brother, Edwin,
said his brother had sworn him to secrecy because he didn't want to
upset their parents. Brian, Edwin said, planned to tell them about his
true career ambition when he signed his first professional wrestling
contract.

The Ongs have responded by filing a wrongful-death lawsuit in Alameda
County Superior Court against All Pro Wrestling and its owner, Roland
Alexander. The case, which is expected to go to trial later this year,
claims Brian relied on All Pro to protect his well-being, and the
school failed him. No one at the school, the suit alleges, made any
effort to minimize the dangers, even though Brian had sustained a
concussion weeks before his death practicing the same move that later
killed him. The Ongs claim Brian's instructors sent their son back
into the ring despite this injury, and disregarded his safety when
they paired him with a fellow wrestler known as "The Giant."

"Prior to the Decedent's death, Defendants, and each of them, knew or
should have known that training and participation in exhibition
wrestling was extremely dangerous and unsafe, including but not
limited to the possibility of brain injury, injury to the nervous
system, and/or fatal concussions," the Ongs argue in their suit.

All Pro Wrestling's Alexander denies any wrongdoing and has countered,
in court papers, that this was a tragic accident in a sport that is
inherently dangerous. Prior to enrolling, Alexander's lawyers point
out, Ong signed a lengthy waiver that relieves the school of any
responsibility for mishaps. In essence, the lawyers argue, wrestling
is risky stuff, and students who sign the liability waiver understand
that. Brian's death also happened to be the school's only fatal
accident in twelve years of doing business, Alexander says.
Although the Ongs' lawsuit seeks to simplify the circumstances and pin
responsibility for Brian's death on the school, the factors involved
are much more complex than the complaint suggests. Since childhood,
the young man had idolized and desperately wanted to be part of the
surreal wrestling world, which has elevated sadomasochism to the level
of a spectator sport. Judging from visits to the boot camp's training
sessions, and watching as student after student jumps into the air,
flips, and lands flat on his back with a terrifying thud, it's clear
no one here should expect to come out of this in full working order.
And in fact, almost no one here does. "There are no guarantees in this
business except that you're going to get hurt at one point or another
-- how serious of an injury it will be, you don't know," says
boot-camp student Noah Staedler, 22, a hospital file clerk from
Vallejo who is studying physiology at Napa Valley College. "It's a
dangerous form of art. Very dangerous. You saw what goes on in there.
It's gonna hurt even if you land right."

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

A professional wrestling event is like an athletic soap opera with
blood and pyrotechnics. The stories, involving characters with names
such as "The Undertaker" and "The Axe," are about good and evil,
revenge, justice, wife stealing, and getting even with the boss. But
in these soaps, actors are hurled through windows, fall off of high
scaffolding, or get tossed into huge speakers that crash over and spew
sparks. Occasionally, the wrestlers are hauled away on stretchers as
part of the show -- and the fans go wild. "Touching and uplifting in a
disturbing, sickening kind of way," is how one superstar described his
work on the World Wrestling Entertainment Web site.

Professional wrestling is supposed to be fake, the stories made up,
and the outcomes scripted. But a convincing show also requires a good
dose of reality. The wrestlers really do get hurled through windows
and smashed over the head with metal garbage cans, although they are
supposed to be trained to take the bumps. The blood is real, too,
although sometimes wrestlers cut themselves to increase the flow and
make the "suffering" look more intense. It's brutal, compelling
theater with a Howard Stern sensibility -- although in this case the
shock jock would have to be pumped up on steroids.

It also happens to be a damn good business. Dominated by World
Wrestling Entertainment, a publicly traded company, the industry
brings in hundreds of millions of dollars through annual ticket sales,
pay-per-view broadcasts, and merchandising. Operated by the McMahon
family from its $15 million corporate headquarters in Stamford,
Connecticut, WWE (formerly WWF, for World Wrestling Federation) is one
of the few companies in America where employees -- the wrestlers --
regularly get to beat up on their CEO, family patriarch and pro
wrestler Vince McMahon. But pile-driving the boss doesn't pay this
well in most corporations. World Wrestling Entertainment's performers
bag six-figure salaries, and its superstars earn in the neighborhood
of $1 million a year.

While lucrative for a stable of 140 wrestlers, the work is physically
grueling. WWE puts on some two hundred live shows annually, which
means the stars are on the road much of the year performing physically
demanding, often-dangerous stunts. Eventually, that kind of schedule
catches up with you. "Some of the fans like the hardcore stuff. They
want to see people get hit over the head with a chair," Roland
Alexander says. "Believe it or not, that's an art form also. That's
not to say it doesn't hurt. There's a way you can hit somebody where
it looks like you're really hitting them, but at the same time, you're
not hurting them that bad. But over the years, you do that and you get
punch-drunk."

This weird amalgam of real and fake, plus intense lobbying by
wrestling's main man, has helped get state athletic commissions and
other regulatory bodies to lay off. Up until the mid-1980s, promoters
had presented their spectacle as honest sport, and wrestling was taxed
and regulated, much like boxing. But in the late '80s Vince McMahon
and his wife Linda, who helps run the company, sought to reposition
wrestling as entertainment. They convinced authorities in a number of
states, including California, that their events need not be regulated,
and their pay-per-view proceeds -- unlike those of boxing -- needn't
be taxed. By doing so, they were able to milk maximum profits from a
growing and lucrative part of their business.

With the advent of cable TV and McMahon's keen sensitivity to the
public's appetite for sleaze, violence, and a tough-guy script,
professional wrestling took off in a spectacular way. WWE's revenues
reached $82 million a year in 1997, according to Fortune magazine, and
by 2000 had soared to $379 million. Attendance at WWE events also
skyrocketed, surpassing a million tickets a year by the mid-'90s.

But as the industry grew, so too did the demand for wilder and more
dangerous stunts. Wrestlers began taking bigger and bigger risks to
keep audiences happy. "There's no regulation in wrestling whatsoever
-- not the matches, not the schools," says Bob Barnett, an attorney
and professional wrestling manager based in Southern California. "Over
the last few years, these guys started getting suicidal with chairs
and knives, and it's gotten really big in Japan. Wrestlers began to
make a lot of money carving up their bodies, and wrestlers are too
stupid to say no."

Barnett says the industry is plagued by steroids and rampant drug
abuse -- in part, he notes, because many wrestlers are in physical
pain from injuries sustained in the ring. At least 75 pro wrestlers
have died in the last six years, according to Dave Meltzer, editor of
the Wrestling Observer newsletter, which has documented the spectacle
for more than two decades. Most of the deaths, he says, have been from
drug overdoses, although a few have happened in the ring. But despite
the scourge of drugs in the industry, Meltzer says, the WWE doesn't
drug-test its talent.

Serious injuries are also common. The WWE, Meltzer notes, has had nine
or ten wrestlers break their necks over the last two and a half years.
"It's definitely a high-risk business and it's gotten a lot more
high-risk in recent years and I don't know how to change that," he
says.

WWE officials don't deny the casualties. "There have been serious neck
injuries in the WWE, and we work very hard as a group to ensure the
safety of the performers in the ring," says company spokesman Gary
Davis. "Our superstars are trained professionals and go into the ring
with very good knowledge of what they are supposed to do with their
partner in order to conduct a safe match, but accidents do happen
despite your best efforts."

Barnett, for one, is dubious that government regulators could do
anything to rein in the gung-ho wrestlers, who do nearly anything they
can to please the crowd -- even make themselves very, very bloody.
"They put a piece of tape around their finger with a piece of razor
blade and cut their foreheads. They drink a lot of whiskey and take
aspirin before a show because that thins their blood out and makes
them bleed a lot," says Barnett, who calls Vince McMahon "one of the
biggest bleeders in the country."

Even though it's his chosen industry, Barnett seems to have little
regard for wrestling. "It's the sickest business I've ever seen, from
top to the bottom, from the bleeding to the injuries," he says.
"There's nobody in the business who's even remotely normal."

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Almost everybody involved in wrestling knows it's not for everyone.
Brian Ong understood this from an early age. In his legal testimony,
Edwin Ong said he and his brother would watch pro wrestling on TV as
young kids growing up in Walnut Creek. Their parents couldn't
understand its allure. May Ong, who is Chinese American, would ask in
her strong accent, "'Why you watch that stupid thing?'" Edwin
recalled. As Brian got older, Edwin said, he began keeping his deep
interest in wrestling to himself. "He did not want to worry my
parents," the younger Ong said. Brian's parents declined to be
interviewed for this story.

By all accounts, Brian was an eager student. Vince Principato, one of
All Pro's trainers, described him as a boot-camp enlistee who was
damned happy to be there. "He had a fantastic attitude," Principato
said in sworn testimony. "One thing I remember about Brian is every
time he took the School Boy [move], he would run and shout like he was
happy to take a bump. Nobody did that. He was always there. He was
excited about everything he did."

Although details of Brian's first wrestling injury are sketchy, court
testimony shows that he sustained a concussion a few weeks into his
training, which began in February 2001, while practicing a
spinebuster. In the move, one of the wrestlers holds the other one
upside down by his shins, so that the guy being tossed has his stomach
against his opponent's back. The lead wrestler then pitches his rival
over his shoulders and onto the mat. Done properly, it should look
like a violent throw, when in fact the lead wrestler is supposed to
guide his victim down so that he lands flat on his back, distributing
the impact. A few weeks into his training, Ong tried the move and hit
his head. He missed the next two classes in order to recover and then
continued to train.

According to the lawsuit, the boot-camp trainers "knew or should have
known" that the concussion put Ong at risk for more serious injuries.
No disagreement from Jim Brambilla, who writes an online wrestling
column from his New Jersey home. "He should have been taking care of
his concussion," he says. "As soon as Brian had a concussion, he
should have sat on the side and not taken any bumps."

The night of May 28, students practiced at the gym, which sits in a
large converted warehouse in a drab Hayward office building. Brian
sparred with various people, including Dalip Singh, a freakishly huge
Indian guy who also dreamed of being a pro wrestler and had attended
the boot camp a few months longer than Brian. Singh, also 27, was so
big you could have watched a movie projected onto his back. He had
biceps the size of the average man's thighs, and a chest like a
redwood trunk.

Despite his mammoth stature, Singh was reportedly a sweet, gentle man
who spoke little English. According to various accounts of that night,
Singh wanted to practice the spinebuster and was paired with Brian.
The first time the two tried it, Ong grabbed Singh's shirt as he was
tossed over the giant's shoulders. Principato explained to Brian that
he needed to push off his opponent's back as he was tossed. Singh then
did the move with two others in the gym that night, including one of
the trainers, so Ong could see how it was done.

On the second attempt, Brian grabbed Singh's shirt again. This time,
his tailbone hit first, and his head whipped back violently against
the mat. He didn't get up. Instead, he turned over, said he was dizzy,
and began to moan. "Nobody thought, 'Oh, this guy is in really bad
shape,'" Principato remembered.

Before long, however, it was clear he was indeed in bad shape. Brian
tried to crawl out of the ring but managed only to get up on all
fours, vomit, and then collapse. Someone at the gym called 911 and
paramedics carted the unconscious wrestler off to St. Rose Hospital in
Hayward, where he was pronounced dead on arrival. The Alameda County
Coroner's Office later listed the official cause of death as acute and
subdural hemorrhage due to head trauma.

There's no doubt what happened was tragic, but was the school
negligent? The Ong family clearly believes it was, but some wrestling
insiders who know the business and how training schools around the
country operate don't think so. They say Brian's death was an
unfortunate accident at one of the best-run of the bunch. "APW is in
the top echelon of wrestling schools. It is one of the most famous,
successful schools," Wrestling Observer's Meltzer says. "They've sent
a lot of guys to the major leagues, and they're a lot better-trained
than the guys who come out of most schools."

There are dozens of wrestling schools across the country, and when you
sign up for any of them, you are warned what you could be in for, says
Mike Lano, a boxing and wrestling writer since 1966 who lives in the
Bay Area. "I've examined schools around the world, and APW is one of
the best," he says. "It's in the top 10 percent of schools. APW
exceeds most schools in terms of safety, cleanliness, and experience
of trainers."

Meltzer describes the spinebuster as a basic move that isn't
considered especially high-risk. Nor does he consider Ong's pairing
with such a huge opponent unusual, although Singh, he acknowledges, is
a giant even by WWE standards. The editor notes that there have been
occasional deaths and serious injuries at other wrestling schools over
the last several years, although neither he nor anyone else,
apparently, has kept statistics on these rare events. "Wrestling is
dangerous," Meltzer says, "but it's more dangerous to be a wrestler
than to go to wrestling schools. Professional wrestlers die from the
tolls of the business, and maybe one or two pros die in the ring each
year."

That, says Nancy Hersh, the Ongs' San Francisco attorney, is something
the government should be addressing. The Ongs' case, she says, deals
with an unregulated industry that's in a position to exploit people
financially, physically, and psychologically. "We're hoping that as a
result of this litigation, we initiate some form of regulation and try
to encourage people who run businesses like this to initiate safety
measures and take care of the people who pay them," she says. "If
these people had given any thought to the safety of Brian and others,
this never would have happened. It's unfortunate that we live in a
society that requires an impulse from outside in order to initiate
measures to protect their consumers."

Hersh wouldn't address the details of her clients' case or its chances
of success, but hand-wringing about the need to regulate pro wrestling
won't help her in court. If the Ong case makes it to trial, Brian's
parents will face serious legal hurdles. The first of these is the
liability release he signed before he began training at All Pro
Wrestling. Second, and probably more ominous for the plaintiffs, is a
ruling by the California Supreme Court last August that puts a major
headlock on anyone who sues over accidents incurred during sports
instruction. "Legally, I'd say they have an uphill fight," says
Stephen Barnett, a professor at UC Berkeley's Boalt Law School. "It's
because the courts apply a concept of assumption of risk in these
cases. If you agree to engage in a sport like wrestling, you are
generally held to assume the risk at least in terms of negligence, and
you can't sue for mere negligence. It has to be something more than
negligence, like recklessness."

The precedent-setting case was Olivia Kahn v. East Side Union High
School District, in which a fourteen-year-old San Jose girl sued her
school district's swim coach after he allegedly failed to teach her
how to safely dive into a shallow racing pool. During a school swim
meet, the young girl executed a practice shallow dive and broke her
neck. The high court determined that, while sports instructors "owe a
duty of due care not to cause an unreasonable risk of harm to others,"
some sports are "inherently dangerous" and any attempt to mitigate the
risks could alter the activity itself and "inhibit vigorous
participation."

The justices also noted that "a significant part of an instructor's or
coach's role is to challenge or 'push' a student or athlete to advance
in his or her skill level," and that fulfillment of this role would be
"improperly chilled by too stringent a standard of potential legal
liability." Any plaintiff bringing such a case, the court concluded,
would have to prove the instructor actually intended to harm his
student, or that the injury occurred as a result of action "totally
outside the range of the ordinary activity."

Which begs the question: What's out of the ordinary in pro wrestling? 

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

On a Saturday night in November, the headquarters of All Pro Wrestling
is abuzz with activity. This is show time, one of the school's
periodic wrestling events in which students get a chance to strut
their stuff for a crowd. At least seventy people are jammed into
folding chairs all around the ring -- the front row is set back
several feet, naturally, to make room for wrestlers who get thrown
over the ropes.

As a warm-up, the audience is treated to a videotaped match featuring
Crash Holly, one of the school's most successful graduates, who
wrestled for the WWE but died just a week or so before tonight's
event, reportedly of a drug overdose. In the movie, Holly, whose real
name was Mike Lockwood, battles his opponent outside at night. They
throw each other onto cars and then take turns chasing one another
with the vehicles. They get hit with open car doors and run down. The
audience goes wild.

Outside the auditorium, men run around in spandex pants, masks, and
muscle shirts. They are excited to perform, giddy and nervous as
children before a school holiday pageant. As the main event
approaches, lead trainer Robert Thompson calls all twenty or so
wrestlers outside and urges them to "give the audience something they
haven't seen before." The men all nod silently. They are ready to
deliver on that solemn promise.

Nearly all of these guys desperately want to break into WWE. Few ever
will, but they are determined to give it their best shot. In the
meantime, one works as a plumber, another repairs video games, a third
is a full-time college student studying to be an English teacher,
while a fourth sells antacids and nicotine gum. But right here at the
gym, during a match, is where they feel their lives are as they should
be. "I just want to wrestle in the ring in front of a crowd," says
Ruben Garcia, a new student at the school. "I will be doing this as
long as I'm walking."

One of the school's instructors, a former pro, says wrestling is a
career for those who simply can't stomach the idea of a boring day
job. "Seventy-three percent of Americans are unhappy with their jobs.
I may be busted up and can't walk and am in a bad situation, but I
chased my dream. I went as far as I could," says Steve Rizzono, 35, a
cardio trainer at the gym who tonight will be playing the role of a
Mafia don who screams fake Italian at his wrestler buddy.

Rizzono resembles a grown-up Eddie Munster with a nose that's been
broken so many times it looks as if the letter Z has been stuck on his
face. He's a sweet, soft-spoken man, in dramatic contrast to his
former ring persona. The trainer spent the last few years wrestling
for the now-defunct XPW league, an extreme wrestling outfit based in
Los Angeles. Because the league was so outrageous, paramedics stood by
the ring in case of disaster.

Rizzono's specialty was wrestling on broken glass, in rings with
barbed-wire ropes, and -- the coup de grâce -- with metal shovels. But
even then there were surprises -- such as the match where he had a
sword jammed into his skull and required numerous stitches. The man
has suffered some twenty concussions. One friend says Rizzono is
permanently punch-drunk and often has trouble keeping his thoughts on
track because of the repeated head injuries he has endured.

None of this is obvious when a reporter speaks with him. Rizzono
answers questions articulately and directly, but he does have several
cracks in his spine -- three disks are damaged -- and finds standing
and walking difficult. To keep ahead of the intense pain, Rizzono says
he takes morphine, Xanax, and codeine. "Sometimes I have to take so
much medication, I'm incoherent," he says.

But this evening he is eager to be a part of the show. "Some people
call it the wrestling sickness, and I have it bad," the trainer says.
"It's just that you do whatever you can to please a crowd, whether
it's barbed wire or a headlock. I did wrestle every match like it was
my last. If I made one person in the audience pop and say, 'That guy
was amazing,' it made me as happy as I could be."

Rizzono's girlfriend of two years, Joanne Alesi, is with him this
night, as she always is at his matches and wrestling events. A petite
blonde divorcée who works as a supervisor at a high-tech medical
device firm in Richmond, Alesi supports her boyfriend but doesn't try
to understand his world, because she simply can't. "He's a nice,
big-hearted person who wouldn't hurt a fly, so why does he want to get
hit in the head with all this stuff?" she asks.

The same question could be asked of almost every guy competing in the
match. In interviews, they are polite, deferential, and honest. They
know they cannot adequately explain their love of wrestling, but they
try. Each and every one talks about the thrill of stirring up the
crowd and being the center of attention. Each match is a bout with
glory.

"You want to give the crowd something to remember. That's what it's
about for me," says Garcia, a 22-year-old mechanic who works in a
Fremont bowling alley and who, after a couple of weeks at All Pro,
already sports a chipped tooth and sore back.

Tonight, he and the other green students are yelled at and humiliated
onstage by trainer Thompson, who enters the makeshift arena to a
booming rap song, its lyrics -- "Real man! Real man!" -- chanted by
the audience as he storms into the ring. Inside the ropes, Thompson
puts the students in a line and berates them like a drill sergeant
hazing his recruits. He calls their outfits "stupid" and screams at
one fledgling, "If you ever miss a session again, I am going to smack
the hell out of you!" People boo and yell at him and he shouts into
his microphone, "Shut the hell up before I come out there and kick
your ass!"

An intriguing opening act, for sure, and what follows is just as
bizarrely compelling. The wrestlers grunt and bleed as they are thrown
around. They sweat as they hit each other with surfboards and tumble
out of the ring onto the concrete floor below.

Roland Alexander watches the evening unfold with pride. "I know I am
keeping kids that come through that door off the streets, and they're
not involved with drugs or gangs. I am doing good things for them," he
says without a hint of irony.

Alexander believed he was doing the same for Brian Ong. Now he just
has to convince the court.


--- Internet Rex 2.29