Talon entered the ring at the Ludus Wrestling Center for a four-way match holding the Fighting Spirit Primero Championship belt high over his head, strutting like a bald diva, wagging his finger in the faces of his foes. A slim man with a hipster’s beard and a menacing glare, Talon had held onto the title for far too long by cheating and scheming, and his three opponents were eager to reclaim the belt for all that is good and right with the world.
In the crazy cartoon world of professional wrestling, Talon is a heel — a bad guy — whose arrogance deserves nothing less than a beat down. The bell clanged to begin the bout, and Talon’s opponents — Machine Sam Shields, Mike Draztik and The Young Legend Joel Maximo — immediately took turns slapping, kicking and throwing him around the ring. After a few minutes, Talon was cowering in a corner, moaning in pain.
“Break his bones!” one bloodthirsty fan shouted.
Welcome to a Saturday night at the Ludus Wrestling Center. There is nothing polished or pretentious about this professional wrestling school that takes up most of the second floor of a squat gray brick building in the shadow of the BQE. Ludus is located in a gritty industrial Brooklyn neighborhood, not far from the Gowanus Canal. The ring dominates the wrestling school’s main room, leaving just a foot or two on either side for fans to get to a few rows of folding chairs in the back. It is windowless, dimly lit and unheated, more warehouse than athletic facility. Wrestlers who jump from the turnbuckles have to be careful not to smack their heads on the low ceilings.
But for the two dozen or so boys and men enrolled at this Brooklyn wrestling school operated by Maximo and his wife Elena, Ludus is a dream factory. This is where aspiring wrestlers can learn the moves their heroes perform on television. This is where they can learn to follow in the footsteps of Hulk Hogan and John Cena. Maximo says it is important to teach his students piledrivers and deathlocks — but it is also important to inspire them to travel the world and entertain fans, just like he did.
“We’re trying to create a family environment here,” Maximo says.
Maximo’s youngest students are two brothers who call themselves “Murphy’s Law.” “Little Dan” Murphy, 12, and “Kid Christian,” 9, say their goal is to become the youngest tag-team champions in wrestling history.
“We catch a lot of heat from other parents who think we are crazy for sending our kids here,” says Dan (Papa Murph) Murphy, a burly, bearded Brooklyn dad who could pass for Captain Lou Albano’s son. “But my kids have played ice hockey and football, and that is way more dangerous. This is a controlled environment. There is no better place to train than Ludus, bro. My kids are living the dream.”
His wife, Lisa Murphy, says Ludus has saved their home. “We’ve gone through three couches in five years,” she laughs. “It’s better that they wrestle here.”
With Talon temporarily subdued, his challengers turned on each other. The first man to pin another wrestler would claim the Primero belt — awarded to Fighting Spirit’s top challenger, an honor second only to the FSW heavyweight championship — and all the glory that goes with it.
Shields, built like a linebacker, dropkicked Draztik clear out of the ring. The husky Maximo, a cross between a bull and a ballerina, slammed into opponents as he danced across the canvas. The 70 or 80 fans jammed into Ludus gasped when Draztik did a back flip off the top rope, landing squarely on all three of his foes.
“This is awesome!” the audience chanted. “This is awesome!”
By the end of the bout, all four wrestlers were on their knees, immobilized by exhaustion. But the evil Talon suddenly rebounded. He picked up Maximo, slammed him onto the mat and pinned him for the win. The crowd booed as Talon reclaimed his belt from the referee, stomped on Draztik one last time and stormed out.
“This is awesome! This is awesome!”
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When Joel Maximo was a kid in Bushwick, he knew exactly what he wanted to do when he grew up: He wanted to see the world, he wanted to make fans cheer, he wanted to hang out in gyms and he wanted to get paid for smacking the snot out of people.
Maximo, 33, learned the basics at House of Hardcore, a school in Deer Park, L.I., and spent the next decade working as a wrestler. He and his brother, Jose, were known as “SAT,” for Spanish Announce Team. The tag team appeared in several WWE shows, but most of their bouts were for independent promoters such as Total Nonstop Action Wrestling and Ring of Honor. When Jose retired, Maximo’s younger brother Wil took his place.
Thanks to wrestling, Maximo got to see a lot of the United States and plenty of Europe, too. He spent much of his career in Mexico and Japan.
“Joel,” says longtime wrestling journalist Bill Apter, “has wrestled everywhere.”
Maximo developed a fiery style that combined Mexico’s acrobatic “Lucha Libre” tradition with the Japanese approach, which emphasizes kicks, punches and submission moves. Mike Mooneyham, a wrestling columnist for Charleston’s Post and Courier for several decades, says promoters appreciated Maximo’s versatility.
After many years and many miles on the road, Maximo felt it was time to return to New York and settle down. He was at a crowded house party in Manhattan a few years ago when a pretty woman — Elena — chewed him out for grabbing her behind. Maximo says he was wrongly accused. He pulled Elena aside and insisted he was innocent.
“I wanted to clear my name,” he says, “and we wound up exchanging phone numbers.”
Maximo and Elena opened Ludus in November of 2011; they now have 25 students who pay $110 a month to study and work out at Ludus. Elena takes care of the business end of things; Maximo and his head trainer, Angel Ortiz, are the main instructors.
“I see wrestling as an art, and the ring is our canvas,” says Ortiz, who is known in wrestling circles as “Funky Monkey” and is FSW’s heavyweight champion. “You can get seriously hurt doing some of this stuff if you don’t know what you are doing. But if you pull it off right, it is amazing.”
Maximo is also the brains behind Fighting Spirit Wrestling, a promotion company that stages shows at the Ludus Wrestling Center as well as larger venues. Some of the Ludus crew, including Ortiz, Talon (real name: Chris Velletri), Shields (Sam Vascones), Draztik (Mark Anthony) and Joe Etell (real name, no fooling , is Joe Etell) already appear regularly on the independent circuit. Maximo says some wrestling schools hold back rookies until they’ve polished their acts, but he urges his wrestlers to appear in as many shows as they can.
“There is nothing like performing in front of a live audience,” Maximo says. “That’s how you learn.”
Irv Muchnick, the author of a history of wrestling book entitled “Wrestling Babylon,” says Vince McMahon’s WWE accounts for 90% of the North American market. Wrestlers make a lot more money than they did in the old days, when the country was carved up into territories controlled by a few dozen promoters, but they compete for far fewer jobs. Nobody is getting rich on the independent circuit, he says.
“The WWE is Broadway,” Muchnick says. “Maximo is Off-Broadway.”
But that doesn’t mean there isn’t an audience for the kind of small, independent shows that Maximo produces. Mike McNicholas, a 14-year-old Brooklyn wrestling fan and “Ring Fever” blogger, says the Ludus experience is much different than watching wrestling on TV or in a giant arena.
“This gets your adrenaline going,” McNicholas says. “It’s exciting for the fans to get involved. You don’t get that when you watch wrestling on TV.”
For the scores of hard-core fans who flock to Ludus shows, Maximo’s school is a wrestling Valhalla that allows them to get so close to the action that they can rest their elbows on the ring. The fans are part of the show, high-fiving wrestlers they like, getting into nose-to-nose shouting matches with the ones they don’t. When one wrestler told a young heckler that he sucked, and his mama did, too, the kid pointed to a pleasant-looking middle aged-woman on the other side of the ring.
“She sure does! She’s sitting right there,” the kid shot back as his mother smiled, nodding in agreement.
* * *
Tyler Lavallee first heard of Joel Maximo when he was a 12-year-old wrestling addict growing up in Massachusetts, and he’s been a fan ever since. Lavallee, now 22, moved to New York a few years ago after studying English and communications at New Hampshire’s St. Anselm College. He’s a manager at a midtown bar called Local West, but he has always wanted to become a professional wrestler.
When he learned that Maximo had opened a wrestling school in Brooklyn, he felt compelled to sign up. Lavallee’s ring name is “Trance” but he hasn’t figured out if he wants to be a heel or a “baby-face.” “I’m talking with Joel to figure that out,” he says. “You have to figure out your own style.”
Like Lavallee, the other students at Ludus know they are more likely to win the lottery than become wrestling legends. The matches may be fixed and the punches may be pulled, but professional wrestling is a punishing hobby; bouncing off turnbuckles and jumping butt-first onto the canvas leaves the body bruised and battered.
But the wrestlers say there isn’t anything else in the world they’d rather do.
“I love being on stage, I love being in front of the camera,” says Talon, who works at a fitness club when he is not wrestling. “I love showing off my athleticism. You have to be insane to throw your body around like that. But when I get in the ring, it’s like a switch has been flipped in my head.”
Talon says wrestling is intellectually challenging because competitors have to take their cues from the audience. It’s like being a stage actor who makes up his lines as he goes along.
“You have to know what moves will connect with an audience,” he says.
“Everyone knows it is fake,” he adds. “But people are willing to suspend disbelief because they want to be entertained. There is an art to getting people emotionally involved. When you are able to do that, there is no better feeling.”
* * *
Fighting Spirit Wrestling’s next show will feature ECW stars Sabu, Sandman and Shane Douglas, as well as wrestlers from Brooklyn’s Ludus Wrestling Center. The show – “Battlefield” – will be held at Die Koelner Bierhalle at 84 St. Marks Place in Brooklyn on April 20. Tickets are available at the venue, or at TheLudusWrestlingCenter.com
