This article was posted in the Eastbay Express last year:
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 the School of Hard Knocks.
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."
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Today damages were handed down in the case above in the amount of 1.34 million. There should be more details on the ruling forthcoming.
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