Shortly after I arrived Los Angeles for a series of shows in the winter of 2019, a friend in the business told me that I needed to interview Southern California’s biggest wrestling fan.
Around 2016, Shawn Scoville, aka DaShawn2Cents, became known for hanging out at indie shows and inviting the wrestlers back to his home for web interviews in a hot tub. Shirtless and rotund, with water bubbling against his body creases, Scoville’s interview style was uninhibited. “I give zero fucks,” he said of his corpulence. “I’m a large guy. That’s who I am.”
He also knew the Southern California indies, impressing his subjects with his appreciation of their craft and awareness of their respective careers. To some, a segment on Scoville’s channel came to be perceived as the modern equivalent of an appearance on Piper’s Pit. When Matt Riddle was passing through town, he apologized for not having the time to make it to the host’s Bellflower, California, home, but agreed to be interviewed in the hotel bathtub instead.
The renown elevated Scoville to a different status, something slightly above working press. Before a series of death matches during a Game Changer Wrestling (GCW) swing through Los Angeles, I saw Scoville backstage, assisting in organizing the light tubes.
“I have ADD, Asperger’s and depression,” he told me. “I was kicked out of school. They had me on so many pills, I couldn’t figure out what was going on. I have so many mental health issues, I can’t hold a job. My dad said I’d grow out of it. I never did. You know what helps me? Wrestling.”
According to Steve Bryant, who runs the SoCalUncensored website, as of 2019, there were approximately 50 indie cards in Southern California each month. Scoville tried to attend as many as possible, relying on the many friends he’d made on the circuit to drive him to the various venues.
“If I miss a wrestling show, I go into a depression.”
A lot of Southern California fans felt the same way.
“There’s a wrestling style that’s very unique to Southern California,” noted Pete Trerice, the cameraman and editor for Scoville’s hot tub series. “We draw on lucha, obviously, because we’re so close to Mexico.” But unlike traditional Mexican wrestling, the SoCal luchadores work on the left side of their opponent’s bodies, allowing them to use the right hand when mounting a comeback. “It’s harder hitting than lucha. And with New Japan having a dojo in Los Angeles, there’s a lot of Japanese influence too.”
Said Brody King, who debuted in New Japan in 2019 in addition to working for Ring of Honor, “Everything I am essentially came from the mixed Japanese strong style and lucha I learned on the Southern California indie scene.”
In the territory days, the Los Angeles promotion centered on the storied Olympic Auditorium at 18th and Grand in East L.A. and extended from the Mexican border to south of San Francisco. The rights to promote at the Olympic were held by Aileen Easton — the first woman inducted into the International Boxing Hall of Fame — while her son Mike Lebell ran the business end of the territory. Her other son, notorious shooter “Judo” Gene Lebell, was the promotion’s enforcer, putting on the trunks when necessary to punish a wrestler who didn’t want to do business the way the family wanted.
Although a member of the NWA for most of its existence, the territory broke away in 1961, creating its own title, the Worldwide Wrestling Associates (WWA) Heavyweight Championship. Unlike other belts, which were regional, the WWA championship had international cachet, with the title changing hands in both Japan and South Korea. In 1968, the group rejoined the NWA and flourished, broadcasting in both Spanish and English, with Mexican stars like Black Gordman, Great Goliath, Rey Mendoza and Mil Mascaras supplementing cards featuring The Destroyer, Pampero Firpo, Killer Kowalski and Rocky Johnson. A 1971 grudge match between the territory’s biggest name, Freddie Blassie — then known as “El Rubio de Oro,” or “The Golden Blond,” to his Mexican devotees — and “Maniac” John Tolos was held outdoors at the Los Angeles Coliseum. Officially, the card drew 25,847 fans. Both Tolos and Blassie suspected that the attendance was significantly higher, but Mike Lebell downplayed the numbers to siphon off a larger share of the proceeds for himself.
Even during its waning days, the territory was a showcase for future headliners like Chris Adams, Chavo Guerrero and Roddy Piper. Officially, the promotion held its last show in December 1982. As Vincent Kennedy McMahon began his national expansion, Lebell affiliated himself with the World Wrestling Federation, allowing WWF to claim beachheads in both Los Angeles and New York.
In the aftermath, a few small promoters attempted to run shows with former Olympic Auditorium names and luchadores who’d come up from Tijuana for the day. But California State Athletic Commission requirements were costly. When the authority stopped regulating wrestling in 1989, previously reticent promoters reconsidered. The same year, the Slammers Wrestling Gym opened in Sun Valley, recruiting the Fabulous Moolah as a trainer, with the goal of producing the next generation of SoCal wrestlers.
Lucha always hovered above the scene. After Mexico’s AAA promotion attempted a U.S. incursion, selling out the Los Angeles Sports Arena for the When Worlds Collide pay-per-view in 1994, a number of promoters attempted to gain traction with lucha-oriented cards. World Power Wrestling (WPW), based in Santa Ana in suburban Orange County, started in 1996, sometimes drawing 1,000 spectators for shows featuring wrestlers from Mexico.
By contrast, Bill Anderson and Jesse Hernandez began operating the Empire Wrestling Federation (EWF) in Covina the same year, primarily using students from their wrestling school, offering a presentation based on what fans had seen in the WWF in the ’80s.
“California felt disconnected from the rest of the wrestling world,” said Kevin Gill, a West coast–based commentator for GCW. “Everything seemed to be focused on the East Coast. You had these hard-working wrestlers on the other side of the country, but how many people knew they were there? Some of these guys had to actually travel to New York or Philadelphia to get people to pay attention to them.”
Recalled Joey Ryan, “You didn’t have these super-indies, like ECW, that everyone knew about. So there weren’t these shows with all-stars from all over the country. At the same time, there was something starting to happen. The people were less jaded and more appreciative of the talent they saw. They started going to indies and kept coming back again.”
In the late ’90s, Fred Olen Ray, a director, writer and producer who worked on more than 150 low-budget movies, including The Brain Leeches, Attack of the 50-Foot Centerfold and Hollywood Chainsaw Hookers, created All-Star Championship Wrestling (ACW). Using ECW as an inspiration, Ray, who wrestled under the name “Fabulous” Freddie Valentine, went out of his way to feature a hardcore match on virtually every card. He brought in celebrated bloodletters like Terry Funk and Abdullah the Butcher, and staged title matches that involved stunts like placing the championship in a box of rattlesnakes or on the back of an alligator. “I think the alligator was drugged,” said Steve Bryant. “He really didn’t do anything.”
By the early 2000s, upcoming SoCal talent like Ricky Reyes, Super Dragon, Rocky Romero and Messiah could find work at a growing number of indies, including Revolution Pro Wrestling — not to be confused with the British group of the same name — and Xtreme Pro Wrestling (XPW). Founded in 1999 by Rob Zicari, aka Rob Black, the owner of L.A. porn company Extreme Associates, and his wife, Janet Romano (adult actress Lizzy Borden), XPW ran matches featuring porn stars and an annual death match tournament called Baptized in Blood.
Provocative by nature — Extreme Associates would later face obscenity charges for sex scenes featuring an adult actress pretending to be a young girl, Jesus Christ coming down from the cross and having sex with an angel and a gang rape led by Osama bin Laden — Zicari’s troupe attended ECW’s Heatwave pay-per-view at the Olympic Auditorium, the company’s Los Angeles debut. Before the action started, security had warned the visitors to turn their XPW shirts inside out. Although they complied, tensions in the arena remained high.
Throughout the night, porn star Kristi Myst was seated in the front row and feigned removing her top, riling up the crowd. Just prior to the main event, featuring Justin Credible defending his ECW World Championship against Tommy Dreamer, Myst turned to the audience and took off her shirt, exposing a black leather bra. This infuriated Dreamer’s valet, Francine, who was supposed to lose her top in the match. She rushed over to the front row, berating the X-rated performer for drawing the heat to herself. Hoping that the cameras were catching the confrontation, XPW wrestler Supreme then tried to show off his XPW shirt, as security swarmed him. In the fracas, Supreme accidentally bumped into Myst, who fell to the ground.
The pushing and shoving caused much of the ECW locker room to charge down to the ring, throwing punches at the intruders. Security removed the XPW posse to the parking lot, where they were again confronted by the ECW contingent. Outnumbered, members of the XPW ring crew were allegedly punched and kicked several times — reportedly by Paul Heyman, among others — before escaping the scene.
Yet, XPW was able to use the altercation to their advantage. Why was ECW so defensive? Was it because XPW really was more extreme? Playing off the incident’s notoriety, XPW staged a show at the Olympic on April 21, 2001, called Scene of the Crime. Much had changed in professional wrestling at this point. Most notably, ECW was out of business, its resources now owned by the WWF. Indeed, the invasion angle that pitted ECW and WCW wrestlers against the WWF involved a ringside melee that conjured up memories of the Olympic Auditorium incident.
By sheer circumstance, Scene of the Crime happened to take place on the same night as the first and only championship game of the first incarnation of Vince McMahon’s XFL — six miles away at the L.A. Coliseum. Not only was the football league’s acronym similar to XPW, the team that ultimately won was named the Los Angeles Xtreme.
To most observers. Scene of the Crime was a disappointing show. But a match between Rising Sun and Super Dragon left the fans awestruck. Despite their masks, the combatants were not luchadores from south of the border. They were Californians wrestling the new SoCal style. When a tape of the match was shown on XPW’s broadcast on KJLA, thousands of viewers suddenly realized that the local indies were worth checking out.
“It was a great time,” recalled B-Boy, a future Pro Wrestling Guerrilla (PWG) World Tag Team champion. “There was fan intensity. People were loyal and started coming to every show. There was a familiarity between all the top talent. There was still a lot of tape trading going on, so we’d study moves and recommend opponents for the promoters to bring in. Every time we toured somewhere, the people would learn what we did in Southern California — how it was a hybrid of styles, how nobody here knew just one genre.”
Growing up in a military family, B-Boy — the real-life Benny Cuntapay — followed different wrestling territories as he moved from base to base. But it was the Randy Savage–Ricky Steamboat match at WrestleMania III in 1987, when Benny was eight years old, that solidified his love for wrestling. “Even at a young age, I thought talent was more important than whatever character you were playing,” he said. “I knew these were two of the greats.”
Attending high school in San Diego, Cuntapay made bad choices, falling in with a Filipino gang. Still, the craving for wrestling endured. “I was a thug. I was always getting into fights. The other guys would make fun of me because they said wrestling was fake. But I didn’t care. It gave me direction. I knew what passion was.”
He began training at the Palace of Pain in San Diego in 1997. When Rick Bassman, the man credited with discovering Sting and the Ultimate Warrior, opened a gym in Mission Viejo in 1999, B-Boy switched there. Bassman’s Ultimate Pro Wrestling (UPW) group eventually became a developmental league for WWE and included John Cena, Samoa Joe and The Miz among its rotating roster. Coached by Tom Howard and Christopher Daniels, B-Boy learned how to structure a match and tell a story.
Around this time, B-Boy received a piece of advice he’d impart to every young wrestler who’d ask him for guidance. “You just have to make the drives.” In B-Boy’s case, that meant commuting, when necessary, as far away as Sacramento, more than 500 miles from his hometown.
In 2003, he flew to Philadelphia and won CZW’s third annual Best of the Best tournament, beating Sonjay Dutt in the finals. With his reputation authenticated, he went from being an aspirant to an indie attraction, receiving dates in Europe, Asia and Australia.
While others moved beyond the indies, B-Boy never received the call, instead starting the Level Up Pro Wrestling school in La Mesa, as well as the Ground Zero promotion in the Imperial Beach section of San Diego. “I’m one of the boys first, but business is business,” he said of running a promotion. “I have to tell my students when they’re not ready to be on the show. It’s never easy but, hopefully, it motivates them to work harder.”
For his trainees, a glance at the careers of arguably the most ostentatious duo to arise from the modern Southern California indies was a reminder that Golden State fans did not suffer mediocrity.
Although their surname is Massie, the Young Bucks have been calling themselves “Jackson” since an indie promoter gifted them the moniker around 2005. The sons of a part-time minister and full-time general contractor from Rancho Cucamonga, Matt and Nick and a younger brother, Malachi, were wrestling obsessed. Matt’s annual birthday celebration was centered on screening the latest WrestleMania while eating pizza with his friends and family.
Of all the wrestlers they idolized — Edge and Christian, The Rock, Matt and Jeff Hardy — Shawn Michaels would have the greatest impact on the Bucks. Their preferred attire was spandex, conjuring up memories of Michaels and his partner in The Rockers, Marty Jannetty. Their specialty would be the Heartbreak Kid’s finisher, the superkick. When Michaels headed the WWF’s D-Generation X faction, he and his partners taunted foes with crotch chops. Later, Matt would march the entire length of the ring, crotch chopping the whole way, before delivering a clothesline.
Nick compared a Young Bucks match to a visit to Disneyland. “Our act is pretty much your routine tag team wrestling, but you’re on cocaine,” joked the straight-edged Matt to Vice Sports.
In exchange for working for their father, the boys were allowed to build a ring — hammering down the wood frame and setting the posts in concrete — in the backyard. It was unveiled on Matt’s 16th birthday. “Nick was 12 and Malachi was 10 years old,” Matt told the Ring Psychology website. “We taught ourselves how to do flips and impersonated what we saw on television, We fell in love at first bump.”
When the family relocated to Hesperia in San Bernardino County, they began staging a wrestling event every Thursday at a local skating rink that would occasionally feature known indie wrestlers en route to their weekend SoCal dates.
Early on, the brothers wrestled as single performers. But at an Olympic Auditorium show, they were booked as a duo. When the promoter had them come out to the Twisted Sister song “We’re Not Gonna Take It,” they complained about having the “whitest” presentation in the business. Converting an embarrassment into an asset, they flippantly referred to themselves as the “Young Bucks.”
At the time, Malachi was part of the act. Before he retired in 2010, citing travel fatigue, the siblings periodically billed themselves as the “Jackson 3.”
They accumulated fans as well as detractors. Their synchronized gymnastic style was derided as hackneyed, while their propensity for leaving their feet caused certain blocs to label them “spot monkeys.” After other wrestlers diminished their matches as one long “superkick party,” the siblings plastered the slogan on t-shirts, bracelets and stickers. In 2015, in a naked effort to go viral, they helped a kid celebrate his ninth birthday by superkicking him during an event in Baldwin Park, California.
The plan worked.
It wasn’t the first time that a child got involved in a wrestling match. During the days of Les As De La Lutte, 13-year-old Jacques Rougeau participated in an angle in which Tarzan Tyler bodyslammed him in the Montreal Forum. In 1996 in ECW, the Sandman’s six-and-a-half-year-old son, Tyler Fullington, berated his father as a drunk and blamed him for divorcing the boy’s mother. At the “Natural Born Killaz” event at the ECW Arena, tow-headed Tyler — who’d begun dressing like Sandman’s enemy, Raven — blasted his father with Sandman’s Singapore cane. Twenty-two years later, at WrestleMania 34 in 2018, Braun Strowman seemed to randomly pick a fourth grader from the crowd to team with him against Sheamus and Cesaro. Although Strowman and his teammate, Nicholas — the real-life son of referee John Cone — were successful, capturing the tag team title recognized on Monday Night Raw, the two relinquished the championship the next night, due to the youngster’s demanding school schedule.
It was all fun, as long as a kid didn’t get hurt.
In the Bucks’ case, they took pride in being “light” performers who could make a move look believable while barely grazing an opponent and were confident working with an amateur. They also enjoyed boasting about having the most exciting match on every card. Hoping to consistently achieve a five star rating in the Wrestling Observer, the Bucks named their finisher the Meltzer Driver. During those times when Dave Meltzer happened to be in the audience, Matt and Nick blew him a kiss before executing the maneuver.
In reality, the Wrestling Observer rating system benefited not just the Bucks, but the entire SoCal scene. “After all those years of Southern California not having the bigger promotions, like you saw on the East Coast, the fans were less jaded and really appreciative of what our wrestlers could do,” said Joey Ryan.
Ryan first discovered the indies when he attended a WWF card in Anaheim with his brothers, and someone handed them tickets to a local show. In 1999, he began training with the EWF but switched to Rick Bassman’s UPW a year later. Although he was working regularly on the SoCal indie scene, he continued his apprenticeship under Bryan Danielson in 2004 at the dojo opened by Japanese legend Antonio Inoki.
He soon developed a character patterned after Tom Selleck’s 1980s Magnum P.I. television persona, coming to the ring in tight trunks, his body oiled, a lollipop jutting from below a well-trimmed mustache. In both promos and in-ring action, he secreted sexual innuendo. Indie fans grew accustomed to seeing Ryan grab an opponent while positioned on the turnbuckles, facing the ringside area. Taking his rival along on a drive to the floor, Ryan’s catchphrase became, “Who wants a mustache ride?”
After working for TNA and its India-based affiliate, Ra Ka King, between 2011 and 2013, Ryan developed the gimmick for which he’d become best known. During a confrontation with Danshoku Dino in Japan’s DDT promotion in 2015, he seemed to develop prodigious strength in his penis, using it to win a test of strength. Video of the exchange received international attention, prompting Ryan to name a new signature move the YouPorn-plex, in honor of the online video company YouPorn. In the course of a match, he’d somehow manage to get an opponent to grab his crotch, then flip the victim to the mat.
“I’ve been wrestling a long time and tried stuff that worked and stuff that didn’t work,” he said of his penis routine. “It’s the evolution of me as a wrestler or as an artist.”
At the end of 2015, Ryan was signed to Lucha Underground, then a year-old television series that mixed American indie wrestlers with standouts from Mexico’s AAA promotion. The hour-long program was divided into seasons, broadcast in Spanish and English and featured storylines with supernatural and science fiction themes. Ultimately, conflicts were resolved in the ring, located not in an arena or a television studio, but in an intimate, darkened warehouse in L.A.’s Boyle Heights neighborhood — in 2018, the location was moved to an old cold storage facility in downtown Los Angeles — known as “The Temple.” Seen primarily on the El Rey Network, founded by film director Robert Rodriguez for a Hispanic-American audience, Lucha Underground was the first television show to screen theatrically, using 4DX technology, allowing the audience to experience environmental effects like seat motion, wind and scents.
For the first few years, Lucha Underground appeared to be yet another option for the plethora of indie talent trained in the SoCal style, including Brody King, Eli Everfly and Jake Atlas, who were also all graduates of the Santino Brothers Wrestling Academy.
“When you look at the quality of the wrestlers who’ve gone through Santino Brothers, you realize why they’ve made such a big difference out here,” said SoCalUncensored’s Steve Bryant.
Founded by Mongol Santino and his in-ring “brother” Joey “Kaos” Muñoz — the team that battled the Young Bucks in their Olympic Auditorium debut — in 2007 in Norwalk, California, the school dedicated itself to teaching submission grappling, lucha libre and SoCal strong style, along with cardiovascular training, mental endurance, character development and even ring crew set-up.
The wrestling seminary’s establishment corresponded with a time when interest in even the fringes of the industry had been revitalized. In 2008, Mickey Rourke starred in The Wrestler, portraying Randy “The Ram” Robinson, an ’80s wrestling star still hanging on in the New Jersey indies. Necro Butcher, Ron “R-Truth” Killings, Johnny Valiant, Claudio Castagnoli (Cesaro), Robbie E, Austin Aries and the Blue Meanie all had roles in the movie. Although the mood of the Darren Aronofsky film was hopelessly dreary, the excitement that Randy and his fellow indie performers engendered was conveyed. At one point, Rourke’s character is going through some papers when he finds a photo of Afa the Wild Samoan, at whose Allentown, Pennsylvania, school, the actor trained. Even the fans in the film were legitimate indie followers.
Journalist Kenny Herzog noted that, by the turn of the 2010s, anyone who attended an indie show was aware that not just one, but numerous wrestlers on the card had the potential to become top talent. “These guys weren’t waiting for anyone to make it happen for them. They were making it happen.”
No place was this philosophy expressed as purposefully than at Santino Brothers, which moved to the city of Bell Gardens in 2010. Jake Atlas was one of about 30 students when he began training. In a typical Santino Brothers class, he said, only one to two graduate. “If you can make it to that level,” he said, “you’re ready to start generating a buzz wherever you go.”
At GCW’s To Live and Die in L.A. show, on a rainy Saturday night a half block away from a homeless encampment in downtown Los Angeles, I stood with Steve Bryant watching Santino Brothers graduate Matt Vandagriff wrestling New Jersey native KTB. While I scribbled on a notepad, Bryant held his phone in his palm, glancing down to monitor fan reaction to the newcomer on Twitter. As Vandagriff executed a sky twister, Bryant pointed out that the comments were intensifying.
Until Vandagriff was picked up by WWE, AEW or Ring of Honor, Bryant speculated, this kid was going to help reconceive the Southern California indies. “It’s kind of cool,” he said, “to see the world discovering this guy.”