Source: Appleton Post-Crescent
A former pro leads diehards in Packerland Pro Wrestling
By Steven Hyden
Post-Crescent staff writer
This is what it feels like to be hit in the face with a metal chair: It kills.
That’s according to Jim Duda, 25, of Kaukauna, who wrestles under the name Assassin in an Appleton-based wrestling league called Packerland Pro Wrestling. Most assassins deal with guns, poisons and the occasional throwing star. Duda’s method involves stripping down to tight red shorts and repeatedly kicking an adversary in the face and stomach.
Duda, who has a friendly face reminiscent of Green Bay Packers tackle Mark Tauscher, can’t count how many chairs have been cracked against his forehead. Ten? Twenty? Your guess is as good as his. Duda’s best chair story is the one where he took three smacks to the head in one match, a beat down that culminated with the chair being set on fire and drop-kicked into his face.
This is not wrestling as you know it from television. This is actual, live, bone-crushing mayhem, and it happens every Sunday afternoon in a large yellow ring erected behind Chris Bassett’s house on Appleton’s north side.
Bassett, a former World Wrestling Federation (now World Wrestling Entertainment) wrestler and owner of Packerland Pro Wrestling, trains local wrestlers to be lean, mean, smack-n-smash machines. Then he puts on wrestling matches booked at local bars and surprises people expecting the glorified soap operas of televised wrestling shows.
“That’s what sells tickets,” Bassett said. “Because everyone goes, ‘Oh, wrestling is fake. And then they come to our show and say, ‘Holy cripes! Did you see that? He hit him for real!'”
If there were doubt over how real is real, Duda took a break from some serious assassination action during a recent training session on a sunny, late August Sunday afternoon to fetch a metal chair out of Bassett’s garage. It was black and speckled with rust, and the backrest was half-smashed.
“That’s the contour of my head,” he said, pointing to a cranium-sized dent in the seat. So, yeah, Duda gets slightly peeved when people call him a faker.
“Yeah, it gets under your skin,” Duda said, “because I’ve been doing this every Sunday for seven years.”
If you play your cards right, your head could be denting metal chairs in no time. Bassett is looking for four to six wannabe wrestlers to train this winter and hopefully unleash at PPW shows throughout Wisconsin by spring. But finding the right guy is tough. Last summer a dozen prospective wrestlers came out for a try out, and they all “collapsed, puked or were carried out to the car by their loved ones,” Bassett said.
“They’re going to me, ‘Mr. Bassett, this is not what we thought it was. When does the acting start?’ I said, ‘Son, you’re not even close to the acting part yet. You haven’t even gotten through the warm-up. This is what we do to warm up to start to wrestle and you’re puking and passing out, and you’re quitting already? Get back in the ring.'”
Bassett’s tough-guy posturing is no act. A cross between Hulk Hogan and Mr. Miyagi from “The Karate Kid,” he has lived the wrestler’s life of hard knocks for more than 20 years. A Milwaukee native, he started wrestling relatively late in life at 25 and trained under Verne Gagne, a 2006 WWE Hall of Fame inductee who owned the Minneapolis-based American Wrestling Association in the 1960s, ’70s and ’80s.
Training with Gagne was hell. It began at 2 a.m. when Bassett would get a phone call telling him to be in Minneapolis by 8. The calls came three or four times a week, and Bassett had no way of knowing when he might be called.
Once he hustled to the Twin Cities, no small feat in the mid-’80s when the trip consisted mainly of country roads, there was a 2-mile run followed by two to three hours of conditioning and then two to three hours of mat work.
“Then you got in the ring and that’s when all hell broke loose,” Bassett said. “Guys would (urinate) blood.”
You showed up if called or were cut immediately. If you couldn’t walk you were told to crawl. Bassett almost quit three times but his wife, Nancy, refused. You paid $3,000 for this, she reminded him. Bassett ending being one of three guys who survived Gagne’s punishing ordeal; 21 other guys dropped out.
Bassett went on to wrestle in the WWF in the late 1980s and early ’90s, sometimes competing under the name Chris Zarna, a name taken from his grandfather, a former boxer and wrestler. Along the way he faced “Ravishing” Rick Rude, Curt Hennig and King Kong Bundy. He once had his neck broken on ESPN. It was quite a career.
Retired since 2000, the 40something Bassett still is an imposing presence with a barrel-shaped chest and tree trunk arms. He admits he isn’t as tough on his kids as Gagne was on him, but he can still kick their butts up and down the ring. They need to be toughened up, to learn to fight through pain, to be able to fall down light so your back is bruised and not broken when you eat the floor.
“You always get hurt in this business,” Bassett said. “Your training determines how bad you get hurt. If you’ve got good training hopefully you won’t get hurt real bad. If you’ve got (bad) training you get hurt real bad and you’re probably out of the deal in a year or two.”
Bassett had good training, but he’s still pretty messed up. He has ripped his stomach walls, had hernias, suffered permanent whiplash, endured both shoulders being dislocated and has seen his rotator cuffs ripped out, his hips dislocated and his knees blown out. All that and Andre the Giant couldn’t pull him out of the ring.
“It’s a way of life,” Bassett said. “It’s like waking up and going, ‘Geez, I’m not going to train today’ … That doesn’t feel right.”
Nonwrestling fans might be wondering, what’s the point of this? Wrestling on the independent circuit is far from lucrative, typically paying only $50 a night. Some of Bassett’s trainees have wrestled in Japan and even made it to the WWE for tryouts and a few one-off matches. But, by and large, wrestling is something you do for fun, not profit.
Matt Boeing is one of Bassett’s newest recruits. The 21-year-old Appleton man doesn’t look especially huge. In fact, he looks positively average. You want to pull him aside and remind him that he is surrounded by muscle-bound maniacs capable of doing some serious damage. But Boeing won’t be persuaded. He might not have a lot of size, but he makes up for it in determination.
Boeing’s first time out, “he fell down a lot,” Bassett said. “He had a lot of heart, though. He kept getting back up.”
Boeing heard about Bassett from a friend and was immediately intrigued. “I always liked wrestling so I thought, ‘Why not try out?'” he said.
Boeing was back for his second camp on this August day. Bassett guided him through a sweat-inducing workout called the Circle of Woe while PPW’s official security guy, a very large man introduced as Gorilla, looked on. Meanwhile, an elderly man mowed his lawn next door. Apparently this was just an average day in the neighborhood.
Finished for now with Boeing, Bassett challenged Assassin to a match. After several minutes of tussling, Assassin had Bassett on the ground. One! Two! Three! Bassett had only one option: Slam his head into Assassin’s crotch. The move, predictably, sent Assassin reeling.
“Is that legal?” somebody asked.
Probably not. But it sure looked cool.
