Get in the ring: Indie-circuit wrestlers find satisfaction playing heroes, villains

The tallest man milling about the Osage Centre 20 minutes before Cape Championship Wrestling’s first standalone event Saturday night is Brad Fox.

He’s well north of 6 feet tall — 6 feet, 6 inches by his own admission and 6-foot-8 according to an online promo — with a fearsome shock of dark beard.

Even with his long hair pulled back, Fox, 33, looks like a castaway or a Visigoth.

His handshake is surprisingly gentle.

Five or six years ago, the Blackwater, Missouri, native still would have stood out in a crowd, but only for his height.

Brandon Barbwire enters the arena Saturday for a Cape Championship Wrestling match against Sexy Sarge O'Riley at the Osage Centre.Fred Lynch

“I had a job in finance,” he said. “Clean and shaven, suit and tie. Sitting in a cubicle for hours every day.”

It was a good job, but it meant succumbing to the litany of necessary pretenses that often come with good jobs.

“I realized I’d rather get kicked and punched in the face for a living instead,” he said.

He’s been wrestling as “DirdEy” Jake Dirden ever since.

Brandon “Barbwire” Anderson, 29, of Kelso, Missouri, has been wrestling for 12 years.

Farmer Billy Hills has the upper hand on Jason Vaughn in a Cape Championship Wrestling match Saturday at the Osage Centre.Fred Lynch

Like most — if not all — the other wrestlers, he started young.

“Wrestling has been my obsession since I was 3,” he said. “Being a professional wrestler is all I’ve ever wanted to be.”

Not because he has the soul of a skull-cracking strongman, but because he’s a natural performer.

“I want to tell the best story that I can,” he said. “I want people to invest in what’s happening.”

Sometimes “Barbwire” plays the villain. Sometimes he plays the hero.

Regardless, Anderson said, he’s trying to have a positive effect on the fans.

“When you’re watching what’s going on, they’re not worried about their bills. They’re not worried about rent,” he said. “For the little bit that they’re here, they get to have a good time, and that’s a big deal for me, that I get to be a part of that.”

While Fox and Anderson have ring personas that are larger-than-life, they talk about characterization in similar ways.

“It’s just a ... more of me. Letting myself become more free,” Fox explained. His fingers disappeared in a thicket of beard as he scratched his chin.

“There’s a lot of things society tells you you’re not supposed to do,” he said. “But in [the ring], none of that really applies. It’s all your inhibitions stripped away.”

He said the good wrestlers are the ones that take away the contrivances in their personalities, not the ones who add them.

Anderson said commitment is more important than flash.

“Everything centers around what you do in [the ring],” he says.

And that means cardio workouts, in-the-ring technique, strength training. Even film study.

The people who crow about how wrestling, even with a day job, isn’t a lucrative endeavor are basically right. Fox concedes that.

But that line of thinking, he said, misses the point entirely.

He recalled conversations with fellow wrestlers about why they do what they do, and plumbing those depths doesn’t help come up with an answer.

“I don’t know why we love it so much,” he said. “Almost more than we should.”

An indie-circuit wrestler is, in a way, like a journeyman stand-up comic or an aspiring Olympic trampolinist. Some passions just don’t chart onto conventional career trajectory.

When it comes to wrestling, you either get it, or you don’t.

And when the show starts, Anderson’s crowd-mentality insight proves correct.

An 8-year-old’s shrieks turn to wails, appalled as the bad guy climbs the rope to body-slam the dazed hero. A trim, white-haired man in a tucked-in golf polo blows raspberries at the villain. The crowd cheers when the hero recovers to take the match.

People get it.

“It doesn’t promote longevity by any means,” Anderson said. “But I can’t not do it.”

tgraef@semissourian.com

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