Midwest Xtreme Wrestling Alliance: A Pro Wrestling Show with a Spirit All Its Own

Photos by Chris Mortenson

It’s another insanely hot, slow summer night in Iowa City. Some are camping out for RAGBRAI, more are holed up in air-conditioned homes. Figures stand like nails silhouetted against the outside lights of downtown bars smoking cigarettes. But at the Wildwood Saloon in the far Northeast corner of town, dimly lit from the outside and perched the corner of Dolphin Drive SE and Walleye Dr off the Herbert Hoover Highway, The Chief, a monster of a man, tall and thick as a pile of sandbags and emblazoned with a pink Mohawk and rainbow warpaint, is stapling a dollar bill to the head of Nick Wiqied, a thin, shirtless grappler whose hateful scowl gives him the look of a wild convict. Blood runs down his head in thick, jelly-like arcs. His wounds are deep red and shiny. And both men–along with the wrestlers of Midwest Xtreme Wrestling Alliance (MXWA) are hoping to do this more often.

The Chief would go on to win that match after tossing Wiqied into the ropes and, as he ricocheted back, lifting and dropping him with his signature Broken Arrow Slam onto a pile of thumbtacks. This ends the main event, the third “Japanese deathmatch” the Iowa independent wrestling company has put on. For the MXWA faithful, it’s another brutal night of thrills. For the MXWA roster, it’s a little more than that, a kind of old-school caravan performance troupe with a cutting-edge violent twist.

Founded in early 2007 by Mike Pride, one of tonight’s announcers and roster mainstay, Midwest Xtreme Wrestling Alliance began its foray into the strange world of professional wrestling with a unique story.

“We started off as a backyard promotion renting a ring and a building,” says Pride, a skinny young guy eating a basket of ribs a few feet from the ring. A backyard promotion is one based around fans, often very young, emulating the wrestling they see on TV without formal training in how to perform the moves, or even worse, how to bump.

Bumping, industry jargon for having a move done to you and making it look good, can be very dangerous, which has led major wrestling organizations to decry it. Backyard federations usually never make it past the “bunch of naive kids with a dream” phase, when its roster realizes they’re hurting themselves needlessly and without anything in return. But this backyard fed was different.

“[Co-founder The Chief] Rod came in and trained us and started hooking up with local talent.” Pride said. “Rod liked what he saw with us guys and how much passion and heart we had for it, he saw all that and agreed to help me promote it. We agreed to co promote and do shows together. Rod’s been around for a long time and took us under his wing.”

The Chief concurs.“We started in Muscatine,” he said. “They brought in me and a few trained wrestlers. We rented a ring. I started training and bought the ring, got us licensed. We had 265 in Muscatine A few people here in Wildwood a few months ago. We were licensed, bonded, and insured by the Iowa State Athletic Commission.”

With the youthful passion of Pride and his ilk under the steadfast guidance of the veteran Chief, MXWA has begun to travel and expand, bringing their oft-funny, oft-barbaric roadshow to Iowa City and hopefully beyond.

Tonight is the second time MXWA has run at Wildwood. When you’re standing in the entrance, you begin to really wonder just what kind of show you’re in for. Rules about line dancing are posted to the wall just beyond where the makeshift ring sits. The off-white canvas is stained with smudges of dried blood in alternating light and dark browns like wet leaves. The dressing area is the same material as industrial garbage bags, a 10’ x 10’ makeshift dressing room tented off in the corner. Backstage, the wrestlers are clustered together in the small space. There is excitement and energy in the thick barroom air.

“You have to have a passion for this,” Pride says. “It’s hard to explain.”

“It’s different now being a wrestler than in the 80s,” says the Chief, spiking his pink Mohawk. “There were 33 full time territories back then so you could work a lot of places back then in front of much larger crowds. We’d wrestle 5-7 nights a week, now its only on weekends. The only steady money is in WWE (World Wrestling Entertainment). There’s only a few people who get to travel around on the indie scene who get to travel around like me. Most just wrestle in their home area but it’s like a hobby thing. They get paid, but it’s a hobby thing. Yes, it’s a form of art. It’s changed now…I’m very old school, into crowd psychology. Getting the fans on the edges of their seats. Wanting them to really see that heel (bad guy) get his butt kicked.” A plywood board covered in fearsome coils of barbed wire sits ominously propped up next to the ring. “Yep, for the main event Japanese death match,” Chief says. Japanese pro wrestling became infamous in the early 90’s for the use of weapons and aggressive stunts in matches. Chief nods at the board, saying “I’ve been on a lot of them. As I’ve gotten older that’s kind of my forte. I do regular matches too but I get booked in a lot of matches for this kind of stuff.”

It’s just a part of the design of the main event, and while the hardcore violence is one of its signatures, MXWA is filled with wild characters that create an odd balance with the blood and gore; there’s Cousin Larry, a nightmarish clown decked out in a mask that can only be described as the head of a Mexican luchadore monkey trimmed with white fur wildly banging a plunger against a cowbell, an act so rich in abstract symbolism it would burst the heads of the most seasoned class and culture theorists; there’s Tommy Ace, who, at the last show, went to strike The Chief with a sledgehammer before his mother jumped into the ring, informing him his soon to be victim was, in fact, his father, and is now on his way to becoming a top good guy; Eric Lancaster, morbidly obese creep who followed losing a match with a shirtless tantrum in the ring; the dastardly Steven Stonebreaker, an angry heel and stickler for rules (which he doesn’t apply to himself) not afraid to berate the fans. But his most devilish quality? He’s a die-hard Iowa State fan, and he’s happy to let the Hawkeye crowd know it. It’s all very weird, very different, and, most of all, it’s very fun.

Wrestling is changing, and the wild ways of yesterday are giving way a changing business where the backstage secrets and what happens in the ring are blurred together and where WWE eschews the word “wrestling” in favor of “entertainment” and focusing on muscular Adonis “superstars.” Professional wrestling itself, the ubiquitous, stigmatized, and unique show of planned—but painful—holds and throws between larger-than-life characters representing good and evil, has been around in America for nearly 200 years. Combining the popularity of strongman exhibitions and travelling circus acts involving planted “fans” challenging gruff Greco-Roman wrestlers, the planned nature of the matches and enactment of characters—called “kayfabe”—was the business’s long kept secret, guarded to the great extremes. Wrestlers and promoters went to great lengths to convince fans that they were the meanest, gruffest, realest fighters around. But wrestling’s boom of popularity and explosion into the televised public spotlight in the 80’s and late 90’s began to wear away at the secret. Mostly, though, change has come as a result of the internet, which has further stratified a complicated form of entertainment and its fans.

“The internet has changed wrestling, definitely,” Mad Dog Stone, one of tonight’s wrestlers and half of the MXWA tag team champions Celtic Carnage said. “When I started it was still protected, still secretive. If you’re talking about WWE, its more different from what we do here. Their wrestlers look the same and are a cookie-cutter body wise. I miss that from when I started. You could have guys who were different shapes and sizes… when that first core group of guys like (Hulk) Hogan, (Rowdy Roddy) Piper, and (“Mr. Wonderful”Paul) Orndorff retired, there was really nobody to teach these young, new guys the old school way.”

Stone himself is a boulder of a man with a round body and concrete slab shoulders with a jet-black beard affixed to his bald, scarred face. He stands on the balcony, texting on his phone and watching the matches now that his has ended in a loss. What’s more, his own tag team partner turned on him, leaving him lying outside the ring. They’ll be facing each other at the next show.

“I didn’t like my match tonight,” he chuckles. “My partner and I aren’t getting along too good. Plus that new guy…he put a hurtin’ on me.”

Mad Dog Stone and The Chief couldn’t have been nicer guys beyond the ring. Approachable, friendly, and optimistic about the show, only the coldest of heart wouldn’t be pulling for MXWA to expand and succeed, despite the blood-splattered carnage of the main event. These elder statesmen of indie wrestling guide MXWA beyond the glitz and production value of TV promotions in 2011, bridging the gap between the old ways and a new style all their own; it’s a world of barroom brawlers with clear-cut good guys, bad guys, and roster full of men and women who looked like they could have stepped right out of the crowd. And who makes up this crowd, this coalition of nearly 100 booing, cheering, and hollering wrestling aficionados?

“Well, most places we run we have a blue collar clientele. Here (in Iowa City) we run the Marriott a few times a year…then we have a broader crowd, but mostly blue collar, factory workers,” says The Chief.

Tonja, a young woman in a bright pink halter top and jet black hair, explains: “I like the hardcore, the blood…it makes it a lot cooler.” She’s been to every show they’ve had for the last year. “MXWA is one of the top in the whole country for hardcore. MXWA’s hardcore is the best hardcore. Wrestling on TV is over-glamified for me. I don’t have to sit here and watch models and people dressed up talk for an hour and a half. I like to watch actual wrestling and that’s what this is.” As I speak to her, Wiqied gets his leg completely tangled in barbed wire, tearing his pants and opening a fresh gash when he tears it free. “This is crazy-ass shit!” shrieks announcer Axel Greece, bedecked in blinking red sunglasses, a red cap and shirt, and bright blue suspenders like an electric Super Mario come to life.

Just before the end of the show, two girls walked in, clearly unaware that MXWA was running tonight. Upon seeing the ring and the two men trading fists with dollars stapled to their heads, they looked not unlike the protagonists of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre upon stumbling unwittingly into the isolated house of horrors that would become their final resting place. And even though it might not be fore everyone, there’s an aura of importance and success to this show, and that this blend of surreal slapstick comedy and mayhem is very real.

You can see MXWA at their next show is August 19 at the Coralville Marriott. It’s a benefit for the University of Iowa Geriatric Psychiatry program. And it features a tag team match between The Chief and his son Tommy Ace against the treacherous duo Power in Numbers where the winner must slam both opponents through folding tables rigged to explosives.