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posted September 6, 2006
ONE-TIME-ONLY WRESTLING SHOW
At the end of August there was a real pro-wrestling show in the park, on the rink pad. When the organizer first approached park staff with his dog-shelter-fundraising proposal three weeks earlier, the staff asked around among park users and found surprising enthusiasm for the idea. The park skateboarders were particularly excited, since they like a challenging spectacle.
Opening the park to many different people’s events is one of the ways the park has become so lively. And not everyone likes theatre and dance. So the park staff agreed to make this a jointly-run event (the lead time would have been too short for a City permit). They made conditions – no tickets, only pay-what-you-can donations, family orientation, event over by 11 p.m., no loud amplified music. All was agreed to.
On the day of the wrestling, this arrangement fell apart a little. Park staff Eroca Nicols had to stand beside the money person all evening to make sure that payment was voluntary. Negotiations about the amplified music settled on only amplified announcements, no music – but those announcements could be heard inside every house in the neighborhood. The show started an hour late.
Still, there were lots of neighborhood people who came, and lots of new people too, who don’t usually use the park. The rink house changeroom, so often full of dancers or parade marshals or theatre people outside of rink season, was full of wrestlers waiting for their slot. There were moments of good fun.
At the end it wasn’t so good. The last fight involved throwing chairs and smashing fluorescent glass tubes over wrestlers’ heads. One of the two final wrestlers, not a young man, had been seen drinking earlier. At the end of the match, he was lying on the floor of the ring, knocked out, and the blood was more than ketchup. When it was over, the spectators left, the rink lights went off, the ring was disassembled and trucked away. The “loser” refused to go to the hospital, after he came back into consciousness, but hobbled to a truck, groaning, leaning on his escort. The “winner” of the final match, who was also the organizer of the whole show, had to clean up almost solo. At the end he was bundling the sound system into his rented van in the dark, groaning from where the flying chairs had hit him, while the park staff swept up the broken bits of fluorescent tubes. Show business sure looked unappealing that night! And now we really know that pro-wrestling doesn’t fit into the park.