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Article about Johnny Rodz.
http://deadspin.com/the-profane-tea...ource=deadspin_facebook&utm_medium=socialflow
http://deadspin.com/the-profane-tea...ource=deadspin_facebook&utm_medium=socialflow
I’m standing in Gleason’s Gym in Brooklyn, New York, a place Ali and Jake LaMotta trained in decades ago, and Johnny Rodz is giving me shit because I told him I like The Wrestler.
“Is that what you really think wrestling is?” I’m repeatedly asked in a condescending tone.
I tell him I like the work of the film’s director, Darren Aronofsky, and that it seemed, at least to an outsider like me, to be a fairly accurate depiction of what life as a pro wrestler is really like. Its scenes certainly felt more authentic than anything I’d seen in Hoosiers or Any Given Sunday. Rodz agrees with these points, but he didn’t like the scene in which Mickey Rourke’s character, Randy the Ram, is shown taking steroids. “I don’t give a fuck about Aronofsky,” is how he concludes a 40-minute conversation about the movie.
If there’s anyone who should know what wrestling is really like, it’s Johnny Rodz. He’s a WWE Hall of Famer who has been in the ring with the likes of Andre the Giant and Roddy Piper, and was, to hear him tell it, instrumental in their rise to superstardom. Since retiring from the sport, he’s become a well-respected trainer whose past students include S.D. Jones, Taz, Tommy Dreamer, Matt Striker, and the Dudley Boyz.
That’s why I’m at Gleason’s, the place where Rodz runs his wrestling school. I want to learn what a wannabe WWE star has to go through before he can even think about oiling up and strutting into the ring in front of thousands rabid fans. I want to know where wrestlers come from, and I want to know who fine-tunes their skills. Other sports have AAU teams, high school powerhouses, and big-time college programs acting as a pipeline, but wrestling has people like Johnny Rodz, a 74-year-old man running a wrestling school out of a tiny office in a dingy gym.