FLEX FEATURE

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BY ALLAN DONNELLYSenior eDiTor

phoTographY BY tErrY gOODLAD

hip tosses and bent-over rows, just part of a Day in The Life with WWe hopeful Blair Mone

DAY IN THE LIFEBLAIR MONE

ever wanted to know what goes into becoming a professional wrestler? Join us for a trip into the life of a former bodybuilder trying to make his way up the ladder into the WWe.

Part II

(left) meeting with former teacher and fellow wrestler Tank Toland

Mone meeting up with owner greg Colombo in the waiting room of Colombo Chiropractic; laughing with Jenny Lynn; and getting one of his weekly adjustments from Colombo

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“Wrestling has a lot to do with being in the right place at the right time,” Tank Toland says, “sometimes it comes down to what they’re looking for. But he’s got the potential.”

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MonDaY, oCToBer 8NOON We meet up with Blair Mone and then-girlfriend Jenny Lynn at a strip mall where Colombo Chiro-practic and the Louisville Athletic Club, Mone’s two destinations for the afternoon, are located. This morning, Mone trained three clients at their homes. Now it’s his turn. On average, Mone trains six days a week, hitting one bodypart a day. “I go by how I feel,” Mone says. “I have five different workouts. But some days, I look at Jen after practice or after a match and I’m like, ‘Not today.’”

Mone’s first stop is to see chiro-practor Greg Colombo, whom he visits once or twice a week. “It only took him a week,” Lynn says, “before he started hurting really bad. Then he was like, ‘Who do I see?’”12:30 PM Mone’s at the gym, about to train, but first he stops at the smooth-ie bar to talk to a fellow wrestler working behind the counter. “Blair is the chattiest man I know,” Lynn says.

I ask Lynn if she and Mone usu-ally train at the same time. She says yes, “but not today.” Lynn still isn’t feeling well, so she won’t be training. Regardless, she deserves the break.

When she’s not at the gym, Lynn is at home, training clients online and organizing her 12-week transforma-tion contest that 73 women entered last year. “Right now, I have 25 cli-ents around the world,” she says, “and three people that I’m training in person. It’s great — I can sit in my pajamas and work from home.” 1 PM Mone is doing cable rows when we are introduced to Tank Toland, a fellow wrestler — and Mone’s instructor when he first came to Kentucky — who spent six months

on WWE SmackDown!, at the same time as WWE superstars Bobby Lashley and Randy Orton, before coming back to Kentucky and OVW. The message is clear — even when you’re up, there’s no guarantee you’re going to stay there.

“Tank is really, really good,” Mone says, “except he’s not 6’5”.”

Toland laughs. “Yeah,” he says, “Vince [McMahon] likes his mon-sters. But that’s all right. I got a lot farther than people said I would.”

I ask Toland how tall he is. “I’m

5’6” or 5’7”,” he says. “It depends on how high the lifts in my boots are. Of course, they listed me at 5’9”. On TV, no one can tell.”

Despite his size, Toland was called up to the WWE after only three months at OVW. I ask him how long, on average, it takes someone to get that call. “It depends. Wrestling has a lot to do with being in the right place at the right time — sometimes it comes down to what they’re look-

ing for,” he says, looking over at Mone. “But he’s got the look, and, as you know, that’s what they’re looking for — aesthetic potential. He’s got the potential.”1:15 PM Mone is done training, and now it’s time for sushi. We head over to Shogun, a Japanese restaurant Mone and Lynn visit at least twice a week. At lunch, we find out that Mone went to Springfield College at the same time as current WWE Champi-

Earning a spot on the roster of a professional sports franchise is unques-tionably one of the hardest things an athlete can do. The competition is, to say the least, fierce. Last year, there were 1,696 players listed on the active rosters of 32 teams in the National Football League; approx-

imately 1,350 for the 30 Major League Baseball franchises; and, for the 30 National Basketball Association franchises, about 500.

In comparison, the number of wrestlers currently employed by World Wrestling Entertainment holds steady at around 180, making the WWE — strictly in terms of numbers — the most difficult to break into. But every day, hopefuls try.

On October 7, 2007, FLEX sent a team — photographer Terry Goodlad and writer Allan Donnelly — to Louisville, Kentucky, to spend two days with one of those hopefuls as he attempts to make his way in the world of professional wres-tling and earn a developmental contract with the WWE. (Read the June issue of FLEX for Donnelly’s account of day one; day two begins here.)

put your back into it - close-grip cable rows and wide-grip pulldowns as part of Mone’s back routine; Leaving the gym with Lynn and writer allan Donnelly and feeding the machine with a healthy plate of sushi

The scene from above at DCW practice

Mone practices headlocks ...

... and transitions into finger locks ...

...all under the watchful eye of rip rogers.

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on John Cena, and knew Cena while the two were there.

“No kidding,” I say. “You still talk to him?”

Mone shakes his head. “No,” he says. “Plus, I don’t really like to talk about it — you know, like ‘Oh yeah, I know the champ.’ So I don’t really bring it up.”5:30 PM Back at DCW headquarters, we talk to RipRogers. Once again, he tells me about his abstinence from solid food. I ask him if he remembers

the exact date he last ate something he had to chew. He thinks about it for a second. “June 17,” he says, noticing my smirk. “I ain’t all there.”

With that, he’s on a roll, bouncing from the time he went 531⁄2 hours with-out sleep (“I should have been dead”), to his first match with the then-WWF 31 years ago, to the two times he’s been stabbed after matches (once in Austria, once in Puerto Rico), to the mother-daughter team he became intimate with on the same night in a random European city, and then back to the time he was run over by a car and left for dead five years ago.

“I’m permanently partially dis-abled,” Rogers says with a smile and a nod. “I look a whole lot better than I am.”6:15 PM We’re in the video room, watching a tape of 1985’s WrestleMa-nia, and, more specifically, Big John Studd. Wrestler Ali Akbar opens his bag and pulls out a product made by Mone’s sponsor, a container of Mus-cleTech’s naNO Vapor. “I love this stuff,” he says. “I felt it on the first set of declines.”

“Declines?” Mone asks. “Why are you doing declines?”

“For the lower pecs,” Akbar says.Mone shakes his head. “Weighted

dips are better for developing your lower pecs,” he says. “When I was training with Charles Glass . . . ”

“The trainer of champions,” Akbar interrupts.

Mone dishes out some punishment; the action in the ring during DCWpractice is fast and furious, even for the spectators

Kicking, punching, biting, screaming and laughing - or just another night for the hopefuls at Derby City Wrestling School practice

Mone on the receiving end for a change.

There’s always time for a laugh with rogers.

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Mone nods and continues. “The trainer of champions. He always had me do weighted dips.”

On the screen now, there’s a match between The Junkyard Dog and Greg “The Hammer” Valentine. The two intertwine their hands in a game of mercy — a test of strength similar to what Akbar and Mone did in their match last night — which The Hammer wins by dropping his shoul-der into The Junkyard Dog’s chest.

“See, he was nice — he didn’t hit the guy in the throat after the test of strength,” Mone says, referencing Akbar’s underhanded tactics in their match.

Akbar looks over. “Yeah,” he says, “but that’s because he didn’t outweigh him by 100 pounds.”6:58 PM As the DCW wrestlers put mats on the floor around the ring, Rogers blows a whistle. Time to start practice. “Eight in the ring,” he says. “Don’t play f—ing games with it, now.”

Tonight, there are 36 wrestlers — including four women — in the group. “Sometimes I have over 50,” Rogers says. “They’ll get more wrestling in here than they will in seven matches. Everything is fundamental.”

They start by pairing up, inside and outside the ring, with Rogers blowing the whistle and calling out different instructions every few min-utes. Periodically, Rogers leans over to me and points something out,

ranging from the good (“That one was the best of ’em all, there.”) to the bad (“He don’t have an athletic mol-ecule in his body.”) to the hilarious (“He’s getting winded. What’s plural for winded?”).

After about half an hour of chang-ing partners and running through different drills, and another half-hour of takedown practice — where one person stands in the ring and the other wrestlers run at him, one by

one — the wrestlers line up around the ring. Rogers calls out two peo-ple, and has them get between the ropes to run through various moves — chest slaps, punches, takedowns, pins — all the while keeping a run-ning commentary on what they’re doing right and what they’re doing wrong. For the climax, the wrestlers sit in the stands while Rogers calls out names two at a time, until even-tually, they are all in the ring at the same time — a DCW Battle Royal.

“Everybody starts out rotten,” Rogers says to me during the melee. “Some of ’em come in and think they’re good, and they find out

they’re rotten. But if they’re not here because they love it, we’ll weed them out fast.”10:17 PM They’re done for the night, finally, after each wrestler practices in-the-ring promos in front of the group, a way of finding and bringing out their characters. For Mone, Anthony Bravado is still a work in progress. There is much he still has to learn, but then, that’s always the case. Hopefully, he is in the right place at the right time.

Still, making it in the WWE is a long shot, and for every John Cena, there are likely thousands of Tank Tolands. And for every Tank Toland, there are thousands who never even get to sniff the big time. Still, they will try.

“Everybody shakes their heads when you walk away from a six-fig-ure job to beat yourself up for nothing — I mean, I’m paying to be here,” Akbar says as we get ready to walk out the door. “But I can’t put into words the passion some of these guys and I have for this business. If I don’t make it, I’ll be as good as I can be here.”

NOTE: Since our visit, Blair Mone and Jenny Lynn have parted ways. Lynn was preparing to go after her third Figure Olympia title. Mone was still wrestling with DCW in the hopes of earning a developmental contract with the WWE. FLEX