It’s not quite Madison Square Garden, but on a Friday evening last June, there were plenty of pile drivers and sleeper holds to go around in the basement of the Most Precious Blood Church in Brooklyn.
That is where fans gathered to watch a card of aspiring and amateur wrestlers, some paid as little as $20 for the night, take each other on for fourth anniversary of Five Borough Wrestling, a local promotion company that is part of an underground wrestling scene in New York.
Unlike World Wrestling Entertainment, these wrestlers have to set up the ring themselves minutes before the doors open. One of those performers goes by Jake Gomez at his day job as a special education teacher and as Logan Black, King of Chaos when he’s in the ring.
“Mr. Gomez is part of New York’s underground wrestling scene, a D.I.Y. community of performers, referees, managers and fans who embrace the violent pageantry of a sport usually seen on pay-per-view or in arenas,” writes The New York Times’s Ben Detrick.
“For a few hours a week, they congregate in gyms, nightclubs and social clubs to perform under the guises of brutish and flamboyant personae, before returning to their otherwise routine lives.”
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