Photos: Amateur wrestling in Brooklyn, before craft cocktails
The humble rumbles of outer-borough ring kings
Anyone who grew up watching WWF and professional wrestling in the 1980s can relate to wanting to be part of the action. The distinctly American genre of campy play-fighting was chock full of great characters, great narrative and stupid stunts. What’s not to like?
That the late 90s and early aughts saw a surge in the phenomenon of backyard wrestling is no coincidence. The rise and availability of portable video cameras had a big influence on all kinds of urban action sports at the time, from skateboarding to BMX to hardcore inline skating. Suddenly, the power to record, edit, and share narrative versions of these ostensibly underground activities gave new creative license to their approach. Kids weren’t just performing stunts for their peers but for a potential audience via VHS, cable access and, eventually, the internet. YouTube wouldn’t be around until 2005, but there was a sense that home video would continue to have an outsize influence on visual and consumer culture.
Press record.
In 2003 photographer Bryan Denton started shadowing a league of amateur wrestlers in and around New York City. What he saw was much more than your average backyard setup: proper rings plus uniformed refs and throngs of eager fans.
His pictures, made at matches in Brooklyn and New Jersey, and practice gyms in the Bronx, show a contemporary pastime for working class young men looking to escape the pressures of adulthood. Their tight-knit scene offered camaraderie and entertainment in a New York City still reeling from the 9/11 terror attacks, and the characters they embodied—heroes and villains with names like “Darksyde,” “Yams,” “Sheikh,” and “Vinny”—were self determined.
Despite meager facilities in a Williamsburg rec center or a repurposed limousine garage in the Bronx, these kings of the ring commanded respect while building community, and image, one body slam at a time.
Photographs courtesy Bryan Denton (2003–2004).
