In the middle of a civic center auditorium is a wrestling ring, and two men are perched atop one of the corner turnbuckles. Tom Anderson is attempting to slam “Barbed Wire” Brad Taylor into the middle of the ring, right into a bed of thumbtacks. Taylor is holding onto the rope for dear life, after a sudden change of heart.
“He goes, ‘No, forget it, I’m not doing it,’” Tom Anderson says. “Right in the middle of it.”
But, Anderson, then known as “Chris Michaels,” is still determined to give the people the show they had paid to see. After trading blows with Taylor, he scoops the man from his post and body slams him into the bed of tacks. Taylor absorbs the brunt of them, but even Michaels stands up with some embedded in his legs, knees and palms.
The crowd goes wild.
Just another night in the life of a hardcore wrestler.
Anderson wrestled in matches like this for some of his 15 years in the business and, as extreme as they sound to the casual observer, he looks back on them fondly. After finally getting a chance to give his wrestling career a proper send-off back in November, with a “street fight” in the Gentleman’s Quest fundraising show, he finally got his closure.
“At the end of the night, the crowd was happy, GQ was happy, and I was happy,” Anderson says. “At the end of the night, when I did that three-count on Chris Nelson, I let out the biggest sigh of relief. It was, like, the closing moment for me. My night was over, my wrestling career was over.”
How he got into the business, though, is another story worth telling.
LIVING THE DREAM
A wrestling fan since his youth, Anderson got the chance to break into the business when he met Al Hardiman in the early 1990s. Hardiman, who ran a promotion and a training center in Winter Haven, offered to train Anderson to be a manager. It still meant that he had to take a beating.
“They told me, ‘Well, you’re kind of small,’” Anderson says. “‘You’d probably be a manager, so you don’t get killed.’ They invited me out to train.”
This meant learning to take falls, bumps and slams, just like the wrestlers. Except, as a manager, most of these things would happen to him outside of the ring.
Outside of the ring, it’s just concrete. Even in his first night of training, Anderson got well-acquainted with the surface.
“They used me as a crash-test dummy,” Anderson says. “I got slammed around, beat on, body slammed, suplexed. I couldn’t move the next day.”
He had planned to debut as “Fast Eddie Silver,” but the ring announcer instead called him “Slick Willy.” By 1991, Anderson had bulked up enough to train as a wrestler and eventually started competing. He won a championship title in his debut match, working as a heel — a bad guy.
“People think wrestling is fake, because some things are planned,” Anderson says. “Don’t think for a minute that those quest aren’t taking a beating every night.”
For some reason, people began to like “Slick Willy.” Once he became a full-on babyface — a good guy— he was repackaged as the “Party Man,” borrowing some traits from the legendary Shawn Michaels. Bouncing from promotion to promotion, Anderson was able to make decent money doing what he loved as a side gig to his full-time job in a body shop.
“I also had the opportunity to work on shows with Greg ‘The Hammer’ Valentine, Brutus ‘The Barber’ Beefcake, Jim ‘The Anvil’ Neidhart,” Anderson says. “In-between contracts, a lot of those guys would work the independent circuit. I’m living my dream, but I’m also in my dream because I’m working with a lot of guys that I grew up watching.”
When he teamed up with “Dirty” Dennis Allen, Anderson was introduced to the hardcore scene and loved it.
TO THE EXTREME
Allen was a product of Larry Sharpe’s Monster Factory, a training ground for wrestlers based in Philadelphia and New Jersey. He was exposed to Extreme Championship Wrestling, a legendary Philadelphia promotion that eventually went mainstream.
When he came to Florida, he got Anderson to try it out.
“Dennis was sadistic,” Anderson says. “He had a mean streak a mile long. He didn’t intentionally go out to hurt people, but he wasn’t about to let someone push him around, either. Dennis brought out a rougher side in me.”
They formed a tag team called “The Thrillseekers” and developed their own signature match: the “Thrillsville Street Fight.” The first one was a steel-cage match with weapons. The second was even crazier.
“My second hardcore match, my partner actually got us into that situation,” Anderson says. “The guys we were wrestling, the month before, they said, ‘We want you in a Russian Chain match.’ We said, ‘Russian Chain Match … We want you in a ‘Thrillsville Street Fight!’ Dennis looks out to the crowd and says, ‘You come out next month. You bring it, we’ll use it!’”
“I got in the back and I said, ‘Well, what’s that mean?’ He says, ‘I don’t know. But, we’ll see how sick these people are.’”
How sick were they? They showed up in droves, with tire irons, trash cans, car fenders and the tailgate of someone’s Ford Bronco, just to name a few things. The match, which has been uploaded to YouTube, ended in a victory for The Thrillseekers.
Matches like these took a toll on Anderson, who did this all over Florida while working his other job.
“Get off work, go home, shower, get your gear and head to the show, then get in around 1 or 2 o’clock the next morning,” he says. “Then, get up early to go to work again. We’d run on four or five hours of sleep, and we’d do two or three shows a week.”
When he became a hardcore champion, he would bring his own weapons to matches. Finding the right stuff meant going to yard sales and picking up whatever he could find on the cheap, and he’d try to re-use as many items as he could. Weapons were as common as folding chairs, and sometimes as uncommon as vacuum cleaners. No matter what the weapon, guys had to take their shots straight-up.
“The guy that trained me, he was trained by the ‘Great Malenko,’” Anderson says. “That was old-school. If you can’t take a forearm, a chop, a hit to the head, don’t get in the ring. We were not allowed to put our hands up if someone swung a chair. If you put your hands up, you didn’t work the next show.”
CALLING IT A CAREER
Anderson wrestled the Florida independent circuit until 2006, when his work schedule finally caught up with his wrestling travels. As an electrician, he worked so many hours that he would sometimes have no choice but to cancel appearances.
“That’s really what helped me phase out of wrestling,” he says. “We were working so many hours, and I’d have to cancel shows, and it got to where I just said, ‘I can’t do this anymore.’”
The one thing that Anderson misses about competing is working the audience.
“I miss the crowds,” Anderson says. “Going out there with a vision of what you want to happen, out there in the match, hoping to get a reaction out of the crowd that you want — and then you go out there and do it. That’s cool.”
Contact Justin Kline at jkline@plantcityobserver.com.