“This ain’t some ballet, come on, finish him!”
Those were the words that escaped the mouth of 10 year-old Virgil Clark as he was watching the working man “HTK” (initials never explained) and a wiry villain named Calix Fuse go head to head in a wrestling ring in Alpine, Texas.
Out of the entire crowd of people gathered at the Granada Theater for Texas Headline Wrestling, Virgil was easily the loudest and most creative audience member, his gleeful voice rising out of the crowd to shout such things as: “He’s skin and bones, you can take him!” and “Kick him in the fuse this time!”
These were welcome cheers. Texas Headline Wrestling is a local professional wrestling outfit that pulls together performers from around the region for a traveling show of sorts, assembling rings in venues across West Texas and taking each other down. Audience participation is more than encouraged – the performers feed off of it, and it’s essential to a good show.
I asked Virgil where he learned to heckle so well.
“I don’t know!” he said, beaming, his eyes alight. The spirit of the spectacle had clearly overtaken him. This was his first live match, but his mom, Christa, a pro wrestling enthusiast, had shown him some videos that morning in preparation, specifically the 2007 Royal Rumble, which I was assured was “iconic.”
“There were 10 guys in the ring!” said Virgil, with an air of true disbelief.
10 guys is a lot of guys … I think. Apart from my devotion to the amazing and tragically cancelled TV show “GLOW,” I don’t know much about pro wrestling. I do know it's a performance of a fight rather than an actual one, a delicate choreographed dance of moves that make it appear as though people are getting hurt, when in reality, they are making contact after quietly communicating the safest way to do so.
The moves in pro wrestling are acrobatic. The performers fling each other all over the ring, jumping high into the air, twisting, spinning, and slamming onto the plywood floor, which makes a terrifying, rumbling smack. The matches were varied in pace and complexity. Some matches were kinetic and speedy, while others resembled a kind of halting dance (Virgil’s comment about ballet was apt), as if the wrestlers were lunging at each other through jello. I feared, at times, for their physical safety, as stomachs were stomped on, and spines slammed to the ground.
Pro wrestling has a strong legacy in Texas. The phenomenon has its roots in carnival culture, where bulky strongmen would challenge audience members to impromptu duels. After 1933, when the Texas Legislature made wrestling matches legal, Western States Sports was formed, which promoted pro wrestling events across West Texas through the 1970s.
The state has spawned many pro wrestling legends, including Eddie Guerrero from El Paso, “Stone Cold” Steve Austin from, well, Austin, and the Von Erich family from Lake Dallas (the family was the subject of the 2023 film “The Iron Claw”). Texas is also the birthplace of the Texas Death Match, a showdown in which a performer wins by knocking out their opponent for a whopping 10 seconds, weapons are allowed, and fighting can extend outside the ring— a highly deregulated form of pro wrestling, as its namesake would suggest. Suffice it to say, Texas and pro wrestling are deeply intertwined.
“What’s my name?” shouted HTK, standing steady on the second rope of the ring, facing the crowd. A dizzy Calix Fuse crawled on the floor.
“HTK! HTK! HTK!” the crowd chanted, stomping their feet. HTK jumped from the ropes and dealt his final blow to Fuse, who crumbled beneath him.
“And the winner is Jaxon “HTK” Burritt!!!!!!” shouted the announcer.
Brooks and Dunne’s “Hardworking Man” began to play, and HTK strutted his stuff around the ring, showing off his custom blue jeans emblazoned with pink appliques spelling out his name in a font and color that would make Paris Hilton proud.
“Personally handmade,” he told me after exiting the ring. HTK, whose real name is Rylin Burritt, runs the Texas Headline Wrestling show. Burritt grew up in Odessa, and credits his love of pro wrestling to his dad. “When I was little, my dad used to wake me up to watch the Undertaker and Shawn Michaels, so I grew up with it.” When he got out of school, he was looking for something to do in his free time, and stumbled into pro wrestling. “I got the ring, got everything set up, got the training, and I’ve just been running it from there,” he said.
Burritt told me the character of HTK is based in his own upbringing. “My dad worked in the oil field for a lot of years, I think from the time he was 18 to the time he was 60… just a hardworking man,” he said. “Up before 7:00 in the morning and back home at 7:00 at night.”
Part of the experience as an audience member is sussing out who is on which side – there’s always a hero and a villain. My seating companion, Xanti Galindo, age 7, adorably clad in a shiny blue luchador mask and cape, put it simply between jeers and shouts: “If he talks trash, he’s bad. That’s how you know.”
The whole thing was a kind of throwback – not necessarily to the 1980s or 90s, the Hulk Hogan heyday of wrestling, but rather to the middle of the second Bush era – there was a sort of early aughts mall aesthetic going on. The markers of goodness and evil were clear in a made-for-TV-movie way: the villains scowled, walked out to metal music, and wore outfits that looked like they went wild in a Hot Topic. The heroes smiled, appeared good natured, and wore more approachable fare.
“Some matches get out of hand,” said wrestler Lance Dean. “We wanna entertain you guys, but at the same time, we wanna go home to our families at the end of the night. Sometimes it's a trip to the ER first. It can be that way.”
Dean has a sort of bubbly showman air. He calls himself “The Rockabilly Rebel” – he wore American flag spandex shorts and slung a leather jacket over his shoulders when he won his match, his pompadour hairstyle barely disturbed after his turn in the ring. During his match, he had the crowd chanting “USA!”
“I'm kind of an old school guy, with traditional values,” said Dean. “They call me the American Classic. I'm just kinda representing our country and the diversity that we have out here, and to appreciate everybody for who they are and basically love everybody for who they are.”
I nodded at the sheer ease of it. There’s something soothing about pro wrestling. It is, after all, billed as “family friendly,” and harbors the same kind of rationale and narrative as a PG movie. The famed Texas artist Terry Allen may have put it best when he wrote, “… wrestling is the last great public theater. It’s pure theater; nobody bets on a wrestling match. It has the classic good guy/bad guy tension.”
Wrestling feels vintage less for its aesthetic and more for its easy morals: in the midst of what can feel like a chaotic and morally blurry world, the simple archetypes of villain and hero feel easy to digest. This for me, was encapsulated during the second match of the night. There was a moment in which the bad guy, Devin Scott, his spandex leggings sitting in a precariously low position on his torso, slammed the heroic challenger, Oxman, down onto the ground. The crowd booed. Charged by the powers of the boo, Oxman got up, slammed Scott down to the ground, and the crowd cheered. This went back and forth for some time, a seesaw of good and evil, the crowd part of the same push and pull happening in the ring. The seesawing stopped for a moment, and Oxman raised his hand up, beckoning us to yell louder. We did.
All photos by Zoe Kurland.
