Another day in paradise: Living the dream with Tommy Snow on the indie wrestling circuit
TOPEKA, Kan. -- In another space, on other day, in what feels like another lifetime altogether, Tom Randles is “Tommy Snow,” a “mentally challenged” professional wrestler with sheets of long, wet hair and a severed mannequin head named “Nugget” for a manager.
“The fans love him,” says a man named Dan Adams, who wrestles as “The Danimal.”
But that is on weekends.
On weekdays at the Shawnee County Courthouse, Randles is the maintenance man, a pair of jeans in a building full of pinstripes. You see Tommy coming and you say, “Another day in paradise?” And he’ll shoot it right back: “Another day in paradise.”
Everybody seems to know Tommy by this phrase, which is tattooed on his arm. He pulls the hair back into a ponytail on weekdays, and he knows every corner of every floor of the building. If you need a cubicle assembled or a new bulb in your lamp or if the air conditioning is out, you call down to Tommy’s office, where a sign on the door warns you are “entering the Twilight Zone.”
Tom Randles at his day job.
“It’s true,” he says.
People there know about Tommy’s wrestling, because how could you not, but they keep a safe distance from it. There is one lawyer in the building who connected with Tommy on pro wrestling and heavy metal, but otherwise nobody asks about it. Tommy’s weekend hangouts are not pinstripe spots. He wrestles in front of small crowds in places like Larned and Amarillo. It’s low-culture, wrong-side-of-the-tracks stuff.
“Rush hour at Wal-Mart,” Tommy says. “That’s the crowd.”
One story that floats around is how that one lawyer, Jason Geier, brought some guys from the District Attorney’s office to one of Tommy’s shows in a neighboring county. When the wrestlers found out, some were afraid to take the ring.
“They had warrants,” Tommy explained.
It wasn’t until they all got reassurances the lawmen were out of their jurisdiction that the show could go on.
Pro wrestlers, Tommy says, tend to be born outsiders who have spent their lives learning how to disarm people with friendliness.
So on weekdays, with the hair pulled back, Tommy pizzleranges around in the courthouse with near total autonomy, blowing past secretaries and busting in on various legal personalities.
On the Friday I visited, Tommy pushed open the door on the office of judge Steven R. Ebberts, finding him in there doing whatever it is judges do on Friday afternoons (he did not appear overwhelmed). I would later learn Ebberts thought he might be getting pranked by somebody in the District Attorney’s office. You can imagine why: FOXSports.com sent a reporter to Topeka to do a story on the maintenance man? My own long hair and Black Sabbath t-shirt must have amplified his suspicion, but he played it cool. Tossed one right down the middle.
“Tommy does a great job,” he said. “You’d never know he has MS.”
*****
And so, yes, Tommy has Multiple Sclerosis. The clinical definition of the disesase concerns damage to nerve cells in the brain and spinal cord. In practical application, it affects motor function and speech. There is no cure, and life expectancy for its sufferers is a few years shorter than for those without it. But – stab yourself with enough needles and you can live close to a normal life.
MS hits you in flare-ups. In Tommy’s case, he’ll drag a leg around or lose sensation in his extremities. He’s made a party trick out of that. Tommy can touch hot things without feeling pain, so what he’ll do is grab a hot thing and hand it to someone else and they will, in sequential order, (1) feel pain, (2) drop it, and (3) ask him what the hell.
And it is that sort of lemonade-making that produced Tommy Snow, the wrestler “just off the short bus.” Tommy’s MS will cause him to slur his speech, which can read as a mental challenge or drunkenness. Maybe this doesn’t seem like that big of a deal, and in fact the wrestler Tommy would face in the ring the next day entered the gym drinking vodka out of a cranberry juice bottle and left the ring an object of internal controversy, having broken character to accost a fan.
But to Tommy, the character is everything.
“It took the crowd right out of it,” Tommy said.
As a wrestler, Tommy considers himself a storyteller first, performer second, athlete third. His approach is more artistic than athletic. To him, the fourth wall is sacred. So, knowing he could not trust his own nervous system, Tommy built the speech impediment into his character, Tommy Snow.
This has still been problematic, though, because the Tommy Snow gimmick closely resembles that of Al Snow, who wrestled in the WWF in the mid-90s as a schizophrenic who talked to a mannequin head. It also happens to be that Randles looks exactly like Al Snow. For this reason, Tommy Snow has a lot of haters in online forums that discuss the independent professional wrestling scene.
“Some people really hate me for using the Snow name,” he says. “I’m a rip-off, I’m a doppleganger, wannabe, I can’t work. Al knows about this. It’s not like Tommy Snow is getting rich.”
Tommy tells me about this during a 3.5-hour car ride from his home in Topeka to the show in Larned. I can tell this bothers him, but this is a man accustomed to doing without when it comes to outside support.
He describes his brothers as these All-American Boy types. Football captains and honor-roll students. You picture nice haircuts and Disney teeth and getting invited to lots of girls’ houses for dinner and golly Mrs. Cleaver the pot roast sure is good. Tommy tried to be that way.
Tom Randles is ready for his prom.
“I played football because I thought I was supposed to,” he said.
But he only started one game. He also joined the wrestling team, but that turned out to be just one more thing that got used against him. He was heavy as a high schooler, and he says his mom thought it was funny to tell him to “put his weight into it.” She came to see him wrestle three times, he says, and he lost every one.
“I was always the butt of everybody’s joke,” he says. “I was the black sheep.”
Tommy spent his high school days smoking pot, playing hooky and listening to metal. It took him five years to finish. When he finally finished, he signed up for the Marines because he figured that was the All-American Boy thing to do, but he was out before the end of boot camp. A couple years later he caught on with the maintenance department, and that was going to be his life.
Then one day he felt the weirdest sensation in one of his legs. When the doctor came back with the diagnosis, Tommy remembers his mom’s reaction.
“You sure know how to keep my life interesting,” she said.
Well, to hell with it then. Something swelled inside him. An ambition, call it. If he was going to spend his life trying to become something, at least he was going to be the one deciding what. You only get one life, and at some point you face the question of whether you’ve got the courage to make it the life you’ve dreamed of, to give it your best shot and know, when it’s all over, that you didn’t let down the child you once were.
So Tommy found a place to train, and he got started.
Nobody thought this was a good idea. Literally not one single person in Tommy’s life encouraged him to follow this dream. It seemed childish and impractical. You know you’ll never make it to the WWE, they said.
But that wasn’t the point.
“It’s not my goal to make it to the WWE,” Tommy says. “I don’t need Vince McMahon to tell me I accomplished my dream of being a professional wrestler.”
Tommy Snow in battle with Killer Carl.
The dream comes at a cost. A non-exhaustive list of his wrestling injuries:
· Broken noses (5)
· Broken ribs (2)
· Knee injuries (various)
· Broken fingers (numerous)
· Fractured sternum
· Torn rotator cuff
· “Popped my jaw pretty bad”
· “Jarred my neck”
· “Wasn’t knocked out cold but I was knocked pretty loopy”
· Popped hips out of socket
· Once got the edge of a cookie sheet stuck in his thigh
He has learned how to avoid hospital visits. For example: “If you Super Glue yourself, you gotta leave a corner for (pus) to leak out, or you can get some infections going on.”
Some of these injuries come from hardcore matches, the kind where bleeding all over the place is sort of the point; landing on thumbtacks and such. When I asked if the show in Larned was going to be a hardcore show, he said that wasn’t the plan but that he was willing to make it that way if that’s what I wanted to see. I knew he was serious because he had a barbed-wire-wrapped baseball bat in his trunk.
“In my situation,” he said, “all the pain makes me feel alive. It means God blessed me with another day.”
*****
Tommy is estranged from his family. His folks are against divorce on principle, and when his marriage fell apart, the family blamed him. That was three-and-a-half years ago. They haven’t spoken since.
The 20-some odd wrestlers Tommy knows from the indy circuit are what he calls family now.
“My wrestling family came through for me when I was getting divorced,” he said.
Wrestling has been that way for Tommy since he discovered it as a little boy. He would skip Saturday morning cartoons if wrestling was on, but nobody else in his family seemed to get it. He liked that.
“Wrestling was the one thing nobody else watched,” he said. “It was mine.”
Like a lot of kids do, he began collecting WWF(E) action figures and posters and such. Except Tommy never stopped. He now likes to invite people over to The Museum, which is what he calls his basement. Security at The Museum is handled by four dogs, one of which is a bulldog named Odin who Tommy rescued from a puppy mill.
“I had to teach him how to be a dog,” Tommy said. “He spent the first two years of his life in a box.”
Tommy’s home, which he shares with his girlfriend, Renae, and his two teenage sons, is in the Highland Park area of Topeka, which is to say Tommy would like to move, although he is having a hard time getting financing for a new home.
He figures he might have a down payment sitting in his basement, if he could get some fair offers for all his memorabilia.
You walk down a narrow flight of stairs and a beam of yellow Saturday-morning sunlight streaks through a single window, washing over a curation of single-owner wrestling memorabilia that has to be the largest in northeast Kansas, if not the state, if not the world.
Wrestling legend Harley Race poses with Randles.
All four walls are covered with unopened action figures and metal folding chairs signed by some of the biggest (and smallest) names in professional wrestling. On shelves are championship belts, stuffed things, a life-size cardboard cutout that almost got shot by the cops once (long story), and three Nugget heads Tommy has retired.
The first Nugget was off a CPR training doll that was being discarded at the courthouse. When Tommy found out about it, he took out a pocket knife and without explanation sawed its head off in front of some horrified government employees. Some of the artifacts are rare and collectible; there's an action figure from early in Hulk Hogan’s career, when he was briefly a bad guy. Some of the items are just personally amusing, like a $25 paycheck Tommy received from a promoter.
“It bounced,” he says, and you get the impression he likes that story more than he would have liked whatever that $25 would have bought him.
There is also a drum kit with 19 individual percussive elements.
Randles loves his drums.
A lot of the memorabilia is from Tommy’s own shows, the most prestigious of which was for an unusually large crowd of 3,500 in Wyoming -- “We had midgets,” Adams explained -- at which he tag-teamed with the one-and-only Al Snow.
It was a nervous meeting. Until that moment Tommy didn’t know how Al felt about the Tommy Snow character, and Al Snow is not known for his balanced psyche.
They shook hands.
“You’re not mad, are ya?” Tommy said.
In The Museum now is a chair signed by Al Snow: “From one Snow to another.”
It sits next to another signed by Mick Foley: “To Tommy, One Snow is plenty.”
*****
Well the show in Larned was to start at 7 p.m., which meant the museum tour had to be over by about noon. So we stomped upstairs, where Renae had packed a cooler with some peanut butter sandwiches for the road. Sometimes Renae comes along, but not on this day.
“It’s fun,” she says, “but it’s a lot of time in the car.”
So Tommy grabs the cooler and a suitcase containing Nugget and his wrestling garb.
“Make sure you lose,” Renae says. “I love you.”
He gives her kiss.
Tommy Snow and Nugget.
“I love you too,” he says.
And it’s out the door and into Tommy’s gold Ford Focus, the odometer on which reads 104,657. On superstition, he starts the trip listening to “Sam Hall” by Johnny Cash.
My name is Samuel an’ I’ll see you all in hell
See you all in hell
Damn your eyes
“Another day in paradise,” Tommy says.
*****
There are those who say western Kansas begins about the time you exit Topeka, and though that’s not true from a geographical perspective, it is true from a demographical one. The metropolis of Kansas City and the liberal enclave of Lawrence are to the east, and the air capital of Wichita is way down south. The rest of Kansas is all rolling prairie and western sky, the native territory of the Kiowa and the Pawnee, the Osage and the Arapahoe, with great expanses of it looking – apart from a notable absence of buffalo – just like it did before European settlement.
That landscape is interrupted mostly only by farming communities, the descendants of people who came west during the land rush, found the soil to their liking and stuck it out through the Dust Bowl and The Great Depression. The old two-lane highways take you through a hundred of these places, where the water tower gives you an idea how good the football team is, where every other business seems to be a mechanic or a feed-and-seed, and where there’s always a Dairy Queen on Main.
These are the towns where independent wrestlers like Tommy find their audience.
The show is in the gymnasium at Larned Middle School, which appears to have been built in the 1950s or so. At showtime the crowd count is 164, but when we arrive mid-afternoon it’s mostly wrestlers and management and their kids. Everybody gets there so early because if somebody doesn’t show up – which happens – they have time to reorganize the show.
Everyone who sees me beelines it over to shake my hand, sometimes in a way I would describe as “bewilderingly formal.” I am later informed this is a custom; these men assumed I was here to wrestle and were offering their respect. At one point the ring announcer found me in the locker room and asked for my entrance music.
I would not say I look like a professional wrestler, exactly, but then again neither did most of the wrestlers there. Until they get into gimmick, it is near impossible to tell who’s a wrestler and who isn’t at one of these things. Their levels of ambition range from those like Tommy, who do it because they love it, to those who have designs on a WWE career. Tommy himself is built, oh … like a maintenance man. There was a group of wrestlers who showed up from Utah (!), one of whom looked like a Viking with a Pizza Rolls habit, another of whom had the physique of a marshmallow. Before the show, they had taken in one of Larned’s local entertainment offerings, namely a city park.
“We did the spinny carousel thing and got so dizzy,” the Viking said. “It was awesome.”
There would turn out to be two lady wrestlers, one of whom was married to one of the men. It was a touching story -- she’s a stripper and he’s a bouncer at the strip club.
“He brought his work home with him,” Tommy said.
If this sounds like an environment where you’d find some drug abuse, well, there isn’t any evidence for or against that. Tommy’s stories indicate wrestlers like their booze and weed, but that hardly distinguishes them from the general population.
Lenny “Lunatic Lenny” Thompson, who wears contacts that block out his irises and is presumed to have escaped from the psych ward, entered the locker room carrying five wall mirrors. The story behind this was that he had stopped at Dollar General – this is where most indy wrestlers get their gimmicks – and found a rack of cheap 8x12 mirrors. He picked up one and asked the cashier if it was made of glass. She shrugged, so he shattered it against his head.
“I’ll take that one and five more,” he said.
Trouble was, the promoter wouldn’t let him use the mirrors in the show because the audience was seated close enough to catch some shrapnel. So instead Lenny taped a razor blade to his hand and used it to discreetly cut open his forehead during the show, a technique known as “blading.”
“The audience can’t see welts,” Tommy explained.
Lunatic Lenny has some fun before the card starts.
Outside, the gym was filling up. There were a couple rows of folding chairs arranged immediately outside the ring, and the rest of the crowd sat in the wooden basketball bleachers. A DJ spun a mix of hard rock, hip hop and top 40.
“Pro wrestling,” Tommy says. “The only place you can see a black guy playing John Cougar Mellencamp.”
Inside the locker room, wrestlers swapped stories and insulted one another and laughed. Nobody crossed the line because, back stage at an independent professional wrestling event, the idea of a “line” is nonexistent. Blacks and whites trade racial barbs, then hugs, and not always in that order.
“That’s what I love about wrestling,” Tommy said. “There’s no barriers like that.”
This all is embedded in the culture and traditionally has manifested itself in the ring. Only through public pressure has the political incorrectness gradually been squeezed out of televised wrestling. But on the indy level, where the narrative arcs have to be built and resolved in the course of two hours, the characters are broad and the stories are brief.
About a half hour before showtime, The Danimal, who is quarterbacking the thing, gathers the wrestlers for a briefing, which consists of some house rules.
“Don’t scratch the floor, watch the language,” he says. “Be professional. There’s gonna be kids out there.”
The first words of the show, after the ring announcer, are, “Shut up, mother*****s!”
An hour later, a boy who looked about 8 years old, is screaming “He’s a p***y!” at a wrestler in a pink Speedo.
A hard-earned championship belt.
The first wrestler to make his ring walk is a retired firefighter named J.B. Payne who is portraying an Arab character. Payne isn’t of Middle-Eastern descent, however. He is black, and this is how we arrive at his character, The Libyan Nightmare.
He and Tommy go way back, and Payne’s career is heading toward its end.
“I broke in in 1984,” he says. “I’m winding down.”
The Libyan Nightmare’s entrance is made by his hype man, a guy who actually is wearing a towel on his head, is waving a giant flag with Arabic writing on it, and is screaming things like, “The United States is filthy!” to an audience that reflexively boos and chants, “U-S-A! U-S-A! U-S-A!”
The Nightmare follows and taunts the rural crowd.
“You like white bread, you like wheat bread,” he says, “and you like inbred!”
“BOOOOOOO!”
“U-S-A! U-S-A! U-S-A”
The Libyan Nightmare is out here to establish the narrative arc and make a prediction about the event’s penultimate match with Tommy Snow.
“I’m going to make a mockery of the public idiot the promoter put in front of me tonight!” he belts into a microphone.
“BOOOOOOO!”
“U-S-A! U-S-A! U-S-A!”
It’s all ages in the crowd. This being rural Kansas, it’s a mostly white audience but probably not as white as you’re imagining. Larned has a population of 4,054, so for an independent wrestling event to draw 200 (at $5 a ticket) gives you an idea the entertainment dollar here hasn’t been over-stretched.
The texture of all this is combative, but you look around the gym and everyone is smiling. Some even smile while they boo. A little boy, maybe 6, approaches a wrestler and tells him off, and when the wrestler turns back to the ring, the boy turns back to his father, beaming. He’s so proud of himself. He ran off the bad man. An older man, missing several teeth, stands up and gets into it with The Libyan Nightmare, defending the US of A. When he sits down he shares a good laugh with the people around him.
There must be some kind of cultural catharsis to all this, a place where wrestlers come to be things they aren’t, fans come to act like they’re not allowed to act in school or work or church. Nobody here but the kids thinks this is real. These people may be poor, but they aren’t stupid. They’re here to see a story. Redneck Broadway.
“It’s the same story told over and over again,” Tommy says. “Good vs. Evil.”
Tommy is out to tell that story with every match. His critics say he “can’t work,” which is wrestling jargon for “can’t do the fancy tricks.” Tommy admires the great athletes who can and admits that if steroids weren’t so dangerous he’d consider using them. But he thinks a lot of those wrestlers miss the point. He compares what they do to dance choreography, and to him there is something lost when every step is counted out.
“When you go out there just off the cuff,” he says, and thumps his hand against his chest, “you’re using your heart to tell the story. You can’t get that if you do a paint-by-numbers match.”
Right before the main event, Tommy Snow faces The Libyan Nightmare and it does not go well. Tommy bursts out of the locker room, brandishing Nugget high above his head. It is Tommy’s first and final appearance of the night. The crowd cheers.
Backstage, he and Payne had worked it out to where Tommy was going to win by disqualification. This would allow the Payne to keep his championship belt while also giving the crowd the satisfaction of seeing the Libyan Nightmare defeated.
“It doesn’t kill you and it doesn’t kill me,” Payne said. “I’m down with that.”
It is tough to say with certainty what went wrong, but it would be difficult to argue the Nightmare’s blood-alcohol content was not a factor. He comes out there and he’s doing the whole ring-walk routine, circling the ring, insulting America, pointing at fans, arguing. The guy in the towel keeps yelling, “Shut up!” into the crowd, and everything is going as planned.
Boo! U-S-A! All that.
But for reasons never explained this whole thing went on so long it could have worked as a second intermission. Tommy tried theatrically shaming his opponent into the ring, even laying down in the stands and pretending to nap. The crowd became impatient, taunting the Nightmare as a coward.
Except he just kept … not entering the ring.
And when he finally did, he started lambasting a fan for dropping an F-bomb in front of the kids. Given the context, this seemed like a strange battle to fight, and it got even more ironic when, in chastising the fan for using the F-word, he dropped it a couple times himself.
Most devastatingly, though, he was a bad guy who was taking a morally self-righteous stand. He had committed the biggest sin in pro wrestling. He had broken character. Might as well have been out there in his fireman’s suit.
In the locker room after the show, the Nightmare is on the defensive. He is sweating and swearing and talking fast, spittle flying out of his mouth as he tries to explain his decision to Tommy, who is bent but chooses not to press the issue except to remind Payne that next time he decides to do a leg drop into Tommy’s crotch, he’d like a little warning first. When I ask what happened, Tommy says we’ll talk about it in the car.
And we do. It is late, now. Black under a clean prairie sky, and Tommy is bummed as he swallows an energy shot and hooks down a PB&J. This was not how he imagined it going. But in wrestling, he says, any show you can walk away from is a good show -- and indeed, one of the wrestlers had been carted off with an air cast on his leg. Plus, Tommy didn’t get stiffed this time. Got paid $40, straight green cash. That wasn’t enough to cover the gas, but that’s OK. That was never the point.
It was another day in paradise.
Over dark highways and through little towns, we’ll talk about music and movies and whiskey and food. Tommy loves to cook. He’s got a smoker he uses for barbecues, and when people come over he’ll serve them his own barbecue sauce. When he makes lasagna for his family, he goes all out. Five kinds of cheeses, a sauce that takes all day. On Sunday mornings he likes to make a big breakfast for his kids. He’s looking forward to the new Muppets movie; he loves them as much as he loves Metallica.
Tommy has made so many of these drives, sometimes three or four a month. Sometimes a lot longer than this one, often alone, and often for as little as a couple of hot dogs and a soda.
I ask him why he does this.
“Because I can’t imagine not doing it,” he says.
