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Wrestling to benefit students
A real wrestling winner
Date published: 5/15/2006 By JONATHAN HUNLEY BY THE TIME you read this, Mike Moon will have battled an angry Ugandan in Courtland High School's gym. And the social studies teacher's students may have rooted for the painted-up giant of a man, not for the guy who decides their grades. The 34-year-old Moon, the head JV football coach at Courtland, has been a fan of professional wrestling since he was about But his first visit to a live grappling event was Saturday--and Moon got a better-than-ringside view of the action. He was in a tag-team match in which his team tangled with one led by wrestling legend Kamala, The Ugandan Giant, a sometimes bug-eyed character who wears a leopard-skin-print loincloth. Why on Earth would a professional educator choose to step into the squared circle with a terror of an individual whose face is festooned with freaky white paint, and who has a yellow half-moon painted above his navel and two sloppily crafted stars on his chest? "I blame this purely on my A.D.," Moon said when I reached him last week. See, Moon is the assistant athletic director. By "A.D.," he meant Athletic Director Ronnie Lowman. Courtland struck a deal with Stuarts Draft-based TNT Pro Wrestling for a fundraiser to benefit school athletics and scholarship funds in memory of former students Justin Armitage and Baron P. Braswell. Armitage, a 2005 Courtland grad and James Madison University freshman, was killed in a car crash in March. Braswell, a Courtland junior, was killed at a party in January. Part of the agreement included a coach or teacher joining the action. Moon was that victim, er, person--all 5 feet 10 inches and 155 pounds of him. "I think they want to see me get beat up," he said last week about his students. But Moon wasn't hurt too badly. TNT Pro Wrestling eschews the extreme violence on which other wrestling federations have made a living. And it doesn't allow profanity in the show, or storylines with sexual innuendo. The idea is to present entertainment that's suitable for mixed company. "This is for everybody," said Marvin Ward, TNT's head man. Ward has been involved with wrestling for more than a decade. He was a wrestler before tearing the rotator cuff in his left shoulder and deciding to start his own company.
Date published: 5/15/2006
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