Las Vegas high school senior trains to become pro wrestler
Those little eyes so helpless and appealing
When they were flashing
Send you crashing
Through the ceiling.
Thank heaven for little girls.
——
Maurice Chevalier could have been singing about Cassie McCarthy. Especially the part about sending you crashing through the ceiling.
The Las Vegas girl was only a toddler when she vaguely remembers her parents taking her to a World Wrestling Entertainment show when they were living in Yuma, Arizona.
“Triple H brought Shawn Michaels in front of me and started beating the crap out of him,” recalled the diminutive teenager with the light brown hair and porcelain-like features.
“It freaked me out, but he winked at me.”
The thrashing wasn’t real of course. But have you ever tried to explain verisimilitude to a 4-year-old?
When Paul Michael Levesque, aka Triple H (an abbreviation of Hunter Hearst Helmsley, his original WWE stage name) started pummeling Michael Shawn Hickenbottom, aka Shawn Michaels, and winked, a seed apparently was planted in little Cassie McCarthy’s subconscious.
It would be another decade or so before it germinated at the Comic Con convention in San Diego, nirvana for comic book fans and collectors and self-described teenage nerds who idolize Batman and Pokemon and pro wrestlers that are Stone Cold.
“I met Rowdy Roddy Piper — he was telling me stories, and he put the idea in my head that I was going to be wrestler,” Cassie McCarthy said of her epiphany in the exhibit hall.
Roderick George Toombs, which is what Roddy Piper was called before he donned a kilt and entered the wrestling ring to bagpipe music though he was from Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, in Canada — in pro wrestling, things are never quite what they seem — told 12-year-old Cassie McCarthy that he knew her father, Gordon, from the regional wrestling circuits.
They held up the autograph line telling stories.
When Roddy Piper died in his sleep in 2015 of cardiac arrest, Cassandra Patricia McCarthy was 15 years old.
She was training in Las Vegas to become a professional wrestler.
Not a girly girl
Even if Triple H had not whaled on Shawn Michaels in front of her, or Roddy Piper hadn’t regaled her with wrestling yarns, there was a good chance that Cassie McCarthy was going to ditch the Barbie dolls anyway.
“She wasn’t a girly girl,” Patty McCarthy said of the oldest of her and Gordon’s three children. “She wasn’t a tomboy, either. She’s between situations.”
Cassie’s mom also is between situations. She’s an amateur photographer who shoots wrestling portraits for the independent shows in town. Otherwise, she is the caretaker of her daughter’s wrestling dream. And her chauffeur. She says it will be nice when Cassie learns to drive herself to wrestling practice.
Cassie trains at the Future Stars of Wrestling gym on Pecos Road where the Las Vegas city limits body slam Henderson. It’s a nondescript edifice among an entire business park of them. It consists of a foyer, a utility room and a warehouse just big enough to accommodate a wrestling ring.
The warehouse is dank and drafty.
It seems a good place to catch a cold.
On the day a visitor drops in to watch the Future Stars of Wrestling train, the door to the warehouse is shut tight and it seems much too quiet.
WAM! WAM-WAM!
The jarring sound of a wrestler hitting the mat, or two or three of them, shatters the silence.
When the door is opened, a bunch of large wrestlers are scattered about the ring. A small one has climbed upon the back of one of the large ones and is raking his eyes below the ring apron.
The large wrestlers are men. The small one — 5 feet 3 inches tall, 112 pounds (sans any foreign objects tucked into her tights) — is 18-year-old Cassie McCarthy. One of the large wrestlers puts her in a headlock and makes a twisting motion. The small wrestler grimaces and feigns she is in pain.
At least I think she is feigning.
Soon she will be flying through the air and tumbling from the ropes.
WAM! WAM-WAM!
The next morning she will see the bruises that she only felt the night before.
Souls to take
It can take years before a wrestler is ready to hit the circuit, but Cassie McCarthy already is supplementing her training by serving as a valet at West Coast Wrestling Federation shows in Oregon and the Action Pro Wrestling circuit in Arizona. Sometimes she gets to practice in front of a live television audience.
“Hearing (the crowd), being able to make a kid smile — or give him a scared face — that’s the greatest thing,” she says.
But if you can drag it out of her, there’s another reason Cassie McCarthy wrestles.
It enables her to be something she’s not.
She doesn’t like to talk about it, but she has been bullied, both in school and behind the scenes when she started training. The emotional scars are partly responsible for her wrestling character, an alter ego she assumes after makeup is applied and attitude is assumed.
As it says on her Facebook page in a bloodthirsty font, she’s every nightmare you’ve ever had; she’s your worst dream come true; she’s everything you ever were afraid of.
She’s Lucy SoulTaker. Daughter of The Devil.
“At some point, when I get established, my character, I’m going to have a book of souls, and I’m going to start taking souls and putting them in the book,” she says, clapping her hands to symbolize a book being slammed closed. “That’s where the name came from.
“In real life, I’m shy and introverted.”
These are traits that do not apply to Lucy SoulTaker.
“In the ring not only do you have the chance to entertain people, you have the chance to show another side of you that no one gets to see,” Cassie McCarthy says. “When I’m in the ring I become a totally different me. Someone that’s different than who I am in real life, someone that can talk to people, that can yell at people, that can stand up for herself.”
It can be liberating and great fun, but she also says the wrestling business can be a lonely place without the makeup and the attitude.
You can find drama when you’re not looking for it. You can be ostracized. You can become Mickey Rourke in the movie.
“You have to keep your head down and keep your mouth shut if you don’t want to be a part of it,” Cassie McCarthy says with a sigh.
Joe knows wrestling
In the foyer of the warehouse where large wrestlers send Cassie McCarthy flying through the air and tumbling from the ropes is a small table and chair. This is Joe DeFalco’s office. DeFalco is the proprietor of Future Stars of Wrestling and a producer of live local pro wrestling shows — the minute you sit down, he slips you a handbill touting an upcoming production at the Silverton Casino.
Joe DeFalco wears a warmup suit and a bushy goatee. He isn’t smoking a fat cigar but talks like a guy who should be.
DeFalco seems a straight shooter. So while he may want to tell you that Cassie McCarthy is destined to become a WWE superstar, the next Fabulous Moolah or Miss Elizabeth or at the very least, a star on the independent circuit, he refrains from doing so. Because like Cassie McCarthy says, this a lonely business where you have to keep your head down.
This is a business where only the strong survive.
Sometimes.
“We’ve had some of the best-looking athletes come through the door, and you’re thinking this guy is going to be the next stud. And then the guy never got a match because he didn’t put forth the effort,” DeFalco says of the testosterone-fueled, billion-dollar world of scripted sport and performance art.
“As long as Cassandra works hard, the opportunity will be there. We’re a wrestling company that not only runs a school but we have a promotion where we actually have used some of the kids in the school because they’ve worked very hard.”
Joe DeFalco says if you get your foot in the door and your character in the ring, you never know what might happen in this day and age. Social media can be a more potent tag team partner than Nick Bockwinkel.
“If you can talk on a microphone, you only have to be a pretty good wrestler,” DeFalco says of blending skill inside the ring with personality and charisma and marketability outside of it, which is what the actor Dwayne Johnson was able to do when he was better known as his wrestling alter ego.
“The Rock is a good wrestler — he ain’t the greatest wrestler — but if you have a great character, you can get pushed to the moon.”
Sending you crashing
It’s another Tuesday afternoon at the Future Stars of Wrestling gym, and it’s quiet again. The door to the warehouse where they keep the wrestling ring is closed. Joe DeFalco hasn’t yet arrived.
It seems eerily quiet again.
WAM! WAM-WAM!
The jarring sound of an aspiring pro wrestler hitting the mat once again shatters the silence.
The warehouse is still dank and drafty.
The wrestlers do not seem to notice. They are in the ring, working up a sweat. Working on their moves. Working on their dreams.
They are all males, except for one.
Patty McCarthy, as usual, is the lone spectator.
She watches as her little girl tries to send the other wrestlers crashing through the ceiling in a way that Maurice Chevalier never could have imagined.
Contact Ron Kantowski at rkantowski@reviewjournal.com or 702-383-0352. Follow @ronkantowski on Twitter.
