The Real Life Stars Of ‘Wrestlers’ on Netflix Prove Once And For All That There’s Nothing “Fake” About The Sacrifices They’re Forced To Make

It’s hard to get people to care about wrestling if they don’t care about the people. Al Snow understands this innately. 

He just needs others to understand it, too. 

A longtime professional wrestler and trainer, Snow has seen it all, and as he sits behind his desk in the cramped back-of-house quarters in Davis Arena, the warehouse-like home of Ohio Valley Wrestling, he’s confident that he knows what it takes to get fans engaged. 

“I tell stories that create conflict that has to be resolved in the ring,” he tells Decider. “If you’re a boxing fan, what’s driving you to watch is who’s fighting and why. It’s the same with football, with basketball, that’s what drives the audience — and it’s what I try to get the talent to understand here.”

“It’s the who and the why.”

That storytelling is at the heart of Wrestlers, an engaging new seven-part documentary miniseries that debuts today on Netflix. The show, helmed by award-winning producer-director Greg Whiteley (Cheer, Last Chance U), introduces us first to Snow, who wrestling fans may remember from his own memorable run in the ring in the 1990s and 2000s. In contrast to the stark-raving-mad character he played in WWE, though — his persona involved a disembodied mannequin head that he carried everywhere and spoke to as though it were alive — Snow is thoughtful and serious about his business.

“The only thing that’ll ever be fake is the intent behind it,” he explains, heading off the stereotypical complaint many lodge against professional wrestling. 

Snow believes that humanity is key; no matter how spectacular your moves are, they won’t mean a thing if you can’t get the fans to care about you as a person–something many wrestlers neglect.

“So many [wrestlers]–on every level–they perform, they just want you to believe in what they do, but they don’t sell you who they are, and they don’t sell you why they’re doing it. My belief is that is what will really get the casual audience. They either want to be that person, or they know someone like that person, and then they can believe in what they’re doing–even in the ridiculous circumstances of throwing someone into the ropes or jumping off the top rope, they can still buy into them.”

Ohio Valley Wrestling–which Snow runs the day-to-day operations of–has operated in Louisville, Kentucky for three decades. It once served as a prime developmental territory for the WWE, with future superstars such as John Cena, Randy Orton, Brock Lesnar and Batista rising through its ranks. That relationship ended in 2008, though, and the organization had fallen on difficult times in recent years. 

Things changed in 2021, when a pair of local businessmen — sports radio host Matt Jones and hotelier-turned-Louisville-mayor Craig Greenberg (pictured above) — purchased a controlling interest in the company. Jones and Greenberg offered a much-needed infusion of money and business acumen, but also found themselves facing opposition and mistrust as outsiders in an often-insular world.

“Everyone that’s in this building–the wrestlers, the agents, the volunteers, the academy students, the people selling the concessions… they’ve all wrestled,” Jones explains in an interview with Decider. “All of them. Except for me. So how are they not going to look at me as different? There’s a sense of like, an initiation that I’ve never been a part of. One of the wrestlers told me once, ‘you should get in the ring one time — they’ll look at you differently if you do.’” 

“Maybe that would be what it would take.” He laughs. “I’ve not done it, though.”

The tension between Snow’s old-school, story-first mentality and Jones’s and Greenberg’s need to see the company turn a profit underpins much of the story that Wrestlers is trying to tell. But, just as Snow explained, it wouldn’t work at all without a compelling cast of characters. 

Fortunately, they’ve got that.

There’s Mahabali Shera, “The Indian Lion” (pictured above), a physically-imposing but soft-spoken wrestler who came to the United States from a small town in India, and speaks hopefully of becoming a Schwarzenegger-like star who can help others in similar situations achieve their dreams. There’s Big Brother star-turned-wrestler Jessie Godderz, or “Mr. PEC-tacular,” one of OVW’s most visible performers and an intensely business-minded figure who sees himself following the same route as WWE’s Mike “The Miz” Mizanin from reality television to ring stardom. Cash Flo, the company’s most veteran in-ring presence, is a jovial, gregarious tank of a man who offers a broad smile even as he deals opponents his signature “chop”, slapping them across the chest with a shockingly-loud crack. Freya the Slaya, the self-styled “Queen of the North”, cuts a towering, regal figure in the ring, but in real life has chosen to sell her house and live out of an RV in order to keep pursuing the dream. 

Throughout Wrestlers’ seven episodes, we see each of these wrestlers not just as their ring personas, but as real, relatable people — spending time with their families, working regular jobs to supplement their wrestling income, and speaking candidly both about the challenges of their chosen profession and their reasons to continue pursuing it.

“I’m hoping that the perception of professional wrestling changes, and I hope I can be a small part of changing that perception,” Cash Flo — real name Mike Walden — explains in an interview with Decider. “There has been a stigma on this level of professional wrestling for a very long time, and it doesn’t need to be that. Professional wrestling can be a positive experience. It can help people through tough times.”

The show’s most dynamic storyline follows that of “HollyHood” Haley J — one of OVW’s youngest and most exciting developmental talents — and her mother, veteran wrestler “Amazing” Maria James. The two are in frequent conflict, both in and out of the ring–but they’re also a critical support system for each other, with Maria originally getting into wrestling in order to bond with her wrestling-obsessed young daughter. 

“I did a pageant once, and they asked me what I wanted to be, and I’m like ‘WWE superstar!’, and I threw up the Jeff Hardy,” Haley J laughs in an interview with Decider, replicating the WWE star’s signature hand gesture, “and they’re like, ‘wow, who is this little girl?’”

Their volatile relationship — and Haley’s often-toxic relationship with a fellow wrestler — gets significant play throughout the show, and is a major point of concern for Snow.

“She has all the tools, but she has to have the maturity or she’s going to shoot herself in the foot,” Snow grumbles in one episode. “If she doesn’t get her head on her ass, she’s not just gonna burn out–she’s going to blow up.” 

Their emotional arc culminates in a jaw-dropping, cinematic sequence where mother and daughter face off in a bloody, violent “deathmatch” event (Maria’s specialty), a scene worthy of The Wrestler or Million Dollar Baby. It’s hard to watch — you can see even hardcore fans in the stands with their mouths agape in shock — but it’s also impossible to look away as this mother-daughter drama unfolds with thumbtack-studded baseball bats.

“I hope that my development as a person shows through this,” Haley J notes toward the end of our interview. “I’m still me, don’t get it twisted, but I’ve grown up so much and I’m not gonna let certain things get me out of character as much as they used to.” 

“I just want people to see her,” Maria adds. “She is who she is, no matter what, and nobody’s going to change her. I hope that she shines through.”

It’s easy to write off professional wrestling if you’re not a fan of the sport (something I’d never considered myself prior to watching Wrestlers). To do so, though, is to miss out on some tremendous storytelling. Wrestlers shows what it can be at its best — a physical, visceral human drama that’s impossible to “fake.”

“There’s no better feeling than walking through the curtain,” Freya says. “It’s such an adrenaline rush–the physicality, the unknown. Once you’re out there, you have a plan, you think you know what’s going to happen but really, anything could. You just have to roll with the punches.” 

“As soon as I experienced that, I knew that wrestling was what I wanted to do.”

Scott Hines, publisher of the widely-beloved Action Cookbook Newsletter, is an architect, blogger and proficient internet user based in Louisville, Kentucky.