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The Ultimate Warrior and Hulk Hogan stickers are faded and curled around the car radio, hanging on by Scotch tape. With his stiff right hand clenched on the steering wheel, Gregory Iron stops his worn-in Saturn Ion at a recreation center in Rahway, N.J. In the backseat, next to a life-sized cardboard cutout of WWE superstar Daniel Bryan, sits Zach Gowen with his prosthetic leg – a black titanium rod – rubbing against the driver’s seat.
Hours later, when the music hits, the two limp up the stairs and through the curtain to face a 1,200-strong crowd at Pro Wrestling Syndicate’s Supercard 2014. For those who don’t know them, one’s a guy who wrestles without his left leg and the other without the use of the right side of his body. What they don’t see is a cancer survivor or a former victim of bullying. They don’t see that the guy without a leg battled drug addictions like his father. They don’t see that the guy with the gimp hand had a mother who sold his possessions for crack when he was sleeping.
“The magic is them telling the story of the struggle,” says Joe Dombrowski, a wrestling promoter who first had the idea to pair the two. “To show them get beaten down, to show them get punished, have everything be thrown at them and watching them persevere, that is the magic of Gregory Iron and Zach Gowen.
“It completely transcends wrestling.”
The only one-legged professional wrestler, Zach Gowen! The only professional wrestler with cerebral palsy, Gregory Iron! The Handicapped Heroes!
The crowd gives a boisterous cheer with a few fans offering a standing ovation. What they don’t see is kinship that goes deeper than one night in Northern New Jersey.
Two minutes later, the bell rings. The match is underway.
In the hours before their match, Gowen and Iron spoke with almost every man and woman in tights they saw – including their opponents.
The more extroverted of the pair and a former World Wrestling Entertainment performer, Gowen walked up, with a hitch in his step, to anyone and everyone – from the former WWE, World Championship Wrestling and Extreme Championship Wrestling stars looking for one last run to the young guys still finding their footing in the independent pro wrestling circuit.
“Hi, I’m Zach,” Gowen said to any person in sight. “Nice to meet you!”
Iron, whose personal story went viral in 2011 after a run-in with one of the best pro wrestlers in the world, is more shy. Only after he warms up does his goofball personality come through. He walks with a similar hitch on the right side of his body from his cerebral palsy.
“You know Greg Iron, right?” Gowen asks. “He’s my tag partner.”
Most of the people they greet already know them. Entering their second year as a team, the pair has become arguably the most inspirational story on the independent wrestling circuit.
Their matching, form-fitting T-shirts further their message: “You only get one shot to live your dream.”
“We are fortunate enough to be physically able enough to live our dreams,” Iron says. “I figured out that a bigger part of the story was sharing my story and these moments with other people.”
Gowen adds: “It’s a very, very deep connection. It puts everything in perspective.”
Tonight, that dream is beating the hell out of six other people. They’re competing in what’s known as a fatal four-way tag team match. And most of their opponents have never before shared a ring with pro wrestling’s most recognizable performers with disabilities.
The atmosphere in the un-air-conditioned rec center had begun to get sticky when Gowen started off the match. Locking up with his opponent, he plunged into a set of counter attacks often seen in amateur wrestling. But with 12 years in the game, Gowen proved that he’s more technically sound than he’s been before. The crowd shouted its approval of his mat display, and when Gowen later tagged out, they chanted, “We want Zach! We want Zach! We want Zach!”
As pro wrestling spectacles tend to do, the match’s formalities quickly devolved, its two-at-a-time structure shredded as five of the eight men began battling simultaneously outside of the ring. Someone looking closely would have caught that crazy look in Gowen’s eye: It’s time to go to the top rope.
Cradled on the top rope, as the five guys on the outside stare up agape, Gowen yelled to the crowd and then launched himself into a moonsault – a flying backflip – wiping out all five men, including Iron.
Holy shit! Holy shit! Holy shit!
Gowen stole the show.
Growing up in a Detroit suburb, Gowen was in the second grade when he broke his left leg playing soccer. The X-ray showed a hairline fracture in three or four places. But the leg didn’t heal. On Oct. 3, 1991, an 8-year-old Gowen learned what was causing him so much pain: He was diagnosed with osteosarcoma, a cancer that develops in the bones of rapidly growing children. Stretches of chemotherapy followed, but the family was left with only one option for the bedridden Gowen.
“Even on the day of the amputation, we didn’t know how much of his leg was going to be left,” his mother Colleena Graf said.
When he woke up on Jan. 2, 1992, the doctors were able to leave 8 millimeters on the left side of Gowen’s hip. Wrestling was the source of his recovery, whether he was watching it from his bed or getting stronger doing flips on the couch or the backyard trampoline, emulating his heroes. Years later, he parlayed that athleticism into the high school wrestling team, learning that he competed better without his prosthetic.
After graduation, Gowen joined a wrestling school and even had a tryout match for Total Nonstop Action Wrestling, one of the bigger national promoters. He enrolled at Eastern Michigan University, pursuing a double major in secondary education and math. His plan was to become a high school math teacher and wrestle on the weekends as a hobby. But one February morning in 2003, before a shift bagging groceries, Gowen got a call.
It was John Laurinaitis, then the WWE’s director of talent relations. It was actually Laurinaitis’ second attempt to sign him; he first approached a different one-legged wrestler thinking he was Gowen.
“I liken it to Willy Wonka giving you a golden ticket,” Gowen says. “And I was Charlie.”
Just 15 months after his first pro wrestling match, he debuted in WWE in May 2003 as part of a storyline featuring the likes of Hulk Hogan, “Rowdy” Roddy Piper and Vince McMahon – all before he could legally drink.
“These were my male role models growing up,” he says. “I didn’t have a dad. These were the men who were in my life.”
The amputation is the most well known story of Gowen’s childhood, but there’s another tragic tale. When Gowen was 4, his father walked out. He remembers his father, an alcoholic and addict, as abusive toward his mother. When Gowen made it on WWE, his father showed up to one of his autograph signings – the only time he’d seen him for 16 years. The interaction left Gowen, now a father of a 2-year-old son, confused and overwhelmed.
Zach Gowen
In the ring, Gowen’s run had its highs and lows, a weekly live experiment in front of millions of people.
“A one-legged wrestler has never happened before,” Gowen says. “But I look back on a lot of that programming I did and I kind of cringe.”
Behind the scenes, perceptions about Gowen were quickly changing at WWE.
“Zach is a good kid, but he was young,” says Kurt Angle, who was one of the top stars on “SmackDown!” during Gowen’s tenure on the show. “When the fame hit him, he may have had a little ego, held his head a bit higher, had a chip on his shoulder and made comments of how his character couldn’t be affected by a leg trip, which is crazy because he only had one leg.”
Gowen’s time with WWE is mostly lauded as a success. Yet, everyone interviewed for this article, including Gowen, concedes that it was all too much too soon.
“Once they put him at that top level, there was nowhere to go but down,” says Dave Meltzer, editor of the Wrestling Observer Newsletter.
Days before the completion of his first full year with the company, Gowen’s dream came crashing down: He was released from his contract in February 2004. His run on TV lasted all of five months.
The release sent Gowen into depression. In the next six years, he bounced from vice to vice – alcohol, women, pain pills – in search of relief. He regularly used the pain medications fentanyl and Dilaudid to get through the day. Toward the end of that period, which had him mixing the pain drug Oxycontin and the anti-anxiety med Klonopin, he’d go into withdrawals if he weren’t regularly using that made him sick and even “animal-like.” As he recalls, they worked until they didn’t work.
The demons of his father were now his own.
“I’m so lucky I didn’t die, man,” Gowen says.
“He came to me and said, ‘Mom, I don’t know what to do about this,’” Graf remembers. “‘I don’t think about anything else except getting high.’”
During this time, he also met the man who would define his future, even if Gowen was too drugged up to recall it: “I don’t remember meeting Greg for the first time.”
Three minutes into the match, Iron gets tagged in. The night before, he rumbled along nearly 500 miles from Cleveland to North Jersey in that beat-up Saturn, getting stuck behind the catastrophic crash on the New Jersey Turnpike involving comedian Tracy Morgan. After the show, he’d drive back to Cleveland, before heading another 300 miles to Toronto for a show the next night. He was running on little sleep and far too few energy drinks, but that didn’t matter in that moment inside the sweltering rec center.
Almost immediately, his opponent, who was playing the heel – or antagonist – mocked Iron, hitting his own curled up right hand against his chest. It’s a sign that implies that Iron has special needs. But when the guy turned around, Iron threw all of his 160-pound frame into a stiff slap to his face, sending him tumbling to the canvas and the crowd into a gasp of “Oh!” It was just the start of another long weekend on the independent circuit.
That slap, and everything else Iron does in the ring, goes back to his grandmother. To escape the constant fighting of his bickering parents, Iron, whose real name is Greg Smith, spent lots of time watching wrestling with her. She’d tell him that if he said his prayers, much like what Hulk Hogan preached, then his hand would get better. When she died, 8-year-old Greg placed an action figure of Hogan inside her casket.
Born one month prematurely and weighing just 1 pound, Greg was diagnosed with spastic cerebral palsy at 10 months. The words “retard” and “cripple” followed him during adolescence, but what was happening at home was even more of a burden.
Iron’s mother’s addiction to crack made for a toxic home life. Iron’s father slept with his jeans on, fearing that she would steal the money from his wallet. Iron later told his girlfriend, Mary, that his heart, at least the part reserved for his family life, was like a piece of grilled chicken that was overdone.
“There were some rough roads in the marriage,” says Dwane Smith, Iron’s father. “We were both into illegal substances. We did a lot of arguing. But Greg did what he had to do to get through.”
And that was wrestling. It wasn’t until he was 16 that he realized he could pursue it as a career.
“I didn’t think I could be a wrestler until I saw Zach Gowen do his one-legged moonsault on The Big Show,” he says. “If I didn’t see him, I don’t know if I would have taken the next step to be pro wrestler.”
In April 2006, three years after seeing Gowen fly through the air, Iron had his first tryout. The fear was real for the Cleveland native. Dombrowski, who saw Iron through his training, remembers him as “very naïve and undersized.”
“I always kind of wrote him off as someone who would only go so far and only do so much, because he was 5-foot-5 and only around 150 pounds,” he says. “All of the odds were against him, even before you factor in the cerebral palsy.”
Gregory Iron
Iron has had his share of suffering in his eight years as a pro wrestler, whether it’s the opponents who take it easy on him or the concussion that almost took his life. But at least it shielded him from the tribulations of his mother.
“In this life, you only get one mama,” he remembers her telling him in an argument years later. “Maybe you’ll appreciate me when I’m gone.”
Iron’s mother, then in a homeless shelter, died of a cocaine overdose in 2010, on the Fourth of July. Weeks after the funeral, Iron was transferring tapes of his matches from VHS to DVD when he ran across one of his first matches. In the background, he saw his mother, ecstatic for her son. When he took a big hit, Iron noticed the look of concern on her face. On that tape, Iron saw the mother he never had.
“Somewhere in there, she was a mom,” Iron says. “She was just unable to show it because of the things she was dealing with.”
A year after his mom’s passing, Iron was unexpectedly introduced to a national audience. Right after a match, Iron’s then-teammate, the cult performer Colt Cabana, spent a few minutes pumping up Iron to the Chicago crowd. He then left and returned with CM Punk, the WWE champion, making one of his first appearances since leaving the biggest pro wrestling company on the planet. An overwhelmed Iron started crying in the middle of the ring.
“You’re fucking awesome,” Punk said to him. “You overcome more than I ever have – just waking up every morning.”
Iron’s brush with Punk quickly made the rounds. In the summer of 2011, he was profiled in both Sports Illustrated and ESPN. The bookings started piling up. Everyone wanting a piece of Iron – and his story.
“That moment didn’t justify my career – it justified my life,” Iron says. “I don’t think people understand how much it changed my life.”
Later in 2011, Gowen listened to a podcast featuring Iron, where he explained how Gowen was his inspiration for becoming a wrestler – and how Gowen essentially blew off Iron the only time they ever met in 2006.
“It was disappointing talking to him and knowing he didn’t care,” Iron says now. “I tried to tell myself that it was cool, but he really didn’t help me at all.”
The Gowen who heard Iron’s story wasn’t the same person who met Iron at that Cleveland show. In early 2010, running high on meds and low on solutions, Gowen made a call to WWE’s Wellness Program, which offers current and former employees the opportunity to enter rehab. He was on a plane the next day to a facility in Minnesota, where he spent a month getting clean.
After hearing the podcast, Gowen called Iron to make amends for his past behavior. The two hit it off, and the Handicapped Heroes were born.
“The story writes itself,” Gowen says. “I inspired him to be a pro wrestler and he inspired me to restart my career.”
The fatal four-way tag team match ends when one performer gets held down, and both Gowen and Iron were on the sidelines for the show’s final beat. They didn’t win, but they also didn’t lose. Still, the pair still elicited the loudest shout of respect from the crowd, before they limped off backstage.
Joe Dombrowski
Pro wrestling promoter
What started off as a cool idea of tagging together now has the very real goal of getting signed with WWE or one of the more high-profile promotions. As Gowen jokingly puts it, the plan is to “sell out as quickly as possible.” Gowen, 31, and Iron, 27, know they can’t do this forever.
“If it wasn’t for the addiction, or Greg’s mom, or cerebral palsy, or the cancer, we wouldn’t have been able to rocket ourselves into the state of being we’re in now,” Gowen says.
After he gets dressed, Iron buys a raffle ticket for a rare Hulk Hogan clock before meeting Gowen by their merchandise table in the back of the rec center. Even as the main show is going on, fans stop by, pointing out their favorite parts of their careers, mostly Gowen’s run in WWE and Iron’s night with Punk. Some share stories of their own family members or friends affected by disabilities.
One young boy, who attended the show with his father, wasn’t alive in 2003 to see Gowen on “SmackDown!” And he wasn’t aware of Iron’s story. But the connection, even in those seven minutes, was made.
“You did some cool tricks,” he tells the team.
It’s a win.
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