Kevin A. Roberts
Editor's Note: This story appeared in St. Louis Magazine's October 2016 issue. Harley Race passed away on August 1.
A small crowd has formed outside the entrance of the Harley Race Wrestling Arena, a squat warehouse on the outskirts of Troy, Missouri. When Harley’s 32-year-old son Leland Race unlocks the door at 3 p.m., about four dozen people, almost all men between ages 25 and 50 in ballcaps and T-shirts, shuffle through a hallway and past the ticket window, where each of them happily hands Leland $30 in cash on the way to the arena floor. There, at a long table in front of a wrestling ring that flirts with the low steel rafters, sit two World Wrestling Entertainment Hall of Famers.
Tonight’s event is billed as “The Night of the Dragon,” and at 63, guest of honor Ricky “The Dragon” Steamboat still has biceps that stretch the threads of his black T-shirt; his face is smooth and youthful beneath a shock of silver hair. Steamboat welcomes the fanboys with the exuberant “How are you today?” expected from a longtime “baby-face”—pro-wrestling parlance for “good guy.” He answers questions and reminisces about matches past as he signs original-packaged action figures, magazines, replica championship belts, and even a pair of folding metal chairs, and smiles wide for smartphone snapshots.
Beside Steamboat, 73-year-old “King” Harley Race slumps in a wheelchair, the result of a 30-year career spent as a heel, or bad guy, being tossed and body-slammed onto concrete floors and long folding tables like the one upon which his steel-reinforced forearm now rests. From head to toe, his body contains at least as much metal as does the golden National Wrestling Alliance Heavyweight Championship belt he held eight times in the 1970s and 1980s, now propped up like a nameplate on the tablecloth in front of him. His strawberry-blond curls have thinned; the peacock tattoos on his once-massive arms are wrinkled, blurred, and faded to blue.
Photography by Michael Thomas
“The King” Harley Race oversees promotions and the academy from his office.
And yet his hard gaze and grimace are somehow every bit as intimidating in person as they were on TV during his prime as a tough-as-a-turnbuckle antihero. He barely speaks beyond a gruff “You’re welcome”—that is, until his Sharpie begins to run out of ink.
“Jason!” he bellows in a gravelly tone that echoes around the arena.
At this moment, it seems, the only motion in the building is Leland, instantly answering his father’s summons with two new markers in hand. Jason Leland Race bears little resemblance to his father. Bald and wide-eyed, bearded, with a slight overbite, he’s smaller in stature—a lean-but-athletic 5-foot-11 and 200 pounds—than the barrel-chested 250-pound patriarch looking on from the faded fight bills on the wall. Leland does share his father’s middle name, his passion for wrestling, and his marrow-deep conviction that Harley Race was and is the greatest there ever was or will be—at everything. The son leans over his dad’s shoulder, scribbles out a few lines to ensure that the new pens work, and then slips into the background as the autograph line chugs along and the nostalgia machine keeps churning.
Leland runs to the office to oversee ticket and merchandise sales, then off to the bathroom to stock up on toilet paper and soap. One moment, he’s back in the locker room seeing that the wrestlers, his students at Harley Race Wrestling Academy, have everything they need; the next, he’s using a plastic funnel to fill ketchup bottles at the concession stand. All the while, Leland is trying to focus on his own match, tonight’s main event, against the villainous “Superstar Steve” Fender. With the legendary Steamboat guest-refereeing and his father looking on, tonight is another chance for Leland to shine. Winning the bout is important for his storyline, sure—it will set Leland up for a shot at regaining the World League Wrestling heavyweight title that he lost six months ago. But more crucial is winning the crowd—projecting his baby-face persona, Leland “The Legacy” Race, not just through words and the famous moniker but also by putting on a show. By executing the flips, dropkicks, arm bars, and body slams with the technical proficiency that old-school fans associate with the surname and a bone-rattling impact that will make even the most hardcore aficionados wonder for a moment whether it’s not real. To show that 14 years of paying dues in these cramped small-town sheds and gymnasiums and tents has made him ready for the top rope, the WWE and the worldwide stage The King conquered and has long since abdicated. To prove that he’s worthy of the name Race. That he’s not just…
“Jason!”
The autograph line is spent, the arena now empty but for a skeleton crew setting up rows of metal banquet chairs. Leland grips the handles on the back of his father’s wheelchair and rolls him toward the front office. The son pops open a can of Diet Coke and sets it beside the butt-filled ashtray on Harley’s desk. Here, The King will eat a loose-meat sandwich, smoke Marlboro Lights, and wait while Leland prepares for what they hope will be a sellout crowd.
Don’t Tell Harley or Leland Race that Wrestling isn’t real.
For one thing, they are protective of their family business. They are entertainers, after all, and if there is even one true believer screaming for blood from the back bleachers (and there usually seems to be more than a few), the WLW wrestlers are not going to be the ones to dispel the illusion. Ask Harley how they decide who’s going to prevail in each match, and The King growls, “The best wrestler,” following up with a glare that defies anyone to test his theory.
Michael Thomas
Leland Race applies an arm bar to “Superstar Steve” Fender.
More importantly, for the Races, participation in this testosterone-sponsored soap opera has had very tangible consequences. Wrestling enabled Harley Race, a farm boy from northwestern Missouri who was expelled from high school for punching the principal, to join a St. Joseph circuit at age 15 and work his way into international celebrity, gracing the covers of magazines, appearing on national television, and headlining events in sold-out arenas in cities on almost every continent. “I have pretty much done what I want, when I wanted to do it, from age 15 to right now,” says Harley. As champion of the National Wrestling Alliance, the governing body and loose affiliation of independent regional promotions that were prevalent before the rise of the now-dominant WWE, Race defended the title seven nights a week, often twice a day. He pulled down six figures annually in the 1970s and 1980s. He owned houses, cars, and boats; led a fast beer-fueled lifestyle that, along with the in-ring stunt work, left his body a junkyard of screws, metal plates, broken bones, and scar tissue. There are emotional scars, too: strained relationships, wives and girlfriends estranged by weeks and months he spent on the road. And there’s Harley’s own withdrawal from the spotlight, which dimmed as he aged and eventually lost the ability to even climb into a ring.
Race’s son Leland was born into wrestling. “All I’ve ever wanted to be was a professional wrestler,” he says, “and now the wrestling world is finding out that my father’s legacy didn’t stop with him. Every time I compete, I go out there with the intention of carrying on what he did—which is not just be the best wrestler I can be but be the best wrestler. Period.”
And despite the long odds of seeing The Legacy on WWE Raw or on a WrestleMania pay-per-view, Leland and Harley believe that the younger man’s hard work and inherited ability, along with his father’s tutelage and business connections, make that possibility very real.
In 1984, when Leland was born, his father’s career, and the wrestling world as he had known it, was already pinned on the canvas for a two-count.
The year before, after a thrill-ride decade of hopping regional circuits from New York to Japan to trade beatings with such legends as Terry Funk, Jack Briscoe, Dusty Rhodes, and Bob Backlund—and even being the first to body-slam 7-foot-2, 550-pound Andre the Giant—Harley had reluctantly relinquished his title for the final time to the younger Ric Flair. Fans and promoters saw Flair as the future. Harley tried to avoid becoming the past by investing in ownership of Heart of America Wrestling, the Midwest promotion based in Missouri. But by then, Vince McMahon had already moved on NWA territories with his fast-emerging national brand, the World Wrestling Federation (WWF, eventually renamed WWE), buying up regional circuits or running them out of business. After losing hundreds of thousands of dollars (and, momentarily, his temper, showing up to a WWF event in K.C. and flashing a .380-caliber handgun at Hulk Hogan), Harley essentially turned heel in real life, leaving the foundering NWA to join the enemy WWF.
Though Harley gleefully played the villain professionally, beneath the gruff façade he proved a softer touch at home. He and Leland’s mother were not married, and when the 3-year-old proved too costly for her, Harley took Leland in. When Harley remarried, he made sure Leland was part of the family. “He didn’t have to raise me,” says Leland, “but he did.”
By the time Leland was in grade school, kids across the country were watching King Harley Race square off against Hogan, The Junkyard Dog, and “Macho Man” Randy Savage on national TV, a testament to WWF’s quick success in becoming the ascendant pro-wrestling outlet. Harley was arguably more famous as an undercard veteran in the twilight of his career than he’d been during his regional-headliner heyday. As a result, Leland’s classmates back in Kansas City would either ask the boy for his father’s autograph or pick a fight to see whether he was worthy of his surname. Little Leland was happy to oblige both requests.
Unlike his father, Leland stayed out of enough trouble to keep himself in school and eligible to participate in swimming, basketball, baseball, and amateur wrestling, in which he became state champion. After a freak accident on a table fall during a match with Hogan left The King with a ruptured intestine that eventually forced him to hang up the boots and trunks in 1991, Harley was able to shift his schedule to attend almost every one of Leland’s games and meets.
Meanwhile, all Leland ever really wanted to do was follow his father into the pro-wrestling ring. He was 11 years old in the mid-1990s, when WWE’s battle with upstart World Championship Wrestling for TV ratings, the so-called Monday Night Wars, launched the sport to unprecedented mainstream popularity. The WCW was essentially remnants of the NWA revitalized by Ted Turner’s cash and far-reaching TBS superstation and an appeal to hardcore fans who appreciated technically sound wrestling to the increasingly glitzy and melodramatic WWF. Naturally, Harley Race found a place in WCW as a ringside manager, and he was able to take young Leland to shows and meet such superstars as Vader and Lex Luger. Leland’s favorite wrestler was Rey Mysterio Jr., an undersized second-generation luchador trained by his uncle to use the high-flying lucha libre style to overcome larger opponents.
Photos by Michael Thomas
A young fan waits for the Main Event in a cape and luchador mask.
Though Harley indulged his son’s obsession, the father never went out of his way to explain the business or “kayfabe,” jargon for wrestling’s suspension of reality. He never pushed Leland toward or away from the ring, even when Harley first opened his academy, in 2000. But when 17-year-old Leland told Harley that he was going to become a professional wrestler, The King had two stipulations: First, Leland had to finish high school. Second, he had to change his name. Both Races knew that entering the ring under that moniker would weigh the novice down with unfair expectations. Both also believed that the title carried a price. “I had to do it on my own,” says Leland. “If I failed, if I didn’t live up to the expectations he had for me, or if I was really bad, he didn’t want it to tarnish his name—and I understood and agreed.”
Leland took his birth name and his mother’s last name and created Jason Jones. He would train in North Carolina under one of Harley’s old WCW buddies, George South, in a non–air-conditioned, low-ceilinged Charlotte hole in the wall containing little more than a ring with its legs chopped off. “I put him in the ring with me first thing,” says South. “He’d take a whuppin’. I’d beat him to death.”
South also put Leland to work doing everything from tearing tickets to tearing down and reassembling the ring—usually at least a four-person job, but the youth learned to it do by himself. He sold popcorn and set up chairs. Took overnight shifts driving cross-country. Slept on hotel room floors and crammed for his classes at the University of North Carolina–
Charlotte in the back of the van. In the ring, anxious to learn and adapt to different styles of wrestling, he took on all comers. All the while, only he, his father, and South knew his true identity. (Harley’s 2004 autobiography, King of the Ring, written while Leland was in Carolina, doesn’t even mention the son’s existence.) “In our business, you have a lot of people who say their uncle was Ric Flair, guys even claiming to be deceased wrestlers,” says South. “The ones that brag about it ain’t never done nothing—that’s the way wrestling is. [Leland] is doing it the right way, paying his dues.”
Over seven years, Jason Jones gradually built a name for himself as a proficient and versatile grappler in the small circuits and carnivals up and down the Eastern seaboard and across the South. Leland would call Harley once a week to update his father on his progress, ask for advice and encouragement, and get news from the family. Finally, in 2008, Leland got a phone call from his father. It was time to come home.
One of the first things students learn at the Harley Race Wrestling Academy is how to fall.
Nineteen-year-old Xach Meister stands in the middle of the secondary practice ring at the back of the Races’ Troy arena on a Thursday in May, folds his arms across his chest, closes his eyes, and falls backward, as you’d do in a trust exercise—except he knows that there’s no one there to catch him. His broad shoulders hit the mat with a dull thud. He gets up, a little slower than the last time, and retreats to the opposite corner, where he awaits his turn to do it again. Beneath the blood-splotched canvas is a thin layer of foam on top of plywood that is suspension spring–loaded to absorb impact. All that’s of little consolation to the wrestler’s aching body. “Every single fall hurts,” says onlooker Karim Brigante, a veteran 24-year-old WLW heel who immigrated from Italy just to train here. Brigante is nursing his own sore back on the sidelines. “This is the only sport where you have to hurt yourself,” he says. “It’s tough to do, because your brain doesn’t accept this—it’s not normal.”
Next up is Meister’s best friend, Brian Greninger, also 19. Both are recent high school grads from Webb City, just outside Joplin, where he played football and Meister wrestled. But the boys dreamed of going pro, and they each saved up the $3,000 admission fee for the yearlong course and now chase that dream four-and-a-half hours one way up I-44 two or three times a week. They make the trip because they know that legends like Steamboat, “Million Dollar Man” Ted DiBiase, and “Mr. Perfect” Curt Hennig have all sent their sons here. They know that the school graduated others they grew up watching, including CM Punk and Trevor Murdoch, to the WWE. They know what the name Harley Race means in the wrestling world. “When my boys decided they wanted to get into wrestling, I wouldn’t send them anywhere else,” says DiBiase, who has known Harley since The King wrestled with his dad, Iron Mike DiBiase, in the late 1960s. “I told them, ‘If you want to learn how to wrestle, you go learn it from Harley Race.’ And if Harley says somebody’s ‘got it,’ people [in the wrestling business] believe him.”
Today is the Webb City boys’ third lesson. Greninger stands, crosses his arms, and, at the last minute, braces for the impact. “Whoa!” exclaims Leland from the adjacent ring. “Don’t put your hands down behind you—that’s the worst thing you can do,” referring to the likelihood of a sprained wrist or broken hand. “Now do it again.”
As the lone instructor, Leland must simultaneously keep an eye out for each of a handful of students in two different practice rings, monitor any pupils working out on the arena floor, and listen for sounds from the front office, where his father answers the phone, eats dinner, and chain-smokes his Marlboro Lights.
“Jason!” When a venue calls about an upcoming booking.
“Jason!” When Harley realizes that Leland screwed up the photos on a flier.
“Jason!” When Harley needs his Hamburger Helper warmed in the microwave.
For the moment, the office is quiet. Leland now returns his attention to the primary ring, where two slightly more advanced students, Aaron Roy and Rex Fults, are running through a series of basic moves that Leland has choreographed. The pair locks up in the middle of the ring, each holding the back of the other’s head. Roy grabs Fults’ left wrist and snaps it down for a wrist lock, then turns and yanks Rex over his shoulder and onto the mat in front of him. Roy then applies an arm bar, kneeling over the prone Rex while pulling back and twisting that left arm as Rex does his best to feign pain—but not enough for the instructor. Wrestling is not so much about inflicting pain on the opponent; there’s already plenty self-inflicted and incidental damage involved in the show. The key is to sell the idea of a real fight. Often, especially in these intimate arenas and halls where fans in the back row can plainly see a wrestler’s face and hear his voice, that involves an actual exchange of harmful force.
Leland halts the action, steps in, and moves Roy’s knee atop Rex’s head, pushing it toward the mat. Then Leland gently straightens Roy’s back, applying more pressure on Rex’s arm, shoulder, and neck.
“Aaaaaaah,” says Rex, no longer acting.
“See how much more that hurts now?” says Leland. The other students chuckle.
Rex: “Yes!”
Leland: “Good. Now, if I’m a bad guy…”
“Jason!”
Leland sighs and tells his students to keep working. He walks briskly to the office, sweat soaking through his faded orange Wheaties: The Breakfast of Champions T-shirt, then rolls father and wheelchair across the warehouse floor toward the bathroom.
When Harley called Leland home, in 2008, it was not so his son could reassume the Race name and take his place beside his father on the throne as heir apparent. Not yet. Harley felt that his son’s skills, though vastly improved, still needed polishing under the master’s tutelage. Leland didn’t argue.
As a result, Jason Jones, a 24-year-old billed from Charlotte, enrolled as an advanced student in the Harley Race Wrestling Academy, which was then located in Eldon, Missouri, just 10 miles from Lake of the Ozarks, far enough from anyone who might recognize Harley’s son, now a brawny 200 pounds. At the time, despite a car accident that put two metal plates and 14 screws in his hip and forced him out of big-league wrestling for good, Harley was still jumping into the practice ring as the primary instructor. His fourth wife—Leland’s stepmother, B.J.—was a retired vice president of a Kansas City bank. She used her executive experience to run both the school and the WLW. She made sure that Harley behaved and took care of himself. Meanwhile, Leland was free to just be Jason Jones, the star pupil.
That changed in late 2009, when B.J. died suddenly of pneumonia. Harley was devastated—but he didn’t have time to grieve. “She had taken care of virtually all the financial end of what we were doing,” says Harley, still mournful. “I’m a wrestler, not a banker or a politician, but if you don’t pick things up ASAP, you get so far behind that it becomes impossible to catch up. And every time you’re doing that portion of it, all the memories [of her] come back to you.”
Leland had never seen his father, his hero, so badly hurt. “She was his rock,” he says. “They’d been together for 20 years. They worked so well together, like a pulley-weight system. When you lose somebody that close, especially so unexpectedly… It hit him hard.”
In early 2010, Leland returned from a three-month tour of Japan with WLW’s cross-Pacific sister promotion, Pro Wrestling Noah, and dived into the books, learning accounting and promotions with the same swim-or-drown mentality he had brought to his training. “I initially didn’t want to do it,” he says, “but somebody had to step up, and it had to be family. I was the only one around who was actively involved.” As his father’s health began to fail, the bill for all those falls, wrecks, and surgeries finally coming due, Leland took on teaching duties, eventually becoming lead instructor.
Photography by Michael Thomas
Wrestling fans line up outside Harley Race Wrestling Arena.
Meanwhile, in the ring, Jason Jones was climbing the ropes. He won the WLW Heavyweight Championship in 2011, and that year Pro Wrestling Illustrated ranked him No. 422 on its annual Top 500 ranking, a list that included such WWE headliners as Randy Orton and John Cena. In 2012, he challenged Colt Cabana for the same NWA Heavyweight Championship his father had held (the 30-minute timed match ended in a draw). After a yearlong reign as WLW champ, he briefly lost the belt, but then he won it back in December 2012 and held it for another 170 days.
The following May, reality and kayfabe collided when WLW announced that Jones was vacating his title. A promotional video was screened at a WLW event and eventually released to fans on YouTube. Ethereal string-and-vocal music, like something out of the movie Gladiator, plays over a screen that fades in and out of black-and-white footage of Jones in the ring, in the weight room, standing beside Harley; it then cuts to a dramatic shot of Jones sitting alone in the corner of a ring and rubbing his hands, clad in a jacket and skullcap, WLW belt hanging from the top rope. All the while, Harley’s unmistakable snarl explains: My son came to me a few weeks back and said, ‘I want to be known for who I am, and I do not want to walk in the ring as Jason Jones: world’s champion.’ My son is already the best. He’s already champion. But he wanted to give it up and win it again under his name: Leland Race.
A year later, Leland “The Legacy” Race was re-crowned in the Richmond (Missouri) Community Center. Since then, Leland has lost and regained and lost the belt again, this time to Trevor Murdoch, back from his three-year run in the WWE. Of course, Leland’s immediate goal is to win the title back yet again, become a five-time WLW champion. But the real moment he’s been waiting for is that one time the arena phone rings and he answers his father’s call to find Vince McMahon’s voice on the other end of that line. “Anyone in this business tells you they don’t want to go to the WWE, it’s a bold-faced lie,” says Leland. “Everyone has that ambition. It’s getting paid to do what you love to do.”
“I do think he’s as good now as anything in WWE,” says George South, who’s been in the business for more than 30 years. “Leland’s got one heck of a résumé. Two or three trips to Japan. Eight years under Harley. Why should he have to go to a training camp? [WWE] should put him on the roster.”
“Dr. Tom” Prichard, a former wrestler who briefly trained Leland at Deep South Wrestling before moving on to work in WWE’s wrestler development system, where he helped groom the likes of Edge and Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson, agrees that Leland’s time is now. “After 13 years in the business, he’s ready to break out and do something big,” Prichard says. “He has a prime opportunity to make his break and go for it, and I think that would help Harley’s health—give him something to perk him up and look forward to.”
And what of The King’s assessment? “Truthfully, I could probably get him in with Vince a lot sooner than what I have,” says Harley, “but having him here helping me is much better for me. He’s still young enough that he can pop in with McMahon and be able to run his route there.”
Ding-ding-ding. The ringside bell sounds at 7 p.m., and the first match of Night of the Dragon is underway. As the rumble begins in the spotlit ring, many spectators are still filing through the door and milling about, searching for their seats in the darkened gallery. From his wheelchair, parked outside the office, about a dozen rows back, Harley shifts back and forth to maintain his vantage of the action. Though The King can no longer get in the ring to train hands-on, student wrestlers say that his detailed critique of their matches is still the gold-standard learning experience.
Leland is once again roving behind the scenes, now clad in black trunks, white boots, and a threadbare black T-shirt. He checks in with the merchandise table to make sure it’s stocked with cash, with the concession stand to ensure that there are plenty of hot dogs for the crockpot, with the state licensing official, and with his father and tries to keep the crowd happy—all while mentally preparing to give a main event to remember.
Meanwhile, that audience is being warmed up by the undercard acts of World League Wrestling. Much to the old-school Races’ chagrin, modern professional wrestling has become as much about the show, the pageantry, as the actual technical wrestling. Even the smallest WWE weekly TV productions feature giant video screens, lasers, pyrotechnics, and characters who more closely resemble comic book heroes and villains than athletes. There’s Goldust—real name Dustin Runnels, son of WCW legend Dusty Rhodes—an androgynous wig-and-latex–wearing oddity dubbed “The Prince of Perversion.” Until his recent departure, Goldust’s brother, Stardust (Cody Runnels), was a latex-wearing space demon. One of the biggest superstars is The Undertaker, whose persona has morphed from a Western-style mortician through a weird biker phase and finally into the Lord of Darkness, an immortal who has been buried alive at ringside—and risen. And then there are all sorts of lesser façades, matadors, luchadors, demented hillbillies, and vigilantes-turned-mercenary.
As a result, any aspiring wrestler knows that a promotion to the big time depends as much on his presentation outside the ring as on his abilities inside it. Harley and Leland say they let their students pick their own gimmicks—as long as they’re family-friendly and don’t get in the way of training. And as Night of the Dragon progresses, the cast of characters do their best to sell their homespun devices. One man has installed LED lights in the soles of his boots. They change color throughout the match—until the left boot he forgot to charge goes out halfway through the bout. Another heel declares himself “The King of CrossFit,” marching to the ring in toe shoes and headband and carrying a skull-shaped bell weight. There’s also a bearded baby-face whose shtick is merely that he’s a really, really, really nice guy, chatting with fans during the match, apologizing to the referee, and even congratulating his opponent on a nice takedown.
Leland’s only gimmick is his last name—but even that could be a tough sell in the WWE. Sure, it will give him some instant credibility, and insiders who know and respect Harley are bound to want to help him along. But there’s also that crushing weight of expectation. “From the get-go, you’re going to have to be at a higher standard,” says DiBiase, who followed his father and whose son Ted Jr. followed him into the WWE. “Even if the fans aren’t consciously judging you, they’re doing it. You have to show no fear. I told my son, ‘You’re going to have to become your own person. You don’t want to be me all over again. As soon as you walk through the curtain, people are going to judge you by who I was. When you walk through the curtain, you have to own the crowd.’”
Photography by Michael Thomas
WE Hall of Famer Ricky “The Dragon” Steamboat gives students pointers on how to apply a headlock.
Just before 9:30 p.m., after two-and-a-half hours of choreographed bedlam, it’s time for Leland to do just that. The arena goes dark. From the PA comes a thunderbolt of distorted guitar, accompanied by the lightning flash of an overhead floodlight. The house lights go up as the music blares, and the black velvet curtains part to release Leland, literally roaring from the back of the venue. He struts to the ring and holds up his hands as the ring announcer declares: “At 223 pounds, from Kansas City, Missouri, ‘The Legacy’ Leeee-land RACE!”
The crowd rises to its feet as Leland starts a slow clap, sequins sparkling from a jacket, the back of which reads: REMEMBER THE NAME. Leland quickly rolls up onto the ring and springs to his feet, pumping his arms as he gives one more mighty yawp before his opponent, “Superstar” Steve Fender, is introduced to a cascade of boos. According to the WLW storyline, Fender is an ally and tag partner of WLW champion Murdoch, the man who took the title from Leland. To get a shot at Murdoch and the title, Leland must go through Fender.
“Whup his ass, Leland!” yells a teenager from his seat at ringside as Steamboat, the guest referee, goes over the rules with the wrestlers in the middle of the ring. Then the bell rings and the two come at each other, locking up arms and heads. Fender strikes first, twisting Leland’s left arm and then pulling it back with a wrist lock. Leland yells, the pain exaggerated on his face. That arm will be a theme throughout the match, victim of arm drags, arm bars, and arm wringers, telling a story in a match—a hallmark of Harley’s orthodox teachings.
Fender leverages that wounded left wing to dominate most of the 20-minute bout. All the while, the heel taunts Leland and the crowd, telling hecklers, “Shut up, or it might be you next!” At one point, when Fender goes for the pin and only gets a two-count, he even scolds Steamboat: “Are you too old to count fast?” And later, when Fender lands his finishing move, the Brain Buster piledriver, seemingly knocking Leland out cold, Steamboat is too distracted to register a count at all.
“What are you doing?” Fender yells at the ref. Steamboat holds out his arms, almost apologetically.
Fender is having none of it. He pushes the WWE legend, spurring a collective gasp from the crowd.
Steamboat pushes back. The crowd erupts. Fender is stunned, so much so that he doesn’t seem to notice that Leland is back on his feet. The Legacy lifts the staggering Fender into a fireman carry and then drops Fender’s head onto Leland’s knee, the Go 2 Sleep, Leland’s finishing move. Leland pins Fender, still sprawled on the canvas. Steamboat quickly slaps the mat three times. The bells rings. The match is over. The fans start chanting LE-LAND! LE-LAND! LE-LAND! as Steamboat raises Leland’s left arm, which is still apparently sore.
“Ladies and gentlemen,” barks the ring announcer. “Your winner, ‘The Legacy,’ Leland Race!”
Forty minutes later, the arena is quiet. A few hired hands stack chairs and sweep the concrete floor. Harley is smoking back in the office. And a middle-aged man with a mustache waits with his young son outside the locker room. When the boy sees Leland emerge, still wearing the trunks and boots but now draped with a towel, his eyes light up.
Leland first addresses an employee, who hands him a white envelope of cash, the night’s take. Then the father asks Leland for a photo with his son.
“Absolutely,” says Leland, stuffing the envelope into the back waistband of his trunks. He kneels beside the boy and gives an earnest but tired smile for the camera. “Thanks, buddy,” he tells the boy. And then to the father, as the pair leaves, “Thanks for coming out.”
Leland sits and takes a deep breath. He’s been at this for 15 years, longer than some entire wrestling careers. Though he still feels he’s learning here, he knows that the time is fast approaching when he’ll have to move. He has outgrown this place. “There comes a point when you are ready to take on a different challenge,” he later says. “I need to move on with my career, and I can’t do it here.”
Tonight, Leland’s job is far from finished. His first instinct is to grab some chairs and help clean up, keep things running. But when someone tells him it’s 10:30 p.m., his mind shifts to his father, waiting in the office. It’s been a long day. The old man has to be tired. It’s time to get him home.
A couple of years ago, when Harley was in a care facility rehabbing after one of his surgeries, Leland saw a lot of older people whose family and friends barely visited, let alone helped or provided care for them. Others seemed completely abandoned. “It’s almost like they’re giving up on them,” he later says. “I don’t give up. I’m not quitting on him. As a child, your entire life, your parents take care of you, and then there’s a point where the roles switch. I do that without any regret. He needs help, and I will do that.”
Leland walks to the office, gets behind his father’s wheelchair, and starts rolling toward the door. With luck, he will get his father to bed and be back here by 11 p.m. There’s still a lot of work to be done.
