Wrestling: the Art on Canvas : Instruction: Sun Valley gymnasium provides the training ground for all the might moves.

A possible story line for “The Wonder Years”: Little Kevin Arnold has a dream. He gives a wad of cash to a huge pro wrestler in an arena filled with the sound of screaming fans. The wrestler gets into the ring and whom do we see quivering in the corner but Kevin’s obnoxious sibling, Wayne the bully, whose mission in life is to tease, torment and torture his helpless kid brother.

Insert a shot of the sleeping Kevin flashing his patented “cute smile.” Then a bell sounds and the wrestler descends on Wayne, grabs him by the scruff of his scrawny neck and smashes his empty head on a turnbuckle. Wayne totters like a drunk before an enormous hand yanks him off his feet and then slams his pathetic body to the mat. The carnage ends with Wayne being bounced off the ropes like a cue ball and then cruelly clotheslined onto his back, nearly snapping his spine.

As the wrestler falls on the carcass, a vengeful Kevin leans over and slaps the canvas three times.

If there ever is a scene like this on “The Wonder Years,” Jason Hervey will be ready. The 17-year-old Hervey, who plays Wayne on the ABC sitcom, has been studying the pro wrestler’s art for the past few months in a recently opened gym named Slammers. How much has he learned? The above ring scenario--complete with sound effects--actually happened, and Hervey managed to escape with nothing more than a welt.

Inside Verne Langdon’s office, the incessant roar of 10,000 screaming pro wrestling fans is coming through the walls. It finally sends him over the edge.

“I got to ask these people to quiet down,” he says, lifting his powerful 6-foot-2, 240-pound body from his desk chair. “They’re driving me crazy.”

Langdon disappears through a door. “Knock it off!” he yells. Immediately, the noise ceases and Langdon comes back to his office wearing a smug look.

“I get upset when they don’t listen to me,” he says with a wry grin.

Langdon, of course, is only joking, one of his favorite pastimes. Nobody can silence real pro wrestling fans without threatening them with water hoses. What Langdon did was turn off the stereo that was playing a tape of 10,000 pro wrestling fans. Langdon enjoys pretending they’re real.

“I wish they’d clean up after themselves when they leave,” he says, continuing the charade.

No wonder Langdon likes to twist reality. The put-on is an essential component in pro wrestling, and teaching people to be or act like pro wrestlers is what Langdon does for a living. He owns Slammers, “the University of Professional Wrestling, the very first of its kind in the U. S., if not the world,” Langdon says. The 2,000-square-foot gym, with a 16-foot ceiling--”so you can jump off the ropes comfortably”--regulation 18-by-18-foot pro ring and muted gray and maroon walls, is located in a Sun Valley industrial park.

But Langdon’s involvement in pro wrestling goes far beyond Slam U., as he also calls Slammers. A self-styled “Renaissance man” with a pro wrestling passion since boyhood, Langdon, 47, has complemented the gym with what he is billing as the “only pro wrestling museum in the country,” a collection that includes hundreds of posters, 8-by-10 glossies and life-size photos of all the old-time wrestling greats.

But the jewel in the collection is memorabilia belonging to Gorgeous George, the legendary “human orchid” whose death in 1963 commanded a front-page banner headline in the Herald Examiner. Among the items housed in a large glass showcase inside the gym are George’s sequined wrestling robe and the pajamas he supposedly died in, all donated to Langdon by ex-stripper Beverly Styles, George’s girlfriend.

Although Slammers has a $3,500, six-month pro course--taught by The Fabulous Moolah, former world champion and “our dean of students,” Langdon says--Langdon also built the gym for people who love to wrestle and never had a place to act out their fantasies. People such as himself.

“When I was growing up, I was thrown out of the house more than any other kid in the country,” says Langdon, who was raised in San Jose. “Here, you can do those things that used to get you in trouble when you were young, like rolling around on the carpets or cutting up in the hallways at school.”

Langdon rents Slammers’ ring (there’s also a collegiate mat) for $35 an hour. If necessary, he will find you somebody to wrestle. If nobody’s around, he will climb through the ropes and teach you the same techniques--”like how to get through a match without getting your neck broken”--that made Hulk Hogan what he is today. And although Langdon never wrestled professionally, he has learned all the right moves.

“I’ve been wrestling like the pros since I was 5,” Langdon says. “When the other kids were out playing football or baseball, I was wrestling.” When he was 13, his father, a Bay Area oral surgeon, began taking him to the Wednesday night matches at the old San Jose Civic Auditorium. Langdon also has a group of nine friends with whom he has been wrestling for the past 20 years. “And I know a great number of pros,” some of whom have shared with him “little tricks of the trade,” he says.

Langdon says he also received this pearl of wrestling wisdom from Gorgeous George: “Win if you can, lose if you must, but always cheat.”

Langdon seems to take boyish delight in getting in the ring. “Body slams for fun,” he calls it. When a customer wants to wrestle, Langdon takes off his jeans and sweat shirt, sweeps back his shoulder-length blond hair and wears nothing but black tights in the ring.

He’ll probably put on a mask if asked.

Langdon rents out the ring for children’s birthday parties and also provides free time for the kids who live next door in a trailer park. He says he has about 25 steady customers a week, including Hervey. Langdon usually wrestles men close to his own size, but he gladly makes an exception for the 5-foot-6, 134-pound Hervey, who was called “the Wonder brother America loves to loathe” in a recent People magazine article.

After what appears to be a brutal session with Langdon, Hervey crawls out of the ring and says, “I have to have a screw loose to fall on my back like this.” Then he picks up a metal folding chair--”conveniently placed around the ring,” Langdon says--and flings it at Langdon, who falls over backward. Hervey then stands over the stricken Langdon, squeezes his knees around Langdon’s head and jumps up and down. Langdon yowls, rolling over in pain (“The grunts and groans are music to my ears,” he says later.).

Hervey’s move is called the camel clutch. Slam U. also teaches such techniques as the grape vine, the step-over toe hold, the flying tackle, the chicken wing, the sleeper hold, the Boston crab, the power slam and “the Ozzie . . . oooops, I mean the full nelson,” Langdon jokes. Puffing after nearly 45 minutes in the ring with Hervey, Langdon anticipates a bystander’s comment, pats his ample belly and says, “Not bad for an old fat man, eh?” Then he pirouettes and says, “Baryshnikov taught me that. Irving Baryshnikov, that is.”

In opening the gym, Langdon has benefited from several serendipities--a hunt for Gorgeous George artifacts ended when he ran into a friend who happened to know that Styles had them--and meeting Hervey was one of them. A few months ago, Langdon, who lives in Hollywood, was driving his black ’87 Corvette on Laurel Canyon Boulevard when Hervey pulled his cream-colored Corvette alongside.

Hervey, the godson of pro wrestling villain Terry Funk, had seen “Slam Me” on Langdon’s license plate. At a stoplight, he asked Langdon about it and Langdon told him about Slammers. Hervey’s reaction: “I’m there.”

Hervey, who lives with his parents in West Los Angeles, arrives at Slammers with his father, Al, himself a longtime pro wrestling buff. To wrestle at Slammers, one must sign a five-page liability release. Minors such as Hervey need a parent to sign the release and to attend every session. Hervey, it should be pointed out, also has a wrestling story line for “The Wonder Years.” He calls it “Kevin’s Worst Nightmare,” and you can guess who does what to whom.

Langdon, who has worked at various jobs in the entertainment industry for the past 27 years, has depended on word of mouth and his sprightly newsletter to drum up business. Eventually, he hopes to franchise Slammers in major cities and charge admission for the museum. He admits that his gym/museum would fit in nicely on Hollywood Boulevard, but the “rent’s cheaper out here,” he says, adding that he doesn’t expect tour buses to make the seven-mile trek from Hollywood and deposit hordes of retired Iowa schoolteachers on his doorstep. But that doesn’t bother him.

“Everything I wanted to do in my life has come true,” he says, “and this is my dream.”