May Floor Fans of Heavyweight Wrestling History

The museum door swung open and the curator welcomed the guest inside, where he gouged the visitor’s eyes, picked him up by the neck and crotch and slammed him onto the lobby carpet. Climbing onto his desk, he plunged, knees first, onto the stunned man’s midsection and then hoisted a folding chair and . . . .

OK, OK. None of that stuff really happened.

But maybe it should have.

Because this is a visit to the World Wrestling Museum and Hall of Fame.

The museum can be found tucked inside Slammers Wrestling Gym, in the genteel section of Sun Valley, hard by the auto junkyards (including the interestingly named Hooper’s Rear End Exchange). The gym is home to a school called Slam U, offering training for those who dream of the day they can get paid for having a 375-pound berserker sit upon their heads and tie vital organs into square knots.

The museum, which has attracted about 500 visitors in two years, consists of six glass display cases and rows of posters trumpeting fights across the nation.

One from the 1930s advertises a battle in downtown Yuma between the Yellow Terror and Alex Kasboski. Other posters feature the legends of the sport, including 500-pound Haystack Calhoun, whose wrestling ability consisted pretty much of falling onto an opponent who failed to foresee the negative aspects of lying down in front of a man who weighed a quarter of a ton.

Also growling from the posters are Bobo Brazil, that head-butting maniac; champion Bruno Sammartino, the Italian monster who is now a wrestling broadcaster; Apache Pistol Pete; Buddha Khan, and others who never met a headlock they didn’t like.

More than a hundred photographs of wrestlers, most of them signed by the terminators themselves, line the walls, each with a message to Slammers Gym. Wild woman Suzie Sexton, posing with a scowl on her face and wearing a wrestling gown with a neckline that plunges just short of her wrestling boots, urges admirers to “Slam This! Love, Suzie.”

There is Abdullah the Butcher, his head bleeding profusely from what appears to have been a direct hit by a cruise missile.

There is a frothing man called The Beast, reminding everyone to “Stay Mean,” as he crushes a human skull in his hands. The Beast is old and retired now. Lives in a condo in Florida.

Hey, even Beasts slow down.

There is the grotesquely hulking Zeus, the kind of guy who probably misjudges a door on occasion and opens it from the hinged side. There is George (The Animal) Steele, whose entire body except for his head is covered in thick, black hair and who made the following thoughtful notation on his photo: “Hey Slammers.”

And there is Norman The Lunatic, who looks aptly named, in a wild-eyed pose and hair that seems to have been last trimmed by a horrible lumber mill accident. Norman The Lunatic is wearing hospital psychiatric unit clothing and two different shoes, but still had the presence of mind to note on his picture, “To Slammers Gym. Best Wishes, Norman.”

Lunatics say the sweetest things.

But the real attraction in the museum is the wing devoted entirely to one man. The one, the only, that 250-pound package of muscle and women’s underwear, Gorgeous George.

It was George who single-handedly (a manicured hand, by the way) changed wrestling from a sport in which slobbering men with big necks pounded each other somewhat senseless into what it is today--a spectacle in which men and women and midgets with big necks and publicity agents and makeup and sequined costumes go through the motions of pounding each other somewhat senseless.

“There was only one Gorgeous George,” enthuses Verne Langdon, owner of Slammers and a pro wrestling instructor. Langdon, a bright and articulate man in his late 40s who got into the spirit of the thing by letting his hair grow past his shoulders and dying it blonde, founded the gym and the museum in 1989. He speaks in reverent tones of all of the grapplers who have knee-dropped their way across history.

But Gorgeous George rose above them all.

Nicknamed “The Human Orchid” (as if a guy who legally changed his name from George Wagner to Gorgeous George needed a nickname), Gorgeous sent the machismo of the 1940s into shock when he first appeared, his dyed-blond hair set in beautiful waves and his body covered in lacy, frilly gowns, dresses and robes. This guy made Liberace look like a New York City sewer worker coming off a 12-hour underground shift, and paved the way for gender-bending entertainers for years to come, from Alice Cooper to Boy George.

One photo captures Gorgeous in full splendor, blond hair permed and waved, nails polished, a stunning orchid pinned to a three-tiered, white lace gown. It could be a promotion picture for the film, “Prom Dates From Hell.”

But gosh, how this delicately dressed fella could wrestle! “He was the best,” Langdon said. “Simply the best. No one could touch him.”

Of course, dressed as he was, only a homicidal couturier would want to touch him.

Enshrined in a glass case is a purple silk robe adorned by hand-painted orchids, the robe Gorgeous George was wearing when he died at 42 in a Los Angeles hospital on Christmas Day, 1963, leaving the world of American sports a much different place than he found it.

“This place is unique,” said Langdon. “It is the only place of its kind in the world. It is the Smithsonian Institute of wrestling.”

And if you want to argue with him, just give him a minute to climb onto the top rope. And you might want to protect your eyes and keep your legs together.