In Port Hope, the smell of hotdogs fills the air, and the colourful lights of the midway flicker in the night sky. Chris Gray, 34, long brown hair slicked back with conditioner for a sweaty effect, stands quietly behind a tent, a brawny figure in camouflage accessories. A little girl in a polka-dot dress, roughly the size of his leg, finds him, and they high-five.

This day started hundreds of kilometres away, in Park Hill, Ont., where Gray awoke before his children to work out. Then he drove to London to teach English literature at an adult high school, and then another four hours in the car, to tell the oldest story in the world: good versus evil.

Gray is an independent wrestler, and works for more than a dozen companies performing everywhere from small-town fairs to large arena shows.

Tonight at the Port Hope fall fair, he is wrestling for Classic Championship Wrestling, an Ontario company that takes its family-friendly soap opera of body slams on the road. The promoter has a narrative arc in mind but relies on Gray to help fill in the wrestling parts — he’s like a producer. Gray sits down with each pair of wrestlers as they arrive in the locker room to chat about ideas that match their shticks — maybe a head butt here, an over-the-top insult there. He makes sure there isn’t repetition. A wrestling match has to go up and down. Sometimes bad guys have to win.

Tonight, Gray is fighting in the title match against Todd “The Law” Shaw. Shaw is the villain tonight, a cop with a nightstick. Both men are in their 30s, with two kids at home: Gray — wrestling as lovable redneck Cody Deaner — is known for his deep connection with the crowd. Shaw, hair closely shaved, is the rookie, nervous about the talking parts, worried he might stutter if he thinks too much.

Before the bout, the promoter, Jay McDonald, offers suggestions to Shaw to ease his nerves:

“I’m going to hit Deaner with my finisher,” McDonald suggests, a mischievous smile on his face. “I’m gonna win my belt, and I’m gonna go home and celebrate with a dozen doughnuts.”

Shaw hates doughnuts. Not just the cop cliché — he hates doughnuts.

“Make sure you mention those doughnuts or you’re fired,” Gray chimes in, smiling.

“I hate you,” Shaw says as he paces.

“Then I’ll DDT you,” Gray continues, referencing the inverted headlock impact move made famous by Jake the Snake, “and I’ll have 12 kids come in the ring and each one will shove a doughnut in your mouth.” Shaw shakes his head.

Later, Shaw heads for the ring and tells the crowd his prediction for doughnut-laced victory. Gray waits for his cue on deck, which is just behind a tent with sunglasses for sale, and the little girl finds him.

Hand in hand, they approach the ring, and more children follow, engulfing him.

“He’s great at what he does, one of the best in Canada,” says Cyril Richards, a Halifax promoter.

Gray circles the ring, and his voice turns into the friendly growl of Cody Deaner. This is the part that feels like jumping out a plane with a parachute, relatively assured of safety but not certain what will happen in tonight’s instalment of pile drivers and moral lessons. He asks the kids who they like and who they hate, and they follow him like the Pied Piper. This is the controlled adrenalin rush, the feeling he chases — despite the wear on his body, the long drives, the time away from his family.

The fight hasn’t started, but the kids already know who to bet on.

In Hulk’s loud footsteps

When Chris Gray was a kid in the 1980s, Hulkamania was running wild, brother, in his family’s wood-panelled living room in the beachside village of Port Bruce, Ont.

The second oldest of four children (another sibling would come years later), Gray was the ham who loved standing on his head, mimicking the outlandish wrestling announcers, and idolizing Hulk Hogan. He was wiry, but sure of himself.

“He used to wrestle the teddy bear, throw that on the floor, jump on it from the couch, do holds on it and finally, the poor bear had no stuffing left in the middle,” says his mother, Susan Gibson.

Gray made shirts out of No Frills grocery bags, and walked into his living room, ripping them off in homage to Hulk Hogan.

“There didn’t have to be an audience necessarily, except in his head,” his mom says.

Gray’s parents divorced, and he moved to Aylmer, where he excelled at high school sports, but he never went in for wrestling offered at school. It was too boring — a game of millimetres — compared to the wrestling he fell in love with as a kid.

During his last year of high school the teachers were on work-to-rule. He took his extra free time as a sign, and every night he drove three hours to Niagara Falls to train to be a professional wrestler at a school there that has since closed.

On his first day, 18-year-old Gray — much lighter, and with short hair — learned how to take a fall. The next day, he couldn’t get out of bed, and had new respect for his heroes.

“Honestly, go down into your living room, on the hardwood floor, and throw yourselves backwards, and see if it knocks the wind out of you.”

Gray wanted to pursue his wrestling career full time, but compromised with his dad. He studied English and social science at Western while beginning his wrestling career. He then went to teachers college, following in his mother’s footsteps.

In 2000, he started wrestling as Completely Cody Steele, an arrogant, high-flying bleach-blond wrestler who could be villain or hero. As Steele, he wrestled a few times for the WWE, once on television, in Rochester, N.Y., an unforgettable moment for the kid from Port Bruce. He never got a full-time contract, so he took a risk and changed his character.

Cody Deaner, a mulleted go-hard who wouldn’t be out of place on the TLC show Duck Dynasty, came into the world in 2005. The character was closer to Gray’s own life growing up in rural Ontario.

“All the most popular wrestlers are just extensions of their personality with the volume turned up,” he says. His voicemail doesn’t make a distinction: “You’ve reached Chris Gray or Cody Deaner,” the message says in his regular Chris Gray voice.

As Deaner, he wrestled on Spike TV with TNA Impact Wrestling in 2009, and then returned to the independent wrestling scene, working across Canada and the U.S., with at least a different dozen companies, playing fairs, legion halls, hockey rinks and college campuses.

As an independent wrestler, he books his own shows and sets his rates. When he was a rookie, he often wrestled for free and was happy to make $40, even if it barely covered his travel.

But those days are gone. He’s a known draw, holds the championship belts with four different companies and he’s “well out of the $40 range,” he says. He has to be shrewd if he’s leaving his family.

“I come home with a pile of cash that makes my wife smile,” he says. “It’s financially worth my while.”

This past winter, he produced a video to get the attention of Global Force Wrestling, a new company founded by former WWE wrestler Jeff Jarrett. Gray has wrestled several matches as Cody Deaner.

“Cody is a unique character who’s relatable and who really connects with fans,” Jarrett wrote in an email.

Global Force is working on a television deal in North America, and Gray has a lot of faith in the growing league. He hopes he’ll be back on television again, which increases his demand and value. Getting back on television “means everything,” he says.

‘Cody Deaner is so hot’

When Chris Gray first met his wife in person, it was intermission in London, Ont., and he was wearing Daisy Duke cut-offs, the pockets drooping below the hem, and a fanny pack with a box of cigarettes poking out.

“I gave her a free autographed picture of Cody Deaner,” he says, smiling at his wife in their Parkhill home, which backs on to farmland.

Rachel was not a wrestling fan — “you still aren’t,” he says — but was struck by his gentle, kind eyes. A hairstylist, she saw past the mullet and handlebar moustache: “When he was wrestling it was different,” she says. “He was a character.”

Gray’s mother understands. Her son likes the attention of the crowd, but there is a quieter, more sensitive side that not everybody sees.

At social gatherings, parties, he doesn’t bring up his wrestling. If it comes up, he’ll talk about it.

“This is work and I love it, but it still is work,” he says.

Gray met Rachel online on Plenty of Fish back in 2007. She messaged him that she’d come to his match, but a lot of people say that and never do. So he was surprised when she showed up with most of her family holding a sign: “Cody Deaner is so hot right now.”

He was in a tag team, and they were the bad guys. His partner wanted to rip the sign out of Rachel’s hands, but Gray stopped him

“I pulled him aside under my breath so the fans didn’t hear, and said, ‘Don’t rip that sign. I might marry that girl.’”

“Well, you didn’t say that,” Rachel says.

“I said, date that girl. I like her, I might date that girl.”

They eventually married, and settled into this house built by Rachel’s late father.

Wedding photos and drawings line the walls and the kids happily show off their fading temporary tattoos of princesses and superheroes. Life outside the ring is much more relaxed. Tonight, the only tension is whether Abel, 2, can have more pizza, and River, 4, less crust. And the spilled glass of milk that Gray saw coming.

When they married, people assumed he’d give up wrestling. Same when his daughter, River, was born. He never considered it.

Every day when Gray comes home from teaching, his son, asks to wrestle. Only 2, he has distilled it to its essence: “loud” and “bounce.” When he isn’t wrestling, Sundays are spent at church, and Gray volunteers with the youth group Monday night. He wrestles year round, and after the kids are in bed, he’ll shoot and edit his own videos at home or he’ll network on social media and talk to fans. In April, he was asked to come to Emalee Mayhew’s birthday party.

Mayhew lives in Comber, and first saw Cody Deaner two years ago. He asked all the kids to dance around a wrestler he had body-slammed in a pile of dirt. Emalee, a little shy, joined in, chanting yeah, yeah, yeah.

“He’s just a really fun guy to be around and stuff,” Emalee says.

She has posters of Deaner on her walls, next to horse pictures and drawings made by her little sister. Her parents and grandparents thought they’d chip in to bring him to Comber as a birthday gift.

When he came to the door as Deaner, Emalee — hair dyed a brilliant shade of red like her favourite female wrestling duo, the Bella Twins — started crying. Gray was taken aback: “In her mind, I’m Hulk Hogan. To me, I’m just Chris with my wife and kids.”

The photos show him arm-wrestling Emalee, holding up his belts, and talking to the preteen girls on a couch. Emalee told him that sometimes other kids poke fun at her for liking wrestling. He told her to never give up on her dreams, to stick with them, no matter what anyone says.

Grandmother Ellie Mayhew was impressed: “I could not believe this man could sit here and talk to these 11-year-old girls,” she says.

He answered their questions, posed for photos, and stayed longer than he was meant to.

“He is a very humble guy even though the outer layer of him is rough and tough and he’s got the grizzly beard … he’s just like one of us,” says Emalee’s mom, Deb Mayhew. “I know he’s not this ginormous huge celebrity, but in my kids’ eyes — me watching my kids get so excited brings tears to my eyes. It’s just totally worth it, bringing them to see him as many times as they want.”

From singlet to Eng. lit

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In September 2012, Annett Filler, then 42, was sitting nervously in a classroom at the Strathroy Adult Learning Centre. She had moved to Canada from Germany more than a decade before, and she wanted to upgrade her skills and take a Grade 11 English class. Everyone was younger than she was, including the long-haired teacher at the front of the room who was trying to break the ice by getting the class to talk about their hobbies. He went first. Outside of the teaching world, he was a wrestler.

Filler loved classical music. She was slightly terrified.

Another student, Lee Keeler, remembers the same thing: “He said, ‘If you think getting in front of a whole room full of your peers is embarrassing, try getting in front of the world in a little pink Speedo.”

Wrestling didn’t come up afterward, but the classroom learned pretty quickly that Gray was an outside-the-box kind of guy.

He told the students that no matter what stage of life they were in, they were all on the same footing, Keeler says, and he read the room like the crowd at a match. Gray liked to make points with a long ruler in hand. When he saw Filler flinch, he stopped using it. “I have never met someone so respectful,” she says.

She regrets that she didn’t tell him how uncomfortable one reading assignment made her feel. She was from East Germany, and the dystopian tale of the Hunger Games hit too close to home.

When they cleared the air, Gray encouraged her to come back and finish her diploma. She had only been planning to take the one course for a personal support worker program.

That next year, he made sure she was comfortable with all of the assignments, modifying them when necessary. She graduated.

“He put all this work into one single student,” she says.

Gray loves teaching adults, but he’s not sure what September will bring. He mostly has short-term contracts in London and Strathroy. He also works as a supply teacher. It’s unstable, but he needs that flexibility for wrestling.

He knows people think it’s crazy not to want the full-time job with a pension. But it’s not what he dreamed of when he was a kid.

“When I was 5, I wanted to be Hulk Hogan,” he says. “It was all I ever wanted to be.”

‘The risks are very real’

Sitting in the kitchen of his Parkhill home, hair tied back in a ponytail, Gray rubs the back of his neck. The other day he had to stop doing dishes because his back was on fire.

The human body was not built to collide with the steel-and-wood skeleton of the wrestling ring, and this is the “wear and tear” of the job, he says.

Gray hasn’t broken any bones, or torn any muscles, but he feels it. He was once told that taking a fall in the ring is like getting whiplash in a minor car accident.

“If you go to a good, credible wrestling school, that’s one of the things they warn you about,” says Jordan Marques, a retired Toronto wrestler. “So you kind of know what you’re getting into right from day one.”

Marques, 31, loved the feeling of being in the ring, but had to retire after a bad concussion — his seventh in a 15-year career — sidelined him. (He still loves the sport and co-ordinates Lucha Toronto, a Mexican-style league.) He says in the last five years, the wrestling world has learned more about concussions, and people are taking better care of themselves.

Gray has never had a diagnosed concussion, but has likely had a handful of minor ones.

“The risks are very real,” Gray says. “That’s why wrestlers get offended when people use the F-word and call it fake.”

With 16 years behind him, Gray has never been more in demand. He likes being an independent wrestler because he can control his own schedule, and time with his family.He and his wife are expecting their third child in August. He has hopes of touring the world, and wrestling on television again.

“My goal has always been to make a living doing what I love,” he says. “That’s all making it means to me.”

Marques says a lot of wrestlers are introverted, and focus on their skills to avoid the speaking parts. Gray’s charisma is only matched by a “handful of guys” in Ontario, he says.

“No matter where he is, he could be downtown Toronto, he could be up north, he’s one of those guys, you can put him out there and give him 20 minutes, and he’ll have the crowd chanting whatever he wants those entire 20 minutes,” Marques explains.

Lots of people have asked for the secret, and Gray says it really is simple: if you want the kids to have fun, have fun first. Read the crowd to sense the mood, project the feeling you want them to have. Go all in.

Not everyone gets the chance to follow a dream, says his mother: “Life goes on, and they just follow a path where there is no risk involved, and to me it’s this risky dream-chasing part of him that I think is admirable.”

Back in Port Hope, away from his family and classroom, he taunts The Law, along with 50 cheering children.

The Law covers his ears, and stumbles around, cowering like someone who’s had too much to drink and doesn’t want to hear any more of your criticism. “Shut up!” The Law screams, pointing around the ring at the children who gleefully watch his torment. The match ends in a crescendo of shrieks, as Deaner administers the DDT, and the loudest child is given the honour of making sure The Law is truly down for the count.

All that is good is restored in the universe.

The characters

Rick McEachran, 36(Ricky James)

Wrestling: 19 years on and off

Home: Ridgetown, Ont.

Sometimes, when he’s the heel, McEachran brings his daughter along and picks on her, never revealing that she’s in on it. “Kids are like gasoline if you get ’em going,” he says, noting that if you insult a kid, some of them get carried away returning the insults, and you have to move on pretty quickly and not linger. The crowd always loves to pick on a villain, and “you gotta be able to top it right quick; otherwise you’re just another guy,” he says. Since that fall night in Port Hope, he’s also been the good guy, and it’s much better for selling merchandise. McEachran has had several injuries, but hopes to have a few more years to enjoy wrestling. “I’m so sick of people doing what they don’t love in life,” he says. He loves the energy, that kids know his name and want his autograph. “Then you go home and I have to get my own kid on the bus Monday morning and no one gives a crap.”

Julia Nulis, 30 (Persephone Vice)

Wrestling: 10 years

Home: Ottawa

Nulis works in the health-care field. Some of her co-workers have watched her videos on YouTube, surprised at seeing warm, friendly Nulis berating and beating people. “They’ll say, ‘You’re so mean!’” The character of Persephone Vice is a part of who she is: “A side that nobody gets to see in reality, all those pent-up feelings you get when you’re angry, that’s her.” Wrestling keeps her sane. “I do my best to get out to as many wrestling shows as I can.”

Adam Filangeri, 31 (Phil Atlas, Black Bushi)

Wrestling: 13 years

Home: Windsor

Filangeri is one of those guys who always knew they wanted to be wrestlers. He began training at 18 and spent two-and-a-half years in Japan with All Japan Pro Wrestling, where his masked character, Black Bushi, debuted. Now that he’s a bit older, Filangeri, who is a personal trainer, needs to limber up before the match. “When I was a kid I never stretched, I felt like I was unstoppable. Now, I’m an old man,” he said in Port Hope, where his back was bothering him, but he wrestled as two characters, one bad (a “heel”) and one good (a “face”).

Todd Shaw, 34 (The Law)

Wrestling: two years

Home: Chatham, Ont.

Shaw got his start wrestling with friends in backyard shows in Chatham, trained in his early 20s, but considers his career beginning a few years ago, when his two daughters were a little older. Shaw, who works as a mould maker, said wrestling someone like Cody Deaner is nerve-racking. “They’re at a higher level than you are. You don’t want them to lower their game; you want to raise your game to that level, so they’ll speak highly of you.” He tries to think about the basics, and go with the flow, and get into a quiet place before the match. After the Port Hope show, a little girl came up to him in tears because she was afraid of him after his villainous turn in the ring. He gave her a free 8-by-10: “I didn’t want her to be petrified of the local police.”