Published in the Quad-City Times on Nov. 3, 2023

It was an hour from showtime at the Community Center in Blue Grass, Iowa, which hosted SCW Pro wrestling, the “premier” Eastern Iowan professional wrestling company, Saturday night. 

On the building’s front steps, loyal fans camped in lawn chairs and braved blistering weather, hoping for a front row seat. Inside, the wrestling talent was throwing mock haymakers and pacing inside the ropes.

Ring announcer Alex McCarthy took strides around the facility, dressed in a three-piece pumpkin suit and preparing for the Halloween-themed wrestling event. Saturday night, he worked double duty as both ring announcer and mid-fight commentator, but that’s not his only role with SCW Pro. 

“Nobody understands what Alex actually does from a wrestler’s perspective,” said a man who wrestles as Mason Beck. “If the ring announcer sucks, it totally kills the whole ambience of the room.”

“But he does so much more than ring announcing — he helps with running the damn show.”

McCarthy has been with SCW Pro for almost seven years. He had been a fan of wrestling in the region and noticed that it was hard to find coverage of the Quad-Cities events. He started covering SCW Pro and that turned into the chance to fill in as an occasional commentator.

Now he’s part of the brand’s identity, and helps to orchestrate the wrestling storylines for each of the 30 or more SCW Pro events a year. 

Storytelling comes naturally to McCarthy, who minored in theater at Loras College in Dubuque, has written over 80 short plays and has taught theater for 11 years at the Creative Arts Academy of the Quad-Cities in Davenport. 

“It’s all performance,” he said. “Wrestling is something I’ve always loved and been drawn to because it’s just such a dramatic form of performance, almost on the borderline of overdramatic.”

McCarthy can’t remember a time when he didn’t love wrestling. He had Hulk Hogan merchandise before he was a year old, and first saw professional wrestling live in Cedar Rapids when he was five.

Teaching theater and announcing multiple wrestling events a month can be a tough time commitment, McCarthy said, but it’s worth it.

“Storytelling, theater, wrestling, writing — if you could have told 10-year-old me that I’m going to be getting to do all of those things,” he said. “I really get to live all of my dreams.”

Lucky for McCarthy, his dreams mesh well. He’s able to take teaching strategies from his theater classes and implement them into wrestling preparation. Or he can take lessons learned in the ring, and use them in the classroom. 

“Having a theatrical background, he’s able to take the techniques that he uses when teaching theater and bring it here and help with the character development and things like that with our younger wrestlers,” said the owner-operator of SCW Pro, who wrestles as Marek Brave. “It’s very similar work, theater and wrestling. This is athletic theater.”

But as far as athletic theater goes, this isn’t the Harlem Globetrotters. Sometimes the villain wins. 

On a stage and in the ring, there is skill in convincing an audience of the story’s legitimacy. At the SCW Pro event on Saturday in Blue Grass, it was easy to wonder whether something was real or not. Referees get caught in the crossfire, and there are real and fake spats with audience members, who turn around laughing when it’s all said and done.

McCarthy may know the plot outline, but you can’t always tell. He sells the role as convincingly as anyone fighting. When 20-year wrestling veteran Johnny Wisdom announced his retirement on Saturday, McCarthy stood in the ring corner with his face in his palms.

“That was unexpected,” McCarthy mourned from the ring. “But we’ll have to move forward.”

But even the retirement was theater — later in the evening, Wisdom returned to surprise attack the overall-clad Chuck Brewster. And when the ring floor claps like thunder from an acrobatic body slam, McCarthy’s commentary is the exclamation point.

“The ring announcer sort of serves as the host, but they’re not the main performer,” McCarthy said. “You have to figure out how to take that energy, transfer it to the wrestlers, keep the excitement on them and keep the crowd up.” 

When the doors opened a half hour before Saturday night’s event started, the fans in line outside piled in. Nu-metal music blared from the speakers, and McCarthy crawled into the ring with his microphone in hand. 

Fans chanted, “SCW!” 

Then, like any great stage narrator, McCarthy started the show.