Luchadores were afraid to fight me not because of my strength or skill but they were afraid of the fans recalled

“Luchadores were afraid to fight me, not because of my strength or skill but they were afraid of the fans,” recalled the priest in an interview with Micahael Pazt of Slam Wrestling. “They would shout out, ‘You can’t fight a priest!’ and they would throw tomatoes, garbage and even coins at them!”When this remarkable figure made his last testimonial at the Arena in Mexico City, the entire Mexican wrestling fraternity turned out and applauded. If it weren’t for my children, there would have been no reason to fight.” Father Sergio’s identity was eventually leaked when one of his colleagues, Daniel Garcia, the legendary Huracan Ramirez, attended a mass given by the good father and the news of his identity spread. I was so angry, so incensed, I thought there ought to be better priests in this world to help people like me.” Soon the young man was accepted by a Spanish order and dedicated his life to God, but it wasn’t until he saw a young street kid sleeping rough under a bridge in Veracruz, that Father Sergio found his path and began his orphanage at Teotihuacan, just outside Mexico City, where no child, no matter the circumstance, was ever turned away.”I never knew where the next meal was coming from,” he explained “So I became a professional wrestler because I had a cause. “The day I hit rock bottom, I went to see a priest for help,” he continued “He chased me out of the church. “The fans, the impresarios, thought my nom de guerre was a joke, like all the other characters we impersonate in the ring.”One of 18 children born to poverty, Benitez had little chance for education and so gravitated to the port of Veracruz, fraternised with pimps and prostitutes and got heavily into drugs. But in real life, Fray Tormenta is a real priest who, like the fictional Nacho Libre, donned the leotard in order to feed the children he had found abandoned on the streets of Mexico City.

“No one would have taken me seriously as a wrestler had they known I was a priest,” explained the wrestler, whose real name is Father Sergio Gutierrez Benitez. A professional luchador, Tormenta fought for 23 years, until 2005, and survived 4,000 bouts while remaining incognito inside his golden cape, yellow leotard and red-and-yellow mask. The whole aesthetic really appeals to me.” Indeed, the director’s latest film, the comedy Nacho Libre, stars Jack Black in the title role as a monastic priest who looks after orphaned children by day and moonlights by night as a somewhat inadequate luchador in order to earn money to feed his impoverished waifs. “It just hit me as something so strange and wild,” adds Hess “It was a story I really wanted to tell. The concept is so outrageous.”Strange and wild it certainly is, but this totally implausible story is, in fact, based on the life of one of Mexico’s most beloved grapplers – the legendary Fray Tormenta (Friar Storm). A local hero, Barrio has disrupted the Mexican Congress and led a successful demonstration in support of housing for the impoverished; he is now regarded as a respected national figure and representative of the left-wing opposition, even though he still wears his pants over his tights.”My first impression of lucha libre was that it’s a funny mix of acrobatics, the circus, and pro wrestling in America,” says one fan, Jared Hess, the critically acclaimed director of Napoleon Dynamite “It was funny and different from American wrestling.

Earnest newspapers discuss the results of the previous night’s engagements, while dozens of wrestling magazines, cartoon strips and TV programmes cash in on a seemingly insatiable interest in the activity. And such is the power of the combatants among the people that one masked wrestler – Super Barrio – stands at the forefront of a movement created to help the poor of Mexico City after the devastating earthquake of 1985. It’s a veritable mad house, and fighting has been known to break out among fans of both camps as the skulduggery reaches fever pitch and each side uses everything at its disposal to distract the other.
Yet contrary to how it might appear, this is serious stuff. Governed by the same traditions as wrestling the world over, the wrestlers, almost always tag teams, are divided into two distinct camps: the hairy and ugly, bad guys or rudos, who employ all manner of perfidy and underhandedness to succeed – maybe distracting the ref while his tag partner belts his opponent over the head with a chair; and the well turned-out good guys or tecnicos who invariably play by the rules and use honest-to-goodness wrestling skills to win.

Some of the arenas cater to more than 15,000 crazed fans, drawn from all classes, to watch what is, essentially, grown men in tights and masks rolling about the floor. Mexican wrestling, or lucha libre (“free-style fighting”) is, behind football, Mexico’s second-biggest spectator sport and can be seen on any night of the week in at least 10 venues across Mexico City alone. One of the most important icons in modern-day Mexican culture, both inside and outside the ring, the masked wrestler – or luchador as they are known here – comes in all shapes and sizes and there are thousands of them wriggling about sweat-stained canvases vying to be the country’s top dog. Was he a disgusting, maverick voluptuary? A man in the wrong room at the wrong time? Or the scapegoat for an industry suddenly appalled to have been found with its moral trousers down? We still can’t be certain. But at least we have Jerry Stahl (ex-junkie novelist) and Johnny Depp (modern-day saint) to give us their version of the truth about Hollywood’s dark side.’I, Fatty’ by Jerry Stahl, published by Allison & Busby, £10.99. If the quiet thwack of a leather ball against a willow cricket bat in a sleepy Kentish village gives a certain insight into England, its people and its attitudes, the scream of a masked midget as he flies across a wrestling ring on to the back of a fellow grappler speaks volumes about that eternally kitsch and obsessively Catholic chunk of mercurial real estate known as Mexico.