No, brain surgery this definitely isn’t. To get in cheaply, one needn’t have friends in high places; just buy a Slurpee down at the 7-Eleven store and save the cup. To get in for nothing, just show up at your local arena on the advertised tryout day and attempt to pass the rigorous contender physical. About 2,500 auditioned in Cleveland; almost as many as showed up at Madison Square Garden. “When I saw the lines forming,” says David Fishof, the sports agent and rock promoter who is producing the tour, “I knew this was the sport of the ’90s.” The vast majority are eliminated in the first 60 seconds, when men must perform 55 fingertip push-ups and women 35 military push-ups. Although the prizes for each arena show are modest-a few hundred dollars’ worth of exercise equipment and a year’s supply of food supplements–people have dislocated their fingers and broken bones trying to qualify. “You do it for pride,” says Arlene Brockway, 31, a divorced mother of four and part-time power lifter from Winslow, Maine, who earned a contender spot at the tour’s opening night in Augusta. “It’s an honor to compete against people like this.”
How exactly the Gladiators achieved the aura of True American Heroes nobody knows; for the most part they are an amiable bunch of body-builders and ex-football players employed by Samuel Goldwyn Television of Los Angeles. In the next few months, however, Nintendo will introduce a Gladiators game, Mattel will offer a line of action figures, and there will be bubble-gum cards, pajamas and beach towels to fan the flames of Gladiatormania. Even now one shouldn’t get between Ice and a hard place when fans spot her out in public and make their charge. “They scream out my Gladiator name,” says Lori Fetrick. “I get letters from men asking if I’d like to go camping in the hills of North Carolina. Sometimes it’s kind of scary.”
Scarier still, though, is the thought of what the 5-foot-7, 155-pound lee would do if you ever got fresh with her around the campfire. The five female Gladiators play their games of Powerball and Hang Tough as hard as the men, and their bodies belie the notion that women can’t develop thick, rippling muscles. Along with the five Gladiator men, they spend two to four hours a day working out, and exude a wholesome sexiness. But what makes the concept unique, says producer Fishof, is that it appeals to a basic American “right to participate”-although that usually means voting, and not swinging on a wire from the ceiling of the Providence Civic Center.
But then who could have foreseen the whole phenomenon-the chewable vitamins, the $20 T shirts, that day the name would be licensed for plastic sports bottles, kites and yo-yos? Certainly not Johnny Ferraro and Dann Carr, who dreamed up the Gladiators about 10 years ago while watching the games ironworkers played in their hometown of Erie, Pa. The founding partners appear to have struck the kind of deal with Hollywood that protects them from the vicissitudes of sudden wealth. Ferraro works as an Elvis impersonator to keep his pompadour above water. “My day will come,” he says. In the meantime, somewhere in America a bleached-blond recreation major is mopping up an arena with some hapless accountant or exhausted postal worker. For the guys behind the Gladiators, that’s enough.
