Live From Your City: It’s The American Gladiators
Back in 2018, I wrote a ton of fun pieces for the COMET and CHARGE television networks. Sadly, in the transition of the stations being sold, I think some of the pieces were lost in the shuffle. One of those is the below article where I interviewed a contestant on the live traveling show of American Gladiators.
I figured, what the heck. Let’s give Vince his due.
Presented here is an article originally written April 4, 2018 for CHARGE. Enjoy!
At the height of its popularity, American Gladiators was a pop culture powerhouse worthy of its monumental namesake. At surface level, the show seemed exploitative and even kitschy. But the show quickly gained a massive following, and after two seasons spawned spin-offs in the forms of Mattel toys, Nintendo Entertainment System video games, clothing, bed sheets, trading cards, and much more. In October of 1991, the series was riding an all-time high. According to the Los Angeles Times, American Gladiators drew higher ratings in 1990 than the NFL in Phoenix, Arizona.
Perhaps the beauty of the show and why it appealed to such a wide audience was the seemingly achievable feat that anyone to go head-to-head with a Gladiator and win. A steel worker from Ohio, a grade school teacher from Chicago, a former college football player, yes, even a fifth-grade chump out of Franktown, Colorado such as myself: an Everyday Joe or Jane face the Gladiators and be annihilated into dust on the sport court or emerge victorious. A traveling roadshow of the American Gladiators was an absolute natural, fitting square in the sweet spot of the Venn Diagram of what appealed to audiences the most. A live touring show would present the athletic spectacle, the larger-than-life heroes, and the exhilaration of professional wrestling and put them in an arena where audiences by the thousands could scream their heads off amid it all. American Gladiators was, and still is, a phenomenon. And packing local arenas for a series of un-televised live events across the country was a no-brainer. At the height of the show’s run from 1989 to 1996, the Atlaspheres were packed up into a touring van and the show hit the road.
In 1991, during production of the show’s second season, American Gladiators creator Johnny Ferraro teamed with concert promoter David Fishof to conceptualize a live iteration of the popular televised series. Their goal: to book arenas and coliseums across the country and give every market’s local athletes a shot at defeating the colossal Gladiators. According to Dan “Nitro” Clark’s memoir, Gladiator: A True Story of ‘Roids, Rage, and Redemption, “Johnny [Ferraro] knows a thing or two about touring. Before creating Gladiators, he was a successful Elvis impersonator who played some of the world's largest venues. Fishof is coming off a successful Monkees reunion tour, and also Ringo Starr’s tour.” The two put their heads together and teamed with Feld Entertainment (the mastermind production company responsible for the Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus) and put together a 150-city tour across America, sponsored by 7-Eleven.
Once the dates and venues were booked, next came the audition process to find potential civilians who had the physical prowess to take on a Gladiator. Newspaper ads, posters at 7-Eleven, and local TV spots sent out the wide net casting call nationwide. And the people responded by the hundreds, even thousands, in every city. According to the Hartford Courant, as many as 2,000 turned out in some cities to put their athleticism to the test.
Denver, Colorado, the home-town of the aforementioned fifth-grade chump from a small rural town was to receive the American Gladiators tour in February of 1992 at the Denver Coliseum. Though my ambitions to knock Nitro off the Joust podium may have been a bit fanciful for a kid of ten, several hundred of those Coloradoans who did believe themselves worth of the competition put their physical prowess to the test. According to The Denver Post, the very first physical fitness test administered to would-be challengers was to do fifty pushups on their fingertips in under sixty seconds. That single and first test eliminated nearly 95% of the hopefuls.
Though the rigors of the audition process seemed insurmountable, there were a very select few who qualified and represented their local city in the live tour.
Results of the Denver auditions similarly echoed across the country. Vince Pecchia was one of the competitors who represented Youngstown, Ohio when the event was scheduled to hit the historic Cleveland Coliseum. Having seen an ad in the local newspaper, Pecchia’s girlfriend signed him up to audition, without her significant other being aware she had done so. At the time, Pecchia was juggling working at a steel mill with taking night courses. Fortunately, when his girlfriend (now wife) informed him that he’d be auditioning to battle the American Gladiators, he found the idea amusing and welcomed his girlfriend’s challenge. A month prior to the big show, Pecchia auditioned for the live event at a local auditorium, taking on bodybuilders, lightweight speedsters, boxers, and other local athletes hoping to make the cut. After successfully completing the fifty-fingertip push-up challenge that eliminated most hopefuls, running a forty-yard dash in under 4.8 seconds, a grueling amount of twenty-plus behind the neck pull-ups, and beating out other competitors in one-on-one Powerball and Joust competitions, Pecchia emerged as one of six locals (and two alternates) finally chosen for the Ohio live event.
Qualifying for the big show was a notable achievement, instantaneously propelling Pecchia to the status of hometown hero. Even before the actual event took place. In fact, a speaking point of order at the House of Representatives was for a congressman from Ohio to wish Pecchia luck for the upcoming event.
Having found this remarkable point of order, I decided to seek out Pecchia. Fortunately, I was able to catch up over the phone with him twenty-five years after his live American Gladiators experience. Reminiscing about the experience while seaside at the beach brought an energy and an enthusiasm to Pecchia’s voice that was infectious. And understandably so. Competing against the Gladiators essentially turned him into a rock star. “They brought the six of us to the Cleveland Coliseum for an NBA game and introduced us at halftime,” Pechhia says. “And they made a pretty big deal out of it in our local paper.” Before the main event, there were no rehearsals, no pleasant meetings between the competitors and the formidable Gladiators. Pecchia didn’t come face-to-face with Nitro, Gemini, Laser, and the entirety bevy of the iconic original Gladiators until the Saturday of competition. And that was okay. “They were out to kill you,” Pecchia jokes. “They were the real deal.”
On the day of the main event, the Cleveland Coliseum was packed. Pecchia remembers the massive audience turn out as surprising. And though the Gladiators were all recognizable by name and beloved by fans around the world, it helped to have a few people cheering in the challengers’ corner. “I had everybody there,” Pecchia says, referring to the friends and family that were in the stands. Pecchia and his fellow competitors were put through the wringer, competing in the Joust, Wall, Powerball, and one that was particularly aggravating to Pecchia: the Atlasphere. “Whenever you won an event, you would get ten points,” Pecchia says. “And they took the top two of whoever accumulated the most points to go to the Eliminator at the end.”
Sure enough, out of the six competitors (seven, technically as one of the civilian competitors suffered a concussion during the live event and had to be replaced by an alternate), it came down to Pecchia and one other challenger in the renowned obstacle course, the Eliminator. “And he actually had more points than me, so I had a five second penalty to start,” Pecchia says.
But the five second delay proved easy to overcome as Pecchia raced through the Eliminator and ultimately was the victor of Cleveland’s American Gladiators live show. “Oh yeah, I crushed him,” Pecchia says with a wry laugh. Among the prizes awarded for being the grand champion of the day was a medal awarded at a ceremony following the event, an at-home American Gladiators themed gym, a watch, and a few other parting prizes. But most important to Pecchia was the bragging right that he had faced the American Gladiators and won. Friends and co-workers still love to bring up Pecchia’s day in the spotlight all the time. “I laugh about it a lot too. It was a goofy event but nobody else could do it. They made a big deal about it here,” Pecchia says. “Youngstown is a pretty small town and it made the paper for a month. There was a lot of press from the moment I tried out until the event. When I won, they asked me to go around and talk to the kids in schools. It was a very nice thing.”