The mostly male, mostly lumpy 100 or so fans inside the Framingham Civic League, a 75-year-old suburban hall temporarily outfitted with a wrestling ring, have already sat through three predetermined hours of all-man-meat matches. So when the only ladies on the bill appear for the evening’s penultimate battle, the men are psychologically slobbering.
As Beck’s recorded voice blithely nah-nah nah-nah-nahs her into the ring, Nikki Roxx, the reigning New England Championship Wrestling (NECW) women’s-belt holder, materializes from behind a red curtain. With freshly curled blonde hair, Roxx smiles widely, carrying the title belt on her freckled arm: she’s ready to defend her title against opponent Tanya Lee.
Emanating from a sea of Insane Clown Posse hats and Joe Pesci–in–My Cousin Vinny wavy mullets, the men’s desperate stares suggest Lenny gazing upon Curley’s wife in Of Mice and Men. This woman could break their necks, however. And so Nikki Roxx has nothing to fear — she’s merely thankful that they’ve paid to come watch her power-slam, pin, and ultimately win.
Two days later, when I see Roxx (née Nicole Raczynski, age 25) waiting for me in sunglasses outside the Virgin MegaStore on Mass Ave, cradling a Harry Potter paperback and being accosted by a dirty homeless man who’s demanding a handshake, she isn’t the least bit flustered. “A lot of the fans are really nice,” the Granite State–based grappler says later over mango tea and a fruit bowl at the Trident Café. “But usually I have to go out during intermission and sell pictures, and sometimes you’ll only have one fan talking with you for, like, a half an hour.” She grins, her tongue stud flashing in the light. “That’s what the homeless guy was like. No big deal to me. I was like, ‘Hey, what’s up?’ ”
The Melrose-born Roxx is a longstanding fan of professional wrestlers, especially Andre the Giant, but she herself was no athlete until fairly recently. “When I was in high school, I played with the hacky-sack crew — smoking cigarettes, out drinking,” she recalls, laughing. Then five years ago, back when she was studying accounting (“super-boring”), she started hanging out at Killer Kowalski’s Pro Wrestling School, in Malden, to watch her ex-fiancée train. (He’s now NECW Sabotage tag-team member D.C. Dillinger.) There, another female student encouraged her to try. She loved it. “After that, I was like, ‘I’m not giving this up for anything.’ ”
Living in Salem, New Hampshire, above a funeral home (“cheapest rent ever”), where she can’t shower or flush the toilet when a funeral is scheduled, Roxx still works part-time as an accountant and a Bertucci’s waitress. “It’s hard for [my employers] to understand, ‘Okay, you’re leaving us for a month to go wrestle.’ ”
Roxx used to disappear to, among other places, Mexico, where she spent months wrasslin’ in the Mexican league Lucha Libre Feminil (LLF). Wrestling is incredibly popular south of the border, so Lucha crowds would range from 1000 to 7000 people. At least once, Roxx wrestled in a “dog-collar match,” in which she and her male competitor wore matching chokers attached by a single chain while trying to touch all four corners of the ring in succession. (Roxx won.) The press treats wrestling like any other non-rigged sport: one time her photo ended up in a newspaper right beside American World Series coverage. “To have people yelling your name, and you’re like, ‘Wow — these people don’t even speak the same language as I do,’ is amazing.” She has also wrestled in Japan.
