Former Nashua High School top athlete Jeff Conrow has reinvented himself as pro wrestler Hype Man JC, set to star in a show on Aug. 8 at McCarthy Middle School in Nashua. (Courtesy photo)

NASHUA – Way back nearly 30 years ago, Nashua High School football standout Jeff Conrow and a Panther teammates had a hobby:

Backyard wrestling.

“At my parents house, we had a trampoline, we put ropes up and mats down,” he said. “It started out with a core group of us, and then that number doubled, we had a couple fans, and next thing you knew cars were lined up down the street.”

Back then they filmed it for VHS tapes, other kids in school would watch, “and our fan base just grew.”

Fast forward to today, and the 47-year-old Conrow next Saturday, Aug. 8 will be one of the featured wrestlers in a show he’s helped oganize at McCarthy Middle School to raise money for the Nashua Cougars youth football and cheer programs. Doors open at 5:30 p.m. and bell time is 6:30 p.m.

But oh, those good ol’ days.

“We called ourselves GCW – Gate City Wrestling,” Conrow said. “Which is why I’ve named this upcoming show ‘The Gate City Brawl’ to pay homage to the roots.”

Conrow and his friends, as he said, did “the whole shebang. And back then, if we weren’t at practice, kind of grinding out or whatever sport we were in, it was like we’re just trying to kill time.

“A lot of times we’d go to the weight room, we’d put together our matches and what we were going to do from a production standpoint, and then we would just kind of make it happen.”

The plan was to keep it small and simple, but it just took off. “We were like, ‘OK, this is kind of neat, this is kind of different,” Conrow said. “We didn’t expect that.”

Conrow even after he got a big first down in the 1997 title game in the mud at Holman Stadium popped up and did a sign for D-Generation X, a legendary pro wrestling group known for its rebellious attitude and the crowd went crazy.

The time together helped the football program, Conrow said. “We were kind of a brotherhood,” he said.

During his senior year, Conrow juggled football and lacrosse with getting actual professional training for wrestling. He wasn’t 18 yet but shadowed some local pro wrestlers, including Nashua’s Jeff Costa, more known back then as “Lobster Man”.

But college football at Marist College in Poughkeepsie, N.Y. (where Jimmy Parady was the longtime head coach) put a halt to a lot of it. After graduating from Marist, Conrow played some Arena Football, but then was done with playing and got into coaching, as he runs his own coaching business in the area, and started raising a family. The real world beckoned.

Then some years ago, about 20 years after he stopped the sport, he went to watch one of his friends, Brandon Locke, locally in Hudson perform. And he told him, “OK, man, now is the best time to come back.”

Conrow, in his 40s, was thinking no way. But his friend told him he had great charisma, good with a microphone,etc. So he ended up being a referee at one of his shows and a promoter, Jim Allen, told him he was a natural to get back into doing wrestling shows no matter what the role.

It’s Allen’s group, Pro Wrestling Extreme, that will put on the event next Saturday. Allen put Conrow on the commentator table, and that eventually turned into him being a full-time ring announcer for his shows.

But the group noticed something else.

“They started to realize I could wrestle too,” Conrow said. “They said, ‘Wow, you’re truly the Swiss army knife. And he adopted that as a moniker, saying ‘I’m sharpest Swiss Army Knife in New England’ and his ring name is ‘The Hype Man JC Fox’. The “Fox” pays homage to the Marist Red Foxes, and of course “JC” is what people have always called Conrow, especially on the teams he played.

He will wrestle next Saturday, but he doesn’t do it all the time.

“At my age I can kind of pick and choose when I get in there and kind of roll around, take a beating and give a beating,” he said.

When he does choose to wretle, Conrow says it’s usually for an event that is a fundraiser, for charity, or for birthday parties. When asked why he still does it at his age, he says “Well, look at the smile it puts on these faces. My ‘why’ is giving back, and come back and do that in Nashua. A lot of the kids that are going to be in attendance I coached. A lot of my former teammates are going to be there. I talked to Coach (Bill) Hardy (the former Nashua High football coach) and he’s going to be there. Bringing everybody together for this great cause but also to bring a really good night of family fun/entertainment is my ‘why’.”

Conrow’s business is called Five Star Athletics; he does private lessons, group training, etc. in various sports. He didn’t coach his son, Gabe, now 19, as he got older when he played at Alvirne so he could hear a different voice. The idea for him is to train an athlete.

“We really just want to help or mold the athlete,” he said, noting he gets a lot of satisfaction out of watching the youths progress. “A lot of times parents will call me up and say ‘Hey, my son or daughter doesn’t listen to me,’ and that’s normal,” he said. “That’s kind of the boundry of being the parent and not the coach.”

Conrow will also coach coaches, helping them to develop practice plans, put in offense or game plans in phases, etc.

“There are a lot of volunteer coaches at the youth level,” he said. “I try to bridge that gap, they can still do the coaching and sport that they love, but kind of get them off of YouTube to learn coaching principles, get that one-on-one mentorship. They then can kind of take it to the field.”

Conrow says he’ll wrestle until he can’t. “It’s great my family can come to the front row and enjoy something I enjoyed as a kid,” he said.

An action figure, he said, is in the works for his character. He has event merchandise (T-shirts, etc.) which he sells with the proceeds going to charity. It’s recreation for Conrow, but his main goal is giving back to the community.

Ironically, Conrow didn’t wrestle at Nashua High. Now, in the professional wrestling shows, “safety is at the forefront of what we do,” he said. “Before you can come in and work on any sort of move, you have to learn how to fall – we call that ‘take a bump.’

“I look at my football background, which is a violent sport, being a running back and getting tackled all the time, especially on the frozen tundra of Holman Stadium, I would have to know how to fall or absorb the blow. You have to preserve your body to play four quarters, and if you remember my style, I was the bruising back.”

Jeff Conrow was a key cog in Nashua’s state football title team of 1997 as a top running back. (Courtesy photo)

Indeed, he was the force while Eric Thiboutot was the slasher, the duo getting the popular nickname “Thunder and Lightning.”

“We had the best offensive line in high school I’ve ever seen,” Conrow said. When I think about the parallel between football and wrestling, it’s very similar, right? There’s a level of safety, a level of discipline, high level of excution. We do a lot of communicating (in wrestling), and if we’re really good at it, you don’t see that. It’s kind of like the quarterback in the huddle talking to the group, or the defensive back calling out the front or the coverage.

“Our communication is about safety a lot of times. Or, it’s about telling a story, because that’s kind of why we’re there … We’re listening to the crowd. If we’re doing something, and we’re not getting a reaction, we’ve got to change something up. If we get a big reaction, we’ve got to keep doing it, we’ve got to pile it on so we’re giving them every bit of who we are as performers. And their takeaway is ‘Wow, we want to go back.'”

Conrow is in the gym five days a week, but says he trains differently now than he did during his football days. Movement and staying active are his keys. And his wrestling career “forces me to double down in the gym”, another advantage.

“We’re performing in front of a few hundred people a show, and you essentially are your brand,” he said. “Do I want to be jacked and stacked, no. But do I want to be fit, yes.”

Conrow doesn’t get too involved with the business side, but he’s more involved in this event as he’s the bridge between the promoters and the Cougars. He’s also on the creative team so he hears/sees some of the business side. But the goal next Saturday is simple, in order to give the Cougars a worthwhile donation.

“In order to really make it worth their while, we need to fill the school,” Conrow said. “If we fill the school, it’s going to be an amazing fundraiser for the Cougars.”

And Conrow got a call from an interested group in Merrimack also looking for a fundraiser for next year.

“It beats the old selling popcorn and selling calendars, because you’re going to get a night of entertainment,” he said. “And as a coach, it’s ‘Hey guys, this is a team build. We’re all going to be there.'”

There will even be a women’s match. “We have some very talented women that are also coming through the ranks,” Conrow said. “They put in all the blood, sweat and tears and aches and pains as everybody. And I love the idea we do diversify the show. …. These women have dreams, too, and they’re living those dreams they set for themselves.”

Conrow was certainly a fan of Nashua’s most famous wrestler, Paul Michael Levesque, otherwise known as Triple H. He was working at a local gym when Leveseque showed up.

“He said, ‘Hey, Jeff, can you give me a spot?'” Conrow said. “I turn around and there he is, and he’s lifting 315 (pounds) on the bar. And he repped it out for 10, and he did not need a spot. But that made my boyhood dream.”

And he invited Conrow to a show in Waltham, Mass., and Conrow brought some of his Panther teammates, including Aaron Gureckis and Femi Ayi. “He saw us and nodded, he knew it was us,” Conrow said. “There we were in our Nashua Football T-shirts.”

Conrow also has to stay in character during the shows. That’s part of the profession. He may see a young youth in the front row “and they look a little worried or nervous, and I’ll give them a wink,” Conrow said. “When my Mom goes, forget about it, she’s a nervous wreck.

“I’ll be truthful, sometimes we try to break each other, crack each other’s character during a promo. We do that because that’s the comradrie we build. … We get pretty locked in.”

And it’s been that way for Jeff Conrow since those backyard wrestling days.

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