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Inside the ring, in a Westside Fort Worth warehouse, two wrestlers, Tyler Maverick and Junior Garza, do their choreographed arm-twisting and face-smashing, loudly thwacking shoulders and backs onto the canvas. The slap of the belts is like bizarre background music to the action in the ring.

Those holding the belts have just won a raffle: They plunked down a dollar for a chance to whip any wrestler who gets thrown out of the ring. And because this is professional wrestling - in direct lineage from Gorgeous George and the Von Erichs and Hulk Hogan - you know that someone is going to get thrown out of that ring, to the mercies of the belt-wielders, who are also their fans. It's all part of the script.

There are a few rules for the fans. No hitting in the head and no hitting with the buckle. The fans are supposed to stay on their designated side of the ring (two per side), though that idea quickly disintegrates. When one wrestler gets thrown out, all eight run to where he lands.

"Throw Junior out, Tyler, so my wife can beat his ass," yells a tattooed and bandanna-wearing man from the audience.

And just like that, Garza gets thrown over the ropes, and Jennifer Jackson of Fort Worth begins whipping his bare back with her white belt and laughing maniacally. Her four kids, ages 3 to 9, yell encouragement from the front row. "Hit him, Mommy," they scream.

Garza gets back in the ring, his back red with welts. Soon after, it's Maverick who gets thrown out, and the mob once again descends. Then the referee gets thrown out and whacked as well. At one point a third wrestler, Red Wing, who had fought in a previous match, holds Maverick while a 9-year-old whips him on his bare chest.

Eventually, Maverick and Garza get back in the ring, Maverick pins his opponent, and both roll around on the canvas in obvious pain. The crowd of about 60 cheers loudly as the men display the angry red stripes on their bodies. The promoter of this event, Chuey Martinez, a former wrestler himself, yells into the microphone, "Wasn't this a great idea?"

Is Jackson worried about the violent and perhaps bizarre behavior she's modeling for her kids? Nah. "They know it's part of the show, and no one really gets hurt," she says.

But they do get hurt. Maybe not as badly as a football player suffering a concussion or a wrecked knee, but any professional wrestler will tell you that the high-flying body slams and knees to the head are painful and sometimes cause serious injuries.

What about the mother of 9-year-old whip-wielder Cameron Shaver? No problems there either. "He really likes wrestling," says Sandra Shaver of Kemp. "He really didn't hit them hard. It's just a part of the show."

Professional wrestling has always been about the show. These are character actors in some respects, trained athletes with the ability to do back flips off the ropes onto their opponents. They play to the crowd, yelling and screaming at fans young and old, who yell back "you suck" ad infinitum.

But when does this lowbrow performance art cross the line? Is allowing a wrestler to be whipped by a little kid really just "part of the show" on a Friday night in Cowtown?

If you think belt-whacking goes too far, then the final bout at the Outcast Xtreme Wrestling (OXW) arena the previous Saturday wouldn't have been for you either. Maverick and Garza staged a staple-gun match, where the first wrestler to staple seven dollar bills to his opponent's body won. Not much blood, but still very hard to watch so close up.

Maverick won that one as well. He managed to staple three dollar bills to Garza's forehead, one to his chin, one to his crotch, one to his back, and one to his butt.

Maverick had six, on various parts of his anatomy. It was a very close match.

Curtis Hankins, 77, of White Settlement, is sitting in the front row at the OXW with his grandson, Jonathan Hankins, 13. The black wooden walls sport a barbed-wire design. White skulls are painted around the edges of the wrestlers' entrance, where competitors emerge from a mist of fog and laser lights. "She's My Cherry Pie" blasts from the speakers.

"I was raised up in this," Curtis Hankins says. "Been seeing these wrestling matches since I was a kid. You could always see who was the better man."

Then he looks at his grandson. "Maybe one day he's going to be one," he says.

Jonathan is a big fan. He learned of the OXW wrestling (which started in August) through a flier at a convenience store. "I told my grandfather about it, and we've been coming here every Saturday night," he says. His favorite part is "how they are always talking and yelling at you and how much fun it is to yell back at them."

Professional wrestling has been around since the mid-1800s in this country, when carnival operators set up exhibition matches between wrestlers who traveled around the country. From the beginning, they created characters and wore costumes to draw bigger crowds. Taunts traded between the wrestlers and the crowd have always been part of the action.

By the 1950s, television had entered the picture, and Gorgeous George became a national celebrity. But since then professional wrestling has had its ups and downs. Hulk Hogan helped make the '80s an "up" decade. Since then, despite the televised matches of World Wrestling Entertainment (WWE), the sport's fortunes have declined slightly, measured by overall audience numbers. Part of this has to do with the popularity of mixed-martial-arts cage matches, which have siphoned off some of professional wrestling's fan base.

But the biggest hit in professional wrestling has been taken by the local venues, which found they couldn't compete with national organizations like WWE. In the 1960s, Dallas professional wrestler Jack Adkissson, known in the ring as Fritz Von Erich, began booking wrestling shows in the Dallas Sportatorium. By the 1980s, with Adkisson's sons also featured in matches, the Sportatorium was the place to be for North Texas wrestling fans.