A Philly public-school teacher helped Drew Gulak become a professional wrestler and a WWE mainstay

The King Kong Bundy picture resting on the chalkboard inside the elementary school science class had nothing to do with the periodic table, plate tectonics, or the structure of an atom.

“It had nothing to do with professional teaching and the curriculum that we had to follow,” said Jack Zabarsky, who taught for 35 years in the School District of Philadelphia before retiring in 2000.

The 8x10 photo of Bundy — a larger-than-life wrestling star in the 1980s and 1990s who grew up in South Jersey, was a small way for Zabarsky to acknowledge his love of professional wrestling. It was his escape after he left the classroom.

“When you teach school, you have to have something that’s a different part of your life,” Zabarsky said.

The picture was enough to catch the attention of one of Zabarsky’s students. Drew Gulak, like many kids in the late 1990s, loved wrestling. He and his younger brother slammed each other around their house in Fox Chase, pretending to be the stars they watched on TV.

And now he learned his teacher was a fan. Gulak and Zabarsky bonded over wrestling. The teacher at Greenberg Elementary in Bustleton told Gulak about the wrestling he watched on the weekends in an old South Philly freight house under I-95.

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“He would tell me about these shows where guys were flying through tables and flying through glass and using barbed wire,” Gulak said. “They’re lighting each other on fire and cursing up a storm. He said, ‘You have to check it out.’ ”

Gulak was hooked and needed to see it for himself. His mother signed off and Zabarsky picked up Gulak and his brother, Rory, and drove them to Swanson and Ritner Streets. They sat in the stands, cheered for the heroes, booed the villains, and took pieces of broken tables back to school to show the other kids.

“That was my entry into pro wrestling,” Gulak said.

Gulak stood on a rope in the wrestling ring and shouted out instructions. A night earlier, he wrestled on TV in Florida. Now he was instructing two 20-something wrestlers in Kensington to do an Irish whip.

He signed with WWE in 2016 and appears weekly on NXT, a cable TV show meant to be a proving ground for the next crop of pro wrestling stars. He is expected to have a role on Saturday afternoon at WWE’s NXT Stand and Deliver at the Wells Fargo Center, a few hours before WrestleMania takes over Lincoln Financial Field for the first of two nights of wrestling in front of 70,000 fans.

The Northeast Philly native now lives near Orlando but flies to Philly every week to teach at CatchPoint, the wrestling school he opened last summer just a few blocks from the El in Kensington. That’s why he was on the turnbuckle giving instructions to two 20-somethings who were running out gas.

The 36-year-old Gulak’s career — perhaps the longest in WWE by a Philly native — has been impacted by teachers. First, there was Zabarsky. Next there was Mark McCready, a Northeast High chemistry teacher who recruited Gulak and his other buddies in the magnet program — “It was a bunch of us nerds,” Gulak said — to join the wrestling team. They warmed up for practice by running up and down nine flights of steps with bricks in their hands. It was nuts, Gulak said.

Then there were professional wrestlers like Sabian, Joker, Zandig, Nick Berk, Trent Acid, and Nick Gage who befriended Gulak and his brother when they started hanging around the CZW shows. There were Chris Hero and Mike Quackenbush, two stars of the independent wrestling scene who showed Gulak the ropes. And there were the countless others he shared the ring with or studied from the stands.

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Now he’s the teacher, hosting classes inside a converted warehouse on East Westmoreland Street. Gulak’s classroom has a 20-foot by 20-foot ring that is the same quality used by WWE. A cast of students comes through the door to learn from one of WWE’s best tacticians.

Even the WWE has used Gulak to teach. Not only does he train new recruits at their Performance Center in Florida, but he’s the one who has to break in the celebrities who get in the ring like sports-talker Pat McAfee and rapper Bad Bunny. And he does it all while maintaining his own in-ring career.

“At first it was just me having to fill it and teach people because there was no one else to teach,” Gulak said of his start years ago as a trainer. “I would just yell at people. I knew what I was talking about, but I would just yell at them if they didn’t do something right. Then one day I realized, ‘Why am I yelling at people? Who am I? It’s not nice. It’s not fair.’ Ever since then, I’ve been much better. I’m patient. I want this place to be a good community.”

His school in Kensington is open to everyone from novices who have no idea how to run the ropes to trained professionals who want to sharpen their skills. CatchPoint has two levels: fundamentals and foundations. After students complete the six-week fundamentals course, they’ll have their first matches and be fit to work for other wrestling companies.

“This is the most positive wrestling school I’ve ever been to, by far,” said Robby Gailor, who wrestles as Curt Robinson. “I feel like we have a zero-tolerance rule for negativity. A lot of schools might try to bring you down. This is like-minded people all getting together and doing something that’s so cool. There’s nothing cooler than this. It’s a live-action performance play and there’s one take.”

Gulak was enamored by the shows Zabarsky took him to and soon realized that the wrestlers he cheered for were not much older than he was. Maybe he could join the show. He was soon helping to build the ring, cleaning up broken glass, and stacking folding chairs when the night was over. Gulak was doing anything he could to be a part of it. He started training at CZW’s school when he was just 15 years old.

Gulak finished the school day at Northeast High, went to wrestling practice, and then drove through rush-hour traffic for his pro-wrestling lessons in Deptford. The days were long, but Gulak didn’t mind. He was chasing a dream.

“It enriched me,” he said. “It was such a good experience. It was fun and kept reinforcing my passion and to do what I do. I take that with me every time I breathe when I’m at work.”

He was booked to wrestle his first match in April 2005 on a CZW show in Northeast High’s basketball gym. The promoter asked Gulak to help sell tickets, so he set up a table in the cafeteria and hustled his friends. He told his art teacher before class started that he would have to step out to take a phone call. The show’s promoter would be calling. The teacher said it was fine.

“I got the call, stepped out, and started talking to him,” Gulak said. “The teacher comes out and says, ‘Drew put your phone away.’ I said, ‘I’ll be a second. You said I could.’ She said, ‘Drew put it away. I’m not going to tell you again.’ I said, ‘OK. Let me say goodbye.’ She said, ‘You’re getting suspended.’ It was very weird.”

Gulak, part of the school’s magnet program, spent the next three days in a trailer as part of an in-school suspension. But the wrestling show went on and he made his professional debut as part of a tag-team match. He wore his Northeast High wrestling singlet and his buddies cheered from the bleachers as he won the match. The suspension was worth it.

“It was absolutely worth it,” he said. “But I wish I didn’t have a crazy teacher or that I walked away quicker.”

Gulak fell in love with the extreme wrestling he watched in South Philly — “These freakin’ crazy, wild athletes in front of this bloodthirsty Philly crowd,” Gulak said — but his own style is old-school, technical wrestling.

“I got to the ECW Arena one day early for practice and the bleachers were put out,” Gulak said. “Chris Hero was sitting by himself on the bleachers watching DVDs of old World of Sport wrestling. Guys like Johnny Saint and Steve Grey. I sat next to him and watched this and said, ‘Whoa. They treat this completely like a sport. Very cut and dry.’ It comes from that moment. I try to focus on making everything as realistic as possible.”

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Gulak wrestles without knee pads in tights and tall boots. He looks like one of the British wrestlers he watched with Hero. And he performs like them as every maneuver has meaning. Another teacher helped him perfect it.

“We had [Elite Pro Wrestling’s] Les Thatcher come to the CZW school,” Gulak said. “He’s from the era where no one called anything beforehand and everything was called in the ring. Good guys and bad guys had separate locker rooms. If you told the fans this was phony in any way, you were kicked out of the business forever. Hearing him talk reinforced my mindset and gave me even more confidence to improve.”

Gulak spent years in the independent scene before signing with WWE. He has appeared on Raw and SmackDown — the company’s flagship TV shows — and has wrestled on pay-per-view in front of 60,000 fans. In a business in which longevity is rare, Gulak has carved a role with the industry’s leader.

“The WWE is acknowledging the perfection of pro wrestling within guys and they’re giving them the spot,” said Bill Posada, who wrestled in CZW as Joker and assists Gulak at CatchPoint. “They need to show the world that it’s more than oily muscles and a bunch of grunting. There’s technique involved. It’s fluid. I try to explain to people about pro wrestling and they say it’s fake. So I say look at a performance like Cirque du Solei. It’s choreographed because that’s how you tell the story, but all the acrobatics, all the dancing is all real. That’s all talent. Wrestling is the same thing.

“All the hard work he’s done and getting to where he is now. That’s all him. It’s all work. Nonstop. Hustle. Grind. Doing shows every weekend. Traveling to different territories to work at different promotions. Building his name and maturing throughout. He worked his [butt] off.”

Zabarsky, 78, no longer watches wrestling like he used to and he stopped going to shows in South Philly. But he knows what Gulak is up to and has watched him on TV. Sometimes Zabarsky will be in a grocery store near his home in Northeast Philly and an adult will stop him, asking if he was his or her elementary-school teacher. Some remember Zabarsky for the lessons he taught. Or the time he took them to City Hall. Some remember him for the King Kong Bundy photo, the trips to South Philly, and how a teacher introduced a kid to a career.

“I don’t think Jack picked me up and said, ‘He’s going to be a future WWE wrestler,’ ” Gulak said. “I think it was just like, ‘They like wrestling. These are nice kids. Hopefully they have a nice future. I like mentoring people, so why not take them to a show?’ ”

Zabarsky helped Gulak find a path to chase his dream. Eventually, Gulak became a star. And now he is a teacher just like the guy who had a King Kong Bundy photo on his chalkboard.

“The profession is a wonderful thing to be in,” Zabarsky said. “You work with kids and hopefully you can direct them to their greatest potential later on in life. When they remember, it’s a very good feeling.”

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