Florida mayor fulfills dream as part-time wrestler

Harry Venis, three-term mayor of Davie, Fla., and certified public accountant, has had a lifelong interest in wrestling. Shortly after his March 1994 election, he began training to be a professional wrestler, and, in November 1994, he had his first tag-team match with partner Irv “Rambo” Rosenbaum, the town administrator at the time. Since then, through wrestling, “The Mayor” has raised an estimated $200,000 for local charities such as Davie’s PTAs, the Boys and Girls Club, the Arthritis Foundation and the Davie Police Athletic League. To get in shape, he has trained with Red Roberts (a local physician and fellow wrestler) and Rocky Johnson, the father of World Wrestling Federation star “The Rock.”

Q: What does your training involve?

A: When I don’t wrestle in a professional match, I’m in the gym lifting weights and doing the StairMaster, you know, real physical training. I would say it’s probably an hour and a half a day. I don’t go in the ring every day to practice. That may be two or three times a week.

Q: How often do you wrestle?

A: One weekend I wrestled three times. The promoters like to book me because it’s a real oddity to have the only wrestling politician in the country today wrestling and competing. And it’s for real. They hit me just as hard as they do any other professional wrestler.

Q: How has the community responded to your activities?

A: They know that I do it for charity and that I don’t benefit financially from it. They accept that, and they think it’s good. A lot of people worry I’m going to get hurt, but I know what I’m doing, and I’m very careful. So far, everything has worked out fine other than the broken teeth, the broken ribs and the sprained knees.

Q: Do you have any signature wrestling holds?

A: Yeah, sure. The finishing hold I’ve been using lately is a spine buster into a full Boston crab, and it’s very painful. I throw the guy into the ropes, and I pick him up high in the air when he comes toward me. I throw him down on his back, and then I turn him over, and I get the Boston crab on him.

Q: How do you think you would fare in a match with former mayor Jesse Ventura?

A: Governor Ventura, in newspaper articles, has admitted that he is in the worst shape that he has been in, and I am in great shape and still actively compete in the wrestling circuit. In a recent Associated Press news article, the governor’s aide said that [the governor] would not accept a wrestling challenge unless the proceeds would go to our favorite charities. So somebody should ask him straight out if he would accept such a challenge, and then we could determine once and for all who would win this charity challenge wrestling event.

Q: Would you say there are any similarities between wrestling and politics?

A: We’ve had some pretty rough and tumble council meetings here. You know, they both could be very rough professions. You never know what’s going to happen in wrestling, and a lot of times you never know what’s going to happen in politics.