ON THE EDGE

Greg Kennedy Racecar Driver

Greg Kennedy drives Japanese sports cars as fast as he can, upward of 100 miles per hour sometimes, on racetracks all over Texas.

But he doesn’t consider himself a thrill-seeker.

“It’s all so calculated in a way,” he says. “That’s not to say it’s not dangerous. But for the most part, I know everyone around me, and I can trust their abilities or at least, I know what their weaknesses are.”

Commuting everyday from, say, Addison to Oak Cliff, is dangerous too, but that’s no fun.

Kennedy, who owns a company that builds furniture for restaurants and offices, started racing cars in 1999.

He attended a grand prix race in Houston and thought, “I could do that.”

For most of his racing life, he’s sat behind the wheels of Mazda RX7s converted to racecars. More recently, he’s been working on a prototype car that’s similar to the cars seen in the Indianapolis 500, but with closed wheels.

It’s an expensive hobby. An independent driver needs a car and a trailer to haul it, for starters. The typical entry fee for a race costs $400. Fuel, spare tires and other supplies for car and driver can put the cost of a racing weekend well over $1,000.

“There are guys who spend thousands of dollars all for a pressboard plaque,” the typical podium prize, Kennedy says.

The sport is very physical, particularly in sports car racing, which involves shifting, breaking and left and right turns.

“You’re shifting gears as many as 22 times a lap, and your feet are moving most of the time,” Kennedy says. “In the summer, it’s brutally hot.”

Kennedy, who was born in Oak Cliff and now lives in Brettonwood Estates, also teaches performance driving and racing through the Drivers Edge.

His best students, he says, are airline pilots and long-haul truckers, because they know how to scan the road ahead and how to shift the weight of the car in a predictable way.

“We’re so lucky in Texas because we have so many new racetracks,” he says.

He once was T-boned during a race at the Texas World Speedway in College Station. The accident bent his car and caused him some soreness, but nothing serious.

Injuries are rare in motor sports because of constantly improving safety regulations and advances, Kennedy says. Once he saw a driver die on the track — the man won his race and then suffered a massive heart attack during his victory lap and died almost immediately.

Sometimes Kennedy plays “Force of Five,” a car-racing video game, with his daughter. It’s a good game, he says, but there’s nothing that compares to the real thing.

“There’s a thrill when you’re sliding through a corner,” he says. “It’s the control, the mastery of the track.”

Dallas Texas Lucha Libres Luchadores

Sangre Guerrera flaps open a makeshift curtain, and enters under the fluorescent lights of Gaston Bazaar in far East Dallas.

He climbs into the wrestling ring and struts around a few paces, pointing and shouting. Then he drops down and puts his masked face close to audience members sitting in metal folding chairs, everyone pointing and talking smack in Spanish.

Outside the ring, Guerrera is a quiet 52-year-old with a family and a job, but here at Dallas Texas Lucha Libre, he is a foil, the bad guy in a green-and-white luchador mask.

Since a larger, more popular bazaar opened in an old K-Mart just east of Interstate 30 a few years ago, wrestling matches have become the main attraction at Gaston Bazaar. The man behind the luchadores is Mac Reyes of Oak Cliff.

Reyes, who wrestled from 19892012, was a second-generation lucha. His father, also Mac Reyes, was from near Monterrey, Nuevo Leon, and was a popular and well-known wrestler in his day.

The younger Reyes is a 1986 Adamson High School graduate and debuted as a wrestler at the old Sears building on Jefferson when he was about 21. They also held wrestling matches at Casa Guanajuato and Rocket Skate Palace in the ’80s and ’90s.

Reyes started the Gaston Bazaar showcase four years ago as a way to boost the sport in Dallas. The event, every Saturday and Sunday from about 4-6:30 p.m., is donation based. Spectators can donate $3 for a chair, and the hat is passed between matches.

These bouts, although heavy on acting and choreographed moves, can get very serious. When foil Chaco destroys fan favorites Havoc and Dosis in a tag-team match one Sunday afternoon, the fans heckle and boo. Chaco revels in the confrontation; he taunts the audience and then pitches a water bottle, splashing several people in the front row. A guy wearing church clothes and expensive looking shoes shouts expletives in Spanish: “My phone is wet, you idiot!”

The fans throw water and boo heartily until Chaco finally exits to the makeshift backstage.

“We’re like a cheap psychologist,” says Aski, a luchador from Oak Cliff who declines to give his real name because he is masked, and the lucha code requires anonymity.

Wrestling matches offer fans a hero to cheer for and a villain to despise. It gives spectators a few hours to clear their heads and focus only on something fun, he says.

Aski, 35, started wrestling in 2004. He played soccer and football at North Dallas High School, but nothing measures up to this, he says.

The training is intense, and the sport requires physical and mental strength, not to mention acting skills. There are bumps and bruises every time, and wrestling careers sometimes end in back injuries, but blood and broken bones are very rare, Aski says.

Before entering the ring, there is an adrenaline rush, he says, speaking through the mask.

“We know we’re going into a battle, and we don’t know what the outcome will be,” he says. “It’s something that you look forward to, and it becomes part of you.”