An eerie silence prevails. The final suplexes have been applied and the slap slap of sweat-soaked bodies against leather mats have been replaced by the chirp of a cricket, the nearby fluttering of a hummingbird. The floating and bobbing of dust motes is the last sign of life in a building that once breathed life into its patrons. Some will tell you that this place was alive.

Dean Malenko is one of those persons. For 22 years, his family operated Malenko’s Pro Wrestling Camp. Just a few weeks ago, Dean closed the doors on the renowned gym for the final time.

“A lot of young kids came through here,” says Malenko, star of WCW. “Some didn’t have a lot of money and other guys were looking for an opportunity. My father was there to help them: he went out of his way to feed them when he really didn’t have to.”

Wrestling aficionados know Dean is referring to his father, wrestling icon Boris “The Great” Malenko. Boris ran the gym from 1977 until his death in 1994. Dean took it over and operated it chiefly on his own, until costing it in early-1999. His decision to dim the lights on the family business was a difficult one.

“I didn’t want to close it down, but with my work schedule, having a family at home and having a 15-month-old daughter and wife at graduate school, if I’m on the road for 10 days…”

Life on the road with WCW, a blossoming family, made his choice obvious yet painful.

“I still enjoy doing it; it was the Malenko name.”

That’s what made the gym real, the Malenko name: a testament to wrestling excellence, and nobility.

“I see what my dad went through all those years. But by the same token, this is the profession I’m in. I knew getting into the business that you travel, that’s no a big shock. But thinking about that and preparing for it, it’s a different ballgame.”

It used to be easy for Malenko to walk out the door and hit the road for weeks at a time. That all began to change when he and his 26-year-old wife Julie were married three years ago. And leaving home became a giant lump on Christmas Day, 1997, when the couple’s only child, Larissa, was born.

“As she gets older, there’s more of a bond, she’s more vocal, and that gets harder,” says Malenko. “The secret of the business is having a spouse that knows what you do and supports you when you are gone.”

Life in Y2K pro wrestling is as different as pro wrestling was for Boris Malenko a generation ago. Jets whisk the stars from city to city, plush hotels welcome their guests with open bars, VCRs, and beds the size of Haystacks Calhoun. Best yet, headliners such as Dean Malenko make big-time bucks.

Life in the squared circle hasn’t always been that way, and the still-fresh memory of a childhood shuttled from town to town during his formative years has made Malenko particularly sensitive to the needs of his family.

This is just, he says, because that’s what the Malenko name stands for: family.

But first things first. While the Malenko name has been associated with wrestling and philanthropy for nearly 40 years, folks in Tampa, where Dean was raised, know that the Malenko name was the wrestling name of the great Larry Simon. Somehow, Boris Malenko had a more tantalizing, mysterious ring to it that Larry Simon. In fact, Dean Simon, a.k.a. Dean Malenko, grew up in an era filled with intrigue, fascination, experimentation, and change: the 1960s.

As haughty, despicable, and villainous as he was in the ring, Prof. Boris Malenko lived anything but a despot’s existence during his wrestling heyday. His job kept him on the road much of the year, and Dean, brother Joe, and mom Sondra traveled together during the early and middle part of the decade. Despite rumors to the contrary, Dean does not have a sister Denise. She was another wrestler who used the Malenko name. Dean and Joe learned about life from the back seat of their dad’s car, from which they discovered new worlds, among Nebraska’s tall cornfields and Missouri’s sprawling meadows and ranges. From the ring, Dean learned what when the lights went down and the performances were over, Boris Malenko was always a gentleman.

Dean rarely accompanied his father to his often spectacular matches, preferring to remain at the hotel. Some days, in some out-of-the- way Midwest outpost, however, there was no Holiday Inn to welcome the Malenkos. On those occasions, the family would take a front row seat and watch Boris make everyone hate him. After the card, the family would return to their domicile on balding tires and jet off to the next rustic port of call.

They were gypsies who, from town to town, befriended other wrestling gypsies. And they loved it. Life was idyllic, uncomplicated. Except when it came to bidding good-bye to gypsy friends. Why? Was all young Dean could wonder. It would take him year to answer that question.

In late 1967, the Malenko family handed in his last hotel room key and settled in Tampa, Florida. For Dean, this was good news and bad news. No longer did he have to worry about bouncing from town to town, being uprooted, walking down a different school hallway with each passing semester. The bad news was Great Boris was going also.

For much of the next decade, Sondra Malenko became the head of the house. Business took Boris across the water to Japan, across the continents to Australia. He left home for upwards of a month at a time, not from a desire to be apart from his wife and sons, but because that’s what he had to do to support his family. And the family’s needs always came before his own.

Dean recognized and appreciated his father’s selflessness, even if it pained him to be separated from Dad. Living that wondrous vagabond’s life from the back seat of a car had been superseded by familial and social stability.

Separation made the boys closer to their father, although it slowly splintered Sondra and Boris. What the boys lacked in quantitative time with their father, they made up for in quality time. Vacations were spent together, and when Dean played youth football, Boris was usually there on the sidelines cheering his some to score a TD or to dig a shoulder into an opposing tailback.

“I always knew my dad was behind me and pushing me,” says Malenko. “Dad was always proud of me and my brother.”

Some children, such as Bret and Owen Hart, were predisposed to a future in wrestling, for their home resonated with the sounds of suplexes, armdrags, and piledrivers. Wrestling banter was to the Sunday dinner table what cranberry sauce and pumpkin pie are to a 12-pound turkey.

For the Malenkos, however, all the world was not a stage, and the curtain closed on the wrestling world when Dad walked through the front door of their Tampa home. Dean learned at an early age when and how to separate the showbiz world from the real world. Dean did not observe a man who cavorted around town applying facerakes to unsuspecting fans; he saw a man who would literally take the shirt off his back for another person. Boris’ charity manifested most at the gym.

For these reasons, Dean Malenko did not spin childhood dreams of being wrestling’s next great villain. His bedroom was not littered with copies of the wrestling magazines that featured grapplers with bloody noses, bloody eyes, bloody foreheads.

“I sort of fell into wrestling,” he laughs.

Football was his passion, but Malenko eventually got into amateur wrestling. He did not connect the Greco-Roman style with the grunting and smoke-blowing antics of his father’s world. When excited him about the sport was the raw man-against-man competition. The mat work, the moves, the tactics: human chess made his pulse race.

Under the watchful eye of his father, Dean improved steadily as an amateur and high school wrestling. He appeared well on his way to a bright future in the sport, until a 1977 car accident changed his life and ended his high school wrestling career after his sophomore season.

There’s a little ring, a bone, that holds each vertebrae to your spine,” explains Malenko. “”I was missing one from birth. I was 16, and doctors gave me an option: ‘You can probably go through life and nothing will happen to you. Another good jolt, however, and you could be paralyzed for the rest of your life.’”

Malenko knew he had little option but to undergo surgery to remedy the problem. The operation, followed by seven months of rehabilitation, squashed any futures in high school wrestling.

Months passed, and Malenko began to miss the competition, the moves, the strategy. It was then that he began to consider a career in pro wrestling.

“I’m probably the only guy in the world who looked at the wrestling business as a competition. I could still do what I wanted to do in the wrestling business, and I didn’t care about being in front of the camera or calling myself ‘The Flaming Chicken.’ I enjoyed doing the moves part, the countermoves, the athletic ability. Those are the reasons I got in the business.”

Does this sound like the soap opera-ish WWF or WCW? It shouldn’t. Only one territory offered the type of wrestling Malenko wanted: Japan.

Malenko trained under Karl Gotch, the original “Man Of A Thousand Moves.” Gotch schooled Dean on all the technical maneuvers he had popularized in Japan. In 1983, Malenko signed with All-Japan promotions.

What a different world it was from the one his father had dominated for so many years. Here, the characters weren’t a sideshow attraction. In Japan, a skilled wrestler was equated to a New York lawyer or Boston heart surgeon. Malenko, who had never craved crowd approval, nevertheless won over the fans with a tight, skilled, technical style that accentuated the nuances of the sport. Oftentimes, his matches ran 40 to 60 minutes. But there were no 22-minutes preludes, no screaming, deluded interviews. No valets prancing around in panties and bras. Just mat work, suplexes, submission holds, and other moves featured in the Karl Gotch playbook.

“I think it’s the greatest place in the world to wrestle,” says Malenko. “It gives you a foundation and taste of different styles.”

After six years in All-Japan, Malenko moved to New Japan promotions.

“The guys were treated with respect. You never got anyone who would shoot you the bird and tell you to ‘F-Off.’”

Japan and Malenko were a perfect match, and the 12 years he spent there helped tailor a new style of wrestling not popular among artists such as Chris Benoit and Chris Jericho. So what brought Malenko back to the States? Money, and the 1994 death of Boris.

Dean was still working in Japan, but had his sights on WECW, when he learned of his father’s illness. The previous year, Boris had been diagnosed with a rare type of anemia that attacked his red blood cells. He underwent monthly transfusions, but in early-’94, he was diagnosed with acute leukemia. Two rounds of chemotherapy were successfully; doctors, however, wanted Malenko to undergo a third round. But in August, Boris caught a viral infection from which he would not recover.

“I don’t care how old you are…my parents were divorced several years earlier,” says Dean. “It affects you. The divorce of my parents affected me; the death of my father affected me. None of that ever goes away.”

By returning home and joining ECW, Malenko learned that the creative freedom offered by Japanese wrestling was nice, but it did not compensate for a scant salary.

“The money was quadruples what we make in Japan. Bottom line, it’s money that puts food on your table, that’s supporting your family. At the same time, however, you have to have a little pride. If someone’s going to walk all over you, that’s another story.”

Few people trod on Malenko and the time-honored Malenko name. Life as a medium-seized fish in a huge ocean is different for Dean, but over the last five years, he’s developed into on e of WCW’s most skilled grapplers. His name does not carry the weight or magic of Hogan’s or Flair’s, but that is incidental to Malenko. So are the lights, the television, the fame. Wrestling, he insists, is still about chinlocks and reversals.

“I enjoy the business, but not as much as I used to’ it’s not as much fun because of the locker room crap and the egos. The one thing that keeps me going in the business is being surrounded by people I trust, which are few and far between. If you can give me a Chris Benoit or Eddy Guerrero every night or Rey Mysterio that will keep me going.” Malenko’s appreciation for a match against technically proficient wrestlers hasn’t changed; not has his appreciation for family. But his is a new world these days, thanks to daughter Larissa and wife Julie.

“Growing up, and into my 20s, I loved kids and always wanted one. But I was scared to have one when I saw the way society was going and being portrayed. I always wanted to be a father and give to a child the way Dad gave to me.”

Larissa is a Mommy’s girl right now. That’s one of the sacrifices of being on the road. His reality is different, now that he has a child. Malenko says he sees the fans in a different light, and it is not always flattering. Kids wearing T-shirts embossed with foul language; kids who weave sentences out of fouler words with more aplomb then Hemingway creating pictures with adjectives, adverbs, nouns, and verbs. Some of the verbs thse kids use would have made even the villainous Boris blush with shame. This is the world that pays for Larissa to live comfortably; this is the world that pays for Julie’s schooling. This is the world that comes with a steep price tag: leaving his daughter behind.

“Once in a while she pulls that ‘Daddy’ thin, and I don’t care how big or macho you are, you have to melt.”

So much for the “Ice Man” persona.