Flathead grad finds success as pro wrestler

Fairy tales, beautiful but simple, aren’t supposed to be hard to understand. There are good guys and bad guys, heroes and villains.

The real world, as most fairy tale-reading youngsters grow to discover, is never as black and white.

Unless, that is, you spend a fair chunk your time where Flip Gordon does.

“I’m a good guy,” Flip’s alter ego said. “I’m always a good guy. It’s just kind of me; I love smiling.”

Flip’s name is no misnomer, and pretty early on he discovered that a smiley, flashy, high-flying, all-American man in tights had a tough time being anything but a good guy.

“I’ve been a bad guy twice,” the alter ego recalled, pointing to a specific night in Tijuana, Mexico. “I came out and told somebody to ‘shut up’ and they started booing me.”

“But it was just weird … I don’t speak Spanish so they can’t understand what I’m saying anyway. (My partner) was the one talking all the smack and I was like, ‘yeah, what he said!’”

Then Flip Gordon and his tag-team partner began their violent ballet, part-improvised, part-choreographed, in front of more than 5,000 screaming fans — most screaming for the two men on the other side of the ring to smack the smile off Flip Gordon’s face.

But Flip kept smiling. Good guys really stink at being bad, and besides, Flip had been dreaming about nights like this for a long, long time.

BEFORE HE was professional wrestler Flip Gordon, Travis Lopes was just Travis Lopes, a trouble-making kid jumping off roofs and trampolines, and wrestling anyone he could get his hands on at his Columbia Falls home.

“It was not a choice,” Janis Patera, Lopes’ mother, said of wrestling with the oldest of her five kids. “Nobody had a choice, not even me. If he was going to wrestle you, you were going to have to wrestle him or figure out how to get out of it.”

Lopes did not stop at wrestling, either. The little daredevil developed that impulse at a very young age.

“When he was little, I want to say about 5 or 6, he jumped from one balcony on the second floor of an apartment building, thinking he could get to another balcony on the other side,” Patera said.

“He missed.”

But for every reckless impulse Lopes had, he also put his boundless energy to use in other, pretty remarkable ways.

“When he was 18 months old I took him to a gymnastics class and they said he was too advanced for his age,” Patera said. “He learned how to solve a Rubik’s Cube by watching YouTube.”

Lopes taught himself how to play the drums, and to dance, and when he arrived at Flathead High School he stunned the Braves’ legendary wrestling coach, Jeff Thompson, with his athleticism.

“The stuff he can do, it drops your jaw,” Thompson said. “He was an unbelievable athlete. He had that explosive strength and he’s got hops.”

Asked to account for her son’s uncanny abilities, Patera credited the supernatural.

“I’m not even sure,” she joked. “I think he came from outer space.”

Lopes played soccer and wrestled at Flathead, but despite his raw talent he was fairly unremarkable in both sports. Instead, Lopes — who his mother said was diagnosed with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder at a young age — spent a fair amount of his time honing the showmanship that would serve him well as a pro wrestler.

“He was constantly in trouble at school for walking through hallways on his hands, doing flips over desks, really risky behavior,” Patera said.

All of that informed Lopes’ character, Flip Gordon, who he describes as “really just me times 10 or times 100.”

“I’m always go, go, go, go, go,” he added.

“So, in wrestling it’s really cool because I can do all of these showoff things that I used to do when I was in high school, when I was in college, just to get attention. I’m an attention-seeker. Now that I get paid to do it, it’s awesome.

“I’m living a dream.”

LOPES IS not being hyperbolic about the dream, either. He, his mom and his wrestling coach all confirmed that being a professional wrestler has always been where Lopes saw himself as an adult.

“I think everybody knew,” Lopes said. “I was very open with it, ever since I was 8 or 9 years old.”

Most of those closest to him never completely discouraged the dream, but in the same breath they made sure to promote a backup plan.

“It’s one of those almost like being an astronaut,” Thompson said. “How do you get there? I never dreamed that he would accomplish that goal, to be honest.”

Lopes has, incredibly, accomplished his goal, and in less than a decade since he graduated from Flathead in 2010. Today, the 25-year-old lives outside Boston where he trains at the New England Pro Wrestling School. He started his career working for $15 a match and once performed in front of a crowd of seven.

“I think only three of them paid,” he remembered with a laugh.

Barely more than two years since first flipping into the ring, Flip Gordon will officially become a member of the Ring of Honor stable of wrestlers on June 1. The company is a notch below the profession’s pinnacle — World Wrestling Entertainment — but many Ring of Honor matches are televised. Lopes is now also making enough money to quit his 9-to-5 office job and dedicate himself full time to being Flip Gordon. He takes multiple matches every weekend and has fought around the globe.

He won his first world championship, the LDN Wrestling belt, in London earlier this year and he hopes to fight in Japan under the Ring of Honor banner in the coming year. He’s also wrestled in Canada and Mexico.

EARLIER THIS month, Lopes came back to Flathead wearing his glittering championship belt and flashing the Flip Gordon smile. The kid who craved attention was speaking to around 400 students at a school assembly and sharing his story.

The unlikelihood of being a professional wrestler aside, Flathead Activities Director Bryce Wilson and other teachers who knew Lopes did not, at least years ago, expect to see the rambunctious student back in the building, giving advice.

After all, Lopes was hardly a model student and his life was far from easy outside of school.

“He had a tough background,” Wilson said. “I think many of our teachers reached out to me after I brought him in and they came back to me afterward and said it was so great to hear that message. Students were like ‘you can really struggle and at the end of the day come back and be a great success.’

“Sometimes you don’t hear the kid that hits bottom before he gets back up and is able to succeed like Travis.”

Lopes was raised by Patera, a single mother, until he was 13 when the family moved in with Lopes’ stepfather on a farm in Columbia Falls.

“He had a lot of adversity in high school, struggling a little bit in the classroom and even at times it felt like school wasn’t the right thing for him,” Thompson said. “So what he did is just continued to work hard and try to find his niche.”

“He was always so driven and so dedicated and so committed,” Patera remembered.

“He carried that on throughout his own life; possibly seeing the failures of other peoples’ dreams motivated him,” she added, saying people in Lopes’ life had trouble keeping jobs and staying in their homes.

The story of Lopes and his family is not an uncommon one at many schools, and Flathead is no exception. And while not advocating for Lopes’ aversion to the classroom, teachers and administrators said the familiarity of Lopes’ story is what really drove home his message to students.

“There’s a few people that maybe want to take an unorthodox path and those people can also be very, very successful,” Thompson said. “They have that creative mind and have a little more energy and (don’t fit) that structure and system.

“It really does touch those kids,” he added. “We have a lot of them at Flathead.”

Before he left the valley to head back East, Lopes sat a table in a coffee shop, confidently, wearing a neat pinstripe suit with his championship belt next to him on the table. Standing out from the shop’s typical afternoon crowd, Lopes smiled as patrons stared, soaking up the attention and reflecting on what it all meant.

“I’m a small-town kid from Montana,” he said.

“Living his dream.”

Entertainment editor Andy Viano can be reached at (406) 758-4439 or aviano@dailyinterlake.com.