His Wall Street buddies - the I-bankers, options traders, analysts, and the rest of the apprentice masters of a diminished universe - envy him. ''They're jealous,'' Chris Nowinski says. ''They're working 100-hour weeks and stressing out."

And Nowinski is making ridiculous bank flying through the air and upending Tommy Dreamer, Goldust, and the rest of the World Wrestling Entertainment nomads and leaving tickets for his fellow Harvard alums at the Madison Square Garden window.

''He's a tough, down-to-earth, irreverent Midwestern kid,'' says Harvard football coach Tim Murphy, who watched Nowinski fly through the air in a helmet for four seasons. ''And, as I suspected he would, Chris is laughing all the way to the bank.''

Barely two years out of the charm school across the river, the 24-year-old Nowinski may be the best-known and best-compensated member of the Class of 2000. Certainly, he's the most despised, at least when he's in character.

Nowinski's ring persona is the Harvard man everyone loves to hate - smarter-than-thou, snooty, dismissive.

''I'm not cool at all,'' says Nowinski, who expected to get hooted out of the house last night when WWE Raw hit the FleetCenter. ''I have very few redeeming qualities. The only people rooting for me are Harvard people.''

And most of them are amused or appalled by this version of Nowinski, which isn't the guy they knew when he was on campus.

''When Chris was on `Tough Enough,' we were just shaking our heads in disbelief,'' says Harvard wide receiver Carl Morris. ''That elite persona - that's not him at all.''

Nowinski wasn't a trust fund legacy who spent his days sipping gin and tonics at a final club, the Harvard version of a fraternity. ''I wasn't rich enough for that,'' he says.

Nowinski came from Arlington Heights, a Chicago suburb out past O'Hare Airport, was a defensive lineman for the Crimson's 1997 Ivy League champions, and graduated cum laude in sociology. But his former teammates say he had an unconventional, even zany side.

''He went to the beat of his own drummer,'' says football captain Neil Rose. ''You knew you were getting something genuine, but there was something more there. He was kind of mysterious, which is why his character is so Chris.''

Nowinski's parents never let him watch pro wrestling as a kid, but he caught WWE on cable when he was living with some football buddies during the summer before his senior year. ''And I was hooked,'' Nowinski says.

So when his classmates went on to Wall Street or graduate school, Nowinski worked days as a biotech and pharmaceutical consultant and his nights at Killer Kowalski's wrestling academy. A year ago, he sent an audition tape to ''Tough Enough,'' WWE'S reality show on MTV, and ended up making the finals.

Thus was born ''Chris Harvard,'' the Oliver Barrett III from hell. Nowinski took him on tour to the ''indie'' shows, ''Knights of Columbus halls and middle schools'' and found that the shtick worked. ''I figured it was unique and real and I would know what to do,'' he says.

Last April, WWE invited Nowinski to be part of a fan festival during WrestleMania weekend in Toronto and put him through several tryout matches. Two weeks later, he got a contract.

By pro wrestling standards, that qualified Nowinski as an overnight sensation.

''Working your way up in this industry usually means 10 years in the indies, bouncing all over the place, going to Japan,'' he muses.

A unique niche
He was the rawest of WWE's Raw. ''I was horrible when I started,'' Nowinski says. But he had a few assets going for him. He was big (6 feet 5 inches, 270 pounds) and athletic (second-team All-Ivy, with considerable NFL interest until he had shoulder surgery).

Nowinski also had some acting experience; he played Diesel in his high school's production of ''West Side Story,'' took a college drama class, worked in a sketch comedy group on campus, and was center stage for the football skits. ''Chris always loved to perform,'' Murphy recalls.

And Nowinski had a niche nobody else could claim. There was no other Harvard character on the tour, much less one with an actual diploma. ''I'm able to play off every Harvard stereotype that exists,'' he says.

All of them obnoxious. There was no way, Nowinski knew, that he was going to be a WWE darling. ''Once I was the Harvard character,'' he says, ''I knew I was going to have to be a heel.'' At least the costuming was easy - anything crimson with an H (including his old letter sweater) will do. ''I have tons of stuff from the Coop,'' Nowinski says. Everything else is attitude, propped up with a Cantabrigian vocabulary stocked from the Latin side of the mother tongue. ''I busted out `caveat' last week,'' Nowinski says. ''I have to bring a thesaurus sometimes.'' The irony is that he plays everybody he detested during his college days.

''Chris looked down on the snobbishness of some of the kids here,'' Rose says. Now, he takes anthropological notes on them. ''I went to the Temple Bar the other week and people there had turquoise sweaters tied around their necks on a warm night,'' Nowinski says, shaking his head in disgust.

Disdain is the defining quality of Christopher (both his birth and stage name) Nowinski, which is why he says fans are reluctant to approach him in public. ''They'll avoid coming up to me because they think I'm a jerk,'' he says. ''If I'm at all polite or nice to people, they're shocked.'' Last weekend in Springfield, he strode into the ring wearing crimson shorts with a white H on his backside and surveyed the booing crowd with a supercilious smirk. How could they prefer Goldust, an outlandish gender-bender from Hollywood?

The only fans rooting for Nowinski were the ''Right to Censor'' geeks. Everybody else was chanting vulgarities about Harvard. It might have been the Yale game or the Beanpot final.

For an anxious moment or two, it looked as if Christopher Nowinski might win. ''Naw, not the Harvard graduate,'' a dismayed 12-year-old groaned. After Goldust prevailed and Nowinski was left flat on his back, all was harmonious within the WWE Universe, at least for a night. There are four nights a week like that for Nowinski, 200 cities in a traveling carnival that will visit Peoria, Abilene, and India by the end of the year before heading to Japan and Korea.

No end in sight
Nowinski's daily routine is standard. ''Find a gym and a tanning bed,'' he says. His prematch meal comes from Subway (the roast chicken breast sub). Dinner is ''a lot of late-night Outbacks.''

His job is simple: show up no matter what (''Your story line involves four or five other people'') and be a Harvard heel. One fall, 20 minutes max, for ridiculous pay. Nowinski won't say how much he makes (''You do well''), but it's enough to make his Wall Street buddies drool.

His parents, he says, don't mind. ''They've always been supportive - as long as I'm paying the bills,'' Nowinski says. And his alma mater isn't objecting, since he's dropped his original ''Chris Harvard'' tag.

If anything, Nowinski may have enhanced the university's reputation, which formerly relied upon US presidents, Nobel prize winners, scholars, and tycoons. ''Chris Nowinski has now filled this glaring hole in the prestigious institution's resume,'' Raw Magazine pointed out. ''I know this is something I could do for 10 or 20 years,'' Harvard's turnbuckle laureate says. ''I wake up in the morning looking forward to my job - that's never happened before. I don't see where this will ever get boring.''

This story ran on page C1 of the Boston Globe on 11/5/2002.
© Copyright 2002 Globe Newspaper Company.

Return to Articles.