Heavy metal is pounding, and the people are ready for rasslin’ when a man in a black mask cuts the music and grabs the microphone.

“Let me explain the rules,” he says.

Rules? There are no rules.

Around 50 people have gathered in a backyard in East Texas. The man in black and his competitors will battle in a professional wrestling ring. They’ll batter each other with folding chairs, cookie sheets, a thumbtack-studded baseball bat, barbed wire and other weapons. The bloodier, the better.

“Whoever’s the last three standing will meet in a head-to-head, fatal three-way for the title,” the man with the mic yells to the crowd.

He runs to the wrestling ring and dives onto the mat. He slides on his belly and leaps to his feet, waves his hands in the air and rouses the fans to stand up from their lawn chairs and pickup tailgates.

“Are — you — ready!”

A second wrestler in a red mask swaggers toward the ring. He eases through the ropes.

The wrestlers circle one another for a few seconds, each sizing up the other, and when the man in black tries to shake hands to start the match, the man in red kicks him hard in the chest, grabs him by the neck and flips him over his shoulder.

His body thuds against the mat. The fight is on. Let the backyard craziness begin.

THEY GREW UP RASSLIN’

The man in black is named Wayne Williams Jr. The man in red is named David Williams. They are brothers, and they have been “rasslin” in backyards since they were teenagers in Jefferson, in the early 1990s.

Professional wrestling federations such as World Wrestling Entertainment insist that fans not emulate the choreographed stunts they see on television. They say amateurs can seriously injure themselves during the body slams, pile drives and other maneuvers.

The Williams brothers say WWE is for wimps. Through word of mouth and clips posted on the brothers’ MySpace page, their “Backyard Craziness” matches have been known to draw more than 150 fans to sites around the Longview area.

“I just love to entertain, love rasslin’, grew up rasslin’,” says Wayne, who is 33 years old. “It’s just in me. It’s in my blood. Some people love to go hunt, some people love to go fishing, I love to get in there and beat the hell out of my little brother.”

David, 31, counters that he can take the beating and dish it out, too.

One woman joins the backyard ruckus. Carmen Johnson proudly sports a deep scrape on her arm as proof of her toughness.

“I got wounded when I got hurled off the ring,” she says, laughing. “Then they hit me with the pan, and it really made me mad.” She has never wrestled before today. “I had no idea, so I played it out as best I could. I’ve seen one match. I’m not scared of anything.”

TAKEDOWN

A big guy with gray hair climbs into the ring, but not before he accidentally becomes entangled in the ropes and flops onto the mat. Fighting under the name the Lumberjack and wearing camouflage hunting pants, he grabs another wrestler by the shirt collar and flings him into a wooden plank leaning in a corner of the ring.

“Oh no!” hollers Wayne, who is taking a break and manning the microphone. “He got took down by the Lumberjack, and the Lumberjack’s as old as Ric Flair!”

Ric Flair is a wrinkled, 60-year-old professional wrestler. The Lumberjack is 53-year-old Wayne Williams Sr. He’s the brothers’ father and a logger from Jefferson, and his moment of glory ends when he decides that he is too tired to carry on.

“We started in the backyard of my house in ’92,” the elder Williams says after his fight had finished. “We just kind of got started in my yard to have something to do, and they’ve multiplied it a whole bunch.”

For years, the Williams clan tangled in the dirt and grass. Dad sprang for a professional mat and ring when the family fights turned into full-fledged events.

“It’s exciting. It’s a sport, it’s exercise, putting on a show. You can be funny, comical, serious, all that,” he says. “A lot of it looks painful. It might hurt a little bit, but it doesn’t hurt that bad.”

He shrugs off questions about serious injuries that have been attributed to backyard wrestling. While their father talks, David pins his brother against the mat and staples a dollar bill to his cheek, drawing blood.

“That’s better than the stuff we used to watch on TV, man,” their father says.

WHY BACKYARD WRESTLING?

Why would a person beat himself up for the entertainment of others? It’s a question that Ted M. Butryn, a sports psychologist at San Jose State University, has considered while researching the cultural impact of professional wrestling.

INSERTING RISK INTO ONE’S LIFE: “There’s safety in society now,” Butryn says. “You’re not as likely to get hurt by some kind of violent crime, so people are inserting risk into their lives, with risk being seen as something to challenge yourself and break up the monotony of everyday suburban life.”

NO TELLING HOW MANY INJURIES: “In terms of how often people get hurt we don’t really have an idea — broken bones, glass, scars, but obviously there’s no regulation other than the parents saying ‘yes’ or ‘no;’ ‘You can do it in our backyard’ or not. We don’t have any stats because it’s in the backyard, but certainly there’s a risk element to it with (so many) unpredictable elements.”

WHO WINS?

One by one, weary wrestlers begin to fall away.

The fight for the homemade title belt comes down to the now-unmasked Williams brothers and Drew Thomas, a 22-year-old Iraq veteran. The trio sprinkles thumbtacks across the mat and slams each other onto them while fighting. Then the brothers ignite a table of wood and barbed wire and kick Thomas out of the ring, his body crushing the wood and rolling in the wire.

Thomas has been out of the military for almost a year. He served in Iraq for one year and was enlisted for four. He wrestles in his desert fatigues, but he says the heavy clothing hasn’t protected him from the sharp objects.

“It hurt,” he says. “It’s just when you’re in the moment you can take the pain. But the staples went through. The tacks went through. Everything went through. I’ve pulled glass out of my back for a week before.”

Thomas untangles himself from the barbed wire and climbs back into the ring. But the Williams’ 15-year-old sister, Courtney, sneaks behind each of the three fighters and hits them in the head with a cookie sheet. They crumple to the mat, pretending to have been knocked unconscious.

When it happens a second time, the fight judge declares a draw, and the three wrestlers vow to settle the score in a rematch to come at Mom’s Biker Bar in Longview.

Wayne’s wife, Hope, has videotaped the exploits for years. “Everybody asks how I deal with it, but they’re brothers,” she says. “They know what they’re doing, and I think it’s funny.”

After the fight, however, Wayne is not feeling well.

“Somebody hit me pretty hard in the back of the head,” he says. “I’ve had headaches before, but never seen stars.”

Hope drives him to the hospital. Later, Wayne calls to say the doctors have found a troubling spot on his brain. It will require a biopsy that he can’t afford. The years of wrestling are probably not to blame, he says, but chair shots to the skull are beginning to seem like a bad idea.

The fight at Mom’s will go on, but likely without one of its top contenders.

“Somebody’s gonna have to take my place. I’m retired. I can’t take anymore blows to the head,” Wayne says. “I don’t have insurance or anything like that.”

Even so, in the few weeks since his final fight, it has been difficult to abstain when his brother and their friends are stirring up a little backyard craziness.

“I’ve got one left in me, no matter what they say,” he says. “This is my baby. I’ve been doing this for 16 years.

“I already miss it, dude.”