Shawn Davis has always been a risk taker.

It didn’t surprise his friends or his family last August when the 18-year-old volunteer firefighter went to Montana to fight the devastating forest fires. He barely made it back in time for his first semester at the University of Maine at Machias.

Few batted an eye when the East Machias native last fall started driving to Bangor two or three nights a week to take classes at a new wrestling school. Friends cheered him on when his wrestling personality, “Davistation,” won the cruiser weight title in January at Rampage Pro Wrestling’s first show at the Bangor Armory.

Nearly everyone in his Washington County hometown, however, was shocked when Davis broke his neck last month in a freak accident at the wrestling school on Outer Hammond Street. Community members did what they always do when one of their own needs help – they gathered to raise money to help the Davis family with expenses.

Saturday evening, more than 500 people crowded into the Elm Street School in East Machias to help out Karla and Kenneth “Bucket” Davis’ boy. Organizers said the supper for Shawn Davis was the biggest one ever held in the community.

“Bucket” Davis is the first selectman of the town and the maintenance supervisor for SAD 77. Karla teaches special education at the elementary school. Those in the crowd over age 40 came to support them. But the younger people, many of whom left Washington County to attend school or find work, came home for Davis.

Katie Bragg, 20, arranged for time off from her two jobs in Bangor to attend the dinner. Gun Shy, the band she sings with, will play at another fund-raiser later this month. She grew up with Shawn Davis.

“I don’t know any person who met him who didn’t like him,” she said. “Everybody is his friend immediately. He’s very daring. He lost the tip of a finger and has had lots of stitches, but he overcomes everything.”

Now, he’s overcoming a devastating injury that could have left him a quadriplegic and still might affect his mobility permanently. Davis is confident he’ll be back in the wrestling arena eventually. His parents are looking forward to his coming home in another four weeks. The community is confident that the boy’s Down East tenacity will lead to a full recovery.

Today, Davis doesn’t recommend people start wrestling the way he did – just fooling around with his friends at Washington Academy.

“My senior year in high school me and some of the guys got together in our free time and started tussling around,” Davis said Sunday afternoon from his hospital bed at Eastern Maine Medical Center. “I think I found something I was pretty good at. I could combine my athleticism and agility. So I fooled around with the guys doing amateur stuff, which I discourage entirely now.”

Davis was one of the first students to sign up at Ken Banks Rampage Pro Wrestling School last June. Banks is a graduate of Adrian Street’s Skullkrushers Wrestling School in Gulf Breeze, Fla. Davis was the school’s high-flier and did flips off the ropes to land on other wrestlers sprawled on the mat.

“I was the daredevil who wasn’t afraid to get hurt,” he said from his hospital bed.

He was practicing at the school the evening of March 5 – “going for a move I’ve done hundreds of times called the shooting star press.” Starting on the top rope, Davis jumped forward into the ring, doing a back flip. He was to have landed on his hands, knees and stomach over fellow high-flier Matt Lindsey.

Instead, he jumped too far out and not up enough and landed on his head and the back of his neck. He felt a snap and went numb from the neck down. He fractured the C-3 and C-4 vertebrae and crushed the disc between them. Early on the morning of March 6, Davis underwent seven hours of surgery as doctors fused the vertebrae. They offered Davis and his family no guarantees that he would ever walk, let alone wrestle again.

For the first few days after the surgery, Davis could shrug his shoulders slightly and had to activate a call device with his tongue when he needed a nurse. On the fifth day, he felt a tingling in his feet. Over the next two weeks, feeling slowly returned to his entire body. Two weeks after the accident, Davis was able to sit up in a wheelchair, and on March 21 he took his first steps.

He has lost 30 pounds from his top wrestling weight of 171 and still wears a neck brace. Doctors have told Davis that he probably will be in the hospital another month, but he has made remarkable progress especially during the past week.

Davis said his goal is to get into the ring again. His fellow wrestlers, friends and family support that goal. Karla and “Bucket” Davis do not blame Rampage Pro Wrestling or Banks for their son’s injury. They described the event as a “freak accident” and praised the support of Banks and the wrestlers at the school have shown Davis.

“The boys from the school have been his second family,” Karla Davis said Saturday night. “They’ve been here every day since the surgery. They’ve rubbed his feet, scratched his nose and his eyebrows when he couldn’t.”

Banks retired the belt Davis won in January, then almost canceled his school’s second wrestling show on March 17. Bucket Davis talked him out of it. Banks was reluctant to talk about the accident. He downplayed the seriousness of Davis’ injuries when the Bangor Daily News interviewed him and his wrestlers for a story published March 17

After the NEWS was informed anonymously of the serious nature of Davis’ injuries, Rampage Pro wrestlers refused to discuss the accident. Two of them told the NEWS that Banks didn’t want them talking with the press about the incident. However, updates on Davis’ condition and the announcement of the fund-raiser Saturday night were posted on the school’s Internet site.

Banks said Saturday afternoon that he was nervous about what might happen if the media reported that Davis had broken his neck at the school.

“Wrestling isn’t very well-respected,” he said during an interview at EMMC. “Different outlets of the media take shots at it all the time. … People don’t bother to explain how inherently dangerous of a sport it can be and how well-trained you have to be. … I’m afraid of people seeing us as a place where people are just running in to get their necks broken.”

The recent paralyzing neck fracture suffered by Darren “The Droz” Drozdov of the World Wrestling Federation and the publicity surrounding injuries children have suffered trying to imitate television wrestlers made Banks reluctant to talk openly, he said.

“Shawn was one of our best guys, one of our best-trained guys. If there’s a positive that can come out of this, it’s to show little kids that you’re not supposed to be doing this,” said Banks. “This is possibly a wakeup call to people who think it isn’t physical, who think it isn’t dangerous.”

Statistics back up Banks’ claims that wrestling accidents like Davis’ are rare and most accidents occur outside the ring. David Meltzer, editor of the Wrestling Observer Newsletter studied accident and death data of pro wrestlers. He found that at least 16 died during an eight-year period, but most deaths were linked to steroid or other drug use.

The National Electronic Injury Surveillance System compiles data from product-associated injuries treated in the 100 hospital emergency rooms participating in the NEISS. It listed 43,917 emergency-room visits in 1998 and 39,829 in 1997. More that 50 percent of those injuries were sustained by people ages 15 to 24. More than 50 percent of the injuries recorded by NEISS involved exercise equipment and bleachers.

Banks said he will continue operating his school and to support Davis in his recovery. The owner of Rampage Pro Wrestling acknowledged at the dinner in East Machias that the Davis family could have been far less understanding about what happened the night of March 5. Banks told the crowd that if the situation had been reversed and he’d been the one hurt, his father “probably would have shot the guy who owned the school where I got hurt.”

Davis is determined to return to wrestling. He hopes to make an appearance at one of the shows in late spring or summer to let fans know he’s going to be all right.

Washington County-based band Gun Shy will give a benefit performance for Shawn Davis at 7 p.m. April 28 at Washington Academy in East Machias.