Drive Thru Special - Those We Lost In 2024 Omnibus

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Hello again, friends.

And you are our friends, the great Brian Last here.

You there, we are back on the bus with an annual look back at some of the wrestling greats, some of the personalities that we lost over the previous year.

Our annual Those We Lost Omnibus, looking at those that left us in 2024, comprised, of course, of conversations with this man.

the leader of the cult of Cornet, Mr.

Jim Cornette.

Well, you know, Brian, normally here at the top of these programs, we're jacking around and having fun.

This is a more serious subject.

And to be honest, you know, in a lot of cases, these are the shows that I dread doing, that I'm sitting there for a day or two before we're going to record it.

I don't want to talk about this.

I don't want to talk about this.

And

we always usually end up having fun one way or the other by remembering the person.

But at the same point,

you know, a lot of people enjoy listening to them because it's a chance to, you know, hear some stories about somebody that the fans and the listeners may have viewed as, you know, as a hero in their wrestling fandom or whatever and like to hear all these things.

So the point is it's a bittersweet kind of thing, but we put it together.

They do it at the Oscars.

And we put these together, but these are discussions about the various

wrestling personalities that passed away in 2024.

That's right.

And of course, while it's sad that we lost everyone, it is nice to look back and tell stories and enjoy the history.

And, you know, and I'm still, there's

some I'm looking forward to talking about as soon as they, but they won't have the courtesy to go ahead and kick off so that I can talk about them.

Well, this took a turn, ladies and gentlemen.

Let's get right to the omnibus before we hit any other bumps in the road.

Jim Cornette's look at those we lost in 2024.

First, Jim, I want to get your thoughts on the news that broke this past week, the passing of Killer Khan.

And for a lot of the folks who don't,

who aren't old enough or who weren't around at that point, Killer Khan was probably most famous in America for he had the run with the WWF in 19,

what was it?

Was it 79-ish, 80-ish, 81-ish?

What was the date of Andrew?

81, 82.

And that timeframe where Andre Andre the Giant had an accident outside the ring and broke his ankle.

But because he had to be out for a period of time, they actually incorporated it.

They blamed Killer Khan for it and even showed some footage of Andre with his doctor and the size of his cast and made something out of it.

And that was...

unheard of at that point in time that anybody could injure Andre the Giant.

I don't think it had ever been done, at least not on any widespread, maybe in Montreal in the early days, right?

So that got him over with that audience.

He had a ton of heat, but he was

a real Japanese wrestler,

you know, and worked Japan for periods of time, both when he broke in and then later on when he went home

to bookend his United States excursions.

But he, you know, he was huge for,

you know, for the Japanese wrestling scene.

He was, you know, much bigger than almost anybody except Baba.

So he got over that way and then, you know, had the Mongolian look when that was fashionable over here in this country with the ponytail and the whole nine yards and the

big chops.

What'd you think of his screeching?

I guess that's the best way to call it, the best thing to call it, screeching.

Yes.

He had, yes, it was a screech, kind of like

a larger, more intimidating-looking guy doing cactus jacks,

you know, at that

level.

And didn't he then, I mentioned he went back home and wrestled in Japan when

his run in America was done, where he'd, he'd worked all kinds of territories.

He was in Dallas for quite a while, wasn't he?

Wasn't he part of Akbar's gang of foreign misfits at one point?

Yeah, well, he was with Akbar in mid-South, and then he went to world class.

And actually, if you remember, there's a great match.

I'm sure it must be available.

Gordy and Killer Khan.

With Kerry von Erich as the referee, and this is before the Free Birds had officially turned babyface, and it's the first Free Bird von Erich handshake.

It's Terry Gordy at the end, covered in blood, after one of the most brutal matches of the 80s, shaking hands with the Von Erich.

Well, the Von Erich.

With Kerry von Erich.

Well, he was the Von Erich at the time to all the fans.

But what a match.

One of the most brutal, bloody matches, but in the ring, like not like around the arena with chairs.

It was an in-ring brawl.

Hey, in Dallas, you couldn't go around the arena with chairs or you'd have come back in the ring with knives sticking out of your ass.

Fucking idiots.

But anyway, but yeah, I mean, for a big man, he was a great worker and he had the intimidating look.

And then, but at the same time, he didn't just, when he went back,

went back home, he didn't just work a gimmick.

He was a a good worker.

And then I guess owned a restaurant, right?

For some period of time over the last number of years, since he's been retired from the ring, that some of the boys would visit from time to time.

Not just owning the restaurant.

I believe he was the chef in the restaurant.

Well, there you go.

He wasn't just the owner.

He was a customer.

He wasn't.

No, well, yeah.

Well, no, that's not how that works.

Well, that's how the hair club for men fucking spot went.

I'm not, Joe, I'm not just the president.

I'm a customer.

I don't know how you link

squirreling with Killer Khan.

Because he wasn't just the owner.

He was the chef.

One of the best big men, I guess, in America during that era because he had a second run with Hogan in like 87, I think.

Oh, that's right.

I forgot about that.

He was on one of the,

oh, goddammit.

You're probably better with the WWF history than I am.

But wasn't he on, didn't they do an angle on one of the Saturday night's main events?

Am I thinking about somebody else?

You may be thinking about somebody else, but you may be.

But I never met Killer Khan.

In case you were going to ask that question, I'll preemptively strike.

Never met him, believe it or not.

When he was in Dallas before we got there and Mid-South before we got there, and then WWF before I got there,

he was a trailblazer.

He was always there first.

Ole Anderson, Rock Rogowski passed away this past week.

A storied career, a legendary career, lots of stories, lots of incidents, wrestler, booker, promoter, everything.

Someone you had lots of dealings with.

You saw him as a fan.

You were a colleague of his.

Eventually, somehow you earned some respect from him, I think.

But someone who at various points in your life, you certainly thought different things about.

Let's talk a little bit about Oli Anderson.

And also,

for the people, Rock Rogowski, he wasn't the rock, but for the people, especially who had known him since the Ganya days, who would call it rock, and everybody knew personally, you know, not on TV, but in the locker room or whatever.

And everybody knew who you were talking about.

Although I will say when he turned babyface, like that match with Big Bubba in the cage at the Crockett Cup.

That was his name.

They called him Ole Anderson The Rock, and he had a shirt that said The Rock on it.

Well, that's that's right.

And then all of a sudden Vince McMahon made Don Morocco the rock.

So he took that away from him.

Well, but I think maybe they may have taken it away because

it was too close to the Rock and Roll Express at that time.

No, in all seriousness.

Well, Ole was 81, and unfortunately, he'd been in bad health for some time now.

Did he have multiple sclerosis?

Oh, I can't say it.

MS?

Yeah, multiple sclerosis, I believe.

Yeah.

Thank you.

And, you know, and it's a shame, but 81, and my God, he survived, even stabbed seven times, including that one in Greenville.

It was like a fucking half inch from his heart.

And, you know, just a long and varied life.

And Ole's not the kind of guy, I mean, I'm not saying with his, you know, family and, you know, or close friends, but Ole's not the kind of guy

that you really cry about.

Because I don't, he would have laughed at you if you did, right?

Because that sarcastic old rat.

But boy, what a fucking almost unique talent that he was in the business and a fascinating guy and a brilliant guy intelligent guy

and I know a lot of people oh Oli that a grumpy old

Oly

for a certain if you liked sarcastic humor if you liked a guy with that fucking what the fuck are you talking about kind of goddamn approach to things he was one of the funniest people in the locker room he was witty and sarcastic with the comeback, and he'd just obliterate you, or he'd just, if

he saw

bullshit in something as an owner or booker that you were saying, whether he was even right or wrong,

he would fucking not only tell you it was bullshit, he would analyze the fucking consistency and the color of the bullshit and describe in vivid detail what it smelled like in front of everybody to your face.

And you had almost few people

really had a response or could muster one, right?

He was a very intelligent guy.

And as we'll talk about as we go on,

I don't think people understand.

He was one of the most successful wrestlers of all the, I'm talking business-wise, financially and accomplishment-wise, of all of the wrestlers of the territory days from the TV era to the mid-80s.

Because a lot of people don't understand the business.

But

I mean, we've told a million stories, and I don't want to, for all the regular listeners, tell every goddamn chapter and verse story again that's out there.

We've done WCW deep dives and stories of Crockett Days and blah, blah, blah.

But as we've talked about Ole over the past couple of years, I've said, you know, and especially,

you know,

in hindsight, going back as we've done those deep dives, when I yelled at Ole and quit

at WCW in 1990, I was just yelling at him because Jim Hurd wasn't there.

He was just the office guy standing there.

As we've mentioned, I don't think he particularly gave a shit either way,

whether we were there or not, because he didn't give a shit about that job at that point in time anyway.

He just wasn't going to fuck with Jim Hurd about minute shit.

I think he knew it was a lost cause.

What's it like to yell at Ole?

Well, I'd done it a couple of times.

It's not like I'm yelling at him saying I'm gonna come over and punch you in the face I wasn't gonna whip him he can still whip me 50 or whatever and I was 25 but I'm going Ole's is fucking bullshit and well if you think it's bullshit go home Well, that's the best idea you ever had.

Well, go ahead and do it then.

Well, that kind of, well,

and don't come calling me back when you're doing some kind of dog and pony show in Memphis.

Don't worry, Oli, I won't, because this is the last place I want to be.

That type of, you know,

I mean, that was pretty much goddamn some word-for-word shit there.

But it's not like we were to strangle each other over a payoff or something.

You know,

so,

but there was even when we were just compadres in the locker room in 86 working for Crockett, remember at the time we were in Huntington, West Virginia at Civic Center, we're sitting in the locker room, the fucking

86 bash checks had come out.

And what did they, in 86, we did 14 bashes.

And I think Ole and Arne,

they were with the rock and roll most of those shows.

And that was a big, you know, marquee match.

But I think, because Crockett paid all the bashes on one check, you got your regular date check weekly right along, but all the bash shows came in one check.

So it would look bigger, right?

So fewer people would complain.

And Oli and Arne got like 15 grand for the 14 bashes.

And me and the Midnight got, you know, 23 or whatever, because we were working either with Dusty and Magnum or the Road Warriors and blah, blah, blah.

And Oly sitting there

and Baby Doll, that was the key.

It was Dusty and Magnum with Baby Doll and me or the Road Warriors with Baby Doll and me.

It was me and Baby Doll, right?

And it worked, bless Dusty.

And Ole's sitting there going, wow, I never thought I'd live to see the day that I had my sweat and blood and tears in this business and work to build it up so that some fat manager and goofy can come along and make more money than I did.

And I said, and Oly, on behalf of the fucking goofy, the fat manager would like to thank you for all that work you did and putting in me getting this fucking check.

And he started liking me for shit like that.

How did he react to that specific comment?

Did he chuckle?

How did he react?

Yes, yes.

Because it could, because, you know, fuck.

He would,

again, he wasn't firing me because I'd fucked up Columbus, Georgia, or and he was the fucking booker or something.

But he had an admiration for people that could, you know, instead of, well, fuck you, Oli, I hate your guts, could fucking make some kind of goddamn wise ass remark.

And he would engage you.

And so he liked that shit.

And that's, that's the point that I was making is I was never personally,

I don't think Ole, as we've said, he would never admit it probably, but by 1990, that stretch where he was the booker for six months,

he'd, he'd

lost the plot, as they say across the pond.

And I don't think he really, he wasn't there because of financial necessity, otherwise than I think it was against

he, I don't know what other religion he might have had, but it was against his fucking religion to turn down guaranteed hundreds of thousands of dollars a year.

And,

you know, but he didn't have any drive to, you know, break new booking ground.

And he was just doing some old shit again.

And he didn't have it.

But in

the 70s and some to some extent, the early 80s, he had goddamn made a fortune with his booking.

He just didn't give a shit and he didn't have full control.

And the guys didn't understand it.

And I don't think he gave a shit because his check was the same either way.

When he, when it was depending on ticket sales, whether he made any money or not, he made changes changes a lot quicker.

He made some almost bizarre changes at the time, like Roddy Piper getting fired from Georgia while he was in a top spot.

Well,

but the

because I was such a fan of that, right?

That whole, and that's right as I was getting into business.

And

I was such a fan of Piper and that whole angle, but the

conversation that I got

when I first got into locker rooms of guys that had been in the territory or had heard or whatever was that at that point in time, Roddy did not want to do anything but because didn't he go to Continental right after that for just a brief period of time?

Piper?

He spent a minute in Florida, I know.

Or Florida.

He got mad because at that point in time, as long as Roddy showed up for his match, he thought he didn't have to get there on time and he just wanted to go somewhere where he could make $1,000 a week and do the things he was doing.

And I think that's what went sideways with Ole, because

the one thing about Oli, they joked when they actually brought up the idea of a fucking drug test in WCW for steroids, cocaine, whatever the fuck.

They said the only two guys on the roster that will pass that test is Ole Anderson and Jim Cornette, unless you test for cholesterol.

Because Ole wasn't going to goddamn do it.

So that was, I think, him and Roddy may have got sideways on Roddy's habits.

Because that's really the beginning of like the turn in Ole's creative powers.

Because it was that.

And then going into 83, he pushes Barnett out of Georgia, takes full control.

Right.

Just because the other partners weren't going to interfere with him at that point, which would end up, we know how that would end up.

And look at the booking in Georgia in 83.

It's easy to romanticize a lot of it.

You know, Tommy Rich and Buzz Sawyer, the.

creation of the Road Warriors.

No, but it was all over the page.

The Road Warriors were an accident created out of necessity.

It was all over the page because when Oli took full control,

he loved Stan Hansen.

So, sure, Stan, I don't mind you go to Japan for a month at a time while I'll still figure you into big programs or Bill Eady, superstar.

Yeah, we'll use you when you can be here because you're a great talent, but go to Japan for six weeks.

So, they'd do a mask versus mask or loser leave town or whatever the fucking

and then somebody'd be back in six weeks, or it was all over the page.

Things would stop suddenly, And Ole was running the whole company then.

So that he, and then with Barnett gone, Barnett could always be an anchor.

Ole could, you know, he could be a great booker.

I don't know that he was ever intended to run the entire show or not

because he

he had a,

even though he was a heartless bastard,

For the guys that he liked, that he knew had drawn him money, he would give them too much leeway with their schedule because of what was going on in the business.

And Georgia couldn't provide the biggest payoffs anymore.

And Barnett would have probably had a little more stability with that or a little more power

in

convincing people to do otherwise.

And then it all fell apart from there, and he lost the time slot and blah, blah, blah.

But it's so the thing of me.

He lost the company, not just the time slot.

Well, he lost the, well, it lost the company and the TV and the whole nine yards.

But anyway, so just to say with me and Oli, because I know somebody's going to say, oh, Cornette's saying good things about him.

No,

he was a representative of a larger evil.

He was one of the devil's henchmen at the time that me and Oli really weren't happy with each other.

And when he wanted to put the pumpkin over my head, that was three days before that.

Did he want to do that or did Jim Hurd want him to

do that?

See, that's the thing.

He wasn't going to tell me, well, it ain't my idea because he, you know, he, he's the booker and it's not,

he would have wanted to make everybody think all the goddamn ideas were his, right?

Because Ole was not the kind of person that would admit to being told to do something, but they had the goddamn,

the guys dressing up.

Well,

was Jim Ross Dracula?

Missy Hyatt was in some, maybe Missy Hyatt was Vampirella.

I don't know what the fuck was going on, but the announcers were in,

who knows?

I can't remember.

The announcers were in costume.

It's Halloween Havoc.

Goddamn, I think Dangerously is a Vampire, maybe.

And they had the Southern boys run out dressed as caricatures of me with oversized tennis rackets.

And they had me in the goddamn Confederate general uniform to taunt them and Ole pitches me.

And then they'll take one of the, because there's pumpkins and there's bales of fucking hay around.

They'll take one of the pumpkins and they'll fucking hit you over the head with it and it'll stick on your head.

So I'm going to be running around with a jack-o'-lantern on my fucking head, right?

Not to mention the logistics of how big would this pumpkin have to be to cut a hole big enough to get it over my head without taking my fucking ears off.

And

I'd finally, I'd had enough because it's against Tommy Rich and Ricky Morton.

We're in the first match.

Robert's knee was hurt, Gibson.

So it's not Midnight Rock and Roll.

Now it's Tommy and Ricky, and they've never teamed up before on any television program at that point.

And we're going to still do the job.

And

then I'm going to come out and interfere in the Southern Boys, our rivals match, and cause them to lose.

So our program, both teams get beat by other teams, and then they're going to put a pumpkin over my head to erase any heat that I might have accumulated by fucking them out of something.

I said, no, Ole.

They're not going to put a pumpkin over my head.

And he's, wow, they would have done it in Tennessee.

You know, and Nick Gulis, he would have done it.

I said, there's a difference, Ole.

Nick Gulis drew money.

Oh,

sick burn, as the kids say, because Ole hated Tennessee wrestling.

Yeah, where did that come from?

His hatred of Tennessee wrestling.

Because,

despite the fact that he had never been there,

right?

That's what I'm thinking.

He's never worked for Nick Gulis, right?

He never, well, no, not even, no, no, not even in the 60s as a rookie.

We'll get to that um

it was the concept and what people told him ah they got that fucking rough house fargo over there he never saw the tv because there was no fucking home video at that time you didn't see promoters even unless they sent footage of a guy whose film was coming into your territory you didn't see any film from any other territory unless you went there and watched it so but ole was very serious-minded that's the way he and gene got over and built their legacy: these guys are fucking real in a world that potentially might be bullshit.

And it was, you know, even though he didn't mind guys with gimmicks, he wanted guys that their shit looked legitimate or they sounded legitimate, or, you know, not, you're not going to do anything fucking outrageous.

You're not going to break a bottle over a guy's head and he's up making a comeback in fucking five minutes or whatever, shit like that.

And then the predisposition to everybody that had ever worked for Nick Gulis to go around calling goddamn Tennessee bullshit because they didn't like Nick, except for the people who made money in Tennessee and they never left.

So, anyway,

so that's where that came from.

And,

but again,

you know, that's the

Ole was trying to ever increasingly,

you know,

he always wanted control of his company or his booking or whatever.

But I think that's where he lost it when he was like, I didn't pick these fucking guys.

He couldn't just fire fucking guys.

Because that's a lot of times when he worked for Ole, when people suddenly disappeared, he got mad and fired you,

as he's mentioned many times, and many people have said.

But when he was working for TBS,

he inherited this fucking roster of guys.

He's looking and seeing what they're making, and he knows what he's paid talent that have drawn big money in the past and they're, they're overpaid.

And he also sees that they're not drawing dick for a variety of reasons.

And they're still getting that money, whether they practically show up or not.

And that just,

you know, I'm sure he was aft.

But that the thing with Ole is

He wasn't hanging on because he needed the wrestling business.

People kept asking him to come back.

And then he'd get in a spot, well,

they're going to give me $150,000.

And this is 30 years ago.

To a fucking goddamn book or whatever, whether I do any good at it or not.

What the fuck?

Right.

But he had pretty much,

I think it wasn't even, well,

pretty much the last run that he wanted to have as a wrestler was 87, right?

When he finally broke off from the horseman and switched Babyface.

He had intended to be retired at that point, and they brought him back

in 89 when the deal to get both Tully and Arne got screwed up by Jim Hurt.

Am I correct on this in your

computer brain?

He came back a little bit before then.

Remember, they also brought him back, I want to say for one night at the Omni, him and Luger teamed up after Luger turned Babyface in 88.

All of a sudden, they had Oly in the main event of the Omni with Luger.

In 89, remember, he was the

designated enforcer for the Halloween Havoc Thunderdome match.

That's right.

It was him and Gary Hart, and then he punched Gary Hart, causing him to throw his white towel in, and Bruno San Martino thought that was it.

Yeah.

So he was there a little bit before then.

Someone had already made the decision to bring him in.

Yeah, well, it was Flair.

And

that's the thing is that

he knew that, or Flair thought he knew that Tully and Arn were coming back, so you would have four horsemen, right?

But that's the point is that

Ole was 81.

That means he was born in what, 1922 at this point.

He was making big

1922.

1942.

I'm sorry.

What year is this, Joe?

Oh, goddamn it.

I misspoke.

I didn't miss add.

I misspoke.

We got a cognitive test for Mr.

Cornette for that.

Yeah, hey, I'll tell you what.

I'll fucking, you examine this head, you'll find nothing.

By the time the late 60s, he's 25 years old.

He was making good money and on top in the wrestling business.

And

by 10 years, pretty much 10 years in or so, he's booking.

He ends up having a run where he books not only the Carolinas, which was, again, a phenomenal wrestling territory that

did consistent business for all those years, but he was booking Georgia at the same time.

And the Anderson brothers, as main event talent, were going back and forth between those two territories.

And by the late 70s, early 80s,

whenever he bought the piece of Georgia for Watts' piece,

now he owns part of the company.

That was in 15 years.

When he was

in the mid-80s, when he was working for Crockett and then switched babyface and then late 80s, came back to WCW, he had gone back to Minnesota during that period of time because he owned a sawmill.

Some people just call it a lumber yard, but it wasn't like Lowe's.

It was a sawmill that prepared lumber to go to the people that sold lumber.

Because everybody would always ask, hey, Oli, how's the lumber business?

Or whatever.

I goddamn got a sawmill.

Where the fuck are you there?

But I mean, and this

obviously, you don't just own a fucking sawmill for a hobby.

He was making money with that.

He had made a fucking fortune for the territory days in the business.

We've talked about this before, but

when you take into account

what he was making in the late 70s,

in most of the territory, he was in comparable terms with anybody but Andre, the NWA champion, and Bruno.

Because he could, between his booking pay for

a territory like the Carolinas, that ran sometimes three shows a night in those days, and the booker got small percentages off each of the shows, as well as his main event pay for him and Gene being on top, or then later on, him and Hansen, or him and whoever, you know, whatever heel he was teamed with.

And then Georgia, too, he was making a quarter of a million dollars a year in the late 70s.

Gross,

but that's close to a million dollars in today's money.

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and that's what there was a great article i think it was greg oliver um who's done a bunch of the hall of fame uh books and articles um

when they called ole some hall of fame called ole Oh, yeah, that's actually from the wrestling review.

That's from something I own.

Greg reprinted it.

It's a great article.

Well, I'm glad you mentioned you own that because now you can probably dun greg for a fucking percentage of it but yes there'll probably be a wrestling review collection coming out at some point soon oh wink wink nod nod possibly available at jimcornet.com

uh but anyway he wrote the article talking about when some hall of fame called ole to say they want to induct him and what was the premise he asked well why have you inducted me before who's been before me or what whatever ole would do right

and the guy told him, well, you know, you were big in the Carolinas, you know, and Georgia, but you never, you never really worked anywhere else.

You weren't big anywhere else.

And he's, what kind of fucking moron are you?

Why would I want to go anywhere else?

I was doing so well there.

Well, that was the fight he had with Dave Meltzer on the old Wrestling Observer radio show years ago.

Okay.

Dave had him on, and Ole had just put out his book with Scott Teal, which is a fascinating book to read.

It's certainly Ole's perspective of things.

And there was a chapter, which was like two pages, about Dave not putting him in the first class of the Hall of Fame and the voters not voting him in.

And then he went on with Dave, and that was one of the things you didn't go to enough places.

And he's like,

you know, he's one of these people.

It's like, I got into this business to make money.

I didn't have to go anywhere.

Why would I, Bruno?

Why would Bruno leave what he's doing here to go somewhere else?

Well, and see, that's the thing.

That's why I mentioned he was so unique and one of the most successful guys in the territory days.

When you think about

in the territories

system,

when you started in the business, unless you were getting a push because you were some

other professional sport attraction or whatever the fuck, you started like a regular guy.

You would go from territory to territory and hopefully work your way up the cards, get more experience, get better.

Somebody sees you, give you a gimmick.

And you go from making the least amount of money in the preliminaries to the most amount of money in the main events.

But even then, you can still be a bigger star in a bigger territory because the

guys making main event money in the Kansas City territory, that might have been level of the underneath preliminary guys in the Carolina territory.

You wanted to be a big star in all the territories, right?

But it was almost never a career you could even possibly plan, much less actually intend to do, where you would just go to one or two places and suddenly you would get to be such a big star in that location,

making so much money for so long that you would either own part of the thing or you'd never be asked to leave or want to leave.

And that would be the Brunos and the Jerry Lawlers and the goddamn Vern Gagnas

and the

very few other people,

right?

And Ric Flair to Carolinas.

And that's like the goddamn, you know, because there were some guys.

That's the dream, isn't it?

Isn't it the wrestler's dream?

I don't have to go too far from home and I'll make all this money.

In the territory days, think about this.

It wasn't just a wrestler, you know, going from territory to territory in the twinkling of an eye.

It's if he's married, if he's got kids, the wife has to go, the kids have to go, unless you're going to keep two residences in two different parts of the country.

And some of these guys would be in the business for 15 or 20 years and they would make enough money to make a living, but they would be in two or three territories every year rotating around.

Sometimes they could stay for six months or nine months or whatever.

Sometimes it might be three months or who knows what might happen.

And as different schools and apartments and all this bullshit.

And

then when you get to be a star to the level that promoters want you to work all over the country, then you're in the main events and then they're flying you places and you're making main event money and picking your spots.

That's a whole different deal.

But

for somebody to be able to go and not only be a featured main event attract, because when Ole replaced, the original Minnesota wrecking crew in...

the Carolinas was Gene Anderson and Lars Anderson.

And

for whatever purposes that Lars needed replacing when he went out somewhere else, they bring in Ole.

And think about a guy that had been trained by Vern Gagne, kind of Eddie Sharkey in that system in Minnesota.

They need a replacement in the Carolinas.

And they get this guy, Rock Rogowski, who grows a mustache out and looks enough like he's Swedish out of Ole Anderson.

I don't know what the fuck,

that he can be, you know, Gene Anderson's partner and he's a big, tough, legitimate fucking guy.

But then that starts the Minnesota-Carolina pipeline.

Flare to the Carolinas, the Road Warriors, when, when Ole needs somebody on the sperm of the moment,

and they, and, you know, Sharky is, oh, I got these fucking guys.

And that's, you know, how many people followed that?

But Oli was probably the first, right?

What, 68 or so, he, he joined Gene?

He came over early.

And again, he always kept that good relationship with Vern Gagne, too.

He would still talk glowingly about Vern, you know, until the very end.

So they just had that good relationship.

And, you know, it is interesting when you, like, I go through my files I did the other day after Oli passed.

And you look at the Andersons and all these pictures of Gene and Lars.

And it's.

almost a different team just in terms of the feel altogether.

They called him Rock Rogowski for a reason.

He wasn't on the gas or anything.

He was just a naturally big guy who lifted weights.

He was like a rock, as opposed to Lars, who,

yeah, well, you know, Lars was Lars.

He looked like Lars.

I always love when Oli turned on Dusty that he's like, my foolish brother Lars, whatever he said.

He threw out some line about Lars.

But yeah, that opened up the pipeline.

Well, and also the thing is,

Gene and Lars were established as a, and we've talked about the Carolinas being a tag team territory.

And

they would, you know, rotate a lot of, you know, Nelson Royal and Tex McKenzie and Johnny Weaver and George Becker and the Kentuckians and the Bolos and et cetera, et cetera, who are the assassins.

And, you know, the Andersons fit right in there.

But when Ole came in, they were somewhat already established, but.

They got bigger from there.

And I think Ole because,

I mean, we've talked about Gene, what a believable fucking guy he was.

And, you know,

he was an almost 50-year-old fucking stroke survivor who was pudgy and smoked like a chimney and balding.

And he could walk up by the barbarian and give him that fucking grip I've talked about on the elbow, whatever that fucking pressure point, the nerve, the bones.

thumb and fucking middle finger, any barb on the floor, or any other grown man I ever saw.

No, Gene, please, I'm a pussy.

Say you're a pussy, I'm a pussy, Gene.

Anything, let me go.

They weren't working with him.

All the fans knew that Gene was legitimate.

He trained a bunch of guys that broke in in the Carolinas in those days, but he wasn't a great promo.

When they made him a manager, it was because the fans had such respect/slash fear for what he might be able to do to somebody.

But it was because after he'd had the health problems,

when Ole, and you've heard Lars Anderson's promos, Jesus, Mary and Joseph.

So when Ole came in, one of the great legitimate big, bully, sarcastic,

literate, though, logical, emotional promos in all of wrestling,

and he could stand there and tell you anything.

And you've, you might not even believe it, but you would swear on your life that this guy saying it believed it and really meant everything he was saying.

And he was just so

real as a fucking windbag prick and a bully and a blowhard and a fucking egotistical, whatever the fuck, right?

That's what got, I think, the Andersons to the next level and the work.

And then,

you know, that's what

when I was there in the mid-80s, and this was 15 years after,

you know, Ole had started, all the fans would talk about great tag teams.

And whether they mentioned, you know, the rock and roll or the midnight, or whether it's back to Flair and Valentine or Steamboat and Youngblood or whatever, they would mention different teams because there had been so many great teams, tag team territory.

But almost every, the first one would be the Andersons because they were like, oh, it was the Andersons, and then everybody else came.

You know, and that's why they never left.

They just fed guys to them.

And they drew in all those towns regularly for fucking years and years.

As a fan, before you got into the business,

we've talked about it in the past.

We'll talk about it again briefly.

But, you know, one of the things you attended was the night that he turned on Dusty Rhodes, that Gene turned on Dusty Rhodes.

Yes.

Omni and Atlanta in 1980.

But before we even get there,

what was it like for you when you rescued those tapes?

tapes those films yeah and had them transferred and for the first time you're seeing all this stuff which is really the classic Anderson brothers period.

Yeah.

Well, it was, I have, I got goosebumps right now,

you know, running up and down my spine.

No, this was stuff that we didn't know still existed and that, you know, had never been seen before because it was before the days of home video and all that stuff.

And,

you know, it was all of those guys in their prime, but with the Andersons, you can see

they were different than everybody else because they, well you you saw a bit of it in Ole's work in the 80s in terms of if a babyface was going to make a comeback or even gain any ground they really had to fucking fight they really had to fucking assert themselves to fight and then if you if they got enough if Ole and Gene got enough they'd start backing up you can't see me but I'm rocking in my seat now and they You know, if Ole was hanging onto your fucking wrist and you punched him in the head, his fucking body language, he'd register it but like punching a bull but he hit him the second time and his knees would wobble but he hit him a third time and his his body's starting to sag but he's going down to a knee but he's still holding he won't let go of the fucking wrist they made the baby faces fight for shit and the people got with it more and then they were more

yes they were basic but when ole came off the top rope he would jump off the top rope and either do the knee to the arm, which never blew his knees on all those shitty rings doing that.

And when you land, it's more dangerous than what he was doing to the fucking opponent.

Or just to hammer or club somebody and they'd slam on the arm and they'd quick tag in and out.

And the sacrifice thing

where, you know,

they did it in several big moments.

They didn't overuse it because, see, that's another thing.

They stayed in the same territory all those years.

They didn't have once in a lifetime, one in a million fucking fluke spots that they overdid to the point of prostitution because people saw them all the time.

They had to just fight and wrestle and get people behind the fucking match.

And they did that the same place for years and years.

But the sacrifice thing

where all would be lost and suddenly if Gene was hanging on the ropes or whatever or leaning into the ring, Ole would grab the babyface and run the babyface's head headfirst into fucking Gene.

And remember, that's the the same thing that

dynamite kid up in the uh bulldogs match in where the garden or wherever oh he did

well he did that spot of wrestlemania too that was the finish they rammed uh i want to say valentine uh into dynamite kids head and he went flying yeah off the apron into the crowd or not the crowd but all the way to the floor and they missed it they missed the shot of it They missed the shot, but Dynamite didn't miss the floor and that's what fucked his backup.

Well, Valentine gave him that finish because they got it from the Anderson brothers.

And

maybe that's why Gene later in life had the stroke and/or

muscle spasms because they did it a number.

But that's that's the kind of thing they would go to any lengths to win a match, right?

The Andersons, mean, cruel, and nasty.

And that's,

I mean, that's why they had that level of heat.

When Ole was stabbed in Greenville, that was

1976, 1976, maybe.

Whatever the point is, he'd been working Greenville on a weekly basis in the Carolinas for almost 10 years at that point.

He still had enough heat that this guy wanted to kill him, literally tried to kill him, stabbed him a half inch from his heart.

And, you know, you don't get that by goddamn being phony.

When you watch those films after you had him transferred, what did you also think?

Because I'm fascinated by Babyface Ole Anderson, because those promos are amazing.

Yes.

Just his ability to communicate is amazing.

But what did you think of babyface Ole?

Well, that's also with the transfers, one thing I was going to mention was, and Ole could do either one because he could talk and make you believe that he was an evil bully because everything he said made sense and it sounded like he meant it, but he could also talk and make you believe that he was in the right.

in a particular situation because he could logically communicate that.

So it was, it, and and he never said, he didn't suddenly start, oh, I'm only going to do a headlock.

He would still do his Ole Anderson shit.

So it was a heel getting a taste of his own medicine.

But another thing about the transfers of the films to watch the people,

to watch the people in the various venues in that territory that saw wrestling again, either every week or every two weeks at that point in time.

And they would go absolutely bat shit insane for these wrestling stars that they saw on all the shows, but they were so over

and they were so into the

wanting to see their hero win and their, their,

the villain lose, and people get their comeuppance and the fucking,

you know, what's going to happen?

Boy, we want revenge for whatever's been done to our guy.

They just, they're jumping up and down, screaming, throwing umbrellas, popcorn, babies in the air.

I mean, all the the territory crowds, most of them, any good territories, they had their hot moments, but they also,

you know, but for a long period of time, the Carolinas was wrestling crazy.

And the guys that were on top either had an inordinate amount of heat or were just, you know, the people that hung the moon.

And the end of, that's, that's why when,

as I said, when, you know, when Ole got there, he never had, and Georgia was

the

NWA territory next door.

And obviously, even though it was one state, much smaller schedule than the Carolinas with three towns a night through North and South Carolina and Virginia, part of West Virginia, Barnett, one of the most powerful people in the business.

So he would annex some of the talent and the, you know, the Pipers or whoever would appear on both.

It was a great payoff for Jim Crockett senior and junior's talent to come down to either be featured in the Atlanta shows or later on on the Omni.

And when TBS got,

you know, the super station or got to be a super station.

So

there was,

if you were on top in both those territories, you could make,

you know, as I mentioned, a couple or $3,000 a week in those days just wrestling.

Well, actually, some of the guys of the Carolinas in the late 70s, Flair and Valentine were making close to $150,000 grand a year just in the Carolinas.

So that was, you didn't need to go anywhere.

And then Oli, he becomes a booker.

He's making extra money and then he becomes part owner.

So that's a, Ole was never, he didn't drink.

He, I'm,

he, Oli was as much of a fan of women as anybody ever in the wrestling business, but he didn't chase women to a stupid degree and spend a fortune on them.

He didn't spend a fortune on any fucking His

t-shirt with his goddamn,

you know, evil, mean, and nasty or whatever, that was a rib because Ole Anderson wasn't going to spend money on a goddamn ring jacket.

So he was independently wealthy and didn't need to do this by the time the mid-80s rolled around.

Well, before we get to the mid-80s, 1980, the turn in Atlanta.

Yes.

The only match you didn't shoot ringside for.

Well, and that was the thing, the WFIA Wrestling fans international association convention that year's in in the uh georgia and the highlight of the weekend of any of the conventions was you went to the territory's main

you know building to to see when the memphis convention we went to the mid-south coliseum knoxville went to knoxville civic coliseum atlanta we're going to the omni so that weekend we saw a tbs television taping we saw a spot show in

god i think it, it, shit, where was George?

It may have been Carrollton, Georgia.

And we had the banquet and we were at the Omni.

And

I was there at Ringside for all the other matches.

It was Harley Race against Tommy Rich for the NWA world title.

And Dutch Mantel worked with Chavo Guerrero.

The first time I saw.

anybody do a fucking moonsault, body block off the top was Chavo.

and a number of other matches but

there was one match that was the cage match and i had forgotten and got there i didn't have any high-speed film you can't shoot that chain link cage with a fucking flash because it fucks everything up and i say you know what i'm going to go back up and sit with Weasel and my mom is there and,

you know, and just watch the cage match instead of shoot at ringside.

When did you learn that lesson?

Was there a specific match or example where you learned that you can't shoot cage matches?

Yes, the first, the first time that, you know, the chicken wire was okay that we had in Louisville for all those years, but the first time I went to a place they actually had a real fucking cyclone fence cage, it just looked like shit.

It throws not only does the light reflect, but it threw the

automatic exposure setting that you had back then.

It threw that off.

And so the background inside the cage was dark, blah, blah, blah.

And so I started shooting 400-speed film, no flash with cage matches, but

because of the hecticness, I got no high-speed film.

Nobody else, ah, fuck it.

I'll sit this one out.

I'm tired.

I'm so tired.

And luckily, because they had a fucking riot, because it was the culmination of the Year, year and a half long deal they had done.

Ole had turned babyface.

And he had started teaming up with Tommy Rich, and he had teamed up with Mr.

Wrestling 2.

And he had teamed up with, but Dusty Rhodes would never agree to be his tag team partner because of the animosity from them from, you know, the years previous.

And they even, they would show the fucking clip of Dusty.

It will never be over.

And so finally, the Assassins, the hottest heel team, at least of the modern era in Georgia wrestling at that point in time.

Maybe in Georgia wrestling history.

Maybe in Georgia wrestling history.

Finally, it's the Assassins, and they have fucked with Ole,

and Ivan Koloff is a heel.

He's on the Assassin's side, and Gene Anderson had been out of the picture, had been away from the territory.

Ole would later say that Gene had left the territory because he couldn't bear to see who I was associating myself with.

His do-gooder brother Lars.

That's what he called him.

My do-gooder, my do-gooder brother Lars.

But

Oli had problems with the assassins and Ivan Koloff and he needed help.

And Dusty had had problems with the assassins.

And finally,

they shot some kind of, I can't even remember what it did, but they really did something to Dusty.

And Dusty came and agreed to be Oli's partner so they could get rid of the assassins.

And

so, this had been like a year, year and a half in the building of this to get,

even though Oli had been a straight babyface and all the others had teamed up with him, and there was no hint of a betrayal of anybody, Dusty wouldn't have anything to do with him.

And finally, they have the match, and then they have a rematch.

And then, as the classic promo,

everybody's heard it.

I used to hand it out in OVW.

The promo that Ole did the week after this incident we're talking about to explain it all was one of the great ones in the history of professional wrestling by anybody.

He said, I got an idea.

What about a cage, Dusty?

We could keep those assassins in with a cage, and the idiot went for it.

Ole suggests the cage match with the assassins, and Dusty agrees to it.

And the two referees are Gene Anderson and Ivan Koloff.

And so

the match starts, and they're, you know, they're wrestling, they do their thing, and it was a cage match, and it's fine, and people are liking it.

And

then finally, they start getting some heat on

Oli, and they get him down, and there's not really much going on.

It's not like they're killing him or anything.

And then finally, but the people want to see Dusty make the tag.

And finally,

I know, I'm sorry.

I tell a lie.

They did it the other way around.

They got quick, didn't it?

Yeah, they didn't get heat on.

I was was thinking of another time.

They got heat on Dusty straight away.

They did some shining, but then they got the heat on Dusty, and he was milking getting the tag to Oli.

And finally,

Dusty does get the tag to Oli, and that's when Oli jumps in and looks at the assassins and turns around and goddamn starts wailing on Dusty.

And then at that point, Gene drops any pretense of being, you know, against the other guys and he starts getting on and everybody.

A little detail that was awesome.

The assassins look at each other like, what is happening here?

Yeah, yeah.

At first, they're like, okay, we'll just all goddamn it.

And, you know, once they realize they're not really a fight anymore, and now they're in the cage and there's one, two, three, there's five of them and Dusty.

And they're killing Dusty in the cage and they omni in Atlanta.

And the people got hot.

And then it turned more desperate because

they started sending the boys out, the wrestlers, the underneath guys, to start and they can't get in.

They're shaking the door.

The door is locked.

The door, they can't, the referee, it was the referees are in the ring and they've got the fucking keys and everything, blah, blah, blah.

And so the underneath guys start trying to climb the cage and then the heels in the ring.

get up on the ropes and they're hitting their hands so they can't climb the cyclone fence and they're knocking the baby faces off the fucking cage.

And this is really creating a goddamn element of jeopardy.

While they're still working on Dusty and breaking his leg or whatever they were doing, in the middle of the ring, the other ones are keeping the baby faces from.

And that's when you, you know, Lars is out there because Lars had been presented as a baby face,

even though by that point, his glory days were long behind him.

And finally, some of the fans get, they create such a sense of urgency to this that the the fans start trying to climb the guy.

Now the heels are hitting the cage for real.

Oh, shit, don't let those motherfuckers get over the top.

And that's when

they got the bolt cutters or whatever they fucking did.

And they got the door open and a bunch of the babyfaces pour in.

And this is always an awkward moment because there's only one door in those old cages.

It was only like three feet wide.

So the heels have to stand the babyfaces off.

The babyfaces have to go to the injured baby face they're saving and look like they're trying to do something but the heels got to get out the same door they just came in and

those baby faces had to do something so they're wailing on the goddamn heels as they're trying to get out that door that's uncomfortable as i've been in that position and then

the goddamn the Once the heels get out on the floor, the cops are shitting because the whole arena is in an uproar.

And it wasn't sold out that night, but

it looked great to me because it was the first time I'd ever been there.

But I'm going to say, was there 12,000 people there?

It wouldn't have been out of the way.

10 or 12,000 there fucking pissed.

And the floor area and in the Omni, I may have mentioned you had to walk down an aisleway and then kind of cut to a diagonal further aisleway to get underneath to the locker room.

They can't get the goddamn heels out.

They've been in the cage for a while now,

and they still can't get the heels out of there.

And then they just, all the cops circle them as a run, and they got the shit beat out of them.

It was a, it was fucking chaos.

But that got the, um,

it got the point across.

And of course, the video's out there.

I think it's called The Big Turn of 1980.

And it is an extraordinary video because the way they covered it is one of the...

It's an amazing clip because they show the footage and they have all the wraparound interviews while Oli's in a studio.

And I forget who walked away at the beginning, maybe Walter Johnson or who was it?

Someone walked away and they said, You'll get yours one day, Ole Anderson.

And he goes, Not from you.

Yeah, not from you.

Remember the interview I was telling you about where the guy for the football player forgot all the guys' names?

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

That's that's it.

And then Oli said, just go on, just get out of here.

Nobody wants to hear from you.

Just leave.

But anyway, so that's

unfortunately, I think Oli is more remembered for being a grumpy bad booker in 1990 or whatever than he is for being one of the great fucking heel talents in the business and one of the most successful guys of the territory days,

you know, that he should be remembered for because most of that stuff is not.

not around anymore and in the public eye or where people trip over it and are forced to look look at it.

And of course, when you would go to Crockett, he would be there and you would see him.

And that was

the end of his run.

I guess the rumor is that he took all the Georgia master tapes and burned them in his yard when Vince McNamara got the company.

And it sounds believable because of who it is.

He wound up a blood oath with the Briscoes.

I don't know.

With Ole again,

you know, maybe he put them in a goddamn shed just to hide them and he was going to deny any knowledge of where they were and they rotted rather than he, because I'm thinking he could, he's got a figure he could have made some money out of them sometime or other.

But,

but that's why, and of course, I was the first time I ever got fired in the wrestling business.

And

fuck, the last time for the next 22 years, I guess,

was O Lee when he closed the whole territory down in Georgia.

We did the summer of 83 for six glorious weeks.

And he closed the territory at the classic line to Dundee and Ron West.

Don't do this anymore.

What?

The interviews?

No, any of it.

And that was everything's canceled.

Okay.

But he,

when, when I first came to Crockett, think about what Ole thinks of me because I guarant goddamn T you

that Ole Anderson did not watch

any

pro wrestling on television in his spare time

or any wrestling that he was not involved with that he had to watch for business if he was Booker or whatever, or potentially even if he did a television show, I don't imagine he'd probably watch himself by this point, right?

So the only time that he has ever seen me before I come to work for Jim Crockett Promotions, where I'm managing the new top heel tag team that's coming in the territory with their manager, a guy named Jim Cornett.

I worked for him for six weeks, two summers previously, where the most notable thing I did on his fucking Chattanooga studio television show that he was never even there in person for was get my face shoved in a cake while conducting a birthday party for my dog.

The whole time he's blaming Nick Woolis.

That's the funny thing.

Well, well, there you go.

Yes.

And here's the thing

because they told me Ronnie West and Dundee, Dundee, because they were the only ones that actually saw Ole, right?

When we were working there, Ole wasn't coming around those fucking towns, but they would go in once a week and have the meeting with him.

And he didn't like the birthday party with the dog.

They came back and said, oh, fucking Oli hates you.

He hated the birthday party.

So when I met him the next week, because when we did the local promos, it was in the Omni, the offices that the Georgia wrestling office had.

And, you know, he could stroll by.

And I met him

that next week after the birthday, which was two weeks before he came in and said, don't do this anymore.

And he said,

ah, you're Cordette.

I said, Oli, it was nice to meet you.

I saved you a piece of cake.

He said, yeah.

I said, it's in my ear.

And that's the last interaction I had with Ole Anderson until I walked into Crockett being the manager of the top heel tag team.

You know, speaking of interactions, I guess for a lot of the younger fans or people who discovered a lot of these guys on tapes or later on on DVD and then actually really on YouTube, Ole became known as the grumpy guy in various shoot interviews and documentaries where he would say what he would say.

You know, he told Vince McMahon to go fuck himself.

Then he said the same thing to Linda.

Yeah.

He breaded it.

Hold on now.

Don't gloss over it.

Vince said

after the unpleasantness over the Georgia office, Vince was at a place with Linda and he said, Ole said, got my wife Linda here.

I'd like you to meet her.

And he said, fuck you and fuck Linda.

See, the funny thing, too, is Vince McMahon went everywhere with lots of bravado and he dealt with a lot of tough, strong personalities.

He tried to take down Harley Race in a bathroom.

Yeah.

And he got his ass kicked.

When he went down to Georgia after everything, he broke Arillo Monsoon as his bodyguard.

That's the only time he went with someone because he was afraid something could happen.

Right?

Think about that.

And Oli is the only one that would never at any point

before, during, or after his unpleasant dealings with Vince McMahon, did he ever goddamn soften up as, well, Vince, you know,

at least we can look back on those days.

No, fuck you.

And fuck Linda.

And fuck your kids.

You fucked me

and I don't need you.

And I won't buddy up to you.

and I'm not going to forgive you for it.

See, Vince counted on that from the entire industry.

I fucked you, you know it, but you have to come work for me.

And maybe we'll get along.

It'll be great, but you'll be working for me and I'll be in charge.

Very few people said, go fuck yourself over and over and over again, like Ole Anderson did, which makes it even more surprising that WWE Raw, I guess this shows a lot about the change of management there.

Yeah.

They put up a very nice graphic and talked about him a little bit.

Yes, and of course, you could tell Michael Cole had to look down to refer to his notes when he said, The Minnesota, nobody will ever forget the Minnesota Wrecking Crew.

That's the answer we were looking for.

But no, I want to pay tribute to Ole Anderson, a wrestler I've never heard of before.

No, but it was nice.

They did a tribute to him on there.

AEW ended up combining his and Virgil's tribute together during the ring entrance, I think, for the Orange Cassidy match.

And all thinking is, boy, if only Anderson was alive.

Oh, my God.

Let me tell you something.

Let me tell you something.

I'm old.

I need to save my money because it's all downhill from here.

But I'll guarantee goddamn T, I won't spend a lot of money on too much these days, but I would give someone every penny I had to just have a video, much less be there in person, of two hours of Ole Anderson in the AEW locker room.

That would be the fuck Richard Pryor, Chris Rock.

Carlin can get.

No, that would be the funniest fucking material that any, off the top of his head.

That would be the greatest fucking performance in the history of wrestling.

So, and of course, he gave me the greatest compliment I've ever had.

I will memorialize this one more time in your memory, Ole.

He said, Cornette, I used to think you were a dumb fuck, but so many other dumb fucks have come along that are worse than you are, and you've moved up the ladder without doing anything.

And for Oli, that was glowing praise.

You have to think that's his way of saying, I like you.

You're doing good.

Yes.

I had to somehow

impressed him in some fashion that I was now not the biggest dumb fuck he's ever seen.

You know, I saw Ric Flair put out a very nice tweet.

And obviously he doesn't do his own tweets.

He has someone who does it for him.

But, you know, they had a big falling out.

I think Oli lent him money and whatever happens, happens.

And they had a major falling out.

But Flair acknowledged, you know, I was brought in as an Anderson.

That's what got me over, really.

Yeah.

Just being an Anderson in mid-Atlantic and it's all because of Ole.

And that's because being from,

well, I mean, it's, this is as simple as it was in those days, and it worked.

Everybody in the Carolinas knew that the Anderson brothers, the Minnesota wrecking crew, are from Minnesota.

When they bring this kid in from Minnesota,

at that point, it was George Scott, but I'm sure, you know, all the Crocketts agreed and et cetera.

The best way to get somebody over is to align them with the Anderson brothers.

Here's somebody from Minnesota.

He's the cousin.

He's the cousin of the Andersons.

And that gave him instant fucking heat that he was just related to those goddamn low-life people

in the fans' eyes.

And they needed to keep track of who the family was because Arne Anderson at one point was always cousin, his nephew, then eventually his brother.

Well, I think that's when they started realizing, wait a minute, Arn's not, Arn looked older than he was, and to be Oli's nephew, Jesus, how old is Oli?

But yeah, Flair, I think, was always a cousin.

Our cousin, Ric Flair.

And we talk about it getting Flair over in Mid-Atlantic or being one of the things that led to it.

Arn Anderson, Marty Lundy was a very talented undercard wrestler, did some work for Mid-South on TV, was working obviously in his home area.

Becoming Arne Anderson immediately lent him credibility.

And when people talk about the Anderson look, because various other people throughout time since then, like all of a sudden, it's like, here's Bill Anderson.

I shouldn't, that's a, there really is a Bill Anderson.

Well, our country music star, Bill Anderson, would like to have a word with you, but I know the point you were stretching to make.

It's Ole's look, like the classic Anderson look.

It's Ole's look.

It's not like this guy looks like Gene, this guy looks like Lars.

It's, no, this guy's a beard and a mustache and he's going bald.

He's an Asian.

And I think Arne will be the one to tell you that, I mean, Arne was a fabulous worker in his career and was one of the premier talkers, but neither one of those things,

his work got him noticed, but the thing that enabled him to get the spot that he got to show his talents was that he happened to look like fucking Ole.

If he'd have had no resemblance to Ole, I don't know if they would have taken the goddamn,

you know, they would have wanted to do something with him, but I don't know if they would have taken the

time and the care and gone to that level to make him an Anderson brother and put him in a spot like that or an Anderson family member.

If he hadn't looked like Oli, he wouldn't have got that opportunity.

Hey, one more story before, I know we've gone a while here, but you know, Ole was there when you left WCW.

You were there when Ole got fired from WCW.

And you played a part in it.

And I don't mean in a bad way, but it was Oli trying to get it.

I can't say I wasn't even there because I was there.

But it was Ole trying to get his son set up so he could start in a business the right way.

And it ended up costing him his WCW job, although he didn't really seem to be too upset about it.

Well, and

it may be also romanticizing it to say that it cost him his job.

Bischoff was, that was part of the story.

I will tell it

rather than beat around the bush about it.

But Bischoff was waiting for an opportunity, a reason, or just the time where he was far enough away from Ole to fire him.

So it just came up while I was in the middle of it.

But Ole and Eric Bischoff, obviously, for a variety of reasons, and you can go read his book.

I'm not going to quote him chapter and verse, didn't get along with each other or have probably the same outlook on the wrestling business.

But Ole had been at that point because he had a contract

of some description.

You know, he had been the booker and he'd been in management.

When Bischoff made his play for it, Oly had ended up.

He's working in the power plant and as a trainer and/or,

you know, director of special projects.

Steve Hirsch, the head of Vivid Video, the porn company, said whenever they had a girl on the roster that it was their girlfriend, but they wanted to put her on the payroll and get her a job, they'd make her director of special projects.

So he was just hanging around with not a lot of pull on anything.

And they had been training Ole's, Ole was, too many pronouns, pal.

And Oly at the same time, Bryant, his son, Bryant Rogowski, had been training to wrestle and had one of the power plant contracts, whatever they call them, developmentals.

So

I guess as part of the heat,

they either cut Bryant or let his deal expire.

They didn't give him a chance to do anything or whatever.

And that this was the point where I was running Smoky Mountain.

Knoxville and Atlanta are 200 miles apart.

And

it's been so long since I've thought of the initiation of it.

I think Ole called me, did he not?

Or how did I get?

How did I get notified about that?

He must have because you wouldn't have been calling there, like, hey, do you have any guys that they just talked about?

I hadn't talked to Ole since

I yelled at him and walked out on him fucking four years beforehand.

But anyway,

I say, you know what?

The son of Ole Anderson in Smoky Mountain Wrestling, especially if Ole said, I'll cut some promos and introduce him for you.

Now I'm going to get Ole Anderson on Smokey Mountain Wrestling TV.

Yes, I'm interested in him.

He told me Bryant's background.

He was.

not only a big kid and he had the Anderson look.

He had the fucking mustache.

He looked like Ole and also he could wrestle and was a big kid and obviously didn't have any goofy or unrealistic expectations of what the business was because he's Oly's son.

And since then, by the way, he's had a successful business career and personal life and is a well-thought of member of the community down there in North Georgia, I believe.

So, you know,

It's probably better that the wrestling thing went away.

Bryant, I'm talking about.

But anyway, so what I did was I said, look, I got these shows this weekend, then I will come down

to Atlanta and I'll bring the camera.

Let's shoot some interviews with you introducing Bryant.

Because I didn't expect at that time that he would be able to come to my television.

He still works for WCW, right?

He's not going to be able to come to fucking Hurley, Virginia to my TV taping.

I said, where do you want me to meet you at a hotel?

Or we do, you know, what?

No, I'll come to the power plant.

What?

Come on down.

We'll shoot it in the parking lot.

I said, oh, god damn it.

Here we go.

I'm like, I'll be there.

So he gives me the directions that I drive down Jim Cornette.

Now, we know that there's issues between me and WCW.

And at that time,

I think Bischoff was aware that, yes, because I'd specifically at Super Brawl 3, I'd specifically told him that I blamed him him for altering our angle and told him he was the reason we wouldn't be back and didn't trust anybody in the fucking place, right?

So this is like November of 94, October, or whatever.

So I pull in the parking lot

and I park and I go up and I see Jody Hamilton.

Hey, Jody, how you doing?

Blah, blah, blah, blah.

I said, Terry Taylor, hey, Terry, how you doing?

And Terry excuses himself to go somewhere.

Yeah, to make a phone call, I'm sure.

And then here's Oli, and

here's, and Oli tells Jody, Jody, I'm taking lunch.

So we go out in the parking lot, and Oli tells the first thing he says to me says, Eric Bischoff has not been the power plant.

Now, Eric Bischoff has not been in this place in six weeks.

I guarantee you, if you're here an hour, you'll see.

Because it wasn't like it was next door or the CNN center in downtown Atlanta, the regular office.

This was out like in suburban northeastern, whatever the fuck, I can't remember.

So it took a minute, you know, in between.

So we're shooting the interviews, and I've got my tripod and my little eight-millimeter, high eight-millimeter camera.

And Oli's and Brian are talking on my pencil microphone

taped to a pencil because I didn't have a handheld and I just kept it that way.

And they shoot three or four different fucking interviews, right?

Plus, we've talked about it in between.

So let's say, you know, 20, 30 minutes.

And as we're doing the last one, Ole's talking, and all of a sudden he looks off camera.

This is one we didn't use.

He said, ah, here we go.

And I look, and there's Bischoff in his red Corvette pulling in the parking lot.

So I mean, he must have,

he must have used the express elevator at CNN Center.

And

so I said, well, do you need to go?

He said, oh, hold on.

So Bischoff walks up to get within about 10 feet of us.

He sees me there with the camera.

I'm beaming.

Holy, can I see you a minute?

Said, Eric, I'm on lunch.

I'm doing an interview with my kid.

Hold on.

I'll be right there.

So he finished the fucking, the last one we got to do, right?

And he says, all right, I'm going to go in here.

Go in and get fired.

Because he was, I think this was maybe part of his plot.

He knew he didn't want to be there anymore.

He's taking the money, but goddamn it, he wasn't going to fucking get mad if Bischoff fired him because he didn't like fucking Bischoff.

And it was Oldie, right?

So, goddamn, they go in.

the power plant and I'm standing there talking to Bryant and that's what I've told the story before.

I saw Bischoff's spotless red Corvette, and I picked a big old greasy green booger and wiped it across his windshield just so he'd have something to look at on the way back.

And they're in there 10 minutes or whatever, not long.

And I say, Bischoff comes out and gets his car and drives off, not says anything.

Ole walks back up.

Well, what happened?

He said, well, we walked in there.

I said, all right, Eric, everybody wants to know.

Everybody wants to see you and me.

What's going to happen?

Everybody wants to know.

What do you got to say to me?

Like, you're daring him to fire him.

And he said,

he said, Ole said, that Bischoff said,

well, we think you're using very poor judgment in speaking to Jim Cornette.

And Oly said, well, I'm just speaking to him because he's going to give my kid a job.

You know, my kid, Bryant, my son, the one that you fucking cut or fired or, you know, forgot about or whatever terminology you used.

And he says, so he's going to, he's going to be wrestling for him.

We're out there in the parking lot

on my own time.

I'm at lunch, whatever.

Just get it over with, motherfucker.

And he said, Bishop, just, well,

and he changed some

subject and he said something about something else.

And then he said, well,

we'll talk about this further and got back in the fucking car and took off.

And then the next day called him on the phone and fired him.

Maybe it was two days later.

It was imminent.

So when Bischoff was downtown and Ole was out in fucking Peachtree City or wherever, he called him, well, Oli,

we're giving you your notice.

Well, what took you so long was the

comeback that I heard from Ole

because

then Ole ended up coming up and doing, I think, two of my live TV tapings, at least the first one, maybe the first two that Bryant was on.

Well,

Ole Anderson, certainly one of the most unique characters in wrestling history, one of the most influential characters for a generation.

behind the scenes.

And

I guess just to settle it and end it with this, should he be in a wrestling hall of fame

i don't see how he cannot be i mean i again if there's a if there's a wrestling hall of fame and you've got a cap of 20 wrestlers from all history then maybe not

but if it's a wrestling hall of fame open to anyone who's hall of fame level

i don't see how anybody

Again, he was making money and featured in main events as a wrestler and a booker that dwarfed some of the biggest biggest stars that are currently in the Hall of Fame that were just territory wrestlers.

And he achieved something

that few people in the territory days were able to accomplish, really ownership of part or all or some of a territory,

while at the same time doing something else, doing it by doing something else that almost nobody was able to do, which is make one move after you break into business, make one move, and pretty much are able to work that part of the country for the rest of your career and retire off of it.

So there's multiple unique or very rare milestones that Oleander, and to be

not only a main event wrestler that drew money with their matches with Flair and Valentine were what put Flair and Valentine in the Carolinas on the map

in a heel-heel program.

Not only to be great in the ring, but to be even better on the microphone and to do all this stuff behind the scenes and

to have given either their first job or the okay to begin training of them or their first national exposure or their first main event spots to

everybody from the Road Warriors to Rick Rude fucking on and on.

You know, how can he not be?

I don't even understand the discussion here.

We're talking about putting Kenny Olivier in the fucking Hall of Fame and Ole Anderson somehow has to clear a bar as he told the other guy.

Perhaps you just don't understand what success looks like in this fucking business.

Well, there it is, our look at the life and career of Ole Anderson.

And I guess to sum it all up, as Ole would say, go fuck yourself.

Go fuck yourself.

Well, Jim, before we move completely on from the sad news of passings and wrestling, another wrestling death this past week, someone you weren't around too much, if ever.

But Virgil.

Some yes.

Virgil, who most famously was the bodyguard for Ted DiBiase, then had a babyface run after that.

They later brought him into the NWO and WCW as Vincent.

And then they changed his name to Shane.

He was also Curly Bill and Soulman Jones, I think.

No, no, Soul Train Jones.

Soul Train Jones.

Soul Train Jones.

That's right.

But Virgil just passed away.

Any thoughts on this?

Certainly a memorable character from the height of WWF.

Do you know who first told me about, well, his name was Mike Jones.

So do you know who first told me about Mike Jones?

Based on where he was working, my guess is going to be Randy Hales.

Brian Hildebrand.

Oh, really?

Brian Hildebrandt, Mark Curtis, for those of you 90s WCW referee fans, because he was from Pittsburgh.

And that was the period of time, what was it, 86, 87, where several of the guys from the Pittsburgh, West Virginia independent scene that was kind of rudimentary at the time,

got booked in Memphis.

There was

Virgil became Soul Train Jones, and they dressed him up in the red, white, and blue striped Apollo Creed gimmick from Rocky.

and

he was a babyface, and then a guy named Goliath, who was, I don't remember what his real name was, but he was like almost seven feet tall and long hair.

Goliath got a spot,

and also downtown Bruno, Bruno Lauer, because Bruno had been working as an indie manager also up in that area, and he was Brian Hildebrand's nemesis, right?

Brian was always wanting to, you know, to get in a territory, and Bruno beat him to it and got into Memphis.

Bruno could do a bit better promo than Brian Hildbrand.

Brian was a better worker, but he was too small.

Nevertheless, he said, yeah, Soul Train, they're calling him Soul Train Jones, and he's doing an Apollo Creed gimmick in Memphis.

And, of course, then I got the tapes from

most of the territories on a...

monthly basis.

And so I saw him and

noticed him more because Brian had talked about him.

But, you know, you could tell he was great and he was a good athlete, but that was a

period of time in Memphis where not too much was going to get over, but he did a good job with it and was there probably longer than those other guys.

And then that's finally, then after that is when he got the

spot as Virgil, which as,

you know, everybody has since known, it wasn't a common knowledge then to the average fan going to the shows, but they were trying to fuck with Dusty.

Dusty was the booker for the opposition.

So we're going to make the Stooge, the servant, the butler.

We're going to give him, you know, your real name.

And so then when

the shoe was on the other foot and he went to work for WCW

in, what,

99 or whatever it was for the NWO,

it was they named him Vincent after Vince McMahon because he was the NWO's flunky guy.

He really was the perfect guy in the role of Ted DiBiase's bodyguard.

Because, I mean, anyone could have been slotted in there, but he portrayed it the right way.

He never talked.

He always gave you like a stern look.

He always got his ass kicked, but he still came back and you thought he may be tough because he was a big jacked-up guy.

Yeah.

But he was perfect in that role.

And they worked it, you know, when they were out in public too, traveling together.

He would open the doors and carry the bags.

And, well, that's the thing is some people were saying, you know, on the internet after he passed away is that he would do whatever.

You know, when he showed up at a show, what you want me to do, whatever you want me to do, as long as I get paid, right?

And the, you know, getting paid was a part of most of his modern era or latter-day fame in the links that he would go to to sell his gimmicks or merchandise or selfies.

If somebody, you know, on the bus asked him for a picture, he'd charge him for it, whatever.

But but he committed he would always give a hundred percent to whatever he was doing and he didn't mind you know

having people see him carrying ted di bease's bags in the at the hotel because it it made the gimmick it made the gimmick and it worked and they were together for a few years and then they finally built him up with roddy piper behind him to turn babyface to have enough of ted di bease's sudden abusiveness.

He was never really abusive to Virgil.

And then all of a sudden he became a real jerk.

Yeah.

And then Virgil turned babyface and won the million-dollar belt.

And it's easy to forget now, and he certainly became a comedy figure later in life, but on purpose, on social media and stuff.

But for a brief moment there, it worked and they got him over.

And he was really over as a, you know, upper mid-card babyface holding a WWE million-dollar belt title.

And, you know, that's why I was going to say I was briefly around him because as I do recall, I sound like, you know, the guy, the voiceover guy on fucking Iron Chef, as I recall,

he was there when we first started making shots in 93.

Virgil was still there or had maybe he'd left before, but he was there.

No, he finished up, I think the last night was Royal Rumble 94, the beginning of 94.

So he was there.

Yeah, so he, you know, he was there.

And I mean, you know, once a month we'd go up for TV.

I never sat down and had any in-depth conversations with him, but he seemed

like a, you know, halfway normal, rational person for this business.

Admittedly, the bar is low.

But then

I really, you know, have never spent any time around him since then.

Maybe we were, you know, at the same convention at some point or whatever.

But then

in recent years, I would hear the

tweets about the Olive Garden meat sauce or,

you know, whatever.

I mean,

and, you know, we had a series of videos where you and him, or you and whoever runs the social media, were in a very funny fashion going back and forth.

Well, that's what I'm trying to, I don't even remember the details now, to be honest with you about that.

You reminded me of it earlier, but that's what I was going to ask you: was

was this a case where

I hate to speak ill of anybody, but was it like the Iron Sheik where for a while there, maybe he wasn't, you know, all right and people were taking advantage of it, or was it just did he just decide to become a wacky

person in his, you know, later years and for the social media thing?

And

I don't even, like I said, I find it hard to believe anybody my age sitting there tweeting wacky things to the kids out there or, you know, texting or whatever.

But I do know that some of the guys have people that run their social media so they can.

don't have to fuck with it and they say outlandish things.

But what do we know?

Was Virgil serious with all this?

Do we know yet to this day?

Or

was he pulling all of our puds, as they say?

I don't know what he pulled, but it was certainly a social media team and it was a concerted campaign.

Bizarre at times.

I'm not exactly sure where they were going, but it got people talking about it.

I just read something.

It may have been Greg Oliver's column in Slam.

I don't know.

I don't remember off the top of my head.

And I was blown away by this.

It said, after wrestling, he went back and got a degree in mathematics.

What?

Yeah.

I was like, what?

Where did that come from?

I never heard that.

Well,

no, but he was always good with his money.

No wonder he could count so well.

He wanted to make sure he got, he got turned a profit on those selfies or whatever.

But no, we hate to.

He learned a lot about counting with Ted DiBiase's money in his hands.

Well, there you, there you go.

But no, we hate to hear that.

No, never any personal issues or anything with Virgil.

And,

you know, we wish his family and friends, and who got custody of the Soul Train Jones outfit?

I might be interested.

Or the meat sauce.

We need to find out more details.

You know, they never got to actually market his own brand of meat sauce.

Is that what they were going for?

Well, I think the problem was the holdup was WWE owning the rights that are named Virgil.

Because without the name, what are you?

Just Mike Jones's sauce probably wasn't going to.

Hey, would you like to get some of Mike Jones's sauce?

Where?

Well, right over here at the store.

Well, of course, like you said, we send our

thoughts to the friends and family and fans of Virgil.

And, of course,

fans of all meat sauces around the world.

And the Olive Garden.

Can we talk about, we got to say, I know it's your program, but at the top of the program here, I want to recognize we just heard on.

the inner webs this morning that Jackie Crockett passed away.

The black sheep of the Crockett family, he was the happy, entertaining one.

He was totally unlike the rest of them.

It was a rib.

I will explain who Jackie was to us in a minute, but Jackie Crockett was the brother of

obviously Jimmy Jr.

and David and Francis, and the son of Jim Crockett Sr., who started the dynasty.

And

when they

owned Crockett Promotions,

Jimmy was obviously the president.

And David was, I'm sure he had some corporate title of vice president or something, but everybody knew David as the TV announcer after his brief foray into wrestling that did not make it out of his rookie year.

David Finley.

David Finley.

That was his middle name, David Finley Crockett, David F.

Crockett.

So

anyway,

and Francis, as we all know, worked in merchandise and was kind of in charge of the ballpark that they owned in Charlotte, the Charlotte O's, the baseball team and that type of thing.

And Jackie

had

probably the most fun job with the least amount of responsibility, which is that's exactly the way he wanted it.

He was the head cameraman, the fucking handheld floor camera guy at all of the syndicated TV tapings that Crockett did in the Carolinas, going back to before they got on TBS.

And, you know,

when they got the Nemo truck, National Electronics Mobile Operation, that second-hand TV truck that they would drive up to Sillsby, North Carolina, and shoot TV.

And that way, Jackie could interact the most with the boys.

Whereas I'm not saying that Jimmy and David didn't want to be around the boys, but Jimmy and David also, everybody knows, they were were dry as personalities.

They were reserved.

They weren't coming in

throwing the door open and fucking laughing out loud.

Hey, you fucking idiot.

What the fuck?

And or, you know, just, hey, how you doing?

They were very reserved.

Jimmy was positively dry.

And

they always, you'd see, if Jimmy did come to the matches, he'd still be wearing a jacket, even if he didn't have a tie on and a collared shirt.

And, you know, David's always dressing up because he's the TV announcer.

You only saw Jackie Crockett wearing a tie when he was forced into being fill-in interview guy if Schiavani was somewhere else, right?

And he had to do a couple of stand-up interviews.

Otherwise, he was not wearing a suit.

He was not wearing a tie.

I've never seen a motherfucker sweat so much in my life as he did at those

syndicated TV tapings in Spartanburg and all those other places in the middle of summer.

And And he's carrying that fucking camera around and he's got shorts on and he's fucking just looking like he poured a bucket of water over his head and loved every minute of it.

He had a ball doing that shit and he'd be back in the locker room and fucking around with the guys because, like I said, he was the black sheep.

He was the one that was,

it was like Owen Hart and the Hart family.

He was the one with a sense of humor.

And I'm not knocking David and Jimmy when I say that, but that's what all the boys thought.

Well, they're so

they're the epitome of bland white men.

And here's fucking Jackie, right?

And they were, Dave and Jimmy were married and settled down, and Jackie was single, and he went out with the boys to plum crazy and got as drunk as they did, and fucking chased women.

And I guess he kept the cameraman job even through the Turner.

era

and the

he was still there doing it when I left, but I mean, years after that I guess

and you know he just he loved that shit and he was the fucking personality and

if there was a a camera shot to be had of any

voluptuous female in the in the audience anywhere whether it be a you know fucking rec center or one of the

TBS NBA arenas, he would find it for the enjoyment of the he'd focus his camera in such a way as everybody's watching him focus his camera.

And meanwhile, the locker room is getting entertainment.

He just, he just, you know, he was fucking an over-the-top personality.

He could have been one of the boys had he chosen to go in that.

And I don't know about his athletic ability, but had he chosen to go into that, he could have been one of the boys.

I hate to hear that.

But you know, it's crazy, too, when you think about like 1980s, WWF, no one ever says, oh, yeah, my favorite camera guy was, no one knows who any of those guys were.

No one knows any of their names.

But with Jackie Crockett and knowing that Crockett Promotions was a relatively small crew overall as a company, and then later on, just, you know, talking about the production team, think about how many classic moments were seen through his lens.

Oh, yeah.

And he was the one that was smartest to the business.

I mean, all of our,

it was mostly the same crew.

You know, TBS was a different crew and a different setup.

They used the TBS

personnel there, and a lot of them were regulars, also, most of them.

But with Crockett's syndicated TV and the TV truck, it was same director, Wayne Daniel, and same audio guys most times, same camera people.

But Jackie was the smartest one of the business and the one that could just bop in and out and talk openly.

And what are you doing?

Or, you know, you would go up to him and say, well, we're going to shoot this.

And

because there were really no production meetings with the actual

production crew in those days, and the,

you know, the wrestling end, except for, you know, if Dusty knew, ah, shit, they might miss this, he'd tell JJ, go make sure they don't miss this.

And otherwise, it was just, it was a fucking free-for-all.

But

Jackie was the one that was most important, but he could get away with shit too.

If we were in a squash match in some little gym or whatever, Jackie would come up next to me.

I'm on the floor managing the midnight and he'd get next to me with the camera and he's got the camera on his right shoulder and he's holding it with his right hand, right?

With his left hand, he's fucking either trying to goose me with his thumb and the ribs or pinching me in the ass or whatever to get me to fucking jump.

And at one point, this made television.

The director took it.

He crowded me so much in the corner where I look over my shoulder to the left.

He's standing right there.

I look over his shoulder.

I finally reach in my pocket.

I've got like 20 bucks I was going to take to the concession stand to get hot dogs later.

And I pull out the 20 bucks and I'm like, here, please leave me alone.

And

his hand reaches out on camera and takes the money from me and then backs away from me.

Because what are they going to do?

Fire the boss's brother?

Right?

But

it was just, it broke up the monotony of, you know, doing shit like that.

And, you know, but then with the big stuff also, whether it be the fireball with Ronnie Garvin or those flare and steamboat, you know, showdowns or, you know, whatever, he was there through from the,

well, from the beginning because he was a member of the family, but he'd worked there from the 70s through that mid-Atlantic glory years, the expansion, the whole nine yards, all the way through TBS, and

was, again, just the irascable one

well that is the uh tribute to the irascible one of the show

Jackie Crockett Jim we have some sad news to report what's what's up now news being broken by Greg Oliver of slamwrestling.com

or dot net excuse me slamwrestling dot net

promoter Al Zink has passed away at the age of 91.

Oh gee I thought you were it was going to be a rib of some kind or you were going to do something.

I would never make a joke about such a subject.

What's wrong with you?

Never make a joke about the death of Al Zink at 91 years old.

Good heavens.

And in Nova Scotia, too, or up there in

was he Nova Scotia, Newfoundland, New Brunswick?

What part of the world was

promoted?

The Maritimes.

The Maritimes.

I think that's a safe way to.

Well, is that a whole group of, that's what they call the whole group of the area there?

Hold on.

It goes into here.

I could see your Canadian geography is as good as mine.

I was up there a time or two, but not often.

My Canadian geography, I have learned, is comprised of only the territories that were good.

It was any of the ones that are just like, there's no footage or you don't hear any good things about, I kind of don't know the geography as well.

Al Zink was the one that

Dennis Condry went up with Phil Hickerson and David Schultz and the Gibson brothers from Tennessee summer of 77, right?

Was that that was Al Zink or was that Emile Dupree?

I bet you it was Al Zink.

I'm not sure, but did Al Zink, I'm going through this article here.

They left after like two weeks and came back to Tennessee after causing riots and fearing for their lives.

Schultz had to bail him out with a hockey stick.

He was the WCW-NWA promoter from 89 to 93 in Canada.

Well, that's nice of him to

bring back a legend at that point in time.

So did you meet him when you actually worked for WCW in Canada?

I don't remember.

Maybe he was the, good God, was he the promoter of the show that was gassed?

That was gassed?

Remember?

You know what I'm talking about, don't you?

I'm not sure.

We had a goddamn loop up there for WCW in 1990 that was somewhere in Nova Scotia, somewhere St.

John.

There's two St.

Johns.

We were in both of them, I believe.

And the first town drew like shit.

We're talking 500 people.

people to go all that way.

And the second town drew like shit.

And if there was four of them, the third town drew like shit.

And the last one we were going to do before we left fucking to come home,

we get to that one and there's a giant line outside the building, four abreast, and winding around the sidewalk.

And oh, wow.

Okay.

One

fucking show we're going to goddamn do up here that's worth a shit, right?

And the hotel is right across the the street.

And we check in the hotel, and I'm looking out the window.

I'm going, that line hadn't moved.

Well, you know, we still got a few minutes.

You'd think maybe they'd open up the doors a couple minutes early because there's all these people standing there, but we got to walk over.

It's an hour before showtime, right?

We walk over there,

and as we're about halfway there, I think it was David Crockett.

I can't remember, but it may have been.

Nevertheless, whoever was there representing the WCW office started wave and said, go back, go back.

What?

It was a hockey arena, right?

And they'd had a leak in the

gas or in the gas, in the ice freezing process of a professional type of hockey apparatus, somehow there's ammonia involved, right?

And they've had a leak and the whole building, they say, is filled up with

you know what ammonia smells like.

I mean, it'll burn your nose if you just stick it over the bottle, right?

Imagine if there's a leak from this shit from tanks.

And

he said, they've got a bunch of big fans on.

Just go back to the hotel for about a half an hour.

Come back at 7.30.

Okay.

So 30 minutes later, we...

We go back, we walk back over there again.

And we went in because Bobby's like, well, come on, we better get ready.

You know, Bobby is like, we got to work.

We're defying death here.

We walked in the building.

They still had the fans on.

They're still said, oh, it'll clear out.

It'll clear out.

Your eyes start watering.

Your fucking nose hurts.

And Bobby's sitting down in his bag and started take his fucking shoes off.

I'm like, Bobby, don't start getting dressed.

This does not look like it.

They couldn't let the people in at that point still.

And we're in there about to get dressed, right?

And so finally, about 15 or 20 minutes later, saner heads prevailed and they canceled it.

We can't bring the entire audience in here and gas them, even if we can gas the wrestlers.

So they cancel the show.

We're on the way to the fucking airport the next morning, pick up the newspaper

and open up.

And I've still got the clipping.

I think it was in the Midnight Express scrapbook.

The headline in the local newspaper was wrestling show gassed.

I said it was a mercy killing.

And we came back home never to return to Canada for WCW.

Well, as it says here in the article, when the Toronto promotion run by Jack Toney switched allegiances from the NWA and Jim Crockett promotions to the expanding World Wrestling Federation, Zink saw an opportunity.

It was Zink who ran WCW shows in Toronto and in the Maritimes.

Zink worked with them from 89 to 93.

Here's a quote.

I was always a straight shooter.

I almost had Maple Leaf Gardens.

I was so close.

I was ready to undercut tonney.

And then Shane Zinc, his son.

Sounds like a real nice guy.

Here's a story.

I gotta end with this.

I don't know why this gets me.

His son, Shane Zink,

can still recall the way his father would get in trouble as a promoter.

Here's a quote.

I used to go to the wrestling with him in the circuits.

And every once in a while, I'd get a call over the PA system.

Shane Zink, please go to the office.

I'd only be a kid like eight, nine, and he'd be beating up five or six guys

who attacked him.

And I mean, he cleaned the house on them.

He was a real scrapper.

Who the fuck is beating up the promoter?

Is he five or six guys?

Why did he call his son there to see this?

I mean, I know that the sheets weren't as prevalent back in the circuits days, but when the did this take place?

Or could it be, hey, guys, I'm going to call my son to the office.

Let me make it look like I'm kicking the shit out of all six of you at once.

Well, because let me tell you, we did go to Toronto once for WCW in 1990, and it wasn't at Maple Leaf Gardens, it was at some

college gym in Toronto.

And

I recall it being a beautiful drive down by the lakeshore

to this building that there was absolutely nobody in.

And so

I don't want to, I hate to speak ill of the deceased's promotional abilities, but there was

I think maybe the WWE got away from him and he got with WCW,

you know,

for a reason.

But nevertheless.

Apparently, he lived a long, full life.

He had a big falling out with Rudy K.

According to Zinc, Rudy had no business head.

That's a quote.

He was soft with the boys, but I wasn't, especially the prelim guys.

I want my openers to be as good as my main eventers.

It all fell apart.

Here's a quote.

Rudy double-crossed me when I was in the hospital, said Zinc, who had fallen off a horse.

What?

When I was in the hospital, Rudy asked for checks, and like a fool, I signed them.

I think I want to learn more about Al Zink because that's like a fascinating life.

Oh,

and folks, if we've said it once, we've said it a million times.

Never sign checks after you fall off a horse.

It's like operating heavy machinery.

You can't.

You can't be doing that.

Make sure when you're jumped by six people, call your nine-year-old son to come save you.

Yes, on the PA system.

Don't call security, don't call the police.

Call, get on the PA system, see if we can find this man's son so he'll stop wailing on these motherfuckers.

Oh my God.

All right.

We haven't fun yet.

Come on.

Well, yeah, I think, well, no, over the man's death, we're trying to have fun over a man's decedence.

No, we're not having fun over that.

We're having fun celebrating his life.

Like kick the out of a bunch of people all at once in front of his child

and and apparently the pa announcer well before we go any further with the show today

we want to explain we're we're a day late because of a variety of commitments that we both had

but also it was

I guess what maybe 36 hours ago now that Brian, you got the news that a friend of both of ours, Scott Cornish, who has been,

you know, featured many times on the 605 Super podcast and we've mentioned on the show here and have both known

for 30 years had passed away.

And it was,

it was, it was not a, it was a sudden thing.

It wasn't expected because he hadn't been,

you know, ill for a long time.

But we understand in the last week, he caught COVID and complications from that.

And

you

reminded me, I kind of thought that, but you told me for sure right before we went on the air that even though he's become one of your best friends throughout the last 30 years, you guys actually met

at fan week at Smoky Mountain the same year that I met you.

Yeah.

Smoky Mountain Wrestling Fan Week, if you ever, you know, I'm talking to you, the person who actually put it together.

Well, you know, with respect to Brian Hildebrand, you created a lot of friendships.

You put a lot of us together, the self-anointed smart fans from around the country, around the world in some cases, and created friendships.

And I met you when I met Scott Cornish, and I've been friends with both of you 30 years.

I met Stacey, your wife.

Before she was your wife.

Yes.

At Smoky Man Wrestling Fan Week.

I met, you know, someone who's not with us anymore, but I think of, because me and Scott were both really good friends with him, Harry White at Fan Week, John McAdam, who does a show on Arcadia and Vanguard.

I met him at Fan Week.

I met people, Dave Lane, who's still out there.

I just saw him on Twitter.

Great photographer.

I met him at Fan Week.

There are so many of us who met there that have retained a special bond and a friendship.

And like you said, with Scott, one of my best friends, someone who's a major influence on me in everything I like:

music and books and movies and comedy and humor.

A lot of it just comes from long conversations on the phone with him.

We used to do that, conversations on the phone for hours and hours and hours and correspondence via letter, you know, and eventually, you know, on the computer talking back and forth.

But I've had so many adventures with him in wrestling.

And so many in music.

I went to see, with him, I went to see Iggy and the Stooges.

I went to see Hazel Atkins with the Demolition dollrods at American Death Ray.

I went to see the dictators who I mentioned before with the star spangles opening up for them.

I saw Question Mark and the Mysterians at Lincoln Center.

No.

Yeah, at Lincoln Center.

It was bizarre.

The way he was dressed was bizarre, Mr.

Question Mark himself.

But that was the kind of friend Scott was.

When I would go down to the East Village, I'd take the train from Long Beach.

He would come down from upstate New York and we'd go to the 2nd Avenue Deli.

We'd go buy some zines and just have a good time.

And,

you know, I'm doing my best to just be upbeat right now because I've been so down and I've cried my eyes out the last couple of days because it was sudden.

He caught COVID.

He was just out doing what he always does, going to shows.

He didn't have a car.

He didn't drive.

And he found a way to go everywhere for wrestling, for music, for comedy.

It was incredible.

And,

you know, he always was great at having stories and and telling them in the funniest way.

I never got to go to OVW, but he did with Greg Greenland.

And I would hear all about the stories from when they would go down there.

Yeah, they would come to,

well, I said there was a picture posted on

Twitter, I believe, somewhere, of him standing in front of the old Davis Arena over in Jeffersonville.

And he, Greg used to come to a lot of the six flags events we do outdoors, and Scott came to some of those

and

you know it i i i honestly until you said that did not know that he didn't drive at all but he was he was everywhere he was like teleported from place to place because he you would always see him popping up he was very devoted he was in amarola with me me him bob barnett and harry white in a car driving to terry funk's ranch I mean, he was someone who went everywhere and did so many different things.

And, you know, the friendship he had with me,

it's amazing seeing since he passed just a couple of days on his Facebook page, so many of his friends from his other worlds have been posting tributes.

And it's amazing just how many people he affected.

A positive energy, always hysterical, and a very giving friend.

I have here, I posted some of these, Jim.

You may get a kick out of some of them.

In the old days, kids, we used to trade tapes.

And with the tapes, sometimes you would send a letter.

Imagine that.

Sometimes the letter would be bland: here's what I sent you, please send me this.

Other times, you would get some humor out of it.

And Scott was good with that.

Let me read you a couple of these, Jim.

This is actually from the end of one.

This is right after WCW1 censored in 1996.

Late breaking news: Hulk Hogan's next five hand-picked opponents from the Dungeon of Doom.

One, Ted Arcidi.

Two, Curly Moe.

Three, Uncle Elmer, dead four years now and still a better wrestler than Jeep Swenson.

Four, Ed Leslie's latest incarnation, a shoot angle as the untalented suckass.

And five, Bill Kasmire.

What you gonna do?

And then here's another one.

I'll read you this one.

You may get a kick out of it.

He sent me VHS tape of the young ones, which was a British comedy I always was a big fan of.

It used to be on MTV.

People in England are always shocked anyone here knows it.

It was on MTV and then it was on videotape, a cult favorite.

Brian, I know how much you enjoy the young ones, just like Jerry Lawler.

So here we go.

Oh, geez.

So that was stiff.

So here you go.

These are two of the, I believe, four volumes released so far.

I haven't seen these in years since they first aired in this country on MTV.

Enjoy.

Thanks for the great mixtapes.

Some wild, wacky stuff.

If you do another one, you might include one

brody luger cage match i really want to see this even if the quality isn't top-notch just to see it you know

two missy hyatt porn video same reason

three now now wait wait we we have to say that that was later uh

proven to be uh a rumor correct to not get sued or something he just i'm just reading what was written here i'm not oh i thought i thought i thought uh there was at one time

a rumor that that's what prompted this.

All right, now I'm going to stop for a second.

I had the master tape, I believe, of Brody Luger, the cage match that became famous because Brody stopped cooperating with Luger right before he worked for Crockett.

The Missy Hyatt porn video was a rumor that went around in 97, I want to say, because Missy was living in Manhattan.

Around that period of time, I forget the name of the channel because I didn't live in Manhattan, but I spent a lot of time there.

But the public access channel had like porno programming, Robin Bird, and various things.

And there was a video of two women, nude, going at it.

And the rumor was it was Missy Hyatt.

And I may have procured a copy of the tape.

And the quality sucked.

So there was no, I couldn't tell, to be honest with you.

It could be, it couldn't be.

I'm still to this day not certain, but if she says it wasn't her, I'll believe her.

Because I couldn't figure it out.

Well, there you go.

And after intensive study, that's good.

Okay.

Three, the Flair Lawler Jimmy Hart WMC Challenge Angle.

I'm not sure whether I've ever seen this, but I've sure heard about it.

And by the way, I had a copy of that I got from you.

Thank you very much.

You're welcome, even less.

Four, Terry Funk's chainsaw interview and five canvas cavity highlights.

Who says I'm sick?

Hey, it looks like the sportatorium isn't closing after all.

Let's go.

The big Christmas night card features the returning killer Brooks versus Frogman LeBlanc in a cage match with the goon as special referee.

If LeBlanc wins, he gets five minutes with Baboose.

Also, a big $35 battle royal.

Black Bart vs.

Bob Sweethan's Ghost, and Sebastian is rumored to be making a surprise appearance selling programs.

Talk to you soon.

Scott Cornish, check out my new website, www.lanosadick.com.

And folks, I apologize if you've just wandered by this program in the last couple of weeks, but these names from our past are just hilarious to us.

He sent one here, too.

This is the last one I'll read on the air, but it was after I sent him the Heroes of World Class documentary.

He wrote, Mickey Grant invented everything.

But then he sent a copy of,

I'm guessing this, if it's not ICW, it must be ICW.

I was going to say it would be the precursor in Knoxville.

It's a card that has a challenge match, and he wrote the best stip ever.

Ronnie Garvin puts up $5,000 versus Don Diamond, who puts up a Barry Manilow album if he shows up.

Best stipulation ever.

Five grand versus a Barry Manilow album.

Because if it,

Don Diamond,

if he had had long,

fluffy, flowing, blonde hair instead of that kind of curly,

nondescript head of hair that he had,

you would have thought that he was Barry Manilow, except if he would have sang.

You wouldn't have thought that.

Oh, I didn't even put two and two together about that.

The resemblance.

Now that you say it, I guess they look.

Yes, you look dead like him.

If you put a Barry Mantelow wig on Don Diamond, you'd have Barry Manilow.

But nobody knows now what the fuck Don Diamond looks like, so it wouldn't be be funny.

Yeah, his career never really took off past a certain point.

Oh, it took off all right.

It took about 35 years off.

But this is the kind of stuff he would send me.

And again, you know, just a wonderful friendship over 30 years.

And I'm very, very happy.

I guess one of the things I'm grateful for is that since I started having him come on the 605 Super Podcast in 2016,

He developed a following.

He developed people who enjoyed him and his humor the way I did.

And he made a lot of friends through the show.

And that's one of the things I'm always proudest of with 605 and with the Cult of Cornet, the amount of people who had never met each other, very similar to what you did with Fan Week.

People who had never met each other, who somehow, and in this case online, developed friendships through the programs, through the shows, through the community.

And that's one of the things I'm really proud of.

Yeah, the shows are really successful.

But there's people who have best friends right now because of the show.

And like I said, everyone's feeling it.

Everyone who knew him, the amount of people who only heard him and know how much he meant to everyone who have reached out has been tremendous.

And lovely guy, one of the best friends I've ever had.

And

I'm going to miss him tremendously.

And his, his input into things was something I always wanted because he had the most interesting takes and views on things.

And it always made me laugh.

But tremendous guy.

And

everyone, you know, anyone who ever heard him, please think of something he said that made you laugh.

And again, he was,

I think, did you say 63?

64, I believe.

But I got to double check.

64.

And he might appreciate this because

you said that before we started recording.

You said, well, yeah, I met you, meaning me,

at the exact same time that I met Scott.

And me and Scott are both, I'm going to be 63 this year.

We're both about the same age.

I said, I hope you're not like a fucking nursing home home cat.

What does that mean?

I don't know what that means.

And so what does that mean?

No, the legend of the, and there's been more than one, but you hear the stories of the cat at the nursing home that goes and curls up next to the next of the old folks to go.

And they can predict these things and they're comforting them in their last moments or whatever.

I hope you're not a nursing home cat.

I hope so too.

That sounds awful.

You know, it's funny.

I just thought of something.

I knew who he was before I went to fan week because I had seen some of the videos coming out at 93 fan week, the first one.

And there was a series of mock promos leading to a press conference to build up J.R.

Benson versus Dr.

Tom Pritchard.

Yes, yes.

In an electrified, no-rope, barbed wire.

over a bed of infected hypodermic needles match with the loser having to spend 48 hours with dr mike lano Yes, I remember.

I remember that.

I remember that shoot.

Harry White did a promo and Dave Meltzer actually walks on and hands him a piece of paper and walks out and he goes, this just in the observer lifting five stars, seven and a half stars for this match,

which all things considered is funny, but they're doing this mock press conference and it's J.R.

Benson with Kevin Lawler and It's Tom Pritchard or Chris Candido.

And they start taking questions from the audience, which were all the other fans, you know, the smart fans, whatever there were, 30 people.

And Scott, just out of nowhere, and I always remembered it, he raised his hand.

Everyone's making noise, and everyone gets quiet.

He goes, Dr.

Pritchard, Dr.

Pritchard.

And everyone doesn't know what he's going to say.

This wasn't planned.

He goes, and this is the summer in 93, Luger Yokozuna.

Dr.

Pritchard, what about the commission ruling you're going to have to wear a protective pad over the steel plate in your head?

And you can tell Don Pritchard had no idea how to answer that.

The room broke up.

It was such a brilliant, smart, funny, quick thing and uh

yeah i'm really gonna miss him greatest guy just the greatest guy big influence on me and who i am

so scott we've got you to blame for much of this got you to blame too so

well hey i i wasn't i wasn't even there

No, but he was with me in Louisville in 95 for the famous riot, the last great night of Kayfabe in Louisville when the fans decided they wanted to beat us up because they couldn't beat up the wrestlers see he

he could get more heat than anybody we got out of there in time but nevertheless um but yes we will miss scott and that's again

something sudden and shocking so but yes

as as we said we're going to miss scott and and his contributions to and and

you know, the community.

And it's not like something, again, that we were prepared for because it was so sudden.

So you know, kind of a shock with that.

But

can I give you some positive news that we've done something good as a community for some people?

Positive news?

He's getting out of showbiz?

Oh, come on now, Henny Youngman.

What the fuck here?

But then, did you notice?

Um,

it and it was very well done,

what I'm about to talk about.

It was very well done

and very well edited.

The Sika video and certainly called for.

But I had the first reaction I had when it kept going was if the bloodline angle wasn't on top, would Sika have gotten a longer tribute video than Bruno San Martino or Roddy Piper?

Than anyone in the history of wrestling, I think.

Yes, because

they gave him close to five minutes, which, and again, I'm not arguing, but considering their prior track record,

it was more lengthy than normal.

But they have a lot of the footage and obviously had comments in the can about a variety of their hall of famers from some of the top talents.

So they were able to put this together, but they went the whole way with it.

The marquee at the garden had the Sika tribute lit up when people are going through the

train station there, Penn Station,

and this big long video and

you know a lot of acknowledgement of it in all of their social media so

I think the the bloodline angle certainly helped spark interest in

in Alpha and Sika and and the whole family at this point

there's no other reason to think that they would have made such an effort to pay

such an effort but it was nice and it was very nice i'm not saying it wasn't but like you said i can't think you know randy Savage had a few minute long video yeah and he was a main eventer you know Sika got a bigger video than

he got he got the thing in front of Matt than Piper than Bruno than you know I mean anybody it's a it's it stands out I'll just say that but anyway um but that's a thing and and you know honestly, I had much more interaction personally with Alpha

than I ever had with Sika because Alpha at the time that I was,

you know, in the office up there and living up there, Offa was based out of

Allentown, or was it a small suburb, but near Allentown, Pennsylvania.

Yeah.

And whereas Sika had already moved back in the 80s to Pensacola.

So I had met Sika a few times, but again, Offa is the one I had more interaction with.

And he's been in ill health

over the past few months, from what we've heard.

So with back surgery and some other things.

So I hope he's doing well.

But,

you know, the Wild Samoans for, what, 15 years were

one of the top teams across the country.

They went almost everywhere.

They didn't work for Vern.

They didn't work for

Jerry Jarrett in Tennessee.

I never got to see them in person during their day, but they were big on the West Coast in San Francisco, obviously.

They were on top numerous times in New York.

They worked Georgia for a period of time.

They were mid-South.

Did they make Texas?

I can't remember.

Did they get to Dallas on that run?

Probably not.

And I think they did.

No, they didn't work for Crockett in the Carolinas because they worked for the IWA in the 70s, right?

The opposition group.

They were the Islanders, right?

Yes, with,

I think for a while, Saul Weingroff, if I'm not mistaken.

Or was that the other team of Samoa?

See, I'm confused if that was the other Islanders.

That was T.O.

and Reno,

which apparently there was some heat over

when they started using similar names.

But anyway, they were a top tag team and drew a lot of money, especially in the Northeast.

As we know from Young Rock, one of their big programs was with Rocky Johnson and Tony Atlas, right?

Was that their last run as tag team champions?

That was their last run as tag team champions.

I wouldn't say that was one of their biggest runs because Rocky and Tony Atlas, because they hated each other, didn't actually team up that much.

But they turned babyface after that.

They had a brief babyface run, including one of my favorite matches.

If anyone ever wants to see it, it's ridiculous, but I love it.

October 84, Offa versus Dick Murdoch at Madison Square Garden.

It's on their peacock.

Well, I can imagine.

But then they left and they worked

Pro Wrestling USA, I think it was, at the Meadowlands.

And then Sika came back.

And Sika had another run as a single as part of,

remember when King Curtis came in as a manager?

The Wizards?

Yes.

Well, he was part of that.

And he even had a main event match with Hulk Hogan.

And that was kind of the end of them.

But, you know, the Mid-South run, there's a lot of footage of, or at least there's some footage of.

The WWF run, which is kind of a couple of runs starting in 1980, they have all that footage.

Well, and, of course, the story how they got involved in the business is famous in that when Peter Maivia got over in San Francisco and

to some degree because of the

I've been to the Cow Palace and

only as

a WWF performer when people had calmed down, but I can't imagine the thought of the Heels trying to leave that ring in the 60s on a sellout for Roy Shire with heat and even with the whole San Francisco Police Department trying to get back to the locker room alive.

I can't, because

it's a big building with a giant floor.

You got to walk a long way and you got to make some angle turns.

And that's all a recipe for fucking disaster.

So

the Samoan contingent that was going to the matches and the cow palace is not in downtown San Francisco.

Brian, is it Daly City?

I'm not sure.

That it's in.

It's at least when I was there in the 90s, I would hesitate, I guess, to say it was that way earlier.

Not the best neighborhood.

You're getting a rowdy crowd.

It was a promotion built around heat.

And there was a Samoan babyface.

So the story was that Affa and Sika and a number of members of their family started going to the matches at the Cow Palace and rooting for My Via.

And in the process,

you know, either about to kill or beating the shit out of or whatever, all of Shire's top heels to the point where they said,

My Via, talk to these people, maybe fucking get them into business so we can smarten them up or whatever and

stop this.

And can you imagine

a young Afa and a young Sika?

Because what they looked like when they were in their 40s is better, but a young Alpha and a young Sika.

Beating up an old Paul DeMarco.

Beating up an old Paul DeMarco, yes, or just coming at you as angry marks instead of working wrestlers.

Well, remember,

in terms of how frightening they were, The story was, I think it was Sika, during the Vince McMahon 1994 steroid trial on Long Island.

Sika was admonished from the bench or he was kicked out of the room.

I don't remember what happened.

He started mouthing to the jury, not guilty.

Yeah, yeah.

Not.

Imagine that face.

With the wide-eyed, wild Samoan stare, right?

Not guilty, not guilty.

That was some hoodoo to voodoo shit.

Yeah,

and remember Sika was the one also that when they were going to put the belt on Roman Reigns and what New Orleans?

No, was it San Francisco?

Was it San Francisco?

Home base, yeah, maybe whatever WrestleMania that was, and they changed their mind and didn't do it.

There were reports that were tried to be downplayed later on that Sika was going to do something about that shit.

He thought somebody said they didn't want to do a job, whatever.

God damn it.

I think the original way we heard it, and I don't know if it's true or not, but the original way was Sika and other family members started to tear stuff up.

Faith Abe lives.

But anyway, so obviously, and Roman Reigns' father, for those who have not made the connection and we didn't mention it.

Yeah, if you see any of the pictures of him when they first started out before they had facial hair, again,

different body types.

It was a different world, but you could see the resemblance to Roman Reigns.

Yeah.

Well, and said, Roman has been

working out and

it's more modern times to begin with.

And I mean, these guys, I'm not saying that they were some kind of lazy people.

Alpha and Sika did not go to the gym to improve their, they already looked like that when they got into business.

They just grew their hair longer.

That was pretty much all they needed.

There's a great picture that goes that I've seen going around, not just now, but in the past.

And it kind of encapsulates that era of WWF as things went national.

And it's like outside the TV taping in Pennsylvania.

It's Alpha and Sika with no shirt on and Lou Albano with a shirt open and the biggest belly and the iron sheet cut, all roided up, and they're barbecuing.

They're cooking like burgers.

And I'm like, that like sums up an era of WWF right there.

Lou Albano and the Samoans barbecuing.

And who knows who they were barbecuing?

But anyway, but no, we send our condolences out to the whole entire extended family up and down the line, wherever they may be.

And hopefully Alpha is, as we said, doing well.

He's been under the weather, so we send our best out to him, too.

Them with Captain Lou was a winning combination.

Captain Lou

actually.

Body type resembled them, and he may have spoken English just almost as coherently as the wild Samoan savages.

See, that's a great era of Lou Albano, because if you watch when he, not watch, but if you see any photos or any video even of when he first started managing, he was kind of dressed respectfully.

By that point, he was such a slob, he could take on the personality of whoever he managed.

So he managed the moondogs, starts dressing like a moondog.

He manages the Samoans, starts dressing like the Samoans.

He managed Fuji and Saido.

He starts coming out there with a headband on and a

jacket.

So it was a fun period for Lou Albano.

Him and the Samoans, though, on and off for, you know, four or five years there, were a big combination up here.

Yeah, but boy, when he started managing that girls' team, what he wore then.

Oh, my gosh.

Anyway, obviously, we're going to talk about

Kevin Sullivan, who passed away a couple of days ago as we record this.

Some more things about his career and our interaction with him that we didn't cover a month or so ago.

And

that's going to be a lot of the program.

Joining me, as usual, you guys all know his allocades, but most importantly, Germaine to this program.

He was a friend and a fan of Kevin Sullivan's.

The great Brian Last, everybody.

Aloha, Jim.

A pleasure to be here once again.

And we'll have another good conversation about Kevin.

We just talked about him.

And of course, we have this sad news, but there's a lot to remember and a lot to talk about.

Well, and you know, already

this happened as

we said 48 hours ago, I guess, was we got the word.

And,

you know,

even if we had been ready to sit down and record this program and it just happened, we wouldn't have talked about it because

I didn't want to today.

But we took a little time to think.

And actually, I took a little time not to think about it because that's what I've done

for the past day and a half or so is just not think about it.

And then I realized as we were about to record this, that this is another one of those shows.

I love doing the show for the people.

But this is another one of those that

I wish that we could just not do and say we did and pick up with the drive-through and act like

we did it and got it over with.

But that would not be fair to

people who want to hear what we have to say.

Am I rambling here today on the program?

The problem is, is that it's like, and Brian, I was telling you, and you tweeted out some pictures from the files of Kevin, including some things you didn't know you had until you went looking.

And I don't tweet about people

dying anymore.

I haven't in quite some time because

besides the fact that it was becoming way too regular an occurrence,

it seems a little frivolous for this

situation.

But I'm starting to think maybe we ought not talk about it either.

Because what the fuck?

It just, it, it,

everybody gets older.

I think that's Stevie Nix wrote that, didn't she?

Oh, I don't know the Stevie Nicks.

It's sound.

You don't know the whole canon.

Yeah.

But

anyway,

we're going to forge ahead and do this here today.

And hopefully, because you did halfway tickle me

right before we started recording, with

you said, hey, do you think that the people remember that Kevin Sullivan was partners with Whitey Caldwell?

And I said, that's the first fucking story I was going to tell because it's still

one of my favorites that Kevin ever told me.

And

let's get this out real quick.

Folks, we still don't know, you know, exactly.

I believe that the sepsis that

he got from the surgery from a couple months ago, and we talked about it on the

about a month ago on a show, and you can find it on YouTube

when we found out that he had been hospitalized and had an emergency surgery that led to complications.

And

that's the underlying cause of this whole thing.

But

the last update that we had gotten was that he was

doing physical therapy.

And

I know some people think, oh, he was in the gym or whatever.

I know from my cousin,

physical therapy at some level, depending on your condition, is teaching you how to swallow water again

without fucking it going down in your lungs and giving you goddamn infection.

So, but

it was positive.

At last, we heard, but then then this was apparently the underlying cause was the infection that he'd had.

But anyway,

the Whitey Caldwell thing, because Brian, you found some of his rookie pictures in your wrestling news files, or not even rookie pictures, but when he was still in wrestling school, the first pictures he had taken.

And

that was what, 19, maybe 69, 70-ish,

that part of

time,

because

initially, after he wrestled some, and he was obviously from Massachusetts, legitimately, and wrestled some in New England.

And I think he got a few Canadian dates, small shows, whatever.

But his first territory

was

he was in East Tennessee for

Knoxville was John Kazana promoting, and then the Tri-Cities, Kingsport, John City, Bristol.

By that point, Ron Wright was running it behind the scenes, but nobody knew he was the top heel.

Nobody knew that publicly.

But what they would do

is after

Ron Wright and Whitey Caldwell, who, as we've talked about before and the Smokey Mountain fans know, was the all-time top babyface in the territory.

Well, Ron and Whitey had been working.

a program with each other on and off for 10 years, right?

The chain matches and all that shit.

And since Ron's partner, Don Wright, was a wrestler also, and the Wright brothers were a big heel team, they would give Whitey different babyface partners through the years so that he could face the Wright brothers in tag matches and freshen it up.

And Les Thatcher did that in, I think,

was it 72, 73?

He might have followed Kevin Sullivan.

Was it that late that Les Thatcher was there?

Or was he there before Kevin?

Was it late 60s?

That's what I thought.

Maybe I'm wrong.

Well, do you know what?

I'm probably wrong, too.

But nevertheless, yes, ladies and gentlemen, Les Thatcher was a young

spry white meat babyface at one point in time, back when people still saw in black and white.

It probably was the late 60s now that I think about it, because he was there at the same time as Don and Al Green, and that was late 60s.

Nevertheless, it was like 1971.

Kevin Sullivan gets booked his very first territory in the wrestling business.

He's never been out of New England.

He's as Boston as you can get.

And he ends up in the hills of East Tennessee being Whitey Caldwell's partner against the Wright brothers.

And

the deal was the young babyface would sell and the Wrights would get the heat on him and whatever.

And then he'd make the tag to Whitey, who people thought was the toughest man in the world, and he'd clean house.

And so anyway,

Kevin told me a story years ago and and i can't tell it as good as he told it and also the accent

but

he said the first week they have a tag match and they get wild and everything and maybe it's a disqualification or whatever and the second week they have no disqualification match and all kinds of happens whatever

and so they come back the third week in a cage

And even back then in those days, I don't know what kind of cage they may have had in, It was probably in Kingsport.

It might have been chicken wire because they were still using that in Tennessee in the 70s.

They just bring out a roll of chicken wire.

When a guy's got in the ring, they'd wrap it around the fucking ring post.

But it's a cage match, and they go to him ahead of time and say, kid, we're going to need you to get a little color tonight.

And, you know, at this time, he's never done that before, right?

He's like, okay.

And

I can't remember whether it was Ron or Don.

I think it may have been Donnie.

Said, oh, don't worry, kid.

We'll handle it for you.

He's like, what the fuck?

So they get in the match.

And obviously, besides, it's a cage match.

Everybody's got a chain in their pocket or fucking roll of quarters or some kind of Tennessee gimmick.

And they're going to have this wild match.

And when it came time for Kevin to get to color, this is when he found out about the chisel.

the the the wedge that and bo james still has one of these an actual legitimate wright brothers fucking chisel that he says tweeted out pictures of at king of kingsport you can find him but for the people who haven't heard the story

the wright brothers

and ron specifically didn't want people

smart to the wrestling business.

And

if they saw somebody blading,

they get smart to the wrestling business so ron invented a shortcut he went to a machinist shop and he had a piece of flat metal

he had a the tip of a chisel

sharpened down and put on the goddamn piece of flat metal

that was high enough to go in your skin but not deep enough to goddamn

fracture your skull

and then they put tape around it so that the chisel part was sticking out and they made it a set of brass nuts kind of for real

but the tape cushioned the blow of the metal but

they would draw back and pop you on the forehead and you would get color without having a blade

so

the way kevin told the story he's like And we're fighting and it's getting crazy and then fucking, he said, yes, he said, it's Donnie.

He said, Donnie grabbed him by the hair with the left hand and he he said okay kid here comes your color and he drew back and he said Kevin said we looked at his fist it looked like he had a double bladed axe on a goddamn in the end of his fucking fist and he punched him with it boom and he goes down and he's bleeding

and at this point Kevin says fuck these fucking hillbillies it's all been a plot They've got me down here.

They're going to fucking kill me.

This is a double cross.

I've got to defend myself.

And he pulls his chain out of his fucking tights and wraps it around his fist and gets back up and punches Donnie in the face as hard as he can and busts his fucking cheek open.

And down goes Donnie and Kevin gets on top of him.

He's going to beat him to death.

And Donnie looked up at him and said, out of a kid, lay it in.

That's the way we like it down here.

And he's a fuck.

And he dropped, he just started freaking out.

What do I I fucking do?

He dropped the chain and everything.

He was thinking about climbing out, and they fucking grabbed him and started working with him.

That was his introduction to Tennessee Wrestling.

And not the end of his relationship with Tennessee Wrestling.

Again, that's the early 70s.

He would end up there again in the early 80s.

That's, I guess, where you would first get to know him or get to know.

Well, hold on.

No, he went to Memphis from there.

Kevin Sullivan, as a young babyface, was

worked for Gulis from the time that he left Knoxville after that run was over with through

sometime in 1972.

I'd have to go back and look at Tuesday Night at the Gardens, the wonderful book on that era.

But he had worked this territory

in the early 70s, the Memphis territory as well.

And

then I think from there,

did he not,

he had an early run in Georgia also, did he not?

But nevertheless, maybe I'm thinking wrong.

But he started going to some of the major territories.

Everybody that's been talking about his career and all of the

tributes that have come out have focused on,

well, you know, they kind of start with a varsity club and,

you know, there's the 90s WCW and everything, but he had been a star in almost every territory he worked in.

And the Florida stuff.

I feel like the,

again, it's not Satan.

It's not, he's not the devil, but

the dark side Kevin Sullivan kind of not overwhelmed, but it's kind of the thing people most think about

because in one way or another, even with the varsity club, he kind of still held on to that persona.

Yeah, well, that's why the clips are easier to find, and everybody has seen, you know, more of that that was on TBS, etc.

But he didn't start the

Sullivan's Army of Darkness, the whole nine yards, until, what, 82?

Right after he left Memphis.

Remember that?

That's right.

He left Memphis because there was a thing on TV when he returned.

And I want to say it was Lance Russell interviewing Steve Kern as like a warning to the fans of Florida, the promoters of Florida.

He's a different guy.

He's not the Kevin Sullivan, the friendly, I'm going to tag up with Mike Graham, Kevin Sullivan.

That guy's gone.

There's something different about this guy.

And now's return.

And then, of course, that's when the whole gimmick change happened.

So that was 1982.

He's 12 years into his career.

And the early Florida run,

where he was the partner of Mike Graham and one of the top babyfaces in the state.

gets overlooked because that was really the pre-home video era for any but the the most fanatical.

But Kevin, again, you know, when I did a Back to the Territories interview with him, we talked extensively about that period because he looked

like Mike Graham.

They were about the same height.

Mike Graham in those days, not the thin,

you know,

late 80s wrestler or WCW executive.

He was a power lifter.

So he was bulky.

And Kevin, even though he was short, he was bulky because in those early years, he was more into powerlifting and, you know, strength.

And

when they grew a mustache, they looked like brothers.

So it was almost like he had a Graham brothers.

That's the way Eddie Graham used him.

Mike Graham and Kevin Sullivan,

for some period of time, were joined at the hip, indistinguishable in Florida wrestling.

Actually, for a time, Eddie Graham was closer with Kevin than he was his own son, apparently.

Well, yeah, that's another issue is that Eddie and Mike had the Graham family, and we won't get into a sub-reference here, but the Graham family dynamics at various points in time, people were on the outs, and Eddie had taken Kevin more as more of a son.

He was out in a fishing boat, and he was confiding things in him

more than Mike at one point.

And that's another reason why that,

I mean, you know, when everybody says, oh, what a great mind, what a great mind.

A lot of the fans say, well, he, you know, he was a booker, but they don't understand that he got to actually sit in a fucking boat with Eddie Graham and have a personal relationship with him and learn all of that shit.

So he not only

he could book or he could call a finish or he could just,

you know, look at a guy and say, you ought to do this or you ought to more of that or less of that or whatever.

And it

it was carrying that you know that business on when when flair was the booker in wcw kevin was his assistant but kevin was the only one who had booked between me and

rick and kevin he's the only one that had actually been a booker

So he was kind of like showing everybody.

Flair, as we've talked about, had the big time ideas and the major programs

and made the major decisions, decisions.

But it was like,

you know, Kevin knew how to put it together.

That's how I was able to learn something about it.

He was assisting or involved with

a lot more people who were booking at the time when they were successful.

Did I make

sense of that statement?

Even if he wasn't official, he had a hand in things.

You know, when you think of his run in Georgia, I always love that match, him and Tony Atlas against Alexis Smirnoff and Ivan Koloff, where they use the ether and then they interview the fans who, I'm a nurse, and that was ether.

Yes, it gets it over so good.

But he was great as a babyface there and who's in charge?

That was Bill Watts as one of the co-owners.

That may have been at that point only in Bill Watts booking or Bill Watts alone booking, but he was there in Georgia under people that he didn't have the same relationship with that he did Eddie Graham.

But again, he was exposed to a lot of the top minds.

Well, and they did show some

footage or a couple of clips on the tribute that the WWE did.

And we got to

recognize them because we said, oh, Sika got two minutes, you know, because The Rock's on the board of directors, but Kevin got two minutes and he never even worked there.

So it's just, it's the new regime.

So we got to

recognize him for that wrestling, though.

Oh, come on.

I'm in Mark Lewin and the Fallen Angel.

Well, yes, they did, but still, I don't think we're going that far.

And by the way, if we do make a couple of wise cracks during the course of this, Kevin would be

Jammy, Brian.

I can't do the fucking accent.

I sound like Jericho, but Derek, but you know, make some jokes.

What is this?

A fucking funeral?

He used to, every now and then, I never knew what it was sometimes that triggered him to text me or leave me a voicemail.

And it would just be like, Brian, you're a great therapist.

Okay.

But, you know, I liked that.

I would hear feedback from him.

And sometimes he would be listening to something that I had recorded a while back.

And I would get like, recently, or the most recent text I got from him was out of nowhere.

Great job on the Atlanta War

podcast.

I'm like, wow, that was a long time ago.

He was just listening to it.

He just found it.

But I've got a couple of voicemails that I've

saved and recorded for posterity for myself that I probably,

if I've if I played them from Kevin, it would hurt the feelings of some people who may love him, but oh, he'd be like, you're completely right.

He's a fucking idiot.

What the fuck are they doing?

I've got a few of those two, but probably not as good as yours.

But anyway, where were we going with that?

Oh, so they showed some clips.

He worked, he had a run in the WWWF as a babyface, Kevin Sullivan.

What What was that?

1976, because of

the relationship that Eddie Graham had with Vince Sr.

and the Florida and New York pipeline.

So he had already worked for Vince Sr.

by the mid-70s.

He had that to Watts and Ole and Eddie Graham.

And then

Knoxville, Kevin was not before he was a

heel in the you know in the 80s.

And

we talked about that at one point, one of the TV stations had him just introducing clips of other wrestling promotions when there was no local promotion in town because they wanted wrestling.

And he was the guy that they had hosted.

But

when Ron Fuller was running Southeastern the first time around, by what was it, 77, 78,

Kevin was a huge fucking babyface there for a couple of years.

He was a babyface there during the 1979

WFIA convention.

And that was coming off his run, the last big babyface star in San Francisco, him and Bob Rup.

That was right before that.

Yeah, where they

revitalized the business for Roy Shire, and then Rup tried to steal the territory and killed it again.

And then Kevin ended up in Knoxville to watch Rupe try to do that exactly.

Yes, and then here comes Rup and then kills the goddamn territory again.

Jesus Christ.

But fortunately, by then, Kevin went to fucking Georgia, did he not?

Yeah, that's right.

Again, he's on TBS or he's in the middle of a hot territory or he's revitalizing something or he's working for these,

you know, smart fucking people.

And then the reason why that I was excited to see him

before he even came to Memphis, his first Tennessee run 1971, or whatever, was right before me.

So I'd seen the name in the newspaper ads, but I'd, you know,

until cable became a thing and we'd seen him on TBS and heard his reputation from Florida.

You know, but at that point in time,

the Tennessee Territory, it was still a big deal when a major name from national television came in as a regular.

Not necessarily

to make Memphis shots or to fight Lawler or whatever, but as a regular on the card.

And Kevin was a big name at that time.

So when he came in here and they instantly, you know, aligned him with Jimmy Hart, the top heel faction, he and Wayne Ferris, Danny Davis, and

a rotating cast as the second nightmare when

David Oswald quit the business and Ted Allen dumbed himself out of position.

But, you know, he could talk then.

And as a heel, it was different because he had been a babyface most of the time that you'd seen or heard of him.

But also,

well, you seen the pictures just yesterday.

At that point, all of a sudden, Kevin Sullivan, that had been a big barrel-chested powerlifter, he was fucking ripped.

He had gotten into bodybuilding, and

I think at one point he dieted down to like 188 pounds.

He had fucking eight abs.

The goddamn definition was insane.

And that's when,

didn't he do a bodybuilding contest at that point with somebody?

They put footage of it on Georgia TV.

I want to say it was Tony Atlas.

Yes.

But I'm not certain, but I think it was Tony Atlas.

But anyway, he goes from like, you know,

5'8, 270 to 5'8, 188

and 2% body fat.

And,

you know, then that was a real good run as a heel for him here,

even though he was still doing

he was Kevin Sullivan, a regular person, right?

But then, as you said, by the time that he finished the run here in Memphis and went back to Florida, he was fixing to go the whole heel route.

And this was kind of a dry run for at least working in the ring.

Well, he was in the first family with Jimmy Hart, and that's a great period for the first family.

But, you know, Kevin, and I haven't listened to it in a while, but in the many conversations I had with him, I want to say he indicated that before he went back to Florida, he either thought he was going to be or he was led to believe that he may be one of the bookers or get a chance to book.

Do you remember anything about that?

In Memphis?

Well, see, that was when I was still a photographer.

So I would not have been sitting around in a locker room listening to people complain because I wasn't in there yet.

But

I can believe he was led to believe that by somebody, not saying who,

could have been one of several people, but I can't see it ever actually happening because

not because he couldn't or because, you know, he wouldn't do a good job, but because Jarrett, he owned the company.

Lawler was not a 50% partner in 1981, but still he had a percentage of Memphis.

And if Lawler wasn't the booker,

Dundee was going to be.

And

the one time they went outside the circle was Robert Fuller, and that didn't end well.

So

I don't know unless

Unless Jim Barnett or Eddie Graham were telling Jerry Jarrett, oh, you've got to do this, I don't think he would have done it just because Kevin was not a homesteader.

And they tried to keep it in a circle.

And again, he returns to Florida, and this is really the.

And

let me make this point.

And then if Eddie Graham or Jim Barnett was telling Jerry Jarrett, you ought to do this, and he was thinking about it, then Lawler was figuring out a way to say, oh,

and maybe

Dundee would have been fine with what Little Man wanted to do.

But I think Lawler would be, wait a minute.

Well, he would return to Florida, and this is really where we would see his creativity come out for the first time.

At first, it's him and Jake Roberts, and then slowly they add people.

Everyone remembers Mark Lewin walking out of the water, the purple haze emerging from the sea.

But this is really kind of Kevin, Kevin's creativity unleashed, both with Dusty there at the beginning in 83.

And then after Dusty leaves Florida, the show kind of becomes all about Kevin Sullivan and his his stable.

And by the way, that's where I researched bringing Leviathan up out of the Ohio River was the Purple Haze deal.

And Kevin, at that point,

I think Florida was a perfect territory for that because they were.

They weren't going to get heat with the TV station because Eddie Graham had such wonderful,

you know, goodwill and was involved in every civic organization in the goddamn state, right?

And always getting awards.

So they were pretty safe with the TV.

But also,

what made it,

I've talked to Kevin a couple of times about this also, was he had massive heat and his group had massive heat with much of the fan population, but there was that 10 or 15 percent in Florida of those weirdos

that started

either not only coming to support him, bringing him snakes, traveling around to see him.

Remember

the

Kevin Sullivan fans van

is the one that got burned in the parking lot that time.

Do you remember that story?

No.

They had

some group of, you know, several,

you know,

alternatively thinking individuals who were into whatever they thought Kevin's group was, right?

For real and the snakes and the fucking.

they were driving around following him at the town, and they got so much heat with the other fans because they were trying to support Kevin Sullivan and his group that the other fans set fire to their goddamn devil van that these fans were driving around in in the parking lot of the wrestling matches

and if they because

everybody believed it either one way or another, right?

It was like 90 against, but 10 for, and that made it really fucking

intense for people.

And they could get away with doing wacky things because they believed that Kevin was off his fucking rocker.

And Kevin took it really far, at times, maybe even too far, but he took it really far.

But there were lengths he didn't want to go.

Didn't he get, I don't know if mad's the right word, but upset when the After Mags had a quote attributed to him that was made up.

They're like, I am the devil, or I worship God.

Oh, yeah, yes.

See, that's the thing.

He never said Satan.

He never said the devil.

It was non-denominational

devil worthip, if you will.

It was just a cult or a group or a band of wild, weird, wacky personalities.

And he'd let people's imagination take it into, well,

people would have sworn that he was slaughtering goats in praise of Satan and drinking blood in the moonlight.

He didn't do any of that shit.

Never said devil.

said.

Now, Dusty,

Dusty would say that Kevin Thullivan, you little devil,

shit like that.

But no, he never said Satan, never said devil, never mentioned God.

But it was just, it was what people

imagined it to be.

But the things he did talk about, you remember, Abudadin, the tree of woe.

These were the things we heard about.

I have taken the betel nut.

Him and Mark Lewin were taking some beetle nuts on planes over to the fucking Pacific Rim.

They were always wearing Steve Ricard over there, different shows.

King Curtis.

Is the Purple Haze the most successful wrestler named after a strain of weed?

Well, either that or a Hendrix song, one or the other.

Same thing.

And there's a little LSD involved in there also, which is where King Curtis came in handy.

But where were we going with this?

Now you've thrown me off.

And it's interesting, too, if you look at the people Kevin would end up not only surrounding himself with, but getting along with and being a liaison, maybe the last connection in some ways they have to the wrestling world.

Mark Lewin, King Curtis, the Sheik.

It's interesting the people that he forged relationships with.

Kevin is the one who set up

or helped facilitate the Sheik to come back to Crockett for the summer of 88 Great American Bash in Detroit,

most successful show Crockett ever ran there because Sheik was in the main event.

And

also Kevin would facilitate, as we talked about, the international shit.

And that went back before the 90s and or,

you know, Victor Quinones in Florida going to Japan with his group or

Steve Ricard doing something.

you know, in Singapore or

the Polynesian pro wrestling bringing in guys from Japan and then Kevin getting

on one Smoky Mountain Wrestling TV taping.

I had Miguel Perez Jr.,

Bill DeMott, who at the time was Crash the Terminator.

Crash the Terminator.

What a cool thing.

Kanamura, the Japanese guy, bless his little pee-piggin heart.

Yukiro Kanamura, later Wing Kanamura.

And

somebody, and Taz, and Taz, I think, was on that same taping.

And,

you know he was always keeping track of

who and what was going on in wrestling outside of the big companies if he wasn't in a big company and was you know working on deals for everybody and

side note he's the one Kevin god damn it I've told you this in person he was the one that told me oh this guy gigs his arm

Like what the fuck

for those of you and I will I will now blame Kevin.

For those of you who know, you know, but for those of you who don't know.

Most gruesome match in American wrestling television history.

So Kevin

is a heel in Smokey Man Wrestling.

He has been the one

for there were Brian Lee, prime time Brian Lee was the top babyface.

At the time, as Ed wee, yes, we were struggling, ladies and gentlemen.

But suddenly these weirdos and and these creeps and these monsters start attacking him from out of nowhere.

You had this big Mongolian guy, the Mongolian Mauler.

He just passed away not long ago.

Mr.

Peter R.

Miller.

One of the weirdest fucking people in a nice way, weirdest fucking people I ever met in a business of weird people.

Oh, goddamn.

The night we had him hide under the ring at the TV taping to fucking come out and goddamn attack Brian Lee, right?

As another emissary said by this mysterious force, he's under the ring when the people come in the door.

And it's on the second taping, so he's got to be under there for like two hours, 15 minutes.

And in the first taping, it's Robert Fuller and Jimmy Gold in the stud stable, and they're beating up whoever they're working with.

And it's getting wild.

And Jimmy Golden goes and he's going to look under the ring, see if he can pull out a chair.

And

he fucking flips the apron skirt back and he comes face to face with the Mongolian mauler who he doesn't know is under the ring.

It scared the shit out of him.

Oh, he had those contact lenses too, remember?

Yes.

He had contact lenses that Mongolian did that made his fucking eyes all black and a goddamn giant fucking bulbous bald head with a fucking little thing of hair sticking out on top.

And Jimmy Golden was looking at him nose to nose when he was looking for a chair under the ring.

Oh, goddamn, he said.

And he throws the fucking flap back.

And anyway,

how did you signal him that it was time for him to do his thing?

Hildebrand,

I think, somehow bammed four times on the fucking mat or whatever, I believe.

You know, I mean, this is low budget.

But anyway, not Germain.

There'd been Adam Bomb, Brian Clark, the Night Stalker.

He did something.

And Kevin finally is revealed.

as the master, the secret fucking manipulator behind all of this band of weirdos, when he came in the ring and he stabbed Brian Lee in the head with the golden spike

like fucking, I don't know, 25 times or whatever.

And Brian bled like you run him through a razor blade factory.

And we instituted

the goddamn red X up over the screen like they did in the 70s in the WWWF so that we wouldn't get kicked off television showing all this blood.

And it made it even, oh my God.

So now Kevin says, Jimmy, Jimmy, I can't do the accent.

We can get the spike over.

He's these guys from that Victor was booking in Japan, Miguel and DeMott, and also Kanamura with the wing promotion, I guess, or whatever they were doing over there.

Well, can they come and be on the American television and the Japanese photographers will be there?

Got a big spread on Smoky Mountain in the Japanese papers.

And he said, and Kanamura who gets a spike over, he blades his arm.

And at the time,

you know, every once in a while, Dusty had done it and the sheikh had done it when the doctor told him he couldn't fucking cut his head anymore.

It wouldn't bleed.

He'd cut his head and fucking sand would come out.

So

I said, well,

yeah, okay.

Oh, yeah, he does it over there.

All right.

You know, there's no athletic commission in Tennessee.

I'm not going to get my promoter's license booted.

He'll get a little color from the arm, you know, like Dusty has done or the chic's done or whatever.

And so they have the match.

And finally, Kevin pulls out the fucking golden spike and he fucking stabs him in the arm with it.

And I see the guy go down and he made a little swipe and then.

I didn't see anything.

And

then I see him doing something else.

I'm like, what the fuck?

I guess it just ain't going to work.

Right.

And then I see him do something else.

And then you see, Brian, you remember the foot.

You remember Brian Hildebrand, Mark Curtis, when he walks over to La, because now Kevin's trying to work on him with the spike and they're doing whatever they're doing.

And you don't see really any blood, but then all of a sudden, Brian Hildebrand walks over and looks out and just gets that look on his face that Brian used to get when he was seeing something he shouldn't see.

And he just kind of turns around and walks off

and he told me later on it was the sickest thing this guy had cut down the side of his arm the bicep level

big enough it looked like you could lay his fingers in

but he wasn't bleeding

and then all of a sudden it started bleeding

and i so anyway

It it still didn't.

Brian Lee, by drinking two beers beers and taking a couple of aspirins, bled more from a fucking inch and a half blade job to the head than this fucking guy did when he just about

dismembered or decapitated, what's the word, amputated his fucking arm.

Yeah, it was really gruesome, really disgusting.

And well, and I don't think Kevin assumed he was going to be doing that either, but whatever the guy did, he cut it somewhere where this expert at arm blading cut it where you wouldn't bleed anyway until you got down to the goddamn bone or whatever.

And let me let me put the period on the end of the goddamn story and remember where you were going.

So we're back into back.

I said, they're wrapping this guy's arm up.

They've called ambulance.

I said, what the fuck is he doing?

Why did he do that?

I don't know, Jimmy.

It worked before or whatever, but they take the guy.

Now think about this.

We are, you know, where Pigeon Forge, Tennessee is, don't you?

I do.

Well, we are in Sevierville, which is legitimately the next,

Sevierville was actually a town when Pigeon Forge was just a wide spot in the road, but now Pigeon Forge is a tourist attraction.

This small fucking podunk

town at the

high school gym.

And

I think the fire department took him to the goddamn hospital.

He's a Japanese guy still dressed in his wrestling outfit with what looks to be a severe fucking knife wound

running down his goddamn arm.

Doesn't speak a lick of English.

And he comes in at 11 o'clock on a Monday night.

Everybody in fucking town heard about this fucking guy.

It didn't draw us a dime, but it was the goddamn biggest story in history in fucking Sevierville, tennessee to ever happen on a monday night at least

they had never seen anything like it but kevin's run in smokey madden overall i think is pretty underrated it's one of the runs i enjoy it was the first and maybe the only time i ever enjoyed the night stalker because remember he had that match with sid vicious at the clash of champions yes that everyone said at that point things have been a lot worse since but people said that was the worst match ever And then he really didn't do much.

He had Ox Baker guiding his career.

And then he ended up there with Kevin.

The worst manager ever.

But when he ended up with Kevin, it worked.

Like, that was the perfect guy to stand behind Kevin.

But here was the thing.

I had booked Brian Clark, Nightstalker, independently of Kevin.

You know why?

Paul Orndorff.

He lived in Atlanta and he was driving Paul Orndorff.

And Paul said, would you do me a favor?

Because when he said, would you do me a favor and book this guy's going to drive me?

I said, what's his name?

The Nightstalker.

I was like, oh, Jesus Christ, because I'd seen the match, right, with Sid.

But he said, no, I'm working with him.

So Paul had been working with him a little bit.

And then

once that Kevin saw him, he said, he's perfect because the Night Stalker, right?

Why wouldn't he be perfect for Kevin Sullivan?

And that's what Kevin was able to take him.

And

as part of that,

the angle that Kevin was doing where he led the.

the group, which then we tailored down to the Night Stalker for budget reasons, but the group, and he was a heel, and he was involved in things without the pressure of being a single main event guy as green as he was being on Brian Clark.

You know, the other thing I think about with Smoky Mountain is I didn't get to go to the first fan week in 93.

I went 94 and 95.

But Scott Cornish, the late Scott Cornish, the noted wrestling humorist, always talked about

the biggest welcome to Smoky Mountain moment for those fans in 93 was that first show kevin sullivan versus the mongolian stomper i want to say it was morristown maybe

and they wrestled in and out of the building and again the mongolian stomper hadn't really been doing much so it was just this wild brawl and now we're all used to them they're everywhere but not everyone was doing that then kevin was one of the pioneers i hate to say it in some ways of that brawl around the building, but it worked.

And again, that was one of those memorable matches that people still talked about.

Yeah, and he took it it because they were doing it in Japan.

Brody and those guys were doing it in Japan, and

it was easier to get away with because the Japanese people wouldn't sue you, right?

But like you said, people weren't seeing that every match, every show on a regular basis.

I let the people do it that I could trust.

And you trust Kevin not going to get in trouble, not going to fucking be reckless with some gimmick and decapitate some kid but also kevin understood from his previous run in knoxville in 78 who the stomper was so he was a he was a big star that would come in and work at that time with archie who had

the mongolian stomper had respect amongst a certain

era of the boys because uh well bret hart said the greatest heel in the history of stampede wrestling and

I think he may have said the greatest heel in the history of Canada wrestling or well, the history of, and it probably still be.

Joe Leduc might want a word, but well, no, Leduc was a babyface up there.

So nevertheless, but also with Archie in Knoxville, because Kevin had been there in 78, he was the hottest heel in the history of that town.

And Archie had been retired for like five years at that point.

He was working for the Sheriff's Department, but he still kept, he rode his bicycle.

What was he?

56, maybe when he started working for me, he rode his bicycle every day to work at the sheriff's department seven miles each way.

And he looked fucking great.

So

he became

our go-to babyface monster.

They weren't going to boo him anymore.

He wasn't in the business of getting heat full-time anymore.

But he was such a name there that

if you brought him in and made him the monster, he didn't have to speak, he was the goddamn

equalizer or a special tag partner, whatever the case, the people loved it.

And Kevin knew how to work with him.

So,

and you set the tone from the start.

As soon as the people heard, I played the theme from Halloween for him.

Dean, do, do, dean, doon, doon, dean, doon.

And here comes fucking Archie.

He hits the ring.

They fight.

They go everywhere, in and out, whatever the fuck.

It's crazy.

So the boot comes into play, something fucking happens, and whether it's a DQ or the heel gets beat, you don't beat the stomper.

And it worked for three fucking years, a couple times a year, like Rough House Fargo.

We could bring Archie back.

It's Kevin, Kevin, too, because remember at the Christmas Chaos 92, I think, when Brian Lee was hurt, someone had to come and defend, I guess, Brian Lee.

It was my mom's stomper.

The honor of him.

What honor, you say?

No, but yeah.

And then

one of the greatest ones we did was after I think he had, Archie had worked probably with Kevin in Johnson City at Freedom Hall.

And we're doing a backstage interview

with somebody else, right, in the locker room.

The announcer is standing there and he's interviewing.

whoever this is.

And all of a sudden you hear bam, boom from the next room.

And then a door flies open and somebody, I think it might have been Brian Hildebrand, Mark Curtis, runs out and says, he's loose, he's loose, run.

And then somebody else flies out of the room and then there comes the fucking stomper around the corner with his boot in his hand and he charges down the hall and people are screaming, get out of the way.

And he goes across and he

knocks down the heel door and fucking gets on Kevin.

And you see the boot flying and everything.

People love shit like that.

We treated him like the Frankenstein monster, and Kevin was the perfect opponent for him because he knew how to fucking heal him down or use an object to get an advantage or, you know, not when to not beat up the monster.

Because to a lot of guys that had names at that point, Archie would have looked like a

well-conditioned man in his 60s and probably not given him the deference that he deserved.

Where were we going with that?

We were just talking about Kevin and Smoky Mountain and the various places Kevin was and ended up and the people he worked with.

Well, and going back also,

one thing, the Triple Tower of Doom, do you remember that?

Yeah, unfortunately, 88.

88.

But here's the thing.

And the whole thing leading up to that and the execution of that and the story behind that, Kevin sat down down with me on Crockett's plane one night before that whole thing unfolded and explained it to me.

And I thought it was the greatest goddamn thing I'd ever heard of in the history of wrestling.

The problem became in actual execution.

Other people had to do it and you had to see it and you had to put it on television.

And you needed Kevin Sullivan talking to you for an hour and a half to and then it would have been the greatest thing you'd ever seen as long as you didn't see it you just heard Kevin tell you about it

he could he could make even those ideas um

it it it was very intricate as I recall it's so much so that I can't remember what any of the details were but I was fucking captivated as a fan you were captivated until you saw it and then you're like this this is not good

I hope they never bring it back and then they brought it back for Hogan, remember?

Well, but if you got to bring something stinky back, bring it back for Hulk.

They brought it back so Hogan could beat like nine heels in one night or whatever it was,

including the returning Zeus and Jeep Swenson.

Yeah,

there's a couple of names out of the distant past.

But yeah, well, and that was Kevin having to work, unfortunately, with, you know, the largest ego in the business, but he was trying to make things happen.

He made it work, though.

I mean, he, again, he kind of always put it so that he had to, or the way he saw it was he had to gain Hogan's trust as a booker.

Yeah.

And he did it.

Unfortunately, he had to do a lot of stuff that catered more to Hogan than the fans at different times.

But

at the end of the day, you know, we said it the other day when who killed WCW?

If you look at who built WCW,

Kevin's responsible

for a lot of the good things that happened, and he has almost no responsibility for the fall of WCW.

Yeah.

He's certainly one of the heroes of the WCW story.

And as we mentioned also when we talked about the first time

they killed WCW,

Kevin was

not only part of, but pretty much the experienced,

steady hand in the room behind the only successful period that they had from 1988 to fucking 1996.

And that was

when Flair was Booker, but Kevin was the, you know, the only guy that had ever done that before.

And then, yes, and there was Jim Hurd was on the committee.

And Jim Barnett, who,

as we've talked about, was not there to contribute ideas on paper for matches or finishes.

Jody Hamilton, who was snoring quite a bit and not given a lot of responsibility.

Jim Ross, who was the beleaguered announcer who had to call whatever fucking came up.

Myself, who had been booking for a grand total of one day the first day that I was on the fucking job.

So, you know, Kevin structured the fucking thing just by lack of, you know, guidance elsewhere.

What was the quote that was always attributed to him when Heard wanted to cut Flair's hair or something?

And he said, Would you change Mickey Mantle's number?

No, I think it was Babe Ruth.

Babe Ruth?

I think it changed Babe Ruth's number.

You know,

that's the whole thing.

He had to suffer through the Spartacus and the

Jim Heard, the ding-dongs, and the hunchback.

He was there for the hunchbacks.

Kevin was in the room

for the hunchback pitch and an Oli shutdown.

Everybody's heard that story.

Am I repeating myself?

It's been a while, and there aren't a lot of fans who may not know the legacy of Jim Heard's creative ideas.

Well, the Ding Dongs were such a major success.

Ding-dong

that Heard pitched the idea of the Hunchbacks.

They were a tag team of hunchbacks, and the idea was that

They were unbeatable because you couldn't pin them since they were hunchbacks.

You couldn't get both shoulders on the goddamn mat at the same time.

And he pitched this in front of me and Ric Flair and Kevin Sullivan and Jim Ross.

And Ole Anderson was in the room at that point in time and a few others.

And

we all suffered through it.

And then Ole being the fucking one that you would think he would

be the one said, all right, Jim, then book me and Arn against the fucking hunchbacks.

And I'll slap a fucking submission hold on them and make them give up and beat them in 30 seconds.

Well, god damn it.

Only you know what I'm talking about.

You know, it's interesting too,

in between WCW,

because he was there, I want to say he left by 91 and then he returned in 94.

In that period in between,

you know, he had to make a living.

He worked in these like everyone does.

And he did some overseas tours and he did various things, but,

you know, he stayed relevant with the relevant things happening on what was then the independent scene whether it was smoking mountain wrestling i don't know if you consider yourself an independent but or ecw after eddie gilbert left yeah one of the first people paul e brought in was kevin sullen

i don't think him and eddie gilbert may have coexisted well together at that point so after eddie was gone one of the many changes came

eddie would have shit himself if kevin had come in because you know eddie was about being the booker and and kevin had been a booker whereas paul was about about being a booker with smart people to help him be a booker.

And Kevin Sullivan was teaming up with Taz.

And that was one of the first things that really elevated Taz from just being the guy that you used to see on ICW-TV or IW-CCW against Ray Odyssey or Tommy Dreamer to seeing him as being an emerging talent.

The Tazmaniac.

Yeah, well, the Tazmaniac.

A lot of that's Paul E.

the way he used him, but a lot of that was the credibility of Kevin Sullivan teaming with him.

Well, and that's the thing is that

Kevin got Taz down for the volunteer slam that year.

We did the Rage in the Cage.

That's why Taz was in it.

Now that I think of it, it was Kevin had got Taz because I needed an extra fucking heel.

That's why he was working Knoxville.

That's why he was working ECW.

As you said, he also did the international dates.

And he was still living in Florida, but he was trying to make sure that he knew what was going on and had a, you know, had spots in various places.

And,

you know, as you said, stayed because there was no such thing as independent wrestling and internet publicity at that time in those days.

It was all the magazines.

Regional television can add up if it's seen in the right places.

And as long as he's got his finger in four or five different things going on, he's always got something going on.

Because Kevin was smart to how the business worked.

And when he saw the most of the territories going away, he knew he just needed to expand and concentrate.

And you and Paulie both knew that you would be willing to accept promos from him on the beach.

Yes.

But no, but that's the thing.

Well, like I said when we were talking last month about him, he would do, he would go above and beyond instead of standing in front of a brick wall.

You know, he would find a place that looked good.

He did one of the promos that he sent in was he was reenacting the fucking bar scene with the bartender from The Shining.

And you got the extra, you know, bonus of Nancy's arm or hand reaching into the scene every once in a while to hand him a drink or to be an off-camera, you know, fucking

personality of some kind.

And he would put everything into it.

It wouldn't be like, just, I'm coming.

You know, he would think about about it.

And we'd talk on the phone about what, you know, what you want to do in the finish.

What can we come back with?

You know, I wasn't just booking him for dates.

It was, okay, here's what we'll do.

And here's who you're working with and blah, blah, blah.

And he always obviously had great ideas on what to do with it.

Was it Smokey Man or ECW?

There was one promo I remember he did on the beach.

where he starts like at a distance and he doesn't say anything and it starts with him just walking fast right towards the camera.

And it was intimidating.

It was like, oh my God, what's he going to do?

But he would return to WCW as a babyface, team with Cactus Jack against the Nasty Boys, a memorable match in Philadelphia at Slamboree.

And then, of course, and I guess we should send our sympathies to his brother, Dave, Evad Sullivan.

Oh, good lord.

Remember, they brought him and they gave him a Google brother.

That was

Kevin Sullivan back to WCW.

Yes, and he was dyslexic, so his name wasn't Dave, it was Evad.

And he was a hulkomaniac.

What was his name?

He was a fairly nice guy.

I think I met him a time or two.

He had been wrestling as the equalizer.

I can't remember his real name.

It has to be Dave something, because why else would you just assert Dave there?

Where is his name?

Dave Sullivan.

I can't, well, that's a fine Irish name now, goddamn it.

But yeah,

see, even the great ones are sometimes saddled with questionable creative.

But,

you know, everybody just thought, well, if it's weird, Kevin can make it work because he usually does.

You know, I guess we should talk a little bit about everything in WCW with him and

Nancy and Chris Benoit and everything afterwards.

I've always had a problem with people who,

you know, it cost Kevin a lot of...

his good name.

Yeah.

Because a lot of people, first people who were friends with Chris Benoit, who had become friends with Nancy,

just were insistent that Kevin was this awful, awful guy.

I think it was revealed when we had him on the show four years ago

that Nancy had been arrested for abuse on Kevin, not the other way around.

And

oh, go ahead.

Well, I was just going to say, and by the way, what we're referencing, folks,

four years ago, a Dark Side of the Ring episode aired on

the

Benoit and Nancy

Benoit

tragedy.

And Kevin was not on the program.

And so, therefore, even though

other people may have tried to a bit, his story, his side was not represented well in the episode.

And

we had

Brian and I had him on the show here which you can find it on the YouTube channel

official Jim Cornette is what I'm talking about I'm not trying to be commercial but everybody should hear that because he was not on the show because he turned down the request to be on the show because of promise he had made to Nancy's parents yeah he was waiting for permission from them he said that was the only thing that would hold him up from talking about it was he wanted her parents to give him permission.

Darkseid put up

some text on the screen saying that he declined to be interviewed, but that was kind of not the whole story.

And we had Kevin on to tell the story.

And

to be honest, Nancy's sister, not a fan of Kevin's,

which has colored some

viewpoints on a situation, but

Nancy was a handful.

And everybody has issues with their personal lives.

But what really

just disgusted me

was these stupid people because the people, oh, Kevin Sullivan had something to do with it.

It wasn't Chris Ben, that whole bunch of bullshit.

You'd have to be a complete fucking imbecile on the verge of being locked up for your own safety rather than being out in public to believe that Kevin had something to do with any of their deaths.

So what it amounted to was a bunch of fucking assholes acting like assholes, trying to be assholes, and malign and slander somebody

that was more successful than they would ever be at anything.

And that's what makes me mad because it's not like

a great amount of people believed it.

You couldn't.

It's fucking stupid.

But a great amount of people would say it because they thought that that made

special in some way.

Yeah, and Kevin took a lot of hits and he was quiet.

He didn't say anything.

And he took a lot of hits.

And as time has gone by and different things have come out, I think you could say Kevin was really treated horribly by a lot of people and that Chris Benoit was always the bad guy.

You know, he was abusive.

Not just at the end, but he was abusive.

He was hooked on drugs, loaded to the tits on steroids.

And it was easy for everyone to point the finger at Kevin as being the problem.

But Kevin, you know, like I said, he took a lot of hits.

Triple H had very nice words to say about him in that tribute video on SmackDown, and they did a very nice job with that.

Next time you're going to use any of my images, ask for permission.

But, you know, it's like he said all these nice things.

What a great mind he was.

And he was, you know, we were talking to him in recent years.

He was.

Why not give him a job at some point?

You know, why not bring him in and use that mind?

And Kevin, there are a lot of very small independent promotions and some medium-sized ones that benefited over the last 15, 20 years from Kevin's availability and his ability to go someplace and treat something seriously.

And even if it's for one night, if he was going to be booking or helping with creative ideas, he took it very seriously.

He was

still trying to help wrestlers and promoters.

You know what?

Here's the,

well, I would say sad thing.

I mean, my God, you know, he's been retired for a while now.

But if this was, if the Triple H regime, the Paul Levesque regime,

the Vince's absence, if that had happened 15 years ago,

you may very well have seen that because

I think this was another example of Vince's, he's a wrestling guy,

or, you know,

he doesn't understand what we do.

Something like that

is always been the problem with getting certain people that Vince didn't grow up with, grow up around,

didn't serve him well for long periods of time, didn't work in his specific company.

Success outside,

he was

very lackadaisical in recognizing.

And it wasn't like Kevin Dunn was going, oh, you know, we ought to get this

Kevin Sullivan in here.

He was, you know, he's a wrestling guy, Vince, whatever.

I think if now was 15 years ago when

Triple H was in charge, I have a feeling that Kevin would have been being consulted on a variety of things.

Yeah, I mean, so many of the people who were involved with the failures of WCW, including the death of it,

all were able to maintain employment in wrestling, whether whether it's in WWE or TNA.

But Kevin, again, booker for the most successful periods,

never got that chance.

And a lot of it was because,

you know, the Benoits and that crew putting the mouth on him.

They made him the bad guy, not just to,

you know, not to the promotion necessarily, but to fans.

Once you heard that all these guys hated Kevin Sullivan, It made a lot of fans hate Kevin Sullivan.

I think a lot of people for a very long time looked unfairly at Kevin, who, you know, again, from my experience, the nicest possible guy and

so giving with his time and his information and his knowledge.

And I think his reputation, I think he's getting it back a lot now, but for years, it took a really unfair hit.

Well, and also think about this:

were they going to pick Kevin up

in the WWE

when Benoit and his guys had just gone there before WCW goes out of business, that was not an opportune time.

But,

you know, that is, as you said, not only with the fans, but also with some of the boys.

I can see where these guys would have gone.

And if he hadn't worked with Kevin, oh, this fucking guy.

Yeah, I mean, you can't say.

Like, he put, you know, the famous story is, you know, they didn't want to work with him.

He put the belt on Benoit.

And then Benoit left.

But you can't say Kevin wasn't a guy who put put over or helped young wrestlers.

He always did.

Always.

He helped make careers.

Would Rick Steiner have become Rick Steiner without Kevin Sullivan?

Would Mike Rotunda have ever been watchable

without Kevin Sullivan?

Mick Foley, would he have ever gotten a chance on national TV?

I actually have a promo here a bunch of people have sent.

Maybe I'll play you audio in a moment.

Without Kevin Sullivan,

the list goes on and on.

And when you look at WCW, again, he was the booker.

If there was a time where you enjoyed Nitro, 96, 97,

he was the booker.

So if there's stuff you enjoyed, make sure you give him some credit for it.

And I'll tell you one thing, though.

We talk about getting people booked and spots and, you know, working with promoters and everything.

This was about, goddamn, seven or eight years ago.

Kevin, I'm talking to him on the phone.

He says, Jimmy, has this guy?

And I'm not going to call the guy's name.

But yeah, there's this guy in West Virginia.

He runs shows.

He's great.

He's got the money.

The shows are great.

The whole thing.

He'd love to talk to you.

Well, Kevin, if you say he's okay, all right.

You know, it's not that far down the road for me from West Virginia.

So I call a guy.

I get booked on his show.

He's okay.

It's at such and such gym in,

God damn it, was it

maybe

Parkersburg, West Virginia?

I can't remember now.

Parkersburg, Clarksburg, somewhere in that area.

But yeah, there's a big festival in town.

There's going to be thousands of people in town.

And we're going to have this big wrestling show.

And the Rock and Roll Express are going to be there.

And Warlord's going to be in a barbarian's going to be there.

And some other people.

Okay, goddamn.

All right.

I'll do it.

And it's in the middle of the summer, Brian.

And when I get there, they had not lied.

They were exactly right.

There was a big festival in town.

There were thousands of people in town.

Guess where the wrestling show was?

Where?

Not in fucking town.

Where was it?

It was down the road from.

It was like five.

I said, where is this goddamn festival?

Because I show up at the building.

There's an empty, it's like in a residential neighborhood.

There's an empty goddamn parking lot for about a hundred cars and there's two in it, mine being one of them

and a trailer pulled up to this building i said

where's the festival oh it's in town where's that about five miles down this road you go and you'll get right into

god damn it

so it was like

yes there was a festival there but you couldn't see the goddamn wrestling from the festival and

Get in this building.

It's 90 something degree.

And by the way, Kevin is not there.

Kevin's not booked on this show kevin

the jolly joker that he is he said oh yeah the guy's he i got my money but oh yeah the guy runs great shows

and he's off home and fucking whether i think he'd move to washington by then but nevertheless i get in this building if it's 97 degrees in the parking lot it's 127

in this building

because there's absolutely no air conditioning whatsoever.

And it's one of the old gyms where the only windows are right up at the bottom, the top of the general admission seats, right?

And they can just open them like a foot.

And that's supposed to cause some kind of, it looks like a fucking basketball gym from Hoosiers, right, in the 50s.

And then I go to the locker rooms and they're even hotter.

And then I see them carton out this giant fan.

And it's about five feet across.

And they go to the concession stand and they get a bucket of ice and they put a bucket of ice in front of this big fan

and let it blow into the building.

And I go and goddamn get a fucking chair and sit right in front of it.

If you are less than 18 inches from this thing, it's actually comfortable.

But more than that, and you're like in a sauna.

And then, as soon as I had to take a piss and I get up out of my seat, the goddamn rock and roll comes in and sits there.

So I have to goddamn cave.

But anyway, I then go downstairs because

I feel cool air coming from the basement, the stairs down to the basement.

And if you walk down there, it was 20 degrees cooler because it was a natural fucking limestone cave with water dripping and the smell of mildew would make your eyes water.

So after the show, when I got home, I called Kevin.

I said, Kevin, don't recommend any promoters to me anymore.

I can't take it.

My allergies won't put up with it.

I just got sidetracked telling that story, didn't I?

No, but it's good.

I mean, these are the kind of stories we want to get on here.

Not just the ones people know, but...

Not just the ones people want to hear, but the ones they need to hear.

Let me play you some audio because I'd like to get your impression because this is a period of time where I think you were still on the booking committee and it's maybe the longest bleep in terms of wrestling ever on TBS.

Kevin Sullivan with Buzz Sawyer and Cactus Jack.

Let me go to this.

Kevin, this guy's got to have a little help.

He got a lot of help.

He's got me.

Let me tell you something.

It ain't the dog's fault.

When his mother was carrying him and she's walking through the desert because she was a no-man,

she couldn't hold it any longer.

She stopped

I left him there to die.

Well,

the dog didn't die.

By the way, while this is happening, he has Buzz Sawyer, who's on the ground, a chain around his neck, and Kevin's just holding it there while he's choking himself, Buzz Sawyer.

Yes, mad dog Buzz Sawyer, big log and chain around his neck.

Cactus Jack, who's from Truth or Consequences, New Mexico, and obviously deranged.

And then Kevin Sullivan talking about JYD's mother, who was a Nubian.

And as I remember it from the taping, there was something about squatting down and fucking delivering

the infant right there.

Where

you can read his lips something about squatting and the cord.

And Mick Foley Cactus Jack is like oh, that's right.

And she chewed the cord.

And Mick Foley is the most normal person involved in this whole thing, but let's go back to this.

Because

from the fetal position, he crawled the hotburns.

sands.

It's me.

He crawled the heart-burning sands.

Me.

It's me.

God.

It's me.

He crawled the heart-burning sands.

And when he was burning up and withering,

the she-wolf came.

And that dog looked up and he was given the breath of life.

It's not the dog's fault.

He's just a part of the environment he'll be okay

you see because the dog has me the dog finally it's okay it's okay

it's okay it's okay

to cake to cake

the dog has me

the dog has finally found peace in his life

you see all he is is misunderstood

we'll be back right after this

and did i say j y d you said j i said mad dog whatever the fuck but yes and it also with that one was

didn't the didn't the she-wolf

kiss the the dogs and and give him the breath of the i don't know what the i have to go to the second bleak was fair yeah but he's smacking buzz sawyer as hard as he can write in the fucking yeah that's what he kept when he kept stopping that one sentence he's just slapping the shit out of his because Buzz loved that kind of shit anyway.

Yeah, I hit me.

And he's slapping the shit out of him like he's, you know, training a goddamn wild horse.

What do you think of him and Dusty together?

You got to see them behind the scenes.

So what do you think of their feud and their long-running thing in Florida?

And then, of course, for Crockett.

But behind the scenes, what was the relationship like?

Well, they worked great together because they had known each other so long.

And they'd been, by the time that I was together with them, they had been,

you know, they'd drawn so much money with each other and and been such great opponents and that whole thing ran for two years in Florida till

till Dusty came to the Carolinas and

and then Kevin as you said earlier took over the book down there when Dusty got the book for Crockett

but that's it you know Kevin

as a performer he knew what he needed to do and he was also with the guys in his group he wanted to flesh that out he wasn't going to overstep his bounds but if dusty

came to him dusty knew that kevin can either give good ideas or help flesh it out or understand what he's what dusty is looking for because they've worked together for so long so

that's the thing is that you know dusty loved having kevin working there on the card because he didn't have to fucking micromanage him.

He could just give him shit and let him run with it.

And he could make something out of it.

Kevin and JJ.

JJ Dylan got along really great, too.

Well, yes.

And they've

same thing.

They'd both been in the business for a, you know, a long period of time in a variety of roles and were not assholes or power mad, you know, social climbers and understood

how to do their thing.

And it was easy to work with both of them.

What's the secret to the stomp that Kevin used to do where he would stomp on the guy's belly?

Well, I don't, I say the same thing with Finn Balor.

I've had people say, oh, no, they say you don't feel it.

I don't know how.

With Kevin,

there wasn't as much of a secret as much as at least he wasn't getting that much height.

He wasn't getting that much air.

He made it work, though.

He made, you know what?

And again, his earliest wrestling photos, they said probably to help him that he was 5'11.

I think legitimately he was 5'7.

And

he made his size work with the style he worked in the ring.

Yes, as a babyface, you know, he was powerful because, like I said, in the

younger years, he was a powerlifter, stocky body type and had a lot of weight and a lot of strength.

People could see it.

Even though he was vertically challenged.

But then as a heel, because he was

constant motion and he was aggressive and he had that level of crazy by that point.

And, you know, he,

that's why he was close with the sheik, because he was a big, he understood what the sheikh did to be special and unique.

And

that, you know, that kind of thing works when you're a heel and you're crazy.

And he, but he could make it work with the sense of danger and urgency instead of just the

walk fighting around.

So even though he, again, wasn't that tall, he was always at

in Memphis when he had been doing the bodybuilding.

He wasn't that tall, but he was goddamn shredded.

And it actually made him look taller.

And then in the other eras, he wasn't that tall, but he was 250 fucking pounds or whatever.

And you could tell that he had some oomph to him.

And the, like you said, the style he worked

as a younger babyface.

He could still sell.

He could still bleed, make a comeback or whatever.

But as a heel,

he really fell into that pattern of just trying to be dangerous instead of going for arm drags.

But then

as you said earlier, though, you didn't see the goddamn fight in the arena four matches out of seven.

Right.

It was unique.

He was one of the few guys that you knew you would get a wild match out of.

And also, also, and when Smokey Mountain, the next year, I think

it was the next year after the stomper, he had the fucking arena fight with the big boss man, Bubba.

Came back and did it one year later.

I've got pictures of them up in the balcony.

I think that was

whenever the fuck.

I think that was 93.

No, that was 93 because it was the same week.

He just did it with Stomper in fucking one town and Bubba in the other town.

But nevertheless, where was I going with that?

The wild matches and that you didn't see them all over the card back then.

Oh, you didn't see them all over the card back then.

And also

the fact that Kevin could make you believe that there was something

going on with him mentally and that he was way too into this to just be playing a part.

There was some element of legitimacy to it.

That helped him do things that it would be bullshit if other people did them because you could see through them.

And he could go farther over that.

We talked about

Stone Cold Steve Austin stomping a mud hole in somebody, but he was over like God, so he could not even connect.

And the people didn't care.

They didn't see it.

They overlooked it.

Didn't compute.

Kevin in Florida had that reputation to the point where one of the

And now some asshole on an outlaw show is going to do this.

It's going to fall like a fart in church.

But the thing that Kevin did with Blackjack Mulligan and the people believed in Blackjack, too, all the

rednecks and the country people down in Florida, the, you know, the redneck Riviera over there in Pensacola, whatever.

They were at the Orlando Eddie Graham Sports Stadium, which was a big tin building.

It seated like 5,000 people out in the middle of a fucking field.

And they made a fortune there for years.

And Kevin and Blackjack,

they

have double DQ.

They spill out of the fucking ring.

They fight out the back door, out into the parking lot, and off into the darkness.

They didn't even have fucking lights out there.

They just, they're gone.

The people are running.

Where the fuck did they go?

And then the next goddamn week, on the same night, they have wrestling once a week.

They ring the bell for the first match.

The first match gets going.

They've been going about five minutes and suddenly through the front door of the arena,

wearing the same shit that they had been wearing the week before and still bleeding, bust Kevin Sullivan and Black Jack Mulligan.

And they fight into the fucking ran, and the place goes out of their fucking minds.

They didn't stop to think, how could this be?

They just, oh my God,

that's the kind of shit he could get away with.

That was one of the great spots I've ever heard of of all time.

You know, I got to talk a lot of baseball with him.

That was one of his big loves: baseball.

When the 86 Mets beat the Red Sox in a World Series, he was working in Continental.

He had to watch it backstage, he said.

A heartbreaking loss for him.

But a few years ago, I'm looking at some of the text messages here.

I wished him a happy birthday in October.

And he wrote back, Fuck L.A.

and Mookie.

Although he's going to be a Hall of Famer, he better go in as a Red Sox.

So, loved his baseball.

Did you see Fenway Park put him up on the screen, the scoreboard?

That would have meant the world to him.

That would have meant the world to him.

And

yeah, again, from my experience, and I met him when I was a kid, and that was an intimidating thing, even though it wasn't really supposed to be.

It was just an autograph signing, but that accent, you know, nothing he could say when you're a kid sounded nice.

I was wearing a Knicks shirt.

He's like,

how do you think the Knicks are going to do?

I'm like,

I think they're going to win.

Who do you think is going to win?

No, it's going to be Chicago.

Whatever.

You yelled it at me.

But, you know, getting to know him the last several years, he was such a nice guy.

Like I said, always very giving with his time.

He recorded a ton of segments with me.

And

he always just gave me unsolicited feedback, which from Kevin Sullivan, I liked.

I like when top minds give me feedback as opposed to, you know, jerk-offs.

Yeah, the unsolicited part is sometimes the rub, but with Kevin, you didn't mind.

But with Kevin, I appreciated where he was coming from.

So, from my personal experience, just a tremendous guy, a really nice guy.

And I wish he was still here.

A really, really nice guy.

Well, everybody,

everybody heard what I had to say about how he helped me

in WCW, not only my first booking spot, but in Smoky Mountain and trying to help because he knew what I was going through and

what I owed to him for that.

I'm not going to go through it again because then I'd just be repeating myself and

rambling.

But

a lot of people will remember him for a lot of good things.

And

who else can you think of?

54 years after they started in the business, their

passing makes the kind of news his did, not only in a mainstream level, but also amongst the fans and the boys.

Made the New York Times.

Made the New York Times and a scoreboard in Fenway Park.

And,

you know, for that long, I mean, he was literally

still working in the business as far as autographs and et cetera, and had wrestled up until just a few years ago on an intermittent basis.

So

I don't know.

There's a lot of people.

Whatever era it may be, a lot of people have never come close to that level of involvement or longevity in this business.

And I think we should all be

proud of him for that.

Absolutely.

And of course, if you're a listener who wants to hear Kevin in his own words, go back through the archives.

We've had many appearances with Kevin, of course, here with Jim on the 605 Super Podcast, telling his own story in his own words.

But Jim, with that, let's take a short time out.

We'll be right back after this.

We do have some more fun and frivolity on the program today and

some of the modern wrestling.

But

at the start, we want to make mention, obviously, of the passing of Afa Anawai, Afa the Wild Samoan,

just a couple of days ago as we speak.

And

I think he, I believe he was 81 years old, but

This is so, it's got to be murder for the family of what they've they've gone through over the past couple of months, but it's kind of,

I don't know,

apropos, not ironic,

but apropos in a positive way that Alpha and Sika went so close together when they were so

close and intertwined in all the fans' minds for, you know, so many years, inextricably linked.

But in, you know, Alpha had been battling some health issues for quite some time and had still, you know, been kicking out and everybody was, you know, pulling for him.

But

obviously,

I guess Dave Meltzer announced he had passed on Twitter about a day or two before he did.

We may mention that later on.

I'm not sure how much in advance it was, but it was definitely in advance.

It was in advance.

But nevertheless, you know, everybody has,

you know, given the tributes and et cetera.

And we just honestly not to try to shirk our duties.

But as a professional in his career in wrestling, we just talked about the Samoans when we talked about Sika.

So, you know, it might be redundant here.

But I think at this point,

we could focus more on Afa, the

after the wild Samoans the the trainer the promoter

which obviously he was well thought of and he had been to what was it Hazelton Pennsylvania is that his

it's near Allenton is that where he was located I don't remember the exact town I've well I've been there because I worked for offa that's the thing I mentioned when we talked about Sika that

you know that I'd not interacted with him nearly as much as Offa because Sika had lived for years in down in Pensacola, Florida, whereas Offa was in eastern Pennsylvania and that's where his school was.

He ran shows around the area for so many years and especially when I was in Stanford in the office,

you know, there was a lot of period of time when I was booking the guys for third-party promotions or worked for him myself in some cases,

you know, when I was on television managing somebody, whatever the case.

You know, he was much more present around the office and around

you know a lot of the guys in the towns when when they would do tv in the area and actually

he was to he was managing

uh samu and fatu

when we first got there in 93 me and the heavenly bodies right because we with lou albano eventually with with lou albano and they were

Boy, that was the ugliest group of baby faces that I think I've ever seen in my life.

You have Lou Albano and Samu and Fatu and Affa together.

But it was, it

was what it was because of the booking at the time.

But we got to work with him.

So, but Afa was a,

he was a great guy.

And, and,

you know, I've heard so many people speak so well of him as a trainer.

I didn't, you know, I wasn't at his school and witnessed that.

But at his shows,

you know, that's one of the

people that you could book the WWF talent out who is a third party that you knew

they weren't going to be asked to do anything screwy or weren't going to be, there wasn't anything screwy going to be done on the show.

He ran professional, professional wrestling shows.

And somebody will probably come up with a videotape of, well, look, he did this.

And some local manager is quacking like a duck or whatever.

But I'm talking about

the office knew they weren't going to get bad publicity, offensive wrestling staged here.

You know, guy pulls his fucking pecker out.

No, or nobody was going to be set on fire or, you know, plummeted through furniture.

But he ran shows in that area for, what, 20 years, I guess.

So you always got your money.

Everything was always.

I'm not saying they didn't run some local shows, but everything was professionally done within the parameters of the environment

and i guess he's been doing the

still had the training school until you know obviously just his health took a turn recently hadn't he i believe so and uh you know it's interesting to think about the idea that if you were a fan 40 years ago

there were two

or three

Samoan wrestlers that you knew.

It was Afan Sika, and then there was Samoan number three,

who eventually became Samu.

And you didn't know yet that he was Alpha's son.

Then eventually you had Tonga Kid

and then Fatu and in WCW under Paul Heyman actually as the manager and then Oliver Humperdig.

The three of them were together.

It's amazing because like in the 90s when you were around is kind of when everything expanded and they were a family in wrestling and then After a while, they were the biggest family in wrestling.

And Alpha was one of the central figures figures behind the scenes because he always had a good relationship with vince

and you know that's that's the thing is there were other samoans in the 70s remember uh tio and and reno and tio and tapu after tapu took over from reno

um and it was um

goddamn i think reno's last name was to tufili or whatever they were I'm sure they were distant relations because Samoan people come from a fucking island.

So somehow distantly, one would think they're all related.

But the point is

the Anawahi and the Anawahi family overtook all of the other Samoan,

not that there were a ton, but the other Samoan wrestlers in the business and the quasa

Samoans that tried to get by with being Samoans and pretty much their bloodline is now

the only one existent in the business, isn't it?

I mean, it's the the big one.

On any kind of mainstream level, I guess there's...

Wait a minute.

Didn't AEW had some Samoan-looking fellows, didn't they?

The Gates of Agony.

Boy, they passed through them a long time ago to watch them.

But nevertheless.

But anyway, we just, we wanted to

recognize Afa.

And

again, you know,

the...

The tribute we did to Sika is available on the YouTube channel, which talks extensively about Offa as well and the Samoans as a team.

But yeah, you know, you can't,

they have probably surpassed,

I guess by now they have surpassed the Welches and Fullers in terms of just numerical

people.

Well, no, hold on now.

No doubt.

Have we got to like 35, 36, whatever.

If you don't count people who weren't actually related, like the Rock or Jimmy Snooka, like various people that they considered cousins or brought in, if you just count the actual, the real bloodline, Alpha, Sika, Samu, Fatu, Tonga Kid.

Again, not counting Haku.

Rosie and Jamal.

Manu.

Alpha Jr.

was Manu right there.

Roman Reigns.

Are you doing this off the top of your head?

I am.

That's nine.

Usos.

I've worked with a lot of these people, and I can't fucking do it.

Usos, that's 11.

Solo Sokoa, that's 12.

I think it's another brother, but I'm not going to count him because I can't verify the other brother.

Did you say Jacob?

Jacob.

Oh, so there's 13.

So that's just who's on the main stage or has been that I could think of, let alone the other members who have worked in.

Yokozuna.

I didn't even think of him.

Yokozuna.

So that's 14 right there.

You know, again, with the Welches and Fullers,

if you count the Fields family, that's what really gives

a boost, right?

Yes, but also that means you count in-laws, in which case

you've got the people that they married.

Oh, Naomi,

Naomi, and the Flying Burrito Brothers.

She lives in the dark.

She makes you just want to get up and move.

Just get up and go.

Yeah.

Just

anyway, Madonna.

we're trying to be serious here.

We've gone off on a tangent, but the point is,

probably,

I think without question, the family dynasty in wrestling that has grossed the most money

would be the

Onawahis, which started with Afa and Sika.

I think that's a record without question.

How many other wrestling families go five people deep?

Like the Welchers and Fullers, obviously.

The Grahams and Kayfabe are certainly a well, no, but yeah, the Von Ericks.

The Von Ericks.

Gosh, whiz, now you've

there were three Miller brothers.

Yes, definitely the Hearts.

The, you know, the aforementioned Welch-Fuller Fields-Hatfield

arrangement.

Five.

Well, you know what?

Five.

The Rock, if you look at his extended family, technically, Peter Maivia,

Rocky Johnson, The Rock, Ricky Johnson.

So there's four members.

I don't know if any of Rocky Johnson's other kids ever did it.

I don't think any of them ever did.

So that's four.

But five, five's the magic number.

So now people are screaming at the, at the,

at whatever they're fucking listening to this on, right?

So what we're trying to say is if you work for AEW, now is the time to take time off and procreate.

Oh, good heavens.

No,

I don't think they're going to be around by the time that your progeny would be of legal contract signing age.

You know, I'm glad they did get that one thing, though.

to wrap it up, talking about Alpha.

I guess it was four years ago, kind of when the bloodline angle story was really starting to take off.

They had the moment where Roman was there and he was presented with the red, whatever they call it, necklace of shells or whatever it is.

The

Ula followed, but I just feel like I'm mispronouncing it even when I'm not.

So I just call it the red leg.

Well, they give him that Afa and Sikadu at the entranceway.

And I thought, that's a cool thing that they did that, that they got that moment.

You kind of think if they were healthier and, you know, they weren't young guys, but they would would have been somehow incorporated in everything happening but it's good that they were at the very beginning well yeah because that you know and i i'm sure that was a heyman touch i'm not saying that anybody disagreed with it but to have that

the the elders you know to to on video passing the blah blah blah that was a big symbolic

deal that people, you know, register on a subliminal basis.

It's, you know, I mean, some people see it as cool as it is, and others, just still, it's impressive rather than some

wrestling bullshit.

So that was very good.

And I always cite it as a match I love.

Now's a great time to go back and watch it for anyone who hasn't.

It was on the WWE network.

I believe it would still be on Peacock under the WWE old school stuff.

Madison Square Garden, October 1984, babyface offa versus Dick Murdoch.

It is so much fun.

You have to watch it.

So much fun.

Well, and you know, they knew each other from mid-south also.

So

I'm sure, you know, they went back in a number of different territories.

So I'm sure that was fun for both of them.

Yeah, remember, they were managed by Ernie Ladd, and then all of a sudden they were with Ackbar, and that's when Ernie Ladd said, nobody manages the Samoans but me.

And he goes to the raid and they turn on.

Yeah.

And Ernie, meanwhile, was dressed like fucking Richard Roundtree and Shaft goes to Africa.

And then here came the one-man gang

who had just been managed by me as Crusher Broomfield in fucking Tennessee making $350 a week and suddenly goes to Mid-South and becomes the one-man gang and splashed on a lad's leg and broke it.

Before we get to WWE Raw this past week, of course, they had an announcement on the show, but it had broken a few days earlier and we were recording, so we didn't get a chance to talk about it.

So, why don't we talk about the passing of Sid Yudi, aka Sid Vicious, Sid Justice, Psycho Sid with a very unique spelling, all to himself?

What do you think?

Obviously, someone you were around since almost the beginning of his career, and with the news of his passing, one of the clips people love sending around

is when he was revealed to be the partner of Ahmed Johnson and Shawn Michaels in split screen, and you had a little bit of a a meltdown.

Yes, and actually, that was the

you can, if you can imagine the state of the WWF at that point in time when

Sid was the more stable alternative to the Ultimate Warrior who had just gotten fired and was supposed to be in that spot, right?

And the thing, ever since this happened, I've been, because we've told so many stories about Sid on the show at various points over the years.

And

the problem is, in this instance, possibly some of those might not be in

good taste because

the biggest stories about Sid were

him

no-showing or holding somebody up or getting in heat with the office.

It was,

but then when you saw Twitter,

with the outpouring of the clips and the

people talking about him, the fans,

it was two different worlds.

If you had to work with him in a promotional or office, administrative, creative, booking,

production, you know, type of scenario,

it was fucking bloody murder.

But the fans loved him, and he got over pretty much instantly whenever he you know started appearing somewhere

because of the look and the the intensity and the athleticism.

So the fans loved him, but at the same time, all of the industry stories center around,

you know, the softball Sid thing.

And it said, so how do we

carry on with this today and discuss him?

Well, I think we can look at it from both perspectives.

You from the person who had to deal with him as a wrestling executive.

and as a coworker and me as someone who when i discovered the nwa one of the first guys i was a mark for was Sid Vicious.

He had the coolest entrance music.

If he wrestled, sometimes Spivey wouldn't get in the ring.

Yeah.

He had an aura.

I mean, I know it's such a corny word to use, but he had an aura around him that not too many other people did.

He also did things that heels didn't typically do in terms of almost asking the crowd to cheer.

You know, he would make those little hand movements and the crowd would go nuts for him because here's a guy six foot nine doing all these big power moves, killing everyone, and then turning to the crowd to celebrate yeah and he's built like a greek god

you know with that physique and at the same time he can do a nip up

and is because you know i'll give you an example i'm nine years old right and well right now or at one time maybe mentally but in 1989 and at the bash it's the skyscrapers against the dynamic dudes yes that's what i was going to bring up but go ahead and they're almost cool to a nine-year-old you know they've got surfboards and they're wearing neon you know like that's what's supposed to hit with a kid you would almost want to root for them how are you going to root for them against sid vicious yes and the baltimore fans i mean that was kind of the reaction a lot of wrestling fans had to sid

despite limitations in the ring and problems dealing with him that was the kind of reaction he always got And the thing is, they would boo Spivey.

When Spivey was in a red boo, they wanted to see Sid.

When Spivey got in red Sid, Sid, and and then he'd tag and they'd fucking blow.

And the dudes were goddamn burnt toast.

But that was the thing.

Remember, they had to edit the WWF.

You know your

New York history better than I do.

What was the pay-per-view?

Well, it was the Royal Rumble, but what year were

92.

Hulk eliminated.

No, Sid eliminated Hulk, and then Hulk held on to Sid and pulled him out, and they booed Hulk.

It's the year Ric Flair Flair won.

Maybe the greatest Rumble ever.

The last three are Flair, Sid, and Hogan.

And if you're a fan of WCW or the NWA, you know there's a little bit of a history with the two former Horsemen, but they don't really talk about that there.

But it's intriguing.

Sid eliminates Hogan, the fans cheer.

That was the big moment where finally it showed that people were kind of sick of Hogan's act because it had gotten really,

you know, corporatized.

It was just

at the very beginning, and, you know, he was kind of like a big, wild, steroid man.

And then all of a sudden, he was just, he was a bullshit artist to a lot of kids.

And Sid eliminates Hogan, the fans cheer, and then Hogan from the outside of the ring just grabs onto Sid and starts pulling at him, which is a total heel move if you want to.

Yeah, sore loser.

Yeah.

And then Flair, the true heel, gets behind Sid and dumps Sid out of the ring while Hogan's doing that.

And Sid's mad at Hogan.

By the time that aired on TV, they edited it so that the fans were cheering Hogan for some unknown reason.

Mad Orthodox, there was no reason to cheer him.

But, you know, that's again, he could make an impact like that.

And he's another guy that,

you know,

he hit at the right time, you know, with the explosion in television and et cetera

of that period.

And, you know, everybody had video.

His career really,

what was it, 13 years, 14 years between

his first matches in Memphis and the leg injury.

And I mean, he wrestled a few times after that, way after that.

But everybody thinks

he's always been, oh, Psycho Sid or Sid Vicious.

And there were so many breaks in between when he would just go home.

But yet they kept giving him chances and he would go in and get over,

but then he would do something to get himself under with the company and he'd be gone again.

And so that's why it was the,

you know, the difference between trying to work

with him in the ring where, you know, they're cheering the wrong people and or he,

you know, doesn't want to sell whatever

or he doesn't want to, you know, do this or that except when he did.

Or working with him as the promoter of the booker where you're trying to make plans and what the fuck, you know, when are they playing softball

but the fans every time that he would go out there and do his shit

they fucking loved it can you imagine how good he must have been at softball it's like aaron judge he's gigantic he would just be popping them all over the place i don't know what was i never saw him play softball but i heard about it all the time did lawler

um oh i'm sure that uh

Lawler's seen him play.

I don't know if he's played him or had him on his team or whatever, but I'm sure there had to be conversation between the king and Sid on softball.

But that was the thing in

WCW, I guess, in early 91,

Heard signed him to a new deal, had to have him.

And what Sid had asked for was, I think, $400,000 a year guaranteed, which what's that

from 1991 now,

you know, maybe a million in today's money.

But 400 grand a year, he wanted the world title and he went softball season off.

And they gave him the money and the world title.

They just didn't give him softball season off.

And I.

They didn't give him the world title.

I thought they did.

He didn't get it until years later.

Oh, that's right.

That's right.

Because he didn't make it

on that deal long enough, I don't think, to softball season.

Or was it, was that when he quit for softball season?

That's when he ends up going to sign with the WWF in 1991.

And the last match he has for WCW is a stretcher match against El Gigante.

Oh, where he didn't go out on the stretcher.

Yeah, he just walked out.

He didn't go out on the stretcher.

That was his goodbye to WCW, that match.

And that's, you know, that's one of those early examples.

And again, I'm not saying he was Tiger Mask or anything, but fans like me were into Sid because he had that aura and that personality that not too many other guys had.

He's one of the first examples of someone, although people look back on the Sid Justice run now

and they like it, I think it's one of the early examples of Vince not getting how to use someone right out of the gate who came over from WCW, actually.

Yeah.

Yeah, and I agree with you there.

And

Sid, how long did Sid Justice last?

The name, the whole...

Well, he started, he was there at SummerSlam, but I think maybe the month before.

So let's say July, June, July, 91.

And then he left.

He quit right when he was about to work the big program on him and the Ultimate Warrior, which would have been amazing.

Coming out of WrestleMania 8, let's say May of 92.

Oh, it just seems shorter.

But yeah, I mean, see, here we are.

We're talking, yeah, he did this and then he quit, or he did this, and he got hurt, and then he did this and he quit, and he left and went to the other place, but he didn't like.

And I've told the story before.

I apologize if everybody's memorized the entire catalog of the YouTube channel, but that time in San Antonio when they brought him back in 97,

when they fired, well, no, it was at 96 when they fired the warrior.

Whatever the case, it was the goddamn San Antonio, the Joe and Harry Freeman Coliseum, because I remember I was so hot that I was ill and almost threw up by the time I got back to the hotel room.

It was like 110 in San Antonio that day.

And

Vince had insisted he come.

He'd been off because he was injured.

And Vince had me call him.

And I called and got his wife because he was out.

He was playing softball.

Or

he took the softball team to

Osceola or somewhere in Arkansas.

And I said, Vince wants him.

You know, at raw Monday night, he doesn't have to wrestle.

He knows he's hurt, but he's got to make an interview appearance and do part of this deal, right?

Oh, he's not going to like that.

He hasn't had time to train lately.

He doesn't feel, well, I said,

he's not wrestling.

How bad could he look in a fucking month?

I'm thinking to myself.

We haven't seen him in a fucking month.

What could he have deteriorated to?

And

she said, you know,

Sid's often said that he...

He thought he might be happier if he went back to selling farm chemicals.

I don't know whether she's trying to just pour her heart out to me or negotiate with me on his behalf.

Like, you better give him more money.

He might go back to selling farm chemicals.

And I said,

I said, nevertheless, Vince wants in there.

He's sending a plane ticket.

Monday, San Antonio.

He's going to do this interview thing, right?

So he shows up.

And I can't even remember the particulars, but the four top baby faces, whoever they were at this point in time,

Michaels is whoever the fuck, they all come out on the stage

and confront the group of heels

in the ring.

And Sid is one of them.

And

he didn't take his shirt off.

He's dressed in street clothes.

He didn't take his shirt off because he felt like he hadn't tanned.

Like, Jesus Christ.

And then they were supposed to come back at the top of the hour, Seg 7, and that was when Raw was a two-hour show, and do some kind of run-in and whatever and pay the thing off.

And we started looking around for where's sid

and asked bruno you know harvie whippleman downtown bruno because they went back to the memphis days and that was his manager sid justice yes and and

we said where's sid

oh he he came up to me he said he he felt like he was having a heart attack i said well where'd you take him i took him back to the hotel What?

The holiday inn for a heart attack?

He said, he just wanted to go back to the hotel.

It was so hot.

Yeah, but what the fuck?

Oh, geez.

So he didn't make that segment.

And that's when,

oh, god damn it.

Was it him that Vince said, if I'm going to prorate your appearances, or was it Warrior?

Maybe it might have been both of them.

Both these things may be true.

But

I don't know.

He wasn't around long again after that.

You know, that's sad to hear that.

I didn't even put two and two together about him selling

farm chemicals because I guess one of the things things that they're attributing his passing to is the exposure to Roundup.

Oh, good.

Are you kidding?

No, I read that.

So I thought it was just from, you know,

again, I missed it.

Okay,

I had not read that.

So I wasn't trying to be flippant, as they say.

Yeah.

Wow.

Well,

who would have thought he got out of wrestling and it killed him?

You know, he's an underrated promo.

You may not like his style, but he was, and I don't know if he always made sense, but there was an intent, again.

No one had this intensity, he had certain intangibles that no one else had, and he made it work for him.

He, no, he was a perfect promo, except if he had to go too long or explain one of the guys,

there's a lot of guys like this.

If they have to go too long or explain too much detail, it robs them of their intensity because they get lost or they just get

hesitant, as I just was.

And that's why, if you have the little manager to fill in the details and do the fucking bridges amongst this monster having short, violent, verbal outbursts like he could do tremendous,

that's your key there.

But I

one time again on one of the promos, it didn't even matter, like you said, whether it made sense because it sounded so real

that he was saying it.

He actually, he did a promo and I can't remember what it was, but some way or another, he told the people in some twisted syntax that he was half as smart and

half as

big as his opponent or whatever.

In WCW, yeah, it caused Scott Hall to start laughing at him in the middle of the ring.

Yes.

But, you know, but again, it's fucking Sid and everybody thought he was goofy and out of his mind.

And because he party, he was goofy and out of his mind.

He He went from screaming to whispering better than anyone.

You know, he was able to,

you know,

and then he would all of a sudden become Jake Roberts and lean in and you would see his eyes.

And,

you know, it worked.

What was up with Vince's spelling of psycho?

I think it was something he wanted to try to trademark or just to, you know, have some alliteration there

with the SS, psycho Sid, not SS in terms of connotation of Germany, but just alliteration on his logo.

Let me tell you about my favorite Gestapo.

Well, now that may have come later, but

yeah, it was just the alliteration, and so they could trademark the

action figures and et cetera, et cetera.

But that partially came from

because that, you know, when I heard from Vince and Bruce, hey, I'm bringing Sid, I said, he's fucking, he's a psycho because the thing that had happened with Arne.

And Vince comes up, and you know, changes the spelling, whatever.

Oh,

he almost died, you say.

How could I use this?

Yes, how can I?

Yes.

So,

I'm surprised

they didn't license that music from fucking Bernard Herman.

Now that I'm thinking about his music, did his music have like a fake psycho sound at the beginning?

Yes, yes.

I never even thought about that before.

Wow.

Yes, that's the goddamn deal, but they should have just gone all the way with it.

Like I played the theme from Halloween for the Mongolian stomper.

Play the fucking shower music.

I liked Sid better in the mid-90s when he returned to the look without the mullet that he had when he first hit in 1989.

I didn't like him with long hair as much.

Well, and it made him look taller when he had shorter hair.

That's right.

I liked him with Shawn Michaels.

You know, everyone talks about Shawn Michaels and Diesel.

I thought he was really good at Shawn Michaels bodyguard.

Well, and again, that formula works when, you know, when both guys

do their thing, but that's why Vince McMahon was so sold on

Sid multiple times because he looked so good.

And Vince knew he could just

like Donald Pleasance in Halloween, if he could just reach him.

You know, but he found out that those eyes were soulless.

He couldn't keep him

under control

from blowing up, from having issues, whatever,

to fully monetize him.

And that's the thing they threw

from 1989 through

1990, what, eight

or nine with WCW.

A little bit after that, yeah.

A little bit or 2000, they threw money at him.

He would, he'd quit, leave, go home, get mutual split, whatever the fuck, all the incidents,

get fired for the thing with Arn.

And he'd sit at home for a while.

And then when the heat was off the other side, because there was something there,

they would get him.

And then some would happen again.

So

he could have been much bigger.

And for a longer period of time, because there were so many breaks in that period of time.

That's a sad transition right there.

What I was going to say is, you know, when he passed a couple of the matches that came to my mind were the dudes match and I posted the link to the Lee Scott match, which is just amazing to see because the crowd starts coming alive with each destruction of Lee Scott.

And the match with Sean at the garden for Survivor Series in 96, where the fans turned on Sean.

Yeah, Sid became the biggest babyface in the world that night.

Unfortunately, one of the memories a lot of people have, and I try not to think about it, to be honest with you.

It makes me sick, the image of it.

Sid Vicious breaking his leg in BCW.

What was your reaction when it happened?

What did you think when you heard or saw it?

Well, I wasn't watching live,

but heard about it and then saw the tape.

And that is just, but,

and he had said later on and ended up suing WCW because they said do this.

But at the same time,

why would you tell this guy to do that?

Because the one thing about Sid,

the entire massive body, he had kind of some

bird legs down below there.

But that was nothing that he had ever done.

It wasn't important.

As I remember, just coming off the second rope with a kick to a guy, how can that be an integral part of a finish?

So

I don't know if he ever won any money because could he prove that they

insisted he do that?

And he said, no, I can't do that kind of stuff.

Did he get a big settlement?

Was this reported?

I actually don't know.

I do know that most people who sued WCW ended up happy in the end, but I don't know.

Well,

WCW wasn't giving out happy endings.

When I worked for them, I might have stuck around.

They were giving out settlements.

You sue them.

They didn't want to.

I mean, how many people sued just because they knew they would get a settlement out of WCW?

No, I know, I know, but they certainly weren't giving out any happy endings.

No, no, no.

Well, you don't know what Jim Hurd and Jim Ross were doing late at night at the bar.

Hey, now, come on.

You don't, you weren't there.

Or the bourbon for Heard.

But anyway, but nevertheless, but yeah, and that injury, leg injury to Sid pretty much ended his full-time career, and he came back long after that to do just a, you know, few matches.

But

yeah, I didn't ever understand that deal from either side, why that they would insist.

And here's the thing, we couldn't get Sid to agree to come to work.

We were paying him a half million dollars a year.

Why would he agree to jump off the fucking ropes on one leg for somebody?

What the fuck was going on there?

Well, that was

our look at the life of Sid.

I can't even say it because of the way you ended that.

Well, no, but I mean, not even being disrespectful, but he picks them to agree to do something.

I don't know.

But again, a memorable character from the 1990s, one of the more memorable wrestlers of the decade in a lot of ways because he was in both companies on various occasions and had big runs at the top and often just disappeared or was fired or was sent home.

For, I mean, it was a variety of things.

Well, and he would go back to Memphis and work for Lawler

because he lived in West Memphis, Arkansas, and that's where he started.

Lord Humongus was

at first it was Mike Stark a long time ago in Memphis, and then Jeff Van Camp.

He broke in here.

He played football for the University of Louisville.

And then,

you know, when they wanted to bring the gimmick back, they put it on Sid, and he was the most impressive looking of the bunch.

And then when the people found out it was him, point is whenever he would,

he would be gone from WCW or WWF, but he'd show up in Memphis.

And those people would say this international star for the next three weeks.

And then he'd go somewhere else.

Do you think it was worth maybe looking into

like having like a tour?

Not the Lex Express, but like Sid

going town by town.

Whatever town he's going to wrestle in, he takes on your softball team during the day.

If you know you have this guy that can hit bombs, put him in there against every schlub in town to promote the wrestling event.

Yeah, but you know, it might have ended up like.

George Gulis, when he had the wrestlers form the basketball team so he could be the captain and they would go and play the local high school team in the school that they were having the matches in that night.

They'd have a ball game and they'd set up the ring during intermission, and then they'd have the wrestling.

But one night in Rabbit Ridge, Kentucky, the fucking high school team beat the wrestlers, and George got so mad he canceled the matches.

What?

Are you serious?

I never heard that before.

Bobby Eaton told me that one.

Get the fuck out of here.

That's amazing.

Yeah, he said they cheated.

There's some referee call or whatever that he felt they had been wrong.

No, we're not, no, take the ring back.

We're not doing it.

Daddy, they cheated.

That's nuts.

I never heard that story before.

But there you go.

But Sid.

That was it, the life of Sid?

All right.

Well, before we talk about the invasion of Germany, we have to mention that I just heard this, gosh, this morning on the internet.

Sonny King passed away, 79 years old.

And we'll talk about that in a second.

That surprises me.

But

is this, again, is this part of a curse with our show?

Every time we tell a story about somebody, something bad happens to them.

Well, again, this is a little different.

I forget what even brought it up recently.

We talked about it was talking about Buddy Landell and Mid South.

And then, you know, it naturally went into the problems that they had.

And that was the tail end of his career.

And that's important to note because.

No, that was the end of his career.

84 was his last year.

Yeah, I think that may have been the last place he worked, actually.

And that's why I was saying, because that's 40 years ago.

That means he was 39 years old.

Sonny King.

39.

Wow.

Exactly.

He never changed appearance.

And he had such an intimidating look and demeanor to him when he wanted to, that you.

You didn't really have an age for him, but his career was over as in part with what we'll talk about, the attack that he suffered in North Carolina.

But he was only 39 years old and he was done.

But he

had had a lengthy career before that and was on top in all kinds of places.

It was 1971 that he and Jay Strongbow were the WWWF tag team champions, right?

That's right.

And he worked on top in the Carolinas in the early 70s.

What were you going to say?

I was just going to say, and you never think of him as a Northeast wrestler.

And there he is.

Well, and I'm not sure, truthfully and honestly, how he broke in, who trained him, what his early career was like.

But that was

the first time that people in the magazines or people reading the magazines, you know, would have heard of Sonny King.

But then, as I said,

he worked in the Carolinas on top.

He main evented with Johnny Valentine when Valentine came into territory.

He was big in

the Louisiana part of

Leroy McGurk's territory before it became mid-South.

And he was in and out of

Memphis territory because he got to be,

Jerry Jarrett thought the world of him and they got to be good friends.

And he was, I guess,

from 1978 until

1982, it would have been his last run here, only four years, but he was here a lot of that period of of time, both as

a heel wrestler and a heel kind of wrestler manager for Joe Leduc and Jean-Louis,

who was the hangman, Neil Guay.

That's always my favorite name.

Jean-Louis.

Well, no, specifically Lance Russell, like Joe Leduc and Jean-Louis.

It's just that.

Yeah, and

they spelled it because At first they were spelling it like L-O-U-I-S, like you would in French, right?

But then all the fans were reading it in the newspaper ad and started calling him John Lewis.

So then

they started spelling it John Louie, L-O-U-I-E, like Huey, Dewey, and Louie.

And here's this giant 325-pound bearded guy.

Well, there's John Louie.

So it just, but that was French to the fans in Tennessee, you know.

But anyway, he was a manager for them.

And then he came back

a while later as a babyface, and he worked a lot as partners with Ricky Morton.

Ricky Morton loved him because,

you know, we've talked about especially the last couple of years of Sonny's career and

how, you know, physically and in the ring, he was difficult to work with, not attitude-wise, but just his style was very unorthodox.

And he had lost a few steps by that point.

But he was a very guy and he'd been in the business and worked on top in a variety of places.

So he taught Ricky a lot about

psychology and how things worked in other territory, things like that.

And

the reason why

Jarrett wanted them as partners was because he had high hopes for Ricky Morton and he wanted him to be able to learn.

So he would team him up with guys like Sonny King and then Tojo had a part play early in Ricky's career and then

Ken Lucas because the veteran could teach.

But anyway, Ricky loves Sonny.

Wasn't it that angle when Ricky was teaming with Big Red?

Because I always felt so bad for Big Red.

It was such a sympathetic thing where they just like knock him to the ground and just tie him so he can't get up.

Yeah.

And then just beat the crap out of Ricky Morning with Sonny King and Tojo?

Yes, yes.

And Big Red was all if

he was down without being tied up, he was almost immobile right so he couldn't get up when he was tied like a with a shoestring or whatever

but that was I spent the day with Sonny and Ricky in Memphis one time after TV

just taking pictures I had great pictures them with the the bridge over the river and behind them and on Beale Street and all kind of shit that we just did for the the magazine But that was the thing.

Sonny, as I said, he worked on top most of the places he went for the first 10 years of his career.

And

in the 70s, he was a better athlete.

But I think, honestly, it was, he had a boxing background too, so he would incorporate that.

But

it was just a very unorthodox style that he had.

And I think his literate low-key promo

and just his demeanor and look, and he looked looked like Isaac fucking Hayes,

and that didn't hurt in the 70s.

I think that's what got him over in a lot of places.

And he was, what, six foot three and 250

and, you know, in shape at a time when that

was not as commonplace as it is today.

When you see him in Mid-South in 84, if you had told me he was 45 years old, I would have said, okay, I believe that easily.

Yeah, because of hand, and how he'd been in, like I said, in 1971, he's already in the magazines, WWWF champion.

So 13 years later, and

he always looked like a grown adult.

And he shaved in 84, so he looked like somehow that made him look older than when he had.

Yeah.

And we're not talking about a shaved head.

He was always bald, but the beard,

he had a beard for a while.

And like you said, it made him look older when he shaved his beard off.

But anyway, I guess the thing we talked about the incident or mentioned a minute ago,

and we've talked about this before, you tried to find the promo on YouTube.

And of course, of all things, it's not there.

But the best promo that Sonny ever did came off, again, of a real life thing.

And this is pretty much what finished his career and him being that young, because when he tried to come back, it wasn't the same.

As I said, Sonny had worked in.

North Carolina and he was visiting there.

I'm trying to remember.

I think he, was he working here or had he

just gone somewhere else?

He spent some time in Florida too, but that was earlier in the 70s.

He definitely wasn't working there in Mid-Atlantic when it happened.

Well, no, but I'm saying, was he working here?

I'm trying to think.

But the point is, he had gone to the Carolinas to visit just on a vacation or for some reason.

And there was a show in Charlotte.

at the old Coliseum and he went to visit some of the boys, right?

And I've talked about how that, you know, especially a big crowd or whatever,

the back door of the Coliseum, the guys had to go right to the side parking lot and get in their car.

And if the fans were out there, you

needed cops, whatever, and they would come to the back door also, the fans try to get in.

And so there was one,

you know, I can picture the classic old security guard at the Charlotte Coliseum, but there was one guard at one of the back doors, and some drunk guys were trying to push their way in and get in free and he was trying to hold them back.

And Sonny's just standing back there watching the fucking matches and sees this and goes to help the guard.

And one of these guys ends up having a knife and stabbing him.

I don't know how many fucking times, but one of them actually pierced his heart, right?

So obviously this became a big news story amongst in the wrestling business.

And I don't know.

I can't even remember the date of that.

I don't know how long he was out, but it was months and months and months.

And,

you know,

that's kind of, you know, fan interaction you had in the Carolinas back in those days.

But anyway, finally,

the best angle they ever did, as I said, Sonny was good friends with Jerry Jarrett, and Jerry brought him back

as a babyface.

And this was

probably spring 82-ish.

Am I close?

I think that's about right, yeah.

And

basically, had Sonny come out and do an interview and tell the story

of how that he got stabbed and it punctured his heart.

And

this sounds like a Meltzer-Shapupe deal, but this was the truth, and it actually can happen.

They did open heart surgery on him, and

the scar was like, Jesus Christ, it was all the way down his chest and stomach.

And they actually, the doctor held his heart in his hand and massaged it as they were repairing and doing whatever the fuck they needed to do.

And he tells this whole story in that

accent he's got.

He was from Louisiana.

And he had kind of

that accent and also that.

that matter-of-fact voice.

And then he said the reason why that he was coming back to wrestling was for his son, Larry.

Because he did have a son named Larry, and he would be a nice kid.

He'd probably be 45 years old now or whatever.

But he used to bring him to the matches sometime.

And Sonny's license plate back when nobody had a vanity plate back in those days was Larry.

And he did this promo about how he wanted his son to see him wrestle again and blah, blah, blah.

So he's coming back and he's doing this for Larry.

And

that registered, right?

And I mean, it didn't sell out to Mid-South Coliseum,

but

it was the best,

one of the best usages of a real life tragedy that wasn't in bad taste that I've ever seen in wrestling.

And, you know, but

the problem is at that point, just, I don't know how else it might have affected him, but

his in-ring was,

it just, it wasn't there anymore.

And then the

reason why he got spot in Louisiana

was not only because Dog had left and they were trying, they tried everybody else, right, as we've talked about,

but Sonny was from Louisiana, I'm pretty sure he was living there at the time, and Dundee was booking, and Dundee knew him from Memphis and thought, well, let's try and see if,

you know, if Sonny can do anything anymore.

And

it didn't work.

But yeah, it's amazing that he was only 39 years old at that time.

Well, there it is, Sonny King.

And

again, shocking about how young he was.

You say that about someone who dies in their 70s, but still, you would have thought he was a lot older.

Oh, yeah, because it was, so he was on top in Madison Square Garden in 1971, 72.

That's 52.

He would have been 26, 27.

So that is, you know,

amazing and something you don't think about.

And because of that incident, his career ended right about the time

of home video really exploding.

And then 1984 comes and boom, boom, boom.

And,

you know, by that time, he's, he's done.

The other thing is everyone looks younger now.

Everyone dresses younger.

You know, it used to be like you grew up and then you started dressing like an adult.

And like the rock stars got to wear whatever they want.

Well, but what about people's faces?

I mean, they weren't back in those days, people weren't taking a stick to other people's faces.

Just here, ugly you up, boom, boom, boom.

And they looked more mature and older and

you know, more stentorian-looking type of

visages.

I'm using large words and phrases, but now everybody looks like they're fucking 12.

You have a brain surgeon looks like a goddamn Boy Scout.

The fuck.

my new doctor is a little too energetic i think for his own good

why do you say that well he just he's always happy

i don't i don't want happy die i want serious doctors

anyway but and whatever happened to sunny we we send our condolences out i guess we should wrap that up jim any thoughts on the passing of kuniaki kobayashi

Yeah, I'm surprised to hear it.

I have no idea that this happened.

When did this happen?

It happened this past week.

Well, nobody told me.

I didn't get a heads up on it.

You know what?

He was a fucking badass in his day, wasn't he?

You know what?

He looked more like Bruce Lee than anyone else.

So when I first started getting Japanese tapes, I was a big mark for him.

The hair.

Where did he...

Where did he fall in terms of in-between what rivalry of Tiger Mass?

What year would I have seen him?

Was that 82-ish?

82, 83 because i think he was after

he was after dynamite he was he was i think he may have been really the last great tiger mass feud before sayama quit new japan and started uwf with maida and uh shima and they called him kid kobe did they not oh i don't know i i've i've seen some

or i saw some magazines of the time period with you know with the fucking karate stuff and everything it was kind of it was very cool as you mentioned yeah i always like those matches just as, I mean, the dynamite matches are incredible and they are the historic ones, but as far as actual matches go, like if you want to rate PAC versus Osprey ahead of like Osprey versus whoever he's been feuding with for two years, the matches may have been better.

Kobayashi and Tiger Mask.

Oh, yeah.

Well, because

they were doing

some of these things.

But they had still been trained by people that had the contest came first.

They didn't lose the thread of the contest.

And the aggression and the emotion was there.

And even though Japanese wrestling logic has always been different,

you didn't get the idea that it just here, let's stand here and let each other hit each other or let's cooperate in this extended series.

of gymnastic stalemates that go nowhere and then shake hands.

It was

quicker movement, if that's possible, and more,

it looked more impromptu, more,

you know, like some

legitimate escapes when a guy cartwheeled out of something and landed on his feet.

You were like, oh, shit, he almost got him with that one instead of, oh, that was pretty.

Like the people imitating

Billy Robinson and Tony Charles only not being

salty old fucking

middle-aged 40-year-old fuckers that really knew how to shoot, but guys doing homages.

Some of the video game wrestlers look like an homage to the type of things that they were doing in the early 80s,

you know, junior heavyweight, light heavyweight division in New Japan.

I prefer that to the guys copying Eddie Guerrero and Dean Malenko.

Endlessly.

Endlessly.

Well, Kuniaki Kobayashi, there it is.

Check out his stuff if you have never seen him.

Kuniyaki Kobayashi versus Tiger Mask and his red trunks.

Check it out.

That would have to be on YouTube, right?

That would still, because I mean, we just, because you and I have the mammoth tape collections and or, you know, we've been watching this shit for so long, we just assume, well, yeah, you know, pop one of those VHSs in

the machine and check him out.

Can they get it on the YouTube?

It's definitely on New Japan World, obviously, but I think there has to be some stuff on YouTube or Daily Motion.

So Kuniyaki Kobayashi.

But let's start with a serious topic.

And obviously, it's one that when the news broke, a lot of the listeners started reaching out, wanting to hear what you had to say, because it's a name a lot of people first heard from you in a lot of ways.

Joe Koff,

former head of Ring of Honor.

He had been a vice president and then, I believe, a senior vice president for Sinclair Broadcasting, just passed away.

And obviously, you worked with him and you knew him.

Well, and

he had cancer.

That's

been mentioned.

And

it had been known

by myself and certain people for a little while now, but he hadn't made a public issue out of it.

And I guess it was probably about

six weeks ago that he decided to stop treatments because he wanted to,

they were not going to be successful and it was diminishing his quality of life to where he couldn't spend time with his family and his grandchildren.

You know, I think I was thinking about it in my mind.

I think besides Delirious, Hunter Johnston,

Joe Koff is the only person I didn't yell at the whole time that I was there with that

Ring of Honor period from 2009 to 12.

He was a,

every one of the wrestling fans, if you're an AEW fan, especially,

but every wrestling fan should be grateful to him, if for nothing else, then he kept Ring of Honor alive a couple of different times.

First, in,

you know, when they bought it originally from Carrie Silken.

And then

secondly, when

he made the decision to sell it to Tony Khan rather than just sell the tape library to the WWE, they wouldn't have picked up anybody's contracts or hired probably, you know, a good portion of the talent or whatever.

But he

was a tremendous,

and I don't want to say this the wrong way, he was a tremendous fan of wrestling, not that he was a mark or that he was trying to throw money around or whatever, but he was a tremendous supporter of wrestling.

And he appreciated the wrestling business and he always had.

And he

didn't go crazy, wanted to be involved in it just to be a mark.

He was involved in, as we mentioned long long ago, the Florida office, the Battle of the Belt specials they did syndicating those.

And

it was to the point where Eddie Graham wanted,

or

Eddie may have been dead, but whoever was running the office.

Yeah, Eddie was dead already.

Yeah, they wanted him to continue working for the company and trying to get him TV deals.

And he just, well, I, you know,

he was more established in the career trajectory he was already taking.

But

so he provided a service for a lot of the guys in the business in that they had a place to

grow and

progress and flourish or whatever.

And at the same time,

he did everything he could.

And when I've talked about all the chaos and the misery that whole period cost me,

it was never Joe's fault.

He's the one that got him to buy it, but even he

couldn't get him to spend any amount of money.

And, you know, part of that, they had the overall Sinclair broadcasting, the bigger vision

of buying up all these television stations.

And,

well, Brian, you know of, you know more about the business world, but Sinclair Broadcasting had like at one point a number of years ago, last time I checked,

hundreds of millions of dollars, if not a billion dollar in dollars in debt, right?

They had taken on an incredible amount of debt trying to put together these regional sports networks and buying up all these television stations.

And it fell apart.

It's not something that's very easy in this market, in this day and age, to do.

If they had tried it 20 years earlier, it would have been a different story.

But Sinclair, you know, in an era where less people than ever before watch network TV or local TV, they still own TV stations all over the place.

Well, and when we started, and again, let me go back and start at the beginning.

It basically started with

when Kerry Silken

called me after

TNA had decided to let me go.

Yeah, with after the whole Jeff thing and Dutch was gone and they found, and then,

you know, Russo had his way for a month till Hogan came in, whatever, that whole bunch of chaos.

Kerry had talked to me about coming in and what can you do for it.

You know, he was losing money and

he

loved the thing also.

He loved Ring of Honor and Wrestling and wanted to keep it going.

And I was pissed off, you know, at these other yahoos who were wasting all these opportunities.

And I said, Carrie, I'll find you something.

I'll figure out a way to get you on television or a sponsor or

help some way, talent, whatever.

And you know that because we had some conversations in New York.

But one of the people that I talked to was Gary Juster, who I'd known from the 80s and Crockett and etc.

And he came to one of the shows and he said, this is an amazing live atmosphere.

I said, how do we get it on television?

He said, I know a guy that works for Sinclair Broadcasting in Baltimore because Gary had lived in Baltimore for

years before he moved down to Atlanta and had run the Baltimore Civic Center and and bought time from Joe Koff that many years ago.

So we went, and that's where the talk started with Joe Koff.

The idea

originally was just to get on those television stations.

And the reason why I talked earlier about how many stations they ended up buying at this time,

I think they owned like,

was it 55 or 50 something television stations?

And they would get to where it was, what?

What did they get up to?

Like 130 or 40-something?

Am I exaggerating that?

I don't think you're exaggerating.

I don't remember the exact number, but I remember being over 100.

So the idea was that, you know, as they got on more stations, we didn't know they were going to get on that many.

It would increase the coverage of Ring of Honor.

And Joe got so interested and started talking.

And they ended up buying the company outright from Carrie.

But the problem was,

as we mentioned, they they didn't want to spend a lot of money past that.

It took a number of years

for them to start spending any money on the thing.

And,

you know, that was my issue.

You don't get a second chance to make a first impression sometimes.

But also,

you know, that was the thing is that

the corporate world always has a problem mixing with wrestling.

We've seen that.

And Joe was probably the greatest guy

that has ever been the conduit between

the corporate world and the wrestling people.

He was gentlemanly and nice and articulate and smart,

and he tried to do the best he could, but,

you know, that's that's sometimes those worlds just don't mix.

So Joe.

I never had an issue with.

And,

you know, he did the best he could in those early years while I was around.

And he always did the best he could.

But that's, you know,

his

primary position in Sinclair had been that he was the guy who trained.

And I don't know whether he oversaw him on an ongoing basis, but the different local sales departments at all the stations.

He trained them.

He had regular two-week seminars where they would bring all these people together and he'd teach them how to sell television and sponsorships and value-added packages and et cetera.

And that was another

part of the

idea for Ring of Honor originally

was not to just suddenly make tens of millions of dollars with live events, but be a value-added thing for the local television stations.

And that's what he was so good at because he had trained a lot of people in the sales departments.

He regularly talked to all the, you know, local sales managers and everything in all these stations.

So that was,

again,

that was part of the original plan.

I knew we found out later on, Sinclair wasn't going to give us the credit, Ring of Honor credit for the sponsorship money that the local television station took in in conjunction with our live events.

We've gone over that many times in Ring of Honor talks.

This is not the spot for it here, but that,

you know, Joe sent me off

to a number of stations to talk to the sales departments about how specifically to sell wrestling.

And I enjoyed doing that because you could get them excited and go out and motivated.

And boom, boom, boom, it made the program more

profitable and more important for the local station if they were getting revenue off of it.

But anyway, you know, he just

a nice guy.

And,

you know, I think, like I said, not only were he and Hunter the only two guys I don't think I ever yelled at, but

when I cracked up and I had all I can stands, I can't stands no more moment with the whole thing,

the only two people I felt like I were letting down, or I was letting down, poor grammar, were Hunter and Joe.

You know, I felt bad because Joe had done all he could and got him to buy the thing and was trying his best he could.

And Hunter was there left with,

you know, a lot of stress on his hands.

But so I hated to hear this news.

You know, another thing about Joe Koff, Jim, is that he is one of the people responsible for all in.

And

I don't think he ever felt that he and Ring of Honor got the credit they deserved because everyone pretended like it was just the Bucks and Cody doing a show, not that it was a Ring of Honor production produced by Cody and the Bucks.

Well, besides that, they were all under contract to him, so they could, he had to let them do the thing to begin with.

And then, yes, they used their office infrastructure and,

you know, the ticket master things, all the details of running a show and

their production

equipment and/or department, and et cetera.

It was just, it was produced by the talent, but the whole thing basically was pulled off by the Ring of Honor infrastructure.

Who got no credit for it, really?

When you think about it, I mean, right there,

who then had a billionaire come along and sign up all of the guys after they, you know, hey, thanks.

It's a nice audition tape you made for me.

I think a lot of people that were involved with Ring of Honor behind the scenes for those couple years there have a good deal of resentment and for good reason with some of the people involved with all in who went to AEW because it was basically they gutted Ring of Honor.

Well, yeah, they basically held the company hostage because they

ring of honor was still small enough to where when they brought their, at the time,

what, you know, audience of a few hundred thousand indie fanatics.

to a company that size, it made an instant difference.

And then they held the company hostage to do all of their cartoonishness

and build it around them.

And then they bailed as soon as they helped them make an audition tape for the billionaire that was going to spend a fucking fortune.

But otherwise than that, it was great.

Yeah, there are a few people

who stayed behind who were like, what the fuck?

But yeah, Joe Koch deserves a lot of credit for all in.

And of course, Ring of Honor does, but he was the person in charge.

But anyway,

you know,

that's why they owned the actual footage until Tony Khan bought Ring of Honor and Cody said, what the fuck?

But anyway,

you know, I hate to hear this news.

It's bad news.

And Joe Koff has a couple of different places in wrestling history, which

I think overall, I think he'd be proud to be included in.

Well, there it is.

Jim's look at those we lost in 2024.

Wrestling history, great stories, so much more.

Jim, any final words as we wrap up this omnibus?

Yes, I was joking around at the top of the program.

I'm not wishing demise on anyone.

However,

there are a few people that if they will have the courtesy to cooperate, I will enjoy discussing on next year's omnibus.

So we got that to look forward to.

Well, there you go.

You have something to look forward to in 2025.

Listen to the show.

Find out if there are any pleasurable deaths that we'll be talking about on the next omnibus.

And of course, the drive-through any experience available wherever you find your favorite podcast and on the YouTube channel.

But until next time, for Jim Cornette, I'm the great Brian Last, Tally Ho.