Q. Does there need to be more competition in the business and do you think TNA is the answer or does someone else need to come along and step-up?R. TNA/Impact has EVERYTHING they need to compete with and blow WWE out the water, everything but the one thing lacking that screwed WCW-MANAGEMENT!
Q. Does it take an addictive personality to be a pro wrestler or what type of mental attitude do you need to make it in the business?
R. You HAVE TO BE persistent without being a complete pain in the ass. You NEVER know what powers that be are watching you at the darkest hour. You just have to be driven and passionate NO MATTER WHAT. I went for an announcing spot in the WWE in 2003 - 2006. Tom Pritchard and Lawler BOTH told me to keep being the way I was and that I was going about it perfectly. One day I got the call to OVW and then to the Deep South and by the time the Florida developmental started up it dawned on me than one of those two CLEARLY went to bat for me.
Q. What kind of pre-match ritual do you have before you go through the curtain?
R. Get this! STRETCHING (big time!), coffee, energy drink, diet Pepsi and water. It used to be marijuana but I've cut back on that, it also used to be a cigarette but I quit smoking so now it is simply toking on my e-cigarette. Yes, seriously, ALL of that stuff. I just love it!
Q. Do you find yourself giving 100% no matter if there are 25 people in the crowd or 2500?
R. Every single time. I do it until I get blown up; I challenge myself and TRY to blow up now every time I go out there. It's STILL fun...
Q. Do you ever practice cutting a promo in front of a mirror?
R. All the time, especially in the shower because I'm already spiking my hair into a Mohawk (laughs).
Q. How do you define yourself as a pro wrestler?
R. Hybrid style, mostly chain. Jack (ass) of all trades and master of truly none. I'm not the same guy the dirtsheets (because there was no Internet to praise the underground indie worker) in '93 and '94 praised. I swear, back then it seemed like everybody wanted a piece of my shit, then I went to Memphis and learned I didn't have a clue and the flippy flops don't draw ANYTHING. It took a while for me to get that clue and I learned eventually. At first I just figured everyone was jealous because I did all this stuff that none of them did. Oh wow! I was so great because I hit a moonsault (laughs)! Holy balls was I beyond clueless (laughs).
Q. What is the weirdest thing you have had happen while in the ring?
R. Me and Brickhouse Brown dropped acid before wrestling each other one night in Dyer, Tn. I walked out there and all the fans looked like dwarfs. I was tripping like crazy. Sorry but my early 20’s were LOADED up with experimenting with some wicked stuff.
Q. Fans either love you or hate you, what has been your worst experience with a fan?
R. Follow the angle, Mike Samples who had a problem with Sean Venom who did a snake handler gimmick. His partner was Flash Flanagan. So, Samples goes out and gets The Wolverine, a Wolfman complete with rubber mask and claws and Lawler gives me the whole gimmick except the clothes. I asked Jerry how this Wolfman-guy is supposed to dress. He goes, "Grungy, you know, kind of like the shit you usually wear ha ha!" So I tore up an old shirt and pair of sweatpants, did the gimmick on a Wednesday in Memphis (we moved from the Mid-South Coliseum by that point). I'm on my way back from the ring, did the job, jumping for joy inside because I thought the match was pretty good (and it really was). I'm jumping up on the guardrails, shaking them up and down and going nuts, howling, acting crazy, well, some wiseass fan rolled up their programs that night and stabbed me right in the eye. The only thing I was fortunate about was that I was near the entrance, I stumbled through the curtains and man, I could already feel my eye swelling shut. The next day the light was shining down on me through my window. I've NEVER felt burning like that...
Q. If you could go back to any era and wrestle for one night, where would you go and who would you step into the ring with?
R. Good Lord you have too MANY good questions, Ok, I'd say since they haven't had a State Athletic Commission since the '40's-I'd HAVE been the special guess ref the night Lawler beat Hennig for the AWA belt. Yep, at just 13 years of age-how wicked would THAT have been?
Q. What move do you think is overused and just does not get over now, like the carotid clutch in the 70s?
R. A punch, nobody knows how to get people to sell it or timing after throwing one. My 5 year-old nephew can hit with a half-dozen and your forehead would look like a sack of doorknobs yet we are grown men and well...Do I really need to elaborate?
Q. How would you describe your time in the USWA?
R. The greatest 3 years of my life. If I ever Groundhog Day'd (you know the movie?) 3 years over and over again and again, THAT is my utopia FOREVER...
Q. What is your fondest memory of working the Memphis territory?
R. Waking up every single day with the reality that WRESTLING, 7 days a week, was MY JOB. EVERY SINGLE DAY. Money left over to put in the bank. Every single day was my FAVORITE memory. Full-time, never a day off (well only if you didn't do Tony Falk's Paducah, Kentucky town on Sundays and also once we lost Evansville in '95 and they switched around on Monday nights), you know THAT was the best I ever had it in wrestling but I was way to young to even notice (20 - 22/23 years old). Today's guys have NO CLUE what they missed. It will NEVER be done again like that. EVER! I feel so bad for today's guys. It is all hit or miss, feast or fathom, ying or yang. I was a job-guy and was hauling Jerry's ring once Buddy Wayne parted ways with them and once Bruno (Wippleman) left this time to be a ref and seen as a young job guy who hauled the ring, they made SURE I was making enough to NOT work a regular job and be seen as a "normal" guy. It kind of defeated the purpose of the term "job guy" if you know where its origins are from (laughs)!
Q. What did Mike Samples bring to the territory?
R. Mike had a lot of unique ideas that were really out there. I've had so many ups and downs with the guy but Burton himself told the boys to write down their ideas for what could change the territory and his ideas were better than what anyone had at the time (I had QUIT, I couldn't take it any more).
Q. Everyone hates Larry Burton for what he did to the territory, why do you think Jerry Lawler got into bed with him to start with?
R. They filmed the WrestleMania thing with Goldust and Piper outside of "his studio" and he befriended Matt Borne before that. Lawler knew the guy would turn him a quick buck and could con some marks (The Selkers of XL Sports out of Cleveland is who they found) out of money. Lawler didn't bank on these people doing their homework and them tracking down Burton's criminal past. The guy falsified his own death-lol! I STILL reminisce with Viscera about The Burton Files all the time. He really did die recently according to Jerry and I knew as of a few years ago (2009) Lawler was STILL going to court over that whole mess. It was kind of comical when Burton made all the people who snuck down from the bleachers before the matches started to go back to the seat they paid for. He STRICTLY enforced it. When my buddy John (who was my Eddie Gilbert equivalent of John Gilham) left to get a jack for the trailer and Larry didn't let HIM back in the studio, well, that was all I could take. EVERYONE quit because he dropped me back to $100 a night and I couldn't afford to pay anyone to help with the ring. Not even Chile, who was a good friend of Downtown Bruno and Bruno and I clashed HUGE over that. BRUNO even quit the territory but came back because one of his best friends, Doink the Lombardi was headed in-lol! Where was I, oh yeah, so Jerry pulled a trick the Welch (Fuller) family did for YEARS, years ago in the eastern part of the Tennessee territory. He dumped the place onto some marks laps and was going to buy it back for way cheaper. Only one thing, the territory was down and out for the count and they knew they had been had. Believe it or not, to this day I STILL laugh at the Burton stories and I talked to him a couple of years ago (2009) and he STILL remembered my first wife Crystal(!). The best was him and Dave Brown arguing when he called Dave an "asshole" and Dave, who I never heard curse like this, goes, "Asshole?!?! You're the asshole, asshole!!!" It is still WAY too funny thinking back...
Q. Tell me something not many people already know about Larry Burton
R. I went to ONE court hearing over that bunch of shit (sorry), you know the court case of the XL Sports vs. Larry and Lawler and Co. I STILL have the whole book itself of the lawsuit scanned into my C drive. The guy was Tony Frisco, Larry Bergman, Lawrence Burton, and my LORD his names never seemed to end. Watching him get Starbucks flown in from California every day (when I went to his upscale apartment on Park Ave. in east Memphis) was pretty strange. He had this high-pitched voice that would drive you CRAZY. Once in the midst of them selling the place he went nuts and told me to come over RIGHT AWAY. When I got there he was screaming back and forth and thought Lawler was taking Bruno's side over some kind of fight. Anyway, they worked it all out and he felt bad and bought me a full tank of gas for my truck.
Q. Of all the people and feuds to pass through, who do you think made the biggest impact?
R. The Smokey Mountain vs. USWA was ON FIRE! Going back and forth to the territories was cool and I even got to work a few SMW houses shows and one taping. I remember doing Memphis tapings and riding back with Jamie and Wolfie after going to both tapings with Tracy Smothers, 800 miles round trip and Tracy paid for all the gas. Tracy noted that only the job guys got paid for TV so imagine he made not one penny until the house shows. Any who, that feud, MAN, it took us from the week norm of 1,000 people to over 4,000 paid over one summer. Watching all the WWF talent come through and pop the gates from time to time was incredible and I got to befriend ALOT of the talent. It broke the ice for when Bruno (Wippleman) would take us Memphis job-boys to the WWF and some of them had squash matches against local Memphis guys for the big card when they were in Memphis on Monday nights. It was really neat getting to work with The BodyDonnas, Godwins, Ahmed Johnson, Tatanka, Undertaker and so many others come to the studio. Also the guys getting rehabbed came through, guys like Sid, Jeff Jarrett and too many others, I was just a kid and got to work the biggest names in the entire industry PLUS the office of WWF knew who I was, ME, this nobody kid from New Jersey. It told me something when Bruce Pritchard and Sgt. Slaughter told Bruno that they wanted ME at the next WWF tapings in Nashville. It was blowing my mind. Kind in mind please that this was the original WWF developmental territory. They knew who I was because they say ME working with all the developmental talent every week when they got the Memphis tapes.
Q. How does someone with a degree in journalism suddenly become a hardcore wrestler?
R. I was running two different nightclubs in Memphis on a weekly basis. One was a Gothic nightclub and the other was an alternative '80's club. I managed to get booked in Onita Pro in 1999 through Mike Samples when Big Japan fell through for my and got to do some deathmatches overseas. THIS was a crowning achievement since my idol since the early 1990's Atsushi Onita came through Memphis as well. I was his hugest mark and to this day LOVE the guy. Well, the DVDs resurfaced one the screen in the club where we would air all kinds of bizarre movies and DVDs on the large screen. I couldn't help put myself over, it is club life. I ALWAYS have people ask about all the scars and to play tough guy bouncer I barely ever wore sleeves on shirts under my suit and would show them off in the club because as you know, EVERYONE is famous in a nightclub. Well, it didn't take long before one of the girls (Briana Cambel-my "sister") who did the cable access TAJJ when she was a teenager (this was when Tv-5 got rid of wrestling for good and the Memphis promotion was in between going to Channel 30), well, she comes to me and has an idea for the guys to do deathmatches and the girls to do oil, Jell-O, ice cream and whatever-the-hell-else the chicks can wrestle in. We put all the details together and my own promotion Sex and Violence was born. I needed a main guy to feud with that was good at the hardcore/Deathmatch stuff so I brought in my buddy Pondo I knew from my IWA-Ms days and there you have it. I was just trying to be something like my hero/idol Onita but because we had such a limited roster, testing was cheap and I wrestled under a billion different weird gimmicks for the over 3 years the place stayed afloat. We also brought in EVERYONE from CZW, I love those guys. They are some of the nicest people out there. Really, all it is was me trying to be the Onita of my own little world. It was me combatting HUGE depression from being away from my whole family in New Jersey for over a decade. It was right after I was told that WWE didn't need me pursuing my announcing any more just 2 days before Christmas and it was my own way of self-destruction. I mean, YOU take off your regular job twice a year if you are lucky just so both your daughters can see their cousins, grandparents and aunts, uncles, the whole family. Yes, I was fighting off a major homesick depression and felt there was no reason to be geographically located in Memphis but I was tied down with a second divorce and a few houses I financed that I wasn't about to let go of. My best friend, CHRIST! I watched him go from a millionaire to a full-blown Crystal Meth addict over a seven year span. Everyone knows who and it has been well documented. The guy lost EVERYTHING. His wife, his house, bank account, ALL OF IT, GONE! This was all also DEFINATELY the darkest point of my life. I'm not making excuses it is just that in the pursuit of happiness I learned that it could easily take your life if you pursue your goals too much. I look back and am SHOCKED I didn't lose an eye or something MAJOR. My scars have scars but hey, I'm a silver lining kind of guy. The scars make me feel tough, they are cheaper than tattoos and will always make me unique and hey, for some screwed up reason, and the hottest chicks dig scars. Cool (laughs)!
Q. Have you met your goals in wrestling and if not, what do you still want to accomplish?
R. I'm living my dream and goals STILL every day. I broke better than even, survived being a casualty of Wrestling and Wrestle against ALL my childhood heroes every single weekend through one of the places I broke in at almost two decades ago (ECPW-East Coast Professional Wrestling). I'm going to name drop, the hell with it, over this past year ALONE I've wrestled Tom Brandi, Tito Santana, Honky Tonk Man, Duggan, Beefcake, Slaughter, Valentine, Snuka and so many others. It can't get better than this...
Q. If you could propel yourself back into an era of the USWA what time period would you like to be a part of?
R. Maturity, it sure wasn't there the first time around. I was 19/20 years old, the hell was I thinking (laughs)?
Q. What has changed about the business that it will never recover from?
R. The mystique. EVERYONE is a promoter/wrestler now. I might as well sit back and ride my passion off into the sunset. I just try to block out the blockheads. If we acted the way some of these goofy guys do back THEN, man, they would have used the door to put our heads into before they flung us outta the building.
Q. If you were a young man starting out in the business, what would your career goal be?
R. Nowadays it can only be TNA/Impact or WWE. I can't fathom how these poor kids feel...
Q. You have one shot against the most vile person in the business, who would you be shooting on?
R. Randy Hales, that bastard seemed to be sent here from the Devil himself to kill my love and passion for wrestling. From day one he was the biggest prick on this earth to me. If you saw my heart and realized my sacrifices you would know you had the world's biggest Memphis mark who would do ANYTHING that the promotion wanted me to do (other than act on Randy gay fetishes and THAT'S the truth and shoot and everyone knows it RANDY). In the Power Pro years he even sent a couple of guys to kick the hell out of me. They saw through him trying to get them to do the dirty work and that was that...
Q. Do you fear getting Hepatitis C with so many workers not reporting or not knowing they have the disease and by virtue or working a hardcore style?
R. All the time, I've been lucky to have dodged the bullet and SAC (State Athletic Commissions) do need to reinforce it. It is just that nobody wants to make a huge deal about it Jerry because you know how wrestling is, you don't snitch, and you don't rock the boat. I'm saying it will save someone's LIFE so the guys SHOULD stick together and not be a mark who doesn't want heat. It starts with you and guess what? I BETTER practice what I preach or I'll just wind up hating myself...
Q. Can ROH or TNA be a legitimate challenge to the WWE?
R. Absolutely, it just takes restructuring through re-educating your audience and the correct people in charge. WWE, the buck stops with Vince and he is worth what? 800 million this week. He is the greatest Wrestling promoter EVER...
Q. One valet to walk The Tony Myers down the aisle, who would it be?
R. Miss Elizabeth, my 11 year-old Keri's middle name is Elizabeth but other than that, someday, someway, my girlfriend. Shannon Hunter (Wrobleski) the proud owner and booker of WPW (World Professional Wrestling) out of Reading, Pa. It can happen any time on any indie at this point BUT I'd like for it to be special.
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