Episode 18 - Later, Brotherrr

Timestamps
 0:05:54 - Follow Ups (Demolition Blast, Nikita Koloff Audio) 

TGBL: One cool thing happened when we talked about that last week on the show – one of our listeners, Brian Ross, got in touch through our Facebook page, and I’m going to read what he wrote here, Bix – this is pretty funny.

“So I grew up in Concord, NC, right outside of Charlotte. My heyday was Crockett during the 80s. I was there in Charlotte among the 7000 when Ron Garvin had Jim Cornette in the cage. But anyway – my Nikita story. Nikita opened a gym in Concord and had his gym account at my mom’s bank that she worked at. He kayfabed them the entire time, speaking broken Russian and asking how things would work, like the drive-thru drawer and the buzzer. She would say they could hardly understand half of what he would say. This went on for YEARS. So yeah – when you played that clip, the first thing that came to my mind was “he enjoyed playing up the Russian angle.”

 0:25:22 - Dennis of the Week 

“Yo Brian, it’s Dennis – where the frick you been? Call me back real late tonight – make sure to leave a number I can reach you at. Later, brotherrr.”

- home recording audio of Dennis leaving a message on Brian's answering machine; 1998.

 0:27:01 - A look back at the career of Chris Candido on what would have been his 44th birthday 

 0:50:36 - Guns in Wrestling 

''' 0:53:09 - What If - Ted Turner had financed a national expansion of Mid-South Wrestling in 1985 like he agreed to? '''

 1:32:45 - The man, the myth, the legend: Santo Gold 

TGBL: So, in the middle of this movie, Santo Gold – or at least this is what the clip that’s out there – comes on the stage at the civic center to sing a 5 minute song called “Santo Gold,” and it’s all about Santo Gold and 95% of the lyrics are, in fact-

Bix: Santo Gold....with a 40 piece orchestra.

TGBL: A forty fucking piece band! You’ve never seen more people on a stage in your life! There are people on the stage not doing anything! Little John Harris – Silo Sam, whatever you wanna call him – he walks out with Santo Gold at the beginning. Santo Gold comes out; he looks like Elvis after he died. He comes out, he’s wearing this white suit, he has two security guards carrying him by the arms to the stage, and when he gets there, all of a sudden, these other two guys come out. One’s a giant fat guy in a suit and he comes out there and he sits down next to Santo Gold, for no reason at all. Another guy is John Harris, you know – 8 feet tall. Comes out there in a suit, stands next to Santo Gold, puts his arms on his hips, and then about 10 seconds later turns around and walks away. Again; no explanation about what’s going on.

 1:51:55 - Ron Skoler (Part 2) 

Ron: Up until La Revancha, there hadn’t been a major Lucha Libre show in L.A. – well, there had never been a show on that level with that many people in that kind of a venue ever before – but the last major show was years before. Other than that, they were running in a gym at a college, and it was no-where near this. So, then they decide – “well, I’ll spend the money on Mexican rodeo; maybe I’ll go to a concert of Los Tigres del Muerte,” whatever. We’ll go to this, we’ll go to that instead. There’s always things competing for the money, and it’s always a same day buy because they’re so used to getting screwed, you know, when events get cancelled and things like that. So – the bloom was off the rose a little bit. It was still profitable but it wasn’t what I had thought what we could really build on it. I think part of the reason I have to blame is Galavision and Televisa, because no matter what I would try to tell them or beg them, or cajole them, or plead them; whatever I would do – it fell on deaf ears. We couldn’t get any continuity. One week, the wrestling show was on a 2 o’clock. The next week, it’d be on at 4 o’clock. The next week would be 3:30. The next time it would be on because they’d have some special. The next time would be 6’o clock, and there was no continuity; like we were able to build up all the heat from TripleMania – which was shown on television for weeks later and months later in Mexico and therefore in the United States – we didn’t have that continuity for the second show. I wanted to get television. I knew that if we could get TV, we could have done amazing things. I had so many great angles and so many great storylines that never got off the ground that would have been unbelievable –off the charts – that we never got to do. We brought in a tag-team of these two white wrestlers in L.A. that we called La Migra – you know, the immigration police. We could have built that into a big thing if we had television, but we didn’t. That’s really the worst thing – the most frustrating thing – about the whole thing. Could you imagine if WWE didn’t have continuity on television? If you were having a match, you know, between John Cena and Undertaker or whatever, and you’re not able to build that up week after week, week after week, week after week, but you’re still showing matches between Hulk Hogan and Ultimate Warrior? It was pathetic. I thought Pena was wonderful, he was great, and as far as Galavision and Televisa, I have less than no respect for them.

- on the difficulties of establishing continuity to run shows with more frequency following La Revancha.

 2:26:04 - Bobby Simmons (Part 1) 

Bobby: Mid-South, when they started, they maintained the Friday night contract with the Auditorium, they brought guys in from all over the country. I mean, they’d have Hiro Matsuda, they’d have Jack Brisco, they’d have Jerry Brisco, they’d have Bill Watts. All of these people that people were seeing in the magazines, but they didn’t know ‘em. So, it took a while for them to catch on and for them to get a crew in here. Once they got a crew in and was established on tv, we were both drawing good houses. That leads us up to the Gorilla Watts incident. Bill Watts would go on TV – Ray Candy, who was a guy who worked for the city of Atlanta, he had been training for some time, but Tom Renesto finally broke him into the business after Gunkel Enterprises became a reality, and they made Ray Candy the Georgia Heavyweight Champion – first Black Georgia Heavyweight Champion ever. It got over super – people loved Ray, Ray was a good guy, had a great demeanor. Well, Watts would go on TV and say “ahh they got nothing but garbage men over there,” knocking the guys. He’d not say us directly but it was innuendo and people knew who he was talking about. That’s when Gorilla Watts came in – I think Renesto brought him in as a slam on Bill Watts. I don’t know his real name (laughing). He was about 5 foot nothing and he weighed about 300 pounds; he could not lace his own boots up. He had a girlfriend that would lace his boots up at home; he would come in with his trunks under his pants. We would – somebody would feel sorry for him in the dressing room and would help him slide his pants over his boots to help him get them off. Guys would go in and fly over the ring for him because he really couldn’t do a whole heck of a lot, but yeah, he was here for a few months but that was the deal: they brought him in – it was a stab at Watts; that’s all it was.

- on the competitive nature of the Gunkel camp vs. the Mid-South Sports camp during the Atlanta Wrestling War following the dissolution of Ray Gunkel's ABC Booking, leading to "Gorilla Watts".