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Ten Years Later: Drugs, Drinking, and Shockingly Revealing Ring Gear

Posted: Feb 25th 2012 By: mikeiles

So in the summer of 2003, after an amazing event at the Creek Indian Festival, I was upset to find out that Tornado Lucha Libre was officially dead. Our home base, the Mexican mall in East Tulsa, had said they didn?t want us back. To this day, I?m not really sure why. We had already been moving away from the Lucha stuff anyways and this was just the nail in the coffin. We were now going to be known as Tornado Pro Wrestling. That is if we could find a place to wrestle again.

In my first two years, I had already gone through the demise of two promotions (OPW and OCW) and now it looked like TLL/TPW was done. Add to that my mentor and promoter Rocco Valentino was now retired from active wrestling. All the backstabbing from guys he trained and then split to go work for his competition and also just spending his Saturday nights with the scum of the earth that makes up Oklahoma indy wrestling had made him kind of bitter. Rocco had been more and more active in his church and hanging out with his daughter. Plus he owned his own wedding DJ service and could make more money doing that than promoting wrestling. He just decided he was done with wrestling (for now). Rocco did stick around to help out with announcing, managing, and some of the booking, but Sonny C was now taking over as promoter. He was looking to find a new building where we could run weekly shows.
I took a few weeks that summer to take a summer class in community college. I was doing surprisingly well in college and for the first time started thinking about a career outside of wrestling. However, Pro Wrestling was still my ultimate dream and number one priority. Around that time I switched jobs from working at a call center to working at a bank (making much better money). I, Sonny C, and Russ (Romero) were going out several nights a week and (even though I wasn?t 21) alcohol always got involved. Luckily Romero was big enough to bail me and Sonny out of any fights we might get involved. More often than not Romero and I would insist on crashing in Sonny?s tiny converted garage/apartment, ruining whatever chances he had of bringing a girl back and keeping her there. Life was pretty good (except for not having a place to wrestle in Tulsa). Even our arch rival fed, SRPW, was not running that summer. Traditionally, summer always seems to be smaller crowds. Rocco said from his experiences that most of the wrestling dollars come from families bringing kids to the shows. In the summertime those families have a lot more entertainment options. Usually a vacation or two during the summer will also mean tighter budgets for things like indy wrestling tickets.

It was not too long before Sonny C came through and found a place for us to run TPW. The building was at 21st and Sheridan in Tulsa and it was called DJ?s Flea Market. Today, that building is the DirecTV call center. Back then, the man who ran this flea market was called Mr. Washington. We quickly discovered that maybe Mr. Washington might be into more than just running a flea market. While practicing one night, we discovered a bag in the back part of the building where they let us keep the ring set up. Inside the bag were smaller bags filled with white powder. We brought them to Mr. Washington and he thanked us and asked us not to talk about what we saw.

By the end of July we got to run our first show at DJ?s and that first event was packed! That night I teamed with Romero for the first time ever to take on Shane Morbid and Mountain Man. Brent Albright even showed up and came backstage to say hi to all of us. At the time, Rocco and Brent were not on speaking terms. They had a beef dating back about a year. Brent going to SRPW only made it worse. Back earlier in 2003, Brent called me and asked if he could practice with us at the TLL ring in the Mexican mall. He had a tryout coming up with TNA and wanted to get in some ring time. When I told Rocco that Brent was coming, Rocco wasn?t too excited about Brent using his ring. Rocco showed up to practice that night, but barely acknowledged Brent?s being there.

During the show at DJ?s, there was a bit of a wardrobe issue with Tyler Bateman. There are just some guys that can pull off wrestling trunks and look normal. Then there are some guys that just look so damn awkward in trunks that it distracts from their match. This especially happens when maybe the trunks are more revealing than you first realized. Tyler came out to the ring in a neon pair of trunks that just looked inappropriate for some reason. By the end of the match the whole audience was quietly whispering back and forth about the trunks. Parents began covering their children?s eyes. After the match Rocco (who was sitting ringside as guest time keeper for the show) brought a towel into the ring for Tyler to cover up with.
But that was not the most exciting part of that evening. That night the police showed up and nearly shut the event down. Apparently they had their eye on that place and Mr. Washington for a while. They used the excuse that the building was not properly zoned for this event as an excuse to come harass Mr. Washington. The venue that looked so promising was no longer available for us to run shows at. We still got to keep the ring up for practicing, but it would be 3 months before TPW ran another show. In the meantime, some of the talent was getting frustrated. SRPW was promoting bringing in names like Perry Saturn and running once a week. They were not by any means selling many tickets to their events or making money off them, but at least they were running shows. This led to a few defections, most notable of which was X-Cal. He felt justified leaving us for SRPW. Originally he just wanted to work for them until TPW started running again. The way we saw it, if you didn?t stick by us in the bad times, why would we let you come back for the good times. I don?t know how fair that was. I understand a young kid just wanting to wrestle anywhere he can. However, we were trying to grow the TPW brand. What good is your brand if you can see TPW guys on the SRPW shows? With all the drama and setbacks in 2003, wrestling was not quite as much fun as it used to be.