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The World According to Dutch: Introducing Dutch

Posted: Sep 30th 2009 By: mikeiles

Welcome to the first edition of The World According to Dutch. In case some of you are not familiar with me, let me take this time to introduce myself. For those that do, no introduction is necessary.

My name is Dutch or that's what I've been answering to for a long time. Dutch Mantell to some, Dirty Dutch to others. I've been a professional wrestler for many years until I finally stepped out in 2001. I step back in occasionally but only if the money is good. When I got out of the ring, I didn't get out of the wrestling business. I still write, book and produce wrestling shows. Of course, that's between my time spent testing the theory of quantum physics and my part time Sudoku jousts.

I am presently in the stages of writing a book on my career and the inside workings of pro wrestling. It will contain in-depth stories of what the business was like years ago and how it's changed for the better or, as some see it, for the worse. I've written some stories that I have never told before or at least in writing. My chapters will cover what I've seen and done within this crazy business we call pro wrestling. Here are some of my chapter titles:

Riots and Near Riots and being the object of one which isn't a lot of fun I might add

The Memphis Years and the Infamous Jerry Lawler feud

The Macho Man Meets a Police Dog at a Waffle House

Getting Started in the Wrestling Business

The Night of The Curtain Call in MSG and Vince McMahon's reacton to it

My Time in the WWF

How and Why I Gave Steve Austin His Name

My Time In TNA and how TNA actually got started

How the TNA KnockOut Division Was Born

Dutch's Hall of Fame

Weirdest People I've Met in Pro Wrestling (I may have to write a second book if I want to get everybody in)

Undertaker and I getting stopped on InterState 65 at Gunpoint

The Real Story of the Heat Between Jimmy Cornette and Vince Russo

The Andy Kaufman Story

I write about what every aspiring young wrestler should know and accept before he enters the wrestling business, wrestling in prisons, craziest places I ever worked, craziest crowds, wrestling in front of an orchestra, wrestling a match on a scaffold 25 feet in the air, Dutchisms, etc. and a lot more. The name of the book is The World According to Dutch or an alternate title could be The Greatest Bullshit You've Never Heard.

So you might ask yourself how I've accumulated such a vast array of stories. Well, I've been listening to dressing room bullshit for my entire time 30 years in the business and now I'm going to give some of it back to the wrestling fans. One thing about the wrestling business, the more it changes, the more it stays the same. One day I was thinking about the width and breadth of what I'd done in the business and these are some figures I came up with for those of you who love numbers. As you may have surmised, it doesn't take a lot of amuse me.

I estimate that I've wrestled close to 6,000 matches over 30 years. I started out my career working over 300 LIVE shows a year. Later on, when Sunday shows started being more frequent due to promoters getting greedier, that number got pushed up to around 330 days per year. Out of 6,000 matches, I won 7 matches. But I cheated to do that. Always remember, if you don't cheat, you're not trying.

Taking those numbers into account, I estimate that I've probably taken close to 20 thousand body slams, 2 thousand clothes lines, 50 thousand arm drags, turnbuckles, tackles, spears, suplexes, DDT's, power bombs etc. I've been hit with everything from chairs, spark plugs, rocks, bricks, 2 by 4's, bats, kendo sticks, suspended on scaffolds, doused with fire extinguishers, bullwhipped, beat with belts held by fans and bled like a stuck pig on more than one occasion. I've wrestled animals such as bears on chains and off chains. I remember after wrestling the bear, PETA wrote a letter to the promoter saying the animal had been abused. There was nothing in the letter about me, just the bear. Bastards.

I've worked for WWF, WCW, TNA, Florida Wrestling, Memphis, NWA Charlotte, Atlanta, Continental, Southeastern, Smokey Mountain, Kansas City, Puerto Rico for WWC and IWA, Japan, Texas in Dallas and San Antonio plus a thousand other jacklet independent shows I couldn't even begin to tell you who they were.

I've worked in Madison Square Garden, the United Center in Chicago, the Spectrum in Philly, the Cow Palace in San Francisco, Staples Center in LA, Reunion Arena in Dallas, Memphis' Mid South Coliseum, the Omni in Atlanta, the old Boston Gardens, Rosemont Horizon in Chicago, Louisville Gardens, Wimbley Arena in London, and a building in Berlin where Hitler once gave his Final Solution Speech. Being in those buildings, especially in Berlin, gave me chills.

On the other end, I've wrestled in parking lots, car lots, National Guard Armories, baseball stadiums, soccer fields, county fairs, high school gyms, churches, maximum security prisons, barges on a river, Monster Truck Shows, on the bed of a flat-bed trailer truck as it drove slowly around a racetrack plus one time in Kentucky, in a cave, with real bats flying around. The name of the cave was Bat Cave, that's why I remember the name. Being in these places especially in Bat Cave gave me chills too.

I've had a varied and interesting career and it's been a journey. I've forgotten a lot of the matches that I've had not because they weren't important but mostly due to the fact that most of those 6,000 matches all run together in a blur.

I still have fans come up to me when I do autograph signings and personal appearances telling me that they saw me in a match in some God Awful town, of which, I have no recollection at all of being there and certainly not who I was wrestling. Unless it was a match that had some serious importance to it, I probably don't remember it. To most people, that could signal a serious sign of Alzheimers but to a wrestler, it's business as usual.

Wrestlers are a unique breed of animal apart from athletes and other performers. Wrestlers are athletes but a different hybrid. Wrestlers aren't like baseball, football or basketball players. They're not even like actors, stunt men or circus performers. In those lines of work, there's an off season. Wrestling never has an off season. It's a 52 week season with no playoffs and the winner is determined weekly not yearly. Wrestling has no down time, no off season and when I started, if you're weren't working, you're weren't eating.

I have wrestled and worked with the greats, the near greats, the not so greats, the wannabe greats and the wannabe wannabes. In the 30 plus years I've put into this business, I've wrestled or worked with a list of names that I call Dutch's Hall of Fame. My Hall of Fame includes the very best of all the guys I've worked with through the years. I've listed them all in my book and there's a lot of them. I could write till the year 2050 retelling my personal relationships with the very best this business has to offer. The list includes wrestlers, promoters, bookers, owners and referees. Sometimes a person didn't even have to be in the actual wrestling business to get into my Hall of Fame. If a person walked into a wrestling dressing room and was accepted by the wrestlers, then that person was one of the boys and eligible to be listed.

I've worked in most of the 50 states with the exception of the Dakotas and Montana. How I missed those I don't know. I've worked all over the world including Japan, England, Ireland, Scotland, Germany, Canada, Mexico, Puerto Rico, Bahamas, Aruba, Barbados and Trinidad. All of my time inside this business I've enjoyed and I've met a lot of good people. I've met a ton of assholes too but I'll leave those pricks alone if they leave me alone.

I truly can't imagine how my life would have turned out if I had never gotten into the wrestling profession but one thing I can say with absolute certainty. If not for the wrestling business, I would have missed the RIDE. If not for the RIDE, I would have missed the damnest wildest bunch of SOB's that God ever planted on his green earth. That statement not only included the other wrestlers but the fans as well. Every night was a different town with a different story with a different crowd and a different dynamic. To be honest, it was fun and I got paid to have fun. How many jobs do you know where that happens?

In the book, I will take you on a journey that I've been on for the past four decades. I'll tell you some stories and hopefully, give you a feeling of what it felt like to be on the inside looking out. Maybe you've read other wrestling books before but every wrestler who pens a book writes from a different perspective.

I've loved the journey and it was a journey that I traveled by accident really. I never had really planned to be a pro wrestler. That dream belonged to my older brother but he never got a chance to realize it. My friends used to ask when I was going to get a real job. Truth is, I've never had a real job. What's that? Nor am I going to get one.

In my book I will recount some old wrestling stories handed down through the ages from the older wrestlers to me when I was just a kid. These stories were told to me just as a grandfather would tell stories to his grandkids around a roaring fireplace on a bitterly cold January night. I stored away all of these stories to memory just as they were told me on long road trips in the early days of my career as we traveled up and down the road from town to town. All of the stories are original and have never been told before. Some date back before most of you were born and I, quite possibly, may be the last person that even know these stories exist or the last one willing to document them. Unless these stories are passed on, the stories will go the route of the 8 track tape. Obscurity. Of course be reminded that some of these stories are possible bullshit candidates but they are entertaining.

The days of regional or territorial wrestling is long gone and to never return. The territorial system died years when Vince McMahon started his national takeover in the mid 80's and he never stopped nor looked back. The landscape of the wrestling business today looks nothing like it did when I started. The business has changed so much that it doesn't even remotely resemble what it was years ago unless you're using the ring as a reference point.

But while the business has changed, one thing that hasn't changed is the chance for the right guy or the right girl to make a ton of money in this business. Who knows who that next person might be?

Enjoy the blog. I'll keep you updated on what's going on in DutchLand and hope to keep you entertained as we go along. For the serious wrestling fan, keep in mind that there's still a lot of changes coming along and hopefully, a lot of surprises.

Next week, a story about the old Amarillo territory when a young man got a new name from Dory Funk Sr. that he really didn't like and what he did about it.

Leave comments below or contact me privately at:

dirtydutchmantell@gmail.com

Tags: Dutch Mantell, Jerry Lawler, WWF, TNA, Jim Cornette, WCW, NWA