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The World According To Dutch: Fighting Fans Over ShooBaby and eBay Auction?

Posted: Mar 22nd 2010 By: CMBurnham

I was going through some things two days ago and ran across something that I thought I had thrown away. As I was looking and cleaning out my storage area, I ran across an old item that I thought I had thrown away.

I called her ShooBaby, not the original but ShooBaby #3. I've had several bullwhips but this one was without a doubt, the best one I ever had. Or it was before she ended up in two pieces.

How did that happen? Read on. If you're a frequent reader of The World According to Dutch, you've read me long enough to know that I just can't tell you the story right off the bat. This is a story that has to be told to be understood.

The reason I even ran across Shoo Baby #3 is due to my wife, who is a huge fan of the show, Hoarders. If you've never seen Hoarders, its a show where people just keep things for year and years and years and never throw anything away or dispose of it. It just stays in their houses and after awhile, their stuff is to the ceiling. My wife thinks I have hoarding tendencies and to a degree I do but not to the extremes you see on the show.

So I thought it would be easier to throw stuff out instead of listening to my wife so I started going through my stuff. Notice I said my stuff...not her stuff. Voila, I ran head lone into ShooBaby # 3. There she was...the best bullwhip I ever had. It was like seeing a picture of your favorite uncle who passed away 10 years ago. ShooBaby # 3 was the perfect length, weight and the most versatile whip I ever had.

As I looked at it, some thoughts zoomed into my head so I decided to take a photo just to illustrate what I'm going to blog about today and the photo above is exactly how a beautiful piece of hand made craftmanship ended up broken and frayed.

In the mid 90's I was working in Puerto Rico and as everybody knows by now or those who have read my book, it was dangerous to work amongst those heathen bastards. I apologize to the bastards for saying that. No, they were probably just heathens. I had been there almost a year and had fought just about every Puerto Rican wrestling fan on the island personally or so it seemed. But about that time, it was all coming to an end as I had just booked myself into the WWF as the manager of Ron and Don Harris who would be known as Jacob and Eli Blu. I had brought Ron and Don to Puerto Rico many times during the year I was there since they lived in Florida and I had gotten to know them well.

But now, I was finally going to WWF...and I was getting the hell out of Puerto Rico. YIPPPEEE. I had about a week to go and I had a closing match with a guy named Rey Gonzalez, who was and still is the Puerto Rican equivalent of Ric Flair.

I knew this match would be one of those crazy, wild matches that we made Puerto Rico famous for and everybody knew that it was going to spill out on the floor and go all over the arena which, for me, I never liked too much because it put me too close to the fans. But the fans didn't pop much for technical wrestling skills in Puerto Rico, which of course was right down my alley as I possessed none. Fighting all over the place was fine, if were were Puerto Rican, but for me, I never cared for it too much. Actually, it was in Puerto Rico where I learned to watch my front and back at the same time.

Unbeknownst to a lot of fans today, but it was Rey Gonzalez and me who first started out Carlitos. Carlitos, in those days, was just a kid who was attending the University of Puerto Rico and didn't really want to get into the wrestling business but the angle I worked was so perfect for him that he had to get in. That's a story for another day but the TV I was producing in Puerto Rico at the time was getting prime time numbers on Saturday morning time slots. Gonzalez was a master heel and so was I so to say when we broke up was a BIG THING. It would have been bigger but I had to rush the breakup due to getting booked in WWF. So this night was the big blowoff between Rey and myself and the arena was packed out with as many people as it could hold...I'd say around 2,500 people.

The match got started and as usual, the fans were loud and vocal and as I knew it would, the match spilled to the floor and there we were...brawling all over the place. The match finally concluded. course with me doing the favor for Rey since I was leaving, and he was staying. What happened next had never happened to me before nor has it since. I recall after the match was over...more of my guys came down to the ring to attack Rey and once we got him down outside the ring, I reached over and grabbed old ShooBaby.

There are no ringside seats in Puerto Rico. Thank God for that. The fans sat away from the ring and I can only imagine the trouble that I would have gotten into had the fans been a little closer. Hell, they were too close as they were and that was away from the ring by 30 feet.

Back to my story, I reached and grabbed Shoo Baby and then started whippingRey like he stole a 'government mule' as Ernie Ladd used to say. The crowd was getting pretty warmed up but I knew, by now, how far I could take them and I hadn't reached that point yet. But I knew that this arena was famous for wrestler/fan confrontation and it was, without a doubt, one of the worst arenas I had ever seen for wrestler/fan violence. This was also the arena where I ended up with 14 stitches in my head after a riot in which Kane ended up saving me.

After a couple of well placed whip shots, where the whip was sounding like a .22 pistol recoil, the crowd started moving in on me. I placed myself close to an area where I could have make a quick exit but they closed that off quickly. I was planning on throwing a couple more shots and then having Rey get up and grab the whipwhich which would please the crowd and appease them enough for me to make it to the safefy of the dressing room. I could get my whip back later. But I never got that far. As I started to throw one last parting shot, my arm suddenly stopped in mid air as though somebody had blocked my arm. I knew exactly what had happened. In order to properly execute a whipping motion, the whip has to come from behind you so you have to arc the whip, so to speak, as to aim it.

But when that ong side of the whip went behind me, a couple of fans grabbed the end of my whip, or the cracker end, and held on for dear life. So when I started my forward motion, it didn't go far. When I turned around to see what was going on....I saw a woman and a man who were both holding on to the end of my whip. Their eyes were full of emotion and fear because they grabbed it and now didn't know what to do. Actually, that made three of us because I didn't know what to do either except I had to recapture my whip from them. I could see it in their eyes that they were dead serious about stopping me from whipping their hero.

I knew this little confrontation wouldn't last long and I had about 15 to 20 seconds to recapture control of Shoo Baby. I knew, from experience, that if this crowd sensed I was in danger, they would act upon it. They had one end and I had the other. So what do we do now?

I pulled on my end to try to yank it away and they pulled back. I pulled again but this time, the other fans caught on to our little Tug of War we had going on so they grabbed the whip too. Now I was pulling against 6 people so I pulled again and they pulled back. God dammit...it started to look like a Three Stooges skit as it turned into a comedic tug of war and I could see right then that unless I did something dramatic right away, I was going to lose not only my whip but it would end up in a physical fight with the fans. Bastards. They hated me and I hated them arseholes.

So, judging from past experiences with them, I had one last attempt to I pulled as hard as I could and suddenly, I found myself with my whip back in my hand as I stumbled backwards and almost fell after I heard a LOUD POPPING sound. As I regained my balance, I looked down at what I held in my hand and yep, I had Shoo Baby all right...but not all of her. What I ended up with was just the handle and 18 inches of leather. I had less than half a whip in my hand. No, I had less than a quarter whip in my hand. The other 75% of it was in the hands of the fans who rejoiced in their victory with such glee that I wanted to slap every one of them. But, to slap them would mean that I would have to actually get close to them to which I had no affinity for. One thing I learned about fans in Puerto Rico is that they carry personal weapons on them for protection...like guns. But for the fans that had won control over our little impromptu Tug of War, it was a great victory for them and once you've lost a battle like that, the only thing you can do is retreat gracefully. I retreated but I don't know how graceful it was.

What I had intended was for Rey, to grab the end of the whip and have him take it away from me but the fans had different ideas. ShooBaby, at the time, was about 10 years old and she would have lasted years more but not with a bunch of yahoos like those assholes yanking on her. When I got back to the dressing room, I was literally sick about it. I've had several whips over the years but none of them were as good as ShooBaby 3. Great length and weighted with the precision of a surgeons' scapel. I could pick a 3 inch toothpick out of a man's mouth at 12 feet without touching skin but after the incident with the fans that night, ShooBaby was no more. Assholes.

One of the security guards came into the dressing room and I asked him where he was during the tug of war and he didn't say anything because he and I both knew where he was. I should have bullwhipped his lazy ass because I know exactly where he was during that whole "Dutch Fight the Whole Crowd Deal". He was at the cantina (which is Spanish for BAR) and probably didn't see one second of what happened. Needless to say, I should have taken what was left of ShooBaby and beat the crap out of him for not being present. I asked him who ended up with my whip and he acted as though he didn't know what I was talking about which was probably true seeing as how he was at the bar the whole time I was fighting for my life and my whip. To say that security was lax in Puerto Rico is like saying Dolly Parton had big boobs.

I started in the WWF a couple of weeks later as Uncle Zebakiah and I didn't carry a whip which was good seeing as how I didn't have one thanks to the bastards in Puerto Rico. Ordering a quality bullwhip isn't an inexpensive purchase as good bullwhips can run upwards of 5 to 6 hundred dollars. What also makes it hard to get a quality bullwhip...is where in the Hell do you get one? All my early whips were made by an old man in Mississippi who died years ago and he was the maker of Shoo Baby 1, 2 and 3. But he was dead so my last connection to getting another bulllwhip made passed with him. So I was now bullwhipless. You just don't pick up a Yellow Pages directory and find a lot of bullwhip artists. You might find some Bulls**t artists but bullwhips...kinda scarce.

Back to today. To appease my wife, I am now offering Shoo Baby # 3 to the highest bidder. The item will officially be offered for sale on eBay starting soon. ShooBaby # 3 is a part of wrestling history and has been used on such notable opponents as Undertaker, Jerry Lawler, Jimmy Hart, Dirty White Boy, Wendell Cooley, Tojo Yamamoto, Randy Savage, Bobby Fulton, Steve Keirn, Bill Dundee, Kamala, Rick Rude, Abdullah the Butcher and for those who have read my book, it has been used on me more times than I care to remember. It will be sold with a personal autograph on the handle and it goes without saying that it is a one of a kind item. I don't know of many wrestling bullwhips that are on eBay. LOL.

Tags: Dutch Mantel, WWF, Ric Flair, Ernie Ladd, Uncle Zebakiah, Jerry Lawler , Dirty White Boy, Wendal Cooley, Tojo Yamamoto, Bobby Fulton, Bill Dundee, Kamala, Rick Rude, Abdullah the Butcher