• Look Back In History
• Pmessages
• Quiz
• Stump The Staff
• Top Fifty
• Close

Ten Years Later: The End of ICF

Posted: Oct 12th 2011 By: CMBurnham

My first two years in the business were intense. Brent Albright and Rocco Valentino were great trainers. They were the best in Oklahoma at that time. When I look at how people are "trained" now a days, I really feel Kenny and I were two of the last to be fully trained the right way in Oklahoma. Most "training classes" consist of someone incorrectly bumping and a "trainer" telling them what a great job they did. Then everyone gets in the ring and has some cluster 10 man tag match. Nobody really does drills or psychology of a match training. Rocco preached psychology to us and worked on standing arm holds outside of the ring for weeks before we even set foot in the ring. Even then, we had a whole training class dedicated to properly entering a wresting ring and circling the mat. When Brent took over Kenny Campbell and I's training, he had us learning shoot amateur wrestling for about an hour each night. He wanted us to have an appreciation for what it is we were supposed to be simulating. He usually followed this up by a series of bumping drills, followed by a 10 move spot drill we had to do repeatedly until we either got it perfect or our bodies couldn't go anymore. He wasn't big on compliments. Usually the best encouragement we got was "Well that one didn't suck too bad." And then for grins he would have us practice being bumped over the rope for a while.

A lot of my early days were spent trying to win Brent?s respect in the ring and out. He and Rocco were our idols. Brent was closer to our age, and we knew he was going to be picked up any day now. But, Brent could also be kind of a bully to people at times. It came from the fact that he was passionate about his craft and he expected that same passion and respect from others. He was like the captain of the football team and you were just trying to be part of the jocks and not one of the nerds. In 2003 Brent was running John Crow?s OCW training school for him (the company had changed from OPW to OCW because of pending lawsuits from Pete Maguire) Brent had a certain mindset about who deserved to be in the business. New students that showed up who were way too skinny or way too fat didn?t stand a chance. If he decided you weren?t good enough, he would run you off on your first night. He expected you to perform up to his level in the ring. If he had to work down to yours, you could expect some stiff shots. Usually the stiff shots were nothing too vicious, but definitely enough to make you try harder. I'm thankful for this type of training. Although there were nights I'd go home feeling like Brent was the meanest bully in the whole world, I can now see how this mentality made me better.

For reasons that don?t need to be discussed in my column, Rocco and Brent had a falling out around this time; as a result, Brent dropped his belt to Beau Dalton and stopped wrestling for OCW. John Crow turned to Kenny and me to take over the class. Kenny had a reputation for being a better bumper than me and I had a reputation for being the better talker than Kenny. When class time came, I usually did most of the talking and Kenny did most of the demonstrating. It actually worked well, but Me doing most of the talking led to me also doing all of the payment collecting and most of the paperwork on the students. Eventually, I kind of just took over the class all together. This led to heat between me and Kenny. I definitely regret that I didn't do a better job of communicating with Kenny. I think Kenny felt I was trying to muscle him out. I felt by this point we had a solid friendship, but my ego definitely got in the way of that sometimes. Things got worse between me and Kenny and eventually reached a pretty bad breaking point.

Rocco decided ICF was done and he wanted to split us up so that we could wrestle each other. By this point our female ICF member Vanessa had quit wrestling over some backstage drama, but Kenny and I had still been tagging pretty frequently. ICF had a series of great tag matches with "Dynamite Extreme" but I know Kenny was happy about ICF splitting up because up until this point he was basically playing my bodyguard during singles matches and was not getting as many matches to shine on his own. When we started wrestling each other, we had some 5 star matches. During our feud, Rocco told me he wanted me to drop the belt to Kenny. I understood it was the right thing to do. Kenny deserved it, and without the title change, there was no heat on the belt.

There was just one problem. That idiot John Crow decided he wanted to invest a bunch of money that he didn?t have in getting all new OCW belts. His genius idea was to have a raffle by selling the old title belts. He started with my belt. He basically sold a perfectly good belt for $25 in raffle tickets! I was pissed. I personally had my parents by about $20 worth of raffle tickets because that belt had a lot of history behind it and for me was very significant. I would have loved to have owned it. Well I didn't win and $25 was not enough to have a new belt made. So a new heavyweight, television, and tag titles were made with money that Crow didn't even really have, but no light heavyweight belt was ever made. Luckily, the young man that won the raffle for the light heavyweight belt was Shane Morbid, a kid who wrestled in my backyard. He let me use the belt on occasion, including the night I dropped it to Kenny

In an odd twist, the storyline for me and Kenny's blow off match was built as a loser leaves town angle. I told Rocco I didn?t like this. Losing a belt was one thing, but having someone retired me felt like I was about to get buried in a way that would be pretty hard to bounce back from. Plus, it meant I would not be doing any wrestling for a while. John and Rocco convinced me to do it with the concession that a big tournament was about to happen in August and I was guaranteed to win it and get a win over Kenny ?Outcast? Campbell in that tournament and get put back on the roster. It sounded like a good deal to me. The match with Kenny took place and the old Midnight Rodeo on 46th between Mingo and Memorial. It was the first time Kenny and I main evented as singles wrestlers. To this day, it ranks as one of my best matches. The only bad part was Kenny was doing a swanton at this time and he landed ass first on my chest. For a second, I felt like my ribs were broken and my lungs were collapsing. Neither was the case, but it freaking hurt. Kenny finished me off with a top rope Razor's Edge. The crowd popped big for it and I was forced to "leave town." Of course, that did not last too long. Things got better between me and Kenny, but little did I know they were going to get a lot worse.