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Ten Years Later: Rocco And Justin Cross The Line

Posted: Nov 16th 2011 By: CMBurnham

In 2003, Oklahoma Championship Wrestling was sinking. The booker, Rocco Valentino, was reaching his breaking point with John Crow, the Oklahoma Championship Wrestling owner. Crow had long since lost the confidence of the locker room. He was constantly discussing with everyone how bad the company was doing financially. He even told us the stress of running the company gave him a heart attack. The man was always a bit of a drama queen. I do believe he had good intentions. But like most indy fed owners, he had no business trying to run a wrestling company, or a company of any kind for that matter. He wanted to put his creative stamps on the shows so bad that he would bring in talentless hacks he found on the internet, pay them more than his own boys, and then have us lose to them. He once booked a show in Kansas and failed to pay about half the boys. In fact, he finally asked us all to stop asking for our paydays despite the fact that OCW actually had a small but decent weekly Saturday night venue at this time.

At some point in 2003, Rocco told John Crow that he would no longer be the booker. He agreed he would stay on as a wrestler as long as he could book his own angles. In need of a booker, John asked me to take over booking responsibilities. It was really the best scenario. I would still run everything by Rocco, and Rocco wouldn?t have to be the bad guy all the time. But me as booker really pissed off some people in the locker room. Big Daddy Moore actually walked out of the company when he heard I was the new booker. I had a lot of fresh ideas and I had learned a thing or two from Rocco. My first show or two went alright backstage. Out in the ring, the crowd was no longer booing me as a heel.

I was a top bad guy for the company. I had gotten a decent haircut and was now in the gym enough at this point that I looked more competitive going against guys bigger than me. I had a stable of guys known as the Heat-Seekers. It was myself, Ryan Styles, and Ron Mac. No matter how much cheating I was doing, I was getting mixed and face reactions from the crowd. It was partially because I did do a lot of high flying and fast paced matches which were exciting to watch. I think it was also because I was the youngest looking guy in the locker room and OCW had a younger crowd that related to me. They cheered me no matter what heel things I would do. Rocco, on the other hand, had been a face for quite a while and he had decided he wanted to go heel. He pulled me aside and asked if I was ready to go face. Rocco is a good salesman. He convinced me that if I went along with the program he had in mind, I would be a ten times bigger star than I was doing my current angle. What followed was an incident were Rocco channeled his inner Sheik (his child hood wrestling role model). After defeating me, instead of walking away, he pulled out a spike (pencil wrapped in tape) and jabbed it repeatedly in my head until the fans stopped cheering him and were upset at his ruthlessness bullying of a defeated opponent. He got on the microphone and told the fans they were to blame for this.

I knew it was a bit more graphic than anything done in OCW up until this point and somewhat controversial. But I did not predict how much it would upset members of the locker room (many of whom were already upset that Rocco for various reasons). Some were upset enough to quit OCW and join a fed called SRPW, founded by Sarah Harmon. Sarah was someone who helped out in OPW during their early days and was romantically linked to Beau Dalton, and later Luc Lapointe. She had come into some money at some point and used it to start her own wrestling company. The fed was basically the anti-Rocco federation. They had an open house meeting and invited all the OCW guys to it to tell them if they were fed up with Rocco (and his boy Justin) and were ready for a change, they could all join SRPW. Many of them did.

At this time OCW was running out of Powerhouse Cheer and Stunt in Tulsa on Saturday nights. The parking situation was kind of a nightmare, but the crowds were decent and the rent was cheap. John was also trying to pay for a tiny building in Sand Springs to have his training school. John was so bad with the money, that it was at this point that he asked training school student / rookie wrestler Sonny C to give him a small loan to keep the company going for another month or two. I was Sonny?s primary trainer at this point was well as his friend. He asked me what I thought. I told him honestly that I liked having a company to wrestle for, but he needed to make sure that he had some kind of compensation if the company went under. Sonny drew up a contract that stated if John was even late on one payment by more than ten days, the wrestling ring and the title belts would become his property. John needed the money bad enough that he signed the contract and the payments almost immediately started coming in later than ten days. At this point, Sonny C could contractually take the ring and belts from John at any time. This was ultimately what led to John Crow losing his company and his sanity as he promised to murder both Sonny C and myself.
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