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Ten Years Later: Konnan, Chavo, Sr. & A Skating Rink

Posted: Dec 1st 2011 By: CMBurnham

In late 2002, I was a booker for a play fighting group called Oklahoma Championship Wrestling. The emergence of a new fed called Steel Rage Professional Wrestling kind of lit a fire under many us. It was like we had a cross town rival. Many guys were jumping ship to join SRPW, but many of the loyal guys stuck around and started to working that much harder. One major problem arose. Beau Dalton, the OCW heavyweight champion at that time, was among those leaving OCW to join SRPW. In fact, Beau?s girlfriend Sarah Harmon was the owner of the new SRPW. SRPW was founded as the anti-Rocco wrestling company and they planned to run shows in Tulsa on the same night as OCW. Obviously it would be very embarrassing to have the OCW champion walk out to the ring on the first SRPW show and drop the OCW belt in the trash. To his credit, Beau Dalton came back for one last show and dropped the title. We decided to have Rocco win the belt since we still were not sure if Beau was going to do business. He trusted Rocco to keep his word and not try to sneak any cheap shots in. Rocco was still a great amateur wrestler and was much stronger than Beau. If something shifty happened, we knew Rocco could legitimately take him down and pin him. Fortunately, Beau was a man of his word and dropped the belt that night to Rocco. A few years later the FBI showed up looking for Beau at a wrestling event.

Even before winning the OCW belt, Rocco had just made his heel turn a few weeks earlier by attacking me with a spike and making me bleed in a very vicious segment that upset some people. His title win set me up to start main eventing. The title was going to be involved in our feud. I was turning face and the crowd was accepting me as a face. Rocco once told me ?They have to hate you before they can really love you.? It makes sense if you think about it. Some of the most over baby faces in the history of wrestling started out as some of the biggest heels. Think about the Rock. When they started him as a baby, everyone hated him. Then they turned him heel and he was the most hated man in wrestling for a while. But eventually the crowd turned him baby and now he gets over just by raising an eye brow. Think about Ric Flair. He was the #1 heel for years. Now, people love him and cheer for him even when he is heeling. Not to compare myself to the Rock or Flair, but I was definitely getting loud cheers at the OCW shows from people who used to boo me.

OCW had once again found a new venue. This time, it was Hot Wheels Skating rink in Northeast Tulsa. It was a great venue for shows. What the OCW owner John Crow had failed to tell any of us is that Hot Wheels had already told him they were going out of business in a matter of months. At this point we were leaving a weekly venue that our fans had gotten used to and starting over in a new one that would be shut down in a matter of months. That was a bad business decision, John Crow was an expert at bad decisions. His worst decision was taking a loan from Sonny C and using his wrestling ring and title belts as the collateral for that loan. He had made so many late payments that Sonny C could legally take the ring at any time.

John Crow actually made a good decision once. Towards the end of 2002, he promoted an all lucha libre show at the local Mexican mall. This wasn?t his first attempt at doing this. The first time he tried to promote it, he booked Konnan as the main star. The show was going to take place at the midnight rodeo where we used to run Sunday night shows. Konnan canceled on him at the last second and we scrambled to let the fans know. Russ (Romero Contreras) was the only Mexican we knew. We sent him to the arena that night, along with 2 bus boys that worked at John Crow?s restaurant, to tell the other Mexicans that showed up at the door why the show was canceled. We quickly learned Russ didn?t speak as much Spanish as we may have been lead to believe.

A few months later, Crow took another stab at running a lucha show. The plans for the show started to fall apart about half way through. Rocco Valentino, who had been a successful promoter for many years, finally stepped in to make sure the show didn?t fail. He helped get it promoted in a local Spanish written newspaper. He had John Crow basically pay to bring in the entire roster of Texas Xtreme Wrestling for what was supposed to be lucha libre style matches. The only problem was that with the exception of one match, there was no lucha style. It was straight American Pro Wrestling by Mexicans wearing masks. The main star of the show was Chavo Guerrero Sr., who Rocco got all the travel arrangements worked out for. Chavo was a nice guy and he told us what a piece of crap Konnan is. It didn?t take Chavo but a few hours after arriving to ask Russ (Romero Contreras) where he could score some cocaine. Despite being very old and high as a kite, Chavo?s match went well and the OCW lucha show drew a lot of fans. Everyone got paid. Despite the triumph of this show, and the momentum that OCW had in the new venue, OCW was about to go out of business in one very dramatic night.