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Ten Years Later: Ghetto Wrestling, Time to Go Heel, and the Violence Alliance

Posted: May 25th 2012 By: CMBurnham

In early 2003, I was wrestling for Tornado Pro Wrestling. The company was owned by Sonny C and was still being booked by Rocco Valentino. We had just started running weekly again in a venue in North Tulsa called Owen Park Recreation Center. The place was in the ghetto, but after the struggles to find a weekly venue, we were just happy to have a place to set up shop. We did have several incidents of stolen purses and cars broken into. Towards the end of our run there, those incidents certainly kept the crowds away. The crowd sizes were always unpredictable. There were weeks we were packed and then there were weeks we had less than twenty paid tickets.

The major players in TPW at the time were all great performers, especially by the standards you see today. We had some of the best heels who actually worked at getting the crowd to hate them. This is what really separated our show from SRPW?s (our rival fed). Our top heels at the time were ?The Heatseekers? (Rick Styles & Karl Davis). These guys had been around since the heyday of OPW and Rick was one of the best at getting the crowd fuming. And of course Anthony ?All Action? Jackson was always a top heel. He wasn?t afraid to spend half an hour working the microphone until everyone in the crowd had been personally offended. He was the king of the long winded promo. Then we also had New Canada, our current top heel team at the time. My two best friends Romero Contreras? (Russ) and Sonny C were the top two baby faces. I had just returned from a head injury that had kept me out of the ring for almost 9 month, so the crowd was still getting reacquainted to me. We were more than a little disappointed to find out that our TPW champion, Kenny ?Outcast? Campbell had decided to join SRPW full time and leave without dropping the title in the ring. There were many defections from TPW to SRPW, but that one certainly meant the most to me. It would be some time before my former tag partner and best friend Kenny spoke. Kenny?s first show in SRPW as himself (he had been wrestling under a hood as ?Anarchy?) he had to put over the SRPW champion Brandon Groom. I can?t blame SRPW for doing that. If we had a chance to bury an SRPW guy we would have taken it too.

I hate interrupted title lineages. Throughout wrestling, I love to see that the champion had always beat the previous champion in the ring. Rocco was left with no other option than to declare the TPW belt vacant and have the winner of that year?s Oklahoma Stampede battle royal also be declared the new TPW champion. The battle royal was won by Russ (Romero). To further muck up our title situation, we had to have a battle royal the very next week to declare new Tag Team Champions. Both Butch Dalton and Brian Lakewood (the current champions) had been missing from our roster for quite some time.

I was kind of lost in the mix of everything. I was a baby face and had been for over a year. It was around this time that Rocco suggested I go heel again. When I first started as a heel back in 2001, I was more comedic than anything else. I was half the size of the rest of the roster and was like a yapping dog biting at the heels of the OPW stars. Now that I had actually gotten in the gym and gotten better at my craft, I was ready to be a more serious heel.

I have never been a fan of small heels. A guy being smaller than his opponent automatically makes the fans want to root for him in most cases. He is the under dog. Heels need to be mean and vicious and believable. Hulk Hogan was a huge guy, but throughout his career he always was seeking guys that could make him look smaller like Andre, John Studd, King Kong Bundy, Vader, Zeus, Undertaker, Yokozuna, etc. This is because he always wanted to appear as the under dog.

As tough as I acted, and as much as I bragged about my martial arts skills, I knew in the eyes of the crowd I was still a pretty boy who did back flips. I talked Rocco into putting me with Draven Cross and Cold Blooded Chris. Both guys were huge compared to me and as my back up, it made me a much more believable heel. My new group was called ?The Violence Alliance.? I stole the name from a faction from my backyard wrestling days. I didn?t wrestle a match without throwing my opponent out to my fellow alliance members to lay a beating on them. I once read that Ric Flair refused to win a match cleanly when he was a heel. Even if he was wrestling a no-name local guy from that territory, he always would grab the tights, or use the brass knucks, or hit the low blow when the ref?s back was turned. He never let his ego keep him from being a good heel. I made sure to always do the same. Even when I wrestled generic masked guys, I did as much cheating as possible.

My first heel act was to kick my best friend Sonny C in the face when I was supposed to be the guest referee for his match against Draven Cross. I had landed some unintentional stiff kicks in my time, but this one was probably the meanest. I was so full of energy and excited to swerve the crowd that I just extended way too far and nearly knocked him out. He later forgave me, but it took many beers. This was the first step in a journey that I hoped would end in me winning the Oklahoma Heavyweight Title for the first time.