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Ten Years Later: The Flying Shoe Incident

Posted: Jan 12th 2012 By: CMBurnham

In 2001 Kenny Campbell and I were indy wrestling rookies and tag team partners in a team called ?ICF?. He and I had a history that went back to wrestling in backyard leagues. We saw each other pretty much every day to either train or go do something wrestling related. We did nothing but eat sleep and breathe wrestling. We trained hard and were known for not being afraid of taking any bump. I know his talent pushed me to try even harder. The wrestling side of things came more natural to him and the entertainment side came more natural to me. Neither of us was interested in getting real jobs because that would only take away from wrestling time. He was working part time for his dad and I was working at a Blockbuster Video.

Eventually all that time together led to a blow up and Kenny and I each went our separate ways. I began to get tighter and tighter with Sonny C, Romero Contreras, and Rocco Valentino. The four of us started calling ourselves ?The Compound?. Sonny and Romero were the first guys to introduce me to going to bars and hitting on women. At the time I was only 20, but Sonny C knew just about every bouncer in Tulsa and could always get me in. For the first time since I was 13, my mind started being on something other than wrestling. Sonny C was usually a very chill guy. He was a smoother talker and was not afraid to approach any girl he met. He was pretty brawny and could get kind of cocky when he drank. I remember one New Year's Eve party where he drunkenly challenged an entire balcony full of guys to a fight, thinking we were standing behind him backing him up. He turned around to discover Romero, Rocco, and I had already gone inside and he was alone. Luckily, the guys decided not to come down and take Sonny up on his offer to fight them all. Romero on the other hand, no matter how much he drank, never acted intoxicated. It is probably because he is such a big guy. Romero is also a very entertaining guy, but what some people don?t realize about him is that he can fight. There was more than one occasion that Sonny and I started something in a bar, and Romero demolished someone. Rocco did not go to the bar with us that often, but when he did, he had this bad habit of ?pie facing? strangers. There were a few instances where drunken Rocco?s pie face led to Romero putting some guys on the floor. Rocco, himself a bouncer for years before he became a wrestler, actually taught me the secrets on how to win a bar fight every time.

I remember one instance where Rocco?s younger cousin (not Vinnie Valentino or Joey Casanova) had come in town from Ohio. He was under 21 and couldn?t get into the bar, but we took him to Hooters. While we were at Hooters, Sonny got a call from a girl he was seeing asking him to come to a party at her house. Technically only Sonny was invited, but all of decided we were going to be his ?plus one.? Drunken Rocco stepped in some mud on his way to her house. When he walked in, his muddy shoes left tracks all over the white carpet. We were being pretty loud and the entire party looked as if they were terrified of us. The poor girl went crying off into the kitchen when she saw the muddy foot prints. Her friend was trying to calm her down. She decided the best way to fix this situation was to get drunk Rocco to take his shoes off. She walked out into the living room and made the announcement that everyone needed to take their shoes off on the carpet. Rocco, realizing that this was all about him, slipped his shoe off and chunked it as hard as he could against the white wall leaving a muddy shoe print. We were then asked to leave.

In 2003, the four of us were part of a wrestling company in Tulsa called Tornado Lucha Libre. The idea behind the promotion was to put on a mostly lucha style show with numerous characters wearing masks and having colorful costumes and names. We would market the show towards Tulsa?s Latino crowds. I was a yellow wearing technico (baby face) called El Furioso. Butch Dalton became the crimson colored Dragon Rojo. Kenny Campbell became the black and red wearing Anarquia. I came up with the idea to put a spin on the Canadian thing and created a character called Canadian Luchadore (to be played Burt in a new mask). We never put a mask on X-Cal because he was the closest to Mexican looking on our whole roster. We even had a real Mexican Luchador named Victor (who called himself El Sufamilico Sr). Russ went from being a homo erotic goofy sidekick character called ?The Man Servant? in OCW to the street tough good guy thug called Romero. He was our only actual Mexican wrestler (except for Victor). He basically became the face of our company. The idea behind the show was solid, but for some reason it never took off with the Latino crowd. Years later, a downtown bar called ?Elote? tried the same idea and now it is the most successful wrestling show in Tulsa.

Back then I was not thrilled about the idea of wearing a mask. I was almost two years into my career and I was hell bent on making it to the WWE or TNA and wearing a mask seemed like a setback for me. I wanted to build my brand. I wanted to flood the internet with Justin Lee matches and get some bookings. In TLL, no one was allowed to even know I was Justin Lee. The mask was not easy to wrestle in either. One night I was in a 6 man lucha style tag match (lucha style means you can come in without tagging your partner as long as he leaves the ring). I was going to perform a cross body block to Dragon Rojo (Butch Dalton) who was standing against the ropes. Our momentum would take us over the top rope and to the floor so that two more guys could come into the ring and do their spots. Well I aimed a little too high thanks to the mask and I bounced right off of him and went over the top rope head first. The side of my head slammed into the solid floor and I was knocked out. My yellow mask quickly began turning red. The next clear memory I had was sitting in the locker room and my dad holding my mask asking me questions. This was my second concussion in two years of wrestling. However, my worst ever head injury was yet to come.