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Ten Years Later: Hot Pants, Cinco De Mayo And Canada

Posted: Jan 19th 2012 By: CMBurnham

In 2003, I was working as the luchador El Furioso for a group called Tornado Lucha Libre. As the weeks went by and the Latino crowds just were not coming, the locker room morale was starting to dip. We had some promising rookies in X-Cal, Deuce Rodriguez, Shane Morbid, Ron Mac, and Sonny C. We had some established OPW era vets like Rocco Valentino (the promoter and booker of TLL), Anthony Jackson, Rick Styles, Brian Lakewood, AWOL, Butch Dalton (AKA Dragon Rojo) and Killer Karl Davis. The matches were solid.

One thing I have learned is that everyone loves a tournament. Or so John Crow (former OCW owner/worse thing to happen to Tulsa wrestling) always said. But in this case, he was right. With the crowds being so small and mostly our regular American fans (despite the fact we were running inside a Mexican mall in East Tulsa) Rocco started thinking we should move back to a more American format. One thing we were going to do is create a tag team division (with the belts Sonny C. had repossessed from John Crow in OCW). This tag tournament to crown new champions and would basically be the end of Tornado Lucha Libre and the start of Tornado Pro Wrestling.

This transformation from Lucha style back to American was good news for me. In one big angle, Rocco Valentino pulled off mine and Kenny?s masks to show that Kenny was really Anarquia and he would be reverting back to his Outcast persona to join him as the new VIP crew in the tag tournament. For those who were not around for OPW, Rocco had a cousin named Joey Casanova. Now of course that wasn?t really his cousin. Joey brought his girlfriend Jenna Love to the OPW shows and talked her into joining. It was not soon before Jenna and Rocco struck up a secret relationship. Let?s just say that Joey-Rocco association ended badly and the light heavyweight title ended up in Rocco?s flower bed. Kenny jokingly started calling himself ?Outcastanova? as tribute in his new VIP crew team.

The next week after the unmasking, I finally got to go back to being Justin ?The Future? Lee. All my dreams of superstardom and indy wrestling grandeur were now back on track. When I started in 2001, I was about 173 pounds. Throughout 2002 I had been in the gym quite a bit and was finally up to a solid 188 pounds in 2003. I had been calling myself ?The Future? for the past year and finally had some new black biker tights that actually had ?The Future? sewn on them in silver letters. My first match back I wore them against the debuting Canadian Luchadore (AKA Burt in a new mask I had made for him). There was a row of fans who decided that my new tights were a little too shiny and looked like ?hot pants.? Later this would be something I embraced and joked about, but at first it made me furious (no pun intended). Here I was trying to be this bad ass martial artist and rising indy star, and I was being laughed at for my professionally made tights when half the guys in Oklahoma were wearing jeans and a t-shirt to the ring.

Despite the crow taunting, Burt and I had a great match. I put those series of matches with Burt together from beginning to end and I can honestly say that despite whatever reputation Burt developed, those 2003 matches are still solid and hold up. Since the Canadian Luchadore was my creation, I told Rocco I would put him over in this debut match with a small catch. Jon Davis (the referee) was to get involved. Since the OPW day the best referee was easily Jon Davis. Every now and then you get a student who is good at the technical aspects of wrestling, but just doesn?t quite have that charisma in place to be in the show yet. So you make them a referee with the promise of moving them into the show when you think of something for them. Well Jon Davis waited. And waited. And waited. He never quite got moved up to the roster. Partially because he was such a great ref, everybody wanted him to ref their matches. Also, we didn?t have very many dependable referees back then to take his place. Even when SRPW started and they offered Jon Davis a spot as a wrestler, he stayed with our group out of loyalty to Rocco. Well in the months leading up to this debut for Canadian Luchador, Jon wore a Canadian maple leaf patch on his referee?s shirt. Right as I was pinning luchador in the first match with the small package, the referee Jon Davis flipped the package over and quick counted a 1-2-3 victory for his fellow Canadian. Even though I lost, I was proud to be part of Jon Davis getting to finally move into the spotlight. Over the next few weeks AWOL defected a good guy American soldier to be part of the ?New Canada? faction. At first, Jon was just a manager, but soon moved into the roll as wrestler and did a great job as the leader of his own stable.

Tornado Luca Libre was about to be over in favor of Tornado Pro Wrestling, but not before the biggest (non WWE) show Tulsa had seen in several years. The Mexican mall had a big Cinco De Mayo festival every year out in their huge parking lot. They asked us to put on a series of shows during the festival. These shows drew more people than I can count and helped Rocco actually make a profit off of promoting for the first time since TLL started. I remember looking into the crow and seeing more just a sea of Mexicans cheering. The other festival vendors actually complained that the wrestling was keeping everyone away from the rest of the attractions. We all kind of left that festival feeling pretty good about the future of the company. Little did we know we were about to be evicted from our Mexican mall home, and my mentor and friend, Rocco Valentino, was about to retire.