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A wrestling life Stamped on his face

Posted: Nov 29th 2015 By: Amarillo.com

Dennis Stamp was part of the heyday of Amarillo professional wrestling, with more than 2,000 matches under his belt. "I never felt so alive as when I was in the ring," he said.

His colorful past is etched on the face of Dennis Stamp. Even though he?s nearly 69, it?s not hard to see his 6-foot-2 frame on 210 pounds and full head of light gray hair and
imagine what he once was.

Stamp lives comfortably off 34th Avenue in the middle of Amarillo with wife Debbie and their granddaughter Jaclyn, who is an honor student freshman wrestler at Amarillo High.
In his spare time, Stamp also is on the wrestling mat, a longtime referee of age-group amateurs.

Stamp, it seems, has always been on the mat or in the wrestling ring. It?s at least a half-century of that, starting in college in Minnesota.

?It?s the only time I?ve really ever been alive,? said Stamp. ?There?s no place I?d rather be to this day than in the ring.?

If you are a certain age, say the mid-40s and older, and were an impressionable kid living in the Texas Panhandle, the name Dennis Stamp might ring a long-ago bell.

He was a pro wrestler, a ?heel? as it were, a bad guy, in the hotbed area of the Amarillo territory. This is before wrestling went all WWE and corporate, when wrestlers were a
rough regional brotherhood of Thursday night matches at the Tri-State Fairgrounds and Saturday afternoon televised matches from the studio of KFDA.

?My performances,? Stamp said, ?were my life.?

And they were performances. Athletic performances. Let?s not get into the old debate if pro wrestling was fake or prearranged ? surely we know that answer ? but what it was
was great theater in the round. No fans asked for their money back.

?It?s a visual art form,? Stamp said. ?What you see is what you get. Most of the time, though, things that looked like they hurt, didn?t. And the things that looked like they
didn?t hurt, did.?

Stamp is a storyteller, so much so that after some encouragement, he put a number of those stories in print in a book, ?The Stamp Collection.?

?I?ve probably sold 30 and given away 50,? he said.

Stamp?s first pro match was on Aug. 9, 1971, in Thunder Bay, Ontario. He got the chance to wrestle in the Amarillo territory ? one of 22 nationally ? on May 24, 1976. He
jumped at it, staying his first night at the Center City Hotel and wrestling that night.

?The reason I wanted to come was Dory Funk Jr., was my idol in the ring,? Stamp said. ?I knew how good he was. The Funks were wrestling royalty. This was a tough business ? there were sacred cows everywhere ? but I had this idea that if I could be good enough here, they would have to recognize me.?

At 6-foot-2 and 250, Stamp didn?t take on a ring name, but he did about anything else. In Los Angeles, before coming to Amarillo, Stamp was known as an ?office policeman,? meaning if some nut thought pro wrestling was fake and wanted a challenge, it was up to Stamp to climb into the ring and give him the what-for.

In 1975, Bryant Gumbel had a show in LA, ?Be What You Want To Be.? Some guy wanted to be a wrestler. Stamp was who he was to wrestle.

?Break a bone,? the local promoter told Stamp.

He didn?t. Not only was the promoter mad at him, but he got the silent treatment for days from other wrestlers.

?They said, ?How are you going to get people to believe it?s real if you don?t really hurt them??? Stamp said.

Stamp got 15 minutes of fame for a small role in the 1999 documentary, ?Beyond the Mat.? He was jumping on a trampoline and an ad-line became a catchphrase: ?I don?t do
tricks. I just jump.?

Stamp wrestled about 2,000 matches, averaging about $40 per match. He drove 300 miles one way once for a match that paid him $25. He wrestled in front of crowds as large as 10,000 and small as eight.

Stamp wrestled Dory 33 times and five times with brother Terry. Three of them were one-hour ?Broadways,? meaning a draw.

?To keep people excited for an hour, that takes a lot,? Stamp said. ?But Terry was so good. He made it easy.?

Amarillo wrestlers in the 1970s had weekly matches taped at KFDA at 11 a.m. on Saturdays and were shown at 4 p.m. That was must-see TV.

?One Saturday afternoon, right after we taped, a bunch of us headed to Colorado Springs for matches,? he said. ?We stopped at a gas station in Texline and the guy had the
matches on inside. We were all watching ourselves wrestle.

?I said, ?Boy, that guy?s getting after it, and look how handsome he is.? The guy at the station never caught on.?

Local wrestling began to tap out in the early 1980s, Stamp said, when WTBS began to broadcast matches nationally and national promoters, like Vince McMahon, began signing
wrestlers.

Stamp continued his gig into the early 1980s. He was a ?Jobbroni? in Las Vegas, meaning he had a job to do to make others look good. He would fly out when called, stay with
seven others in a casino hotel room, wrestle four times and get $150.

When that played out, Stamp focused on the more mundane as a career, spending 30 years with Cavely?s Pest Control in Amarillo. Four years ago, though, he overcame his biggest foe, shocking doctors when he battled through Stage 4 non-Hodgkin lymphoma. High dosages of chemo eradicated the tumors.

In a way, he looks like he could climb onto the mat today, and not just as a referee. For sure, he?s got the stories.

?You know what, you should get me and Terry together and write a book,? he said. ?Now there would be some stories.?

No doubt about that.