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Bruce Prichard shares stories from the wrestling ring in popular podcast

Posted: Nov 18th 2017 By: Andrew Dansby

Bruce Prichard works with an angel over his shoulder.

Inside his Friendswood office - a room teeming with four decades of colorful ephemera from a life in professional wrestling - the bust of Maurice Tillet is impossible to miss. A wrestler known as the French Angel, Tillet's life was testament to the art of reinvention. He was born in Russia to French parents, a baby-faced kid who developed acromegaly as a teen. His condition prompted seemingly
inhuman growth that left Tillet a 5-foot-7-inch, 276-pound man with a skull more than twice the size of a normal person's.

These days Prichard's four decades in wrestling are fueling "Something to Wrestle With," a podcast that reaches more than 1 million listeners.

Next to the Tillet bust in Prichard's office is a photo of him, age 10. He's holding up a belt. Not a wrestling belt; just a belt you'd wear to keep your pants from falling.

"That's my big Christmas present in the background," he says. "A chalkboard. You can see we wrote 'Houston Wrestling' on the back. That was the backdrop. I'm doing an interview there, pretending that belt is a championship belt. I'm telling you, man, this was all a lifelong dream."

Prichard cycled back into the news last week. The rapper and producer Sean Combs - aka Puffy, Puff Daddy, P. Diddy and Diddy - declared he was changing his name once again. Combs said he'd now be called Brother Love.

The backlash among wrestling fans was swift and unforgiving. To their minds, the name was already claimed. Nearly 30 years ago Prichard was taking his own beat downs in the ring as Brother Love, a bespectacled, red-faced, white-suit wearing character bleating the sing-songy cadences of a televangelist. Brother Love was loved and loathed in the World Wrestling Federation, as that world's great characters should be.

Once, when Brother Love took a chair to the head, the ringside announcer said, "There's no love for Brother Love in the City of Brotherly Love."

Exactly.

The story of Prichard's moment in the lights is a funny one. He'd been working for the WWF, now the WWE, for years, as an announcer, manager and promoter. He recalls years of doing the Mid-South circuit, sitting in a Holiday Inn in Bixby, Okla., accompanied by wrestler Eddie Gilbert, a case of beer and some weed.

"You know what was on," Prichard says. "Oral Roberts, Jim Bakker, Jimmy Swaggart. Of course the main event was Robert Tilton. He was the best."

Prichard goes into his Tilton impersonation. Actually, he prefers they be called caricatures. He can perfectly capture wrestling icon Dusty Rhodes' syrupy lisp or WWF/WWE head Vince McMahon's muscular nasal voice: "DAMMIT, PAL."

He tried his Tilton-influenced act on McMahon once. McMahon thought it was amusing. "DAMN, I LOVE IT. FIND ME SOMEBODY TO DO THAT."

Telling the story today, Prichard's face turns downward. "I said, 'No, it's me. It's mine.' Vince said, 'DAMMIT, PAL, YOU CAN'T DO IT WITH THAT FACE.'

"I was heartbroken."

So Prichard waited until McMahon was in a meeting. "You know how you can walk into a meeting and you can tell if it's a good meeting or a bad meeting without anybody saying a word? This was a bad meeting."

Prichard slicked his hair back, put on a set of oversized glasses and stormed the meeting in evangelical mode. He placed his hands on the heads of the attendees yelping and yawing. Then he walked out, having never broken character.

His dream of playing a character on camera in the WWF finally was realized, he was added to the performance roster.

Prichard hit the color combination: red face, white suit, red shirt. He conjured up the name: Brother Love. His deal was playing a televangelist without the religion, a bit of magician's misdirection: Brother Love only preached about love. His Bible was the "Book of Love."

"I just replaced everything 'God' with 'love,' " he says. "Religion? I didn't want to go there. I didn't want to go sacrilege. People's minds would take them there, anyway."

The kid in the photo had found his gimmick.

Prichard was born in El Paso in 1963, but grew up in Houston. He saw his first wrestling match at age 4, the legendary Dory Funk and his sons, Dory Jr. and Terry.

"I knew it was something I had to do," Prichard says. "I wanted to wrestle. Failing that, I wanted to be in the wrestling business."

He'd go see the Friday night matches at the Sam Houston Coliseum. On the occasional week day when school was out, his mother would take him to Boesch's office. Boesch was a Brooklyn native who wrestled until an injury forced him into the role of promoter and announcer. He took over Houston Wrestling in the '60s and became a regional wrestling legend.

Prichard knew Boesch would walk from his office to the front of the building to get his mail at 9:30 each morning. Prichard and his brother would wait and then get a tour from their hero.

At age 12, Prichard was selling posters for Boesch. He'd move them by the thousands. By 14, he was doing ringside announcing. By 16, Prichard was in the ring, refereeing. Wrestling was his higher education.

Prichard later moved north and started working with the World Wrestling Federation during its first golden era, which began in the '80s when McMahon bought out his father's wrestling company and built it into a national, and later international, industry.

"We all set goals," Prichard says. "I wanted to be part of a main event at Madison Square Garden. I wanted to be a world championship wrestler. I didn't ever get to be a champion wrestler, but by the time I was 25 or 26, I was working a main event at Madison Square Garden. So I had to set new
goals. These things are supposed to take you lifetimes to achieve, right?"

Prichard speaks with admiration and irritation for the televangelist culture that inspired Brother Love.

"The greatest thing I took away from Tilton was the simplicity of success in life," he says. "You just gotta have faith. 'If you only have a dollar, send me 75 cents.' ... I'm like, 'I love this (expletive). He's got balls.' "

Then he adds, "I just love to exploit those who exploit."

Prichard recalls an interview "A Current Affair" did with Bakker's then-wife Tammy Faye.

"Maureen O'Boyle asked how she could talk about being real and humble with all the makeup she wore, and with a straight face, Tammy Faye said, 'I don't wear make-up, honey,' " he says. "I loved her for that. To this day, I deny I ever wore make-up."

As much fun as he had getting into character and drawing cheers and particularly boos, Prichard knew Brother Love would have a limited shelf life. He retired the character in 1991.

Prichard worked briefly as manager for the imposing wrestler the Undertaker - Houston native Mark Calaway - then left the WWF for about a year, returned in 1992 and stayed until 2008 after it had become the WWE.

He didn't get to do anything as flamboyant as Brother Love. But he still loved the work. "If you ask me if I prefer to be in front of the camera or behind it, well, I love both," he says. "But the producer role being behind the camera: I get to be everybody. I get to play everybody. You can create
everybody when you're a producer or director. You get to do it all."

After leaving the WWE, Prichard spent a few years with TNA, Total Non-Stop Action Wrestling. A year ago, he reluctantly tried something new: his next reinvention.

"I was doing podcasts two weeks before I figured out how to download one," Prichard says.

He was talking to Conrad Thompson, a lifelong wrestling fan who worked at a mortgage company. As he's wont to do, Prichard was reeling off story after story about his decades working in wrestling.

"Conrad said, 'This is a podcast,' " Prichard says. "And I said, 'Yeah, I'm not gonna do that. I can't share this stuff.' He asked me what I was saving it for. Who was I trying to protect?"

Their target for the first podcast - Aug. 2016, with Dusty Rhodes as the subject - was to achieve 10,000 downloads, which would bring in a little money. They did more than 60,000. The number of listeners has since grown to about 1 million.

Prichard and Thompson avoided all popular myths about theformat.

"They said to keep it under an hour, our show averages three hours," he says. "They said it's guest driven. We don't do guests. They said don't curse. We're horrible, extremely vulgar. Everything they told us not to do, we did."

They know their listenership and they play to it. Prichard says the analytics put his female audience at about 2 percent. Their listeners are males aged 25 to 54 - people old enough to remember the '80s heyday of the WWF and also the early 2000s renaissance in the WWE. "Those are the sweet
spots," he says.

Some of the pull is strictly wrestling fandom. But the two men have hit on an engaging tone. Thompson prepares methodically with dozens of questions for each podcast. Prichard prefers improvising.

A recent episode about Bret "The Hitman" Hart was the podcast's 73rd. And they've expanded into live events. This Sunday they'll set up shop at Houston's House of Blues. Prichard is particularly jazzed because they'll be joined on stage by Josh Reddick, the Houston Astros right fielder and
noted wrestling enthusiast who carted around a championship belt during the team's World Series run.

Part of the podcast's pull is Prichard's accessibility. When he describes a late night bender with ZZ Top's Billy Gibbons, the tone of his voice gives away his fandom. So when fans buy a shirt or some merch from the Something to Wrestle site, he calls them. Because he's one of them, a kid who found a way into his dream job. A guy who is savvy about people, who didn't study communications or work at an ad agency, but has an instinctive awareness of what his audience does and does not want. And as with Brother Love, what they will and will not tolerate.

"Wrestling fans are so loyal," he says. "They'll (complain). 'If you don't change, I'm going away.' But instead they just stay and (complain). And I appreciate that. I really truly do. As long as you're there, we'll give you something to complain about or to love."