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Ten Years Later: How To Kill A Wrestling Company

Posted: Oct 26th 2011 By: CMBurnham

Like most indies in this state, Oklahoma Championship Wrestling was not a well ran company. Despite Rocco?s best attempts as booker, OCW would never be OPW. The biggest factor in that was owner John Crow. John was not good with money. He had no problem discussing his money issues in front of the boys. He admitted to having borrowed money from his wife?s parents to keep the company going. At one point he tried to make us all fill out tax forms as his employees (wrestler are not employees they are outside contractors). He tried to ?pay us? by giving us tickets to the shows. Whatever we sold we could keep half. Whatever we didn?t sell we had to give back. And his sad attempt at advertising was a joke.

One time we were having a 3 day tournament. Friday night would be in Tahlequah, Saturday in Collinsville, and Sunday in Tulsa at the Midnight Rodeo. John made up a thousand flyers for this event and passed them out in all three towns. The problem was that all he put on these flyers was his ?OCW? logo and times/locations of shows. He never bothered to put that OCW was a pro wrestling company or a picture of pro wrestling action of some kind. Anyone seeing that flyer had no idea it was for a professional wrestling event or what OCW was. So imagine our surprise when 4 people turned up for the outdoors Collinsville show in the middle of a field. To top it off, the heels were all forced to change in a shed. And when I mean shed I mean a 5x5 compact area where we barely had enough room to stand. And to top it off, the ropes broke on the ring during the show. Oddly enough, this didn?t stop the girls from still using rope spots in their match. They literally bounced off imaginary ropes.

Even worse, John was obsessed with C. M. Burnham, a fan that was being allowed to write a column for the OCW website. John kept leaking spoilers about his own show to CM. Finally he committed the ultimate sin and destroyed the last remnants of kayfabe in this state. He decided to bring CM backstage to the locker room. Up until this point I had never been in a locker room that had a non worker in it. CM was there to see babies and heels sitting together discussing matches. Nothing was ever really the same after that.

The boys in the back quickly lost confidence. A lot of people were going on the OCW website and blasting him anonymously. John called an emergency company meeting to discuss this. He had actually hired an investigator to find out who had posted the messages. He said he knew who it was and gave them one last chance to confess. It turned out it was a wrestler named Luc Lapointe. These kinds of scenes became somewhat normal activities over the next year.

John once booked a show in Bristow with Brandon Groom?s help. Rocco was getting so fed up at this point with John?s interference on his booking that he told John he could book this Bristow show himself and Rocco would wash his hands of it. Going into the third hour of the poorly booked and timed card, John actually moved the main event up because one of the sponsors was ready to go home but wanted to see the main event match. Yeah. A fan changed the card order so they could leave early. When I went to get my pay day on that show, John said he was tired of everyone trying to get in his pocket and walked off without paying me. I am sure tribute Doink got paid.

Rocco Valentino was the booker, but John was forcing him to use his ideas in the show. John demanded that Rocco take training student Drew Joels and turn him into Sonny Cassanova, Rocco?s cousin. Rocco refused. Drew was kind of the victim in all this as that made Rocco not a fan of him even though he had nothing to do with the idea. I guess it was his fault for looking kind of Italian. Rocco had booked a long angle to turn Butch Dalton, a loyal guy for many years, into a main event heel by beating Rocco for the TV title. The story involved Butch and Rocco having a series of matches all summer. Butch lost and had to shave his back. He lost again and was forced to wrestle in a dress. Finally Butch won the belt from Rocco in a blow off match. One week later, John forced Butch to drop the belt to Sonny C (aka Drew Joels) after only having been on the show for about 4 weeks. John was high on Sonny because he was the first student out of John?s training class to be any good and he wanted to build him as the next big thing. This was the moment where Rocco decided he had enough.