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Ten Years Later: Drunk dialing Harley Race, Boxing Indians, and my 21st Birthday

Posted: Mar 2nd 2012 By: mikeiles

In the summer of 2003, Tulsa wrestling was far from thriving. SRPW was running spot shows once in awhile in front of less than remarkable crowds in random places all over the state. TPW, the organization I considered to be my home fed, had just run a big show at DJ's Flea Market in Tulsa in front of a big crowd. However, that would be the last show at DJ?s. The police were investigating the place and its owner. They said this building was not zoned for this kind of event and prevented us from running there anymore. We did get to leave the ring set up there and were able to practice regularly. It was around then that we were training Kitty, the first female wrestler in the training school in quite a while. Kitty was a fan that had been coming to the shows regularly with a group of other fans, including Stevie Caballero. In fact, she was the first one to make fun of tights calling them ?Hot Pants.? She and I had become buddies since I was still doing a lot of the training. I guess it got back to Harley Race that I had a female wrestler in training. He called me and left me one of the most bizarre voice mails ever. I don?t know if he was drunk, but it kind of sounded like it. ?Hey Justin Lee. This is Harley Race. I?m a famous wrestler that you probably know. In fact, I?m getting in the WWF Hall of Fame this year. They are going to fly me down for the ceremony and induct me. Anyways, I hear you got a girl wrestler. I need an opponent for one of my girl wrestlers. Call me.?

Around this time SRPW put out a press release on their website and to any wrestling news website that would publish it. The statement basically said that SRPW was the top indy fed in the country. Never mind all the Northeast or California indy feds. According to this press release, the fed selling less than one hundred tickets a show in Oklahoma and using all local talent was the heartbeat of indy wrestling. Of course this pissed us TPW guys off. Since May we had fours shows in front of 1000+ crowds in Oklahoma. Even though we didn't have a home venue, we were still outdrawing SRPW and running as often, if not more frequently. We found out later that the reason they did the stupid press release that summer was because supposedly this financial backer from Europe wanted to use his personal fortune to build a wrestling federation to compete with the WWE. He wanted to take an existing fed and make them into a major company. Sarah Harmon (the SRPW owner) went along with it. I can?t blame her. If someone offered me a bunch of money to build my fed, I would take it in a heartbeat. Apparently this European guy fronted the money for some shows and paid to bring in some names. The first name they tried to bring is was Raven. When that didn't work out, they brought in Perry Saturn. I remember C.M. Burnham, a local wrestling reporter, did an interview trying to get Perry to talk about how he was coming to SRPW to compete with the best (just like the press release said). Perry basically said "I?m retired, but I will pick up the pay day I guess."

That August and September there were no TPW wrestling shows. However, Rocco Valentino was promoting a tough man boxing contest out at the Creek Indian fairgrounds again. He had promoted one in June that was very successful. X-Cal, another indy wrestler who began his career wrestling in my backyard back in high school, actually won the light heavyweight division of the June tough man boxing event. I had planned to attend the event and be a judge like I had for the one earlier that summer. The show actually fell on September 20, which was my 21st birthday. My plan was to attend the boxing, then Russ, Sonny C, and myself would go hit the bars for the first time with me as a legal patron! No more sneaking in or paying off a bouncer. Four days before the event Rocco approached me. It turns out he was one light heavyweight short of what he needed to fill out the spots in the tournament. He wanted me to enter it. My first instinct was "HELL NO!" However, Rocco can be very persuasive. I was a Tae Kwon Do black belt and in the best shape of my life. He told me that if skinny little X-Cal (and he was at that time, he has since gotten much more muscular) could win, so could I. I spent every night that week trying to train like a boxer. I worked out at Mikey's gym in East Tulsa and that place was crawling with boxers and MMA guys. I got advice from everyone I could while doing hours of cardio up there. I got my dad (who is a sixth degree black belt in Tae Kwon Do) to work on striking. I got my buddy Josh to throw punches at me for ten minutes at a time while I got used to blocking and using boxing gloves.

That Friday rolled around and I spent my twenty-first birthday entering a tough man boxing contest. I was not the only pro wrestler Rocco had recruited. When I got to the competitors tent, I saw Shadow of Death was also entered in my division. Bill (Shadow of Death) had a reputation for being a little stiff and hard to work with. He was not technically sound by any means. In fact, he was a multiple time hardcore champion. Although he was skinny, he was a very muscular skinny. I was not paired up against him in my first fight. My opponent was an older Indian guy who was a little overweight. He was still kind of scary looking and I was very nervous. The bell rang and my first instinct was to charge this guy and try to land one quick one knockout punch while he was off guard. It worked. In his attempt to move out of the way of me and my attack, he twisted his knee and tore something. He fell down immediately and the referee stopped the fight. I won my first ever tough man match in a matter of seconds. I got lucky and ended up getting a second round bye because someone else couldn't continue. I was in the under 185 pound division finals. Unfortunately, the guy I was fighting for the championship was about 6' 3" and apparently had boxed before. When the bell rang he had punched my face 5 times before I even got close enough to touch him. I put up a fight and even landed a few. The crowd was going nuts during our exchanges. At the end of the first round he got me good in the chin and I went down. As the ref counted ten I had a conversation with myself in my head. I could get up and prove how tough I was or I could stay down and still have a pretty face when I went to the bar for my twenty-first birthday that night. I chose option B.

The boxing got my competitive juices going again. I had not done any martial arts in a long time. My dad had a former martial arts student of his that had moved to Colorado and started his own martial arts school. The school had expanded all over Colorado to the point that his guy was now a millionaire and ran a chain of schools. He offered to let me and my dad come down to Colorado as his guests and let me compete in the black belt tae kwon do testing and fighting they were going to have at a ski resort in the mountains. It just so happened that this weekend would coincide with the weekend of TPWs first show in several months. I actually opted to skip the wrestling show and go to Colorado. That ended up being one of the worst decisions of my life. In fact, it almost cost me my life.