FULL BLAST WRESTLING

F.B.W moves to television

 but Behomoth's heart can't take it.

John Foulds-Carter:  Behemoth couldn’t cut a promo to save his life but he was a guy who loved the business. He embodied what we took on when we decided to televise Full Blast Wrestling. That was a time when wrestling was taking off and becoming mainstream and we wanted it on our screens. We had looked at various different promotions but FBW had the fan base that we desired; we wanted a show that would appeal to people who knew about wrestling, which featured guys who could actually do the business in the ring. Our network was not interested in barb wire matches or offensive content; we wanted the best in-ring product without the controversy. Famous last words!

 

Anyway, those boys could wrestle, and Micky and Pitt knew how to put on a show. That side of things was all taken care of. What they didn't know about was the difference between a TV show and a live wrestling show. Their live show could be two or more hours and feature six or seven fights plus promos and breaks for the audience to go pee or buy a beer. The medium of television is different. They got one hour, with commercials, which meant that it was cut to about forty-eight minutes of show time. Everything had to be faster and bolder and better than before. The promos were a couple of minutes and the bouts were five to ten at the very most. Even this meant that not everyone was wrestling on TV every week and some characters would go a month without even making an appearance on the show if they were not booked into a storyline. They had all been used to being in the show every night when it was travelling, so that was a shock for some of those boys. I don't think it was about ego, most of it was about just wanting to be a part of the show and they worried that not being featured meant they were getting cut.

 

They needed have worried. They were still on the road almost every night, the only difference was that sometimes they were getting their faces on television and sometimes they were just wrestling for the fans in the hall like they had before.

 

Nobody was a finished product but we knew that they had a something that was really exciting and all we had to do was work on the rough edges and make it something which older kids and adults would want to watch through the medium of TV. Most wrestling shows at the time were going for the younger kids demographic; we saw FBW as something we could market differently because it was skill-based wrestling more than a lot of the cartoonish characters other brands offered.

 

It's an exciting moment when you start off on a new journey like that but, speaking as a producer, it is a total shot in the dark when you begin working with a group of amateurs who know nothing about our world. They knew how to perform but not on television. They didn't understand how to wrestle in a way that the cameras could see what was going on, which was an issue with only three cameras at ringside. We had to teach them time and again that if they were in a hold on the mat, they needed to have the guy facing the camera so we could see the pain on his face and not the seat of his pants.

 

The biggest learning curve for most of them, however, was speaking to the camera. There is always a group of guys in any wrestling promotion who can talk to the camera like they were born to do it, while others cannot string a sentence together. Most promotions have managers who talk for the dopes who are too inarticulate or nervous to speak for themselves. In FBW, Micky did most of that himself but we could only use him as a manager for one performer at a time on the show. So, until we got other managers in for people, the guys had to speak for themselves, even if they hated doing it. What is more, some of the ones who had previously been gold on the microphone at house shows became tongue-tied when we stuck a camera in their face. Corby Starr took to it like a duck to water but most of them struggled at first. We didn't mind too much; as far as we were concerned, the wrestling quality would sell the show and we would refine the product later.

 

The guy who had real trouble with speaking was Joe 'Behemoth' Sloane. When the network made me producer of the show, I met Joe and a bunch of the other guys for a meal to celebrate and get to know them a little. They ate and drank and swapped war stories about wrestling to impress me. I knew nothing about the business, so it was an eye-opening experience. I was thirty years old and had graduated media at Cornell just a couple of years before.

 

I had never cared a thing for wrestling or known much about it; I grew up as a baseball fan in Montana. I had wealthy parents and had left the big sky state for the big city. After graduating from Cornell in New York, I took the first job I found in a relatively small station named TYP1 because my university sweetheart was from Baltimore where the channel was based. We moved there and had a kid. I started to dream about taking over the station. However, it turned out that a degree from Cornell was not enough to launch me straight into the boardroom and I was assigned one dead-end show after another to produce until I finally bottomed out with the wrestling. I suppose at the time I did not have any idea how heavily the station were backing it financially, otherwise I would have realized that it was a big deal that I was the guy they chose to run the show. Instead, I spent that first night in the restaurant faking enthusiasm for the whole thing, not realizing that very soon I would fall so in love with that business that it would last a lifetime.

 

As we ate dinner and the night wore on, the guys all drunk and got louder and more raucous, except for Joe. He was this big, gentle man who actually sat and listened to the few things I had to say. He spoke to me about his childhood and asked questions about what we had planned for the show. The other guys may have been smarter than Big Joe in a general knowledge quiz but he clearly cared enough about the business to want to know what we had planned. He needed to hear that we were going to treat wrestling with a little respect and not belittle it in the way some people did.

 

“I have no idea what we are going to do, Joe” I told him. “I’m kind of new to the wrestling world”.

 

“Well, don’t worry,” he replied with obvious sincerely. “Just keep the people entertained and make them laugh with us and not at us. If you do that much, it will all work out just fine”.

 

I liked him a lot and found him to be articulate beyond his intelligence, so I thought he would be solid in front of a camera. This great big man with a booming voice could just yell into the microphone and scare his opponents to death in a way the audience would have no trouble buying into.

 

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Micky:  Jesus, that Behemoth was a dumb son-of-a-bitch. When we did house shows on the cities tour, he wouldn’t say a word. I’d walk out into the ring with him and rant and rave about him being this uncompassionate man-mountain; we told the audience he was a mute who had been raised in the wild and never learned to speak. The story was that as a kid he had nothing to play with so his only fun was picking up these huge boulders and tossing them around, which is how he had grown to this enormous size. The guy was about 6’5” and weighed God-only-knows how much, maybe upwards of 450lb.

 

When we got the TV deal, we were given two months to hit the road and work on the show before the first filming. The thing was billed as live but it was actually shot a week in advance and then edited to look live. All the guys stepped up their game at the time and we had a camera and photographer following us around to shoot promotional material for the upcoming show. Between shows the camera crew would cut a whole load of promos with the guys about feuds that were going to start the season of the show. Corby would cut loose about Clinton and Marlon, as those guys were booked into a 3-way feud for the title to start the TV off strong. Paddy and Shooter were making some hilarious promos about each other. The tag teams were awkward on the mic but the Houdini Brothers did shoot some nice promos with some pretty sinister magic tricks thrown in.

 

Behemoth was due to start the TV with a feud against Rip Skinner. The idea was to have Corby, Marlon and Clinton fight for gold, Paddy and Shooter do the technical stuff, the tag teams have some fun, and Rip and Behemoth would bring the pain.

 

We first stuck a camera in Joe Sloane’s face in Springfield, Illinois, and he almost passed out from the tension. All he had to do was say “I’m Behemoth and I like to crush people”. It took him damned hear a hundred takes and the dope still couldn’t get it. Here he was, supposed to be this huge, imposing monster and yet he was fumbling his words and sweating . His eyes were darting around in fear.

 

I told the cameraman we should stick with the mute barbarian gimmick he had on the tour but they wanted him to speak. I could see the logic in that; they felt like making him mute would close the door off to him speaking in the future. That showed how little they knew about wrestling; it really is just as easy as having the guy not appear for a couple of weeks, bringing him back in a different colored outfit and letting him talk. The crowd will forget he was ever mute within a minute. Or you just tell them some back story about how he got hit on the head and suddenly stopped being a mute.

 

Anyway, those two months passed by and Joe didn’t even cut any more promos. They just took pictures of him and filmed him in the ring and forgot all about the talking. This lasted right up until the week of the first TV airing, when the final vignettes were being cut. Suddenly they called in Big Joe and put him in front of a backdrop of boulders and wasteland and gave him some lines.

 

He read them carefully while the cameras were not running and then he started doing the damnedest thing. He began stretching and then doing scales with his voice. La-la-la-la-la. His voice was like a sack of gravel dropping on the ground. Flat as a pancake, the whole thing the same bum note. Then he closed his eyes and started doing this meditation breathing shit.

 

“What the fuck is going on?” I whispered to the camera operator.

 

“Acting lessons,” he replied. “I gave him the number of a friend of mine in Chattanooga and he’s been going there for full-day sessions on his day off”. Joe was busy screwing up his face and then opening and closing his mouth to loosen his jaw.

 

“He looks like he is taking a difficult shit.” I said.

 

“Don’t worry, just wait till he gets on the mic. You’ll see”.

 

And so they clicked on the camera and shoved a mic in front of Joe ‘Behemoth’ Sloane’s face. After he had stopped gurning, he cut one of the worst promos you’ve ever seen. It was the same stuttering, uncomfortable crap he had done weeks before. They called “cut” and he stood there in shock. He’d really thought that a month of acting lessons was going to change him from a wordless monolith into Marlon Brando. That acting teacher must have been some hack. Or maybe Joe just didn’t have a grain of talent for it. Either way, they shot that promo over and over until Joe was close to tears. In the end they got about eight seconds they could use but it never even made it to the TV.

 

The very next day Joe Sloane was working his match against Rip Skinner and the big man just keeled over flat on his back and died from a heart attack right there in the middle of the ring in front of the cameras. Bang! I think he was dead before he even hit the floor. Moving 450 pounds of mass around the ring every night had finally taken its toll.

 

+++

 

Pitt:  I say Micky is an asshole and I mean it in every respect. There was a time when I was in awe of him when we were first working the circuit together, running the shows and building the promotion into something. It was a big adventure. Of course, Micky did shady things all the time and treated people like dirt but I always thought he had a human being’s soul underneath it all, even if he had never shown it before. The night Behemoth died in the ring changed my opinion of that.

 

They carted his huge body off on a gurney. The paramedics had worked on him in the ring for a few minutes but they didn’t even rush him to the ambulance. He was gone and they knew that putting up a fight wasn’t going to change that.

 

Kids in the audience were crying and the people were filing out slowly. The TV cameras stopped rolling and we agreed to stage the show again the next week to finish filming and delay the TV debut by a week. The wrestlers were all in shock. I never thought of any of them as being particularly religious but Marlon Danger and the Hispanic boys were praying together. Clinton and Corby were both in tears. Rip Skinner seemed totally unconcerned even though Big Joe died being dropped by a huge clothesline from Rip at the same time his heart burst, which we only found out later when the autopsy results came in. For all Rip knew at the time, he might have been the cause of death. He didn’t seem to care too much.

 

It was Micky that really worked me up, though. Not a couple of minutes after the accident, while the paramedics were still in the ring working on Joe’s body, I heard him pestering the cameraman. “Don’t turn it off, keep it rolling, we can use this later. This is good stuff”. I wanted to lay him out cold.

 

“What the hell are you doing?” I asked, pulling him away.

 

“You gotta see the bigger picture, Pitt. We got a promotion just getting started and this is publicity. A week from now we hit the TV and we can sell this. Imagine the tagline: The wrestling promotion so dangerous it kills people!”

 

I was almost speechless. “Micky, he’s dead. You get that, right? He’s our friend and he’s dying out there.”

 

“Sure, I get it. I’m real sad. But you gotta think how we can work it. If he dies, we need to find a way to put a positive spin on it for the rest of us. We can put Rip Skinner over as a killer, call his clothesline the ‘Deadman Maker’ or something like that. This could be a real launch-pad for his character.” He bustled and hustled in that horriblie little way of his.

 

“You’re sick.” I said and walked away. A few days later Micky was already working all the angles on how to make it benefit us (or maybe I should say benefit him) that Behemoth was dead. He couldn’t give a rat’s ass about Joe, the man that was playing the character. When he was drunk or telling the story of Joe’s death to others he would say, “I don’t think it was the heart attack that killed him. I think it was the stress of doing the promo the day before. His heart couldn’t take it”.  Damn, it might even have been the truth.