Posted on by bdamage1
Brian Damage
This is the 533rd installment of the ‘Wrestling with Sin‘ series. A group of stories that delves into the darker, underbelly of pro wrestling. Many of the stories involve such subjects as sex, drugs, greed and in some cases even murder! As with every single story in the Sin series, I do not condone or condemn the alleged participants. We simply retell their stories by researching interviews, newspapers, magazines and various other sources of media.
Tully Phone
During the earlier portion of Tully Blanchard’s career, he worked for his father Joe Blanchard’s territory Southwest Championship Wrestling. At one point, Tully was appointed booker of his father’s promotion. Tully readily admitted that he made several bad business decisions for the territory. In large part, due to his growing cocaine habit. Blanchard said he overpaid talent to keep them happy. While other promotions were offering 30% of the gate, Tully was offering 46%. In addition to that, Tully was paying around $7,000 to the USA network to air their product.
The once red hot “outlaw” wrestling promotion was seeing attendance dwindling and Tully’s personal life was begin to spiral out of control with his addiction to coke. Tully had to walk away from the promotion because his drug use was severely affecting business. While he stepped away as both a wrestler and booker of Southwest Wrestling, the Sheepherders temporarily took over booking duties. Blanchard decided to return to the territory after a brief hiatus, still dealing with drug problems.
With business continuing to wane, Tully made his biggest mistake yet, when he came up with an idea to generate interest in the promotion. Blanchard went on the air and asked wrestling fans to call a number to vote for their favorite Southwest matches. As it turned out, Tully gave out the number to the USA network. The network’s call center was bombarded by calls from wrestling fans. So much so, executives at USA decided to cancel their deal with Southwest Championship Wrestling and allowed Vince McMahon and the WWF to swoop in and take their TV slot.
Are You Smarter Than A 9th Grader?
While on tour with the WWF in July of 1993, tragedy struck wrestler Kamala aka James Harris. His youngest sister and niece were murdered at the hands of an estranged boyfriend. The boyfriend, then turned the gun on himself and attempted suicide but survived. As the tragic news reached Kamala, he asked and received time off to deal with the sad situation and tend to his family.
When he returned to the WWF, Kamala said that two weeks later, he was handed his release from the company. Kamala said he was not given a reason for his release. He believed his 9th grade education allowed the WWF and other promoters to take advantage of him. As bitter and angry as he was, Kamala grew to forgive McMahon and the WWF, by saying he owed a lot to the company for making him a bigger star than he ever imagined.
Smoke Break
In 1993, Road Warrior Hawk joined Eastern Championship Wrestling as a singles wrestler. According to then ECW owner Tod Gordon, Hawk loved working in the Philadelphia based promotion. Hawk’s reasoning was that throughout his career, he had dealt with way too many shady promoters. Hawk felt that Tod Gordon was upfront and honest with him and paid him well and on time…something he apparently didn’t always experience.
Gordon claimed that one evening after a show, Hawk approached Tod backstage and told him since Tod never lied to him, Hawk wasn’t going to lie to him. Hawk went on to tell him that he was going to skip his next ECW date so he could stay home and smoke crack. That was basically the end of Hawk’s ECW run.
Steif the Thief
George Steif was a Bulgarian born professional wrestler, who emigrated to the United States and took up residence in San Francisco, California. His wrestling career began in 1910 and lasted up until 1914. In July of 1914, Steif was arrested at a San Francisco hotel on charges of writing fraudulent checks. It was reported that Steif swindled a bank in the San Fran area out of 500 dollars.
Detectives said that not only did Steif pass bad checks in San Francisco, but in places like Utah and Montana as well. When Steif was arrested, no money was found on him. Steif admitted guilt and was eventually put in jail for an undisclosed amount of time and then reportedly deported back to Bulgaria. Steif never wrestled again after his arrest.