Several people I knew thru the years had asked what or how I became a writer for newsletters. known as a 'sheet' writer. With this article, I'm gonna take you on the journey of how it happened, how I..at the time...'honed' my style to what it was to where it got to be pretty well known in certain circles.. and how what I wrote which was what I felt at those times.. got me alot of heat. Mostly because nobody at the time either broached a certain subject the way I did, or decided to go down a road on certain subjects in detail that nobody at the time really had the courage to openly say it, or say it like I did.
I have had letters printed in Pro Wrestling Illustrated, Inside Wrestling, so that planted a seed. when I found out about newsletters, the Observer and Torch weren't always so 'eager' to print what I wrote because alot of what I had to say was stinging and against what the masses that were their readers had to say. Someone told me about this little newsletter down in Mississippi called "Pro Wrestling Monthly". Nothing fancy, not the most professional looking thing but when I got sent an issue, the editor Sheryl had written in her editor's column that she was looking for more columnists. So I wrote something up mish mash that added some negative comments on things I saw on tv at the time. and after going thru about maybe, a dozen different titles, the title "Below the Belt w/Bill" clicked in. Logic being, I'm hitting below the belt with my comments and opinions so why not try to tie that in with the name.
Sheryl writes me back after I sernt her that and welcomed me aboard. Now I had a forum to speak how I feel from an old school territory fanatic point of view, along with comments on what certain things 'inside' the business. After acouple issues a woman i started trading tapes with tells me about a newsletter called the Wrestling Edge, based in NYC. I made copies of the columns from Pro Wrestling Monthly and sent it to the editors. They liked what I wrote and wham, another place to write, then another one in alabama soon followed. I first started just writing one column for all three but then, because I was 'getting over' (both good and bad),each editor wanted a different column, no more same column for all of them. I was actually turned down by Georgiann at the wrestling chatterbox because to her, I was 'too negative' in what I wrote. Something I always found funny now that most newsletter writers seem to write some things the very same way I do, ad libbing comments that sting. Did I start a trend? I can't really take that credit I can say though, I was one of the ones that started telling a truthful opinion on certain things and if it stung, tough, truth hurts, deal with it.
So I decided I needed a 'niche', something that would have me stand out more than the others who had a more calmer traditional approach. So when I'd get my Observer and/or torch, I'd start looking for something 'deeper' to expound on in my column. Then, it came to me, slowly...
Hulk Hogan had put out a music cd. while the claims of him selling tons of them seemed believeable. when I actually saw an employee at a walmart, featherdusting Hogan's CD. That clicked with me, as well as the fact I saw that his CD was moved to a clearance shelf. So I wrote about that and the fact that I thought it was funny people are making claims this CD is selling like hotcakes, but I see it getting feather dusted on a clearance shelf. Spoke the truth, the fact was right before my eyes..
Sheryl from PWM calls me and says I may need to write a retraction about the Hogan cd. She got a call from someone claiming to be Hogan's lawyer who wasn't happy. I told Sheryl the fuck if I'm writing a retraction, I'll go and take a picture of where the cd was and the employee feather dusting it. I even knew someone else at a music store who told me they moved Hogan's cd to the five dollar sale shelf. So I told Sheryl to pass my number to the lawyer and he can talk to me.
Someone named 'Dewitt' or claimed to be calls me the next day threatening 'pending legal litigation' for what I wrote about the Hogan CD. I simply said "come with it, I'll see you in court". This guy tried to put a scare in me and it almost worked but I said he'd have to come to NH(where I was living) and when we're in the court room I'll have the proof to back up what I wrote. I hung up and decided to check further. If I was really gonna be brought to court I may as well get as much ammo as i could.
So I went to my local walmart where I saw the feather dusting, took a picture of the section where Hogan's CD was, went to the walmart in the next town of somersworth and did the same thing, had my friend at a music store write up a statement saying that Hogan's CD wasn't selling and it was moved to the clearance rack. and the kmart in my town never even heard of it.
This guy 'Dewitt' calls the next day again making threats and I again said bring it on. I explained what I had to back what I wrote and said, "How are you gonna explain it when I present all this proof in court in front of a judge"? I then asked him when wil the supenoa be coming so that way I can look forward to this because when it com,es I can have it be known in every way I could. He hung up. I never heard from him again, no litigation evber came and I never wrote a retraction. I did mention the phone calls and what I had to back it up in my very next column. Whether there really was any litigation or not I'll never know, probably not but you can never tell so it was good to be prepared.
After that the editor's at the Wrestling Edge wanted to put a disclaimer on my column. At first I was kinda irked about it but since nobody else had a disclaimer that must mean I'm hitting someone's nerve so I decided to embrace it. The disclaimer was your basic "the following doesn't reflect the views of anyone at the Wrestling Edge", and I used that to base alot of future things based on that, it's my view and my opinion? You just gave me the licence to let it rip, and I did.
I was getting tapes of different indy groups around the country and at the time there weren'ty many that really impressed me, so I went on a tagent about it and when other indy promoters complained to the editors of each newsletter I came back with "If you're group is as good as you say it is, prove it, send me a tape and let me see it". You'd be very surprised how many promoters fell for that. Sometimes I went out of my way to trade off a tape for an indy group tape just so I'd have some fuel for the fire. One of the guys who's attention I aquired in this was a guy named Dale Pierce. He was involved in acouple groups in the Az/Ca. area. most notably, the AIWA(which I've written about in other articles). Dale and I for weeks went thru this snail mail debate back and forth and it did get quite heated. Dale and I had some mutal friends and guys on both sides said "you and Dale butting heads..whoa...".
If anyone knows Dale he's very outspoken, so am I, so pitting us against each other lead to some every lively letters going back and forth. it got real heated at one point and he did get one good shot on me, he sent a letter that said 'you want a tape, here's some tape, enjoy the tape'..what it was, was a piece of duct tape, masking tape and scotch tape, LOL! I was SSOO pissed, but I tried not to let it show when i wrote him back. It was escalating and then we somehow managed to find a middle ground on it all before it went way too far. He sent me some AIWA stuff which compared to alot of Northeast indy groups that featured the same wrestlers in the same match ups with no real storyline to them, the AIWA was a breath of fresh air. And watching what Dale did for that group was very entertaining so he kinked the armor..
I wound up getting alot of heat with some guys in ECW. While I loved their product, I went thru the process of ordering an ecw merchandise catalog, what I got, was a tape list from RF Video. I knew all about RF Video as they had full page ads in wrestling magazines, but had some of the worst quality tapes I had ever seen. I knew the things I had that improved quality on tapes and I had better quality of alot of their stuff than they did, how can that be if they have the full page ads? And why is it when i order an ecw merchandise catalog so i could buy a t-shirt I keep getting this same tape list from RF Video?
I wrote a very scathing section of a column for all the newsletters about it and the editors of the wrestling edge always went to the ECW shows in Philadelphia, so they took a bunch of the issue with that scathing statement and handed it out. Mikey Whipwreck was rumored to be pissed that I wrote that. I never did get an actual ecw merchandise catalog and had to have the editors at the edge actually buy the shirt at a show for me because I couldn't order one. Every month I kept the 'update' going on the merchandise catalog. "Yep, got yet another tape list from RF Video instead of the merchandise catalog and this tape list is currently lining the bottom of a birdcage which tells you what I think of them". Needless to say, I didn't make many friends doing that but, truth hurt.
Thanks to the Torch and Observer always printing the results of indy shows, my next idea came right before me, which lead to me wanting to get involved with an indy group(which we all know now from you reading things on my webpage, I did do).
They'd print results that had 'name' guiys on the show, but they're drawing less than 200 people in attendence. This still annoys me because if you have well known guys headlining, you should be able to draw if you're promoting the show. But when you see attendence numbers like, 98, 150, 12(and that was with the rock n roll express and tommy rich), that kinda tells you just what kind of 'promoter' that person is if that's the best you can do. So...with making credit to where i got the results from, I starterd making mentions of this, over and over, and over again...stating that if this is the best you can do then someone needs to go to promoter school. I went from coast to coast with the results, canada, japan, any show results that had low attewndence like that proved my point, and to this day it still does. Want to talk about putting a bullseye on my back? That did it. I had a ton of heat and got many letters and phone calls about it. These promoters actually tried to get the editors to stop me from writing about it. Didn't happen as the editors stated "there's a disclaimer in his column for a reason and he's making a valid point, nobody else has ever mentioned this before and he has the forum to write about whatever he wants".
Between that and how i thought alot of what I saw in indy groups sucked, got the attention of the late Dennis Caroluzzo, and his bunch that included current IWF promoter Tommy Fierro and a photo guy named Eric Simms. I wrote about all that in a seperate piece called "Drawing Heat By Being Me". Alot of these promoters had the same excuse they hid behind when it came to0 being caled out on why you have big names, but can't draw good attendence. "If he thinks he's the know it all then why doesn't he do it". It was their way to deflect their own failures off them and try to spin it on me so that way they could cover their own ass and don't have to explain themselves.
When I helped locally promote the first WWA New England Show in Rochester, NH. (afternoon and evening show) and it drew 200 for afternoon and 480 for the evening show, I proved my point. I made a point to have them results printed in the torch and observer...and saw who was running that week, the week before and week after. With George Steele, Sgt. Slaughter and a special appearance by Kiler Kowalski I had better attendence than most of the other groups that ran that included acouple ECW house shows. Knowing what I did to actually 'promote' the show, and seeing the end results that blew away other indy groups that had big names, I knew exactly what kind of column was coming next.
I was able to get a writing gig at Wrestling Then and Now and Evan allowed me to write exactly what it took for me to get them WWA New England Shows off the ground. So as can be found on this page and the WT&N webpage, I wrote in detail which included a radio ticket giveaway, getting off my ass and doing everything I could and then out drawing al my critics was indeed a wonderful ace in the hole on everything I had wrote.
The very next column had me yes, bragging that I did it, I answered the critics and here was the result, and compared them to the critic's shows who ran shows and how I out drew them. Global Wrestling newsletter in alabama and the wrestling edge went out of their way and sent that issue right to Caroluzzo's p.o. box. rub salt in the wound and after that, the critcs for some reason, got very silent. Imagine that.
I'm sure some had that "oh he was just lucky' excuse, when people get proven wrong they seem to always have excuses over just admitting they were wrong. so when I locally promotred the second WWA New England show in Farmington, NH and drew over 500 people. by doing the same things I did for the rochester show along with the president of the farmington 500 boys club getting an ad on a cable access channel...The critics had nothing else to say. I did exactly what I said needed to be done, get off your ass and actually 'promote' the show. How hard is that? Obviously by seeing some like Tony Falk's promotion, the answer seems to be.. very hard because I still see these same dismal results for having big names on the shows. Laziness isn't an excuse and that's what it really comes down to at the end of the day. No excuse a promoter can come up with can cover obvious laziness.
An example of that laziness was in Sivano Sousa. When he was doing his Atlantic Wrestling Federation, and was runing Manchester, NH on a regular basis(at a place called St. Ceceilia's Hall). He always had telemarketers do the ticket selling, and one poster on the side of the building in Manchester. All the other posters were where? In the trunk of his car. he and I were exchanging tapes one night and I noticed the advertising posters. I suggested he give me a few and I could put them up in the Rochester area where I lived. That way people know, there's wrestling 45 minutes away, easy drive, etc etc. His answer was, "Nobody from Rochester will come".
Hmm..I live in Rochester, my friend dave who was the one who bought me the ticket to a manchester show that got the ball rolling, lived in Rochester. We had acouple other people from rochester coming just on our word of mouth. I made that mention to him and it went in one ear, and out the other, and the next show he had when he saw me, dave, Kevin, Matt and acouple others, ALL...from where? You guessed it, Rochester. He didn't say much to m,e after that and another suggestion about putting posters up went sailing faster in one ear and out the other than the first time. That was when I knew I had to explore other options about bringing a show to Rochester. Nobody else was running that area so ther old "you don't go into someone else's backyard" excuse couldn't fly. I went as far as to ask the member of the state boxing and wrestling commission that did all the shows if there was a registered promoter for that area and the answer was no, open market and he told me this is the things I could do..Which is why I made the move to the WWA.
I made small mentions of that in my column and even made the mention of local promoting when the EWA's show in Waterville Maine didn't draw good. Waterville's a fairly big town so whoever was in charge of the local part really didn't do much. If i was a resident of Maine which is a requirement to be a promoter there. I could've stepped up but because I lived across the border in NH, no go. I did try to send feelers for border towns like sanford, maine, berwick, etc and had the interest been there I could've given the info to someone like Josh Shea and he'd know what to do with it.
When I started doing reviews of shows I worked on some said I was just putting over the guys because I was 'a company man'. that I was 'told' to write it this way or that way. Nobody...told me how to write anything in any way...I slammed some of the matches I saw and based it not only how I saw it but how it was or wasn't getting over to the paying crowd. When the WWF training Dojo was part the WWA's shows not once did Bruce or Tom Pritchard come up to me and ask/suggest or tell me to write something a certain way. I put over who I personally liked based on what they did in the ring and how it got over to the paying crowd. Funny how the guys I put over went on to the WWE, be it the main shows or developmental, and one of them, Matt Bloom, currently wrestles in New Japan. I must've saw something right because he's a great example of it.
Alot of the newsletters I wrote for were shutting down for whatever reasons, and when i tried to get into other ones they knew the heat I brought with what I wrote. So seeing this I kinda knew my run was ending, they didn't want a stick of dynamite that would have explosive heat on them so it started to fizzle and the timing of that was good because my divorce was final, the bipolar woman I was dating was giving me more of a roller coaster ride than any amusement park could give me. And I was getting burned out.
Now if I get the bug to write something, I have my own webpage and I can definetely answer to nobody but myself in what I write. Writing these memories has been nice because I can go back in time to recapture things that aren't posted anywhere else on the internet, and gets whatever bug for writing out of my system. I can honestly say that seeing how some people write editorials,etc on wrestling now, it's funny that I was one of the first ones to do it that way and got slammed for it then, but it seems to be ok to do now. Funny how people change in time sometimes..
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