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“That’s what it’s all about,” he said after the match. “To not do anything for ten minutes and still have the people going crazy is a wet dream! I wish we could have that every night!”

I wasn’t sure if he meant good matches or wet dreams.

Another Catch routine the heels followed was the instigating of fines. If a referee spotted someone breaking the rules, they would fine the offender for bad behavior. A good villain would do something dastardly during the match that everyone but the ref would see. When the blue-eye had no choice but to retaliate, he would get busted and fined by the ref. If the gimmick was done properly, the fans would be furious and volunteer to pay the fine for the innocent man. After the match, the paid fines were split up three ways with your opponent and the ref.

Because we were wrestling in front of a lot of the same fans every night, working the fine wasn’t something you could pull off regularly. It also wasn’t something that just anyone on the card could sell to the customers; you had to be good at it and have a certain level of heat with the crowd.

The best fine producer in our tournament was a guy from Tennessee named Moondog Randy Colley. He’d spent a few years in the WWF as part of the Moondogs tag team and claimed to have invented the leather-clad face-painted gimmick of the tag team Demolition, which Vince then stole from him. I liked Demolition better when they were called the Road Warriors anyway.

Randy was great at getting the crowd to hate him, which made it easy to get them to pay the fines that he caused. He also used solid ring psychology and everything he did made perfect sense.

He carried a giant dinosaur bone to the ring that he would use as a foreign object during his matches. Whenever he won it was because of the bone and whenever he lost it was because of the bone. It was a simple rule that I’d learned in camp...if you have a gimmick, make sure to use it. Moondog used his gimmick every match and the bone became his trademark.

Another of my opponents was a New Zealander named Rip Morgan. Rip’s gimmick was performing a Maori haka prior to every match. The haka was a combination dance and chant that became one of the highlights of the night—the fans loved seeing it.

Rip asked me one night, “Have you ever thought about going to New York?”

“I don’t feel like I’m ready for the WWF yet.”

“Really,” he replied. “I think you should send them a tape. You’d be perfect for Vince.”

I was honored that he felt that way, but I told him I wanted to get more experience first. What I didn’t tell him was I would’ve gone to New York in a New York minute, except for the fact that nobody had ever asked me.

There were some very good workers in our tournament but there were also a lot of bad ones too, the worst being our boss. Rene Lasartesse had been one of the most hated and feared heels in Europe in the 1960s and 1970s but now he was just plain red reels. He was in his late sixties and insisted on wearing this ricockulous Dracula cape to the ring, because it “scared children.”

He wrestled every night, his version of wrestling consisting of standing in the corner throwing the worst kicks and punches imaginable. Worst of all, since he was the booker he won all his matches and won them with the worst finishing move of all time...a cartwheel.

With his victim lying prone on the mat, he’d put his hand on his throat and do the worst old-man cartwheel ever with the idea being that he crushed his opponent’s larynx. It reality, he only crushed their pride.

One night as Rene was feebly kicking me, one of my contact lenses popped out and crumpled up on the mat like a dying spider. I deftly rolled over, grabbed my little buddy and put it in my mouth. Storing the lens without swallowing it while trying to carry Rene to a good match was like trying to pat my stomach and rub my head at the same time.

But it wasn’t just the wrestlers that made it hard to have a good match. The tournament