My career I definitely owe to two people. The first is my grandmother. When I was growing up we used to watch Championship Wrestling from Florida, hosted by Gordon Solie I might add, on WTOG-TV Channel 44. My grandmother's favorites were the Brisco Brothers(Jack & Jerry), Bugsy McGraw, and The American Dream Dusty Rhodes. My favorites, at the time were Steve Keirn, Mike Graham and a young wrestler named Jimmy Richland. Her least favorites, or most hated, were Terry Funk and his brother Dory Funk Jr. She used to call them the Skunk Brothers. My least favorite was Kendo Nagasaki, with Kevin Sullivan running a close second. I would go to see wrestling when it was still housed in the Fort Homer Hesterly Armory on Howard/Armenia Ave in Tampa. I told my grandmother thats what I want to do. We watched wrestling til the beginning of the 80's, when she passed away and CWF vanished off of WTOG-TV, and I started losing interest in wrestling, or so I thought. I would catch WWF every once in a while when they had Saturday Night's Main Event on NBC. It wasn't til the late eighties that my interest starting sparking in wrestling again. That spark was started by Wrestlemania Two when I saw the Macho Man Randy Savage take on Tito Santana for the Intercontinental Title. That was it...blood starting boiling and heart started pumping and I was hooked again.
The second person is Taryn Michaels. She began to push me into going after my dreams and to make them a reality. I went to the USF Sundome in Tampa to see WWF Live. It just so happened that the Macho King, with Queen Sherri, was on the card that night. It wasn't til mid 1990 when I began to make my trek towards the ring. I was working for Jewel Osco when Johnny Ace, at the time one half of the Dynamic Dudes, came in. We started talking about wrestling and where to go to learn the art. Johnny gave me Steve Keirn's number, but unfortunately he was in Japan wrestling. Roadblock Number One. A year went by, I had left Jewel Osco and moved to Tampa.
Going to school I had weekends off, when I saw a commercial that Pretty Boy Larry Sharpe's Monster Factory had an school opening in Tampa. They were having tryouts the same day as Wrestlemania in April of 1992. I headed for tryouts with my friends in tow, one of the being Taryn. When I got to the school, I found out that the teacher was none other then "Gigolo" Jimmy Backlund, formerly known as Jimmy Richland. Took every thing in my power not to ask for an autograph. Tryouts went well and I enlisted in the school.
FLORIDA MONSTER FACTORY STUDENTS
and, myself...