August 21, 2025 • 39 mins
Bradley Jay Fills in on NightSide
Wrestling is mankind’s oldest and most basic form of recreational combat, tracing its origins back to the dawn of civilization. The WWE has made international stars out of wrestlers like Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson, Hulk Hogan, local John Cena, and Killer Kowalski to name a few. Author and former host of the radio program Wrestle Radio, USA, joined us to talk about the evolution of pro wrestling!
Wrestling is mankind’s oldest and most basic form of recreational combat, tracing its origins back to the dawn of civilization. The WWE has made international stars out of wrestlers like Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson, Hulk Hogan, local John Cena, and Killer Kowalski to name a few. Author and former host of the radio program Wrestle Radio, USA, joined us to talk about the evolution of pro wrestling!
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
It's Night Side with Dan Ray on WBZY Boston's me Radio.
Speaker 2 (00:07):
BZ News Radio ten thirty. Thanks to David Bieber.
Speaker 3 (00:10):
For all the work bringing all in those artifacts in
so that we might kind of relive the Boston of
the seventies. And during the break we madly took formal
photos of these things on a black background, and later
on we'll do a slide show which I'll post on
(00:31):
my Facebook page for you to see and it will
be a companion to the broadcast that we just did.
So again, if you want to get involved with this,
follow me on Facebook and the way to get there
is go.
Speaker 2 (00:45):
To BRADLEYJ dot org and just well it'll be very
clear what to do.
Speaker 3 (00:52):
So we're ready to talk to Ed Simcus and actually
the Ed's a person that I believe David Bieber turned
me on to and we're going to talk about in
some detail, in great detail, actually the evolution of professional
wrestling and another project that that's doing.
Speaker 2 (01:08):
And one reason that the.
Speaker 3 (01:09):
Evolution of professional wrestling is particularly interesting to New Englanders
and particularly relevant is there's a big New England connection
when it comes to wrestling. And we'll get to that first. Hello, Ed,
how do you.
Speaker 4 (01:28):
Do, Bradley, I'm all right. Let me ask you a
quick question. Do you need me to put on my
radio voice or can we just talk?
Speaker 3 (01:35):
It seems to me you already have your radio voice
cooking right now.
Speaker 4 (01:38):
All right, I'm ready to go.
Speaker 3 (01:40):
All right, we can just talk.
Speaker 2 (01:42):
I mean I don't. I don't have a radio voice.
Speaker 3 (01:44):
A lot of highly paid DJs from my past did
not either, so I wouldn't worry about it.
Speaker 4 (01:51):
I'm fine.
Speaker 3 (01:52):
I want to include you in this, just as we
did in the last and the most most recent segments
we did. How do you like professional wrestling? Do you
follow it? Do you care about the personalities into it?
Do you think it's ridiculous? Do you think it's fake?
Do you think it's real? Even if you don't like it?
I mean, that's a story too. Tell me that six one, seven, two, five, four.
Speaker 2 (02:16):
Ten thirty. So Ed, how did you just? How did
you know?
Speaker 3 (02:20):
The obvious question is how did you get so wildly
into professional wrestling? Because you'll see people. ED knows this
inside and out. He's got all kinds of secrets that
we're gonna learn about. And how did you get into it?
Speaker 4 (02:33):
I can't tell you the secrets. But how did I
get into it? Well, I was a rather young lad.
I was living in Dorchester, mass and a triple decker,
and I was on the second floor with my family,
and up above us my grandparents lived, my grandmother and grandfather,
and every once in a while I heard a lot
of noise going on upstairs, like banging things, and I
(02:54):
was asking what it was, and it turned on my
grandfather was a pretty hardcore pro wrestling. These were the
early days of television, and he would always watch and
he knew it was real, and he would always root
for the good guy, and he would always hate the
bad guy. And that's what I was heard. What I
was hearing he was banging on the furniture when the
(03:14):
bad guy was beating up the good guy.
Speaker 3 (03:17):
And you know, I never thought maybe he was he
and your wife were rumbling up there.
Speaker 4 (03:22):
No, he was watching TV. He got caught up in it,
and somehow I honestly discovered it by chance flipping one
of my three television stations, totally innocently on TV. There
it was. I was probably watching a show called Bedlam
from Boston. I'm really not sure if that was the title.
(03:43):
In the early nineteen sixties. I was a little lad.
I was a tyke, and I was seeing these two
big guys in their black underwear beating the tar out
of each other. And one would get knocked down and
writhe around on the mat and he would get up
and knock the other guy down and he would ride around,
(04:04):
and then it would happen all over again, back and
forth and back and forth. And I got it as
a ten or eleven year old. It made me laugh.
I said, this isn't real. This is funny, And you
know what, it still makes me laugh.
Speaker 2 (04:18):
Yeah, But back in the day, wasn't it real?
Speaker 3 (04:20):
I mean way back at least.
Speaker 4 (04:23):
Oh, you want to go way back. I mean it
was way before my parents were born. But yeah, when
you go back to like eighteen hundreds, early nineteen hundreds,
there wasn't anything called pro wrestling. It was just called wrestling.
It was It was a legitimate sporting contest.
Speaker 3 (04:39):
It was like boxing, only.
Speaker 4 (04:41):
It was like boxing were wrestling. Unfortunately, the matches would
go on for hours. They would wrestle until somebody pinned
somebody else, and it was boring. It became boring to
people who were watching it. There was no TV. Of course,
back then people go and went and paid. And what
happened was a couple of guys in the business who
(05:03):
put on these contests or wrestled, they got an idea, Hey,
maybe we can sell more tickets. These were the wrestlers
and promoters. And two of the guys were named Ed
Strangler Lewis and Tutzmont. Great names. This is, I'd say.
In the nineteen twenties and thirties, they said to each other,
there were pals. They said, why are we beating the
(05:26):
hell out of each other for real? Why don't we
figure out a way to make money together? And what
they came up with was pro wrestling. Make it fake.
It didn't matter who the best wrestler was, which was
what was happening up until then. It became showbiz in
the twenties and thirties, and they would you have predetermined
(05:46):
finishes and they would play to the audience. And this
thing grew in the nineteen thirties in the forties and
people started coming crowds. Came a guy named Louthez with
the champ I don't know for twelve fifteen years were
too fire.
Speaker 3 (06:04):
I want to make sure I understand. In the beginning
it was real and the turn of the century, but
real wrestling was too boring because it would go on
and on and on. So you know, what we'll do
is choreograph this so we know when it's going to
be over. We can make it last the perfect amount
of time relative to people's attention span, and we'll make
(06:26):
more money that way. And plus we won't get all
beat up.
Speaker 4 (06:29):
And well they of course they did get a little
beat up, but yes, they they choreographed it and it
attracted the crowds. At what the crowds got into was
booing and cheering and having fun, kind of like my grandfather.
Speaker 3 (06:43):
And whether did they assign villains? Was there a known
villain or heel then?
Speaker 4 (06:48):
And then?
Speaker 2 (06:49):
And the good guys and the good guys always.
Speaker 4 (06:51):
Won, you know your term heel and villain very good,
and the good guys were called babyfaces, yes, very good
and baby paces yeah, you know, for the first for
the most part, and back in those days, the good
guys were usually the champions, but they would just take
(07:11):
care of any bad guys or villains who came through town,
and they would work with each other for a little while.
They would do two or three matches over maybe a
month or something. I'm not really sure of that time span.
But in one of them there would be a disqualification
and one guy would lose. In another one that would
be a different kind of a finish, and the other
(07:33):
guy would lose and would finally have a third match
and it would be I don't know, a steel cage
match or something, and that would end that program between
those two wrestlers, and then they would go on to
fight other people. So was it just went on and
on and on. It was a long, long spanning story before.
Speaker 3 (07:52):
We get into wrestling further, tell me a little bit
about you and you're your background and other things you've
been doing, and we're going to actually talk at length
about your new one of your newer projects.
Speaker 2 (08:06):
But I'm just curious, who is this Ed Simpkiss guy.
Speaker 4 (08:11):
You know, I always wanted to be a pro wrestling referee.
I really did when I was a kid, but I
hurt my wrist and I couldn't slam it down on
the Masters Whore the one two three. I am a
local boy Dorchester. I'm an Emersonian. I'm a graduate of
Emerson College. I'm a film critic. One of my offshoot things,
(08:32):
these days is I read short stories on a podcast
for blind listeners. I play guitar. I just learned how
to play gut Feeling by Devo on my acoustic guitar.
Oh my god, that's an important thing in my life.
Speaker 2 (08:53):
Just as an a sign in the future.
Speaker 3 (08:55):
It's looking like I mean, I'm thinking as a seventy
eighty percent answer, we're going to have Mark mothers Law
from Devo as a guest next week. Oh and for
you and anybody else, there's a new Devo documentary which
is not just about the music, but it really gets
(09:17):
into the the political side of what made them sick.
Speaker 2 (09:21):
For the longest time, they didn't even think about music.
Speaker 3 (09:23):
They were into somehow figuring out how to show that
the country and the world was no longer evolving but
de evolving evolving.
Speaker 4 (09:33):
And I'm actually I've seen the film, I know.
Speaker 2 (09:35):
So it's really great.
Speaker 4 (09:36):
So that's it is a great film.
Speaker 2 (09:38):
That's on't aside, but it's kind of a plug for
the future for next week.
Speaker 4 (09:41):
I hope that's also a gomman to learn the song.
I just learned it yesterday.
Speaker 2 (09:45):
Are you good on the gets there?
Speaker 4 (09:47):
No? I play in my room. Nobody else gets to
hear it me.
Speaker 3 (09:50):
Too good, So we have a handle on who you are.
Back to the back to the wrestling. Oh look at
the time, I'm going to continue with the ed and
wrestling right after this quick quick message on WBZ.
Speaker 1 (10:05):
You're on Night Side with Dan Ray on WBZ Boston's
news Radio.
Speaker 3 (10:11):
Read the j for Dan little story before we continue
with our guest, Ed simcis talking about pro wrestling. I
grew up in a very very weirdly rural, Gothic rural area.
My grandparents lived on a farm with cattle and you know,
the whole deal. And I remember when I was I
don't know, had to be five or so, grandfather sitting
(10:34):
in his old beat leather easy chair in his corner
smoking his pipe, and grandmother sitting in her rocking chair
for real knitting, and both of them were watching well wrestling,
and they were watching Bruno San Martino and I think
(10:55):
Big Chief Strongbow. And that was my introduction to it.
Was in black and white, and then it kind of
went out of my brain until the you know, the
Hogans of the world came back. I'm fascinated, and believe me,
we're going to hear some inside stuff on how it
works from our guest ed Simkis.
Speaker 4 (11:18):
Now, well, can I talk to you about the TV
thing that you just mentioned and I mentioned with my grandfather. Yes,
TV is what kind of made it, what made pro
wrestling it was in the fifties, pro wrestling was a
major part of television, mainly because it was so cheap
to produce. You know, you point the camera at the
ring and usually just one camera. You have an announcer
(11:38):
and a couple of guys, sometimes four guys wrestling. That
was it. It was all about entertaining people, and a lot
of people watched and of course the best way to
use television was as a form of advertising for the
live wrestling events, and that's what they did. That's how
they attracted people. That weird.
Speaker 3 (11:57):
Did it go from becoming real choreographed?
Speaker 4 (12:02):
Oh? Early on in the nineteen twenties, Oh okay, really,
but it was the sixties, like you were probably just
talking about. You know, Bruno Sanmartino became the champ. He
was the most popular ever at that time. And I
mean this guy if he was wrestling in town, if
he was in New York, Bruno Sanmartino would sell out
(12:23):
Madison Square Garden. When he would maybe fight Killer Kowalski
and fans would be turned away at the door. That's
how big it was in the sixties.
Speaker 3 (12:32):
Now were these was this a case of these people
are working really hard and making nothing or do they
get paid big ten?
Speaker 4 (12:40):
You know, it's really hard to tell what these guys
got paid because everybody lies in the wrestling business. But
it's fairly established that Bruno, the big guy at the time,
was taken in in the nineteen sixties approximately one hundred
thousand a year, and that's nineteen sixties dollars, which so
it would be so much more nous. He was a
(13:00):
huge star. He was the star, and nobody else was
making that much. But I think he did pretty well
and eventually, I mean the guys and women today, depending
where they are on the ladder of success, where whether
they're wearing championship belts or not, they're up in the millions.
Speaker 2 (13:20):
You know, it's.
Speaker 3 (13:23):
Thirty. If you'd like to chime in, maybe your favorite wrestler,
what you think of for wrestling either way, and I
do need a favor. Can somebody calculate look up online
what one hundred thousand dollars in nineteen sixty.
Speaker 2 (13:35):
Dollars is now, because I'd like to know that.
Speaker 4 (13:38):
Okay, keep going, Oh, okay, so what happened to that point,
I'm going to kind of bring you up to what
happens after all that. In the sixties, more TV stations
kept popping up, and there was more wrestling on television
on local stations all over the country, and this thing called,
this phenomenon called territories was born. Different parts of the
(14:03):
country had different big wrestling promotions WWWF Worldwide Wrestling Federation,
National Wrestling Alliance, which was a large umbrella group for
other promotions different parts of the country Central States Wrestling,
Georgia Championship Wrestling up in Canada, Stampede Wrestling. There were
(14:24):
territories they covered different states, and certain wrestlers only worked
in those territories and they did good business. The biggest,
most widespread group was NWA. The second biggest, which people
are going to know about this was the Worldwide Wrestling
Federation that is WWE now. It was run by Vince
McMahon senior, not the guy we know as Vince. In
(14:48):
the Northeast, mostly Baltimore, New York, New Jersey, and all
throughout New England. All that kept building and building and
building and kind of waning and building and Wayne s.
But Vince McMahon junior came by the son. He was
an announcer for quite a while for years. He bought
the promotion from his father, and he set out to
(15:10):
turn it into an empire. He hired wrestlers away from
the other territories, built up the WWF, and he drove
the territories out of business. And he got a hold
of this up and comer at the time named the
Hulk Hogan, and he turned the whole thing into I
guess what you called mainstream entertainment. He stopped using the
(15:32):
word wrestling on his shows. The announcers had to stop
using that word, and they had to call it sports entertainment.
Speaker 3 (15:39):
Interesting, So why was that so that he would never
be accused of saying that it was real?
Speaker 4 (15:48):
He wanted to sound legitimate.
Speaker 3 (15:52):
I guess sports entertainment is pretty generic, like football and
baseball in every sport.
Speaker 4 (15:56):
Yeah, yeah, safe. It was a safe term. I think
the problem it wasn't a problem. Hogan Halck Hogan wasn't
much of a wrestler, but he was a bigger than
life star. He connected with all these fans because he
was so charismatic and under the guidance E Vince, this
become a huge business. Every arena was selling out, millions
(16:17):
of people were watching the TV, and T shirts were
selling like crazy. It was it was nuts.
Speaker 3 (16:24):
I allright to have the information regarding the how much
one hundred thousand dollars would vantage now thanks to Sean
McNally for sending this in. Actually, Sean McNally was the
person that was putting on the event where our previous guest,
David Bieber hoovered up so many T shirts this event
Vince's T shirts. Okay, Sean says, actually he he took
(16:50):
a screenshot one hundred thousand dollars in nineteen sixty five,
his equivalent in purchasing power to about one million twenty five.
Speaker 2 (17:01):
Yeah, oh, just over a million bucks. So that's pretty good.
Speaker 4 (17:05):
Yeah, I mean they make it a lot more. Now
if you're a big star, they're making twelve to fifteen million,
probably the big stars, more of them are a few
million less, but yeah, they do. They do make good money.
Vince did, by the way, had some he had some competition.
He had World Championship Wrestling for a while. Ted Turner's
group down in Georgia and he eventually he took that
(17:29):
promotion over and he had Extreme Championship Wrestling. It was
the group that used barbed wire baseball bats and lighting
people on fire in the ring. That was kind of weird.
They kind of they made a small dent, but that
went away and Vince won. And then what can I say?
In the nineteen nineties, as I said, it goes up
(17:49):
and down, up and down, interest kind of waned. But
you know today it's still happening. It's cyclical. It seems
to come back up in pop culture. I mean, wrestling
survived the pandemic when they had to close them all down.
They completely went out of business for a little while,
but they kept on doing shows without audiences, and even
though the sales numbers aren't what they used to be,
(18:10):
it's still a pretty big business.
Speaker 3 (18:12):
Here's a question for you. Is this something about the
American personality that uniquely likes pro wrestling or is there
an audience around the world and which countries like it
and which countries don't.
Speaker 4 (18:26):
England is quite big, but not nearly as big as
the United States. Japan is much bigger. Japan is the
biggest place for pro hosting I don't even know how
many promotions they are out there, and every once in
a while we get some of their wrestlers here and
they go back and forth. But they take it a
lot more seriously. As far as training out there, they
(18:47):
live in sword dojo's is I think that's the word. Probably, yeah,
And they trained for years and I think they get
paid pretty well too. But over there also the fans
are very much into it. Although they're they're more polite.
They don't.
Speaker 3 (19:04):
You say they're training a lot.
Speaker 4 (19:06):
No, they're training just so they can do more crazy moves. No,
it's not nothing. Pro wrestling is not real, Bradley, Come on, Okay.
Speaker 3 (19:13):
I found maybe it would be in Japan because they
had they bothered to train more. Okay, So what did
VINCENTI Vince mcmahn do to be so successful where others didn't.
Speaker 4 (19:28):
Basically very simple. He gave it much better production values,
He put in more TV cameras, he hired better writers. Remember,
these are scripted, these things, these matches, these storylines are scripted,
and then they have to get into the ring and
act them out or act them out in front of
the TV cameras when they're just talking right to the audience,
(19:50):
so he just had he hired better people, he added music,
he had it much more lighting, and he made it
more of an entertainment spectacle. And I I think he
also charged quite a bit more for tickets eventually, and
people went.
Speaker 3 (20:05):
Believe it or not, I only went to one of
these events at the probably the new Garden, I guess.
Speaker 2 (20:11):
And yeah, you know, it didn't resonate with me.
Speaker 3 (20:15):
Somehow.
Speaker 4 (20:16):
You have to go with the right people. The last
time I went to a pro wrestling match at the
newer Boston Garden, oh man, this had to be fifteen
years ago, because I kind of lost a little bit
of interest. But I was invited to go by Al Cooper,
who was a hardcore wrestling fan, and I had so
much fun just watching him watch the wrestling matches.
Speaker 2 (20:34):
Al Couver the music person.
Speaker 4 (20:36):
Oh yeah, oh wow, that was kind of a surreal
event for me. Yeah.
Speaker 3 (20:43):
So Ed he's got some insights on the inner workings
of how a match goes oh, and how they kind
of decide what's going to happen next, and how they communicate,
which I find very fascinating. We'll talk about women in wrestling,
and also it has another entire another different project he's
(21:06):
working on involving a really interesting filmmaker, and so we'll
talk about that as well. All coming up on WBZ.
Speaker 1 (21:16):
You're on Night Side with Dan Ray on w b Z,
Boston's news radio.
Speaker 3 (21:22):
All right, here you go, we have Ed Simkus with us.
He's going to talk to us. Tell us about the
workings of pro wrestling in the ring and how they
decide how the play is going to play out, and
how they communicate. And I don't know how you found
this out. After you tell us what's going on, tell
(21:43):
us how you found it out too.
Speaker 4 (21:45):
I'll tell you right now. I know someone who knows
someone who knows someone at the.
Speaker 3 (21:49):
End of the line. That's someone at the end of
the line. What is there You don't have to tell
me their name, but what is their function?
Speaker 4 (21:57):
Okay, I'll tell you that later. For you to tell
you work, let me just tell you what makes a
pro wrestler. What they have to do to get it? Yeah,
they they have to go to wrestling school for the
most part. There are plenty of wrestling schools. Now, you
have to be an athlete, you have to be in
really good shape, you have to have control over your body.
(22:19):
No matter what happens to it, and you have to
have a lot of stamina. These things go on for
a while, and even more important, you have to have
some uh I would say call it acting ability. You know,
you have to be able to make the fighting look real,
and you have to be able to hold a microphone
in your hand and sell yourself to the crowd when
(22:41):
you talk and yell at them whether you're a heel
or a baby pace.
Speaker 3 (22:46):
I could do that part, but the whole physical part,
I guess I have to.
Speaker 4 (22:50):
Yeah, I gotta train a lot, I.
Speaker 3 (22:52):
Got I guess my shot to becoming a pro rest
is pretty much over.
Speaker 4 (22:59):
Okay, there's always hope. So these storylines are all script
they really are. I mean, nobody's writing down every word
of what's going to happen. You know, maybe somebody's been
trying to win a championship belt for years now. He
gets a chance. A bad guy wrestler is trying to
steal the wife or a girlfriend of a good guy wrestler.
(23:20):
One wrestler and a tag team accidentally hits his partner
and they get into a feud. It's a big soap opera. Man.
Speaker 2 (23:27):
Yes, he's from city to city and don't get resolved.
Speaker 4 (23:32):
For years sometimes. Honestly, you know, the stories build up
to them, these guys and women taking it out on
each other in the ring, so there's some justice. Okay,
it's all predetermined. It's not exactly scripted, but it's planned out.
Here's what happens in the ring. In the old days,
at least the two or some the tag team for wrestlers,
(23:54):
they know before they go in the ring who's going
to win. They know how long this match is supposed
to take, almost to the second, and they know what
the finishing move is going to be. That's really all
they knew. If you look really close at those old matches,
you could sometimes see the wrestlers signaling to each other
(24:15):
the way they slap their shoulder or something, or sometimes
even when they're in a clench, talking to each other
saying what they're going to do next. These days they
still do all that, but there's a setup in the
back room at the wrestling matches where people from the
wrestling office watch the matches on. Monitors have microphones and
(24:35):
headsets on and they're constantly talking to the referees who
wear earpieces. They tell the referees what they want the
referees to tell the wrestlers about what moves to do next.
The refs and the re sorry, the refs and the
wrestlers are all signaling and talking to each other through
these matches. But they do it just really well so
(24:57):
you can't see it. Happened in the BWE right now,
Triple H who used to be a big star and
is now one of the executives, he's one of those
people talking to the refs telling them what goes next.
That's how it works.
Speaker 2 (25:11):
How about injuries? Are there a lot of them?
Speaker 3 (25:14):
How do they do with them?
Speaker 4 (25:15):
Fortunately, because they're not doing a lot of drugs, steroids
and everything, they are less. I think there are less now.
But way back when I had a radio show called
Wrestle Radio USA. This was in the early and mid nineties,
and I would interview the wrestlers and I would always
ask them, give me your list of injuries, and I
(25:37):
wrote out one. Right now, I have it right in
front of me. It's it's kind of brief. I talked
to Bruno Sam Martino, who's just a great interview He
loved telling stories. I said, quote, could you list some
of your injuries. I'm going to read his answer. Okay,
the nose has been busted eleven times. Everyone's amazed at
the way my caldiflower ears. Look. My jaw was cracked.
(26:02):
I don't know if there are any ribs I haven't
broken or cracked. The fingers on my right hand have
all been broken. I broke my collarbone. Both of my
knees have had surgery for cartilage and ligaments. I've had
a fractured vertebrae in my lower back, and I had
a broken neck, which was the most serious one. That's
the bones. If you want to talk about cuts and bruises,
(26:24):
I've had a million of those. That was Bruno.
Speaker 3 (26:29):
And they don't mention brain trum. I mean they do
get their head slammed against the mat.
Speaker 2 (26:34):
Sound hopefully not.
Speaker 4 (26:37):
It's kind of rare, like like stone called. Steve Austin
was in a in a move where they accidentally dropped
them in his head. He didn't move his neck right
to make the move not hurt, and he peep broke
peep too, broke his neck or a couple of the vertebrae.
I'm not really sure there are less and less accidents,
(26:59):
but when they do happened, you're out of the ring.
I mean, most of these guys who have gotten through it, okay,
are still these days suffering where and from wear and tear.
You look at the older wrestlers in the sixties and
seventies who have retired, they have trouble walking, They have
trouble raising their arms, you know. So it's a tough,
tough sport. I don't like calling it a sport. I mean,
(27:22):
it is athletes. It's weird to call predetermined things a sport,
but it's it's very tough, and it's very tough in
the body, and you take a lot of bumps.
Speaker 3 (27:32):
So in a pre interview conversation, you told me that
the WWE will always be on top, But I didn't
really ask why is that the case?
Speaker 4 (27:43):
And why is that it is that always has been
since since Evince went out and bought everything else out
and he made it on top. And it's pretty much
the same answer I said before. He had this vision
of great production values and he would go out and interviews.
Vince McMahon junior. He would go out on interviews at
(28:05):
the time, going I don't do wrestling matches, I don't
do sports entertainment. I make movies. Yeah, and that's what
he called it. There are the groups that are on TV.
I think wrestling is on TV six nights a week
at this point, I'm not positive of that. But there's
another group called All Elite Wrestling. There's another group called
(28:25):
Total NonStop Action that's awn TNA. They just they have
great athletes doing great performing, but they don't have the
production values. They don't have the slickness of it all.
There's also if you want to see some really cool stuff,
you look at the old YouTube videos. There's so much
(28:48):
old pro wrestling on there and you can see, oh yeah,
they're all over the place. And if anyone wants to
get a better understanding to see how all of this
production stuff works and how the back room works and everything.
A new TV show. It's a new series. It just
started I think two weeks ago on Netflix. It's called
WWE Unreal and they actually do take you backstage and
(29:13):
show how it's all done and talk to the people,
the wrestlers, of the agents, the scriptwriters, and they actually
explain how this whole thing is done. So it's a
fascinating show. I've only seen two episodes so far, but
I highly recommend it if you're a fan or if
you want to get into the whole thing of it.
Speaker 3 (29:32):
Okay, two more questions on wrestling. One, we hear a
lot about how female athletes make less money for doing
the same thing, at least in soccer and perhaps basketball.
But what about wrestling. I understand they kind of make
(29:53):
the same money.
Speaker 4 (29:54):
Yeah. Again, I don't have exact numbers and anything, and
I don't believe anything that comes out of the wrestling office.
But it looks like even though in the old days
that was exactly right, women always got much less. Oh,
they've been doing this since the twenties and thirties. Also
today it's pretty much equal. I mean, if you're the
top woman star. Oh man, I'm gonna test myself here.
(30:18):
I don't remember who's the women's champ now. It might
be Rhea Ripley. Please forgive me if I got that wrong.
She's probably making about five million dollars, six million dollars.
She is the best out there right now. That's why
I think she might be the champ. She's an Australian
wrestler who puts on garish goth makeup and in one
of these shows that I just mentioned, unreal, we see
(30:40):
her without the makeup and she's rather pretty and nice
and not being the goth monster. There's a woman named
liv Morgan who's not one of the champs, but she's
one of the wildest performers in the ring. Very very attractive,
very athletic. Her stick is making it look amazing to
(31:01):
get beaten up more than beating up other people, and
she does it. She's got a great act. When they
reached the level that these women have in the WWE,
at least they make damn good money, all right.
Speaker 3 (31:13):
And final angle on this, there's a big New England
connection when it comes to Killer Kowalski, a Canadian originally
a Canadian wrestler from Windsor in Canada, came down here
and kind of established a New England presence.
Speaker 4 (31:30):
Yeah, he had the Killer Kowalski School of professional wrestling.
After he got out of it, he was the biggest
bad guy at the time. That my favorite Killer Kowalski story.
I hope I get these names right because I haven't
told us for a while, but he was in a
feud with Pepper Gomez. I got it right, Pepper Gomez
(31:53):
and Pepper Gomez had a cast iron stomach that was
his stick. It couldn't. It could punch him in the
stomach as hard as you could and nothing would happen.
Keller Kowalski said, I can make you submit, and Peppergum
has said, give it all you've got, give it your
best shot, and he agreed to lie down on the
(32:14):
on the mat in the middle of the ring on
his back. Killer Kowalski would go up to the top
rope and he would jump off of it, land on
his stomach and make him just groan and give up.
Speaker 3 (32:28):
Well, I hope you're not going to get me into this.
I mean I have I'm busy enough. I can't start being.
Speaker 4 (32:32):
A Well let me tell you what happened. Though it
didn't play out the way pepper Goma has wanted it to.
He did. He laid out there and Killer Kowalsk climbed
up to the top rope and he jumped off and
landed with his knee on his throat, and which began
for about two months or so, a total blood feud.
(32:54):
Every week they would just be going at each other
and the crowds loved it.
Speaker 2 (32:58):
No, I'm hooked, I'm hooked.
Speaker 4 (33:00):
Completely fake, you know.
Speaker 2 (33:01):
He a little bit more about the school in Where
was that the school?
Speaker 4 (33:07):
Well, when I talked to Kowalski the first time, the
school was down near the combat zone in the old
something or their union, I can't remember the name of it.
That's where I met. I mean, he had a couple
of mets set up and he was probably I'm going
to say he was in his mid to late fifties
at that time, and he just he had a wrestling
school and he talked people how to do all of
(33:28):
these moves and how to stay in good shape. And
he would always tell him you should be a vegetarian,
and you should drink all of your liquids at room temperature,
nothing cold and nothing hot. That's a bad imitation of
Kola Kowalski. But he was funny as hell, and he
had the best matches with Bruno, and he was Kowalski
(33:51):
was his name was Walter, A sweet, sweet guy, nice man.
I really enjoyed talking with him.
Speaker 2 (33:57):
Okay, thank you for that.
Speaker 3 (33:58):
We're going to talk about your next endeavor or something
you're really into right after this quickie on WBZ.
Speaker 1 (34:06):
Night Side with Dan Ray on WBZ Boston's news radio.
Speaker 3 (34:12):
Raby J for Dan Tonight, we were with Ed Simkis
and he's taken us to school and on wrestling, and
I do appreciate that I do a quick question before
before we move on, and that is you mentioned that
there was a documentary kind of a behind the scenes
thing about wrestling. I can't remember the name of that
cause you send me that again.
Speaker 4 (34:29):
Oh there was the TV series. Yes, it's on It's
on Netflix. It's called WWE. Next word Unreal Unreal? Okay, yeah,
really cool. So can I give you a bit of news,
kind of unpleasant wrestling news. Yes, this just came out
a couple hours ago. You know, we lost hell Cogan
a couple of weeks ago, maybe a week and a half,
(34:50):
a couple of weeks ago. Uh. He supposedly died our
heart attack, and a report came out just tonight from
a fairly reputable wrestling newsletter that it very well might
not have been a heart attack. They said his frenic
nerve might have been compromised. I don't know what a
frantic nerve is, but it has something to do with
(35:11):
the ability to breathe. And they also leaked a secret
that he had been suffering from leukemia for quite a while.
I never heard any of this.
Speaker 2 (35:21):
You say, they, do you have a source?
Speaker 3 (35:24):
Uh?
Speaker 4 (35:25):
No, I don't have been in front of me. It
was a reputable pro wrestling insider newsletter. I'm really sorry.
I think very few of them, but yes, this one was.
I'm sorry, I don't have that source. All right, So
that's a maybe.
Speaker 3 (35:40):
Now you asked me to talk about a project do
you have regarding a filmmaker who has since past that No,
one really, not too many people know about. However, the
person was influential on people we do know about, like
John Waters, et cetera. And you could talk a little
bit about that project.
Speaker 4 (35:59):
I think it would be slightly surprised to find out
how many people did know about him, because he was
a multi millionaire because of his films. We're talking about
the great, the late great russ Meyer. Russ Meyer, who was,
in my mind, a groundbreaking, one of a kind movie maverick.
(36:20):
He did his work in the from the late fifties
to the late seventies. He died in two thousand and four.
He did it all. He wrote movies, his own movies.
He wrote them, directed them, edited them, photographed them, distributed them.
They were exploitation films. I guess that's the kind way
(36:40):
to say what they were, and they were, for the
most part, pretty huge hits. The two that I the
two titles that I picked up that I think people
might know were great. One Faster Pussycat Kill Kill. I
love that movie title. There's a lot of commas and
exclamation points in there, and maybe the biggest one was
(37:01):
called Beyond the Valley of the Dolls. He was hired
by MGM to go and make a movie over there,
and it was from a script written by Roger Ebert.
I had nothing to do with the original Valley of
the Dolls, but they kind of borrowed the title because
there was talk of making a sequel, and somehow he
(37:21):
got the rights for but very very crazy filmmaker and
I did a go ahead.
Speaker 2 (37:28):
He was different because he was a one man operation.
Speaker 4 (37:32):
Basically absolutely yeah. I mean he had a small crew too,
but he was in charge of all that. He was
a World War two film maker, film combat man. He
made movies and took still in World War Two when
he was stationed in France. Then he came back and
started making movies here. He started actually doing Playboy shoots
(37:55):
and got into the movies. Eventually and a company got
in touch with me. A couple of years ago, now
called University Press of Mississippi put out a series of
books called Conversations with Filmmakers. They're books that they're just
interviews from all over the world, interviews spread out in
(38:17):
chronological order that has each filmmaker, one per book, tell
his or her own story in his or her own words.
Through these interviews. I was asked through some friends, do
I want to contribute a volume to one of them?
I said sure, and they said, who do you want
to do? I said Steven Spielberg, No, no, no, that's
(38:39):
already been done. Robert Alban No, no, no, that's already been done.
Well about the eighteenth name? As a dad? I said
how about russ Meyer? And they said, let us get
back to you on that. I knew they were going
to say no. Two days later I got the call,
do it okay?
Speaker 2 (38:56):
And we have to go Where can people get that book?
Speaker 3 (38:59):
Is it done yet?
Speaker 4 (39:00):
It's done? It's out, came out in March. You can
get it at Amazon, you can get it at University
Press of Mississippi. And lastly, right now I am they
asked me to do another one. I'm working on a
book on Guy Ritchie right now.
Speaker 2 (39:12):
Oh wow, Hey, you're a great guest ed, thank you
very much.
Speaker 4 (39:16):
I'm tired all the time.
Speaker 3 (39:18):
Well that's because it takes a lot out of a
person to be that great.
Speaker 4 (39:22):
There you go, Thank you sir.
Speaker 2 (39:23):
You're very welcome. You take care Chattie with you Okay,
you too.
Speaker 3 (39:27):
And by the way, where we're talking about buying books,
don't forget to pick up the Peter Wolf memoir Waiting
on the Moon. Artists, poets, drifters, grifters and goddesses. Now
I need to know after this about your favorite local restaurant.
I'll explain. Where's your favorite niece, you little your little
hideaway that you love.
Speaker 2 (39:44):
It's WBZ.
It's Night Side with Dan Ray on WBZY Boston's me Radio.
Speaker 2 (00:07):
BZ News Radio ten thirty. Thanks to David Bieber.
Speaker 3 (00:10):
For all the work bringing all in those artifacts in
so that we might kind of relive the Boston of
the seventies. And during the break we madly took formal
photos of these things on a black background, and later
on we'll do a slide show which I'll post on
(00:31):
my Facebook page for you to see and it will
be a companion to the broadcast that we just did.
So again, if you want to get involved with this,
follow me on Facebook and the way to get there
is go.
Speaker 2 (00:45):
To BRADLEYJ dot org and just well it'll be very
clear what to do.
Speaker 3 (00:52):
So we're ready to talk to Ed Simcus and actually
the Ed's a person that I believe David Bieber turned
me on to and we're going to talk about in
some detail, in great detail, actually the evolution of professional
wrestling and another project that that's doing.
Speaker 2 (01:08):
And one reason that the.
Speaker 3 (01:09):
Evolution of professional wrestling is particularly interesting to New Englanders
and particularly relevant is there's a big New England connection
when it comes to wrestling. And we'll get to that first. Hello, Ed,
how do you.
Speaker 4 (01:28):
Do, Bradley, I'm all right. Let me ask you a
quick question. Do you need me to put on my
radio voice or can we just talk?
Speaker 3 (01:35):
It seems to me you already have your radio voice
cooking right now.
Speaker 4 (01:38):
All right, I'm ready to go.
Speaker 3 (01:40):
All right, we can just talk.
Speaker 2 (01:42):
I mean I don't. I don't have a radio voice.
Speaker 3 (01:44):
A lot of highly paid DJs from my past did
not either, so I wouldn't worry about it.
Speaker 4 (01:51):
I'm fine.
Speaker 3 (01:52):
I want to include you in this, just as we
did in the last and the most most recent segments
we did. How do you like professional wrestling? Do you
follow it? Do you care about the personalities into it?
Do you think it's ridiculous? Do you think it's fake?
Do you think it's real? Even if you don't like it?
I mean, that's a story too. Tell me that six one, seven, two, five, four.
Speaker 2 (02:16):
Ten thirty. So Ed, how did you just? How did
you know?
Speaker 3 (02:20):
The obvious question is how did you get so wildly
into professional wrestling? Because you'll see people. ED knows this
inside and out. He's got all kinds of secrets that
we're gonna learn about. And how did you get into it?
Speaker 4 (02:33):
I can't tell you the secrets. But how did I
get into it? Well, I was a rather young lad.
I was living in Dorchester, mass and a triple decker,
and I was on the second floor with my family,
and up above us my grandparents lived, my grandmother and grandfather,
and every once in a while I heard a lot
of noise going on upstairs, like banging things, and I
(02:54):
was asking what it was, and it turned on my
grandfather was a pretty hardcore pro wrestling. These were the
early days of television, and he would always watch and
he knew it was real, and he would always root
for the good guy, and he would always hate the
bad guy. And that's what I was heard. What I
was hearing he was banging on the furniture when the
(03:14):
bad guy was beating up the good guy.
Speaker 3 (03:17):
And you know, I never thought maybe he was he
and your wife were rumbling up there.
Speaker 4 (03:22):
No, he was watching TV. He got caught up in it,
and somehow I honestly discovered it by chance flipping one
of my three television stations, totally innocently on TV. There
it was. I was probably watching a show called Bedlam
from Boston. I'm really not sure if that was the title.
(03:43):
In the early nineteen sixties. I was a little lad.
I was a tyke, and I was seeing these two
big guys in their black underwear beating the tar out
of each other. And one would get knocked down and
writhe around on the mat and he would get up
and knock the other guy down and he would ride around,
(04:04):
and then it would happen all over again, back and
forth and back and forth. And I got it as
a ten or eleven year old. It made me laugh.
I said, this isn't real. This is funny, And you
know what, it still makes me laugh.
Speaker 2 (04:18):
Yeah, But back in the day, wasn't it real?
Speaker 3 (04:20):
I mean way back at least.
Speaker 4 (04:23):
Oh, you want to go way back. I mean it
was way before my parents were born. But yeah, when
you go back to like eighteen hundreds, early nineteen hundreds,
there wasn't anything called pro wrestling. It was just called wrestling.
It was It was a legitimate sporting contest.
Speaker 3 (04:39):
It was like boxing, only.
Speaker 4 (04:41):
It was like boxing were wrestling. Unfortunately, the matches would
go on for hours. They would wrestle until somebody pinned
somebody else, and it was boring. It became boring to
people who were watching it. There was no TV. Of course,
back then people go and went and paid. And what
happened was a couple of guys in the business who
(05:03):
put on these contests or wrestled, they got an idea, Hey,
maybe we can sell more tickets. These were the wrestlers
and promoters. And two of the guys were named Ed
Strangler Lewis and Tutzmont. Great names. This is, I'd say.
In the nineteen twenties and thirties, they said to each other,
there were pals. They said, why are we beating the
(05:26):
hell out of each other for real? Why don't we
figure out a way to make money together? And what
they came up with was pro wrestling. Make it fake.
It didn't matter who the best wrestler was, which was
what was happening up until then. It became showbiz in
the twenties and thirties, and they would you have predetermined
(05:46):
finishes and they would play to the audience. And this
thing grew in the nineteen thirties in the forties and
people started coming crowds. Came a guy named Louthez with
the champ I don't know for twelve fifteen years were
too fire.
Speaker 3 (06:04):
I want to make sure I understand. In the beginning
it was real and the turn of the century, but
real wrestling was too boring because it would go on
and on and on. So you know, what we'll do
is choreograph this so we know when it's going to
be over. We can make it last the perfect amount
of time relative to people's attention span, and we'll make
(06:26):
more money that way. And plus we won't get all
beat up.
Speaker 4 (06:29):
And well they of course they did get a little
beat up, but yes, they they choreographed it and it
attracted the crowds. At what the crowds got into was
booing and cheering and having fun, kind of like my grandfather.
Speaker 3 (06:43):
And whether did they assign villains? Was there a known
villain or heel then?
Speaker 4 (06:48):
And then?
Speaker 2 (06:49):
And the good guys and the good guys always.
Speaker 4 (06:51):
Won, you know your term heel and villain very good,
and the good guys were called babyfaces, yes, very good
and baby paces yeah, you know, for the first for
the most part, and back in those days, the good
guys were usually the champions, but they would just take
(07:11):
care of any bad guys or villains who came through town,
and they would work with each other for a little while.
They would do two or three matches over maybe a
month or something. I'm not really sure of that time span.
But in one of them there would be a disqualification
and one guy would lose. In another one that would
be a different kind of a finish, and the other
(07:33):
guy would lose and would finally have a third match
and it would be I don't know, a steel cage
match or something, and that would end that program between
those two wrestlers, and then they would go on to
fight other people. So was it just went on and
on and on. It was a long, long spanning story before.
Speaker 3 (07:52):
We get into wrestling further, tell me a little bit
about you and you're your background and other things you've
been doing, and we're going to actually talk at length
about your new one of your newer projects.
Speaker 2 (08:06):
But I'm just curious, who is this Ed Simpkiss guy.
Speaker 4 (08:11):
You know, I always wanted to be a pro wrestling referee.
I really did when I was a kid, but I
hurt my wrist and I couldn't slam it down on
the Masters Whore the one two three. I am a
local boy Dorchester. I'm an Emersonian. I'm a graduate of
Emerson College. I'm a film critic. One of my offshoot things,
(08:32):
these days is I read short stories on a podcast
for blind listeners. I play guitar. I just learned how
to play gut Feeling by Devo on my acoustic guitar.
Oh my god, that's an important thing in my life.
Speaker 2 (08:53):
Just as an a sign in the future.
Speaker 3 (08:55):
It's looking like I mean, I'm thinking as a seventy
eighty percent answer, we're going to have Mark mothers Law
from Devo as a guest next week. Oh and for
you and anybody else, there's a new Devo documentary which
is not just about the music, but it really gets
(09:17):
into the the political side of what made them sick.
Speaker 2 (09:21):
For the longest time, they didn't even think about music.
Speaker 3 (09:23):
They were into somehow figuring out how to show that
the country and the world was no longer evolving but
de evolving evolving.
Speaker 4 (09:33):
And I'm actually I've seen the film, I know.
Speaker 2 (09:35):
So it's really great.
Speaker 4 (09:36):
So that's it is a great film.
Speaker 2 (09:38):
That's on't aside, but it's kind of a plug for
the future for next week.
Speaker 4 (09:41):
I hope that's also a gomman to learn the song.
I just learned it yesterday.
Speaker 2 (09:45):
Are you good on the gets there?
Speaker 4 (09:47):
No? I play in my room. Nobody else gets to
hear it me.
Speaker 3 (09:50):
Too good, So we have a handle on who you are.
Back to the back to the wrestling. Oh look at
the time, I'm going to continue with the ed and
wrestling right after this quick quick message on WBZ.
Speaker 1 (10:05):
You're on Night Side with Dan Ray on WBZ Boston's
news Radio.
Speaker 3 (10:11):
Read the j for Dan little story before we continue
with our guest, Ed simcis talking about pro wrestling. I
grew up in a very very weirdly rural, Gothic rural area.
My grandparents lived on a farm with cattle and you know,
the whole deal. And I remember when I was I
don't know, had to be five or so, grandfather sitting
(10:34):
in his old beat leather easy chair in his corner
smoking his pipe, and grandmother sitting in her rocking chair
for real knitting, and both of them were watching well wrestling,
and they were watching Bruno San Martino and I think
(10:55):
Big Chief Strongbow. And that was my introduction to it.
Was in black and white, and then it kind of
went out of my brain until the you know, the
Hogans of the world came back. I'm fascinated, and believe me,
we're going to hear some inside stuff on how it
works from our guest ed Simkis.
Speaker 4 (11:18):
Now, well, can I talk to you about the TV
thing that you just mentioned and I mentioned with my grandfather. Yes,
TV is what kind of made it, what made pro
wrestling it was in the fifties, pro wrestling was a
major part of television, mainly because it was so cheap
to produce. You know, you point the camera at the
ring and usually just one camera. You have an announcer
(11:38):
and a couple of guys, sometimes four guys wrestling. That
was it. It was all about entertaining people, and a lot
of people watched and of course the best way to
use television was as a form of advertising for the
live wrestling events, and that's what they did. That's how
they attracted people. That weird.
Speaker 3 (11:57):
Did it go from becoming real choreographed?
Speaker 4 (12:02):
Oh? Early on in the nineteen twenties, Oh okay, really,
but it was the sixties, like you were probably just
talking about. You know, Bruno Sanmartino became the champ. He
was the most popular ever at that time. And I
mean this guy if he was wrestling in town, if
he was in New York, Bruno Sanmartino would sell out
(12:23):
Madison Square Garden. When he would maybe fight Killer Kowalski
and fans would be turned away at the door. That's
how big it was in the sixties.
Speaker 3 (12:32):
Now were these was this a case of these people
are working really hard and making nothing or do they
get paid big ten?
Speaker 4 (12:40):
You know, it's really hard to tell what these guys
got paid because everybody lies in the wrestling business. But
it's fairly established that Bruno, the big guy at the time,
was taken in in the nineteen sixties approximately one hundred
thousand a year, and that's nineteen sixties dollars, which so
it would be so much more nous. He was a
(13:00):
huge star. He was the star, and nobody else was
making that much. But I think he did pretty well
and eventually, I mean the guys and women today, depending
where they are on the ladder of success, where whether
they're wearing championship belts or not, they're up in the millions.
Speaker 2 (13:20):
You know, it's.
Speaker 3 (13:23):
Thirty. If you'd like to chime in, maybe your favorite wrestler,
what you think of for wrestling either way, and I
do need a favor. Can somebody calculate look up online
what one hundred thousand dollars in nineteen sixty.
Speaker 2 (13:35):
Dollars is now, because I'd like to know that.
Speaker 4 (13:38):
Okay, keep going, Oh, okay, so what happened to that point,
I'm going to kind of bring you up to what
happens after all that. In the sixties, more TV stations
kept popping up, and there was more wrestling on television
on local stations all over the country, and this thing called,
this phenomenon called territories was born. Different parts of the
(14:03):
country had different big wrestling promotions WWWF Worldwide Wrestling Federation,
National Wrestling Alliance, which was a large umbrella group for
other promotions different parts of the country Central States Wrestling,
Georgia Championship Wrestling up in Canada, Stampede Wrestling. There were
(14:24):
territories they covered different states, and certain wrestlers only worked
in those territories and they did good business. The biggest,
most widespread group was NWA. The second biggest, which people
are going to know about this was the Worldwide Wrestling
Federation that is WWE now. It was run by Vince
McMahon senior, not the guy we know as Vince. In
(14:48):
the Northeast, mostly Baltimore, New York, New Jersey, and all
throughout New England. All that kept building and building and
building and kind of waning and building and Wayne s.
But Vince McMahon junior came by the son. He was
an announcer for quite a while for years. He bought
the promotion from his father, and he set out to
(15:10):
turn it into an empire. He hired wrestlers away from
the other territories, built up the WWF, and he drove
the territories out of business. And he got a hold
of this up and comer at the time named the
Hulk Hogan, and he turned the whole thing into I
guess what you called mainstream entertainment. He stopped using the
(15:32):
word wrestling on his shows. The announcers had to stop
using that word, and they had to call it sports entertainment.
Speaker 3 (15:39):
Interesting, So why was that so that he would never
be accused of saying that it was real?
Speaker 4 (15:48):
He wanted to sound legitimate.
Speaker 3 (15:52):
I guess sports entertainment is pretty generic, like football and
baseball in every sport.
Speaker 4 (15:56):
Yeah, yeah, safe. It was a safe term. I think
the problem it wasn't a problem. Hogan Halck Hogan wasn't
much of a wrestler, but he was a bigger than
life star. He connected with all these fans because he
was so charismatic and under the guidance E Vince, this
become a huge business. Every arena was selling out, millions
(16:17):
of people were watching the TV, and T shirts were
selling like crazy. It was it was nuts.
Speaker 3 (16:24):
I allright to have the information regarding the how much
one hundred thousand dollars would vantage now thanks to Sean
McNally for sending this in. Actually, Sean McNally was the
person that was putting on the event where our previous guest,
David Bieber hoovered up so many T shirts this event
Vince's T shirts. Okay, Sean says, actually he he took
(16:50):
a screenshot one hundred thousand dollars in nineteen sixty five,
his equivalent in purchasing power to about one million twenty five.
Speaker 2 (17:01):
Yeah, oh, just over a million bucks. So that's pretty good.
Speaker 4 (17:05):
Yeah, I mean they make it a lot more. Now
if you're a big star, they're making twelve to fifteen million,
probably the big stars, more of them are a few
million less, but yeah, they do. They do make good money.
Vince did, by the way, had some he had some competition.
He had World Championship Wrestling for a while. Ted Turner's
group down in Georgia and he eventually he took that
(17:29):
promotion over and he had Extreme Championship Wrestling. It was
the group that used barbed wire baseball bats and lighting
people on fire in the ring. That was kind of weird.
They kind of they made a small dent, but that
went away and Vince won. And then what can I say?
In the nineteen nineties, as I said, it goes up
(17:49):
and down, up and down, interest kind of waned. But
you know today it's still happening. It's cyclical. It seems
to come back up in pop culture. I mean, wrestling
survived the pandemic when they had to close them all down.
They completely went out of business for a little while,
but they kept on doing shows without audiences, and even
though the sales numbers aren't what they used to be,
(18:10):
it's still a pretty big business.
Speaker 3 (18:12):
Here's a question for you. Is this something about the
American personality that uniquely likes pro wrestling or is there
an audience around the world and which countries like it
and which countries don't.
Speaker 4 (18:26):
England is quite big, but not nearly as big as
the United States. Japan is much bigger. Japan is the
biggest place for pro hosting I don't even know how
many promotions they are out there, and every once in
a while we get some of their wrestlers here and
they go back and forth. But they take it a
lot more seriously. As far as training out there, they
(18:47):
live in sword dojo's is I think that's the word. Probably, yeah,
And they trained for years and I think they get
paid pretty well too. But over there also the fans
are very much into it. Although they're they're more polite.
They don't.
Speaker 3 (19:04):
You say they're training a lot.
Speaker 4 (19:06):
No, they're training just so they can do more crazy moves. No,
it's not nothing. Pro wrestling is not real, Bradley, Come on, Okay.
Speaker 3 (19:13):
I found maybe it would be in Japan because they
had they bothered to train more. Okay, So what did
VINCENTI Vince mcmahn do to be so successful where others didn't.
Speaker 4 (19:28):
Basically very simple. He gave it much better production values,
He put in more TV cameras, he hired better writers. Remember,
these are scripted, these things, these matches, these storylines are scripted,
and then they have to get into the ring and
act them out or act them out in front of
the TV cameras when they're just talking right to the audience,
(19:50):
so he just had he hired better people, he added music,
he had it much more lighting, and he made it
more of an entertainment spectacle. And I I think he
also charged quite a bit more for tickets eventually, and
people went.
Speaker 3 (20:05):
Believe it or not, I only went to one of
these events at the probably the new Garden, I guess.
Speaker 2 (20:11):
And yeah, you know, it didn't resonate with me.
Speaker 3 (20:15):
Somehow.
Speaker 4 (20:16):
You have to go with the right people. The last
time I went to a pro wrestling match at the
newer Boston Garden, oh man, this had to be fifteen
years ago, because I kind of lost a little bit
of interest. But I was invited to go by Al Cooper,
who was a hardcore wrestling fan, and I had so
much fun just watching him watch the wrestling matches.
Speaker 2 (20:34):
Al Couver the music person.
Speaker 4 (20:36):
Oh yeah, oh wow, that was kind of a surreal
event for me. Yeah.
Speaker 3 (20:43):
So Ed he's got some insights on the inner workings
of how a match goes oh, and how they kind
of decide what's going to happen next, and how they communicate,
which I find very fascinating. We'll talk about women in wrestling,
and also it has another entire another different project he's
(21:06):
working on involving a really interesting filmmaker, and so we'll
talk about that as well. All coming up on WBZ.
Speaker 1 (21:16):
You're on Night Side with Dan Ray on w b Z,
Boston's news radio.
Speaker 3 (21:22):
All right, here you go, we have Ed Simkus with us.
He's going to talk to us. Tell us about the
workings of pro wrestling in the ring and how they
decide how the play is going to play out, and
how they communicate. And I don't know how you found
this out. After you tell us what's going on, tell
(21:43):
us how you found it out too.
Speaker 4 (21:45):
I'll tell you right now. I know someone who knows
someone who knows someone at the.
Speaker 3 (21:49):
End of the line. That's someone at the end of
the line. What is there You don't have to tell
me their name, but what is their function?
Speaker 4 (21:57):
Okay, I'll tell you that later. For you to tell
you work, let me just tell you what makes a
pro wrestler. What they have to do to get it? Yeah,
they they have to go to wrestling school for the
most part. There are plenty of wrestling schools. Now, you
have to be an athlete, you have to be in
really good shape, you have to have control over your body.
(22:19):
No matter what happens to it, and you have to
have a lot of stamina. These things go on for
a while, and even more important, you have to have
some uh I would say call it acting ability. You know,
you have to be able to make the fighting look real,
and you have to be able to hold a microphone
in your hand and sell yourself to the crowd when
(22:41):
you talk and yell at them whether you're a heel
or a baby pace.
Speaker 3 (22:46):
I could do that part, but the whole physical part,
I guess I have to.
Speaker 4 (22:50):
Yeah, I gotta train a lot, I.
Speaker 3 (22:52):
Got I guess my shot to becoming a pro rest
is pretty much over.
Speaker 4 (22:59):
Okay, there's always hope. So these storylines are all script
they really are. I mean, nobody's writing down every word
of what's going to happen. You know, maybe somebody's been
trying to win a championship belt for years now. He
gets a chance. A bad guy wrestler is trying to
steal the wife or a girlfriend of a good guy wrestler.
(23:20):
One wrestler and a tag team accidentally hits his partner
and they get into a feud. It's a big soap opera. Man.
Speaker 2 (23:27):
Yes, he's from city to city and don't get resolved.
Speaker 4 (23:32):
For years sometimes. Honestly, you know, the stories build up
to them, these guys and women taking it out on
each other in the ring, so there's some justice. Okay,
it's all predetermined. It's not exactly scripted, but it's planned out.
Here's what happens in the ring. In the old days,
at least the two or some the tag team for wrestlers,
(23:54):
they know before they go in the ring who's going
to win. They know how long this match is supposed
to take, almost to the second, and they know what
the finishing move is going to be. That's really all
they knew. If you look really close at those old matches,
you could sometimes see the wrestlers signaling to each other
(24:15):
the way they slap their shoulder or something, or sometimes
even when they're in a clench, talking to each other
saying what they're going to do next. These days they
still do all that, but there's a setup in the
back room at the wrestling matches where people from the
wrestling office watch the matches on. Monitors have microphones and
(24:35):
headsets on and they're constantly talking to the referees who
wear earpieces. They tell the referees what they want the
referees to tell the wrestlers about what moves to do next.
The refs and the re sorry, the refs and the
wrestlers are all signaling and talking to each other through
these matches. But they do it just really well so
(24:57):
you can't see it. Happened in the BWE right now,
Triple H who used to be a big star and
is now one of the executives, he's one of those
people talking to the refs telling them what goes next.
That's how it works.
Speaker 2 (25:11):
How about injuries? Are there a lot of them?
Speaker 3 (25:14):
How do they do with them?
Speaker 4 (25:15):
Fortunately, because they're not doing a lot of drugs, steroids
and everything, they are less. I think there are less now.
But way back when I had a radio show called
Wrestle Radio USA. This was in the early and mid nineties,
and I would interview the wrestlers and I would always
ask them, give me your list of injuries, and I
(25:37):
wrote out one. Right now, I have it right in
front of me. It's it's kind of brief. I talked
to Bruno Sam Martino, who's just a great interview He
loved telling stories. I said, quote, could you list some
of your injuries. I'm going to read his answer. Okay,
the nose has been busted eleven times. Everyone's amazed at
the way my caldiflower ears. Look. My jaw was cracked.
(26:02):
I don't know if there are any ribs I haven't
broken or cracked. The fingers on my right hand have
all been broken. I broke my collarbone. Both of my
knees have had surgery for cartilage and ligaments. I've had
a fractured vertebrae in my lower back, and I had
a broken neck, which was the most serious one. That's
the bones. If you want to talk about cuts and bruises,
(26:24):
I've had a million of those. That was Bruno.
Speaker 3 (26:29):
And they don't mention brain trum. I mean they do
get their head slammed against the mat.
Speaker 2 (26:34):
Sound hopefully not.
Speaker 4 (26:37):
It's kind of rare, like like stone called. Steve Austin
was in a in a move where they accidentally dropped
them in his head. He didn't move his neck right
to make the move not hurt, and he peep broke
peep too, broke his neck or a couple of the vertebrae.
I'm not really sure there are less and less accidents,
(26:59):
but when they do happened, you're out of the ring.
I mean, most of these guys who have gotten through it, okay,
are still these days suffering where and from wear and tear.
You look at the older wrestlers in the sixties and
seventies who have retired, they have trouble walking, They have
trouble raising their arms, you know. So it's a tough,
tough sport. I don't like calling it a sport. I mean,
(27:22):
it is athletes. It's weird to call predetermined things a sport,
but it's it's very tough, and it's very tough in
the body, and you take a lot of bumps.
Speaker 3 (27:32):
So in a pre interview conversation, you told me that
the WWE will always be on top, But I didn't
really ask why is that the case?
Speaker 4 (27:43):
And why is that it is that always has been
since since Evince went out and bought everything else out
and he made it on top. And it's pretty much
the same answer I said before. He had this vision
of great production values and he would go out and interviews.
Vince McMahon junior. He would go out on interviews at
(28:05):
the time, going I don't do wrestling matches, I don't
do sports entertainment. I make movies. Yeah, and that's what
he called it. There are the groups that are on TV.
I think wrestling is on TV six nights a week
at this point, I'm not positive of that. But there's
another group called All Elite Wrestling. There's another group called
(28:25):
Total NonStop Action that's awn TNA. They just they have
great athletes doing great performing, but they don't have the
production values. They don't have the slickness of it all.
There's also if you want to see some really cool stuff,
you look at the old YouTube videos. There's so much
(28:48):
old pro wrestling on there and you can see, oh yeah,
they're all over the place. And if anyone wants to
get a better understanding to see how all of this
production stuff works and how the back room works and everything.
A new TV show. It's a new series. It just
started I think two weeks ago on Netflix. It's called
WWE Unreal and they actually do take you backstage and
(29:13):
show how it's all done and talk to the people,
the wrestlers, of the agents, the scriptwriters, and they actually
explain how this whole thing is done. So it's a
fascinating show. I've only seen two episodes so far, but
I highly recommend it if you're a fan or if
you want to get into the whole thing of it.
Speaker 3 (29:32):
Okay, two more questions on wrestling. One, we hear a
lot about how female athletes make less money for doing
the same thing, at least in soccer and perhaps basketball.
But what about wrestling. I understand they kind of make
(29:53):
the same money.
Speaker 4 (29:54):
Yeah. Again, I don't have exact numbers and anything, and
I don't believe anything that comes out of the wrestling office.
But it looks like even though in the old days
that was exactly right, women always got much less. Oh,
they've been doing this since the twenties and thirties. Also
today it's pretty much equal. I mean, if you're the
top woman star. Oh man, I'm gonna test myself here.
(30:18):
I don't remember who's the women's champ now. It might
be Rhea Ripley. Please forgive me if I got that wrong.
She's probably making about five million dollars, six million dollars.
She is the best out there right now. That's why
I think she might be the champ. She's an Australian
wrestler who puts on garish goth makeup and in one
of these shows that I just mentioned, unreal, we see
(30:40):
her without the makeup and she's rather pretty and nice
and not being the goth monster. There's a woman named
liv Morgan who's not one of the champs, but she's
one of the wildest performers in the ring. Very very attractive,
very athletic. Her stick is making it look amazing to
(31:01):
get beaten up more than beating up other people, and
she does it. She's got a great act. When they
reached the level that these women have in the WWE,
at least they make damn good money, all right.
Speaker 3 (31:13):
And final angle on this, there's a big New England
connection when it comes to Killer Kowalski, a Canadian originally
a Canadian wrestler from Windsor in Canada, came down here
and kind of established a New England presence.
Speaker 4 (31:30):
Yeah, he had the Killer Kowalski School of professional wrestling.
After he got out of it, he was the biggest
bad guy at the time. That my favorite Killer Kowalski story.
I hope I get these names right because I haven't
told us for a while, but he was in a
feud with Pepper Gomez. I got it right, Pepper Gomez
(31:53):
and Pepper Gomez had a cast iron stomach that was
his stick. It couldn't. It could punch him in the
stomach as hard as you could and nothing would happen.
Keller Kowalski said, I can make you submit, and Peppergum
has said, give it all you've got, give it your
best shot, and he agreed to lie down on the
(32:14):
on the mat in the middle of the ring on
his back. Killer Kowalski would go up to the top
rope and he would jump off of it, land on
his stomach and make him just groan and give up.
Speaker 3 (32:28):
Well, I hope you're not going to get me into this.
I mean I have I'm busy enough. I can't start being.
Speaker 4 (32:32):
A Well let me tell you what happened. Though it
didn't play out the way pepper Goma has wanted it to.
He did. He laid out there and Killer Kowalsk climbed
up to the top rope and he jumped off and
landed with his knee on his throat, and which began
for about two months or so, a total blood feud.
(32:54):
Every week they would just be going at each other
and the crowds loved it.
Speaker 2 (32:58):
No, I'm hooked, I'm hooked.
Speaker 4 (33:00):
Completely fake, you know.
Speaker 2 (33:01):
He a little bit more about the school in Where
was that the school?
Speaker 4 (33:07):
Well, when I talked to Kowalski the first time, the
school was down near the combat zone in the old
something or their union, I can't remember the name of it.
That's where I met. I mean, he had a couple
of mets set up and he was probably I'm going
to say he was in his mid to late fifties
at that time, and he just he had a wrestling
school and he talked people how to do all of
(33:28):
these moves and how to stay in good shape. And
he would always tell him you should be a vegetarian,
and you should drink all of your liquids at room temperature,
nothing cold and nothing hot. That's a bad imitation of
Kola Kowalski. But he was funny as hell, and he
had the best matches with Bruno, and he was Kowalski
(33:51):
was his name was Walter, A sweet, sweet guy, nice man.
I really enjoyed talking with him.
Speaker 2 (33:57):
Okay, thank you for that.
Speaker 3 (33:58):
We're going to talk about your next endeavor or something
you're really into right after this quickie on WBZ.
Speaker 1 (34:06):
Night Side with Dan Ray on WBZ Boston's news radio.
Speaker 3 (34:12):
Raby J for Dan Tonight, we were with Ed Simkis
and he's taken us to school and on wrestling, and
I do appreciate that I do a quick question before
before we move on, and that is you mentioned that
there was a documentary kind of a behind the scenes
thing about wrestling. I can't remember the name of that
cause you send me that again.
Speaker 4 (34:29):
Oh there was the TV series. Yes, it's on It's
on Netflix. It's called WWE. Next word Unreal Unreal? Okay, yeah,
really cool. So can I give you a bit of news,
kind of unpleasant wrestling news. Yes, this just came out
a couple hours ago. You know, we lost hell Cogan
a couple of weeks ago, maybe a week and a half,
(34:50):
a couple of weeks ago. Uh. He supposedly died our
heart attack, and a report came out just tonight from
a fairly reputable wrestling newsletter that it very well might
not have been a heart attack. They said his frenic
nerve might have been compromised. I don't know what a
frantic nerve is, but it has something to do with
(35:11):
the ability to breathe. And they also leaked a secret
that he had been suffering from leukemia for quite a while.
I never heard any of this.
Speaker 2 (35:21):
You say, they, do you have a source?
Speaker 3 (35:24):
Uh?
Speaker 4 (35:25):
No, I don't have been in front of me. It
was a reputable pro wrestling insider newsletter. I'm really sorry.
I think very few of them, but yes, this one was.
I'm sorry, I don't have that source. All right, So
that's a maybe.
Speaker 3 (35:40):
Now you asked me to talk about a project do
you have regarding a filmmaker who has since past that No,
one really, not too many people know about. However, the
person was influential on people we do know about, like
John Waters, et cetera. And you could talk a little
bit about that project.
Speaker 4 (35:59):
I think it would be slightly surprised to find out
how many people did know about him, because he was
a multi millionaire because of his films. We're talking about
the great, the late great russ Meyer. Russ Meyer, who was,
in my mind, a groundbreaking, one of a kind movie maverick.
(36:20):
He did his work in the from the late fifties
to the late seventies. He died in two thousand and four.
He did it all. He wrote movies, his own movies.
He wrote them, directed them, edited them, photographed them, distributed them.
They were exploitation films. I guess that's the kind way
(36:40):
to say what they were, and they were, for the
most part, pretty huge hits. The two that I the
two titles that I picked up that I think people
might know were great. One Faster Pussycat Kill Kill. I
love that movie title. There's a lot of commas and
exclamation points in there, and maybe the biggest one was
(37:01):
called Beyond the Valley of the Dolls. He was hired
by MGM to go and make a movie over there,
and it was from a script written by Roger Ebert.
I had nothing to do with the original Valley of
the Dolls, but they kind of borrowed the title because
there was talk of making a sequel, and somehow he
(37:21):
got the rights for but very very crazy filmmaker and
I did a go ahead.
Speaker 2 (37:28):
He was different because he was a one man operation.
Speaker 4 (37:32):
Basically absolutely yeah. I mean he had a small crew too,
but he was in charge of all that. He was
a World War two film maker, film combat man. He
made movies and took still in World War Two when
he was stationed in France. Then he came back and
started making movies here. He started actually doing Playboy shoots
(37:55):
and got into the movies. Eventually and a company got
in touch with me. A couple of years ago, now
called University Press of Mississippi put out a series of
books called Conversations with Filmmakers. They're books that they're just
interviews from all over the world, interviews spread out in
(38:17):
chronological order that has each filmmaker, one per book, tell
his or her own story in his or her own words.
Through these interviews. I was asked through some friends, do
I want to contribute a volume to one of them?
I said sure, and they said, who do you want
to do? I said Steven Spielberg, No, no, no, that's
(38:39):
already been done. Robert Alban No, no, no, that's already been done.
Well about the eighteenth name? As a dad? I said
how about russ Meyer? And they said, let us get
back to you on that. I knew they were going
to say no. Two days later I got the call,
do it okay?
Speaker 2 (38:56):
And we have to go Where can people get that book?
Speaker 3 (38:59):
Is it done yet?
Speaker 4 (39:00):
It's done? It's out, came out in March. You can
get it at Amazon, you can get it at University
Press of Mississippi. And lastly, right now I am they
asked me to do another one. I'm working on a
book on Guy Ritchie right now.
Speaker 2 (39:12):
Oh wow, Hey, you're a great guest ed, thank you
very much.
Speaker 4 (39:16):
I'm tired all the time.
Speaker 3 (39:18):
Well that's because it takes a lot out of a
person to be that great.
Speaker 4 (39:22):
There you go, Thank you sir.
Speaker 2 (39:23):
You're very welcome. You take care Chattie with you Okay,
you too.
Speaker 3 (39:27):
And by the way, where we're talking about buying books,
don't forget to pick up the Peter Wolf memoir Waiting
on the Moon. Artists, poets, drifters, grifters and goddesses. Now
I need to know after this about your favorite local restaurant.
I'll explain. Where's your favorite niece, you little your little
hideaway that you love.
Speaker 2 (39:44):
It's WBZ.
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