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“A very good read...entertaining and hilarious.”
Larry Zbyszko accomplished much during his long, illustrious career -- trained by the best, working with the best and helping the best.
Hall of Fame type? Yes, especially when you take into account what he did in the ring, outside the ring and behind the scenes.
Working 'the program' with the original Living Legend Bruno Sammartino which culminated in a soldout Shea Stadium, enticing a speaking first in AWA terrain on ESPN, announcing WCW on TBS during the famed Monday night wars and helping establish the tide-changing nWo are some major league highlights.
Zbyszko did plenty which makes his autobiography Adventures in Larryland! (ECW Press) a very good read.
What do you do these days?
``I golf a lot, play some poker on the weekends. I usually fly out and do appearances. I still wrestle a little bit.''
Zbyszko defended the AWA title against Johnny Vandal on an indie show in (South Florida) Boynton Beach.
Zbyszko, 54, remains in good shape.
``I've been real lucky. I've never had bad injuries. I feel pretty good. It's still in the blood. So once in a while, I enjoy doing a little wrestling. Most of the time it's autograph sessions or conventions or nostalgia shows.
``There are things in the wrestling business I'd like to do. It would be much better off if some of these organizations would listen to me in terms of how to do their wrestling show and their business. It would be fun to help the business out from behind the scenes. We'll see what happens.''
Pro wrestling these days
``They seem to have gotten off track, losing some of the audience to the ultimate fighting.''
Working behind the scenes in TNA
``I try to help TNA out a little bit, once in a while, but I'm really not involved in that end of the TNA show. I'd like to be. I think TNA has got a good product. They're very nice people who work very hard.
``I think they need a little help, though. They got the mindset that they have a wrestling show, and they do it too much like Vince McMahon does his wrestling show. They look at it too much as entertainment and not a sport.
``A lot of these young guys are great athletes who can do some great stuff, but instead of letting them become these athletic guys, they have them do these silly, stupid skits. It's like watching Saturday Night Live.
``They're all doing skits about everyone's in love with someone else's wife, and no one believes it or cares. Hopefully, they'll wise up.
``That started to evolved in the 90s. It kind of evolved out of a selfish system that developed actually in the southern regions of the old territories. It was designed to protect the cliques.
``Like in WWE, Jr. McMahon's show, he likes a handful of guys. You watch it next year, and you'll see the same guys - his son-in-law Triple H and Randy Orton and John Cena - he likes to push and a couple of other guys. They keep these silly storylines going forever and ever. They keep the same guys in the spotlight forever and ever. The audience thinks it's boring. How many times can you watch the same guy wrestle the same guy?
``If they got rid of the writers, they'd get rid of the problem. Wrestling is a spectator sport. Writers are something that's killing it. It's not that kind of show.''
Career highlights
``There are all kinds of high points in my career. Probably the most exciting to me was the whole thing with how I learned enough from Bruno [Sammartino], the big star of the day who was also smart. He knew the wrestling psychology. He ran the whole top programming of WWWF for almost 20 years. He was smart enough to keep himself alive for 20 years and sellout Madison Square Garden (20,000+ seats) every card. No one could ever do that. Not only did I learn, I had an opportunity to make myself a name and become a star. Because of what I learned from him, I came up with an idea to pull off a big thing. I was a young guy. I got caught up between Bruno, the biggest star, and he McMahons, the biggest promoters, and Bruno couldn't stand the McMahons. The McMahons, the typical promoters, would try to get everybody to do everything for nothing.
``It was an interesting time in the business before contracts came out. It was a wild adventure for a young guy to be caught in the middle of that and pull off the biggest thing wrestling had ever seen before. Shea Stadium back in 1980 put wrestling on the map."When I was with WCW, going from wrestling to broadcasting, which is something I didn't even want to do but then fell in love with announcing, it was great. I had an opportunity to take a product that was stale. WCW was stale. It wasn't until the end of the 1990s that we were able to pull off the new World order scenario.
``The reason it came off good. I had the right political ties at the time to set it up right. I take great pride in getting that set-up right and making the crowd go nuts and putting back the old heat that was missing from wrestling for years and years.
``Then it kind of regressed back into the skits. It's too bad.''
ESPN Classics is showing AWA wrestling from the 1980s at midnight
'Everyone started telling me, `You're back on TV with classics.' I was watching those shows. I love them. Just watching that old Showboat show. I hate to sound like I'm bragging, but I forgot how good I was.
'Watch the show. Just me standing there, the place went nuts. In the book, there's a chapter how we started the `Larry sucks' chants on television, which doesn't sound like much because every other word nowadays on television, cable, is an 'f' word or a dirty word or 'kick your #$%' or something, but back then in the mid 80s, you couldn't say that on TV. Thank God there was cable.
'If you notice, the announcers don't even mention a word about the crowd chanting, `Larry sucks.' That was almost considered an obscenity.
'It would be years and years later before Steve Austin could finally say `#$%' on TV. Even on TBS or TNT, the beginning of WCW, you couldn't say '#$%.' It was heavy duty for the times.''
Watching the old footage again
``I love watching that. There's a bunch of cool stuff I remember with me and Col. DeBeers and Jimmy Superfly Snuka and other things. So I'm like my biggest fan again.
``I'm watching how the people got [ticked] off. It was exciting. It was a good show. It was simple. There weren't these stupid skits. We didn't have fireworks and all kinds of ridiculous productions. The crowds got into it, got into the character. It had one element wrestling doesn't have today. It had drama.''
Differences in pro wrestling then and now
``There were good guys you loved and bad guys you hated. There was the drama because you did not want to see your heroes lose. Today, it's like everybody is OK. No one really cares. You're not really a bad guy. You're not really a good guy. You're all a bunch of guys who look the same and hop around a lot.
Singles over tag team
'I enjoyed being a singles' wrestler more than anything. That's where the opportunity was more to be a star in those days and even now. I teamed with Tony Garea when I started and with Haystacks Calhoun as a novelty. Arn Anderson and me had a heck of a team called The Enforcers. I liked working with Arn. He was one of my favorite guys. I had some classic matches in the mid 90s with Steve [William] Regal.''
Downfall of pro wrestling
``So many guys would do steroids and just have no talent and no athleticism. They would just stand there and throw a clothesline because that's all they could do. Guys who were good at their craft were getting ignored. It was kind of irritating, but that was the mindset.
``At the same time, they were complaining how come they weren't making money; how come they're not getting good ratings; how come they're not getting good pay-per-view buy rates.
``To me, it was frustrating because the upper echelon kept asking themselves how come the ratings were down. Don't you think they'd be smart enough to say, `We must not be doing this right.'''
WCW's demise
``The first guy I met who was running the company was a guy who managed a Pizza Hut, the second guy was an attorney. What the heck did they know about pro wrestling? They had an accountant. They had a couple of wrestlers like Cowboy Bill Watts who just did not fit with the corporate world. He was a different kind of character. The corporate people had no idea who they hired. It was constantly picking the wrong people.
``The only reason the lucked out with Eric Bischoff was because he was shady enough to pull off some things that no one else was shady enough to do. After Bischoff, nobody was in charge. I think when they removed Bischoff for a while, they put this accountant in charge.
``The accountant was the one who grabbed a couple of guys, [Vince] Russo and [Ed] Ferraro, away from Vince McMahon. I remember I came into the building, and Bill the accountant said, `Hey Larry, I did some exciting stuff. I stole Vince's writers away, and guess what? They weren't even under contract.'
``Then, I about lost it. Ask me about these things before you do this stupid stuff. The reason writers are not under contract is because Vince really doesn't need them.
``I knew what these guys did. They'd come up with 100 ideas which were all stupid. Vince would nullify 99 of them and maybe use one. He would then have his guys like Pat Patterson twist it around so it would work.
``In WCW, he let these guys in who had no business in the business.
``You got the perfect example. Here we got a guy Goldberg, and the people were chanting Goldberg every night. So who's the heavyweight champion of the world? The stupid writer. That tells you right there how screwed up they were.''
The good ole days
``For me and the business of wrestling and even the wrestlers, it was better in the days of Bruno. It was easier to make a living because there were territories. When you got burned out in one territory, you went to another area and then another. The guys always made money.
``When it turned to nationwide, there was only a handful of guys who lucked out at the time. There were guys like Lex Luger and Sting and some other guys who people considered stars, when the reality is they were basically worthless. They were just very, very lucky individuals who were in the right place at the right time when the people running the business did not know what they were doing. It was really an amazing thing.''
What was it like working with Bruno?
``It was a thrill and an honor.
``Like I wrote in the book, years ago they didn't want people in the wrestling business. If you came around bothering the promoters to be a wrestler, they'd tell you, `Sure, show up in the afternoon, and we'll see what you got.'
``They'd put you in the ring with somebody who would break your arm, and that was the way of promoting how tough the wrestler was. The guy would go home and say, `Oh my God, he broke my arm.'
'Then the people would say, `Wow, the wrestler really is tough.' That was the old school days. When Bruno took me under his wing, it was really kind of a destiny, kind of an honor thing that came true.
``Besides that, he was such a big star that the other names in the business who would have turned their back on a newcomer -- because they didn't want anybody to get their spot -- really went out of their way to be nice to me and teach me everything they knew."It was kind of really buttering up to Bruno through me. It was like politics. I was very lucky. It was a well-groomed beginning for me.
``It was a very positive experience. That lasted me my career. It made my career.''
What happened to Bruno?
``Bruno went into kind of a period where he was pretty elusive. He didn't want to talk about the business. He was pretty upset with the direction because he knew it would basically lead to bad business. He was a businessman.
``We always kind of kept in touch over the years. If I had a question, I'd always ask him. People want to put us together on the nostalgia show circuit.''
Working with David Sammartino
``I had a lot of matches with David. He is a good kid. Wrestling was his dream. The only problem David had was Bruno's shoes were so big that David got very frustrated because he just could not fill them. Bruno was a phenomenon of his age in his era, and his name was so big that by the time David came out and because David wasn't as big as his dad or that gorilla looking kind of guy, people just didn't buy him.
``It was very frustrating for David to try to follow in his dad's footsteps because it was an impossible thing to do.''
The Best
``Bruno Sammartino, he's No. 1.
``Look at all the numbers and records. There still was never a wrestler in any territory at anytime who had the number of sellouts for so many years as Bruno did. In fact, he was such a big star, that's how all the other stars were basically created for all those years.
``Anybody who came into New York to wrestle Bruno -- whether it be George the Animal Steele or Prof. Tanaka or Gorilla Monsoon or Killer Kowalski. Whoever came to wrestle Bruno became a star, and that's how big Bruno was.''
Advice for aspiring wrestlers
``Make sure you get an education.''
• Voted Rookie of the Year in 1974, Zbyszko enjoyed 30 years in the limelight in the wrestling business. Wrestling's self-proclaimed Living Legend shares his story of how all his dreams came true with Adventures in Larryland! (ECW Press). During his entertaining and hilarious memoir, Zbyszko recounts his ascent into wrestling notoriety.
