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MITCHELL'S MEMO: NWA Star-Filled Fanfest with Ric Flair, Harley Race, and more
Jul 30, 2009 - 1:09:26 PM |
By Bruce Mitchell, PWTorch senior columnist
The annual NWA Legends Fanfest, August 7th through 10 at the University Hilton in Charlotte, N.C. is always one of the highlights of my summer. Promoter Greg Price's nostalgia convention is well run, and hardly like those shows in The Wrestler. He has now established Fanfest as the top wrestling event of its type in the country.
This year's Fanfest line-up, even by the standards of past shows, is a doozy.
I'll give you an example:
Last year I'm standing in the Hilton bar. I've just introduced myself ("blah blah Pro Wrestling Torch blah blah Wade Keller blah blah blah Mark Madden") to Scott Hall, whom I've never met before. He completely blows me off with "Tell Madden to eat some doughnuts." Great.
Another guy at the bar, big New York accent, turns to me. "Are you Bruce Mitchell?" Now, you're talking. This guy knows who I am. So does his buddy. That takes some of the sting of the Razor cut away. They're from one of the New York boroughs, I forget which, but suffice it to say, they would have looked at home at the Bada Bing. Really cool guys.
Turns out they're not extras, though, they're making their own independent movie. (I live near a university with a big drama department, so I run into folks from time to time who do this successfully, so it's not the eyebrow raiser that, say, "I'm starting my own pro wrestling company, and we've already got internet portals/foreign television networks interested" can be.)
Their movie, of course, has a pro wrestling element to it. They want Kevin Sullivan for it, and as it happens he was there. Sullivan looked tan, rested, and in tennis-pro shape. It's quite the contrast from the tank Sullivan was in the ring all those years.
These guys have a question for me, one that they see as crucial to the success of their film.
How can we contact Austin Idol?
Now, The Universal Heart Throb Austin Idol was the one guy who, back in the late seventies and early eighties, could go mirror for mirror, mullet for mullet, brag for brag, and robe for robe with the Nature Boy Ric Flair. He was more Tito Ortiz than Tito Ortiz. He even beat The King of Memphis Jerry Lawler in a head-shaving cage match in one of the wildest scenes and most famous matches in Memphis history.
If you could take The Women's Pet and The Men's Regret, The Greatest All-Around Athlete of All Time from 1980 Georgia Championship Wrestling and transplant that character into the 2009 Raw sports entertainment show he'd get over huge.
Well, being Pro Wrestling Torch's Senior Columnist, and someone who knows at least half the words to "Heart Throb" by the Idolators ("Harley Race, you fat disgrace" and "Ric Flair, I think you dye your hair" stand out) of course I had no idea. I knew the guy lived in Tampa, because he was featured in a newspaper article down there a few years ago in front of his flooded house after a hurricane, but that was it. No one in wrestling had seen him in years.
My new friends were disappointed. No Austin Idol was going to leave a big hole in their movie.
I couldn't find him, but the NWA Legends Fanfest did, and boy, did my phone start to ring when that was announced. Austin Idol is going to be at the Highspots.com sponsored table, and apparently he hopes to parlay this appearance into his election as Tampa's next mayor. At 59, he even looks like Austin Idol.
Austin Idol isn't the only rare find for this over-stuffed-with-stars convention. The legendarily scarce Mark Lewin is also coming. Lewin, who was in one of the biggest drawing babyface Madison Square tag teams of the sixties with Don Curtis, is mostly remembered by today's fans as the "Yeet! Yeet!" Purple Haze, who the afore-mentioned Kevin Sullivan called from the sea in Florida championship Wrestling in the early eighties. My pal John Hitchcock loves him so much for years he's claimed Lewin is his father.
I'll be keeping my distance for that touching family re-union.
Lewin has been gone so long legends grew just about where he was. He married a princess in Singapore. He lived in Malaysia, just because it was really far away from the wrestling business. Even his old booking partner Sullivan wasn't sure what happened to him.
If the last great Mid Atlantic get, Blackjack Mulligan, hadn't backed out, NWA Fanfest would have hit the rare wrestler trifecta.
Bigger than even Austin Idol, the NWA Fanfest features the most sought-after and hard to book attraction in all of the nostalgia circuit - the reunion of Ric Flair, Tully Blanchard, Ole Anderson, Arn Anderson, and J.J. Dillon, the Original Four Horsemen. It's the first time in almost twenty years they'll have been together. Fans will have the rare opportunity to get an autographed picture with one of the first and best (with the Fabulous Freebirds) of the cool heel gangs.
Hopefully, Ole Anderson, who holds court in the hotel lobby every Fanfest, and Flair won't ask each other how their mutual "cousins" are doing.
This is where I point out that, judging from Hulk Hogan's recent appearance in Cincinnati, where an estimated 400 fans paid ninety-nine bucks a shot to get the Hulkster's autograph, Ric Flair is the real champion in this market, too.
I'm also excited for the opportunity Thursday night to co-host, with former WCW announcer Chris Cruise, a Question and Answer panel with NWA World Champions Ric Flair and Harley Race on the first Starrcade. There's a lot of fascinating material to cover there, and it goes well beyond Starrcade being the granddaddy of the big show model that pro wrestling runs on these days.
The emotional highlight of the convention is the annual Hall of Heroes banquet, catered by the Hilton. Friends, family, and fans of legendary wrestlers inducted into the Hall gather together to remind themselves that the reach of pro wrestling goes even beyond the McMahon family legacy. It's an emotional night, and something special that goes well beyond the promotion of a wrestling show. The Fabulous Fargos, Playboy Gary Hart, Chief Wahoo McDaniel, Blackjack Mulligan (with Flair inducting, appropriately), Nelson Royal, and Lance Russell
People all over the world come for the autographs, and beside the Original Horsemen, this year Abdullah the Butcher, Ole Anderson, Tully Blanchard, Dave Brown, Bob Caudle, Chris Cruise, James J. Dillon, "The Fantastics" Bobby Fulton & Tommy Rogers, Don Fargo, Jackie Fargo, "Nature Boy" Ric Flair, Susan Green, Jimmy Hart, Sir Oliver Humperdink, Jerry Jarrett, Paul Jones, Rich Landrum, Mark Lewin, Bugsy McGraw, Magnum TA, Judy Martin, Angelo Mosca, Angelo Mosca Jr., Harley Race, Rock Riddle, Billy Robinson, Lance Russell, Bill Watts, and Barry Windham will be signing autographs and taking photos with fans.
I'm always fascinated with the telephone pole posters, old magazines, clip-books and videos for sale at the vendor tables in the huge dealer room. You can pretty much find every wrestling doll ever manufactured (and every shoot tape). There's a ton more wrestlers coming with those vendors. It's a great place to find wrestling books. I look forward to picking up Jim Cornette's Midnight Express book and the late Gary Hart's autobiography, both of which I hear good things about.
Then there's just hanging out at the bar and eaves-dropping on both old-time wrestlers and fans you only saw twenty-five years ago at the wrestling show and haven't seen since. There's something wonderfully surreal about half-hearing snatches of conversation all around you and they're all about pro wrestling.
There's always a wrestling show, appropriately enough, Saturday night.
The NWA Fanfest is also where I finally get to meet, in person, a lot of Pro Wrestling Torch readers. That's really cool. To a man (and woman) Torch readers are an intelligent bunch that knows their wrestling. (You can tell because they always encourage me to keep arguing with Wade Keller on the audio.) If you're coming, make sure to find me.
Maybe I can get you in a movie.
Bruce Mitchell has been a PWTorch columnist since September 1990. Listen to Mitchell and Torch editor Wade Keller every weekend at the PWTorch VIP website (pwtorch.com/members) in the VIP Audio Show section where they spend about two hours discussing current events in wrestling plus topical historical subjects and answer member questions. He writes Memos most weeks and feature-length columns about once a month for PWTorch Newsletter.
Send feedback on this article to pwtorch@gmail.com and we'll regularly publish reader feedback in the "Torch Feedback" category on the Main Listing.
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