Black History Month DAY 24

Orlando Jordan v Tony Jones UWA 2000

And it’s another black wrestler v. black wrestler match in another promotion with (at least a worked) black owner in front of a majority black audience. The UWA was the Urban Wrestling Alliance; a “Hollywood” wrestling fed that recorded about eight episodes for syndication in 2000. It had many of the problems that one would associate with a “Hollywood” run promotion.

The matches were short and it was way overwritten. There were way too many valets. There was obviously canned crowd noise. This was being filmed in LA (at the Olympic—or more like a room in the Olympic) and not in Memphis. So no history of large black audiences attending wrestling shows. It was pretty clear that lots of the audience was plants. It’s possible that they comped Oaktown 357s families to get more black faces in the audience. It’s also possible that they paid out of work actors ( probably the kid who played Stephanie Tanner’s docile black schoolmate for the two seasons that it was cute for her to have a pet black friend before it became threatening to have her around a black male).… Both Raven Symone and Monique can be seen cheering in audience. Nobody on commentary mentions “celebrities in attendance”.

The commentary was done by the team of ex Rough Ryder Cross (http://www.maverickentertainment.cc/images/products/underground_ss.jpg) and John Watanabe who went on to do commentary for those English language FMW DVDS. It was a bad commentary team. Both guys were more concerned with getting their own gimmicks over than getting over the action. Cross’ tough guy rapper swagger kind of buried the talent. He did lots of threatening the wrestlers to step up to him and lots of “see I wouldn’t have let that happen to me, cause that’s not how you do it in the streets.” type comments. And John Watanabe was working hard at getting over his “wrestling expert guy who ha watched wrestling since the seventies” gimmick at the expense of getting over the stuff in front of him. He did lots of saying that what a wrestler was doing was “shades of” someone else without explaining what the actual wrestler was doing. My favorite John Watanabe getting over gimmick of “wrestling expert” name dropping is when he called a wrestlers divorce court variation as “shades of Japan’s Fujiwara armbar breaking his arm shades of Ole Anderson”.

There were guys in it with clearly little wrestling background chosen for their look (www.aaronbaker.net/ ) combined with some really green wrestlers. Your two highest pushed singles wrestlers were Sonny Siaki as cocky face Money (Cross: “cause we all about the money” baby) and Deuce/Solo Snuka as Solo the rogue maverick cop who was known for both excessive force and ratting other cops to internal affairs( “ no one can trust” him).

Lots of time was spent on self mythologizing of commissioner/owner. Its commissioner was Alonzo Brown, formerly one half of rap group Dr Jeckyl And Mr Hyde (http://www.cocaineblunts.com/blunts/?p=679 ). Jeckyl was Uptown records kingpin Andre Harrell and went on to become the CEO at Motown. Hyde was Alonzo Brown who was involved with this show and went onto write the movie “Honey”.

But the shows had a lot of charm and character. The matches were pretty straight forward with pretty clear face/heel structure. And you get the sense that being the writer for Honey makes you a better writer than being an ex writer for Friends, or a writer for the WWF magazine. As the writing and character development pretty much made sense. The basic opening premise for the shows was that Alonzo Brown was the son of tag wrestling legend the Brown Horne and he has ambivalent feelings about pushing tag team wrestling due to that relationship, he is also coming to grips with finding a new champion since longtime champ Mustafa (not the Mustapha from ECw but an actor) had just stepped down. The whole starting a show in medias res, is on the one hand a sign of overwriting and on the other hand awesome throwback to kayfabed Rio De Janero tournaments and belt histories.

Orlando Jordan at the time wasn’t working a boxing gimmick (his punches weren’t very good) he was working as one half of the Black Legion. His “brother” was the highflyer while he was the technical half(doing lots of throws, toe holds into majistrals etc). Tony Jones is wrestling as HTK (Hard to Kill) and brings rottweilers with him to the ring. Match is real simple. OJ as face attacks HTK quickly at start bulls HTK into the corner, ref separates, and then HTK takes advantage and just starts tossing OJ around with lots of big throws... OJ gets a couple hope spots in the form of suplex reversals and eventually is able to catch HTK off a missed charge with a German and a death valley driver. Nothing exceptional, but the match is made by the angle. Tony Jones comes to ring with a hardback copy of the Oxford anthology of (I think British) literature and announces: “you people need to get off of welfare… you people need to stop whining and complaining…you people need to stop making excuses…you [OJ] and your people need to open up a book and learn to read”. Dana White isn’t in the audience, or if he was you couldn’t hear him cheer. And this is met with real boos from the audience, and it sounds weird as actual heel heat mixes with the canned one. Orlando Jordan takes the mic. And says “You know something [about that reading] can you hook me up.
HTK: “Here’s a book of literature, you should try to read it from cover to…”BAM!!! And OJ hits him with the literature anthology. The crowd cheers and the bell rings as OJ swings the book at HTK. If you ever had to read a literature anthology you know that those are some onion sheet pages and so unfortunately no garbage paper cut spots. A really fun perfectly executed angle that keeps the audience involved for match. John Wattanabe tries to do cliché wrestling commentary spots” HTK is showing really good Greco and freestyle wrestling skills, whatever you think of HTK’s personality, you have to respect his skills”. But Cross will have none of that”I don’t need to respect nothing, he’s a degenerate, and if you’re down with him you’re a degenerate too.”.