For decades, St. Louis was a unique hotbed for professional wrestling. Run by National Wrestling Alliance Kingpin Sam Muchnick, the promotion regularly boasted high-caliber main events featuring wrestlers from a variety of territories.
Larry Matysik worked in the St. Louis Wrestling promotion for two decades. His jobs ranged from public relations to office management to play-by-play announcing. Along the way, he saw wrestling's good, bad, and ugly sides, and learned the ins and outs of the business.
In this interview with Wrestling Perspective, Matysik discusses:
- Why the St. Louis promotion was always able to attract top-level talent.
- What Sam Muchnick and Paul Boesch had in common.
- What it was like to work for Sam Muchnick.
- Why clean finishes contributed to the promotion's success.
- How the promotion handled wrestlers who refused to lose.
- The first responsibility of a wrestling announcer.
These topics and many others are addressed by Larry Matysik in Wrestling Perspective #112.
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Then read these excerpts below:
Matysik on how Muchnick handled egos: "He was completely unimpressed if somebody came in there and said, 'I’m Dick the Bruiser!' Sam would say, 'Oh that’s fine, big deal. Can you draw me money?' It was really hard to argue with someone who was that good of a pragmatist."
Matysik on the articles he wrote for Ring magazine: "I tried submitting a couple of articles to Ring magazine, which at that time was mainly a boxing magazine, but would carry maybe 15 pages of wrestling stories in every one of their editions and lo and behold, they printed them. Didn’t pay me for them, but they did print them."
Matysik on Wild Bill Longson: "He was a great teacher and had been a great professional wrestler, vastly underrated for the money he drew, he was a tremendous drawing card and he understood the business. He was just a gentle old bear of a man, which would be hard for anybody who might have heard stories about him as a tough guy in the ring."
Matysik on Muchnick's promotional style: "Sam’s theory was to make it accessible, understandable, sensible, but of course what was his background? Major League Baseball. Well, he liked to see a pennant race and that’s why somebody lost in St. Louis, it didn’t mean they were going to be wiped off the face of the Earth."
Matysik on the problems that faced the Von Erichs: "I was close with the Von Erichs, David in particular, and I’d still like to believe the thing with David was an accident and he overdosed by mistake. But they were living in some sort of fantasy world down there because they were on top of the world in World Class Wrestling in those days in the early and mid-Eighties. "
Matysik on why Muchnick never expanded the St. Louis Promotion: "He told me once, 'Well, yeah, I guess I could have tried to take those Kansas City or Indianapolis, or get them involved with St. Louis, but I didn’t want to work that hard. This is fine. I have enough hard work with all those guys calling the NWA every time they had a little problem.' Like there was a fight down in Knoxville, Tennessee, or there was a fight in Tuscaloosa. He didn’t want to go through all that. He wasn’t that ambitious and he was happy with St. Louis "
Matysik on Vince McMahon: "He told me one day, 'This is a rotten business with rotten people. The only way to survive is be more rotten than they are.' Well, anybody who lived through that in the mid-Eighties would say, 'Yep, Vince did that.'"
Matysik on why the NWA promotions couldn't fight off McMahon: "If I’d have come and we’d all made peace and we’d all been back together, Vince still had a lot of big advantages. I would have been involved with a lot of people who had different agendas that didn’t all fit the same thing. Vince had one agenda, one idea, one goal. Bill Watts had a goal, Jim Crockett had a goal, Verne Gagne had a goal, Fritz Von Erich had a goal. There’s no way that was ever going to fit together. Vince’s goal was to pick them off, one by one, guerilla warfare."
Order your copy of Wrestling Perspective #112 featuring the Larry Matysik interview today!
Click Here To Order Issue #112 With Your Credit Card
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