By Jason Powell, ProWrestling.net Editor (@prowrestlingnet)
Shotgun Wrestling Radio with Eric Bischoff
Host: Zach Takes
Interview available at YouTube.com
On getting the call from Gerald Brisco informing him that he was being inducted into the George Tragos Lou Thez Hall of Fame: “For someone of Gerry Brisco’s stature in the amateur wrestling community as well as everything he’s done for the professional wrestling community it was an honor, I hold Gerald in very high respect for a lot of reasons he’s just salt of the earth as far as I’m concerned. So they didn’t call me to tell me it was actually a surprise. I was actually at an event and Mr Brisco was there along with a few other friends from the world of professional wrestling, and I had no idea it was coming. I saw the cameras around, and all of a sudden they approached me, and Gerald let me know that’d be inducted. Like I said, because it was a full circle thing, it was special. I’m so much looking forward to it.”
On whether he’d met Dan Gable: “The Summer between my junior and senior year, the tryouts for the US Olympic team were taking place at a high school not far from mine. I grabbed a friend of mine, Greg Hagy, who wrestled 98 pounds for us. Greg and I wanted to go watch, and we packed our workout gear and went out cause there were a lot of people we knew a lot of kids like us going to be spectators but we also brought our gear so if we found a wrestling room we could just go in there and work out unofficially. So we did that, I got all geared up, I was doing takedowns with one of the other kids that was there, and you know, just a half-speed workout working on timing.
“And from over in the corner I see this guy working out and he was really intense like the rest of us were screwing around we didn’t have anything else to do so let’s just work on takedowns. He was intense, clearly not one of us, obviously one of the competitors, and I was watching him out of the corner of my eye, and he looked over at us, and I was about his same size. He looked over at us and pointed at me and said, Hey, come on over. I didn’t know who he was. I walked over, and he wanted to do a couple takedowns. He wanted me to be his takedown dummy. So I’m standing there and it was bam, woah, what was that. It was just so fast how he took me down, and he did that a few more times, and he was done with me. I found out later it was Dan Gable.”
The George Tragos/Lou Thesz Hall of Fame Weekend goes down in Waterloo, Iowa at the Dan Gable Wrestling Museum July 17th-July 19th. All access passes can be purchased here: here.
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