Counting The Lights

I got the call from the Editorial Desk at CtL central late last night: “We need you to review shoot tapes for us. It will up our circulation.” I explained that we don’t actually print anything and thus don’t have any circulation, but I think Noah had just watched a History Chanel special on newspapers, so he just kept yelling reporter jargon at me until i agreed to do it.

The introductory review is the shoot tape featuring Magnum TA and Nikita Kolov. Now, in a matter of full disclosure, I don’t like shoot tapes, especially for guys who have been out of the business for a while. More often than not, I think there is an air of voyeuristic cruelty to them, like watching the town retard drown a puppy. It just feels like the point of the interviews are to point out how incoherent, bitter or addicted they ended up. However, Sam and Noah kept telling me how great this one was and I should watch it. Thus, we convened in the CtL Media Center and I joined it in progress.

I was pleased that neither looked like they were pulled out of the gutter. To be honest, Nikita looks exactly like what I would have expected him to look like. He was bald (that run in 90 where he had hair never seemed right) and still in good shape, but not as diesel as he had been back in the day. Magnum TA apparently couldn’t make it, so they had his dad in for him. Had I not seen Magnum in one of the Fed DVDs a few years back, I would have guessed that was Don West before Terry Allen. Hell, I would have guessed it was Barry Allen before it was Terry Allen. Turns out smashing two vertebrae can have a pretty deleterious effect on your general well-being. He only has use of one arm and i imagine is still only moderately ambulatory, but he looked better than Christopher Reeves did. That guy was Superman, so I will count that as a victory for ol’ Mag.

I apparently joined in at the part of the tape where they were tired of talking about wrestling. I missed the point where we find out who gave Magnum his ring name, or why Nikita took that time off. Instead I got treated to a fifteen minute tale about how Nikita hit some guy who rushed the ring & in his arrest report admitted that Nikita gave him a concussion with his chain. If you read that sentence, you got everything I did out of the story with 14:45 to spare. Actually, my sentence was a little funnier than the story.

Magnum then took over and told us all about how his accident led to the transformation of Nikita Kolov into a top tier talent. They both praised the genius of Dusty Rhodes for turning Nikita face and having him cry on “the magazine.” Magnum claimed to have watched the world of wrestling change in the five months he was in the hospital. If you believe Magnum, TV had just been invented when he wrecked his Porsche and when he got out, PPVs were shown in 3-D and food was replaced with meal pellets.

Also, Nikita and Magnum (with the help of Tully and Flair) taught Philadelphia to like Southern-style matches. Yep, before these guys, Northern fans could only take 10 minute TV matches, and Magnum taught everyone how to enjoy a 60 minute masterpiece of arm bars and other rest holds. Thank you, the south. We had no idea.

Truth is, doing a 60 minute match is like doing a cage match or a ladder match: pointless unless you are building an idea with it. Doing a 60 minute broadway because you have the conditioning doesn’t mean that you should do one.

So in addition to these nuggets of knowledge from the days of yore, we learn that both men are now Christian. I really think that is great. I would rather see guys talk about religious beliefs than how they had to have their heart restarted after they were found buried under a mountain of blow and horse tranquilizers. But Nikita has made a career out of it and is now a motivational speaker. It really comes off forced and scary to hear Nikita use that motivational speaker cadence and talk about how he went from “successful… to significant.” It’s a wrestling tape, man… mentioning your beliefs is fine, a 10 minute selling shtick on it just makes us all long for you to growl “zha-tow-ah-tah” at us.

Magnum, with his limited mobility and paralyzed arm, is in the cell phone tower construction business. Really. He drives the truck with his one good arm. He apparently made a ton of cash at it initially, sold that company, founded another and is now struggling to get that one on it’s feet. He is also a Christian, but he doesn’t let it ruin his shoot tape experience.

So, to sum up:

* Nikita isn’t Russian. (Noah was actually a little upset by this)
* Magnum made a ton of money, so don’t worry about how he looks now. Seriously, he wrecked a Porsche, not a Le Car, and that was while he was working for the US title.
* Philly loved 5 minute squashes until Magnum taught them better.
* God… and Jesus… and the Bible.
* Nikita can’t tell a story. At all. He makes more sense using that fake Russian he used to spout because he was more concise there.
* Magnum looks kinda like Don West.

-Ryan