out the steaks. A lot of the guys who had spent some time wrestling in Japan had gotten used to the food. While they were slurping down gooey fish and slimy things you couldn’t even identify, I was twiddling my thumbs and salivating in anticipation of my next streak, which always seemed to be three days away.
Getting from one arena to the next also wasn’t easy. We had twelve big wrestlers packed onto a very small bus. We’d drive four hours to our destination, shuffle off the bus, head into the arena to wrestle, and then head back to a hotel that had no resemblance to the kind of hotels I was used to. They were the size of a matchbox. Every time I tried to roll over in bed, I’d end up falling out and banging my head on the toilet. The only time I didn’t fall out of bed and bang my head on the toilet was in a hotel that didn’t have toilets in the room. They only had one bathroom per floor, and it can be a pretty gruesome sight heading into a shower after eleven other professional wrestlers have already gotten their wash on.
Needless to say, I didn’t take to Japan that first time I went over. A part of it had to do with the fact that I was uncomfortable because I was still so green, feeling like I wasn’t pulling my weight in the ring. A part of it had to do with the fact that I wasn’t yet accustomed to life on the road. But it’s amazing how a little time and experience can change a man. Now Japan is one of my favorite places in the world, full of colorful people and places. My first time over there, I guess I was just so consumed with trying to find my niche that it was hard to truly open my eyes to all that was going on around me.
When I stepped off the plane in Charlotte, North Carolina, I was happy to see my family. I was also eager to start wrestling in the good old U.S. of A. I had gotten all the kinks in my game straightened out over in Japan, and, thanks to Gene Anderson and Nelson Royal, I had gotten a gig with the South Atlantic Professional Wrestling Association (SAPW) on the East Coast. So, my father and I hit the road.
We traveled to Winston-Salem, Wilkesboro, Columbia, Atlanta, and a dozen other cities in the southeast. Sometimes I’d perform in front of fifty people in a high school gym or a veteran’s war memorial building. Other times I would entertain hundreds of people in the Winston-Salem Coliseum or the Memorial Coliseum in Charlotte. And then sometimes the show got canceled because only seven spectators turned up. The only thing constant was the money—no matter how big the show, I usually only made enough to pay for the gas back home. Technically we were in a rough spot, but that’s not where our heads were. We had moved east to fulfill a dream, and now we were living it. There was no doubt in my mind that as long as I stuck with it, I would make it to the top.
And besides, I had never seen my father so happy. Every Friday and Saturday night we would be on the road, heading to some new destination. One of his favorite things in this world is to drive, so he would stay up all night behind the wheel while I napped in the passenger’s seat. And when we got to an event, my father would jump into the mix and help the promoters set up the ring. He’d work his way around the crowd, find someone interesting, and have an hour-long conversation about professional wrestling. He was truly in the height of his glory, living out a fantasy he’d had since his childhood. Both of us were having a blast.
It wasn’t long until I started seeing the same faces in different towns, and I realized that people were actually making a two-or three-hour drive just to see me perform. The fans made me feel accomplished; they made me feel like I was actually going someplace. I wouldn’t have turned my back on a single one of them, but it did start getting a little hard for my family. At that time, many of the fans were convinced that professional wrestling was real. They bought every line and gimmick hook-line-and-sinker. If I did or said something that they didn’t agree with, they opened up the phone book. They all knew that I wrestled out of Charlotte, and with there only being one Shamrock in the Charlotte phone book, it didn’t take them long to find my number. Then they’d called me up to give me a piece of their mind. My wife usually answered the phone.
It didn’t take long before my family got tired of the angry phone calls, so I stopped using my real name and started going by Vince Tortelli. I don’t recall how the name came about, but I kept it because people thought it fit my Italian look. The name change didn’t affect my popularity in the slightest. I was drawing larger crowds at every show, performing in cities further away each week. But despite my accomplishments in the ring, professional wrestling still wasn’t paying the bills.
With my father doing a majority of the bread earning working at a local group home, I started scouring the city for illegal prizefights. I was surprised by how many I could find. I fought in the backrooms of bars and in vacant parking lots. Seldom did I walk away with more than fifty bucks in my pocket, but every little bit counted.
Just as money started to really get tight, I heard about a Toughman competition they were having in Statesville, which was close to our home. Ever since I had won the money at the Redding Toughman contest, I had been keeping my eye out for them. There had been a couple of shows on the East Coast, but most of them had been a six-or seven-hour drive away from where we lived, and we didn’t want to waste the money on gas. But now that they had one in Statesville, I wasn’t going to pass up on the opportunity to make some easy money. And for the most part it was easy money. I blew through the competitors and took home close to a thousand dollars. That was more money than I made in several months doing professional wrestling, so when I heard that they were having another contest in Hickory, which was also close to our home, I went down there and entered it.
The purse for the winner of this tournament was $2,500. I went through my first two competitors with ease, but when I stepped into the finals the following day, I found myself up against a guy with over fifty armature fights. Seconds into the first round, he stepped forward and hit me with a six-or seven-punch combination. At that point, I still hadn’t learned any boxing skills. I knew enough about the sweet science, however, to realize that if I tried to get fancy, I would probably end up lying on the canvas with the whites of my eyes showing. So I did what came naturally—I started to brawl. I powered into him and hit him with these big sledgehammer fists. At one point, I even pushed him out of the ring. It was a tough back-and-forth battle, but in the end my street fighting experience put me over the top and dropped $2,500 in my pocket.
Before I could skip out to the parking lot, the promoter caught up to me. I knew something had been a little fishy in that last fight, and he confirmed my suspicions.
“Man,” he said, shaking his head, “you just beat my ringer.”
Most promoters were not in the habit of sharing the fact that they had a ringer in their tournament, but I could tell this guy was busted up over having lost $2,500. If the promoter’s ringer had won, the promoter would have only had to pay him what they’d agreed upon ahead of time, which, from the look on his face, was a lot less than $2,500. I figured that the only reason the promoter told me about the ringer was that he wanted me to become the new ringer. I wasn’t interested, not after doing a year of Buzz Sawyer’s dirty work, so I turned and walked away.
That decision came back to haunt me. I was getting the idea that I was pretty good at this Toughman thing, so whenever a tournament came around, I started to rely on the money before stepping into the ring. And it was a lot of money to count on. In my last competition, I had made more money in one night that I did in a year wrestling on the road. Well, I heard that they were having a tournament up in Charlotte for all the guys who had already won an event. It was sort of like the Ultimate Ultimate would be—everyone wanted to know who the toughest Toughman fighter was. I had already won two events, so I naturally thought that they would let me compete. I was wrong. They banned me from the event, and when I asked them why they had banned me, they said it was because I was too tough. Right then I knew what had happened. They had found another ringer, and this time they wanted to be sure that I didn’t go in there and beat him.
I didn’t spend too much time worrying about it because things were starting to happen for me in the world of professional wrestling. My name, Vince Tortelli, was starting to get around,
