ROH Fightin' Words

Fightin’ Words

Fightin’ Words
By Mike Greenblatt

Our Puerto Rico vacations had been ongoing for a number of years by now. We stayed at the same hotel every time: The Marriott Candado right on the beach. They knew us there. We liked being known. We hooked up with our friend Francisco “McGyver” Gaztambide of the San Juan Star who we had gotten to know by going to many of the shows and had a meet over mango. I would conduct the interviews in English, write most of the stories, and he would translate it all into Spanish. The former publisher of Wrestling World would let me have my Metal Maniacs Art Director on a freelance basis, the talented Chinaman Dep Lee of New York City, to lay out the pages. Through our contacts, we found a distributor on the island, Agencia de Publicaciones de Puerto Rico and a printer, Best Litho, in Miami. Cary Silkin would be Publisher, I’d be Editor, and the mag would be titled Lucha Libre De Puerto Rico, all in color, and dedicated to the proposition that this beautiful island had the greatest wrestling in the world.

So with Spanish words, Chinese lay-out, Italians in Miami doing the printing, and Jewish ownership, we put out our first issue. I was trepidacious at best. After all, I had no way of knowing how McGyver would end up editing. He could put anything in there and I wouldn’t know it! What if we got sued for libel? With a giant leap of faith, a love of Puerto Rican wrestling, somewhat of an understanding of its history, and the cooperation mostly of the IWA, we set out to do our interviews, take our pictures, sell our ads and put together the magazine.

One thing was for sure. We loved going to the island on our business trips, having meetings, seeing shows, going in the dressing rooms to conduct interviews and witnessing the spectacle that only wrestling on this island could provide. How many times did we get lost in the foothills of the Caribbean mountains and forests looking for an out-of-the-way run-down gymnasium that held a local house show in some town we never heard of? Plenty. And when we walked into smoky cantinas not knowing the language to disturb intense-looking men hunkered down over checker boards smoking big cigars while salsa blasted through tinny sound systems, we thought we were taking our lives in our hands. One such establishment, nestled within a sleepy hamlet in the middle of bum-fuck nowhere festooned with palm trees, faded billboards and scrawny half-starved dogs walking around, was particularly intimidating. We were alone together in our rented car, not knowing where the hell we were, trying to find where the wrestling show was, and, to make matters worse, we had had a particularly good day at the craps tables that afternoon and forgot to put our winnings in the hotel safe, so we had major dough on us. Shit!

“You go in and ask,” I told Cary. “I’ll wait in the car.”

“Fuck that,” he answered. “We go in together.”

“Great,” I thought. “Let’s put our money in the glove department first,” I suggested.

When we walked in, it was like one of those oldtime westerns where the stranger walks into an unfriendly bar, the music stops, and the men all turn around and look up.

“Uh, donde es la luche libre?”

I knew I probably had my tenses all wrong but it seemed the right question to ask.

“Ahh, lucha libre! Lucha Libre! Si!”

And with that, we not only got perfecto directions, but one of the disturbed checker players hopped in his car and just said, “vamanos,” and he led us right there.

The magazine’s production had started.

ROH