I think there were two famous professional wrestling cards in Muscatine.
The first occurred Thursday, March 23, 1972, at Central Middle School. George Long used to promote wrestling matches as a fundraiser for his local Red Sox Baseball Team, and I suspect this was one of his cards. It was headlined by the ever-popular AWA star Reggie Lisowski, better known as The Crusher, who made Milwaukee famous.
The Crusher was a beer-drinking Polish strongman who loved to talk on television about going to the bars and dancing the polka with all the dolls. A bronze statue stands in South Milwaukee as a tribute to the working man’s hero. It depicts an image well remembered by his fans, the barrel-chested, strong-armed man carrying a beer keg on his shoulders.
His opponent that night was “Dirty” Dusty Rhodes. Before he became The American Dream, Dusty Rhodes was a bad guy, a heel in the AWA. What a villain he was. He had loads of charisma and the gift of gab, so when the two collided, it set an attendance record that would grow in legend.
My old friend, Jim Burr, told me he had heard the fire marshall threatened to shut the show down because so many people attended. Worried about having a riot on his hands if he did, he let the event go on.
The match was a brawl from start to finish, with the two going all over the building. It was just another night of leaving it all in the ring for their blue-collar fans for Dusty Rhodes and The Crusher, but the match is still remembered by those who were there.
I was a small part of the other historical card in Muscatine.
Sometimes, all a baseball player can say is they once faced Nolan Ryan in the minor leagues. Wrestling great Stan Hansen talked to me once about snapping the ball to the legendary Johnny Unitas when he was on the practice squad of the Colts. Hansen never made the team, but he can tell people he was on the football field with Johnny U.
I can tell folks I was on a card headlined by “The Phenomenal” A.J. Styles and Tyler Black.
A.J. Styles was coming to town, and he faced the young wunderkind, Tyler Black. The show was going to be held at the Jefferson school gym, which was pretty cool, as it was right next door to Central, where The Crusher and Dusty Rhodes battled 30 years before.
Doug and Matt Ritter were promoting another show in town for their fledgling promotion, No Limits Wrestling. Buffalo native Colby Lopez wrestled as Tyler Black then and had been part of their shows from the start. I figured this was an acknowledgment of the hard work he had put in for the Ritters and a chance for the young man to display his stuff against a world-class talent. The two had a great main event that showed Tyler Black could hang with one of the best wrestlers in the world.
A few years later, Tyler Black was signed to WWE and was sent to Florida to sharpen his skills in their developmental system, a minor league for the company. There, he trained under the tutelage of a retired wrestling legend, Dusty Rhodes. He also changed his wrestling name to Seth Rollins.
Seth Rollins speaks fondly of his mentor Dusty Rhodes and all he learned from him. Last year at Wrestlemania, I saw Seth Rollins face Cody Rhodes in a fantastic match that showed the return of Dusty Rhode’s son to the WWE.
As you get older, you realize you can never pay back the folks who helped you on your journey. So if the chance to help their kids comes up, you make it happen. Seth Rollins always works hard in the ring, but it seemed the Iowa native was also paying back Dusty Rhodes, the Texas outlaw who tore the house down at Central Middle School against The Crusher when they were hanging from the rafters.
