All Tiny Tiswell wants to do with his life is to promote Professional Wrestling. You can see it on his face and you can hear it in his voice as he talks about the new All Pro Wrestling arena located in the Riviera Shopping Center on Mobile Highway in Pensacola, Florida."We've got a year to make a success of it, " Wayne Sellers, AKA "Tiny Tiswell" explained. "We have 2400 square feet of space dedicated to weekly pro wrestling matches and a chance for fans who can't travel out of town to attend wrestling more often than the monthly shows offered by different local competitors."
Those "local competitors" include Ultimate Wrestling, with a juggernaut lineup that includes such notable personalities as Brutal Joe Gibson, Bobby Doll, Death Row, Former Chocolate Boy Wonder, Marcus Gibbes and expert journeyman wrestler Carlos DeAngelo, whom some reckon to be the best-rounded athelete in current local competition.
That's going to be a tough submarine to ping, let's face it.
Additional competition comes from ICON Wrestling in Milton, whose talent crew is less known to this blogger due to my never having attended an event of theirs. They too are head to head with Ultimate's Traveling Unit, which run's a monthly event in Milton. Milton shows may not seem like competition to APW, but the two cities are interchangable so an Ultimate show in Milton could well affect APW attendance 25 miles away. ICON, while not a factor at this writing, could break out given more visible talent, better storytelling and better word-of-mouth publicity from attendees.
This latest attempt at a permanent weekly wrestling schedule is far from doomed to failure, as some prejudging critics have predicted. Precedent favors the upstart promotion. For openers, everybody loves an underdog. Ultimate is not so much a lumbering boxer, as it is a lean, well-trained Shao Lin Priest, adept at bobbing and weaving and avoiding anything other than glancing blows from opponents. APW is a lean, hungry challenger with an absolute need to succeed. Failure is simply not an option.
When DSPW launched against Ultimate in Pensacola, under the guidance of Tiswell, it was a dress rehearsal for APW. The Principle handicap in that effort was building rent VS the difficulty in sustaining a steady fan return rate in a monthly setting. Fans simply forget the next show is coming unless constantly reminded. DSPW's steadily diminishing ticket sales during that run were more a product of publicity shortfall, an less that of the featured talent, because fans in actual attendance really liked such personalities as Gothic Warrior and "So Fabulous" the short-lived flamboyant tag team with the shocking pink boa trademark.
"When attacking, in order to prevail, one must overcome," says (the TV Series) Kung Fu's Master Po. "Whereas, when defending, in order to prevail, one needs merely to survive."
Wise words to live by.
APW, in order to prevail in a tight economy against entrenched competition, must pull a rabbit out of a hat. It will not be enough to present a weekly wrestling program in a clean, comfortable environment that features a well-rounded snack bar and a coherent sound system. APW will have to produce interesting, extraordinary wrestling programs that fans, after that first attendance, will want to invest in emotionally. The APW "Sportatorium" (that's me saying that and not them) will need to become a weekly meeting place of friends who share a common interest- wrestling, and a common enthusiasm - APW Wrestlers and their stories, and the guest wrestlers who come in periodically to turn the world upside down.
Ultimate need not worry about the loss of its audience’s loyalty. Ultimate is well organized, well staffed, well managed, and the audience chairs are populated with fans for whom the monthly get together at the Legion Hall is liken to a family reunion more so than an entertainment event. “The Ultimate Café” is iconic, serving better hamburgers than McDonald’s in my opinion, supplying onions in perpetuity, and staffed by personable, visually pleasant young women (occasionally supplemented by Roger). They are in a permanent “what’s not to love” catbird seat.
So APW’s task is not to unseat Ultimate or swipe their audience, but rather, build an audience of its own, using a unique style to win fans and influence critics. There will inevitably be crossovers. Some Ultimate fans, those who eat, sleep and breathe wrestling, will see APW’s weekly schedule and low $5 admission price as an opportunity to “see more wrestling.” I imagine that those fans will be the harshest judges of APW talent’s efforts.
In the end, it will be fans, not critics or bloggers or message boards ne’er do wells that will decide APW’s long-term fate. The promotion will need to average 100 tickets sold per week to cover overhead expenses related to a 365 day a year venue. The building capacity is approximately 150, so it is a tightrope over an abyss that Tiny and company will be walking.
What price a dream? What would you give to be the guy that returns weekly wrestling to Pensacola? Will APW earn a place in history alongside Robert Gibson, XW-2000 and PWA, all of which successfully maintained a more or less weekly schedule in a permanent location?
At Ultimate, Alexander and Diana Drake Hearse know just what lies ahead for APW. Weather, the price of gasoline, downtown festivals, the fair, a thousand distractions have the ability to leave seats empty inside a wrestling building. They’ve weathered ever storm Tiny’s team faces and probably some he will be lucky enough to dodge. In the end, a friendly cross-town rivalry that echoes the PWA, XW-2000 wrestling wars of 8 years ago just might awaken long dormant fans enough to start paying more attention to wrestling.
Tiny is going to need luck and plenty of it. But then, isn’t luck always what pro wrestling has been about?
