Amanda Hugankiss
wrote Thu May 20, 2004
I've got these tapes in my office I pulled from my company's archives of an event we did for a client of ours in 1989. The client is a cereal giant that was having a sales and marketing meeting at the Minneapolis Hyatt Regency. We hired the AWA to put on show as part of the meeting. .......
I'll describe the event the best I can here. The tapes are different camera angles and isos that were later edited and given to the client. We probably used far more cameras than the AWA was used to. Larry Nelson emceed and anounced from a table in the back. There's a good 20 minutes of an iso camera showing Nelson sitting there bored to death trying to stay awake during part of the program. A guy he announced as Dale Gagne was the ring announcer and Gary Derusha(sp?) was the ref. They changed the names of all the wrestlers for the matches. The faces all represented our client naturally and they won all the matches.
First match was Total the Terrible versus Nutri Rockne (face). Both looked familiar but I can't identify.
Second match was Hondo Honeybee who looked very familiar versus Mr Opportunity (face), the only African American who was announced as being from Omaha and had a jerry curl hairdo.
Third match was The General announced as the leader of that team who I did recognise as Colonel DeBeers versus Doctor K (face) who was none other than Wahoo McDaniels big chop and all.
Final match was a tag team event between a team called the Mills Brothers who looked familiar but I can't identify. Both had black mullets and wore zebra striped tights, one was bare foot and looked Asian and the other looked like Billy Ray Cyrus. They could pass as brothers in the wrestling world and since they had identical tights I assume they wrestled as a team in the AWA. Their opponents were called the S&M team standing of course for sales and marketing. They were the faces and were actually Greg Gagne and Tom Zenk.
The faces won all the matches which were all 10 minutes or less. The S&M team accepted a trophy from the top exec at the end of the show. Cereal was used as a prop in several matches, once to blind a wrestler and Gagne after taking a beating and getting thrown out of the ring eats a handful of our clients cereal and does the Popeye-Spinach routine to rally back in to the match. DeBeers did a good job as head heel and destroyed lots of cereal boxes.
The only reference to the AWA was the logo in the middle of the ring they used. The producer who did this show said it was a lot of fun. During rehearsals they had the wrestlers doing elbow and leg drops on full cereal boxes. I know that Curt Henning was one of the guys who had a great time smashing cereal all over the place because I saw that footage years ago. I'm not sure why he wasn't part of this event. We might have done several days of meetings with different shows each session or the elbow drops on cereal were done just for the fun of it. I only have the footage that I've described. The rest is with the client or lost in the archives.
I don't mention our clients by name but I think you can figure it out.
