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| Pro wrestler Dutch Mantell pens book about his world |
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By: LISA MARCHESONI, Senior Writer
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Posted: Sunday, January 3, 2010 8:34 am
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Wrestler Dutch Mantell pens book on industry.
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Stories floated around in pro wrestler Dutch Mantell’s head until he propped up on a Puerto Rican beach last fall and began writing.
Mantell compared himself to Ernest Hemingway when he spent about 15 days with the stories flowing out until he completed “The World According to Dutch,” a 272-page compilation of pro wrestling stories beginning in the 1970s.
“I learned stories, unless written down or documented, they’re lost forever,” Mantell said of his book being sold at Amazon.com or on his own Web site, DutchMantell.com.
Mantell, who has lived in Murfreesboro about 15 years, recalled how he chose a wrestling career. As a young man, he served one year with the U.S. Army’s 25th Infantry Division in Vietnam. Afterwards, he worked for $60 a week mowing yards in the early 1970s.
A friend landed him an interview as a wrestler in Atlanta. He earned $420 the first week, working 15 minutes a night. As he learned more, he developed the persona of a cowboy carrying a whip. He made up his fictional hometown of Oiltrough, Texas, telling people who asked only three people lived there, the mayor, his granddaddy Sagebrush and his cousin, Clutch.
“If you didn’t have a presentation … you didn’t eat the next week,” Mantell observed. “You had an incentive to do well.”
He learned from veteran wrestlers he drove around after matches, listened and asked questions. They made recommendations.
“It’s all in the presentation,” Mantell said. “You’ve got to get people to watch. I became a student of the game.”
In turn, he educated younger wrestlers in the “University of Dutch.” Wrestler Steve Williams, also known as Steve Austin, needed a name.
“I actually gave Stonecold his name,” Mantell said.
He trained the Undertaker and Stonecold.
Mantell competed in some 6,000 matches in the U.S. – he’s been to every state but Montana and North Dakota and doesn’t know how he missed those – and traveled 4 million miles all over the world. He met actress Sophia Loren and media mogul Ted Turner during a TV taping, entertainer Jackie Gleason at the Miami Convention Center and star basketball player Charles Barkley on the side of an interstate in Birmingham.
“It ran you ragged but it was never boring.”
The storyteller
Mantell leaned back and relaxed in a chair, then presented himself as a storyteller. And some of his stories are almost unbelievable.
Legendary wrestlers such as Randy Savage, the Macho Man, performed in a feud as the “bad guy” against Mantell’s “good guy” in the Nashville territory.
“Me and Savage had chemistry with the fans,” Mantell noted.
Lifelong wrestling fan Ric Gross watched Mantell wrestle Savage as a 10-year-old boy with his older brother Al and father retired Col. Albert Gross at the state fairgrounds in Nashville.
“You could feel it – the ultimate crazy guy Savage,” Gross remembered. “Dad enjoyed seeing Dutch and Savage wrestle. He slept through the rest.”
Mantell detailed their performance in one chapter.
“One thing you had to have when you wrestled Savage was aggression,” Mantell wrote. “If you left aggression in the dressing room, Randy would just literally beat the living crap out of you. So I stocked up on aggression when I wrestled Savage. … Savage had no speedometer. He was wide open, all the time.”
In another story, Mantell recalled how three Kentucky state troopers and five sheriff’s deputies pulled over a group of wrestlers at gunpoint late one night.
“Someone reported we brandished a handgun around because our dome light was on,” Mantell said with an expression of disbelief. “They checked us out big time. When they didn’t find anything but some Red Man tobacco and as far as I know it’s still legal in Kentucky they let us go. They were big fans. We signed autographs for them.”
One of his wildest experiences occurred in a maximum-security prison in LaGrange, Ky., where wrestlers performed for convicted murderers, rapists and robbers.
“We found ourselves on the floor in front of all those convicts. It was the longest three hours of my life.”
His expression turned serious as he described one of the darkest days in wrestling history when he witnessed a wrestler stabbed in a dressing room in 1988 in Puerto Rico. No one could stop the bleeding and the victim died the next morning.
“The whole thing was the guy who did it walked free,” Mantell recalled. “I explain that in the book. It was not an indictment of Puerto Rico but an indictment of the judicial system everywhere.”
He switches to another story where the Wichita State band performed in the “Masters of Percussion” show for the PBS “Lonesome Pine” series on TV. As the band started playing, the stage rose with a ring of a match between Mantell and Jeff Jarrett. The performance is now archived at the Smithsonian Institute in Washington, D.C.
Later he remembered an organizer seeking volunteers to wrestle Ginger the bear during a hot summer in East Tennessee and eastern Kentucky.
“Hell, I’ll do it,” Mantell said, adding the match developed into “a love story between me and Ginger.”
Before the match, he took the 7-foot Ginger two candy bars and a Coke and stood with her a long time.
“I wanted her to know I’m not her enemy,” Mantell said, describing how he felt sorry for her cooped up in a 6x8 cage with people poking sticks at her and her trainer mistreating her. He ran off the people poking at her and threatened the trainer.
When they wrestled, she remembered him and treated him lightly, wrapping a paw around his leg.
“She liked me,” Mantell said before admitting, “I was actually scared of the bear.”
Mantell lamented how promoter Vince McMahan took over the Memphis territory and changed the face of wrestling. In his day, 1,200 people made their living wrestling but now it’s down to 150 worldwide.
“Today, they all look the same, all cookie-cutter,” he observed.
Mantell still makes his living in wrestling by producing a wrestling show in Puerto Rico, holding wrestling seminars and events and writing books.
Gross, who helped edit the book, described it as a “fascinating, behind-the-scenes look.”
Besides the book, Mantell offers a special collector edition with an 8x10 photo and diploma from the University of Dutch.
He documented some of the stories by referring readers to You Tube here and here.
He hopes to do book signings and take the book on the road. He expects his next book to be titled, “Down and Dirty with Dutch” where he intends to “dish a little dirt.” That made him remember another story when he trash-talked a man in McMinnville.
The man later asked him if he remembered the exchange when Mantell told him, “I’m going to write a book about idiots I’ve met and you’re going to be in the first chapter.”
Because of the amount of trash talk he delivered, Mantell didn’t remember the exchange.
“I’m not looking for votes, I’m looking to sell tickets,” he explained.
Lisa Marchesoni may be reached at 869-0814 or lmarchesoni@murfreesboropost.com.
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Member Opinions:
By: titansone on 1/6/10
Dutch, Jackie Fargo, Tojo Yamamoto, Len Rossi... all great wrestling greats back in the day. It was great fun to see those matches when I was a kid - not the trashy, sex-laden flash that today's kids are exposed to.
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