Smokey Mountain Wrestling's KC O'Connor Extended Shoot Interview

Smokey Mountain Wrestling's KC O'Connor Extended Shoot Interview
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[@bdr113080]

Just to add on what he said about the legacy of Smokey Mountain wrestling, he is right it really was the last great territory that we had. That’s no disrespect to USWA. Memphis wrestling is legendary but really by the time you got to the 90s it was just WWF bizarro it felt like all the baby faces and he traded places when they went there. But yeah it was really the last great run of so many legends, and so many veterans. Rock n Roll Express, Tracy Smothers, DWN Tony Anthony, Buddy Landel, Bob Armstrong , Ronny Garvin……. that was really the last good run for those guys. I’m not saying they never worked again, but as far as actually really been an important part of a promotion where they were given stupid gimmicks, and if they weren’t there the next week nobody noticed that was really the last great run of those guys.
Then you guys like Kevin Sullivan and cactus Jack who still went on the national scene for years after that, but they did great stuff there, too, and then look at all the people who really got their start, it was the first place that many of them ever worked on television. Chris Candido, Chris Jericho, D-Lo Brown, Al Snow, the heavenly bodies , Tha Gangstas, Lance Storm, Kane, Bob Holly….. some of them had been enhancement talent, other places, but this was their first time really being on TV doing more than enhancement matches. They had the music they finally got to cut promos, and as someone who was a fan of wrestling back, then honestly I think smoky mountain wrestling did more with what they had than any other promotion in the first half of the 90s.
No, they didn’t have like Ric Flair or Randee Savage, or Yokozuna or Sting when you are grading the promotions just on working with what they had instead of who they had, for me, smoky mountain wrestling did the best at that in the first half of the 90s. It took a while for them to get started but if you start watching Smoky Mountain wrestling in the fall of 1992 for me, I would say to the summer of 1995 those are the best years of Smoky Mountain wrestling.

[@bdr113080]

Thank you for interviewing KC. I remember hearing stories about him from other SMW wrestlers and there was one other shoot interview he did that came out in the last couple years and I know a lot of mainstream of today that love WWE and AEW probably have no idea who he is but I love hearing him tell stories he left the business after Smoky Mountain closed down, so he doesn’t really have a dog in the fight. He can just tell the stories as honestly as he remembers them.
Like him I’m also a son of North Carolina and grew up watching NWA/WCW and we also watch Smokey Mountain wrestling in the first half of the 90s . When I really think about the wrestling, I miss the most even though I loved the Monday night war era, and I loved with both WCW and WWF did at the time, I find myself reminiscing about old-school WCW and Smoky Mountain wrestling more than I do the Monday night wars. You have Monday night wars if those wrestlers didn’t learn how to do wrestling the good old fashion way it should be done first.
I thought wrestling was in a really good spot in the 90s because you had two national companies but then you still had a handful of territories like SMW, USWA, ECW, GWF…. so every now and then a wrestler might pop up and you can tell he knows what he’s doing but he wasn’t on either of the big two companies channels so they could work those territories for four or five years and then get called up to the big leagues. After the territories and WCW went away, it just turned into either. You were a backyard wrestler who got into the wrestling business or you were trained by WWE and only no way of working and nothing else. Today everybody is so cookie-cutter and works the same and cuts the same promo. It wasn’t like back in the day when we had Cactus Jack, Sting, Rock & Roll Express, Hogan, Flair, Ron Simmons, Ricky Steamboat, Randy Savage, Harlem Heat, Kevin Nash, Sean Waltman etc. look at that list of guys I mentioned not one of them is so much like the other that you can just take them out of a spot and plug the other one into it. The territories going away I think, has really hurt the heart of professional wrestling.