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As much as Saturday will be a celebration of Don West’s life and career within Impact Wrestling, it’s equally important to reflect on Tenay’s own unique journey into professional wrestling that saw him go from fan entranced by professional wrestling in Los Angeles to newsletter publisher to radio personality to announcer to Hall of Famer.
Taking us back to the origin of Mike Tenay, The Professor noted, “I became a wrestling fan at the age of seven years old in 1962. My grandfather came to visit from Kansas and picked up the LA Times newspaper, looked at the sports section and said, "Oh wrestling's on at eight o'clock tonight, we're gonna watch wrestling." I was a baseball, football, basketball fan at that point, and wasn't really even introduced to hockey, which became my favorite sport. I said, "What the heck is wrestling?" He said, "Don't worry about it. We'll watch it tonight."
It was a television viewing experience that launched Tenay like a rocket into a new trajectory in life.
“The first guy I saw on the TV was The Destroyer,” Tenay remembered, his tone not even close to hiding his glee about the circumstances. “He opened the show, because I've been able to go back and find it because of the internet and because of all the great wrestling databases and Cagematch.de and all those great sites that have results that I spend way too much time on just looking at them. I can almost narrow it down to the exact day on a Wednesday night in 1962 that I saw that first TV show and opening match that night was The Destroyer - the first person that I see when the TV comes on, and I can't figure out why there's a guy in the mask. He has a hold called the figure four leg lock, which looks amazing to me, and he gives people $1000 if they can break it. Then he comes out, he does an interview and the interview just has my jaw dropped and I'm blown away and after watching him I became hooked from that day.”
For the man who would one day become endowed with “The Professor” nickname, Tenay had quite the quandary as a professional wrestling fan in that era.
“I wanted to find out everything that I could and it was such a weird situation because, where do you go to get knowledge of wrestling? I went to the encyclopedias that we had and I looked at it. There was amateur wrestling. Nothing really clicked and I was watching a TV show with my dad one night, a talk show and they had a wrestler there and they showed a wrestling magazine, and I went, "Oh my God, there's wrestling magazines?" And the floodgates were open.”
Like everyone who has ever loved professional wrestling, of course, the next big stop comes with virgin territory - experiencing your first ever show in person.
“A couple of months later in the summer of '62, I went to my first live event at The Olympic Auditorium in Los Angeles,” remembers Tenay. “The very first match that night was The Destroyer versus Mr. Moto. Again, The Destroyer in that very first... the reason, that was the main event, but in those days, Wednesday night was a TV night and the live TV show started at eight o'clock. 7:30 is when they had what they called a dark match main event that they didn't show on TV. So again, here's The Destroyer in the first match that night. And I just...because my grandfather and my parents, believe it or not, smartened me up to the business when I was seven years old. I always was amazed especially when I went live because I knew what was going on.. I wasn't “smart smart smart” to the business, that would come later when you become inside, but I knew what was going on. I wanted to know how this was all happening and how it was all put together.”
That drive for knowledge plunges Tenay into wanting to know how the machine is made, so he does what everyone who finds their passion does, they research and immerse themselves into the madness behind the mayhem.
“The business side of it became really the thing that I was interested in,” Tenay recalled. “The thing that really caught me off guard was being there live in 1962, and you can imagine the reaction of the fans in '62, knowing what I knew about what I was watching, I was amazed that they were able to manipulate the fans. I mean that in a positive sense, not a negative sense, but that they were able to manipulate the fans and that aspect of wrestling is really what attracted me more to it than anything. I started going to the library. I would get the New York Times newspapers on microfilm and microfiche, and I would sit there and I would write down the results of the Madison Square Garden cards going back to the 1950s and I would study booking patterns, and it was easy because that era and then into the WWWF was probably the most formulaic booking patterns of all time, but it enabled me to sort of understand how things were done. I didn't know who did them necessarily, but I knew there was somebody that was behind the scenes and I heard about matchmakers but I didn't know about bookers. I just became totally immersed in anything that I could read or anything I could find about professional wrestling.”
All of that research leads to Tenay launching his own newsletter, one of many at the time were the true centerpiece for what would now be termed influencers and taste-makers, the most die-hard fans sharing information, results and opinions.
“In 1966 when I was 11 years old, again, I've been reading the wrestling magazines, and I would always go to back and they would have pen pals and the fan club section, and I didn't necessarily want to have a fan club for a particular wrestler, but I wanted to learn more about the business in general rather than just one guy in particular,” said Tenay. “That's why when I started my wrestling newsletter, it was on coverage of the entire business which in those days, there were a couple. The one that immediately comes to mind was a publication called Mat Mania by a guy named Burt Ray. It was just a fantastic monthly publication and was the thing that really, when I saw that piece of work, I knew I couldn't emulate that at 11 years old, but I wanted somehow to be a part of that. I thought, how cool would it be to have correspondence in all the major cities around the country and then eventually turn into Canada and Japan and England. How awesome was it that I could have these correspondence, where we would exchange programs, we would exchange results? It then led to exchanging audio tapes of the TV shows. I would get the tapes from Seattle, I would get the tapes from Houston, I would get the tapes from Detroit, and I would make copies of the Los Angeles TV shows and trade with those people. And I had all the information and I thought, "Well, this is my opportunity," and that's where I started the newsletter. And it turned out to be very well received. I was very proud to be recognized at a really young age at the WFIA convention two years in a row for having the best newsletter, which really meant a lot because it was a lot of work that went into it. And it just led to that love of the business and years later as we fast forward.”
With technology being what it was at the time, we could land a Man on the Moon, but for wrestling fans, audio was the only chance to experience a piece of professional wrestling beyond your local area, as VCRs wouldn’t hit the market for years.
“I look back and I remember that as a kid, I would bring a tape recorder, a cassette recorder to the live events at The Olympic Auditorium and I would do play by play,” Tenay explained. “There was a correspondent that I had in Detroit who would do the same thing. He would go to shows both at Cobo and the Olympia because this was in the era of the wrestling war between Bruiser and Sheik, and he would do play by play of the matches and even though I'm sure our play by play wasn't up to broadcast standards, when you're in the midst of a crowd, it's gonna be pretty much anything sound exciting. I think back and I remember bringing two 90-minute cassette tapes with my recorder and the battery and sitting there and people looking at me like I was from Mars, of course. I had seats, primarily we called it the front row, it was the second row. At the Olympia, they kept the front row empty. My seats were always directly positioned behind Dr. Bernard Schwartz, the famous ringside physician that everybody remembers. I remember people looking at me thinking , "What the heck is this kid doing?" They knew I was talking into this cassette recorder. Again, at that point did I ever have it in my head that I would become a wrestling announcer? I guess if you said, "You wanna be a wrestling announcer?" I would have said, ‘Oh my God. Holy sh**. Yes, I do.’ But it was never anything that I really thought that I would get to do, it's just such a narrow field. I went more towards mainstream sports and I became the sports editor of my high school newspaper, which I think is invaluable to people that want to be broadcasters and I always tell them that. I think if you learn how to tell a story, whether it's baseball or anything, I think it helps you out later in life. But the writing aspect to me always helped, I thought, as a broadcaster because it made me check all the boxes when I'm telling the story.”
Story continues on Page 3.
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