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That passion for pro wrestling intercedes with Tenay’s real life job one faithful evening that is the best of times and the worst of times - it lands him a new career, as well as his wife’s scorn!
“If I can make a long story longer, I was working for the Gold Coast Casino in Las Vegas in management in the racing sportsbook, and it was a fantastic job, it really was. It was just a job that I loved because of my love for sports betting. I started there in 1986. I'll never forget in 1991, I had a guy come in that was a regular, he was a horse player. And I knew him conversationally in the casino. And he said you know I just started out on the first national sports talk radio network, it's called SEN, the Sports Entertainment Network, and my shift is 12 midnight to 6 AM Pacific. His name was Jay Richards. He says, ‘I don't really have an opportunity to have guests from the East Coast because it's 3 AM. It's kind of tough even with West Coast guests because it's midnight.’ Again, in the infant stages of national sports talk, he was reading the USA Today sports section and he was reading the Las Vegas Review Journal section on the air to fill time. He said, ‘Someday, when you're working the swing shift….’ I would be off around 11 o'clock when the last games and the last horse races were over, he said, ‘Would you consider coming down and being a guest on the show?’ I said, ‘Okay, this Thursday works out okay for me.’ He said, ‘Fantastic. Come by Thursday, and we'll go on the air.’ “
It all started innocently enough, just discussing the sports stories of the week....
“I can remember going on the air for the first 45 minutes we talked about mainstream sports. I remember a lot of Joe Montana, it's kind of a weird memory that I have about that time period. He and I had had discussions in the casino about different sports and wrestling had come up. I had mentioned to him that when I was a kid, that not only did I do the wrestling newsletter but I also, I would write stories that were published in the Olympic Auditorium program, that my mentor Jeff Walton, he had come from being the president of the Freddie Blassie Fan Club, and then was the media director, the publicity director for the Olympic Auditorium, and he would run my stories in the Olympic Auditorium program. Jay was just so intrigued by that, again, 45 minutes in he says, ‘What do you think, can we talk about wrestling?" and I thought, ‘Well I'm leaving here shortly.’ It’s coming up at one o'clock in the morning. We had no phone calls. And the most amazing thing that you can imagine. He brings it up and we start discussing my wrestling memories at one o'clock in the morning. I'll never forget, we go to the next commercial break on the quarter hour and the call screener on the other side, I'm watching his face, and as we go to break and he goes to commercials he comes flying out of the call screener booth and he opens the door and says, ‘We got seven phone lines and all seven are lit up!’ at one o'clock Pacific in the morning and I ended up staying on air until 3:30 talking about professional wrestling. We received phone calls from St. Louis to Chicago. Most importantly, we got a phone call from Las Vegas and a guy named Howard Schwartz, who owned a gambler's book club in Las Vegas, which was a brick and mortar store, and he was a wrestling fan from New York in the 1950s, and he was throwing names at me from that era, and I was familiar with all of those names, just because I studied the business so extensively, and he was amazed by this.”
Without knowing it at the time, The Professor had just given his first lecture, but that didn’t even give him immunity from the principal’s office.
“I get home that night at 4 o'clock in the morning,” Tenay recalls, telling this story while sitting just feet from his wife. “I hadn't even told [her] that I was going to do the radio show, because usually after a shift in the casino, I might have a drink with one of my other co-workers, so it was no big deal to me that I didn't come home directly after work. No cell phones in 1991, so at 4 o'clock in the morning, I show up and my wife has her arms crossed waiting for me at the front door. She says, "Where the f**k have you been?" and I said, "Talking about wrestling on the radio," and she said, "F**k you, f**k you, f*ck you, you're sleeping on the couch.”
While the couch may have been anything but pleasant, the ripple effect of that radio appearance was sweet indeed.
“At 9 o'clock that morning, the phone rang, and it was a guy named Jerry Kutner. He was from Philadelphia originally and had moved to Las Vegas to open the Sports Entertainment Network. He beat ESPN to the punch. I think there might have been an ESPN Radio, but it wasn't sports talk, it was scores, so this was the first 24-hour sports talk station. He called and he said, "You know I woke up; I had insomnia last night at three o'clock. When you own the radio network at three o'clock and you wake up, you turn on the radio. I know that Jay Richards on the overnight shift, it's life and death to get one phone call. And I heard phone call after phone call and I thought, ‘what the hell am I listening to?’ He said, ‘Can I have lunch with you today?’ We arranged for lunch. It was a Friday. And he said, ‘When I got to work, I had a message from Howard Schwartz from the Gamblers Book Club and he said, ‘You better give this guy a radio show and I'm willing to sponsor.’' So he says, ‘Can you start a radio show tomorrow night?’ It was an opportunity.
Mike Tenay was off to the races. All those hours of pouring over, writing about and discussing professional wrestling had prepared him for a career he didn’t even know he was auditioning for, becoming a professional wrestling announcer.
“I think a lot of people know Mike Tenay the wrestling announcer if you're a wrestling fan, but you probably don't know my background as far as being a wrestling fan,” Tenay noted, “The things that I did related to wrestling, even before I was fortunate enough to get the opportunity to be an announcer. The story I guess that I would want them to know is the long-term commitment that I had to studying the business. This is the 10,000 hour story that actually pays off where, for my entire life I was willing to commit that 10,000 hours and then the 10,000 hours got passed long before I ever did anything on air. So, I never looked at it necessarily as one thing, that wrestling announcing job, but again, it's part of this reflection of the last couple of weeks.”
Tenay continued to reflect on everything a life in professional wrestling has brought him, and the butterfly effect that can be traced back to that fateful night on the radio that landed him his own professional wrestling talk show on national radio.
“As I think back to all of the opportunities that I've had - they're there for you,” The Professor advises. “If you take them, it doesn't guarantee success because you may be terrible, you just don't know until you do it. We did one hour the first week. We went for two hours almost immediately. We went three hours after that. I had come up with the name Wrestling Insiders because I liked the slant that I wasn't going to be anything storyline driven. I wanted to reflect the newsletter era which was so dear to my heart but it had advanced so much with the Wrestling Observer, quite honestly by that point that I felt it would be a step backwards to do anything besides trying to take that same mentality and create a radio show. So, I thought I could do that by having wrestling guests, both media-wise and current and former wrestlers and I just thought this really sounds like it could work. And, you know, it was really kind of a crazy success story. The big advantage that we had in that era was pre-internet. So, people weren't all geniuses about the wrestling business like they are now. I say that sarcastically because every, you know, people know more now than they ever have, and that's great. It really is. You can't put the toothpaste back in the tube - it's gone. So, again, we're going back to what I brought in terms of legacy. I think a lot of teaching, a lot of bringing across how much I love the business. The Lucha Libre AAA show I almost look at "When Worlds Collide" in a similar manner and the extension of that to the time that I spent early WCW with the Japanese and the Mexican matches where they would bring me in as the "specialist" for that. The ability to take a talent and a storyline to weave the storyline in and out of the broadcast, while at the same time trying to personalize the wrestler so that the viewer becomes more familiar with the individual and relates better to them.”
Of course, how does one get to national TV? The same way a musician makes it to Carnegie Hall. Lots of practice and lots of preparation.
“I've always been known for being a crazy prep person,” Tenay admits. “I remember Taz, who I also had a great relationship with as broadcast partners, many great years with Taz and Taz would tell me, ‘I thought when I watched Jim Ross that he was a preparation maniac. But brother you take it to another level,’ and he'd just shake his head. I would always go to the talent, even if it was somebody who was maybe just potentially brought in for one week and I tried to have a five-minute conversation with them, just so that I could try and get some information about their life or their career, but even if not, just have a conversation so that when I spoke about them, it made it easier for me to try and bring that across to the audience.”
Tenay remains humbled by it all, even when asked about how he views his own personal legacy in professional wrestling on the eve of it being celebrated.
“Legacy-wise, I never called myself ‘The Professor’,” Tenay pointed out. “That was a name that was given to me by another announcer, so I didn't...again the egocentric parts where I've taken five, where I've taken a half an hour to give you a five-minute answer. But I hope that the takeaway from my career is that you may have enjoyed my wrestling announcing, maybe you didn't, it's a matter of taste. I don't have an issue with either, but if you learn something…I'm gonna be doing a meet and greet in Chicago this weekend after the show on Saturday night, and it's the first one that I've done in many years. We used to do them almost as you remember when you go to a TNA pay-per-view, they have the whole weekend and usually the Saturday before the show, we'd have hours where we do meet and greets with the whole roster….the amount of people that would come up to me and say, ‘You educated me about Lucha Libre, you exposed me to Lucha Libre, you opened my eyes about Japanese wrestling,’ That was the conversation that I had with them that meant so much to me. I'm kind of looking forward to it again on Saturday. Just to get that feedback. So I guess the legacy of all of that is that ability to teach and hopefully at the same time expand the careers of the wrestlers, make them feel more important to the people watching at home.”
Story concludes on Page 4.
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