• Old School ECW Veteran Celebrates His Birthday
Old School ECW Veteran Tommy Cairo celebrates his 61st birthday today.
Tommy Cairo is mostly remembered for his time in Tod Gordon’s Philadelphia based NWA Eastern Championship Wrestling promotion, where he won the short-lived ECW Pennsylvania Championship, a title that was retired a few months later.
Shortly after the company withdrew from the National Wrestling Alliance and was renamed “Extreme Championship Wrestling”, he left and returned to working on the independent scene, before he retired from active in ring competition in 2000.
HAPPY BIRTHDAY TOMMY CAIRO!
WATCH: Former WWE Diva Kelly Kelly Slaps Her Own $exy Bum:
• Sgt. Slaughter Reveals What He Refused To Do During Feud With Hulk Hogan Ahead Of WrestleMania VII
During a recent interview with CBS Sports’ WFAN, WWE Hall of Famer Sgt. Slaughter talked about his WrestleMania VII feud with “The Immortal” Hulk Hogan and what he refused to do during that feud.
Below is the complete story:
“Vince McMahon had called me up after about 6 years of hiatus from WWF, and he said he just got out of WrestleMania VI and wanted to do WrestleMania VII. So, he’s already looking at his main event, and he said, ‘Are you ready to go back to work?’ I said, ‘Yeah, ready.’ And he says, ‘Well, come on to my house and I’ll show you what I’ve got in mind.’ So, I figured he’s gonna take Sgt. Slaughter, G.I. Joe, the real American hero, and make him the real, real, real American hero.
So I get to his house, he’s got this layout of L.A. Colosseum, 104,000 seats, and he says, ‘We want you and Hulk Hogan to be the main event.’ I said, ‘Okay, how are we going to make Hulk Hogan the villain?’ He said, ‘Hulk Hogan? No, he’s not going to be the villain. You’re going to be the villain!’ I said, ‘Well, how we gonna do that?’
So he starts laying out the Iraqi sympathizer, and you think America’s got weak, and a little country like Iraq taking over Kuwait and running the world, and you’re back and you’re not happy. I said, ‘Okay.’ He said, ‘Well, go home and talk to your family about it because it could be a little rough.’
It was financially beneficial, yeah. But we had bomb threats, death threats every night. I came home from back to Philadelphia after winning the Title from The Ultimate Warrior in Miami at the Royal Rumble, and one of the backstage hands said, ‘Hey, have you talked to your wife?’ And I said, ‘No.’ ‘Have you talked to Vince McMahon?’ ‘No.’ We didn’t have cell phones, so, I get on the phone, my wife’s answering machine. I call Vince, ‘Oh yeah, Sgt., I just talked to your wife and I sent her to a hotel.’ I said, ‘What happened?’ Well, somebody called up the wrestling office this morning and said they’re gonna kill you, and kill me, and kill our families; Blow up our houses and cars.
I took it pretty serious, and then again, I thought, well, I guess I did my job right. I never really regretted it. The only time that I ever really had a problem with it was when they wanted me to burn an American flag and I wouldn’t do that.
So, I gave them a better idea: I thought, put the Hulk Hogan shirt on a flag pole and I’ll burn that and say, ‘It’s Americana!’ So, that’s what we did and I think that it got the right type of ‘heat,’ as we say in our business.”
