Here are links to my preview of this Sunday’s WrestleReunion in Atlanta, as well as interviews with “Cowboy” Bob Orton and Bruno Sammartino. I’ve also included a little bit of the Sammartino interview that didn’t make it into Creative Loafing‘s wrestling guide.

http://clatl.com/atlanta/wrestlereunion/Event?oid=3004466

http://clatl.com/atlanta/wrestlereunion-bob-orton-casts-a-legacy/Content?oid=3010321

http://clatl.com/atlanta/wrestlereunion-bruno-sammartino-reminisces/Content?oid=3010323
Do you see any wrestling promotions today that are more in keeping with the type of wrestling you were part of?

No, it doesn’t exist. Unfortunately all the new promotions try to copy WWE. When I heard that TNA was coming up and going to be different, I watched it one time. I never watch wrestling on TV anymore, but I watched TNA because I wanted to see how different they were. But I didn’t see any difference, I really didn’t. I think the mentality is that the way it’s supposed to be today and when new promotions come up they don’t get the wrestling of yesteryear. It’s an era gone by and this is now. But I don’t understand that because when they try the arenas they’re not successful. Even WWE, which is the biggest organization, of course, we’re lucky here in Pittsburgh if they come here twice a year. Madison Square Garden maybe twice a year, but it’s always for Raw or one of the TV shows. And even with that, they paper a lot of it, so they can’t get a legitimate, genuine sellout. Everybody says how much bigger it’s gotten and, in some ways, yes, because they have merchandise, which we never had, and pay-per-view events, which we never had, and they go to as many as 125 countries television-wise, which, of course, we didn’t. But what we did do, we had local TV shows in different cities and we’d draw the crowds at the arenas. The people would come out and go out of their way to buy a ticket and come into the arena. That’s the way wrestling belonged. And besides that, they say some guys make more money now than ever. Very, very true, but the problem is that in my day we had what they called territories, therefore you had a lot of different promotions throughout the United States and Canada and they all employed a pretty good number of wrestlers. When Vince McMahon, with the help of Dick Ebersol from NBC, came and said they could go anywhere and became so powerful, they were in opposition of everybody and drove all the other promoters out of business. Then McMahon himself couldn’t sustain those territories because people didn’t buy that kind of wrestling. As a result, what do you have? You no longer have any territories to speak of and therefore all those wrestlers that used to wrestle for all those different organizations are out of work. The only wrestlers employed are those that WWE can use, or some in TNA. Overall, there are a lot of wrestlers that could be making a living at it that are no longer there.