Tag: wrestling

Here is an interesting article about a Kunsan Airbase NCO who has a side gig as a professional wrestler in South Korea:

Over the past year, Tech. Sgt. Gregory Gauntt has established an alter ego as one of the most despised characters in South Korea.
That’s Ryan Oshun, the persona that Gauntt, 33, adopts when he steps into the ring as the Pro Wrestling Society heavyweight champion. The noncommissioned officer in charge of fuels knowledge for Kunsan’s 8th Logistics Readiness Squadron calls Oshun “the guy you wouldn’t want to ever bring home to your mother, but the guy you want to be around because it would be super cool.”
Before Gauntt started his yearlong stint in South Korea, he contacted Korea-based Pro Wrestling Society promoters and worked his way into their shows. He hopes the momentum he’s built establishing fans and enemies in Korea will continue when he returns to the States next month.
“I hope wrestling in Korea will boost my résumé because I am now an international champion,” he said. “Maybe the stock behind my name is more, and I have more credibility now that I have traveled outside the U.S.”

Stars & Stripes

You can read more at the link.

South Korea’s national team wrestlers work out rigorously at the Taeneung National Training Center in Seoul on June 10, 2016, for the Summer Olympics in Rio de Janeiro in August. Chung Mong-gyu, chief of the South Korean Olympic delegation, visited the center on the same day with 57 days before the Games begin. (Yonhap)

In honor of the passing of Muhammad Ali I figured I would share this story about the trip the legendary boxer made to North Korea.  Muhammad Ali joined a group of professional wrestlers on a friendship tour to North Korea in 1995 at the invitation of famous Japanese wrestler Antonio Inoki.  One thing you can always count in life is that pro-wrestlers will tell it the way it is and that is what Ric Flair does about his 1995 trip to North Korea in his book, Ric Flair: To Be the Man:

The second we arrived in Pyongyang, our passports were confiscated. Then each of us was assigned a “cultural attache” to follow us everywhere; these guys even sat in the dressing room while we went over our matches. In the dining room where the wrestlers ate, there was a camera in each corner, monitoring every movement. When Scott Norton called his wife and said, “This place sucks,” his phone line suddenly went dead.

Here is my favorite line from the book where Muhammad Ali also tell things the way it is:

Because of the ravages of Parkinson’s disease, it was difficult to understand Muhammad Ali when he spoke. But at one function, we were sitting at a big, round table with a group of North Korean luminaries when one of the guys started rambling on about the moral superiority of North Korea, and how they could take out the United States or Japan any time they wanted. Suddenly, Ali piped up, clear as a bell, “No wonder we hate these motherf*ckers.”

I wonder how the North Korean translators translated that. Probably the same way they translated this:

Before we left North Korea, our handlers requested that I make a speech at the airport. They even had specific points that they expected me to articulate — things like North Korea being a worker’s paradise, and that America sucked. I looked at Bischoff and told him, “I can’t say this.” The last thing I wanted was to be quoted in the American press making statements that I didn’t mean. So I just spouted some generic comments and thanked everyone for their hospitality.

This is how I was quoted by the official North Korean press agency: “Before I leave this beautiful and peaceful country, I would like to make a tribute to the great leader, Mr. Kim Il Sung (the late father of the current dictator), who devoted his life to the Korean people’s happiness, prosperity, and Korean unification. His Excellency, Kim Il Sung, will always be with us.”

Muhammad Ali probably should have never went on the trip, but at least he did not fall for the propaganda like so many other foreigners like Dennis Rodman did when they traveled to North Korea.

South Korean wrestlers train at the Taereung National Training Center in Seoul on Aug. 3, 2015, in the buildup for next year’s Rio de Janeiro Summer Olympics. (Yonhap)