Gary Juster On WWE Locking WCW Out Of Arenas During Monday Night Wars, Differences Between AWA & WCW

In a recent interview on the Wrestling Inc. Daily, Gary Juster, who is currently the director of operations for Ring of Honor, discussed the differences between working for the AWA and WCW, WWE locking WCW out of arenas during the Monday Night Wars, and much more. Here are some highlights:

Gary Juster on the differences between working for the AWA and WCW: “Well, I hadn’t worked at any kind of corporate environment in the AWA. I worked at the AWA as a kid. I did a yearbook. We had kind of a split on the money. I did some spot shows in the suburban area where I lived, and I didn’t work again with the AWA, really, until when I was promoting in Baltimore and looking for talent. I had some talent from Verne from what we then called Pro Wrestling USA and then later combined with Jim Crockett Promotions where I have three matches from Jim Crockett and three matches from Verne, and that was when I ‘worked’, so to speak, with Verne. And I worked with them when they were doing the tapings for ESPN. So that was Pro Wrestling USA and I would work with Verne then, but I never worked in Verne’s office. Verne was never part of a corporate environment. Verne had an old school, old style wrestling office. WCW, of course, was part of Turner Broadcasting. We had a corporate office.”

On the Monday Night Wars and WWE locking WCW out of arenas: “I was at WCW from the first day until the last day. There were so many ups and downs. Of course, the Nitro years, when we had the big ratings and the famous 83 weeks, those were huge years. Those were years where we were selling out Nitro on a weekly basis, and it made my job as a promoter a lot of fun because just seeing the sales on the first day was great and setting those up, booking those buildings, putting the tickets on sale. We used to do a deal that Zayne Brezloff, our promoter later on used to do, where we would have a talent, and Randy Savage was it a lot, and he’d appear in the lobby of the of the building of the ticket office the day things went on sale. And it was a big deal back then. There was no internet. You got your tickets either by the phone or by showing up at a box office or a ticket office.

“Those things were huge. So that’s when you know things were really really big. They were really big during that time when we were able to go to domes and do big business. There were times when the WWF had us locked out of buildings. Now some of those buildings we were able to crack and get in, but others, we did not. So we would run domes. We ran what was called the TWA Dome in St. Louis and did 31,000 people in December for a Nitro. We did the Georgia Dome in Atlanta when they were building the new arena. We did almost 40,000 people there. We did the dome in New Orleans. So we had some real big times, and then we took our lumps as well.”

On his friendships with Road Warrior Hawk and Sgt. Slaughter: “When I was an independent promoter and I was young and impressionable, I would, at times, go out,” Juster stated. “Ric Flair was famous for taking kind of new people in the business out and buying them drinks and being ‘The Naitch’ as he would call himself, but as I got a little bit further, I did not really spend a lot of time outside the business with the wrestlers. Mike Hegstrand, Road Warrior Hawk, was a good friend of mine. I was at his first wedding. I had kind of lost touch with him, for the most part, a year or two before he died. I was really shocked when he died, died so young.

“I had, I would say, a good relationship with most of the wrestlers. I’ve had a good time seeing them at some of these kind of cons that have gone along with big events, WrestleMania weekend and other times. I saw Bob Remus, Sgt. Slaughter, a couple years ago at one, and it was great to see him. And I shook his hand to say goodbye, and he said, ‘What do you mean shaking hands?’ And he said, ‘Give me a hug,’ and he gave me a big hug. Those kind of things, at this point in my life and career, mean a lot. The fact that we built good relationships with the talent and with buildings and such too, I take some pride in that.”