The Lions Feeds Tonight

Ron Fuller, man of many hats, adds another: author.

Brutus

By Ron Fuller Welch

ISBN-10 : 1701818426

Just what can’t Ron Fuller do? The third generation wrestler and promoter, who branched out into minor league hockey ownership when the territory era of wrestling was ending, now turns his hand to writing fiction, a thriller set in his former wrestling home of Knoxville, Tennessee.

The titular main character is not a person, but a lion. And not your warm and cuddly Born Free lion, but a man-eating king of the jungle that has travelled across the continent, hunting two-legged prey. One of his victims, an American trapped named George Steadman, along with his partner Natu, finally manages to capture the great beast and arranges to have him shipped to his employer, the Knoxville Zoo.

And George has the worst of ulterior motives, wanting to get revenge on the animal that took his leg. But what does not plan on is the weird bond that forms between Brutus and George’s nephew Jeb, who works under George in the carnivore department of the zoo.

Needless to say, things do not go as planned once Brutus gets to the zoo. The opening ceremony for the lion’s arrival, planned by the Zoo’s director against George’s advice, goes horribly wrong. And why won’t the great beast eat the slaughtered animals that Jeb provides him?

After a series of events that sees Brutus transferred to the Charlotte Zoo, things go from bad to worse when a landslide in the Great Smoky Mountains frees Brutus from his transport and the killer lion is free to hunt at will in one of America’s biggest national parks. The race is on to capture the lion before the body count gets out of hand.

The novel does a great job in introducing a diverse cast, including a displaced Australian police detective and his family, an ambitious TV reporter, the vain and pompous zoo director and a number of hunters and trappers that come to try and capture Brutus. And Fuller manages to keep ratcheting up the tension, as the deaths continue. A scene late in the book, where the lion has trapped some people in a car, was very reminiscent of the scene in Cujo when the dog menaces some victims also stuck in a car.

Although the book is set in the present, Fuller has said it was originally written years ago and only recently dusted off and published. It certainly feels like a classic Hollywood thriller. I was imagining George C Scott as George Steadman and a young Anthony Perkins as Jeb.

Brutus is a page-turner that was hard to put down, especially once the hunter for The lion begins in the National Park. A great effort from a first-t8me author, albeit one who spent decades writing a different kind of fiction, with a different kind of pencil.

You can order Brutus from Amazon or from Ron directly at tnstud.com, where you can also get an autographed copy.

Pad and Pen(cil)

They Call Me Booker

By Jeff Bowdren

Crowbar Press

By the time I got to college in the late 80s, my interest in wrestling had begun to dissipate. The NWA/Crockett promotion had gotten stale and lost a lot of talent to the WWF. The UWF had gone. The AWA on ESPN was lurching to its end. And, even though I had only starting watching as a teenager a few years ago, I already had grown tired of the WWF version of the business. 

My interest eventually picked up again for a couple reasons. Our dorm was one of the few at the time with cable (all of couple dozen channels) and one of those was the Financial News Newtork, which turned into Score on weekends and one of the things they showed was Memphis wrestling. I had only read about the promotion in the Apter mags, since living on the East Coast, we got a lot of shows (including World Class on a UWF station from central PA), but Memphis was not one of them. So, it was cool to finally those guys in person, even if I had seen the territory mainstays in other places like Crockett or the AWA. 

The other thing was finding Dave Meltzer’s column in The late, great National daily sports newspaper. And from there, that led me to being a subscriber to the Observer newsletter in November of 1990. (Which means I have been a subscriber for almost 60% of my life.)

And quickly, one of my favorite things in the Observer was the Bowdren the Booker column. Long before the term “fantasy booking” was beaten to death on the Internet (I was still a year away from discovering Usenet while working at the college newspaper), Jeff Bowdren was writing a “What If...” fictional column  most weeks in the Observer. 

Thankfully, almost three decades later, these are now collected in one book, “They Call Me Booker.” This means never having to dig through boxes and boxes of yellowing paper and trying to squint to read the old Observers written in even harder to read type than what we have now (still the same since 1991. I got on the bandwagon right before Dave upgraded typewriters or word processors.

The column all centers around Jeff being called out of the blue and given the job to book WCW by Ted Turner. Remember, this is 1990, when the great year of 1989 and Flair vs Steamboat and Flair vs Funk had given way to, ... well, let’s not disparage many wrestlers no longer with us that were once big stars. 

In hindsight, Bowdren chooses to push many workers who were newsletter favorites back in the day: Barry Windham, Brian Pillman, the great Muta, and the tag team of Owen Hart and Chris Benoit. Reading about the brief real life team in 1990 of Hart and Benoit in 2019 just makes a long time fan mournful. 

There is also a special mention here for two guys who have been called underrated for so long, you wonder if they can be called that anymore: Brad Armstrong and Buddy Landell. Both guys are central to the narrative, fulfilling the potential they arguably reached in real life. 

And as you would expect from a snarky newsletter wrestling column, there are plenty of in-jokes and references to old angles that would get a pop from most readers who would probably remember most of the bits from the first time around. 

I won’t reveal any of the plot twists, as some of the angles and swerves are really clever and do make you wish you could have actually seen this played out at 6:05 on Saturdays or at Starrcade 90 (no black scorpion here).

If you are a longtime or lapsed fan, especially someone who was an Observer reader at the time, this is definitely worth picking up. I mean, it’s better than watching this week’s WWE TV, right?