Spade, Flamingo, and Dao Remember the Roots of WildKat's Revolution Rumble

WildKat’s Danny Flamingo chokes Antonio Rossi at Just Eat Me Sweets

The “I Quit” match between J. Spade and Danny Flamingo early in the indie promotion’s history showed them what was possible.

 BuKu Dao’s t-shirt is damp with sweat and frosting. He and the WildKat Sports wrestlers just finished shooting a commercial for their upcoming Revolution Rumble, which takes place Saturday night at the Alario Center. They took over Just Eat Me Sweets in Metairie and shot a commercial that ended up with a bakery-themed good fight. Danny Flamingo choked out Antonio Rossi with bread dough while Luke Hawx gnawed on the skull of Simon Philips, whose face pressed against a display case filled with cookies. Dao dove off the counter and took down Revolution Champion Mickey Drama with a chocolate cake as a weapon, and even though the move didn’t make the final cut, his t-shirt paid the price.

The Revolution Rumble is WildKat’s biggest event of the year, and its 14th anniversary show will also feature appearances by “The Franchise” Shane Douglas, ECW’s “Queen of Extreme” Francine, and WWE veterans Ron Simmons and JBL along wrestlers from across the Gulf South. After cleaning up the bathroom of a nearby bar, Dao joins his tag team partner in Slime SZN J. Spade and former WildKat champion Danny Flamingo to remember their first Revolution Rumble—the company’s second—over drinks.

Dao was part of the first WildKat class. He started training with them in 2011 and worked his first match in 20112. He did so without telling his parents, who came to New Orleans from Vietnam and were very strict. “I had to lie to them,” he admits.

He told them that he was going to Tulane for kinesiology and didn’t reveal the truth until he invited them to what he thought would be his last WildKat show. Family and friends knew and showed up regularly to support him in his matches, but Dao kept his parents in the dark until he signed a contract to go to the WWE as a referee.

He’s still in WildKat as a coach because “two weeks before I was supposed to move out there, they called,” Dao says. They blamed budget cuts as they rescinded his contract and said maybe later, though that later never came. Even though he trained as wrestler, he thinks he would have been happy as a ref.

“BuKu Dao had his bags packed and was ready to go,” he says.

Flamingo and Spade were part of the second class. WildKat founder Luke Hawx assumed Flamingo wanted to be a referee when he walked in the door wearing the khakis and button-up shirt he wore in his day gig as a salesman.

“No, I’m here to get my head kicked in,” Flamingo told him.

Spade wasn’t as jacked as he is now, but “I already had a good physique,” he admits. The showmanship side took longer to come together because “I am shy by nature,” he says. “It took me years to get where I am now where I’m comfortable with talking.”

Now he’s not only good on the mic but he can be funny, a skill not all wrestlers possess. He credits working with BuKu for that, both as students early on and later as the tag team Slime SZN. The WildKat tag champs have a playful streak, and when the two of them dispatched their opponents during last year’s Revolution Rumble match, Dao went under the ring and pulled out a Rock’em Sock’em Robots game. They fought with the boxing robots while waiting for the next entrant, and once they threw him over the top rope and to the floor, they resumed to the game.

Spade and Flamingo remember their first year well because they got involved in something that became meaningful right away. They had a feud for much of 2014 that grew out of a tag match with Spade and WildKat’s Purple Haze facing Flamingo and Ricky Starks, who wrestles now in NXT as Ricky Saints.

“That Rumble closed a lot of storylines,” Flamingo says. It was the company’s second, and one of the biggest matches on the card featured Danny Flamingo and J. Spade in an I Quit match. Over the course of the year, Flamingo won one match by downing Spade with a low blow, and when Spade beat him clean the next time they faced each other, Flamingo left the ring then returned to beat Spade down and spit on him. They had built the feud to a point where it could only be resolved with a high stakes blow off match.

“We started hot,” Spade says.

They began to brawl the minute they left the locker room, “and he lit me up from the entryway to the announcers table,” Flamingo continues. He’s garrulous and coaches the WildKat students’ promo sessions. He also tends to drive the conversation as he, Spade and Dao swap memories as if they still can’t believe they lived them.

They battled for almost five minutes before they finally entered the ring. At one point, Flamingo recalls, “You laid me across the top turnbuckle and you were kicking me and kicking me.”

“I gave you the kicks,” Spade says.

“Then you gave me the big kick and knocked me off the side.”

“You flew off.”

“Then I tumbled down to the floor and that’s where I grabbed a chair on the outside.”

“At that point, I was panting because I had done so much shit and I wasn’t really breathing properly,” Spade says. He was gassed but knew that if he could run to the ropes one more time, he’d get a break.

“I hit the ropes, I run, I close my eyes and BOOM.”

Flamingo waffled Spade with a folding chair to the head and laid him out for a while. While down, Spade could hear a loud gasp and caught his breath, knowing the crowd was hooked.

Today, a greater awareness of Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy (CTE) has prompted most promotions to be more cautious about chair shots to the head, Flamingo owns the fact that he did it and doesn’t apologize.

“He knew it was coming, and he knew he had to protect himself,” Flamingo explains. “Neither one of us could halfass it.”

“It’s a gentleman’s agreement,” Dao adds. “We’re going to do it the best we can and make it look as violent as possible.”

After the chair shot, the crowd responded not to an exhibition of wrestling spots but to the story of Flamingo and his valet Connie Marble trying to make Spade say I quit. They went so far as to duct tape Spade’s hands together around one of the ring ropes so he was helpless while Flamingo hit him in the back with a kendo stick.

Late in the match, the roles were reversed and the crowd was ecstatic. “I’m down, I’m duct taped, and Spade’s going to town on me with a kendo stick,” Flamingo says. He started to bruise but Spade kept going. Like the chair shot, it’s part of the gig.

Flamingo tried to rotate so Spade could hit a spot that didn’t already hurt, but Spade didn’t realize that and rotated with him, inadvertently working the same arm over and over until Flamingo finally said, “I quit.”

In the back after the match, “everybody congratulated me on having a great match and it gave me chills,” Flamingo says, laughing. “But every time I got goosebumps, it hurt!”

BuKu Dao remembers the match almost as well as Spade and Flamingo, and when one of them hesitated about what came next, he filled in the blank. He knows the match because he edited the video of it, and because he saw it as proof of concept for WildKat.

“I looked at that match and thought we had a future,” he says. “We’re independent and no one knows us, but there’s a future in this if we really try and put our hearts in it.”