Of all the indie promoters who have made
attempts at promoting professional wrestling
shows in Northern California in the last
25 years, J.R. Benson has easily been the
most successful. Pretenders like Roland Alexander
and Kirk White make a lot of outrageous claims,
but the truth is that not since the demise
of Roy Schire's promotion in 1979 has any
single promoter enjoyed the success that
J.R. Benson has.
The San Francisco Bay Area, considered one
of the world wide Mecca's of pro wrestling
from he 1950's through the 1970's, literally
died as far as any form of pro wrestling
in the 1980's. It was in the early 90's that
J.R. Benson, using a rag tag bunch of blackballed
wrestlers who couldn't get work elsewhere,
began promoting the most cutting edge wrestling
shows anywhere in the world. As far back
as 1993, J.R. was promoting shows in the
SF Bay Area far ahead of their time. Years
before the WWF developed "attitude"
that caused so much controversy due to it's
adult content, years before ECW even existed,
J.R. Benson and his co booker Ron Hed were
promoting adult content wrestling shows that
had never been done before. Obviously this
style would have been done by numerous people
whether these Northern California maniacs
had introduced it or not but let the timeline
show that the indie wrestling style in Northern
California was years ahead of the rest of
the business which caught fire using these
same concepts in the late 1990's.
After years of small shows garnering little
notice, J.R. Benson got the attention of
the pro wresting world when he co promoted
Incredibly Strange Wrestling with Southern
California icon Johnny Legend in 1995. Using
the most controversial characters and storylines
ever seen, ISW sold out the biggest night
clubs in downtown San Francisco, including
Paradise Lounge, Transmission Theatre and
the Trocadero, on a monthly basis the entire
year of 1995. It was the hottest ticket in
San Francisco that year and spring boarded
ISW to shows in Hollywood and the biggest
of them all, ISW on the side stage of Lollapalooza
in Seattle in front of 30,000 paying fans,
an unheard of crowd for indie wrestling at
any given time.
Even the late night adult San Francisco nightclubs
were freaked out by Benson and Hed's over
the top antics and tried to tone down the
product. At this point, Benson and Hed left
ISW, took their crew with them and formed
Extremely Strange Wrestling. ESW promoted
such shows that will live forever in infamy
as Human Cockfighting 96, featuring the first
ever Tub of Aids Infected Syringes match
and Exposing the Business 98, featuring the
legendary Fuck With Death match, still the
most violent and destructive wrestling match
in Northern California history.
ESW finally closed down shop as there was
simply no more limits for them to push but
the crazy characters and the sickness and
wrongness will live on forever.
J.R. BENSON AND RON HED, THE SICK MINDS BEHIND
EXTREMELY STRANGE WRESTLING.
