Trevor Murdoch talks about the short-lived Ring Ka King promotion.
Ring Ka King was an offshoot of TNA Wrestling created specifically for the Indian market. It featured names such as Nick Dinsmore, Chris Masters, Scott Steiner, Abyss, and many more names, including Trevor Murdoch.
Speaking with Sean Ross Sapp, Trevor recalled his time with the company and says that much like his NWA run, his introduction to Ring Ka King stems back to an interaction with Dave Lagana. He got a phone call from Dave Lagana because Jeff Jarrett needed a cowboy.
“I got a call. Dave Lagana’s name has bounced in and out throughout my life. Dave Lagana’s one of those guys who called me. He said, ‘Hey, Jeff is putting together shows over in India. We need a cowboy.’ The way he was trying to explain it to me, basically what he needed was the generic cowboy,” Trevor recalled. “‘Cause over in India, they don’t understand redneck, country, and cowboy are three different things. All they know is be country. So they wanted cowboy hat, chaps, the vest, which was no problem for me. Plus, Jeff was a part of it and I was part of the original TNA. I was part of the first eight or nine episodes when it was the weekly pay-per-view model there. Obviously, Jeff knows what he’s doing, he’s built the company up to now. We’re still talking about that company.”
Trevor Murdoch was eager for this opportunity and recalled his immediate reaction upon landing in India and taking a two-and-a-half-hour taxi ride to the hotel.
“So I was like, ‘Yeah.’ I was ready to go. Plus I had never spent any time in India. So it’s one of those countries I wanted to mark off my worldly map. Man, you talk about crazy. Positive crazy. There’s positive and negative, and there was both in India,” Trevor said. “You watch TV shows sometimes and you’ll see a scene where they’re at an airport and there’s craziness going all around and there’s cars. Really, that’s a shoot. You walk out of the lobby of the airport and there are a ton of people waiting for whoever. But behind them, the roads and the streets, the laws are different, obviously over there than they are here, and the street etiquette is different. So you’re constantly hearing horns blowing, people zooming off in front of you, cutting you off, whereas that would not work over here. There would be a lot of fights over here if people drove like that.
“But then I take a two and a half hour taxi ride to our hotel and that in itself was a crazy experience ‘cause you’d be driving through these towns, you’d be out in the middle of nowhere, and then you’d come and hit this town,” he continued. “You would see a beautiful house, nice, put together, and right next to it is a shanty. Like a house made of nothing but roof sheeting. There’d be two or three of those houses and then right next to that house would be another beautiful home that you or I would live in and so on and so forth. So there’s no middle class there. There’s the haves and the have-nots. They just co-exist. That’s just how life is.”
Overall, he calls the Ring Ka King experience a very positive one. Saying that the wrestlers were viewed as though they were rock stars in India. Trevor recalled one of his matches with the promotion, a Mumbai Street Fight against Doc Gallows.
“It was an amazing experience," Trevor said. “On top of the fact you go in there to wrestle, India doesn’t have a lot of wrestling companies. They don’t get a lot of live pro wrestling. So we were like rockstars there. They had, I think, ticketing was either really cheap or free. Which brought the masses, man. They had to close the doors and say, ‘We can’t fit any more people in here.’ Which was amazing in itself, but you’re also walking by the fans—they’re pulling, they’re trying to touch you and I had them try to pull my hair just so they can have a little bit of my hair. Crazy insane. But as a wrestler, you ate every bit of it up. ‘This is awesome.’
“I got to have a Mumbai Street Fight with Doc Gallows. Which started on the back of a flatbed tractor trailer truck. It was awesome, man. We worked our way back into the arena, through the crowd,” he continued. “Had all this Mumbai Street Fight stuff set up from around the ring. The one thing I remember is Doc and I had a spot set up where I was gonna jump off the ramp, he was gonna be laid out on this cart and I was gonna jump off the ramp and drive an elbow through and we’re gonna come crashing through the cart. It was gonna be a great part of our match. So we got it set up, we talked to all the guys, we found the cart, real rickety to help brace us some. It was gonna hurt like hell, but at least it’d soften the blow a little bit.”
Unfortunately, Trevor goes on to recall that the spot didn't go as planned because someone had switched out the cart they planned to use for one that would provide better visuals.
“We found the cart, we got it all set up, we walked through it. Me and Doc, we tell everyone, ‘This is where the carts are gonna be on each side of the ring. Don’t mess with ‘em.’ We’re going to every production guy because a lot of them were Indian folks, just double checking, ‘Don’t touch this. Don’t move it.’ ‘Okay. No problem, no problem,’” Murdoch said. “It’s time for our match, we’re having our match, everything is great. I got Doc, I’m hammering forearms, I lay him on the cart, I do the slow walk up the ramp.
“I’m getting the pop,” he continued. “I’m standing on the ramp, I’m tough guyin’ this shit. I jump up, I go to drive the elbow and what we didn’t know was we obviously missed somebody and didn’t tell somebody because somebody switched the carts for the visuals, it was better visuals for the ramps to be on [the other] side. We had no idea, I come down with the elbow, and me and Doc just go [cruuuuh.] We just slide off the cart. We’re like, ‘What the fuck?’ You see us kind of lay there for a good, probably, sixty seconds. We just knocked the piss out of each other. Me and my two-hundred-and-seventy-pound ass coming down on Doc and me landing on the cart, just as solid as concrete.”
These days, Trevor was most recently riding high as the NWA World Heavyweight Champion, while Gallows continues to make an impact alongside Karl Anderson as members of the Bullet Club.