Harlem Heat made their WCW debuts in August 1993, but not as Stevie Ray and Booker T. They were originally named Kane and Kole, making Stevie Ray another in the long list of professional wrestlers to have used the Kane moniker. The gimmick was that they were two brothers raised in the harsh surroundings of a Harlem ghetto, with an interesting piece ran on them in WCW magazine at the time. The piece referred to them as men of the streets, with scars all over their bodies and badly swollen hands. This sounds like a mighty inconvenience for a normal life, so I suppose professional wrestling was the only way to go. WCW wasn't particularly very good at masking its racism, and Harlem was depicted as being something akin to a dystopian future hellhole, where you don't know if you're going to bed that night or if there'll be a bed at all. The truth is this isn't as bad as it could have been, as the original idea was for them to be a pair of wrestling slaves won by Colonel Robert Parker in a card game. Read that sentence back, and join me in moving palms to foreheads. They were even going to come to the ring in shackles. I don't know where to start with that one. Stevie Ray and Booker T are indeed brothers, but they were born and raised in Houston, Texas. My American geography isn't the best, but I believe it is quite a distance from Harlem. Still, Kane and Kole changed their names to Stevie Ray and Booker T in 1994.
Born in the middle of Wales in the middle of the 1980's, John can't quite remember when he started watching wrestling but he has a terrible feeling that Dino Bravo was involved. Now living in Prague, John spends most of his time trying to work out how Tomohiro Ishii still stands upright. His favourite wrestler of all time is Dean Malenko, but really it is Repo Man. He is the author of 'An Illustrated History of Slavic Misery', the best book about the Slavic people that you haven't yet read. You can get that and others from www.poshlostbooks.com.
