Eric Gargiulo

Eric Gargiulo was born July 18, 1972 in Queens, New York, and trained under Jim Kettner, the Delaware promoter whose East Coast Wrestling Association school turned out a long list of Northeast independent names. Gargiulo debuted in 1994 and worked roughly a dozen matches for ECWA and other small shows. That was the extent of it. He figured out early that his value to a promotion was not what he could do between the ropes but what he could say about it.

The first company to pay him for that was Extreme Championship Wrestling. He started as an ECW ring announcer in November 1996 at a show in Staten Island and kept the job through May 1998 — the peak years of the Philadelphia original, when the ECW Arena crowd was the loudest supporting character in the business. A ring announcer in that room had to be heard over people who did not want to be quiet. He managed.

In January 1999 Gargiulo launched Pro Wrestling Radio on WBCB 1490 AM, a small Philadelphia-area station, and kept it on the air until 2009. The first guest was Chris Jericho. Over the following decade the booking sheet read like a Hall of Fame roll call: Steve Austin, Ricky Steamboat, Bret Hart, Edge, Dusty Rhodes, Bruno Sammartino. The program billed itself as the longest consistently running pro wrestling talk show on terrestrial radio, and no competitor stepped forward to dispute it.

The timing is worth noting. Wrestling radio in 1999 meant a phone line, a studio and a station manager willing to give the slot to a niche audience. Podcasting did not exist yet. When it did, Gargiulo moved with it — he took full ownership of the show in 2009, dropped the terrestrial signal and carried Pro Wrestling Radio into an online and podcast format, where the format he had been running since the dial-up era finally had a natural home.

Gargiulo joined Combat Zone Wrestling in 2000, first as a backstage interviewer, and made his announcing debut on the home video Caged to the End. From there he became one half of the CZW commentary team with John House, and that pairing called the promotion's pay-per-views, its television, its home-video releases and a tour of Italy. He stayed through 2007.

Whatever the historians make of the CZW deathmatch era, the record of it is the tapes — and the voice on most of them belongs to Gargiulo.

The job carried a particular problem. CZW built its name on ultraviolent matches — light tubes, barbed wire, the Tournament of Death — and a commentator has to make that legible to a home viewer without either flinching or cheerleading. Gargiulo's approach was to call it as a wrestling match first: who was hurt, what it meant for the tournament, why the crowd cared. The blood was context, not the script. Fans who bought those DVDs got their sense of what CZW was from that framing as much as from the footage itself.

Between CZW dates Gargiulo announced for nearly every small promotion that needed a voice on tape in the early 2000s. The list is long enough to be its own record of the regional independent scene of that period.

Two of those lines stand out. He was in the booth with Steve Corino for the first two Ring of Honor home videos in 2002, at the moment the company was a Philadelphia start-up and not yet a national brand. And he called the last two shows of the original Major League Wrestling before it shut down in 2004, more than a decade before the name was revived. He was, in short, present at the beginning of one promotion that lasted and the end of one that had to wait.

The piece of Gargiulo's résumé with the longest reach is not any single broadcast. In 1996 he worked with Rob Feinstein and Doug Gentry at RF Video on what became the professional wrestling shoot interview — a wrestler on camera, out of character, talking about the business as it actually was. The format spread across the industry and later became the template for a large share of wrestling podcasting. Gargiulo still hosts and writes RF Video interviews.

In 2007 he started The Camel Clutch Blog, hosted at first on phillyburbs.com, covering wrestling, mixed martial arts, the NFL and politics. It drew enough traffic to be featured on Yahoo Buzz. He took ownership of it in 2009 and published regularly until 2017. Along the way he built NFLLockout.com during the 2011 labor dispute and sold the domain to the NFL Players Association for a reported $25,000.

In 2019 Insights Publishing released his WWE Pop Trivia Quiz Deck. It is a small item, but it fits: a man who spent twenty-five years asking wrestlers questions eventually wrote a box of them for everyone else.