Thanks for taking the time out of your busy schedule to meet with me today. What made you want to make the transition from being a professional wrestler to a relic hunter?
Ric Savage: Being a professional wrestler was never one of my goals in life. I always wanted to be some kind of entertainer. I used to want to be a rock singer or a guitar player but I can’t sing and I can’t play the guitar. When I got out of the army, my friend was running a pro wrestling school so I started doing that just as a fun thing and I ended up getting some breaks & made a job out of it but I never had a real passion for it. I met a lot of great people and enjoyed doing what I did but wrestling wasn’t something I lived & breathed but history always was.
How has your background as a pro wrestler helped you in your new venture as a relic hunter?
Ric Savage: The best thing wrestling ever taught me was how to network with people, how to talk to people, how to deal with a lot of different kinds of people in different situations & being a good guy & a bad guy teaches you how to be able to have a thick skin.
You mentioned it helped you deal with different people. I watched a sneak preview of your show & you knock on a lot of doors. What’s surprising to me is not everyone is open to wanting to work with you & have you go digging in their backyards. How has your background helped you to overcome the obstacles?
Ric Savage: When you wrestle, when you are doing the independent circuit you are self promoting. As a self promoter, you spend a lot of time doing autograph sessions. That how you make money, you sell them. You literally become like a street hustler. Learning how to talk to people and negotiating with people & just kind of schmoozing people, it’s like being an outside salesman. It’s the same concept. You take that & when I knock on someone’s door, you try to be disarming & you’ve got 10 seconds to see if they’re going to like you or not. That’s the average time it takes for someone to determine whether they want to talk to you. So I get a 10 second window from the time I walk up to their door to get into a presentation to explain what I want to do. A lot of times, I’m a big guy & it could be a little freaky to people when I walk up but then they see I’m fairly harmless.
The artifacts found in people’s backyards on ‘American Diggers’ isn’t just for show. You are also splitting profits with the owners of the properties you dig on.
Ric Savage: What amateur diggers don’t like about us is that we’re willing to give up part of the $. For most diggers, the idea is you go to the homeowner, you get permission, you go dig & whatever you find you sell it or keep it for your own collection. What we do, we’re renting your property. Every digger will tell you, oh you’ll never get in there, that guys hard to deal with. He might be, but if you give him an incentive he won’t be that hard to deal with. I came to the idea, as much as I want to keep everything I find because I love it, if I sell it, I still get to enjoy it find it, make that connection with history and this guy is going to make that money too. Now he’s got an incentive to let me dig in a place I wouldn’t normally be able to dig.
Tell me about your company American Savage.
Ric Savage: The company got started with the show. Relic digging was a hobby & a passion. The hardest part about relic digging is getting into the right properties. There’s certain places everybody’s dug & there’s places nobody’s dug. So if you can find a hook to talk to them & get them to let you to dig, you’re going to get some place no one else has got.
What are some of the locations we’re going to see this season?
Ric Savage: Tombstone, AZ, Alaska, Louisiana, St. Augustine, Florida, Brooklyn, NY, Detroit, Chicago,
Today we’re here at the Santa Monica Beach. What are some hidden treasures local Angelinos might find?
Ric Savage: The whole area of Los Angeles was originally owned by Native Americans, the Spanish came here first. So this was part of the Spanish empire. When Mexico had their independence from Spain, they took over California, Los Angeles the whole area here. Then it came to the United States in 1848 with the treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo after the Mexican war. So this area has had a lot of transitional history Spanish, Mexican, US. The kind of stuff that you might expect to find here on the beach, because the sand turns over so much are modern coins and jewelry. People that beach hunt are looking for rings, watches, earring necklaces stuff that bathers lose. Santa Monica itself, all these piers, around the turn of the century making piers was a big deal & all the major cities in the country did these piers. Piers were the amusement parks of the turn of the century. You can still find potentially if you get into the right spots some older coins, older jewelry maybe dropped 30, 40, 50 or 100 years ago.
If someone out there thinks they may have some treasures in their backyard, how do they contact you & your crew?
Ric Savage: They would contact us right now through Spike TV.
What can someone at home do to get started?
Ric Savage: If I wanted to be a metal detectorist at home, & I was into the hobby, the first thing you have to do is find a machine you can afford. The prices on the low end are about $300 & go into the thousands. A machine that detects gold is $5000 but you can get started at $300.
I thought it would be fun to try my hand at treasure hunting while at the beach with Ric Savage. He bought along 3 pieces of equipment: a V3i metal detector, a BeachHunter & a sand scooper. Ric let me test out the V3i metal detector, which allowed us to detect a foot and a half under the sand & showed me how to sweep the sand. Ric himself has found civil war artifacts at during his own beach hunts in South Carolina. Unfortunately, I came up empty handed. As Ric said, hunting requires lots of time & patience. Additionally, if this were a true beach hunt he would have brought out the big guns.
Ric Savage: Truthfully, if I was going to do this, I would use ground penetrating radar if I was legitimately doing an artifact dig because we’ve usually only have a day to get in and get out & it’s a lot of territory to cover. Surface hunting can take you a lot of time. With ground penetrating radar you can see 18 feet down.
What’s your favorite part about what you’re doing now?
Ric Savage: My favorite part is that I’m doing a job that allows me to do what I love to do with the people that I love to do it with & I get to go around the country. I get to meet a lot of great people. I get to see every historical site in the country in one way shape or form. That’s what I love. History is my passion.
Watch Ric Savage & his crew on the premiere episode of ‘American Diggers’ this Wednesday, March 21st at 7:00 pm PT, on Spike TV. You can catch a sneak preview of the show & learn more about Ric & his crew at this link: http://www.spike.com/shows/american-digger/
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