(Author's Note: I have been invited to be one of the kayfabe-era wrestling (typically meaning professional wrestling up until 1989, although that will not be a hard and fast rule) correspondents on this fine blog. It is my hope that this piece will serve to introduce me to you, the readers, and explain, for those of you too young to live through the time period discussed, why you should care about the personalities, programs, angles, and matches that I'm sure to touch on in the weeks and months ahead. It is my hope that you will enjoy reading about these events as much as I enjoyed experiencing them as a small child obsessed with professional wrestling).
Allow me to take you back, to a time and place that may seem unfamiliar to the younger readers reading this. The time was circa 1985. A time that I fondly term BCABIR (Before Cable and Before Information Revolution); a time when people got their news and entertainment from either the “big three” broadcast television networks or an “unaffiliated” station, which were television stations on the UHF band that now typically show UPN or CW programs showed whatever program they could get cheap. The place was Baltimore, Maryland, where a little seven-year-old boy would sit with his grandfather, or his great-uncle, or his favorite uncle, or a combination thereof, watching television on a weekend afternoon, transfixed, as the little boy had since the age of three. While the family members mentioned above are no longer with us, the little boy has since grown into a man pushing thirty years of age, and his little shadow stares at me when I look in the mirror, and the memories of what transfixed him remain with me to this day.
What was it that so transfixed me, you may ask? Professional wrestling. On or around that time, Baltimore got Verne Gagne’s American Wrestling Association (AWA), Bill Watt’s Universal Wrestling Federation (UWF), three of Jim Crockett Promotions’ shows, and two World Wrestling Federation shows airing in one weekend. I watched them all. The larger-than-life characters: men named Hayes, Gordy, Roberts, Slaughter, Hogan, Koloff, Kernodle, Junkyard, Williams, and the greatest of them all, a man named Flair. I watched their wild deeds from strange-sounding places: The Irish-McNeil Boy’s Club, the Tulsa Fairgrounds, the Cobo Arena, the Forum, Madison Square Garden, Charlotte, Raleigh, Spartanburg. And what did they do to transfix me? What was it that I liked so much about it?
Done well, in any era, professional wrestling is the highest form of performance art. Wrestling, in it’s basic form, is a morality play. Good versus Evil. One man wronged another, now the man who did the wrong must pay. Or one man wants what another has (typically a big gold belt, but also including money and women, which have all been put up for grabs in a wrestling match, in every era, at one time or another). I was transfixed by this ever-evolving tale of good and evil, the men who performed it well, and even the men that described it. For those of you who weren’t old enough to know, I can’t tell you what it felt like to see two thousand people making enough noise for one hundred thousand, as Steve Williams won the UWF championship on television against the One Man Gang. And I also can’t begin to describe how the announcer, whose face looked like a hoot owl and voice sounded like a hick, made the action in the ring seem more important than anything. The hoot-owl face and hick voice belong to a man named Jim Ross. Or how David Crockett would announce matches like his grasp of the English language was tenuous at best: “Magnum TA…Blanchard’s face in the fence…Git’em now, Magnum, Git’em.” Great stuff! And it seemed like the most important thing in the world to me. Or the voice of a man called Gorilla and a man called the Brain, the most underrated comedy duo of all time! This is what pro wrestling of that era meant to me, and millions of others. And, if I had the time, I could be here all night typing of my experiences going to matches, where people could still light up a cigarette inside of an arena, and security was more a suggestion than a force!
Now that you have been introduced to me, my experiences, and the tip of the iceberg of my memories of a time and place, I hope you will continue to enjoy the musings of a man whimsically remembering a time and place long ago passed. And I hope that you will not only be informed and entertained but inspired, the same way these events inspired me so long ago.
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