Pro Wrestling in the South Back in the Day

I was on the phone with a friend last week, just catching up on this and that, when my buddy posed a question. “Did you ever get into pro rasslin’?” Now, for the record, I spell it like that because, to me, wrestling is something they do on a mat in a college gymnasium. Rasslin’ is what we watched on TV and in the auditoriums around the South during the seventies. So my answer to his question was easy, “you bet!” I liked it so much, I even attended the training camp once with dreams of being one of the guys.

My Daddy turned me onto rasslin’ in the late 1960’s. The first characters I remember seeing coming through the rabbit ears on the old black and white set were folks like Argentina Apollo (my Dad was an old fan of his Dad, Argentina Rocka), Haystacks Calhoon, Missouri Mauler and Jack Brisco.

The era of Mid-Atlantic Championship Wrestling began in 1970, and ended in 1986. Oddly enough, this mirrors the Southern Rock era pretty closely. Maybe that’s why so many of my fondest seventies memories involve Saturday afternoon’s televised episodes of Mid-Atlantic Championship Wrestling, and the Monday night trips to Greenville Memorial Auditorium to watch the matches live.

One of my high school buddies,  a guy we called The Weasel, was an over the top fanatic about rasslin.’ He did everything short of worshipping Ric Flair, and followed Flair’s every move. 

For a few years there, we went almost every Monday night to the old “Brown Box,” 8:15 bell time. I saw some great matches during those days, stars like Greg Valentine, The Andersons, Ricky Steamboat, Jay Youngblood, Paul Jones, Wahoo McDaniel, Super Destroyer, The Avenger, Tiger Conway, Ivan Koloff, Swede Hanson and my favorites Andre The Giant, Ernie Ladd, Blackjack Mulligan and Nature Boy Ric Flair. Of course Johnny Weaver was there almost every week, giving 110 percent. I heard that Weaver recently passed on. Another legend gone. Sad.

In my upcoming and ongoing series “No Hold Barred,” I will be reliving some of the great memories of the Mid-Atlantic Wrestling era, and profiling some of the stars of the sport. One of the first will be one of my all time favorite rasslin’ stars, the man with the deadly “heart punch,” Ox Baker. A man who lived the song "Flirtin' with Disaster." Join us. Should be fun.

Keep it Real. Keep it Southern.
Buffalo

 

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