For those of you who may have been self-injurious enough to have checked out the first post I made on my blog (“Greetings & Salutations” posted 5/14/15), you already know how badly I misused my Facebook page when I first began posting things on it. The Cliff Notes version of this account is that I fired Facebook up sometime last summer, reached out to 3 – 4 friends, didn’t bother connecting with anyone else and started posting 5 – 6 page missives on things “near & dear” before a few old friends found me and demonstrated through example how the damned thing is supposed to be used. I was using it as a blog instead of the dynamic medium for reconnecting (and staying connected) to people that it is intended to be. As a result, in the recent past, I began moving most of those long-form musings that I originally posted on Facebook to this very blog, which is where such things are right and properly pastured.
However, another thing I didn’t realize back during those early, ignorant days was that all of those other articles and entries that I “liked” or commented on with Facebook were often popping up on my friends’ pages too. As a result, all of my “likes” and most of my comments were being advertised for all of my friends to see. That, in and of itself, was not such a bad thing. The problem was that, during those early days, many of the articles and posts I “liked” and commented on had to do with a very guilty little pleasure of mine, one I had thought I was keeping secret. The long and the short of it was that I was broadcasting my love and interest in the business of professional wrestling for all of my Facebook friends to see.
You see, one of the first things I discovered about Facebook (correctly, as luck would have it) was that there are oh-so-many Facebook pages dedicated to professional wrestling topics, many of them maintained by people who ran promotions or performed in the ring themselves – so if you’re into professional wrestling, there are some great sources of information for it on Facebook. After “liking” one or two of those pages, Facebook did what it does so well and kept directing more and more of those types of pages to my attention. As a result, I spent a lot of my early time on Facebook “liking” and commenting away on professional wrestling posts to my little heart’s content. Little did I know that with each “like” and with each comment, I was broadcasting my interest in professional wrestling to the few Facebook friends I had at the time - people with whom I was very self-conscious about how I came across.
Oh brother. I’m amazed I didn’t end up getting “unfriended” by at least a few of them.
You see, I’m very aware of the disdain in which non-fans and folks who are not into “the business” hold professional wrestling. Hell, for most of my life, I was one of those people.
So why do I like
professional wrestling so much at this late point in my life?
The truthful, if
somewhat surprising answer is: I
don’t.
I can’t stand to watch
a match these days. And while it would
be easy of me to chalk that up to the fact that pro wrestling is pretty much
dominated by one nationwide promotion these days (WWE, previously WWF, whose
brand of wrestling didn’t appeal to me much even back during its two “golden
ages”), the fact is that I don’t even enjoy watching the older matches all that
much. I’ll watch them out of historical curiosity,
or to get the low-down on a wrestler I’ve heard a lot about but haven’t seen in
action, but rare is the time when I actual “enjoy” watching a match for its own
aesthetic purposes.
So why do I spend so
much time paying attention to professional wrestling (as my older Facebook
friends witnessed first-hand)?
Because I’m fascinated by the history of the business.
Professional wrestling is a unique phenomenon in the landscape of human entertainment. Nowhere have I ever seen a business where theater and pageantry, cheap drama and outright pandering, has been so deliberately blended with athletic endeavor to yield such a strange, bewildering product. It has its own lingo, its own culture and own unique history. How wrestling evolved over so many years from being a legitimate sport, to being a sideshow attraction, to being an association of regional promotions to, finally, becoming an international phenomenon able to fill world-class arenas and capture millions of dollars in pay-per-view revenue is, to me, a fascinating line of inquiry that one could easily spend a lifetime tracing and studying. Scholarly interest aside, I also find that studying the history of wrestling is immensely entertaining – much more entertaining, in my humble opinion, than the actual product presented in the ring.
Don’t believe me? Assuming you have a library card, go to your local library and look up any book by any professional wrestler who lived, breathed and worked at any time over the last thirty years. Then actually read the damn thing. Go ahead, you won’t be disappointed. I don’t care if the wrestler you’re reading about was a lifelong “jobber” (i.e. – someone who lost consistently in the ring to make the “stars” look good) or a 16-time world heavyweight champion, I guarantee he/she will have more than a few behind-the-scenes stories about their wrestling days that will make you howl with laughter, or your jaw drop in astonishment, or some combination thereof. There are simply no stories more entertaining than “wrestling stories”, which is why the writing, publishing and sale of books about wrestlers has become a very lucrative side-industry in its own right.
So while at this point in my life I feel confident characterizing myself as fairly well-informed and knowledgeable about professional wrestling, I didn’t come by that knowledge the way most people do (i.e. – by being a lifelong fan and witnessing the “sport” firsthand over many years). My “path to knowledge”, so to speak, was forged via my interest in one man – a wrestler by the name of Barry Windham.
To begin at the beginning . . .
As most of my long-time friends know, even though I was born in Pennsylvania, I spent the vast majority of my early childhood growing up in the State of Florida. We lived down there from approximately 1973 to 1983, give or take a few months in either year. I was a one year-old when we took up residence in what was then a small town called Fort Pierce, an old naval outpost situated on the east coast of the state, approximately equal distance between Daytona Beach and Miami. Now most of us nowadays naturally think of Florida as being a fairly populous, urban and well-developed state. However, most of the growth in Florida has occurred rather rapidly over the last 20 – 30 years or so. Back in the seventies, Florida was still pretty much a “redneck” state. Sure, Miami was well on its way to becoming the sophisticated metro/cosmopolitan destination it is today, but that was a relatively recent development by the time my family lived down there. Much of the rest of the state, even the urban centers, were far from cosmopolitan, and the vast majority of its population would proudly consider themselves either “redneck fishermen” or “redneck cowboys”, or both. Other than for its beaches and its citrus industry, Florida really wasn’t renowned for much of anything on the national level until the Miami Dolphins suddenly became a force in the NFL with the first and only undefeated championship season in 1972 (the year before we moved there). Other than that, there really wasn’t much going on in the state as far as sports were concerned. The then-fledgling Tampa Bay Buccaneers were birthed a few years later, and then very quickly made everyone wish they hadn’t been as they rapidly set new marks for failure and futility. The Miami Heat Basketball Team, the Florida Marlins Baseball Team, The Tampa Bay Devil Rays Baseball Team, Tampa Bay Lightning Hockey Team and the Jacksonville Jaguars Football Team were far in the future and the prospects for such teams were just simply not on anyone’s horizons back in those days. Even the University of Miami’s college football team, the championship-laden Miami Hurricanes, had yet to rise to national prominence in those days, their first national championship being about a decade away. No, what really ruled the Florida sports scene back in those days were two grimy, fledgling, and distinctively “southern” sports which were just not generally appreciated on the national level. I’m talking about auto racing and professional wrestling.
Back then, professional wrestling existed as a series of loosely-affiliated regional wrestling promotions, organized nationally through the National Wrestling Alliance (NWA). These regional promotions or “territories” were allowed to operate with a great deal of independence and autonomy provided they: 1.) limited their reach and operations within the geographical areas allotted to them, and; 2.) recognized only one true “World Heavyweight Champion” who was a wrestler sanctioned by the NWA who continually travelled around to all the territories taking on each promotion’s top talent. This was a decidedly different arrangement than what one saw with wrestling since the nineties, where there existed one or two wrestling promotions that operated on a nationwide-level and competed against each other with completely different wrestlers, titles, storylines and champions. Of course, nowadays, there really is only one game in town on the national level, the WWE. But back in the day, the wrestlers you saw on TV were the same ones who lived in your community, shopped in your grocery stores and performed, almost exclusively, in your state or geographical area. The wrestlers you became familiar with largely depended upon which “territory” you lived in and which promotion had rights to that area.
Where I lived in Florida, that promotion was Championship Wrestling from Florida (CWF), run by its legendary promoter, Eddie Graham.
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| My "Territory" |
Eddie Graham effectively began what became known as CWF in the late sixties when he rode into Tampa and bought into what was essentially a part-time, seasonal wrestling promotion owned and operated by a character named Cowboy Luttrell. Graham had a reputation for being a genius in the business and a master of “finishes” (i.e. – the creative ways in which wrestling matches come to their conclusions). Through a combination of business acumen and sheer creativity, Graham turned Luttrell’s part-time operation into a thriving, statewide spectacle and turned CWF into one of the “crown jewel” promotions in the NWA.
In addition to Graham, CWF was known for two other prominent wrestling figures who obtained that oh-so-rare status of becoming so popular they gained acclaim on a national level – “The American Dream” Dusty Rhodes (one of maybe five personalities in the history of wrestling who became recognizable to fan and non-fan alike on a national level), and “The Dean of Wrestling”, Gordon Solie, whom many consider to have been the finest professional wrestling announcer even up to this very day. In addition to these bona fide CWF stars, CWF also proved to be a developmental ground for wrestling personalities and talents who went on to achieve considerable fame and success beyond CWF’s border. By my unofficial count, CWF spawned no less than five wrestlers who went on to become either World Heavyweight Champion or WWF/WWE Heavyweight champion on the national level. Perhaps the most notable of these was a tall, blond kid by the name of Terry Bollea, the man who went on to become arguably the most popular and famous character professional wrestling has ever spawned – Hulk Hogan (though the lion’s share of his fame and fortune was earned outside of CWF’s borders).
So while CWF was a local, regional wrestling promotion in every sense of the term, it offered national-level entertainment to an eight year-old me growing up well within its sphere of influence. The larger-than-life personalities, the carnival atmosphere when they rode into town for a live show, the easy-to-understand good versus evil dynamic between the “faces” (i.e. – wrestler portrayed as “the good guys”) and the “heels” (i.e. – “the bad guys”) all appealed to my child’s eye view of the world. This was probably the one time in my life when I was a true, dyed-in-the-wool, professional wrestling fan.
While the talent was national-level in CWF at the time, what I remember most about wrestling in those days was just how damned local it felt. It really was a part of the community. Their weekly, late Sunday morning TV show was sponsored by local businesses (most notably, Janie Dean Chevrolet in nearby Vero Beach). They didn’t just stick to the big metro arenas, but they also came to your town or the next town over and had matches in civic centers and rec halls and National Guard armories all over the state. Plus, it was right there on the banner – Championship Wrestling from Florida. This wasn’t the WWF here, which purported to be a worldwide organization even back when it, too, was just a regional promotion. CWF was distinctly Floridian in its approach and feel, and whenever I think back to those now so misty early childhood memories in the Florida heat, those memories are inevitably wrapped up in CWF and how it made me feel.
One of the other distinctly CWF (and perhaps more widely, NWA) attributes that I think are noteworthy was the fact that, at least back then, CWF still took the time and effort to portray professional wrestling as a legitimate sporting endeavor. Sure, it was still wildly dramatic and exaggerated, and any mature adult who took the effort to take an objective step back from the product and see it for what it truly was could see that CWF was more theater than it was true sporting competition. But I loved that they took so much time and energy to portray it as a true sport. Instead of just yelling with bombast about how strong the competitors were or that such-and-such move has “busted” such-and-such wrestler “wide open”, Gordon Solie actually called each move, counter or hold as it happened in his professional, deadpan delivery. Solie may have been the only wrestling announcer I know of where you could have listened to him on the radio (or with your eyes closed) and still have had a good idea what was happening in the ring from moment-to-moment. The wrestler’s names, height, weight and city-of-origin were all announced in the ring immediately before each match occurred, and they even occasionally had good old “Coach Shaffer” sit in every now and then and explain how such-and-such move evolved from the Greco-Roman tradition, or that so-and-so wrestler trained under such-and-such coach at, say, the University of Oklahoma, and explained how this effected that wrestler’s style and track record of success. Now 85% of this explanatory information was complete fiction, but it added so much to the illusion that what you were seeing was real (that concept is known as “maintaining kayfabe” in the lingo of the business – seemingly a lost art these days). Plus I just loved how the wrestlers were just portrayed as wrestlers and actual human beings – good old “Terry Allen” or “Steve Keirn” or “Brian Blair”, not “Mr. Perfect” or “The Birdman” or “Hillbilly Jim”. Don’t get me wrong, CWF had a share of gimmicky wrestlers on their roster, but it was the exception, not the rule, and I just appreciated how wrestlers were allowed to be portrayed as competitors and not repackaged as superheroes or supernatural characters at every step and turn.
And of all these wonderful, athletic, larger-than-life personalities, somehow I ended up fixated on some young, exceedingly tall, somewhat gawky young kid of a wrestler named Barry Windham.
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| A Very Young Barry Windham |
So Barry was my
guy. And boy did I love watching
him. I loved watching him be terrorized
by, and eventually overcome, the much savvier and much more experienced Don
Muraco. I loved his early feud with an
equally young and developing Jake “the Snake” Roberts. I vividly remember being shocked and outraged
when Roberts put young Barry face-first through the wooden ringside
partition. And I also remember the
excitement of anticipation as I waited for Barry to come back the following
week and wrestle Roberts again with a broken nose. I loved how he was portrayed as being Dusty
Rhodes’s young protégé, and how he always gave the travelling NWA champ the
fight of his life whenever he rolled into town.
He was 6 – 7, he was billed as being from Sweetwater, Texas, he took
what appeared to my young eyes to be some of the worst beatings I had ever
witnessed, but he always came back up swinging with those long-assed lanky arms
of his. And more often than not, he ended
up putting the bad guy’s shoulders onto the mat for the three-count.
Oh, and then there was
the “Flying Lariat”.
Or, more accurately,
the “Flying Freaking Lariat”.
That was Barry’s
finishing move. Again, in the parlance
of the biz, a “finishing move” is a wrestling move that is used, usually at the
end of the match to finish off your opponent and cause him to submit or
otherwise render him incapable of resisting a pin. When you saw a wrestler perform his or her
finishing move, you knew the match was likely about to end. Most famous wrestlers had a finishing move of
some sort which often became their calling cards. Hulk Hogan had the “Guillotine Leg Drop”. Ric Flair had the “Figure Four Leg Lock”. Stone Cold Steve Austin had “The Stunner”. And Barry, at least at this point in his
career, had the “Flying Freaking Lariat”.
First off, a Lariat is
a term normally used to describe the rope a cowboy uses to catch
livestock. In the wrestling biz, a
Lariat is really just another term for a clothesline, where a wrestler catches his
opponent with the length of his arm across his opponent’s neck, usually while one
of the two wrestlers are moving towards each other off the ring ropes. What makes a Lariat different from a standard
clothesline really has more to do with the wrestler using it than it does with the
move itself. “Cowboy Characters” are
usually the ones who use Lariats over clotheslines as it is more in keeping
with the mythos of their image. Stan
Hanson was a famous cowboy-wrestler who used the standard Lariat with great success
both in the States and overseas.
The “Flying Lariat” was
different. In describing this move to
you, it will be difficult to do it justice.
First, Barry would push his opponent against the ring ropes and then
launch them across the ring into the ropes on the other side. After launching his opponent in this manner,
Barry would then launch himself into the ropes opposite his opponent, spring
boarding himself toward the center of the ring where he would be, for all
intents and purposes, on a collision course with his opponent. However, a step or two before crashing into
his opponent, Barry would instead launch himself into the air and somehow
position himself to his opponent’s side, his own body a good four feet in the
air and parallel to the mat, and stick out that long-ass arm of his where it
would come down on his opponent’s neck/chest area and literally knock him
flat. It has to be about the coolest
looking wrestling move I had ever seen and must have taken an amazing amount of
agility and dexterity to perform properly.
Quite frankly, I’ve never seen another wrestler even try to perform it,
and I can’t imagine it looking quite right unless it’s being performed by a
six-foot-seven-inch lanky kid from Sweetwater, Texas.
So, again, Barry was my guy. To sum it up, he was a childhood hero of mine, and while childhood heroes are always the most special and most enduring kind of heroes we have, it’s very difficult to explain exactly how and why they mean so much to us.
They just kind of do.
Suffice it to say, my childhood heroes became even more important to me during some very dark years my family had in Florida. My parents separated on two separate occasions while we lived down there and there were times when I didn’t think my family would ever be whole and healthy again. During those times, my heroes provided a very important avenue of escape for me when I could forget those suffocating troubles and relax and feel like a kid again. I had exactly two heroes when I lived in Florida. One was Spider-Man. The other was Barry Windham. However strange and groan-inducing it may sound all these years later, that should give you an idea of just how important the young Barry Windham was for me in those days.
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| Barry - Staring Down Danger |
Turned out I was
wrong. Who knew?
The process of moving from Florida to Pennsylvania proved to be a long and tortured one. We didn’t do it the way most people would – by actually securing a house and location to move into immediately upon arriving. No, Dad’s big plan was to spend time with relatives in West Virginia and southeastern Pennsylvania while scouting out a new house and location in some rural part of Pennsylvania he wasn’t familiar with. So, not only did I have the usual burden of having to get used to a new state, a new geography, a new culture and new friends, all of that was preceded by a good solid three to four months of living on the sufferance of relatives and long-ass drives in the family van as we looked at homes a good hundred or so miles away from where we were staying. Quite frankly, in retrospect, I’m amazed we got through it with our sanity intact.
But the details of that little adventure are better left to another column. Suffice it to say that, due to more pressing concerns, professional wrestling didn’t bubble back up on my radar for a good year or so when, finally settled into a new house and well into the first term at a new school, conversation on the school bus inevitably turned to professional wrestling.
It turned out they did have professional wrestling in Pennsylvania, and while its fan base may not have been as pervasive as it was in the deep South, the fans it had were every bit as excited and enthusiastic about it as they were in Florida. I sat quietly at first and listened to my schoolmates go and on about wrestlers I had never heard of before. Jimmy “Superfly” Snuka. Ivan Putski. Tito Santana. And there was also this dude named Hulk Hogan everyone seemed so excited about.
I also heard names that were familiar to me, as some of the then-current WWF wrestlers had spent time in Georgia and/or Florida in recent years. Roddy Piper. Bob Orton, Jr. (though he was apparently going by “Cowboy” Bob Orton now). Barry’s old nemesis, Don Muraco, was apparently up north at that time too, engaged in a long and bitter feud with Tito Santana over the “Intercontinental Championship” (whatever the hell that was). And also the Iron Sheik, who was pushed as absolute badass heel in Florida for a good eight months or so before disappearing for parts unknown. Well, apparently he had showed up in the WWF by that point and had a run as their champion. Heady stuff indeed.
When finally the conversation turned to the new kid (me) and I was asked the question of whether I liked wrestling and who my favorite wrestlers were, I asked with some trepidation, and not much enthusiasm, “Have you guys ever heard of Barry Windham?”
Had they heard of Barry Windham? You bet your sweet ass they had heard of Barry Windham! The “U.S. Express” baby!
Turned out that in the year or so while I was dealing with the weightier issues of transitioning between Florida and Pennsylvania, Barry had made the move, along with a relatively “new” wrestler who was matriculating in Florida at the time named Mike Rotundo, up north to the brighter lights and larger arenas of the World Wrestling Federation (the WWF, now known as WWE). And, what’s more, the team of Windham and Rotundo were the current WWF Tag-Team Champions, and about to engage in a historic and bitter feud with the Iron Sheik (as soon as he had finished dropping the WWF Championship to the soon-to-be-mega-star Hulk Hogan) and that damned Soviet “commie” Nikolai Volkoff. It was the down-home, salt-of-the-earth, young American good old boys versus the evil international forces from Iran and the then Soviet Union. It was a classic wrestling “angle” and apparently had had the intended effect of whipping the fans into a froth over the upcoming matches.
I was floored. Barry Windham was up here wrestling? Who’s this Mike Rotundo guy he was with (apparently he hadn’t crossed my radar by the time I left Florida). And, wow, he was one-half of the tag-team champions right now? And feuding with the badass and scary Iron Sheik (I had no idea who Volkoff was at that time). What’s this wrestling show called? WWF? When’s it come on? Early Sunday afternoon’s (right around the time my old CWF show used to come on)? You bet I’ll check it out!
So the by the time the next weekend rolled around, I had convinced my Dad to tune in to this new-sounding WWF TV show and see my old hero in action. We had only one TV at the time, so if my Dad was going to commit to allowing me to watch wrestling, then the whole family was watching it or finding some other way to spend their time. It also didn’t help that the WWF show was on one of about three channels we were getting at the time (oh how I missed the cable TV we had in Florida!), and wouldn’t you know it was the one channel that came in fuzzy and required us to move the antenna rotor (a concept and device I was completely ignorant about as even regular network TV through an antenna didn’t require an antenna rotor in flat-as-a-pancake Florida). But those obstacles were quickly surmounted and I tucked myself into the couch and glued my eyes to the TV for my first look at my childhood hero in over a year.
And, thank goodness, he was booked to appear on the show that week.
What the hell? Is that Barry Windham?
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| Barry Windham (Left) & Mike Rotundo (Right) - The U.S. Express |
Part 2: http://epp101.blogspot.com/2015/06/running-thoughts-chasing-barry-windham.html
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