Pro wrestling peaked in Knoxville long before the WWE
by Mike Gibson
There was little love lost when in the spring of 1970 the babyface duo of Les Thatcher and Whitey Caldwell were stripped of their tag team championship belts by the dastardly Wright brothers, Ron and Don, on a cheat, when the Wrights ganged up on the valiant Caldwell and clamped a rag soaked in ether across his face while a criminally unmindful referee held a distraught and wildly protesting Thatcher at bay on some trifling point of procedure. The subsequent venomous verbal exchanges between the two tag teams on the weekly Wide World of Wrestling television show drew outrageous levels of heat, and pointed to the follow-up grudge match as a contest for the ages, the likes of which had never before been seen in area wrestling.
But on the night of the big showdown, the outdoor amphitheater at Knoxville’s Chilhowee Park was beset by a deluge of almost Biblical proportions. With matchtime approaching, the team of Thatcher and Caldwell were wholly convinced the contest would have to be postponed...
Until someone in the dressing area pointed outside to the line of people weaving through the parking lot and around the adjacent Golden Gloves boxing arena. A crowd of several thousand, a number heretofore unseen at a local wrestling event, was determined that on this night, there would be a Reckoning, come hell or even higher water.
“The rain only got worse,” Thatcher remembers of the epic struggle that followed, a scene that consisted of equal parts low comedy and apocalyptic wrestling fury. “I wrestled without boots on because the footing was so precarious in the ring. You couldn’t look at your opponent straight in the face, so you had to look off at an angle. And the whole time we were worried because the ring lights were swinging back and forth overhead.”
“I about drowned out there that night,” says Ron Wright. “It was one of the worst rains I’d ever been in. There was so much water fell, but people never left.”
Recalls Thatcher, “At one point, I remember looking out at all those people standing out in that storm, and I’m thinking, ‘My God, I know why I’m out here. But why are they out here?’”
That night in 1970 augured well for wrestling hereabouts, ushering in a veritable heyday unlikely to be repeated in the modern era.
Pro wrestling 101: A mutant offspring of carnival sideshows in the early part of the 20th century, professional wrestling began in the form of more-or-less legitimate grappling exhibitions and all-comers challenges, but gradually integrated a measure of charlatanry to boost gate receipts.
By the 1930s, it was outgrowing its carnival origins, giving rise to a host of colorful independent local and regional wrestling promotions. By the 1960s, the sport comprised a dozen or more well-established regional “territories,” outfits like Verne Gagne’s American Wrestling Association in the Midwest, the Gulas-Welch Wrestling Enterprise out of Memphis, and Vince McMahon, Sr.’s Capitol Wrestling Corporation in the Northeast.
Each promotion had its own storylines and its own murderous cast of wrestling characters. Each territory was also financially independent, although most of them were at least nominally affiliated through the National Wrestling Alliance (NWA), a loosely organized governing body that allowed all of the associated federations to recognize a single “world champion” wrestler in addition to their own regional belt-holders.
The NWA also upheld the unspoken pact among regional promoters—that each one would respect territorial boundaries and limit their promotional efforts accordingly. When, on occasion, one federation would challenge another in its own territory, other NWA affiliates would send in top wrestlers to shore up the besieged promoter’s card.
“You had a bunch of promoters, most of them about the same size, and everyone was happy with their territory,” says Ron Fuller, the self-anointed Tennessee Stud who would tower over area wrestling as both a champion in the ring and a promoter outside it for the better part of a decade. Fuller’s grandfather Roy Welch was a co-founder of the Memphis Gulas-Welch promotion in the 1930s.
“Nobody was greedy. There was a gentleman’s agreement that you would stay out of each other’s way, and everyone left everyone alone.”
The efforts of early Knoxville promoters George and John Cazana in the ’50s and ’60s, and then Fuller beginning in 1974, would eventually turn the area into a hotbed of wrestling interest, one that throughout the 1970s saw a stream of past and future legends don tights and boots and climb into the squared circle at Chilhowee Park, and later the Knoxville Civic Coliseum—not to mention any number of ready-made rings in gymnasiums and armories in towns like Morristown, Kingsport, and Johnson City.
Future World Wrestling Federation (WWF) star Mr. Fuji wrestled in Knoxville for a few months in the late ’70s, and later retired here to be near his children, whom he sired during a brief marriage while in Tennessee. A blonde leviathan wrestling under the name Sterling Golden also served tours of duty in Knoxville’s Southeastern Championship territory, several years prior to his ascendance as the world’s best-known professional grappler in the persona of Hulk Hogan.
But inscribed just as large in the memories of core fans are the names of other area greats who never entered the arena of corporate wrestling created when Vince McMahon, Jr. erased regional promotional boundaries and took the WWF nationwide in the 1980s—men like Wright and Fuller and “Bullet” Bob Armstrong and the Mongolian Stomper, most of whom forged their bloody legends throughout several of the territories of old.
Says Thatcher, “The history of wrestling in Knoxville is tremendous. It was unique there. Unlike a lot of places, you had local guys who didn’t just become jobbers (journeymen); they became stars.”
Ron Wright still has the scars, telltale track marks from the 18 stitches that sewed up the gash in his left shoulder, from another 38 in his head, and from yet another 192 in a gruesome jagged line extending from shoulder to waist. The wounds all came from a single chaotic evening in Greeneville, inflicted not by fellow wrestlers, but by an angry mob of spectators inflamed to the point of combustion by Wright’s infamous “heel” tactics.
“I made that crowd so mad they had a riot,” Wright chortles, looking back from the infinitely safer vantage of a table at a Cracker Barrel restaurant just outside Morristown. “There was four cops there, and all four of them lost their billysticks. I was stabbed, beaten. I seen I was bleeding to death, so I fought my way to the dressing room, walked across the street to the hospital and received five pints of blood.”
Now in his 60s, his face softer and his body slowed by a lifetime’s worth of war wounds and general pounding, Wright can still occasionally flash traces of the grinning malevolence he exhibited in his youth, often just before he dropped a lead plate in his infamous “loaded boot” and put a Tennessee dog whoopin’ (his pet phrase) on another opponent. In many ways, he is local wrestling’s missing link, one of few surviving connections between wrestling antiquity and its mid-’70s territorial heyday.
A Rogersville native who grew up in Kingsport, Wright started wrestling in the 1950s, after brow-beating local grapplers with names like Killer Kowalski and Wild Bill Caney into showing him the ropes. As a 15-year-old high school student, he was actually barred from prep sports after school officials learned that he had been participating in local pro wrestling promotions.
He would leave for the McMahon family’s Capitol wrestling outfit in Maryland after high school, only to return to the Knoxville area and the Cazana promotions (first George Cazana, and later, his brother John), where he rapidly gained notoriety as the area’s top “heel” (villain.)
“Dirty was the only way I ever wanted to wrestle,” Wright says. “If there was anything under-handed or sneaky, I’d do it. It was a rougher game then, Lord yeah. It’s always been show business. But back then you could still pretty much beat each other to death.”
A street-brawler and an incorrigible cheat, Wright’s favorite finishing move was to stomp helpless opponents with his lead-loaded boot, to which he would always jeeringly point before administering the telling blows. He sometimes pounded his foes with a pair of brass knuckles, or else burned them with the end of one of the huge spike-sized cigars perpetually clamped in his teeth upon his entering the ring.
More often than not, he finished his matches awash in gore, covered in either his own blood or that of his opponent, and sometimes both. He takes considerable pride in the fact that while some wrestlers resorted to tactics like “blading” (self-administered razor blade cuts to the forehead) to turn matches into bloody spectacles, all of his own scars were earned the “hard way,” the result of blows that though they may have been pulled, were nonetheless calculated to rupture flesh. “We knew how to hit people just right,” he says. “You twist that knuckle, and you can pop a gash over a man’s eye.”
With his braying, loud-mouth style and loathsome tactics in the ring, he would become the region’s most memorable long-standing heel, the man East Tennessee wrestling fans loved to hate. And when he and his brother Don clashed with the noble and morally unimpeachable duo of Caldwell, a Kingsport hometown hero, and Thatcher, a handsome, square-jawed Ohioan, the region was bequeathed with its first truly memorable wrestling feud, as well as its first great “babyface” (hero) tag team.
The emergence of two bankable heroes and a pair of even more bankable villains coincided with the arrival of the area’s first weekly-televised wrestling program, John Cazana’s Wide World of Wrestling on local UHF station channel 26. All signs pointed to a huge potential for wrestling promotions in Knoxville. But the sport wouldn’t reach the zenith of its popularity for another five years, when a big man named Ron Fuller took the reins from the Cazanas and transformed it from a local curiosity into a regional phenomenon.
A 6-foot-9-inch, 250-pounder hailing from Dyersburg, Fuller was born to a wrestling family; both his father, Buddy Fuller, and his grandfather, Roy Welch, had earned regional renown not only as wrestlers, but as promoters too. His first wrestling experience consisted of grappling with his dad in a makeshift backyard ring at age 5. He entered full-time professional wrestling upon his graduation from the University of Miami—where he had been a basketball standout, of all things—in 1970. “I trained for it all my life; it was really the only thing I planned to do,” Fuller remembers.
In 1974, he further extended the family’s legacy when he purchased John Cazana’s wrestling interests in Knoxville, and recast the promotion under the banner of Southeastern Championship Wrestling. Fuller had larger ambitions for the promotion, and he fulfilled them first by negotiating a new television contract with WBIR channel 10, which as a CBS affiliate and a VHF station offered reach and reception vastly superior to that of Wide World’s channel 26.
Fuller also brought back Les Thatcher, who had moved to Canada after his first Knoxville stint and embarked on a career as a wrestling commentator. “Most wrestling commentators then were the local weather guy; their heads were more into getting in plugs for their own shows,” says Thatcher, who now lives in Cincinnati and heads his own training academy along with former wrestling greats Harley Race and Ricky “the Dragon” Steamboat.
“Since they weren’t that smart to the business, my job was to be the traffic cop. If the local guy was talking about Mrs. Bertha’s birthday, it was my job to pull things back to the storyline in the ring.”
Under Fuller’s SECW promotion, Thatcher was more than just a TV sidekick: he ran the show, both as the chief on-air personality, and later, the broadcast producer. With his wrestling knowledge and distinctive deep voice, he was the quintessential commentator; engaging, astute, and unflappable. (The latter quality served him particularly well in the announcer’s chair, as heel wrestlers would sometimes storm the set and attempt to provoke him in the middle of a broadcast.)
With Thatcher at the helm, the SECW TV show earned a spot on the Saturday afternoon programming schedule of stations in Crossville, Johnson City, Bluefield, W.Va., and even Lexington, Ky. It served as a weekly advertisement for SECW, setting up the feuds and storylines that would be brought to fruition in the ring, sometimes six days per week at an ever-increasing number of arenas across East Tennessee and Southeastern Kentucky.
Whereas the Cazana brothers relied on talent from Gulas and other nearby territories, Fuller drew on his personal resources, and brought to SECW its own stable of wrestlers. From a California promotion, he harnessed Prof. Toru Tanaka, a tankish Japanese heel who was actually neither a professor nor Japanese. (Later, Tanaka’s old tag-team partner Mr. Fuji moved to Knoxville, and the classic evil-Asian duo carried on a brief but memorable feud with the Fullers.)
From the Fuller family came Ron’s younger brother, Robert, and cousin, Jimmy Golden, a tall, swaggering blonde who enjoyed long stints as both a babyface and as a heel. And from Canada came the Mongolian Stomper, a heavy-browed mountain of muscle in work boots and a shaven pate.
Rarely uttering a sound, the Stomper usually relied on a flamboyant manager—in Knoxville, he worked with Wright, and sometimes with the gold-tressed and garrulous Gorgeous George, Jr.—to draw heat. While Wright gabbed, the Stomper simply stared, his face set in an attitude of stony malice. Sometimes he would repeatedly bend and release a hefty axle spring from an old semi truck as he stood there, his thick arm and shoulder muscles undulating rhythmically beneath the oiled parchment of his skin. “He was one of the toughest,” Wright remembers. “If you got in the ring with the Stomper, threw a punch and it didn’t hurt him, he’d beat you to death.”
Also destined to become a Knoxville wrestling icon was “Bullet” Bob Armstrong, a burly Georgia native, a former powerlifter who had bench pressed over 500 pounds in competition. Already a veteran grappler when he came to Knoxville, Armstrong was a close friend and sometime-tag-team partner of Robert Fuller.
His stint in Knoxville was a wellspring of twists and new storylines. His relationship with the Fullers continually ping-ponged; comrades-at-arms one month, either Armstrong or one of the Fullers would inevitably turn heel at the other’s expense, and the life-long friends became mortal enemies once again.
One such instance inadvertently led to one of SECW’s most memorable melodramas. During a tag-team match that paired Ron Fuller and Jimmy Golden against Armstrong and Robert Fuller (within the ominous confines of a giant chicken-wire cage), the younger Fuller brother abruptly decided that kin was still kin, after all, and turned the tag-team contest into a three-on-one drubbing of Armstrong.
“I was the odd man out,” chuckles Armstrong, now living—and still wrestling—in Florida. “I knew what was coming, but I didn’t know they were going to mess me up that bad.”
The incident, combined with a subsequent accident in the weight room, left Armstrong temporarily disfigured, so much so that he wrestled for several weeks under cover of a mask. The gimmick intrigued him, so he used it again a few months later, this time after coming out on the short end of a singles match with Ron Fuller, in a contest held under the classic wrestling stipulation that the loser would leave the territory.
In the weeks that followed the defeat at the hands of Fuller, a mysterious grappler who called himself the Bullet began terrorizing local rings, bearing a suspicious likeness to the banished Armstrong even through the skin-tight blue-and-white mask that hid his features. The “mystery” of the Bullet’s identity was a source of quarrelling and general ill-tempered divisiveness among area wrestling fans for months thereafter.
“I felt at home in Knoxville; those were my kind of folks,” Armstrong says. His most cherished wrestling memory is a product of his tenure in SECW, from a match held at a high school gymnasium in a tiny mountain hamlet in East Tennessee.
As Armstrong stood outside and signed autographs before the evening’s standing-room-only matches commenced, three small children rode up to the gate on the back of a mule. After disembarking, they slapped the mule’s behind, and the animal turned around and plodded back home as the kids entered. “I couldn’t help but give all three of them a big hug,” Armstrong laughs.
Southeastern Championship Wrestling offered a parade of highlights through the latter half of the 1970s. Nationally renowned icons like Andre the Giant, the 7-foot-5-inch, 500-pound French-born wrestling colossus, and long-time NWA world champion Harley Race made frequent appearances in town. Race would grant a world title match to the Southeastern Heavyweight Champion at least once a year; he and Ron Fuller wrestled to an exhausting one-hour draw in one such instance, in front of the largest crowd to ever attend a Coliseum sporting event. And Race and Armstrong fought an epic in the rain at the Chilhowee Park amphitheater, shades of the Wrights v. Thatcher/Caldwell only a few years before.
For a time, the muscular, bleached-blond Sterling Golden was a regular player in SECW. Under his real name, Terry Bollea, Golden had wrestled his first professional match against Ron Fuller, and would later become the sport’s first international superstar when McMahon’s WWF took off around 1985.
“He didn’t have a lot of wrestling skills, but he had charisma,” Fuller remembers of Bollea/Golden/Hogan. “I thought he’d be good. I just didn’t know he would be as big as he was.”
But as success bred more success in SECW—from relatively humble beginnings, the promotion grew into five states, increased its television audience exponentially, drew record-setting crowds at area venues—Ron Fuller shifted his base of operations to Alabama, creating two separate “divisions” of Southeastern wrestling. By the end of 1970s, he had sold his interest in the Knoxville portion of SECW to concentrate his efforts on the relatively untapped northern Alabama market.
SECW then changed hands several times in the space of a few years. And in 1979, the territory was challenged by a rival promotion, the “outlaw” (meaning that it was not affiliated with the NWA) Intercontinental Championship Wrestling out of northeast Tennessee. The ICW promotion featured former SECW favorites such as Ronnie Garvin (with his Hands of Stone), as well as new talent, including a young Randy “Macho Man” Savage, already playing to the hilt the cryptic muscle-man schtick that would later bring him fame in the WWF.
“The promotional war with ICW really hurt wrestling in this area,” Thatcher says. “It fragmented the fans, oversaturated the market. It started the downslide.”
ICW’s All-Star Wrestling television program lasted only a year in the Knoxville market, and the promotion itself burned out in the early 1980s. Southeastern Championship Wrestling survived only a little longer, petering out in 1982.
Soon after, Vince McMahon, Jr., son of the former Capitol wrestling patriarch, would begin making the moves that would forever alter the sport, shredding the gentleman’s agreement concerning rival promotions and effectively bringing to an end the territorial days of old.
McMahon signed a cable TV contract for his World Wrestling Federation that broadcast the WWF nationwide. The federation began siphoning top talent from all the wrestling territories, especially those that fit a particular mold—photogenic, physically imposing, although not necessarily skilled in the ring.
The resulting WWF product was bigger, splashier, and far sexier than its territorial antecedents, but less grounded in the salt-of-the-earth, sweat-and-blood ethic that had always been a part of regional wrestling. Wrestlers became posers moreso than grapplers. And matches became production numbers, rife with pyrotechnics, loud music and scantily-clad women.
“Any wrestler making money used to know how to “shoot” (wrestle legitimately),” Fuller says. “You learned to shoot, then you got into the ring. McMahon just wanted huge 300-plus-pound guys who made for a big show. It took the wrestling out of professional wrestling. It made me ashamed of the business.”
Regional promoters could ill afford to compete with the big-ticket spectacle and financial clout of the WWF, and they fell by the wayside. Wrestling was rapidly monopolized by the WWF (now the WWE) and, for a time, one other large national promotion.
Occasionally, new regional promotional efforts came forth, such as Knoxville’s short-lived Smoky Mountain Wrestling (SMW) federation in the early ’90s, but those inevitably fared no better than their predecessors. One former local wrestler estimates that SMW’s area television broadcast was hemorrhaging more than $30,000 per episode by the time of its demise in the mid-’90s.
Today, the independent promotions that do exist are tiny, under-funded, and by most accounts, grossly lacking in experience on either side of the ropes. “They’re mostly hobbyists, like people who play golf on the weekend,” Thatcher says. “A guy buys a ring and starts a ‘promotion’ and says, ‘This guy who’s been wrestling 15 minutes is my champion.’ Then these people go off and start their own wrestling schools, and gets more and more watered down. It seems that’s where the future of the business has come to.”
Critics bemoan the fate of wrestling in the modern era. They point to the lack of mat-wrestling basics; the overabundance of sexy storylines and female flesh-baring antics; the jettisoning of classic ring psychology in favor of cartoon melodrama. Old-timers call it “cheap heat”—fan feedback come of gratuitous gimmickry rather than honest charisma and hard work in the ring.
Even Mr. Fuji, who cashed in on his notoriety as a top heel in McMahon’s operations through the 1980s and ’90s, has little good to say about the current state of the game.
“The old school had more psychology,” rues Fuji. “Now, they do things out of the blue; guys turn heel left and right; the title changes hands constantly. There’s no logic to any of the storylines. And there’s too much girly shit.”
Whether these are righteous rantings, or merely the bitter carpings of disgruntled old-timers remains a point upon which reasonable ring-mavens may disagree. But there does seem a certain inherent validity in the notion that wrestlers of yore forged an art and an ethos that have been diluted by the ham-handed tactics of latter-day megaliths like the WWF/WWE.
In the meantime, the remnants of Knoxville’s own glorious wrestling past grow ever more spectral. Many of its legends are long deceased, including the beloved Whitey Caldwell, whose life was claimed by an automobile crash in 1972, not so very long after his rain-drenched battle with the Wrights.
Other former greats are dispersed, most of them long removed from the game; Fuller retired from wrestling promotions in 1988, and now operates a small business in Florida. Ron Wright is simply retired, living in Kingsport, happy, but creaky in the knees, a bit the worse for wear.
Les Thatcher shepherds the Cincy-based Elite Professional Wrestling Training school, along with the aforementioned Steamboat and Race. At EPWT, says Thatcher, would-be grapplers still learn the shooting and mat-wrestling basics that were the sine qua nons of the business in the heyday of Southeastern.
A few locals stayed the course. Having entered the game shortly before the end of Southeastern Championship’s run, Morristown native Tim Horner learned to wrestle at the feet of the Fuller generation. Horner is now a regular with North American Championship Wrestling on the Comcast Sports network, an 11-state outfit that is one of a very small number of significant promotions outside the WWE.
“There are a ton of independents, but 90 percent are under-funded, backyard-caliber stuff,” Horner says. “At the NACW, we concentrate on wrestling the way it used to be, old-school wrestling without the theatrics and the T&A.”
Arguably SECW’s most beloved star, “Bullet” Bob Armstrong rolled with the punches when his sport changed, in much the same way he did in the ring throughout his four-decade career.
Now in his 60s, Armstrong along with his four wrestling progeny—Steve, Scott, Brad and Brian—works independent promotions throughout the southeast, enjoying the freedom and mobility he was never afforded during his territorial indenture.
“Some of these independents, these small-town people, were shut out during the territory days,” Armstrong says in a phone interview from his home in Florida, moments before departing for a match to be staged in front of 800 people at a local middle school.
“In that way, wrestling is more open now,” he says. “Sometimes you have to change clothes in the bathroom, but so what? As long as the money is green, and it’s all there... Wrestling is in my blood, and I’m having a ball. As long as I feel like I can give the people what they want, I’ll keep doing it.”
March 4, 2004 • Vol. 14, No. 10
© 2004 Metro Pulse
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