On a Monday night at the Mid-South Coliseum in Memphis in 1978, Joe LeDuc pressed Jerry Lawler over his head and tossed the Southern heavyweight champion from the ring like a ragdoll onto the ringside announcers’ table. My hometown hero took a wicked bump, crashing off the table and crumpling in a heap onto the floor.
I was sure the King was done for.
Indeed, Lawler was really hurt on this night in ’78 . This was no angle— this wasn’t part of the show.
Although he was treated for a leg injury at a Memphis hospital that night, Lawler was back in the ring two weeks later seeking revenge against the maniacal Canadian lumberjack.
I was only 7 years old, and I thought Lawler was Superman.
Over the years, no matter the odds, Lawler always battled back when a dastardly heel like Terry Funk or Nick Bockwinkel had the King on the ropes. Bleeding and reeling, Lawler always rallied in the end, pulling down the strap on his singlet to make his comeback—think Popeye and his spinach—as the rowdy crowds at Monday Night Rasslin’ went berserk.
Wake-up call: Disguised as a mild-mannered announcer recovering from heart surgery, the King enjoys a salad and a Diet Coke…and a huge steak covered in mushrooms.
Thirty-four years later, on the September 10 episode of WWE’s “Monday Night RAW,” Lawler, who had been experiencing chest pains of late, collapsed to the floor near the announcers’ table, where he was doing commentary.
My hero had fallen once again, this time as a result of a massive heart attack. And once again, this was no angle-”…not part of the entertainment,” as his visibly shaken announce partner Michael Cole told the millions watching Monday night.
I again feared my childhood hero was done for. But on the ropes and reeling, Lawler again rallied, pulling down the proverbial strap to make the comeback and overcome his most dangerous adversary yet.
Three days later, with rumors of death and possible brain damage circulating on the Internet, Lawler began showing amazing signs of recovery, joking and laughing with friends and quickly regaining his appetite. Even Lawler’s doctor was reportedly amazed at the shape he was in following surgery.
I shouldn’t have doubted his resolve-the King has made his living triumphing against the odds in heart-stopping action and suspense.
I’m 41 years old, and I still think he’s Superman.
(I’m back from summer vacation; as always, Parts Unknown was lovely this time of year. This column is dedicated to the King…Jerry Lawler…my childhood hero and, later, my friend. Let’s go, King….)
A bad break ultimately led up to one of the most defining moments of my youth.
Horseplay: Lawler's football hobby sidelined him for nearly 11 months but resulted in a dream feud for the Memphis territory. (clipping courtesy of memphiswrestlinghistory.com)
With less than a year of experience as Lawler’s manager under his jumpsuit, Hart rarely had interview time in 1979, as the King was in his prime as one of the greatest heel promos in the business at that point.
Prior to the injury, most of the dastardly duo’s interviews saw Lawler boast and brag, with Hart relegated to nodding, smiling, carrying the King’s CWA World belt and occasionally chiming in to reassure Lance Russell and the viewing audience, “That’s right, baby!” But with Lawler now on the shelf for an undetermined amount of time in 1980, Jarrett removed Hart’s muzzle, and the young manager was off to the races while his champion stud was put out to pasture for nearly the remainder of the year.
As Jarrett recalls, “We were in Lexington, Kentucky, shortly after we got the news of Lawler’s injury. I was furious with Lawler because the entire territory was centered around him. So I turned to Jimmy. Hart nervously asked me, ‘What do I say about Lawler?’ I was thinking about being in the home state of the Kentucky Derby, so off the top of my head, I gave Hart this line, ‘What if you have a horse-a thoroughbred, a champion-and he breaks his leg? You shoot him!’
“Lawler was watching and took great personal offense to the disrespect shown by Hart, who he broke into the business. Lawler was so mad that Jimmy thinks he purposely broke his jaw in Evansville after he came back from the injury. Jimmy Hart went from being a side man to the center of attention who we built everything around. And while Paul Ellering did a great job as Hart’s new King, Jimmy was the one who kept the Memphis box office going until Lawler could return. It was a natural. I believe the term they use today is a ‘work-shoot.’ We tried to work with what was in front of us—and the reality was that Jerry had felt like Jimmy had let him down by making the racehorse analogy. Lawler really took offense to that and Hart knew it, so he was gun shy around Lawler, and it came across as real to the fans. So…everything had tension and a touch of realism to it.”
With a ready-made angle in his lap, Jarrett initially planned for “King” Paul Ellering, the future manager of the Road Warriors, to oppose the baby face-by-default Lawler upon his return to reclaim his crown down the road.
This interview with Lawler from summer 1980 is about as real as you can get, as he was legitimately hot about Hart becoming a big star in his absence and did not like Ellering parading around with his crown—especially without his blessing. (Jarrett explained this in great detail during our memorable Memphis wrestling roundtable discussion.)
Just one problem: Lawler’s leg was healing in time for a September 1980 return but the impatient King, with the help of Calhoun, sawed off his cast way before the doctor’s orders and couldn’t resist getting in the ring early for “unofficial” bouts with Hart and “Killer” Karl Krupp. He ended up reinjuring the leg, delaying his “official” return until December.
With Ellering now gone, Jarrett was more than willing to welcome back his Tennessee protégé Tommy Rich, the hottest babyface in the country on WTBS, Ted Turner’s SuperStation. The theory goes that Rich was looking to turn heel in an effort to prove to the NWA that he could work any style as a touring World champion. He actually did a damn good job, but local fans didn’t want to boo the homegrown heartthrob, so he wasn’t a great draw as a heel in Mempho. Lawler just happened to be providing commentary during Rich’s televised return against longtime babyface Bill “Superstar” Dundee, which led to an angle to set up an eventual bout between the King and Wildfire. )
Rumor has it that NWA president Jim Barnett, who would eventually arrange a short NWA title reign for Rich months later, advised him not to bow before the King, citing the publicity surrounding Lawler’s return to the ring after such a long layoff. Less than four months after turning heel and attacking a crippled Lawler, Rich abruptly turned babyface just weeks before Lawler’s comeback and began taking sporadic bookings back in Georgia, eventually leaving Memphis and working full time in the Peach State in March 1981, a month before his NWA title win over Harley Race.
So…who would face the King? “Handsome” Jimmy Valiant would have been a natural choice, as he’d been the catalyst for Rich’s babyface turn when he attacked Wildfire’s mother, Peggy. Valiant had been a heel crony of Lawler’s at the time of the injury but was quickly switched babyface to give the fans a new hero in the interim, as the Boy From New York City was always a hot draw as a hero in the short term. In anticipation of Lawler’s return, Valiant was turned heel in November 1980 to set up an eventual showdown for the Southern title upon the King’s return in December. (After defeating Ellering earlier in the year, Valiant had also taken to parading around in Lawler’s crown—mercy indeed, daddy.)
But the fans had already seen Lawler vs. Valiant dozens of times in every type of wild stip possible. The promotion needed new blood who had a big name to go with it.
Then fate stepped in. Troy Graham, who had worked in Knoxville as jive-talking Troy T. Tyler, showed up backstage at the Mid-South Coliseum looking for work. When Jarrett asked if he could “talk,” Graham exploded into his spiel—a charismatic mix of Dusty Rhodes, Superstar Graham and a TV evangelist—absolute gold in the wrestling business. Hart was so impressed, he immediately told Lawler, “We gotta use this guy—he sounds just like Dusty.” Not only that, but Graham could also move great for a big man and was an excellent bump taker. And, um, he came much cheaper than Dusty, a hot box-office draw from coast to coast.
Memphis had taken gimmick-infringement liberties in the past, booking several national masked stars with someone else under the hood. For example, when I mentioned to Jim Cornette that the first card I attended at the Mid-South Coliseum in 1979 featured a heel Mil Mascaras doing a stretcher job for Jackie Fargo, he speculated that it must have been Pepe Lopez under the hood. For the record, Lopez died in the same car crash that killed Sam Bass in 1976, and Jarrett confirmed for me that it was indeed Aaron Rodriguez under the mask nearly three years later.
But in this case, the promotion would be billing the most charismatic star in the country as Hart’s masked bounty hunter. Stanback Headache Powder commercials featuring Dusty had been airing in the Memphis area—often during Jarrett’s show—for months in fall 1980,, so local fans knew the blue-eyed tower of power was a big star.
Although Dusty had worked a few shows in Memphis in ’77 at the behest of Florida promoter Eddie Graham to help Jarrett in his promotional war with Nick Gulas, the American Dream had not appeared in the area since to inconclusive battles with Lawler in 1977.
Jarrett put Troy under a hood and let him do his best impression of Big Dust, playing off Rhodes’ moniker of the American Dream—the masked “Dream Machine” was born. In pre-match interviews, it was strongly implied that Dusty was Jimmy Hart’s gun for hire, with the Dream Machine claiming that he was a big star, with fans nationwide, so he was donning the mask to hide his identity as he didn’t want to break the hearts of his fan base for the punishment he was about to unleash on Lawler. Graham even managed to drop in a reference to Dusty’s sponsor, Stanback Powders, during one promo. A week before Lawler’s return, the promotion attempted to get the Machine over as an unstoppable force, beating up several jobbers, before Lawler made the save to a frenzied crowd reaction.
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The stage was set for the return of the King…in public, if you will….
I had to be there.
As 9-year-old Scotty Bowden waited in line for tickets on that fateful Monday night (while it was a given the show would sell out, Memphis was notoriously known as not being an advance town), an older black gentleman behind my uncle Robert and me told his friend he was sure it was Dusty under the hood. Suddenly, it all started making sense to my young mind. Then I bought the 50-cent program, which confirmed my newfound suspicions with a poem written by the Dream Machine himself. (Never mind that the illustration of the mysterious man seemed to be the product of Lawler’s artistic handiwork.)
Dream weaver: If you can't afford Dusty to do a job for the King, why not bring in the next best thing to talk the people into the building?
When the lights dimmed in the sold-out Coliseum and the King ascended magically through the stage in a cloud of smoke (inspired by a KISS concert Lawler had attended in the same venue months earlier), the fans, including me, sitting way up in the cheap seats, rejoiced. Today’s younger fans hear a lot of hyperbole about the kayfabe era, but I can assure you the atmosphere in that building was electrifying. I fell in love with the business that night. I often wonder if today’s young fans have that same emotional connection to their heroes. The buzz in that flying-saucer-shaped arena prior to the main event threatened to knock the arena into orbit.
Lawler defeated the Dream in typical fashion: Calhoun was bumped, allowing the King to pull a chain from his boot and knock Graham to dreamland—a standard babyface move in Memphis. Afterward, Lawler got five minutes with Hart, quickly pummeling his former friend into a bloody pulp. Revenge is a dish best served cold. And it can be very cold in Memphis in December.
Lawler and the Dream drew huge houses around the horn into January 1980 with the same finish, though a predicted sellout at Rupp Arena was hampered because of a snowstorm. For most of 1981, the Dream was Lawler’s biggest rival, including this loser-leaves-town bout that proved to an angle to turn longtime jobber/midcarder babyface Koko Ware into headlining heel Sweet Brown Sugar.
More than 14 years later after the monumental showdown between the King and the Dream in 1980, I found myself in the ring during a main event tag match with Lawler and Jeff Jarrett vs. Eddie Gilbert and the unmasked Graham.
On this night, I’d turn against my hometown hero and help the Dream get the win.(I’d never forgiven Lawler for cheating to get that win back in 1980; plus, like Calhoun, I was sick of being pushed around by the Monarch of the Memphis mat.)
When recalling Graham, I can’t help but think of the protagonist in the movie “The Wrestler”: Randy the Ram and his unwavering, though misguided, commitment to the business. Fourteen years after seeing Lawler vs. the Dream battle in front of a sold-out Mid-South Coliseum against in 1980, I became Graham’s manager in Memphis.
The big crowds were long gone, a victim of McMahon’s ’80s expansion into traditional territories nationwide. Even though we were often working in front of under 1,500 fans, Graham put his battered, broken-down tattooed body on the line working a very stiff, physical style and getting color (bleeding) in nearly every match. Following a tag-team brawl with Lawler and his son Brian at the Mid-South Coliseum, Graham was preparing to shoot a promo (interview) to promote next week’s rematch, when I walked past his dressing room. I stopped when I heard a repeated, sickening smack against flesh—it sounded like someone was getting his ass kicked. I peered into the dressing room to find a bleeding Graham punching his eye, trying to close it. He saw me in the mirror and asked, “How do I look?” Wincing, I replied, “Dream, you look… terrible.”
Excitedly, he said, “Great, let’s do this!” And off we went to shoot the interview. It did not matter to Graham that in 1994 Memphis was drawing the same number of hardcores each week, no matter what we did. Graham died of a heart attack in 2002. Apparently, he’d spent some time living on the streets.
Last night on RAW, we nearly lost the other half of that great main event in Memphis on Dec. 19, 1980. Jerry Lawler suffered a heart attack at the announce table Monday night, shortly after working a bout with Randy Orton, CM Punk and Dolph Ziggler—a testament that the King could still be creditably in the mix with the best workers in the biggest promotion in the world.
C’mon, King. Pull the strap. Make the comeback. Just once more.
This belt signifies you're the greatest wrestler walking the face of God's green pastures in Tennessee and Kentucky…and parts of Indiana, Mississippi and Arkansas.
After years of frustration in his attempts to convince the National Wrestling Alliance board to give his homegrown star Jerry Lawler a run with the NWA World title, Memphis wrestling promoter Jerry Jarrett created his own championship-the Continental Wrestling Association (CWA) heavyweight title. The idea was that AWA Southern champ Lawler would win the strap from former WWWF champion Superstar Graham and then issue challenges to AWA kingpin Nick Bockwinkle and perennial NWA titlist Harley Race for a series of unification matches. Jarrett, who had begun working with Verne Gagne the previous year, was thinking that perhaps the AWA owner would eventually agree to have Lawler and Bockwinkel “unify” the titles in Memphis, with each man holding the undisputed championship for a period of time.
Of course, Lawler broke his leg just as the unification series with Nick was getting off the ground, forcing Jarrett to go in a different direction with Billy Robinson, who was a classic wrestler in the mold of the men whom the young promoter admired growing up.
With Lawler on the shelf, Robinson drew some strong houses in Memphis defending the belt against the likes of Bockwinkel (after Verne decided to have one last run with the AWA crown), Bill Dundee (who Robinson traded the belt with), former NWA champion Lou Thesz, and Paul Ellering; still, he wasn’t the consistent draw that Lawler was. In fact, it was “Handsome” Jimmy Valiant who picked up the babyface slack with Lawler sidelined. Disappointed with his champion’s drawing power, Jarrett gambled, going with the charismatic if not reliable Austin Idol, who defeated Robinson for the belt on Oct. 6, 1990, when Billy was “forced to quit” after twisting his knee in a rare show at Chicks Stadium-an outdoor show on a chilly fall night that only drew 2,642 fans, despite $3 and $4 tickets and advertised “50-cent beers.”
Idol, who could have played the role of the flamboyant World champion well a la Ric Flair, lasted all of two weeks-just long enough to have publicity photos taken with the title-before forfeiting the championship of the world to rising star Bobby Eaton. I believe Idol left in a pay dispute-certainly not the last with Jarrett-the money he was making in Georgia was probably too good to pass up. (Unless, of course, it was a Fred Ward town.) While he was already one of the best young workers in the business, Eaton lacked credibility, so Jarrett went back with Robinson as champion on October 27 in front of just over 3,500 fans at the Mid-South Coliseum. Lawler returned from his layoff to again set the territory on fire as 1980 came to a close, drawing a SRO sellout crowd at the Coliseum on Dec. 29.
Jarrett wanted the belt off Robinson, but the champ this time refused to relinquish the belt, no-showing a scheduled bout with Dutch Mantell on March 16, 1981. Robinson took off with the title, continuing to defend it in Japan. The last result I saw involving the championship was a title loss to Dory Funk Jr. in Tokyo; however, I have no idea if this title switch actually took place. Robinson has since claimed his ex-wife took the belt following their divorce, which sounds like a WWE storyline. Jarrett was anxious to confront Robinson at the 2009 NWA Legends Fanfest about the belt’s whereabouts…but Billy no-showed that event as well. (In a recent interview, Robinson changed his story, saying his dog ate the belt.)
Despite holding the belt for only 14 days (though that’s nearly triple the amount of time that Tommy Rich held the NWA World title), Idol recently commissioned renowned belt-maker Dave Millican to recreate the 1980 championship belt for photo-ops at upcoming personal appearances. Though Millican wasn’t the biggest fan of the original design-which has Lawler’s artistic style all over it-he agreed, making some slight enhancements, such as accurately depicting the Japanese flag. (The real strap had the red-and-white color scheme inverted.)
Belt-mark critics in the past have slammed the original’s license-plate design and frugal production, but for longtime Memphis fans, the CWA World title is fantastic sentimental piece. I think former esteemed CWA president Nick Gulas would agree. Besides, if you think the original CWA title belt was bad, you should have seen the World championship trophy it replaced-I believe it was one of promoter Eddie Marlin’s old bowling awards.
Though Jarrett’s unification concept eventually came to fruition in 1988, with Lawler wining both the AWA and World Class belts, it would have been interesting to see how the scenario would have played out had Lawler not broken his leg in ’80. But then we might have missed out on the Lawler-Hart feud, which is the program that really defined the territory in the ’80s.
Maybe it was a lucky break after all.
For more on Millican’s incredible work, check out his site and colorful gallery of belts by clicking here.
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