It has been no secret over the years that there was a great deal of animosity between Buddy Rogers and Lou Thesz.  Rogers has passed away, so there’s no way to get his side of the story, but in his book Hooker this is how Lou Thesz says it all started. more

Back in the "dark ages", before the modern era, wrestlers often referred to matches that ended in time limit draws as "Broadways." more

I was looking through the lineup cards for This Week in Wrestling.. more

Wrestling fans are, as a lot, pretty well trained fans. They've been conditioned for half a century that if they try long enough, they can get a response from most wrestlers. more

Johnny Valentine was always known as one tough son-of-a-gun in and out of the ring. more

Dynamite Jack Evans was a prototypical New Yorker. He was a funny little guy and a good hand in the ring. more

Once, when I was working for Bill Watts, there was a discussion as to how over the Fantastics were over with the people of Louisiana. more

In 1983 or thereabouts I was in Texas managing Will Bill Irwin. Bill had recently won the Texas Heavyweight Championship. We were hot everywhere. more

In 1936 my dad had just returned from Europe. He had no manager and was booking his own dates. Then he got a call from Rudy Dusek. more

It's always interesting to hear how different people got started in professional wrestling. Freddie Blassie (B-61) came from a boxing background. Bobo Brazil once barnstormed with the House of David baseball team before getting hooked on the sport after seeing his first match. more

Night Tim "Mr. Wrestling" Woods Was Late to the Ring

In the spring of 1979, I was wrestling in a spot show one Saturday night called Norcross, Georgia. Unlike most Saturday night towns where we were faced with a long trip back to Atlanta, Norcoss is actually right on the loop around Atlanta so we were all looking forward to being in the clubs by 11PM. more

In the world of professional heavyweight wrestling, there are the "good guys" and the "bad guys." Some of the latter group is "nasty bad," and others, "dirty bad." Freddie Blassie (B-13) is probably both rolled into one. more

These are memories of Brute Bernard and Gary Hart's exploits on Australian TV in the 1960's as provided by Wrestling Classics' fan Geoff Brown in a recent letter. more

Long before the days as a manager of the Great Kabuki, Mark Lewin, the Spoiler, and Bruiser Brody, Playboy Gary Hart went to Australia where he manager one of the true characters of all time, Brute Bernard. more

Andre love to play a card game called Cribbage. It's a card game that uses a board with 121 holes per player in it to keep score. I had learned to play in the Navy, so every time Andre came to a territory where I was wrestling he would look me up to play a few games in the dressing room. more

Wrestling generally is in a healthy condition. Many cities are having record high gates (sic) receipts. In spite of this there are two tragic exceptions: Chicago and Montreal. Fred Kohler is the wrestling promoter in Chicago and his story of rags to riches and back again to rags is almost unbelievable. more

The wrestlers liked to have Lucky along on a long trip because of his stories. Lucky always bought two 6 packs of Budweiser, one for him and one for his wife Nelly. On long trips he was often known to break into Nelly's 6 pack. Laughing at his non-stop barrage of unlikely anecdotes made the long Carolina trips seem to pass more quickly. In short, if BS had been music, Lucky would have been a grand symphony! more

I believe it was Rob Moore, who dropped me a line recently. He wanted to tell me that I made it into Cactus Jack’s new book, Have a Nice Day – A Tail of Blood and Sweat Socks. more

Some old timers used to go to great lengths to conceal injuries from the fans. The idea was that, logically speaking, if an opponent had a brace or other such support on a critical area, it would just be common sense to go after that weakness. If you didn’t, the fans were sure to call “fake.” If you did go after such an area, there was a chance you could hurt your opponent. more

I spent almost three years managing wrestlers in Bill Watts’ Mid-South Wrestling and for the Dallas-based World Class Championship Wrestling. I traveled with such wrestlers as Scott and Bill Irwin, The Freebirds, the Grappler (Len Denton), Ernie Ladd, Leroy Brown and The Wild Samoans (Afa and Sika). In that span of time, I can’t tell you how many people (fans and non-fans) nearly got their heads torn off for irritating the wrong person. more

I grew up on the road. By the time I was 3 years old, I had been in 32 states and three foreign countries more

In 1981, I had the pleasure to manage a man who was becoming one of the best workers in the business, Scott Irwin. more

Ken was in bad shape and left soon after the incident to recover. He never had too much to say about the entire affair. He took one whale of a beating. His head was swollen to the point that it almost didn't look human and his entire face was a mass of purples, greens and shades of yellow. more

It was a beautiful spring Saturday morning. My traveling companions and I awoke early. After eating breakfast, we decided to leave about 11 AM, take the back roads and see the sights. We arrived in the town about 6PM after having "crammed" a three-hour trip into almost seven hours! more

In the 1960’s and 70’s, few men were more physically imposing in the ring than big Tex McKenzie. At 6’10" and 280 pounds Big Tex definitely had a ring presence.

Add to this the fact that he wasn’t, by all accounts, the most graceful man who ever entered the ring, and you have the formula for a hilarious disaster. more

In Bill Watt’s Mid South territory in 1981 we were averaging 2000 mile a week in travel. On one occasion we had the opportunity to spend an extra night at home in Baton Rogue in our own beds and drive to Shreveport for the matches the next day. Paul Orndorff, his brother Terry, Tommy Wright and myself made use of the chance and planned to travel together the next day. Of course, we were running late. more

On the way to Miami from Tampa there are literally miles and miles of canals, all filled will alligators. Piper had decided that he wanted to bag one of these gators to make himself a belt and a pair of boots. more

Paul Jones had a reputation as one of the better practical jokers. more

When you ask wrestlers of the 70s and 80s who were the toughest wrestlers in the sport, one name that comes up consistently is Wahoo. more

My father, Wally Dusek, wrestled his first match for a promoter named Gus Karras at the tender age of 16. more

After you’ve been in the ring for a while, you develop a "feel" for the crowd. By that I mean you notice when they don’t react. more

A lot of fans wonder what it’s like when wrestlers find out they are going to achieve one of the ultimate honors in this sport, to hold the World heavyweight. more