Childhood Memories Part One: Mid-South Wrestling

As a young boy, I spent many, many hours watching professional wrestling on television, attending professional wrestling bouts at the Lake Charles Civic Center, and perusing magazines devoted to professional wrestling. This was before the WWF and the WCW and NWE and other other high-profile wrestlers and wrestling organizations. Wrestling was a regional enterprise, enjoyed by only the dumbest, most easily fooled among us. No celebrities like Hulk Hogan or Stone Cold Steve Austin. No, in Louisiana back in the early 1980s, we had to survive on the offerings of Mid-South Wrestling. Televised every Saturday morning. Live matches every couple of months.

Junkyard Dog, Andre the Giant, Skandar Akbar, Ted DiBiase, the Great Kabuki, the Von Erich Brothers, the Rock and Roll Express, Ivan Koloff, "Hacksaw" Jim Duggan, "The Big Cat" Ernie Ladd, the Iron Sheik, Paul "Mr. Wonderfull" Orndorff, Kamala the Ugandan Giant, the Fabulous Freebirds, and Jake "The Snake" Roberts: these were the men I spent my Saturdays with as an impressionable youth. Good times.

The fun all came crashing to a halt, however, when, at a live match one summer, I saw Hacksaw Jim Duggan chatting amicably off-stage with his mortal enemy, Ric Flair. I suddenly realized that these men were not actually fighting and did not actually hate each other, but that, perhaps, it was all an act. For money! I collected the last remaining bits of my childhood innocence, and returned home with my father, who assured me that Junkyard Dog was still cool, even if he was an actor.

He was right.