Anisa Khalifa: Professional wrestling is hard to categorize. It’s a combination of pageantry, athleticism... and carnival barking.
Cliff Bumgartner: But it's also a deeply personal, emotional form of storytelling. It's good versus evil. It's morality plays. It's the oldest story ever told, but done live in the round in front of you, no second takes, you know, and for years and years for decades, was also a major local business in North Carolina and throughout the South.
Anisa Khalifa: I'm Anisa Khalifa. You’re listening to The Broadside, where we tell stories from our home at the crossroads of the South. This week we look at the rise and fall of regional pro wrestling. And find out whether or not it can climb back up to the top rope.
Cliff Bumgartner: Check 1, 2. Talking. I’m just going to talk out loud for a minute. I never know what to do on a mic check even though I do them all the time.
Anisa Khalifa: Cliff Bumgartner is a Raleigh, North Carolina-based documentary filmmaker who's just finished his latest project….
Cliff Bumgartner: So we are just wrapping up a film called “When Giants Walked Here” which is about professional wrestling at Dorton Arena which is a classic piece of architecture on the North Carolina state fairgrounds. And for over 30 years was the home of live, local weekly wrestling in this community.
Anisa Khalifa: Because of that, he’s been deeply immersed in pro wrestling history. But for Cliff, one date in particular stands out.
Cliff Bumgartner: July 31st 1985. Ric Flair. Buddy Landell. Title on the line.
Anisa Khalifa: It was a massive event. Over 15,000 people showed up in Raleigh…on a Wednesday night.
Cliff Bumgartner: The cars are backed up to the highway. They’re having a ton of trouble. It’s also raining and a storm has come into town. Didn’t deter people. People are still coming out in the middle of a horrific storm to go to this show because they had to see that match.
Anisa Khalifa: And those high expectations were well-rewarded…
Cliff Bumgartner: Towards the end of the match, Ric Flair lifted Buddy Landell up for a standing suplex.
Anisa Khalifa: A 240 pound man—hoisted straight up in the air. Landell’s feet were pointed directly at the rafters.
Cliff Bumgartner: And he would often lift people and actually hold them in the air for a few seconds to let the blood drain to their head before dropping them down.
Anisa Khalifa: And according to eyewitnesses, as Flair held Landell suspended in the air, there was a flash of lightning…
Cliff Bumgartner: …that lit up those giant windows at Dorton Arena that are just open to the sky. And then when Ric fell back – when they hit the canvas – the thunder was the sound of the crash.
Anisa Khalifa: That moment in time — with Buddy Landell’s toes 12 feet above the ring in Dorton Arena — that was the high water mark of professional wrestling in the South. And in just a few short years, it would all come crashing down. If you’re like me and you grew up after the 1980s, you probably think of pro wrestling as national television. A type of sports entertainment owned by one or two big companies. But Cliff says that for most of its history, pro wrestling was a hyper local event.
Cliff Bumgartner: It's sort of boom period for, for many years was what's called the territory era from, I think the territories, you can really say 1950s all the way into the early 80s, where wrestling existed primarily as local regional businesses and different areas, different states, sometimes different parts of states had their own promoters, their own wrestlers, their own TV shows. Their own style of professional wrestling that that community got familiar with and came to expect and came to love. In North Carolina and throughout the South, it was largely promoted by Jim Crockett promotions. Jim Crockett was a boxing promoter and promoted concerts. Um, I think he promoted the, uh, Harlem Globetrotters in this area. So, you know, a big time live event promoter. Got into wrestling and started promoting that style here in the South.
Anisa Khalifa: So if regionalism at that time was the defining feature of wrestling, you mentioned the big promoter, Jim Crockett Promotions, what set them apart from everyone else?
Cliff Bumgartner: Wrestling in the South and in, in Mid-Atlantic, which was Crockett's company, they promoted every week. They did live shows across North Carolina, South Carolina, Virginia, every single week. When you're doing that, it has to be more personal. The issues that are on, you know, on camera or happening in the ring, people have to feel I've got to come back next week. People will go to the circus once a year. They're not going to go every Tuesday. So wrestling had to be that way. So you get very personal blood feuds, you know, deep set issues that people were motivated to come out every single week. And that was a big driver of what made people love Crockett Promotions and Southern Wrestling.
Anisa Khalifa: In the Carolinas specifically, who were the big name wrestlers in the ring?
Cliff Bumgartner: Probably the first name you would hear is Ric Flair, who, multiple-time world champion based out of Charlotte.
Ric Flair: Woo! It’s so hard to be humble when you’re looking like Ric Flair.
Cliff Bumgartner: He kind of defined what the, as he would call the stylin' and profilin' bad guy could look like and could be.
Ric Flair: Remember, when Ric Flair's in town, showtime! Woo!
Cliff Bumgartner: Dusty Rhodes was a wrestler, wrestling promoter. Uh, wrestling booker or matchmaker. Did pretty much everything there was to do in wrestling in his later years. He trained the next generation and he was the eternal, I'm like you, good guy.
Dusty Rhodes: I admit I don't look like the athlete of the day supposed to look. My belly's just a little big, my hiney is just a little big, but brother, I am bad and they know I'm bad.
Cliff Bumgartner: He didn't look like an athlete. He didn't look like a major star. He didn't talk like one. He had a lisp. But he would go on television, and he would call himself the American Dream. And he would talk about being like you, and how he was the son of a plumber. And yet, here I am, and now I'm a star. And if I can do this, you can do this. Roddy Piper, a lot of people, an entire generation, probably know him from They Live, the John Carpenter movie.
Roddy Piper: I have come here to chew bubblegum and kick ass. And I'm all out of bubblegum.
Cliff Bumgartner: But Roddy Piper was the eternal wrestling bad guy. Or as they call it, a heel, and he would antagonize people and he could talk, he could talk you into buying a ticket to see somebody beat him up because you hated him so much to the degree that it was actually in Raleigh, North Carolina, he was stabbed backstage by a fan.
Anisa Khalifa: Oh, my God.
Cliff Bumgartner: Uh, it was not at Dorton. We thought it was, and we researched that in the film. And it turned out there was actually a period when Dorton was, I think, under renovation. And so they moved. But Roddy Piper. Had that much what they call heat, people, people being angry with him, people wanting to hurt him that, uh, yeah, he was actually stabbed here in Raleigh during that time period.
Anisa Khalifa: That is wild. You, you talked about Dorton a little bit already, but you have these iconic local venues and I graduated from high school in the Greensboro Coliseum. And I've been to Dorton Arena, but for like the Eid prayers that we have in the Muslim community, because it's like big enough to hold everyone, had no idea of any of this wrestling history. So can you explain what's so special about Dorton Arena?
Cliff Bumgartner: Dorton was the building. There weren't at that time, this is before our other big sporting arenas, basketball arenas, hockey arenas, those kind of things. So people would come from everywhere. Eastern, Northern, Southern parts of the state to get to Dorton because it might be their only chance to see live professional wrestling, to see the people that they saw on television every week. This was home. This was the only home that they had for the thing that they loved.
When you walk into Dorton, it's overwhelming. The place is glass for the most part. It's made to where you don't notice any structure. So there's these swooping walls. And when you're in there, particularly in the middle of the day, it's just bathed in light everywhere you look. It's uninterrupted and it's not an experience that you're, that you're used to. From the outside, it looks kind of like a big Pringle.
Anisa Khalifa: Oh, you're so right!
Cliff Bumgartner: It has this very strange swooping roof that was the first of its kind, and these arches that meet up on the sides at this extreme angle that I think everyone who grew up in Raleigh wanted to climb and skateboard off of, so they had to put fences up there eventually when I was a kid, because I think enough people wanted to do that. It still to this day does not have air conditioning.
Anisa Khalifa: Sure doesn't.
Cliff Bumgartner: Um, which is amazing to me, but, uh, and is probably when we were making our documentary, the number one thing people said was, God, it's hot. And that remains true even to this day, um, you, you've got to love a place to, to be willing to jam into it with 5, 000 people and no air. So I think that that actually speaks well of it.
Anisa Khalifa: But that excitement, that almost religious fervor that would pack Dorton arena with thousands of spectators week after week — it was coming to an end. By the late 1980s, the territory system started to collapse.
Cliff Bumgartner: What started to happen was wrestling started to go national. Television went national, media was going more national, and the WWF, owned by Vince McMahon, was going very national and started kind of gobbling up these territories, started coming into their towns, taking their television, taking their stars, buying people out, in some cases forcing them out, and wrestling started to become less and less regional. Here in the South, You saw that impact on Crockett Promotions towards the end of the 80s, into the early 90s. You see the crowds dwindling as stuff kind of got choked out.
Anisa Khalifa: Jim Crockett Promotions, the biggest promoter in the South, went bankrupt. The company was sold to Ted Turner's WCW. And the drama and the culture of local pro wrestling left Dorton arena, and much of the region, for decades. When we come back — we look at the future of pro wrestling in the South. And find out whether or not it can reach the heights of the 1980s once again.
Chris Lea: Wrestling is a great mixture of sport and theater.
Anisa Khalifa: Chris Lea is a sports journalist at WRAL in Raleigh and was a producer for the film “When Giants Walked Here.” He's loved wrestling since he was a toddler. He was even a pro wrestler for a few years. And he says that just like any other kind of theater, wrestling has roles.
Chris Lea: So you have your baby faces. Those are the good guys. Those are the guys that you want to cheer for. You have enhancement talent or jobbers. Those guys are their whole role. Is to just make the other wrestlers look good. And, uh, they lose a lot. You have your, your heels. These are the bad guys. These are the guys who they're going to cheat. They're going to fight outside of the rules. They're going to yell at fans. They're going to, you know, hurl out insults and things like that. People for some reason go to wrestling events and love being insulted. These days, uh, didn't work that way back in the eighties.
Anisa Khalifa: But Chris says that's not the only way that North Carolina wrestling has changed since the 1980s.
Chris Lea: I think it's kind of changed, you know, the amounts of wrestling that's come to North Carolina. Now you have to more so rely on independent wrestling organizations that run in smaller venues if you want to see wrestling on a monthly basis. Versus Dorton arena, um, could have wrestling every Tuesday. Also, you know, wrestling is competing with everything else that is taking people's attention. And the world is just so vastly different. Since the eighties, North Carolina. has boomed in population. They have three more professional sports teams than what they had then. And Duke, North Carolina, NC state, Wake Forest and ECU and all these other college programs have taken their games to the next level. So there's much more for people to do. So even though there's less wrestling happening, I think it is, it's in a good spot still in North Carolina.
Anisa Khalifa: How has it come back? Is it coming back in a different form? How are people interacting with it?
Chris Lea: Yeah. Instead of the territory system, you have independent pro wrestling organizations. So, uh, you have different organizations that may run in particular locales. There's, uh, some that run in the Durham area. There's some that run in the Greensboro area, some that went and run in Winston Salem, some that run in Charlotte. And so. You're kind of getting back to being able to know the wrestlers that you're, you're watching, you know, where they hang out at, and it's helping to put more pro wrestling stars on the map for the larger organizations.
There's a kid by the name of Javon Evans, who is lighting WWE on fire right now. He's only 20 years old. He's from Greensboro. He's somebody. When he was a kid, he used to come to watch me wrestle. So the local scene also helps to produce tomorrow's big stars for the larger organizations and the fans get a chance to experience those stars and get to know those stars before they become stars. And I think that makes them feel closer to them because they feel like they have a piece of that success that they're starting to feel.
Anisa Khalifa: And in terms of the cultural impact, how would you say the cultural impact is for wrestling now in this current moment?
Chris Lea: I think, uh, it's, um, started to blend in. And I mean this in a very loving way because I consider myself a part of it. Um, it's part of nerd culture I think right now, you know what I'm saying? Like it's, it's, you know, I'm not the type of person that loves comic books and things like that. But typically if you love pro wrestling, you probably also love comic books. You probably also love video games. And those are two things that I don't really, I don't really get into as much, but I do think that I have a part of nerd-dom, you know, within me and, uh, folks that go to comic cons and things like that. There's no surprise that at those comic cons, there's also typically a pro wrestler there signing autographs, or sometimes wrestling shows there.
Anisa Khalifa: Yeah, that's so interesting. Cause those are fandoms that maybe 30 years ago, we wouldn't think of them really interacting at all. And now, yeah, I mean, I'm not in the wrestling space, but I'm in other nerd culture spaces. And sometimes I will kind of like overlap with people who are really into wrestling. So how has the internet really made that possible?
Chris Lea: You know, sometimes it's, it could be hard to find your tribe. I know there's times I was growing up and I felt like, um, it's hard to find people who are like me, who liked some of the same things that I like. And the internet just kind of brings all those people together. And now, with the ease of communication, ease of travel, you see people now who are going to wrestling events or comic cons or different other things like that, that are not in their locales. We had a wrestling event in Charlotte a couple of months ago where somebody flew in from Washington State because they, you know, saw It on social media. They were so enthralled with it and they decided to come in, you know, Hey, buy a ticket, you know, and fly down and enjoy yourself.
Anisa Khalifa: Amazing.
Chris Lea: For independent wrestling organizations, YouTube and social media has been huge. I mean, the independent wrestling scene in the 90s, early 2000s, and even, you know, back when I was wrestling, if you weren't there, you just missed it, right? And now there's a lot of organizations where they'll still draw four or five hundred people, but they're also live streaming to people at home or they're taping as live so they can present it a week or so later on their digital platforms, whether it's YouTube or others. And people are consuming it. They're buying it. And it's helping to support the industry is helping to support these wrestlers and, you know, pay their fees. And that's how people take in wrestling and is also creating more opportunities for folks as well.
Cliff Bumgartner: So it's all cyclical.
Anisa Khalifa: Documentary filmmaker Cliff Bumgartner says wrestling is returning to its roots.
Cliff Bumgartner: For years, wrestling was regional, wrestling was local, and people loved that. National media made the national expansion of wrestling kind of inevitable, but it also shrunk the industry to where for a while you only had two major companies. And then for 20 plus years, you only had one, you had the WWE.
Now you're seeing that more than ever, even just in North Carolina, off the top of my head, I can name like four different regional promotions here in different parts of North Carolina who have their own stars, some of whom start with them and then end up in WWE or end up in one of the major companies, but who train with them, start with them. And you go to these shows, and it is the closest I'll ever get to experience it to going back to the territories, where you're sitting there and there's this old lady behind you just yelling over your shoulder at the bad guys. And people are coming with, you know, the t-shirts and the signs, not for people who are on national and international television, but for that guy that they know and that they see in the grocery store and then get to go see in his matches. A lot of that local regional flair has come back into wrestling through the independents and has brought a lot of that thrill back that was gone for so long and is thriving again.
Anisa Khalifa: Can you see it turning into, like, a new golden age?
Cliff Bumgartner: I think we're in a new golden age already. It's great as a fan, and it's also great as somebody who's studied this stuff to get to see that happening up close. When I was a kid, I didn't get to go see wrestling unless the big guys were in town. Now new generations will get to see their favorite star up close, just like their parents did and their grandparents did.
Anisa Khalifa: In 2016, pro wrestling returned to Dorton Arena after more than 20 years. And Cliff says that if I want to, I can even go see a show there sometime soon…and get the full experience.
Cliff Bumgartner: It looks the same, it feels very much the same way, and it's as hot as it ever was.
Anisa Khalifa: Chris and Cliff’s documentary film, When Giants Walked Here, is out now. You can stream it on PBS Passport. This episode of The Broadside was produced by me – Anisa Khalifa – and our editor Jerad Walker. Our executive producer is Wilson Sayre. Special thanks to Deadlock Pro Wrestling for letting us record a recent match in Durham.
The Broadside is a production of WUNC–North Carolina Public Radio and is part of the NPR Network. You can email us at broadside@wunc.org. If you enjoyed the show, leave us a rating, a review, or share it with a friend! I’m Anisa Khalifa. Thanks for listening y'all. We'll be back next week.