Down South we have sayings for every occasion. “Something in the grits ain’t gravy” is a way of saying you smell a rat. Take wrestling. It started as an ancient martial art. Then show business climbed into the ring and gave us wrasslin’. It’s fake. Right? Read on. I interviewed a real wrestler.

An imposing man walked into my writing class. Sam Morton was a homicide investigator with an English degree from the Citadel. He had a sharp sense of humor. Here’s a snippet from his bio.

“Past occupations include a 12-year-stint as a robbery/homicide detective, a ten-year career as a professional wrestler, and one long week as the blade changer on the potato cutting machine at the Frito Lay plant in Charlotte.”

Sam wrestled as the Patriot. He was a heel, wrestling parlance for bad guy.

“I was part of a tag team called Justice Inc. We wore suits, ties, and sunglasses to the ring. We were from the government and ‘here to kick your ass.’ I was Sam Justice.”

 I told Sam about seeing my first-ever wrestling match at Augusta’s Bell Auditorium. Wrestlers thrown against the posts got a bloody face every time. Not a trickle, a flood of red. When the night ended, Dad had me sneak under the ring where I found broken glass capsules. I asked Sam if wrestlers really bleed.

“One of the tricks we used to ‘juice’ or bleed was to trim a triangular edge off a razor blade. We’d wrap our hands with athletic tape to conceal the blade. Your opponent would throw you into the ring post. You’d fall, writhing in pain. While ‘writhing,’ we’re uncovering the blade. A couple of swipes across the forehead and you bleed like a stuck pig.”

And those glass capsules?

“There were always the glass capsules, but those things might break when you didn’t want them to, and almost invariably, you couldn’t get them to break with a sledgehammer when you needed them.”

 Slamming a chair across a wrestler’s chest? Surely that isn’t fake.

“Another trick,” said Sam. “You hit them with the seat. That way the chair gives.”

 I’d seen matches on TV where wrestlers got the dickens beat out of them. What about that?

“We’d whip somebody with a leather strap. You stand at one shoulder and slap the strap on the mat inches from the opposite shoulder.”

Yep, just like those Nigerian emails that promise you $20 million, sure enough something in the grits wasn’t gravy.

One day in a moment of delusional brilliance, I came up with Culture Night. Go somewhere you’d never go like a honky-tonk dive where electric bucking broncos slung ersatz cowpokes all over the place. Wrestling, here we come.

The emcee, a former wrestler in a tuxedo, Rowdy Roddy Piper, promised mayhem and malevolence. Here comes an inbound missile from the balcony. A ripe tomato blasted Rowdy Roddy in the chest. Tomato pulp and juice splashed across his tux. He went berserk, and the crowd went into a frenzy. (A Canadian, Rowdy Roddy pretended to be a Scotchman, complete with bagpipes, tartan kilt, and Scottish rage. He’s one of wrestling’s great heels.)

We sat behind a man, short and wide like Java The Hutt. When a fake elbow smash missed a fellow’s head by six inches I turned to my friend. “This stuff is fake.”

Java turned to me. “No—hell—it—isn’t.” His hair stood up like a junkyard dog’s hackles. His broad, nostrils revealed gruesome things. We moved.

All evening we watched people curse, throw things, and race around the ring in a fury the likes of which I’ve not seen since. One woman resembling Granny Clampett with a bit of Lou Holtz thrown in for good measure, grabbed her chair and wailed a wrestler as he walked to the ring. Fake? I just do not know.

As for wrasslin’ it was my last match and Culture Night became yet another failed social experience, body slammed by adulthood.

April 1, 2016. Samuel Steven Morton, a “renaissance man,” left his friends, and the ring, for good.

Tom Poland’s website at www.tompoland.net
Email Tom about most anything at at tompol@earthlink.net 

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