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Remembering Eddie Gilbert

Posted: Feb 20th 2012 By: CMBurnham

As many of you may or may not know, yesterday (Feb. 18, 2012) marks 17 years since the passing of Thomas Edward Gilbert Jr., known to the wrestling world as "Hot Stuff" Eddie Gilbert. As I've mentioned many times before in my writings, I've been a wrestling fan all my life and while I enjoyed WWF and the NWA, my favorite wrestling growing up was Memphis Wrestling and Continental Wrestling from Alabama. While like most I was a big Jerry 'the King' Lawler fan my favorite "bad guy" was always "Hot Stuff" Eddie Gilbert. One of the things I liked most about him that I spent a lot of time studying when I started wrestling in 1997 was his promos. Eddie Gilbert much like Jerry Lawler was very gifted at delivering wrestling promos that made you feel like you HAD to go buy a ticket to whatever match he was building towards. Another thing I always enjoyed about his promos was his ability to make you laugh at something he said one minute (even if you hated him), yet turn around and be so serious in the next breath you believed everything he was telling you. It was entertaining but you still believed what he was saying. He had the ability to make you believe that even if everything else on the show was "a work", Eddie Gilbert meant what he was saying...he DID "hate Jerry Lawler", he did believe he was the "new King of Memphis", and it really drew you in to whatever he was doing at the time. Not only in Memphis but in Alabama and in the Mid South/UWF (which I really didn't get to see a lot of til years later via tape trading).

While Eddie Gilbert was also an effective babyface, I always liked him better as a heel. Besides being a good wrestler in the ring, Gilbert was also very good at booking. A very innovative guy who was years ahead of his time and I believe would have been a HUGE factor in the Monday Night Wars era of wrestling had he still been with us. While Paul Heyman gets tons of credit for being the "genius" behind ECW and the "Revolution" they brought to wrestling in the mid to late 90's....many people are unaware that Heyman learned most everything he knew about booking and promoting from his time with Eddie Gilbert assisting him with booking the Continental territory in Alabama in 1988 as well as Eddie helping him book Eastern Championship Wrestling before he became "Extreme". The hardcore style that Heyman helped "innovate" was new to the Northeast but it was just old school Memphis "rasslin" with the volume turned up and a little more edgy. Personally, I don't think Eddie Gilbert gets near enough credit for the innovations he helped bring to the wrestling business during his time in it.


So, a few years ago I decided I would try to do something about that. With all the wrestling books out there I realized there wasn't one on the life and career of Eddie Gilbert. Having an interest in writing myself and lacking an interesting subject to write on I decided I would look into writing the story of "Hot Stuff" Eddie Gilbert as a book. I contacted my friend J.D. McKay who I knew was friends with Eddie and asked his thoughts on it, he liked the idea and helped get me in contact with Eddie's parents Tommy and Peggy Gilbert. They gave me their blessing and said they would be glad to help me out and contribute to the book as long as it was respectful of Eddie's memory and I assured them my entire purpose of taking on this project was to tell Eddie's story in a positive light. From there I set out to contact as many people who knew and worked with Eddie as I possibly could. I also watched as much footage of him as I could get my hands on and read up on as much of his history as I could find. I spent at least two years on this project with literally hundreds of hours spent on the phone interviewing people, emailing people, sending letters to people, transcribing what I was told and putting it into written form that I could use for the book. The list of people I talked to was literally a "who's who" of wrestling and I was shocked at some of the people who agreed to talk to me but when they heard what I was doing and that I wanted to put over what Eddie Gilbert did and that it wasn't going to be an expose' or anything like that they were all glad to contribute.

I really had a great time learning about Eddie Gilbert and his career and getting to talk to so many people that I had looked up to and watched as a kid. Things were going well despite a couple of snags and a few people who were difficult to deal with. One of the people I had hoped to talk to from the very beginning was Eddie's brother Doug. About two years into the project I finally got a response from Doug Gilbert, his response was that he was the executor of Eddie's estate and that he had final say so on anything that was published about Eddie. He wanted me to meet with his attorneys and have a contract drawn up and agree to him having final say on anything that went in the book and it just quickly became a much bigger ordeal than I originally anticipated. He said there were other people wanting to write a book, and do movies and such so I just decided to shelve the whole thing rather than get into a big hassle. It was always my intention to let Mr. and Mrs. Gilbert read the book before it was published and let them have final say on anything they didn't want included. The book was never about money, it was gonna be published through Brian Tramel and Brian Thompson's BT Press and I knew it wouldn't make a lot of money and I wasn't concerned about that, I always intended to give the family a portion of the profits of the book but at the same time this was something I had spent hundred of hours working on, not to mention phone bills and postage, and huge fights with my now ex-wife over it so I wanted to have something to show for all that and the whole contract thing just sounded like before it was over I was gonna take all my hard work and hand it over to someone else to do whatever they wanted with and I'd rather it just sit on my hard drive forever than do that. Another two years have passed and I still haven't seen another book, or a movie come out so I'm not sure what the status is on all that but I'm still considering putting the book online for free as an online book or maybe posting it a piece at a time in this column. What's your opinion? Which would you the readers prefer? Do you even care or want to read it? Let me know either at my email or on facebook at facebook.com/kingofallwrestlingmedia or join the "Hot Stuff" Eddie Gilbert: Pro Wrestling's Uncrowned King Facebook group (the would be title of the book). BTW, the pic at the top is the one I chose for the cover of the book....I have a lot of photos I'm sure many haven't seen that people sent me for the book so I may be adding them to my facebook page soon so folks can check them out. Thanks for reading and I look forward to some feedback on this topic. (Also, I realize I said that the next column would be about Mick Foley's comedy show but I thought this was more time appropriate, the other one is coming soon I promise!)