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Jerry "The King" Lawler Promotes "Memphis Heat" On NPR

Posted: Dec 4th 2011 By: CMBurnham

It?s hard to imagine Jerry Lawler as someone?s lackey, but even The King had to pay his dues.

? Lawler celebrates his birthday week by dropping by NPR studios to discuss the ?Memphis Heat: The True Story of Memphis Wrasslin?? documentary with award-winning journalist Bob Edwards on Sirius/XM Public Radio (XM 121/Sirius 205) Thursday, Dec. 1. The show will also run on NPR?s Bob Edwards Show the Dec. 3 weekend (depending on local airtimes). Visit bobedwardsradio.com/bes/.

? How did Lawler become King in the fascinating kingdom of professional wrestling.

A young Lawler worked for top Memphis wrestler Jackie Fargo and local country music star Eddie Bond. That?s where he started to make a mark. Actually, his first marks with them were via a paint brush.

A gifted artist, Lawler began as a painter for Fargo?s sign company and later became a radio DJ for Bond on the night shift. Eventually, Lawler turned to pro wrestling ? something he longed to do ? with Fargo as his mentor. It was tough, but Lawler persevered.

Lawler, 62, has come a long way, a very long way from those early days. He has achieved so much success in the business ? announcer, booker, owner, promoter, referee, wrestler and artist.

A big part of his secret to success is having fun. That?s not easy to do at a top level in this business, but Lawler found a way. He enjoys his work.

His passion and talent for art initiated that first big break.

?A lot of people may not realize this, but how I got into wrestling and everything that?s happened in my wresting career came about because of my artistic ability,? Lawler said. ?The very first time I ever got to do anything connected with wrestling was just on a whim. I drew a bunch of caricatures, cartoons of the wrestlers, and I sent them - without any kind of expectations - to the TV station WHBQ in Memphis that aired the live wrestling show every Saturday morning.

?Then much to my surprise, the following Saturday after I sent the pictures, when I turned on the TV, our two local announcers, Lance Russell and Dave Brown, were sitting there welcoming everybody to the show and telling them who was going to wrestle who, and I saw my pictures sitting on the edge of their desk, their announce table. I thought, ?Oh my gosh. They?re going to show my artwork.??

Russell is in the top echelon of pro wrestling announcers all-time.

Lawler continued: ?Sure enough, about halfway through the show, at the point where they were recapping what happened at the auditorium the previous week, they held up my pictures and said, ?We have a young artist who sent in some illustrations of what took place down at the auditorium this past week.?

?So they showed those. I was so excited with my name mentioned on the wrestling show, and my artwork shown. After the show, an even bigger surprise, I got a call from Lance Russell, and he asked me if I wanted to do more drawings for him. At that time, they didn?t send a camera crew to the auditorium every week to do highlights. So I became like a courtroom artist, a ringside artist drawing caricatures. Instead of just having the two announcers have to sit there and tell what went on, they had a little artwork to illustrate what happened at the matches. That?s how I got my foot in the door.?

Not bad for a teenager.

?I was a big shot. I was the talk of the town, well talk of my neighborhood,? Lawler said. ?I grew up on a street in Memphis with about 12 boys my age. My brother was probably the oldest. He was four years older than me, but the rest of the kids were around my age. We never really got in trouble or anything. We just always hung out and played sports together up and down the street. When other kids were driving around, getting in trouble, we were playing touch football in the middle of the street or riding our skateboards or boxing or wrestling in our backyard. We had a great time, great friends. As a matter of fact, I still play softball every week, and some of them are still on my team to this day. So back then, being on TV and showing my artwork, all of a sudden I was the big shot on the block.?

Lawler learned from a bigger big shot.

He recalled: ?Then after doing that for several weeks, Lance Russell called me back again and said, ?Hey, would you like to come over to the studio and actually be on the show, and we?ll let you meet the wrestlers.? That?s when I met Jackie Fargo. He was my hero. He was the big shot in Memphis wrestling, and he also owned a night club, sort of a steak house, called the Southern Frontier Restaurant, co-partnered with a country music singer, Eddie Bond, who also had a TV show in Memphis.?

Jackie Fargo became a top star in that territory in the 1970s. Imitation is the greatest form of flattery, and The Fabulous Ones (Stan Lane and Steve Keirn) and Jeff Jarrett were a few who implemented a form of the famous Fargo strut into their routine.

Lawler continued: ?So Jackie said, ?Hey kid. You think you could come over to our restaurant and paint some caricatures of me and Eddie Bond inside the building?? Of course I agreed, and that?s my first introduction to Jackie Fargo. I then started working for he and Eddie Bond as an artist and sign painter. They even started up the Bond Fargo Sign Company, and I was the painter for them. That?s how I got to hang around Jackie Fargo and build up a relationship to where I finally got up the nerve to see if he would workout with me and let me try to wrestle.?

Lawler?s spelling wasn?t as good as his painting nor his wrestling as the Bond Fargo Sign Company soon learned. As mentioned on the ?Memphis Heat: The True Story of Memphis Wrestling? DVD, did Lawler actually misspell Nazarene for the sign company?

?Oh yes,? Lawler chuckled. ?That was exactly right. That was our first big job, too. This was before the days of the fast sign companies where they could just stick the lettering on the side of a truck. This was back in the day when every little local company that had a pickup truck as their business, you had to hand letter the name of the company.

?That was the main lion?s share of what the sign company did, but then all of a sudden we get this big neon sign job where I had to do two big pieces of plexi-glass, start with clear plexi-glass. I painted the words ?The Church of the Nazarene? and then sprayed the back with white paint over that. Then we affixed them to each side of the neon sign. When the pastor came to pick it up, he said, ?Great job except you spelled Nazarene wrong.? I spelled it Nazi. It was like the most embarrassing moment of my life. Jackie Fargo, nobody caught it, until the preacher did.?

Timing is everything, and Lawler was in the right place at the right time, but he also had to work, climbing that ladder. He was no-where near being King, Prince, Duke or Earl. He may have known some Dukes or Earls but not the royalty type.

?I was real fortunate. Thanks to Eddie Bond again, I did a little stint in radio,? Lawler said. ?He was on a local radio station as the country music DJ, and Jackie, of course, was the star wrestler on the wrestling TV show. In reality, when I look back on it, I was more or less their stooge. I was a gopher for them, but in that same respect, I was working for them and got to hang around them all the time.

?I got a radio shift, doing like 7-Midnight, which nobody else wanted on country music radio. When I look back, that really helped with the communication skills that came in handy later on, when I got to do my interviews on the wrestling shows. Also, some of the wrestlers who were going to wrestle on the Monday night card would come by and do a promo on my radio show every week. It was all good, and it all worked out.?

It?s even puzzling to Lawler who became the biggest star in Memphis wrestling. He achieved much fame and notoriety in all facets of Memphis wrestling and later made a huge mark in WWE as a wrestler and color commentator. He truly earned the moniker The King.

?I don?t know,? he said. ?Still, when I look back on it, I think what an amazing set of circumstances and coincidences and luck that it all turned out the way it did.?

How many people in wrestling history accomplished all that Lawler did? How many were as successful at each component; that includes his artistry on the mat and canvas?

Can you think of anyone?

Bueller? Bueller?

? Lawler is a fixture, of course, in the ?Memphis Heat: The True Story of Memphis Wrasslin?? DVD.

?I was really, really pleased with the way it turned out,? Lawler said. ?It?s fun for me to watch the guys on it who were my heroes in Memphis wrestling before I got started.

?I thought it was put together very, very well. Most of the old footage from Memphis wrestling was my footage that came from our wrestling company, when Jerry Jarrett and I were partners and owners of the company, but they also scoured around and found a bunch of older stuff that I hadn?t seen in a long time.?

At the Memphis Heat website and Amazon.com, the current Memphis Heat DVD features three extra hours of footage and interviews.

?That era of wrestling was such a great part of [people?s] childhoods. They can?t forget it,? Lawler said. ?I wish I had 10 cents for every person who has come up to me and said, ?I wish it was still the good old days of wrestling like that.??

The territory canvassed Alabama, Kentucky and Tennessee with a heavy emphasis on Memphis. The company celebrated a strong run, selling out the Mid-South Coliseum in Memphis every Monday night with Lawler on top.

That?s right. Not the weekend but Monday night.

?I?m honestly not trying to blow my own horn because I don?t; well, I just feel lucky more so than anything,? Lawler said, ?but Vince McMahon once told me in conversation, ?I think you?re the most all-around talented guy I?ve ever met in this industry. You?ve done everything, and you?ve done everything well. You started out as a referee. You?ve wrestled. You?ve booked. You?ve owned a wrestling company. You?ve done payroll. You?ve done commentary. You still wrestle.?

?It?s just one of those things. It feels like the baseball movie ?The Natural.? Wrestling and anything involved with it have always come natural to me. I?ve never taken it too seriously. One of the things some people do wrong sometimes is they take things they do too seriously. I?ve always had a great time and always had fun doing it.

?For instance, when Jerry Jarrett and I owned the Memphis wrestling company, we would take turns booking the TV show.?

In comparison to today?s WWE, different times.

?For Monday Night Raw, WWE has a creative staff of about 16 or so writers who sit down and collaborate all week long what?s going to happen, who?s going to appear on the show and what they?re going to say. In other words, their job is to write the show, just like writers who write a movie or write a soap opera or sit-com. So they have a big staff of writers who write the entire show. They collaborate and have meetings and discuss things all week long, until we finally get to that final product on Monday night, and then the show goes on the air live.

?Jerry Jarrett and I used to take turns booking our Saturday morning Memphis TV show six months at a time. When it was Jerry?s turn to book, he would pour over it and take suggestions and take the entire week to book the Saturday morning show, deciding who was going to wrestle who and what was going to be said and everything that was going to be on that hour and a half morning show.

?When it was my turn to book for my six months, I would wrestle Friday night in Tupelo, Mississippi or Blytheville, Arkansas, and when the show was over, there?s an hour and a half drive from that city back home to Memphis. During the drive home, that?s when I would book the show.

?It took me an hour and a half to book an hour and a half show, and somehow it always turn out good. I just could think of stuff spontaneously and put into action, and it always turned out pretty darn good.?

? Former WWE superstar and current physique competitor Rob Conway, who grew up in New Albany, Ind., discussed the significance of Jerry The King Lawler in the South, especially Louisville, and abroad.

?I got to work with him in OVW at the Louisville Gardens.?

Ohio Valley Wrestling was a former developmental territory for WWE.

?When I was growing up, I watched the TV out of Louisville, and Jerry Lawler was the star,? Conway said. ?So Tuesday night at the Louisville Gardens was just engrained in my mind ? more than Madison Square Garden or the Boston Garden. The Louisville Gardens was the place on Tuesday nights. When I was a kid, that?s where we went.

?When I wrestled Jerry Lawler for the first time ... I was in the main event at the Louisville Gardens against Jerry The King Lawler. I came out, and I did my stuff, and the people were into it. Then his music hit, and it dawned on me, ?I?m in the main event at the Louisville Gardens against Jerry The King Lawler in a pile driver stretcher match.?

?When the match finally started, I remember giving him the elbow and posing and saying, ?That?s what a real man looks like, Lawler,? and going right into what I?ve been trained to do.?

Conway?s family and friends attended.

?It was one of those where everybody came out of the woodwork for that one,? he said, ?because it kind of puts you on the map as a young wrestler. When you don?t have a name for yourself, yet, your credibility is pretty much hinged on who you?ve wrestled.

?So when people say, ?So you wrestle, huh?? Like who have you wrestled? Well, I wrestled in the main event against Jerry The King Lawler at the Louisville Gardens. Then immediately people are like, ?Oh, so you?re a real wrestler. Wow, I didn?t know that.??

? Off the Top Rope Productions announces the ?Memphis Heat: The True Story of Memphis Wrasslin'? DVD with almost four hours of Memphis wrestling madness is available for the holidays. Visit Amazon.com and memphis-heat.com.