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Wrestling Icon Invades Vinson Center Saturday

Posted: Dec 4th 2012 By: CMBurnham

When wrestling legend ?Hacksaw? Jim Duggan arrives in the Marvin Vinson Center in Clarksville on Saturday for Traditional Championship Wrestling?s (TCW) ?Holiday Homecoming 2,? he will surely hold aloft his iconic 2-by-4 American flag and be met with the crowd?s patriotic ?U-S-A., U-S-A!? cheers.

It has, after all, been happening more than 20 years.

Duggan has been wrestling for 32 years, but he didn?t begin his storied career as the patriotic hero the world knows him as today until later.

?I went through three different characters in the early days,? Duggan said. ?I started out as ?Big? Jim Duggan. I wore a mask and wrestled as a convict. I was a bad guy! Then, I grew a beard and wore fur and chains and called myself ?Wild Man? Duggan.?

Duggan said the best wrestling personas are organic.

?It?s really just an extension of my personality. The best characters are, I think,? Duggan explained. ?Everyone always wants to be ?Pretty Boy? Bob or whatever. I?m like, brother, you?re not a pretty boy. Come up with something else. ?Macho Man? Randy Savage was always wound so tight. When he died of a heart attack, it came as no surprise because he was always the ?Macho Man.??

Throughout his career, Duggan has wrestled against nearly every wrestler in the business. He has wrestled with World Wrestling Entertainment (WWE), World Championship Wrestling (WCW) and Mid-South Wrestling as well as many other independent circuits such as TCW.

He won the Mid-South world tag-team championship belt and North American heavyweight championship belt. In the WCW, he earned the U.S. heavyweight championship belt and was the final world television champion before the title was retired.

In the WWE, Duggan was the first winner of the annual Royal Rumble match in 1988. Duggan was the 13th entrant of 20 and won after he last eliminated One Man Gang. In 2011, Duggan was inducted in the WWE Hall of Fame by fellow inductee ?The Million Dollar Man,? Ted Dibiase.

Despite the success, Duggan said his career in the wrestling business was not something he strove for in the beginning.

?It was a fluke accident,? Duggan said. ?I wasn?t a wrestling fan growing up. I watched the Green Bay Packers growing up. They were my heroes.?

It happened while Duggan was on a recruiting trip to Southern Methodist University, where he later was a four-year football starter. By chance, Duggan met another wrestler ? Fritz Von Erich.

?He said to me, ?Hey, kid, you should try wrestling,? I guess because of my size,? Duggan said. ?At the time I thought not a chance in the world.?

Yet, some bit of that advice must have stuck. After his career in the NFL came to an abrupt end due to consistent knee problems in 1979, Duggan wrestled his first professional match against Gino Hernandez.

?I encourage kids to chase their dreams,? Duggan said. ?Whatever those dreams are. Mine was football. I chased football. When I couldn?t play anymore, I was crushed.?

As a tribute to his football past, Duggan finished most matches with a signature move ? a clothes line punch delivered from a three-point stance.

While wrestling wasn?t his original dream, the business did for him what he wanted it to do. It put a roof over his family?s head and food on their plates ? the same thing everyone works for. Duggan has two daughters with his wife of 28 years, and has wrestled in every state in the United States, every providence in Canada and 23 other countries worldwide.

Do the math. That?s not a lot of time spent at home.

?Getting into the business was a lot of luck. It was a lot of hard luck, really,? Duggan said. ?All my home videos of Thanksgiving and Christmas are me in the background telling everyone goodbye before I leave. They?ve come to understand that it?s not the date on the calendar that?s important. We make the best of it. We had no idea in the early days. I don?t think anyone could have predicted how big it got.?

The 58-year-old wrestler is set to face Al Farat at TCW?s ?Holiday Homecoming? on Saturday. Duggan said TCW is like a return to true wrestling.

?The name sums it up,? Duggan said. ?Traditional Championship Wrestling. There are no obscene gestures. It?s the wrestling people grew up with. You cheer the good guys and you boo the bad guys. You come to a TCW event and you?ll have more fun than you?ll have at a movie. It reminds me of the old Mid-South [Wrestling].

?I think the pendulum swung way off during the WWE era,? Duggan added. ?I think wrestling should be family entertainment. We don?t need those obscene gestures. It?s for kids. I?ll be screaming ?hooooo? and ?U-S-A?. I don?t think you need someone out there drinking beer and giving someone the bird.?

The era to which Duggan refers is commonly known as the ?attitude? era within the WWE. The era wrestling grew up ? for better or worse. Wrestlers commonly cursed, guzzled beer from the corner of the ring post, made rude gestures toward themselves and toward the crowd. Seldom was there a clear-cut good or bad guy in any given match.

But that?s not TCW. And it?s not Duggan.

As the wrestler explained in his new book, ?Hacksaw: The Jim Duggan Story,? he is just an normal guy who loves his family and did all he could to give them the life they deserved.

?Everyone thinks we?re all destitute,? Duggan said. ?I live a normal life, you know. I like to sit around with my golden retriever. I?m not a big hobby guy. I don?t go to sporting events. I do a lot of charity events. When I?m at home, I just kind of feel like I?ve put in my time.?