Episode 134 - Yippy-Yo Yippy-Yeah

Michael Hayes blinds the Junkyard Dog with the Freebird Hair Cream in 1981.

It’s WON Hall of Fame season and this is the first of our shows examining this year’s candidates. We’re happy to welcome back Greg Klein (@jydbook) to discuss his advocacy of two people in particular, the Junkyard Dog and Houston promoter Morris Sigel. We go over both candidates in detail, including JYD’s drawing power in Mid-South and New Orleans in particular, his time as a main eventer versus his later career, the cultural implications of JYD’s push and his feuds, comparing him candicacy to Paul Orndorff, Sigel promoting Houston for 40+ years, the scope of the Texas wrestling office and how that compares to Roy Welch in the Southeast, wrestlers who got their break in Houston, the Texas Wrestling War and more.

We also go over the rest of the ballot discussing things like “should tag team longevity count in dog years,” lack of footage for pre-territory wrestlers, voting for still-active competitors on the ballot and comparing candidates to their baseball equivalents.

Be sure to check out Greg on some other wrestling podcasts this HOF season. The more discussions on worthy candidate, the better.

Episode 130 - Some Jackets Required

Don Fargo and his new Fabulous Fargos (Ken Timbs and Pat Rose) with host Christopher Love (Bert Prentice) from a 1987 episode of World Organization Wrestling

We’re happy to welcome back Al Getz (@AlGetzWrestling) to discuss the latest edition of his Charting the Territories books, this one covering 1971-1973 Gulf Coast Wrestling. We talk about the main players in the territory at this time, including Cowboy Bob Kelly, Bobby Shane, Don Fargo and Rip Tyler, as well as future stars like Kevin Sullivan, Steve Keirn, Ron Bass and Greg Valentine, wrestling as Don’s brother Johnny Fargo. We talk about the towns the promotion ran and some of the interesting ways they crowned champions there (not with belts or trophies).

Then, as we did recently with Beau James, we talk about the travails of being a wrestling historian, covering a business that’s built on a lie. How hard is it to get “accurate” data on things like shows, box office and the like? And Al talk us through his methodology, both online and boots on the ground research.

We chat about Al being inducted into the Tragos/Thesz Pro Wrestling Hall of Fame in Waterloo, Iowa, getting the James C. Melby Historian Award.

The show ends with some quick baseball chat, with the season just a week old and Al’s Atlanta Braves being the only National League East team with a winning record. He also tells us about his first road trip of the year and dealing with weather issues with early spring baseball in the Midwest.

And the next episode of the Charting the Territories will look at Dick the Bruiser’s WWA in Indianapolis coming next week.

Episode 105 - Tyger, Tyger

A 1912 T202 Hassan Triple Folder tobacco card featuring Hughie Jennings and Ty Cobb.

We’re happy to finally have filmmaker, journalist and author Greg Klein (@JYDbook) on the pod for a chat his new book, his old book and more..

To start, we discuss Greg’s new book, The Paper Tigers, a fictional account of a real-life incident in baseball history. After Ty Cobb was suspended in 1912 for going into the stands and attacking a fan, his teammates refused to play a game in Philadelphia, leaving manager Hughie Jennings to find replacement players. The novel tells the story of some of those players, including two con men and a seminary student., with the central character being a local barmaid who was the sister of one of the con men and married to the other. We talk about how Greg got the idea for the book, which was originally a screenplay, balancing facts and historical fiction, the truth behind Cobb’s attack on the fan, the connection to the 1919 Black Sox Scandal, baseball movies and more.

(22:20) - From there, it’s mostly wrestling chat. We talk about Greg’s book The King of New Orleans about the Junkyard Dog, Sylvester Ritter. We talk about Greg’s fandom growing up in suburban DC but also getting to see Houston wrestling, the rise of JYD in Mid-South Wrestling for Bill Watts, his popularity in New Orleans and the rest of the territory, his leaving for the WWF, Watts trying to replace him with other black wrestlers, Greg meeting JYD in later years and more. We also talk about our shared love of Mid-South as a whole, some of its more famous angles, the transition to the UWF, studio wrestling vs arena wrestling and lot of other wrestling topics.

There were a lot of planned topics left on the table, including Greg now living in Cooperstown and how the Baseball Hall of Fame was effected by the pandemic and past and present work stoppages in the sport, his wrestling career and being trained by Adrian Street and lots of other fun stuff, so we will definitely try to get Greg back on in the future.

Note: We had some Skype issues during recording, so hopefully the editing was not too egregious and the flow of the conversation was maintained.

Thanks for listening.