Required Viewing #15: Not The Mustard!
This one’s for you Memphis fans.If these four words don’t mean anything to you, you need to brush up on your history: Tupelo Concession Stand Brawl.
Ok so this one needs some backstory. We have Bill Dundee and Lawler teaming up against Larry Latham (Moondog Spot) and Wayne Ferris (Honky Tonk Man), collectively known as the Blond Bombers. The Bombers cheated like CRAZY to win the Tag Team Titles. The show looked like it was ending but as they faded to black you heard Russell saying stay with this because there’s a big brawl going on. The brawl went down to the concession stand, and this is what followed.
You’ve seen brawling before. You’ve probably seen brawls way better than this. However, you have to remember that this was June 15, 1979, about three and a half years before Hogan beat Iron Sheik and changed wrestling forever. The wrestlers back then were much closer to the fans, especially in a territory like Memphis. It was real to these fans and they really believed that Lawler and Dundee wanted to kill the Bombers. The other thing was that Lawler and Dundee could do just that, so the ensuing chaos was all the better.
The key difference between this brawl and others: it was believable. This wasn’t something that you saw every day (first time ever for the most part) and EVERYONE talked about it. It saved the territory and worked because it was treated as a huge deal. This is something you’ll still hear about from time to time and you’ll occasionally see tributes to it even today. This is incredibly historic stuff and possibly the most famous moment in southern wrestling.
I’m going to spare you the details on the brawl because it’s one where words don’t do it justice. Reading what happens makes it sound like a comedy sequence, but this was completely serious, especially to the fans in the house that night. Check this out and see where a lot of the future hardcore matches got their inspiration.
I always appreciate any attempt to educate young wrestling fans, especially when moments like this are celebrated.
Memphis’ wonderful string of concession stand brawls turned out to be more than just a great angle; it’s hard to imagine ECW, or ladder matches, or anything of that ilk existing had Jerry Jarrett not invented hardcore rasslin’. I also hope folks interested will explore more of the great Memphis pantheon, if for nothing else, than to realize that automatically calling Jim Ross or Gordon Solie ‘the greatest’ is highly subjective when we also had the incomparable Lance Russell manning the helm.