AEW
By Scott Keith on 25 October 2023
Hello, longtime follower, going back to Rantsylvania days, and longtime lurker on the Blog of Doom (although I do comment every great once in a while).
Some interesting tidbits regarding AEW…
I live in the Memphis area, just across the river in West Memphis, Arkansas, and AEW is coming to town next Saturday for Collision and Battle of the Belts. They are running the FedEx Forum, which is a large arena that seats about 18,000. Currently, they have sold about 1,500 tickets, so yikes!
Last time they were in the area, way back in 2019 during the whole “Will Jon Moxley join the Inner Circle” saga, they ran the Landers Center in neighboring Southaven, which is in Mississippi but it is basically a suburb of Memphis and seats about 3,500.
Anyway, as part of my job as editor of the county newspaper here, I got to interview Jeff Jarrett about the upcoming show. Since I'm 50 years old, I am steeped in the old Memphis wrestling tradition and history and he was kind enough to share some of those memories with me.
I asked him if it was a little too ambitious to be running the FedEx Forum and he didn't really give me a straight answer, but he did say that Memphis area wrestling fans are notorious for being “walk up on the day of” folks, so he expected the numbers to be much higher come showtime.
He was a great interview, and I hope he's right. AEW also gave me a media credential (which WWE has also done in the past), but since I've got three kids, I went ahead and bought tickets. We'll be on the fourth row right behind the announce table, so that's cool.
One fun story to share: Back in 1988, when I was 15, my Dad was the Athletic Director for the Earle School District, a very small school (like K-12 is all on one campus) and they booked the Memphis wrestling guys to put on a show at the high school football field.
To give you an idea of when this was, at the time, the Undertaker (as the Master of Pain) was feuding with Dutch Mantell, who had lost a loser-leaves-town match only to see the mysterious-but-oddly-familiar masked Texas Dirt show up to continue the feud.
Jarrett was tagging with Billy Joe Travis (from whom he definitely got inspiration for the whole smashing-opponent-with-guitar deal). They were going up against Brickhouse Brown and King Parsons when out of nowhere it started to rain (again, they were at the 50-yard-line on a high school football field).
They quickly improvised a finish and then ran to the fieldhouse where the other wrestlers were getting dressed and such, and since my Dad was the AD, my friend and I got to go in there too, so I got to hang out with guys like Jerry Lawler, Sid Vicious, Downtown Bruno and the guys I mentioned above. Brickhouse entertained us with some “Yo Mama” jokes, and when it was done raining, they went out and finished the show.
Anyway, I dig the recent run of Memphis rants as this was right in the prime of my becoming a diehard wrestling fan, and I know exactly where all of this is going with the Bill & Budro Era. Keep on keeping on!
Ralph Hardin