The death of Hulk Hogan did not mean much to me, but it did get me thinking about my brief but intense time in the mid-1980s as a wrestling fan. More specifically, it got me thinking about Jimmy “The Boogie-Woogie Man” Valiant.
When I was in high school in the 1980s, Charlotte was a sports wasteland. There was no NFL team. There was no NBA team. College basketball ruled the city — I’ve written before about how classes were often canceled during the ACC basketball Tournament — but all the teams people cared about were elsewhere — Chapel Hill, Durham, Winston-Salem, Raleigh, Clemson.
What we had in Charlotte was:
A minor-league baseball team called the Charlotte O’s that played in one of the country’s last wooden ballparks … until, this is true, it burned to the ground.
NASCAR. Lots and lots of NASCAR.
Professional wrestling.
For a kid from Cleveland, none of this stuff made much sense. But you make do with what you have. I became a North Carolina basketball fan because they had a freshman named Michael Jordan. I went to a bunch of O’s games and saw Bo Jackson hit his first professional home run for the Memphis Chicks. I tried to learn racin’.
And I started watching Crockett Promotions professional wrestling obsessively.
It’s hard to fully describe how much of a wrestling town Charlotte was then. You’d go around town and constantly see wrestlers at restaurants or the mall — Ricky Steamboat, Dusty Rhodes, Jake the Snake, Ole Anderson … sometimes you’d even see Ric Flair himself. Wrestling was in the city’s DNA in those days when Charlotte was growing too fast to be a small town, but still too new to be a big city.
The wrestler who fascinated me most was the Jimmy “The Boogie Woogie Man” Valiant. That’s what they always called him. Full name only. They’d say, “Here comes Jimmy ‘The Boogie Woogie Man’ Valiant!” and “What a punch by Jimmy ‘The Boogie Woogie Man’ Valiant,” and “I’m going to crush your skull Jimmy ‘The Boogie Woogie Man’ Valiant!”
He used to enter the ring to the old Manhattan Transfer song “Boy from New York City” — I guess he claimed to be from New York City, though the Tennessee twang in his voice betrayed the act.
Boogie Woogie was probably in his 40s by then but he looked much older than that to me. He wore a full beard, a bandana and white pants with red stripes on them. He danced around a lot, and I guess it was Boogie Woogie dancing, though in memory it really just seemed to be a lot of stomping his feet on the ground.
His signature finishing move was sending his opponent into the ropes, knocking them to the ground with his shoulder, and then jumping up in the air and dropping the atomic elbow on them. As a knockout blow, it felt a little light. Other people were jumping off the top rope or detonating the tombstone piledriver or securing pain-crunching Figure Four holds … Boogie Woogie was just kind of jumping on people.
But it worked well enough. I mean, suspending disbelief has never been a tough thing for wrestling fans. We were willing to believe Jimmy was from New York, after all.
The Boogie Woogie Man was always wrestling for something called the “Television Title,” which, no, I never figured that one out. There was the world title of course, and the United States title, and the tag-team title. But the television title? Did winning that title make him the new King of Television? Is that how Johnny Carson got to be Johnny Carson?
Boogie Woogie also often wrestled for hair. He’d promise to shave his head if he lost and his opponents — Tully Blanchard or the Barbarian — had to do the same. This was not as effective when he wrestled Ivan Koloff, who was bald (and the only Russian to grow up on a Canadian dairy farm). But they worked something out.
There was also this wonderful recurring storyline where Boogie Woogie would get banned from wrestling for some reason or other, and then some mysterious 40-something masked stranger with similar body features called “Charlie Brown from Outta Town” would show up and drop some atomic elbows. Who could he be?
Seriously, I couldn’t get enough of it. I still go to YouTube to see old Crockett Promotions wrestling clips. The whole thing was so wonderfully silly and oddly wholesome.
I suppose I talk about this way too much as I get old, but I do miss silliness and corniness.
Anyway, I looked it up and it seems that Jimmy the Boogie Woogie Man is alive and well and running the Boogieland Wrestling Camp in Shawsville, Virginia. The place even has its own Hall of Fame Museum. It looks like it’s just two and a half hours straight up I-77. That doesn’t seem like too long a drive to revisit childhood.
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