New generation can thank Mario Galento

My grandmother, Annie Locke, was a wrestling fan. I guess that explains why I like to watch – and occasionally attend wrestling matches. As I have grown older, I have attended fewer and fewer of the events.
My children, on the other hand, still attend wrestling matches. They like to go to the GCW events here in Phenix City. They seem to enjoy them – just like I did as a kid.

As I stated to start this column, my grandmother was a wrestling fan. If wrestling was being held within 100 miles of her location, she wanted to go. If wrestling came on television, she watched – and you better not get in her way. I think she knew as many holds as any professional wrestler and was prepared to use them if you needed to be put in your place.

I can remember attending wrestling matches in the old Municipal Auditorium in Columbus, the Houston County Farm Center in Dothan, at Fred Ward’s Front Street Arena in Columbus, Darnell Field in Phenix City and on Dillingham Street in Phenix City at a place that no longer exists. In fact, none of the old wrestling venues – except the Houston County Farm Center – still exist. They are now faded memories of my youth, but not completely faded away.

My father made sure my grandmother made it to many of those wrestling matches. I sat ringside with Granny Locke while Daddy sat in the cheap seats. That was probably the best thing for him to do since he always pulled for the bad guys. I think he became friends with most of them because he was their only fan. Granny Locke always pulled for the good guys and threatened the bad guys with bodily harm – many times telling them to stay back or she would stick them with a hat pin.

I was fortunate to share the experience with my grandmother and my dad – my uncle Wallace stepped in from time to time to make sure granny got to the matches when Daddy couldn’t. It wasn’t quite a family event to go to wrestling, but we went together to those places.

Once in a while, when traveling to high school football games on Friday nights, Frankie Bell and I get to talking about the good ole days of wrestling – when wrestling was real. Well, lets say it was “real” entertaining, much more so than today. No wrestlers today can match the fear that Ox Baker put into a child’s heart when he wrestled or Abdulla the Butcher for that matter. These guys played their roles as evildoers to the hilt.

Everybody hated Ox and Abdulla, but there were others who were just as mean – Mad Dog and Butcher Vachon to name a couple. The bad guys today, well, they are comic book characters at best. Does Caine or the Undertaker strike fear into the hearts of little children? I do not think so. The Assassins were scarier than these two comic book characters.

I think my favorite bad guy was Mario Galento (real name: Bonnie Lee Boyette). Mario, who had significant roles in a couple of movies – Frontier Women and Natchez Trail – in the 1950s and 1960s was good at acting his role of villain. In fact, Mario could stir up a crowd to a near frenzy. The local police would have to escort Mario from the ring – sometimes to the ring as well.

After the matches, though, Mario had another job – selling pizza to the crowd. He and his family owned a pizzeria in Atlanta and brought their product to some of the matches to sell. Mario is also the first wrestler I knew that sold and autographed photos at the matches. Mario was a bad guy and an entrepreneur. Today’s wrestlers can thank pioneers like Mario for teaching promoters how to market their products – their wrestlers.

The guys I cheered for and against as a kid are the same kind of guys my kids go to watch today – local guys trying to make a little extra money on the side and hopefully making it to the higher levels of the sport in the future. If they do not make it to the big time, they can be happy knowing they made a lot of people happy by providing weekly entertainment – and by establishing lasting friendships and fan bases. For every John Cena, there are hundreds of Vordell Walkers out there trying to keep people interested in the sport.

Ric Flair, Shawn Michaels, Bret Hart and Hulk Hogan did not hook me on wrestling. Sure, I enjoyed watching them perform over the years, but it was wrestlers like Chief Little Eagle, Greg Peterson, Billy Boy Hines, Bill Dromo, Dick Steinborn, Tito Copa and even Mario Galento got me hooked long before I ever heard those other names. It wasn’t the guys you see on Monday nights on national television or on pay-per-view events who got me hooked. It was the guys that wrestled at the Darnell Fields, Front Street Arenas and Houston County Farm Centers that did that – just like the guys wrestling in Phenix City on Thursday nights are doing now for a new generation of fans.