Building a Book on Alabama Pro Wrestling History (Part 1)

     I don't really know why I decided to try to write a book on professional wrestling history in Alabama.  It is a subject I know absolutely nothing about. Apparently very few people know anything about it prior to the 1950s.  Most of the questions I've asked of the people who I'd think would know come back with very little.  That's not to say I don't get the occasional pointer to some one else or some other source.  But outside the heavyweight title picture, there just hasn't been a lot of work produced to cover wrestling in the 1930s, much less in Alabama.  There are some show results posted to wrestling forums here and there, but nothing collected and nothing comprehensive.  And even what has been posted is effectively just the raw cards and results with no context provided.

    So I was curious, what kind of history of wrestling does Alabama have?  When did it start?  Who were the movers and shakers that got the ball rolling to result in what became the Mid-America, Continental and Gulf Coast territories, and ultimately the fairly vibrant independent scene that exists today?

     Last December (2016), I had some unexpected money land in my hands, and figured I'd finally spring for a subscription to Newspapers.com.  That, combined with my existing subscription to GenealogyBank.com and what existed on the all-but-defunct Google Newspaper Archive, gave me a big pool of resources to work with, even though there wasn't a lot of coverage for Alabama prior to the 1950s.  Add to that about 15 years worth of research skills and knowledge from researching my family history and I had a lot of tools waiting on a project.

    The first big resource I discovered was WrestlingData.com (the English version of GenickBruch.com), a massive database of wrestling information started by a group of fans in Germany.  And while it had over 320,000 shows listed when I first started searching it, I found that, aside from results from shows over the last 10 years, and a handful of scattered results from Birmingham, Montgomery, Mobile and Anniston, Alabama was effectively unrepresented from a historical perspective.   And more recently, shows I had attended in the last 15 years were also not listed.  I'm a sucker for a massive database project, so I decided to see what I could do about filling in that void from 1900-1950.

     I have no idea how long this project is going to take, but here are my ideas, thus far, as to what it will cover.

When?  To try to keep this to something I can accomplish in my lifetime, I've decided to focus on the 1930s.  From my research so far, this seems to be when "big time" pro wrestling was introduced to Alabama on a major scale outside of just the three big cities (Birmingham, Montgomery and Mobile).  I'm just defining "big time" as weekly shows with a somewhat consistent roster.

Who?  Without question, the single man to do the most to establish wrestling across the state was Chris Jordan.  Jordan was a nationally known championship level middleweight wrestler in the 1910s-1920s.  At the end of his in-ring career, he settled first in Jasper, and then finally in Fairfield (now basically a suburb of Birmingham) and quickly became the top promoter of wrestling in Alabama.   Jordan died unexpectedly in 1940, at the age of 56, which cut short what would have been a legendary promoting career.  For me, his death helped define an era on which I could focus, that being the 1930s.

      I'm trying to decide if I want to include his wrestling career in this book, or if I want to leave that as a separate project.  I will probably concentrate on his promoting career, and depending on how large a book that results in, make a decision on this later.  If I leave it for later, it may be in included in the larger context of non-heavyweight wrestling in those early years of the sport.

     Below I will track my progress as I work through the various newspapers for the busier wrestling towns in 1930's Alabama.  A black box indicates there was no wrestling in that town for that year.  Or at least none reported in the newspaper.  No fill color means I haven't started on that year/town. Proofed means I've cleaned up any typos and fixed the formatting and complete means I've decided naming standards and updated all of the names to fit (for instance, I'm choosing Knichel over Knichels, Knichol, Knickel, Knickles, etc).

Progress:

Key

=acquired

=transcribed

=proofed

=complete

	1931	1932	1933	1934	1935	1936	1937	1938	1939	1940
Anniston
Bessemer
Birmingham
Decatur
Dothan
Fairfield
Gadsden
Homewood
Huntsville
Jasper
Mobile
Montgomery
Sheffield
Tarrant City
Tuscaloosa

     There was wrestling in a few smaller towns (Albertville, Cullman and Leeds come to mind), but since they either were not run regularly or I haven't found any card details or results, I'm not going to include them in the table.  Progress for Sheffield includes shows in Florence, and progress for Gadsden includes shows in Attalla.

I see the project following this basic process:

Research - accumulate everything I can find from newspaper archives and hope that I come across some other resources to help flesh out the dry cards and results with historical context and photos.

Writing - actually write the prose of the book to tell the story of the rise of Chris Jordan's promotion in the 1930's, amid the depth of the depression and cover prominent story lines and programs.  Write short bios for as many of the performers and personalities as possible.  Fill in the context of contemporary events happening in Alabama and across the world during the 1930s.

Quality Control - this includes proof reading for typos, as well as basic fact checking and settling on spellings for various wrestlers whose names were spelled a half dozen different ways from one source to the next

Layout - this is where all of the newspaper snippets, photos and possibly charts and maps would be added to the text and organized in a format that is ready for print or e-book release.

Publishing - See the book printed and made available for both of you who might be interested in seeing the finished result.

     The first two stages will likely coincide a bit, as it will take a very long time to accumulate all the information I need for Birmingham, Dothan, Mobile and Montgomery, and I don't want to be idle while waiting to be able to travel to the Alabama state archives in Montgomery.