I have talked about watching professional wrestling from Memphis in previous blog posts. The Memphis wrestling programs were always on at 11 AM on Saturday mornings. While I watched these shows practically every Saturday, I never went to a live taping or the Monday night shows they were promoting. I occasionally went to the Thursday night shows at the Jackson Coliseum in Jackson, TN. In the early 1970’s when they were doing these shows, they would tape a show that would run on WBBJ, the Jackson television station. That show would air on Saturday evenings at 11 PM.
The live events and television shows in Jackson had the same wrestlers and story lines that were going on in Memphis. They didn’t have as many title matches in Jackson. When they did, you could count on the holder of the belt winning or at least retaining the belt because of a disqualification. The big headliners in Memphis would come to Jackson but not as often. They always had someone good on the card for every show.
At this point in the history of professional wrestling, everything was supposed to be real. As a wrestling fan, I was always on the alert to notice anything that might suggest that it wasn’t real. The Jackson wrestling program provided one of these red flags.
Tojo Yamamoto was one of the more famous wrestlers in Memphis in the early 1970’s. He seemed to be short in comparison to other wrestlers at the time. He as this little, round Japanese man, or at least he was supposed to be. He was originally from Hawaii. Tojo had a couple of signature moves that made him one of the more entertaining wrestlers. He wore wooden shoes to the ring, and he wrestled barefoot. He would occasionally use these wooden shoes to hit his opponents over the head, especially when he was wrestling as a heel. For his other signature move, he had to be backing into the corner of the ring usually being double teamed. He would put his head down and use short karate chops to chop his way out of the corner.
Most of the time, he wrestled as a good guy or “babyface” as they called them in the wrestling world. He was also an effective bad guy or “heel”. There was a brief amount of time when the storyline in Jackson diverged from the storyline in Memphis. Tojo was wrestling as a babyface in Memphis and a heel in Jackson. The people he was beating up in Jackson were his best friends in Memphis. It took them a few weeks to get the storylines in sync with one another. This was one of the earliest signs I saw that suggested that professional wrestling wasn’t everything it claimed to be.
