In the 1970’s, professional wrestling was supposed to be “real”. The people involved in the shows never let on that it was anything but a legitimate sport. The wrestlers would violently angry at the suggestion that it was fake. The was well before they coined the term “sports entertainment” to keep it from being regulated like boxing. Occasionally, there would be moments that were so ridiculously contrived that I considered it what I called an “insult to my stupidity”. For example, actor Adam West made an appearance on Memphis wrestling as Batman. He wasn’t supposed to be Adam West, he was supposed to be the real Batman. Jerry Lawler had been wrestling in a Superman outfit for a few weeks and “Batman” came on to tell us that he was upset that someone was impersonating his superhero friend. And we were supposed to believe this was real. This was seven years after the Batman series had gone off the air. And Adam West wasn’t even wearing his normal Batman outfit. Even more than the easily distracted referees, this incident confirmed to me that everything wasn’t on the up and up with wrestling.
There were those occasions that reality crept into the world of wrestling in ways that they didn’t want it to. This usually involved a wrestler getting hurt. You could tell that something wasn’t going right because of the way the announcers reacted. And they would go to unscheduled breaks so they could take care of the injured wrestlers without the scrutiny of the television cameras. One such time involved Jerry Lawler and Mike Stark. Stark had played football at Memphis State University and professionally with the St. Louis Cardinals until he broke his leg. After recovering, he decided to get into professional wrestling in Memphis. During his first appearance on the TV show, Lawler came out and started putting him down. After the confrontation, Stark is walking away and Lawler hits him with in the leg with a chair. Video of this confrontation is available on-line, so I know that much did happen. After that, I remember seeing Lawler standing next to the ring during a match later in the show. Stark came up behind him and hit him over the head with a glass Coke bottle. At the time this part seemed a little too real for me. The announcers and promoters seemed to take a little more concern about what happened. It seemed like they went to a break a little quicker than they usually would with an incident like this. They seemed to be more concerned than they did earlier in the program when Stark was hit.
There are a couple of possibilities here. First is that they did a really good job of staging the Coke bottle incident. I seem remember the bottle shattering. If you remember the Coke bottles from the 1970’s, you know that it takes a lot of force to get one of those things to shatter. So, there is always the possibility that it was a breakaway bottle. My young mind would have been more ready to accept it as a real incident. The second possibility is that it was real. Lawler could have really hurt Stark more than he was supposed to during the hit with the chair. Unfortunately, I haven’t been able to find any clips of the Coke bottle part of this show on-line. Do you remember this happening? Do you know anyone with a video of this incident or who knows more about it? I would like to know more about the background story.
UPDATE:
Since I originally posted this story, someone that read it shared with me a video of the coke bottle incident. Revisiting the video, this seems to have all of the trappings of something that was planned. And I’m more convinced that this was a breakaway Coke bottle. I have added the video below so you can decide for yourself.