Make ’em Say WOOOOO!

When a group of state senators filed a bill last week to earmark $500,000 to study building a professional wrestling hall of fame in North Carolina, it made national headlines and went viral online.

That wasn’t an accident.

Sen. Jay Chaudhuri (D-Wake) filed a similar bill two years ago. In wrestling parlance, it did not “get over.” It got no real media attention or public buzz, and there was little chance of it passing or inspiring a private effort to get the hall off the ground.

But Chaudhuri grew up watching professional wrestling in the 1970s and ’80s when matches would be done in-studio on WRAL. He learned a few things.

He knew, for instance, that before wrestling legend “Stone Cold” Steve Austin broke stadium records as a working class brawler in World Wrestling Entertainment (WWE), he was “Stunning” Steve Austin, a preening but unremarkable heel with flowing robes and bleached blond hair.

“Mean” Mark Callous was just a tall, red-headed bruiser in a black leather vest before his dramatic transformation into the undead phenom “The Undertaker.”

Maybe most importantly, “Ramblin’” Ricky Rhodes was a pudgy wannabe before a fateful plane crash and long recovery led him to lean out, change his gimmick, and become the flamboyant and dominant ladies man, “The Nature Boy” Ric Flair.

When Chaudhuri brought the bill back this year, he dressed it up and gave it a name with an eye-catching backronym: “An Act to Remember Iconic Combatants through Fostering Learning Awareness and Interest in Rassling.”-

That’s right. The RIC FLAIR Act.

It’s a time-honored tradition in wrestling, sending someone away to a new territory for a while so they can come back fresh, with new ideas and a new presentation.

“Go away and learn a new hold,” promoters would say.

This time, it went over.

“I think the name was definitely a big part of it drawing a lot more attention,” Chaudhuri said. “Truth be told, the credit goes to Pierce Bruns, a junior intern from N.C. State who came up with the acronym. … I told him it may be his single greatest achievement in his time in college as an intern.”

This time around, Sens. Danny Britt (R-Robeson)  and Ralph Hise (R-Mitchell) have joined as primary sponsors of the bill, underlining the bipartisan lure of pro-wrestling and its importance to a broad swath of North Carolinians.

When Chaudhuri was growing up, wrestling was still a regional industry. In the South, the National Wrestling Alliance (NWA) was dominant. It was a rougher, bloodier and more adult product than the World Wrestling Federation (then WWF, later WWE), a Northeast promotion that would eventually swallow up the territories.

“The WWF, the production was slicker and more for kids,” Chaudhuri remembers.

NWA crowds were famous for buying into more realistic matches and plotlines.

“Rasslin’ is real,” as the saying went. “People are fake.”

In the South, high-energy tag teams like The Midnight Express and Rock ’n’ Roll Express and cool villainous stables like The Four Horsemen electrified crowds. People shut down highways trying to get to matches between the elitist Flair and his blue collar nemesis, “The American Dream” Dusty Rhodes.

In what was then called “The Bloody Mid-Atlantic,” a North Carolina company was king—Jim Crockett Promotions.

Crockett’s business was run out of Charlotte, but its biggest events were held in Greensboro, where the Greensboro Coliseum held more people than any venue between Atlanta and Washington, D.C. That made it the most important building in the territory from the Crockett days until the promotion was rebranded World Championship Wrestling under new owner Ted Turner.

“I would think Greensboro would be the natural place for a hall or museum, if there’s going to be one,” said John Hitchcock, a wrestling historian from Greensboro whose book, Front Row, Section D, chronicles the glory days from the 1960s to the ’90s. “We had the biggest shows, the hottest crowds.”

The question of where a hall of fame might be located is a little premature, Chaudhuri said. The bill is now in the Senate Appropriations/Base Budget committee. It’ll need to pass the full Senate and House. But Chaudhuri has been hearing from folks from the mountains to the coast, all making the argument that their city should be home to a new hall of fame. 

The half-million dollar price tag on a feasibility study may seem like Ric Flair-level extravagance, Chaudhuri’s office admits. But they’re quick to point out how many things go into a project like this. The big ticket items include site selection and evaluation and estimates for construction. The Department of Natural and Cultural Resources would also need to gauge public interest, local support and the overall market for a hall of fame of this type.

The money would also go toward identifying partners, Chaudhuri’s office said, including individual wrestlers and wrestling organizations. They would also need help curating what sort of things—from ring attire like robes and wrestling boots to historic posters and photography—would be in the hall.

Even if the General Assembly decides not to spend a half-million dollars to study its feasibility, Chaudhuri said, the bill has stirred up enough excitement that private interests may make it happen anyway.

“Wrestling is big again, in some ways bigger than it’s ever been right now,” Chaudhuri said. “I think it’s worth honoring it as part of our culture and our history here. There’s obviously a lot of interest.”