Lance Russell
The year was 1979, and things were just heating up at the Tupelo Sports Center when Lance Russell, the earnest, unflappable voice of Memphis tv wrestling, announced, “Time is almost up,” and signed off. The big title bout he’d been calling was over, even though it hadn’t ended and was, in fact, escalating quickly.
The referee called it for the out-of-town tag-team, wrongfully awarding the unscrupulous heel challengers a pair of metal-clad championship belts — belts that the baby-faced regional heroes Jerry Lawler and Bill Dundee promptly stole back and then used like gaudy clubs, bloodying Wayne Ferris (aka The Honky-Tonk Man) and Larry Latham (aka Moondog Spot), who’d just jobbed into Memphis from Florida looking for a break.
Everything faded to black, then, as the “wild melee” spilled out from the ring, into the dumpy expanse of a converted body shop where Mid-South Championship Wrestling promoted Friday night events. Then, from the darkness, you could hear Russell’s unmistakable voice. “Hey Mike, can you get the camera?” he says matter-of-factly. “They’ve got a hell of a fight going on down here. We can edit it in later.”
What followed was landmark reality programming, long before the phrase existed, planned of course but utterly unscripted. It was a spectacle well known to Mid-South wrestling fans far and wide as the Tupelo Concession Stand Brawl — at the time the Big Bang of “hardcore wrestling.”
Lance Russell worked as a calm yet frenzied announcer for decades, achieving special fame as the straight-faced ringmaster presiding over Memphis wrestling in the era when famed comedian and TV star Andy Kaufman brought his off-brand performance art to town, wrestling women, trash-talking the South, making some folks laugh, and getting lots of people genuinely upset. But the 1979 Tupelo Concession Stand Brawl was a defining moment, and the man bad-guy wrestlers always called “Banana Nose” called it blow by blow with all the gravitas of Walter Cronkite in Vietnam.
When the lights came on again viewers were treated to a shaky-cam free-for-all with shattered glass, thrown tables, flying condiments, and Russell narrating off-camera: “You’re looking at the wildest fight we’ve seen. It’s Latham and Ferris and Dundee and Lawler in the concession stand, all four of them bleeding, pounding ...”
There’s a back story, of course. Memphis wrestling was on the ropes and cash-strapped. The franchise had lost most of its talent when promoter Jerry Jarrett and booker Robert Fuller suddenly parted ways. To survive, Memphis needed to boost its profile and bottom line, fast. So when the team went down to Tupelo, Jarrett gave his wrestlers a special assignment: “Tear the building down.”
“People can talk about things being scripted in our business all they want,” Ferris later told wrestling manager and historian Jim Cornette in a recorded conversation about the brawl. “But whoever believes that is absolutely full of shit, because there are some things that cannot and will not ever be scripted. And that was one of them. …They started beating the hell out of us.”
Great actors learn how tolive naturally in artificial environments. Russell, who played himself in the Andy Kaufman 1999 biopic Man on the Moon, understood this instinctively; his improvised commentary sold Memphis wrestling’s most outlandish characters, gimmicks, and storylines. “They’re falling all over,” he observed that night in Tupelo as mayhem gave way to chaos. “Mustard everywhere!”
Russell never hid the secret of his success. “I was always a wrestling fan,” he told the Memphis Flyer in a 2014 interview. “I never wanted anybody to say to me, ‘Hey, I’m going to win in the third fall on this match. I don’t want to be a stiff actor saying some lines; I wanted to call things as I saw them in my face for the first time.”
The morning after it happened, the brawl entered living rooms across the Mid-South when it was broadcast in full on Memphis’ enormously popular weekly wrestling show. Saturday night’s promotion in Jonesboro sold out fast. People were turned away at the door, and business began booming again for Memphis wrestling. With that one brawl, the colorful territory re-cemented its reputation as a place where anything might happen, and just maybe the only place where Andy Kaufman could happen.
“We were all working,” Russell modestly said of his life spent making a disreputable sport a little more reputable one cranky observation at a time. “That’s what we did for a living.”
Lance Russell died in Memphis October 3, 2017.
