Riverton was a different place as the 1970s drew to a close. The uranium mines in the Gas Hills had over 4,000 miners working around the clock. Nearby Jeffrey City swelled from a wide spot in the road called Home on the Range, to the third largest city in Fremont County, the home of 4,500 people directly tied to the uranium industry.
Most of those miners were young men in their 20s and 30s. The wages were good, money was easy, and they were looking for entertainment.
City League basketball had dozens of teams, and men’s fast pitch softball filled the summer nights seven days a week on the fields east of Smith Road.
Two men, Raoul Sancez and Bill Ash, came up with a venue that offered even more entertainment value. They brought professional wrestling to Riverton on a regular basis.
Professional wrestling grew as a spectator sport in the years after World War II. It was a perfect sport for early television in the 1950s, and wrestlers like Gorgeous George became household names.
The sport of wrestling gradually stepped aside in favor of the drama of professional wrestling. Takedowns, escapes, and reversals disappeared. The mat was replaced by the ring, and suddenly folding chairs, ladders, head smashes into the turnbuckles, high flying dives off the upper ropes and blood, lots of blood, became commonplace. It was entertainment disguised as sport.
Wrestling was as popular as stock car racing across the American South, and it spread north and west into the Great Lakes and eventually to the Rockies.
Riverton had early bouts in the post-war years. Bill Sedlacek recalled going with is father to matches at the Riverton Armory when he was in junior high school in the late 1940s. These matches weren’t regular affairs. Traveling wrestling venues brought their own portable rings, advertised locally, held the matches, then moved to the next town, much like the carnivals that traveled similar circuits in the summertime.
The Rocky Mountain Region was centered in Denver, but matches grew in smaller towns like Cheyenne and Casper. Eventually, they found a hungry audience in those 4,000 miners in Fremont County.
Sanchez and Ash held their first matches in a garage owned by Gene Lee on South Federal in Riverton. Lee was famous as a Studebaker dealer in the 1950s and was a businessman always open to new ideas.
The large garage could hold as many as 2,000 spectators surrounding a permanent ring.
The wrestlers working the Rocky Mountain Wrestling circuit were affiliated with the American Wrestling Association, with headquarters in Minneapolis.
Future wrestling stars like Harley Race, Hulk Hogan, Roddy Piper, Randy Savage, Dusty Rhodes, and Ric Flair all wrestled throughout the Rockies before they hit the big time.
Jody Ray was working at the Woolworth’s lunch counter and remembers serving professional wrestlers.
“They used to have WrestleMania at the Fair Building, and get country western talent to perform,” Ray said. “One time, these gentlemen came in, rather big gentlemen, I waited on them, and they left me a big tip and tickets to Wrestle Mania, one was Hulk Hogan. They sat in a two-seater booth and almost didn’t fit.”
These were traveling wrestlers, trying to make a dollar on the fringe of the profession. With the arrival of Rocky Mountain Wrestling, it became a steady enterprise under various management until the mining boom collapsed in 1983, following the events of Chernobyl and Three Mile Island.
Perhaps the most famous wrestler brought to Fremont County by Sanchez and Ash was Ric Flair.
Flair wrestled in Riverton before he hit the bright lights of televised, national wrestling.
“Ric Flair was bigger when he wrestled here,” Dirk Bush, who frequented the matches, said. “He lost weight and went big time a few years after we watched him at the fairgrounds.”
While Sanchez and Ash were the main promoters and owners of Rocky Mountain Wrestling, their guy on the ground in Riverton was Mark Russel.
Jerry Alley, a Riverton High School wrestler, two-tour soldier in Vietnam, and a professional baseball player, started wrestling with Russel and eventually became a promoter himself.
“I’ve had a lot of opportunities in my lifetime. I was a high school wrestler until I was a senior when I got mononucleosis and couldn’t wrestle,” Alley said. “My mom said I had to do something, so I was Wally Wolverine. I wrestled from seventh grade through my junior year.”
Alley was a gifted pitcher, with a blazing fastball. He was playing AA baseball with the Tacoma Tigers soon after graduation from high school.
“I came home, and Mom said you might want to look on your desk, you have a letter from the Department of Defense,” Alley said. “When did it get here? She said a couple of months ago. I thought I was in trouble, but Mom knew a gal on the local draft board, and she knew I was playing ball in Washington.”
Alley has an affinity for languages, a gift that has sent him to many places across the globe in his life.
“I was in Odessa, Texas, in 1984,” Alley said. “If you didn’t speak Spanish, you couldn’t order breakfast. I speak Spanish, German, Korean, Tagalog, and Vietnamese. When I was stationed in Korea, I studied taekwondo, and that’s where I learned the Korean language.”
Alley had quite a military career, getting shot, blown up, and receiving three Bronze Stars and an equal number of Purple Hearts.
“I came back to Riverton. The mines were really iffy with layoffs. My wife and I both worked out there. I was looking for something else to make money. I’d taken all my money and planned to teach high school and coach baseball,” Alley said.
That’s where Russel and professional wrestling crossed paths with Alley.
“Gene Lee Motors, Gene was one of four brothers. He owned a gas station where Bailey’s is now. Gene Lee collected cars. He’d take a tourist’s good car that was broken and give them another car. He had about 40 cars,” Alley said. “Gene had this smooth-talking guy from Arkansas, Mark Russel. They were two brothers, and they brought in four more wrestlers to work with them. It was 1981.”
Russel brought a ring with him.
“You have to have a ring to practice and work on things. They had a contract with KWRB TV in Thermopolis and filmed it at the armory on Saturday nights. They showed it live once or twice,” Alley said. “These people came here on a shoestring budget. My wife and I were both working at Lucky Mac in the Gas Hills, making a reasonable income. Then all of a sudden, we heard they were laying off, as a result of that, I ran into this Mark Russel. Russel said, ‘Why don’t you come down and we’ll teach you to wrestle?’ I didn’t realize that’s how they made their money; they charged you to teach you how to wrestle.”
As a high school wrestler, and a man trained in taekwondo, Alley was a natural in the wrestling ring.
“I like to fight and I’m damn good at it, I don’t do it anymore. They serve horrible pancakes in jail,” Alley said. “They started with me, and I knew I was physically tougher and better educated in fighting. They were more interested in the theatrics of wrestling. They soon realized they weren’t going to get any money out of me and had to get me in the ring.”
Professional wrestling has its own unique vocabulary, and there is a hierarchy within the organization.
The promoter is the head of the organization; in Riverton, Russel was the promoter.
The booker does what his name implies, he books wrestlers for bouts. A booker has contact with other wrestling organizations. It is their responsibility to create a show that will attract and then entertain a crowd.
“You can’t have a show if you have a 400-pound guy wrestling somebody 140,” Alley said. “It’s exactly like a soap opera. They write a script from week to week.”
The people the booker brings in depend on the storyline he is trying to develop.
Wrestlers have roles as well. The heel is responsible for action in the ring. He has to generate “heat.” Heat is the flow of the match. Is there a history between the wrestlers? Is there bad blood? The heel usually plays the role of the villain.
Just before Russel’s operation folded, he brought in a wrestler named Black Panther. Black Panther was a black man about 6’4″ and 260 pounds. He was a perfect heel for Wyoming audiences.
Not all matches were at Gene’s place or the armory; one night they took their portable ring to Blue Sky Hall in Ethete.
“Panther was a heel. He looked like a heel. He’d never in his wildest imagination ever been on a reservation,” Alley said. “He generated animosity for him and everyone else. One of the bookers’ guys was a big Crow guy from Hardin, Montana. Black Panther went too far, insulting the crowd. The crowd went wild, grabbing tire irons from their cars. It was almost a riot. We had two matches go on before Panther wrestled this guy. The crowd picked the wrong guy.”
Picking the wrong guy with money on the line can be dangerous.
“That was probably the most frightened I’d been in my life, and I’ve been shot three times and blown up,” Alley said. “In Vietnam, you didn’t have time to be scared; that’s an entirely different circumstance.”
It was one of the final matches that Russel managed. He soon left Riverton, headed home to Arkansas, but he left some of his wrestlers behind.
“They were trying to make money any way they could. The booker lied to these people, and they never made money. They came from Arkansas, and they thought wrestling would be the draw, but it wasn’t,“ Alley said. “They had four wrestlers here who were stranded. My wife said we have to do something. We can’t leave these guys in Riverton. My nephew Ellis Alley helped me build a ring on top of Griffey Hill.”
Jerry Alley became a promoter by default.
“It had to be portable, because we were in Wyoming. The ring at Gene Lee’s was permanent. Every time we had to move that ring to Ethete or somewhere else, it was a challenge,” Alley said.
Professional wrestling is violent showmanship. In the late 1970s, it became a much bloodier affair, and blood brought crowds.
“If you did the things for real in professional wrestling, you’d kill somebody,” Alley said. “So, who are you going to wrestle tomorrow? If I swing at you and break your jaw, that’s called a tater.”
Flying off the top ropes, running a guy’s head into the turnbuckle, and the always popular body slam were all featured at bouts in Riverton.
“I was a flyer, I weighed about 240, most of the guys were 280 or 290, I could get thrown over the top rope and into the crowd and not injure anyone in the crowd or myself. While we were here, wrestling was changing on the national scene, to become bloodier,” Alley said.
Getting blood in the ring required a process called juicing.
“I would take the edge of a disposable razor blade and put it on my finger, I’d scratch you and then I’d hit you, not with my fist, it looked like a fist, but I’d open my hand and the blood would fly,” Alley said. “My wife and I hired a Hispanic kid from Worland. He had some training, but he’d never been in the ring. We tried to recruit people from Riverton. We offered people to come to our place of business and try them out.”
Their business was J.A. Promotions, “Jaqueline and Alley.”
Jaquelin did the booking.
“We spent a lot of money on sound systems. We put on shows in Worland and Thermopolis. We rented a building by the airport.”
Fans remember those shows.
Tad McMillan was a young Vo-Ag teacher at Riverton High School in 1982.
“I only went one time. And I rooted for the Black tag team. But they lost. There were only about 20 people there the night that I went,” McMillan said. “I kept hollering to “get out your chain”. He had a dog choke chain that he was using to try to take the good guys out. They kind of look at me like I was on the wrong side. They, meaning the wrestlers and the other spectators. I had to kind of sneak out when it was all over. No autographs for me.
The last match in Riverton was in January 1983, at the site on airport hill.
“It takes skill to wrestle. You jump off a top rope into a guy’s throat, you’re going to kill him. We had about 120 matches total in Fremont County from 1981 to 83,” Alley said. “At first, we sold out. The most you could get in Gene Lee’s building was 2,000. It wasn’t full very often. We lost money, we made almost one of the worst mistakes of my life in wrestling.”
The rings are gone. Regional wrestling is a limited venue, mostly in the American South and professional wrestling has gone “big time” with internationally televised bouts. But it was entertainment in the wild days of Fremont County when money flowed from the mines at Atlantic City, the Gas Hills and Jeffrey City.