Posted on 9/22/126 by DMV Wrestling News
Mike Mooneyham has spent more than 60 years around
professional wrestling.
A September 14 profile by Jim Phillips for Pro Wrestling
Stories looks back at Mooneyham’s career as a wrestling
writer, newspaper journalist, author, and historian.
Mooneyham grew up in Charleston, South Carolina. He told
Phillips that one of his earliest wrestling memories was
watching Haystacks Calhoun and Johnny Weaver face Aldo Bogni
and Bronco Lubich on a black-and-white television.
The program advertised an upcoming card at County Hall.
Mooneyham attended his first live wrestling event there on
July 2, 1964. He still has the newspaper advertisement for
the show. Longtime Charleston promoter Henry Marcus later
gave it to him.
“I was hooked. I was hooked,” Mooneyham told Pro Wrestling
Stories.
He soon started writing about wrestling.
According to Phillips, Mooneyham began submitting articles
to national wrestling magazines when he was barely a
teenager. Editors gave him press credentials, and he covered
shows in Charleston, Charlotte, Columbia, Atlanta, Savannah,
Orlando, and Miami Beach.
He also published the Championship Wrestling Fan Club
bulletin. The monthly publication was produced on a
mimeograph machine and mailed to readers around the country
and as far away as Egypt.
Correspondents sent Mooneyham wrestling results from other
cities.
Mooneyham later worked at The Times and Democrat in
Orangeburg before joining what was then The News and Courier
in Charleston in 1979. He worked in sports and later became
an assistant sports editor.
Professional wrestling eventually became part of his regular
newspaper work.
Phillips writes that Mooneyham once used most of a sports
front and two jump pages for a wrestling feature. Reader
response helped convince the newspaper there was an audience
for more.
Around 1989, an editor asked Mooneyham to write a regular
wrestling column.
Mooneyham wanted it in the sports section rather than arts
and entertainment or features. He also wanted it in the
Sunday paper.
When the newspaper suggested a monthly column, Mooneyham
pushed for weekly.
“If I’m gonna do it, I’m gonna do it right,” he told Pro
Wrestling Stories.
The column has now run for 37 years, according to the
profile. Mooneyham told Phillips that after The Post and
Courier moved online, his column was often the most-read
story on the newspaper’s website during the week it
appeared.
That was how I first found his work.
I was living in Columbia in the late 1990s and early 2000s
when a coworker from Charleston told me about Mooneyham’s
column. I began reading it online.
We later exchanged emails for a while and stayed connected
through Facebook and Twitter, now X. Over the years, Mike
became a friend.
Mooneyham built relationships throughout the wrestling
business.
Among the people Phillips mentions are Lou Thesz, Jack and
Gerald Brisco, Dory Funk Jr., Jerry Jarrett, Tim Woods, Ric
Flair, Jim Ross, and others.
Those relationships also produced reporting.
The Pro Wrestling Stories profile recounts Mooneyham’s
coverage of wrestling’s steroid controversy in the late
1980s and early 1990s.
It also includes a story about Goldberg during his early WCW
run. Goldberg made critical comments about Hulk Hogan during
an interview with Mooneyham.
Mooneyham decided not to publish them. He contacted WCW
public relations and said he would not run the column.
Phillips also tells a story involving Bill Watts.
Watts reportedly held up one of Mooneyham’s columns in the
WCW locker room and warned wrestlers that anyone caught
giving him information would be fired. Paul Heyman later
told Mooneyham what had happened.
Mooneyham and Watts remained friends.
“You had to work, you had to dig,” Mooneyham told Pro
Wrestling Stories about reporting before the internet.
That meant phone calls, sources, and relationships built
over time.
In 2002, Mooneyham and ESPN investigative journalist Shaun
Assael co-authored Sex, Lies and Headlocks: The Real Story
of Vince McMahon and the World Wrestling Federation.
According to Phillips, they conducted more than 100
interviews for the book.
It later made The New York Times bestseller list.
The profile also includes a story from shortly before the
book was released.
Mooneyham was backstage at a WWE Raw event at the North
Charleston Coliseum with Steve Austin, Jim Ross, and Paul
Wight when Vince McMahon walked by.
McMahon put his arm around Mooneyham and told Ross that Mike
understood the wrestling business.
McMahon apparently did not know Mooneyham had helped write a
book about him that was about to be published.
Mooneyham did not tell him.
His work also included preserving Charleston wrestling
history.
In 1998, Mooneyham and Amy McDaniel organized “Lowcountry
Legends: The Night the Legends Returned, A Tribute to Henry
Marcus.”
The event honored Marcus and was the final wrestling card
held at the old County Hall, then known as the King Street
Palace.
Tim Woods, Rip Hawk, Swede Hanson, Thunderbolt Patterson,
Fabulous Moolah, Johnny Valentine, and others returned for
the event.
Mooneyham retired from full-time newspaper work in 2016 but
continued writing his wrestling column.
In 2019, he published Final Bell, a collection of pieces
about wrestling personalities who had died.
His work also had an effect on what later became DMV
Wrestling News.
“Today in Pro Wrestling History” came from seeing the
historical wrestling material Mike regularly posted on
social media. He would post old cards, results, photos,
anniversaries, and other pieces of wrestling history.
That became the basis for a similar regular history feature
at DMV Wrestling News.
Mooneyham was one of the wrestling writers I was reading
long before DMV Wrestling News existed. More than two
decades later, his influence is still part of the work.
I’m grateful to Mike for the inspiration, advice, and
assistance he has given me over the years