IGX

When Sputnik Monroe arrived in Memphis in 1957, by way of Mobile, Alabama, he immediately ran into trouble with the police. His favorite hang-out was the black neighborhood around Beale Street, and that made him the target for the local gendarmes. In those days, there was a vagrancy law entitled "Mopery and Attempted Gawk." Sputnik could mope and gawk with the best of them.

There were many aspects of Sputnik's persona and character that set him apart from his wrestling peers. Early in his fighting career, he had been beaned on the head by an opposing pugilist using a wooden chair as a weapon. When the wood splinters were removed from his scalp, a patch of white hair grew around the wound. Sputnik beat out the punks for colored hair by a good twenty years.

Sputnik was a mean brawler. His self-definition of his wrestling style was "scientifically rough." When asked to elaborate on this, he explained, "Win if you can, lose if you must, always cheat, and if they take you out, leave tearing down the ring."

But Sputnik Monroe's most important contribution to Memphis' society was the fact that he single-handedly desegregated the wrestling spectator community. Like all wrestlers, Sputnik would seek the approval of the audience once he had destroyed his opponent. Just as the surviving Roman gladiators would strut their stuff to governors, patricians and other assorted Roman gentry in the arena, Sputnik would perform his victory romp, exhorting praise from the crowd. But unlike any other white wrestler, Sputnik would not focus his attention on the front rows, nor the women, nor the box seats, nor the predominantly white on-lookers. Instead, he would turn to the small black audience, segregated away in the upper rafters of Ellis Auditorium, and it was from them that he received kudos.

Sputnik was fast becoming a draw card and the promoters and wrestling money people knew this. He was able to use his notoriety to exact changes in the wrestling establishment. He recalls, "There used to be a couple of thousand blacks outside wanting in. So I would tell management I'd be cutting out if they don't let my black friends in. I had the power because I'm selling out the place, the first guy that ever did, and they damn sure wanted the revenue."

The way the business people would limit the black audience was by counting the number of black people allowed entrance into the auditorium, knowing exactly the seating capacity of the "blacks only" section. Sputnik would bribe the employee, who counted black people, to lie to his boss, giving the boss a much lower number of attendees than there actually were. So, when the overseer would demand numbers, the door guy would say something like "thirty" when there were really five-hundred or more black folks in the building. Jim Dickinson, a well known fixture of the Memphis music scene, (he played piano on "Wild Horses," which the Rolling Stones recorded at the Muscle Shoals Studio in Alabama) remembers, "Finally, the audience got so big and heavily black that they had to integrate the seating. There's no other single event that integrated the audience other than the wrassling matches and Sputnik paying the guy to lie."

Johnny Dark, now a Memphis sportscaster, was then president of the Sputnik Monroe Fan Club. He recounts, "I remember one time Sputnik was wrassling in Louisville. In the dressing room, this little black lady came up to Sputnik, she had tears in her eyes, she said 'You don't remember me, you never met me, but I used to live in Memphis, when they made us sit upstairs in those buzzard seats. You're the one who got them to change that.' That was the first time I saw Sputnik with tears in his eyes."

Sputnik's one-man campaign had ripple effects all across Memphis, not only in the black community, but also amongst young white kids. Elvis, Jerry Lee, Carl Perkins, Johnny Cash and Sam Phillips had already opened the valve, releasing emotions in young white people that caused grave concern for the enforcers of the status quo. And here was this upstart wrestler, not just playing with young kids minds, but messing with the gas that fueled how things ran in Memphis, namely racism. Another fan of that era, Jim Black says "I went through my whole twelve years at school having never been able to share an experience with a black, and I was starting to resent this, because I was also listening to radio and Dewey Phillips, and hearing all these great black records and realizing that these were some talented artists, this was another culture. Where, at first, we'd gone to the matches hoping to see Sputnik get beat, we started to realize that he was pretty fucking cool. He had his audience, and he never played down to 'em, never talked down to 'em. He became a role model."

Sputnik says this of his influence on young whites, "There was a group of wealthy white kids that dug me because I was a rebel. I'm saying what they wanted to say, only they were just too young or inexperienced or afraid to say it. You have a black maid raising your kids and she's talking about me all of the time, so I may not be in the front living room, but I'm going in the back door of your goddamn house, feeding your kids on Monday morning and sending 'em to school. And meeting the bus when they come home. Pretty powerful thing."

Sputnik's influence went way beyond the wrestling ring. He interfered righteously with the city fathers' plans for business- as-usual. In one instance, the black leadership in Memphis was involved in a protest against the segregation of an automobile exhibition. Sputnik called up the sponsors and told them that he was planning to open his own car lot in the black community. That night, the change of admission policy was broadcast on the evening news.

The following is my favorite Sheed story as told by a man who witnessed all happen... First team scrimmage Ra's freshman year. Montross and Salvadori had been pushing Ra up and down the court, double teaming him down low, and talkin' shit the whole time. Evidently Ra went up for a turn around "J" in the lane only to have Montross and Salvadori club him and block his shot... each telling him to never bring that shit inside again. Next time down the court Ra caught a ball coming off of the rim at which time he did one of his backboard shaking monster dunks (a 9.5 on Pat Sullivan's grading scale) on Montross and Salvadori. Upon landing on his feet Ra pushed Montross into Salvadori and yelled, "You better recognize.. Motherf***er! Your job is mine!" This outburst infuriated Montross as he chased Ra down the court as the entire team tried to break it up. Ra ran laps for the rest of the practice.

He avoided interviews following games because he was in the training room calling his moms.