By Tabitha Evans Moore | EDITOR & PUBLISHER
It’s the 1990s and Lynchburg native Randall Fanning stands watching a regional wrestling match in Columbia, Tennessee when he spots an audience member with hair packed to the sky like Marge Simpson. She’s animated and cursing at the action happening inside the ring between her favorite wrestler, Cowboy Billy Montana, and another wrestler named Phil Hickerson. It’s a two-out-of-three winner-takes-all match for the championship, and there’s a catch. If Hickerson wins, Montana will never compete for the title again. The stakes are high.
At the beginning of the match, Hickerson taunts Montana.
“These fans might love you now, but they’ll be the end of you,” he spits.
During the match, Hickerson’s manager, Mad Max, sneaks a metal chain to his wrestler while the referee’s not looking, hits Montana with it hard enough to knock him down, and then slides it back to Max.
This happens several times then Max gets distracted by some girls sitting in the front row. When Hickerson slides the chain back to Max one more time, he’s out of position and lands right in front of, you guessed it, Marge.
Montana’s not losing this match – not on Marge’s watch. So, she pitches the contraband weapon to Montana thinking time about is fair play, but the referee spots her and disqualifies Montana on the spot, as Marge begins sobbing uncontrollably.
Sensing his opportunity, Hickerson takes the mic and taunts Montana again, “I told you these fans would be the end of you.”
That’s when the ring announcer says, “No, you don’t understand. Marge was trying to throw the chain to Big Mike the referee, and you just got in the way.”
Realizing this may be her only shot at redemption, Marge thrusts her way across the forbidden outer wrestling ring rope and argues her case.
“That’s it. That’s exactly what I was doing,” and the match resumes.
None of that was scripted.
It’s just one example of the absurdity, drama, and delight of the once-thriving indie wrestling scene in Middle Tennessee and The South, and you’d never guess the man behind this spectacle was none other than Lynchburg’s own, Randall Fanning.
From Hurdlow to the Hollow
A native of Moore County, Randall grew up in the Hurdlow Community until his teenage years when the family moved inside the former Lynchburg city limits. He grew up with his father, John Fanning, mother, Jewell Walker Fanning, and brother, Walker Fanning.
Straight out of high school, he began work at The Jack Daniel Distillery as a Charles D. Manley Scholarship student. By 1978, then Marketing Director Roger Brashears hired him to run the White Rabbit Restaurant on the square. Five year later, Brashears moved him to the third floor of the old barrel house where tours once began to run the first Squires office – a role he continued until his retirement in 2023.
Interestingly, Randall didn’t become a squire himself until after retirement because current employees aren’t allowed into the exclusive club. Former Jack Daniel’s Visitor Center Director Erik Brown recommended him on his way out the door.
Randall now lives in a home on the outskirts of Lynchburg with his wife, Betty, and their cat. Over the years, he’s amassed a massive Jack Daniel’s collection that once existed in every nook and cranny inside his home, but it eventually grew to the point that it required its own separate building.
“Before this building, the fire department told me that if there were ever a fire at my house, they wouldn’t bother responding. There’d be no point,” he jokes.
Rise of the Southern Ringmaster
Randall says he developed a love of professional wrestling from a very early age. At the age of six, he’d convince his dad to go to Fayetteville once a month for a copy of his favorite Wrestling magazine. Every fourth Saturday, he’d beg to go to wrestling matches at the National Guard Armory. One of his favorite memories involves seeing Hawaiian wrestler Tojo Yamamoto in Nashville when he was a teenager.
“He was wrestling the Samoans, and he took their hair and twisted it around this rope,” Randall says with a twinkle in his eye.
In 1994, he and good friend, Steve Bryant, bought a struggling wrestling promotion in McMinnville and a southern ringmaster was born. What began with just 50 fans quickly bloomed to an audience of over 200 under their direction – Randall in the front of the house and Steve backstage.
Baby Faces, Heels, and the Wild Card in the Front Row
A professional wrestling match looks very different depending on your point of view. From outside, the audience becomes enthralled with a match of good versus evil with unexpected twists and lots of drama baked in. Backstage, there are last minute updates to the scripted programs, hidden weapons, and gentlemen’s agreements that sometimes fall apart once the wrestler enter the ring.
Professional wrestling also enjoys its own vernacular. Wrestlers are either Baby Faces (the hero) or Heels (the bad guys), and there’s even a secret handshake. If an opponent shakes hands with just his or her fingertips, it will be a light match. If they exchange a real handshake, it’s Katie-bar-the-door.
Randall says professional wrestlers also use their own language – a sort of pig Latin – to communicate between one another without the audience understanding.
Back in his wrestling promoter days, Randall would have given PT Barnum a run for his money. He mastered spectacle, sleight of hand, and storylines that sell. Like Barnum, Randal likes to put on a good show, and he knows his audience.
He says professional wrestling’s not so much fake as it is theater with events unfolding like acts of a play. A single event usually includes a card, which consists of three to five individual matches, and each match serves a specific purpose leading up to the main event.
He says he and Steve would use the first match to get the audience riled up – something that would pay off down the stretch. Match number two usually happened between the new talent – the unknowns who hadn’t yet built their personas. The third match usually involved a novelty of some sort like lady wrestling or tag teams. The final match always showcased the top wrestlers.
“The secret was to involve local talent,” he says. “You didn’t need to pay for big talent. They weren’t necessarily going to bring more people in.”
One of his favorite stories involves a fan that the wrestlers lovingly referred to as Skunk Lady due the grey streak down the middle part of her black hair.
Skunk Lady used a walker and liked to sit on the front row. She only cheered for the Baby Faces, never the Heels, and if a bad guy happened her way, she didn’t resist popping them with her walker.
“We always told the Heels to never get close to her, because that walker would hit them upside their head,” he jokes. “I’ve seen her hit two or three of them. As soon as they weren’t paying attention, whack!”
Randall says audience members brought an improv element into the show – one that you could never predict. It keeps things spontaneous and left even him riveted at times.
“You just never knew what they were going to do, but you had to be careful, because some of them could get out of control in a hurry,” he says. “Some wrestlers were green, and some were rednecks. But the crowd? That’s the real wild card. I’ve seen fans faint, cry, throw punches, and pull guns. That’s a good night.”
The Hustle Behind the Hype
Randall says he gave up his wrestling promoter side hustle because it grew too successful. In addition to working his full-time job at the distillery, he’d spend every Tuesday and Wednesday distributing flyers for an upcoming show. On Thursdays, he and Steve would spend hours scripting programs and working out storylines.
“We stayed up until three o’clock in the morning, just planning shows and what might happen,” he says. “It’s funny, sometimes it happened, sometimes it didn’t.”
By the weekend, it was showtime, which required setting up the ring and stands, ticket sales, concessions, managing the wrestler, and then breaking everything down once the show ended.
“I already had a job. Once it started being work and not fun, then it was time to move on,” he says.
A near death experience hauling their ring to Nashville for someone else’s promotion sealed it for them. It seemed like a sign to both men that the party was over, and they sold the promotion the very next week.
“We made a little profit, but I didn’t get into wrestling for the money. I got into it for the show,” Randall says. “We took it from less than 50 fans for over 200. That’s pretty good. I mean, for having a lot of fun.”
Small regional promotions like Randall’s eventually got absorbed by what would eventually become the World Wrestling Entertainment (WWE) that you now see on TV.
“It was the World Wrestling Federation (WWF) to begin with but when they went to build the website, someone else already owned www.wwf.com, so they changed it,” he says.
Many of the biggest wrestling stars – folks like Ric Flair, Stone Cold Steve Austin, The Rock, and Hulk Hogan all came from the southern pipeline that once flowed through Memphis. Modern day mammoths like the USA Network and Wrestlemania were built on the backs of partnership with WWE/WWF professional wrestling, but it eventually pushed the regional promoters out.
Randall says regional promotions are making a resurgence though with promotions happening all around the Southern Middle Tennessee area like Rocket City Championship Wrestling in Huntsville as well as smaller promotions in Tullahoma, McMinnville, and other small towns.
He says folks in The South love to watch the battle between the hero and the bad guy.
“They want that fantasy. I don’t necessarily like to use the term fantasy, but they want that fantasy,” he says. “When they are at a show for two hours, they aren’t thinking about the deadlines or a bill they need to pay. They can lose themselves in the matches.”
Randall says professional wrestling, like college football, allows folks to blow off a little steam because the stakes are raised and the emotions are heightened.
“Because you can sit there and scream your lungs out, and no one cares because they’re involved in what’s happening just as much as you are,” he says. “Fans also fall in love with the wrestlers just like they do football players. They root for them.”
He says small, regional matches resonate with fans because the same storylines carry over from week-to-week.
When we ask him what a young, ambitious promoter looking to get a start in the business needs to know, he’s quick to respond.
“Get ready to work your tail off to do it. You’ve got to not only work the show, but also work the advertising,” he says. “The thing that hurts promotions today, the smaller promotions, is the fact that there’s no TV. So, there’s no platform to broadcast it on.”
Randall says wrestling is a craft like any other and it often gets passed down from one generation to the next – just like blacksmithing or whiskey making.
In the end, Randall admits that selling whiskey and promoting wrestling feel similar. They both involve the art of southern storytelling. It’s about reading the room and finding the characters. In both jobs, no two days feel the same.
“Every bottle has a story. Every match had one too.”•
About The Lynchburg Times
The Lynchburg Times is an independent, woman-owned newspaper rooted in the heart of southern middle Tennessee. Led by a Tulane-educated journalist with over two decades of experience covering this region, we shine a light on the people, politics, and cultural pulse of a changing South. From breaking news to slow storytelling, we believe local journalism should inform, empower, and preserve what makes this place unique. Supported by readers and community partners, we’re proud to be part of the new Southern narrative – one story at a time. [Support us here.]