One Friday morning in the spring of 1971, Geoff Winningham picked up the sports section of the now defunct Houston Post. At the time, Winningham had just begun teaching photography at Rice University, but at night, he’d grab his camera and head wherever he could find a crowd to shoot. In the paper, he saw an ad for a wrestling event happening that night at the Sam Houston Coliseum. “I’d bet there be some crowds there,” he thought.

Winningham was familiar with wrestling; he’d grown up in Tennessee, watching Saturday night fights on TV. Yet what he saw at the coliseum that Friday floored him. “I walked in and walked down the aisle, through the crowd, and toward the ring,” he remembers. “All these bright spotlights coming down on this white mat with the ropes around the ring, crowds screaming, and big guys throwing each other through the air and jumping on each other and torturing each other. It was madness.”

The coliseum’s promoter, Paul Boesch—who also served as the ring announcer—welcomed Winningham, and the photographer became a regular, returning to the revelry night after night. Boesch let him photograph locker rooms, gave him access inside and outside the ring, and introduced him to the wrestlers. With that, Winningham—who became known inside the coliseum as the professor of wrestling—spent the next nine months photographing the Houston wrestling scene, capturing the villainous heels, heroic baby faces, and fervent fans. One frequent attendee, Ethel, loved the spectacle so much that she decided she wanted to rest there after death. “It’s in my will,” she told Winningham. “When I die, I want to be cremated, and I want my ashes scattered on Friday night in the Coliseum.”

Houston’s zeal for wrestling has its roots in the post–World War I era, when wrestlers such as the small but mighty Pet Brown and Frank Gotch, who helped popularize the sport across the United States, drew large crowds. By the forties, before television grew in reach and popularity, wrestling had amassed such a large local following that at one event at the Houston City Auditorium, fans purchased over $1 million in war bonds. Later, when TVs became a fixture of Texans’ homes, the airing of matches on KHTV strengthened Houston wrestling’s already considerable hold on audiences’ imaginations. A couple of decades down the line, when Winningham arrived to photograph what he calls “theater on a popular level,” the televised fights that drew thousands of fans to the Coliseum were in their twenty-third year. By the mid-eighties, the World Wrestling Federation’s expansion decimated regional wrestling scenes from coast to coast, and local favorites like Johnny Valentine and Wahoo McDaniel were replaced by national icons like Hulk Hogan.

Almost fifty years later, Winningham—still a professor of photography at Rice, whose work has been shown at the Museum of Modern Art and the Metropolitan Museum of Art—has revived the spirit, grit, and excitement of those sweaty wrestling nights in Friday Night in the Coliseum. The book, which was first published in 1971, saw its second edition released in February of this year. The new edition has been expanded from 144 to 180 pages and features almost 200 photographs—26 of them previously unpublished—that capture a singular moment in Houston history. “As I look again at the pictures that I took and read the words of the people that I remember from my Friday nights in the Coliseum, I am saddened by what has been lost,” Winningham writes in the book’s afterword. “[A]nd I am grateful for what I have been able to preserve.”

Whether or not wrestling is staged is beside the point. The goal is to make the most extreme seem as real as possible. For matches to work at their best, both wrestlers—Dory Funk Jr. and Johnny Valentine, here—must work together in a cooperative rather than a competitive way. “There I was, on the edge of the ring, looking up,” Winningham says. “They’re five feet above me in the ring and I’m right next to them. And they look like they are fighting for their life.”
Photograph by Geoff Winningham
Wrestling wouldn’t work without its fans. Often, it’s the heels (or the villains) who get the crowd’s strongest reactions. Winningham remembers that sometimes fans felt so incensed by what they saw that they’d run to attack the heel inside the ring, only to have a policeman—three or four of them always ringside—pull them back. Conversely, when the baby face, the hero, got thrown into the front rows, fans picked him up and helped him get back inside the ring.
Photograph by Geoff Winningham
To help promote the book, Paul Boesch sent wrestlers to Winningham’s book signing. One of those wrestlers, the sullen Ernie Ladd, would win matches by running, jumping, and dropping the entire weight of his almost seven-foot-tall body on his floored opponents in a move he called the Flying Cloud. “He came in the door,” Winningham says, “and I remember thinking, ‘God, that is the scariest, most intimidating human being I’ve ever seen in my life. He did not have a happy look on his face. But he stayed there for a while, and he signed the books. And when he was ready to leave, I worked up the nerve to go up to him. I said, ‘Ernie, thank you very much for coming, I really appreciate it.’ He looked straight down at me, not a trace of a smile on his face, and he said, ‘It’s okay. Whatever Mr. Boesch tells me to do, I do it.’”
Photograph by Geoff Winningham
This photograph, a portrait of Winningham himself, is the last one he included in the book’s original edition. “I’m hawking my photographs. I’m putting my photographs out there to the world,” Winningham says, before switching to third person, going from photographer to photographee. “The other thing is, he’s a curious looking man. His face and his posture is so interesting. He almost looks kind of alien. He’s a strange looking character and I love the display … you can buy all of them for one dollar. And there he is, holding them out. To me, it’s a beautiful photograph.”
Photograph by Geoff Winningham
There are two types of wrestlers: baby faces and heels. Baby faces are the “good guys,” loved by the crowd. Heels are the villains, who will lie, cheat, and do anything to win. In the seventies Johnny Valentine was a baby face, while Blimp Harris was a heel. When the two fought each other, a fence got placed around the ring. “The fear among the crowd was that Blimp would run away if he starts getting whipped,” Winningham explains. “So you put up the fence so he can’t get away. It just kind of ups the ante on, ‘Okay, he’s going to get what’s coming to him.’”
Photograph by Geoff Winningham
Great wrestling matches have elements of morality, playing on dynamics such as good versus evil or the motivations behind a complicated antihero. But other wrestlers, like Bobby Shane, were more overt in what they represented: Shane, who wore bottoms with “USA” embroidered on the side and a vest emblazoned with stars and stripes, was an all-American good guy.
Photograph by Geoff Winningham
Houston wrestling was part of a larger regional circuit that included Texas, Oklahoma, New Mexico, and Louisiana. Sometimes wrestlers from outside the usual circuit would travel to Houston. Such was the case when Ray Mendoza fought Thunderbolt Patterson. Mendoza was one of Mexico’s greatest unmasked wrestlers, while Patterson was one of the few Black wrestlers in the Florida-Georgia-Carolinas circuit in that era. Years later, several circuits blackballed Patterson after he tried to unionize wrestlers.
Photograph by Geoff Winningham
“Everyone down near the ring knew each other,” Winningham says of the fans, some of whom arrived as early as 3 p.m. to get the best spots for an event that didn’t begin until 8:30. To pass the hours, they’d eat the food they brought, and talk about the previous week’s event and what they hoped would happen in the matches later that night. “All the regulars were there all the time. Being there was almost like attending church. It was a congregation as well as a crowd.”
Photograph by Geoff Winningham
Winningham’s interest in wrestling didn’t stem from peeking behind the curtain. Instead, he was there to capture what the experience looked and felt like from a spectator’s perspective. Once, though, Winningham went into the locker room and saw The Spoiler getting a medical checkup before fighting, and he took this photograph.
Photograph by Geoff Winningham
The coliseum promoters divided each Friday night program into two halves. Three to five preliminary fights, which featured funny characters, wrestlers just beginning to build a fan base, or women wrestlers, kicked off the night. The main-event fights followed an intermission. During the nine months he spent photographing at the Sam Houston Coliseum, Winningham saw women wrestle on only two occasions. “There wasn’t much crowd response to the women wrestling,” he remembers. Today, women are much more visible in the world of wrestling.
Photograph by Geoff Winningham
“As one fan told me one time,” Winningham says, “they’re like gods, the wrestlers. But you can touch them.”
Photograph by Geoff Winningham
One night, as Winningham stood beside the ring, Boesch nudged him and pointed to the far side of the ring. It was the only time he ever did that. “Go down there, down there,” he kept telling Winningham. “By the time I got there,” Winningham remembers, “[Mil] Máscaras was on the ring post jumping. It would have been a different picture—I don’t think it could have been quite as good—from the position I was in before … That thing where the light is directly above him and shining down on his head, that’s the function, of course, of the position I’m in.”
Photograph by Geoff Winningham
As Winningham began thinking of making a book out of the work he did on Friday nights, he knew he had to include a photograph of the empty Houston coliseum. Before the smell of buttery popcorn wafted through the air, and before thousands of fans filed into the building to cheer and jeer, the ring stood quiet and still. It’s the only photograph in Friday Night in the Coliseum that has no people. “I would think of it this way,” Winningham says of the photograph he took almost fifty years ago, “Now that it’s all gone, now that all this wrestling thing has disappeared as it has, just having that photograph to show, ‘Okay, this is the stage on which it all happened.’”
Photograph by Geoff Winningham