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.