On the Timeless Beauty of Jerry Lawler Kicking Andy Kaufman’s Ass

Before he became known as one of the greatest managers in professional wrestling, Jim Cornette started his career as a ringside photographer in Memphis, TN. It was in that capacity, in 1982, that he and his camera got up close and personal for one of the sport’s most unforgettable matches: the lopsided bout between comedian Andy Kaufman and pro wrestler Jerry Lawler.

Between starring on Taxi and appearing on Saturday Night Live, Kaufman had been mockingly crowning himself “the World Intergender Wrestling Champion,” as part of a long-running stage act that saw him fight any woman from the crowd who would challenge him. Lawler, a wrestler so beloved that he was called “the King of Memphis” after Elvis Presley’s death, invited him to bring a run of those shows to the Mid-South Coliseum. One fateful night, Lawler hopped in the ring to aid a downed contestant, a woman named Foxy, and Kaufman’s fate was sealed: It was finally time for him to fight a man. 

In retrospect, it seems obvious the whole thing was staged, but that certainly didn’t dull the fight’s impact on the 10,000 people who filled the arena and followed along on TV. Lawler embodied those wrestling fans’ genuine animosity; in beating down this doughy coward in baggy long underwear, he would defend his sport’s dignity and theirs. And a beat-down is just what he delivered, flipping Kaufman upside down and dropping him twice on his head, with a dreaded piledriver move that sent the actor to the actual hospital. 

The story didn’t end there, though, and until well after Kaufman’s death from lung cancer, Lawler maintained his disdainful pose. When the pair appeared together on Letterman months after the match, Kaufman, still wearing a neck brace, threatened a lawsuit with such increasing agitation that Lawler stood up and slapped him in the face. Even when years had passed, when Lawler was asked by a reporter to comment on the comedian’s passing, he said, “I didn’t like Andy Kaufman, and Andy Kaufman didn’t like me. I’m the wrong person to talk to about that.”

In most retellings of their feud, Kaufman is the center of the story, but it was just as much Lawler who made it work. And today, that’s where Jim Cornette comes in. An old hand who famously helped train such future stars as John Cena, Dave Bautista, and Brock Lesnar, he’s just the guy to elucidate Lawler’s greatness. Below, appearing on VICE Digital’s “I Was There,” Cornette breaks down Kaufman vs. Lawler with his signature enthusiasm. Then, he shared some of his personal photos and dug into what made one of the wildest matchups in wrestling history—and the subject of an incredible episode of Tales from the Territories, streaming now on VICE TV—so magical.

VICE: Who was Jerry Lawler? What was his reputation?

Jim Cornette: Jerry Lawler was the top star in Memphis wrestling, which covered all of Tennessee and most of Kentucky and parts of Arkansas. He was a hometown boy, and he was just a natural—what we call in wrestling a worker. He could do the moves, but the biggest thing was his verbal ability. He could talk. He could either make you mad at him and want to come pay to see him get his ass kicked, or he could make you support him and want to pay to come see him win the World Title. 

The first year that Lawler was a main event star, in 1974, he was 23 years old, and they had 51 shows at the Mid-South Coliseum and sold just around 400,000 tickets—every week, 8,000 people saw Jerry Lawler in person. In the glory years in the 70s and 80s, during Lawler’s run, Memphis wrestling was the highest-rated local television program of any kind in the United States. When the World Series game did 136,000 homes, that same week Memphis Wrestling did 135,000. It beat network television, plus Lawler had his own local TV show too. 

So by the time Kaufman came up, Lawler was already the most popular and successful pro wrestler in the history of Memphis. And there’s no city in America today where pro wrestling is as popular as it was in Memphis in the 1980s.

How did wrestling influence Kaufman, even before he was fighting himself? 

When Andy was a kid in New York, he loved to watch wrestling. He was especially attracted to that kind of heel character—that bad guy who never broke the fourth wall, never let anybody in on what was going on. Before wrestling became the sports entertainment of today, whoever a wrestler was, he was that person in public. Verbally, visually, dress like it, act like it, talk like it, 24/7. It was like performance art. And on some level, you could see that with everything Andy did: He made audiences uncomfortable because he would never break character. Nobody knew really whether he was nuts or not, and that was his goal. 

When he started wrestling—in nightclubs, on talk shows, wherever he could—he knew he couldn’t wrestle men, but he knew enough to be able to wrestle women and avoid being beat for three minutes. He would challenge women out of the audience, and this was completely real. He did the whole male chauvinist pig thing, and he would make these ridiculous stipulations: If the woman beats me, I’ll give her $5,000. If she can beat me, I’ll marry her. He was playing the heel.

How did Kaufman and Lawler meet?

Since Andy is in New York, he goes to Madison Square Garden, and he talks to Vince McMahon, Sr., who was the promoter at that time. But Vince Sr. thought that having a little scrawny-guy comedian would make wrestling look fake or phony or silly. Back in those days, the fact wrestling was [scripted] was the most protected thing that the promoters and wrestlers had. So McMahon wouldn’t do it. But Andy talked to Bill Apter, who was the editor of several wrestling magazines, and Bill said, “A friend of mine down in Tennessee would probably love to have something like this.” They called Jerry Lawler, and he said come on down.

Can you talk more about believability and why people suspended their belief on this?

It comes down to the talent involved and the presentation. If Andy Kaufman had done it in New York, maybe he could have wrestled women and that would have been just OK. If he ended up wrestling the local hero in New York at that time, it would’ve been Bob Backlund, who’s the all-American boy champion. As my mother would say, Bob Backlund couldn’t say suey if the hogs had him—he wasn’t a great promo. He couldn’t have talked people into believing it like Lawler did. 

Lawler and Kaufman had completely different backgrounds, but they were both exactly the same in one regard. Once they inhabited a character—Jerry Lawler being Jerry “The King” Lawler, the king of Memphis wrestling, and Andy Kaufman being Andy Kaufman, the Inter-Gender Champion—they could make anybody believe anything they said. 

Ahead of the match, Andy Kaufman was making wrestling a joke on TV, and he was making wrestling a joke in interviews. He sent these videos where he was trying to teach the wrestling fans in Memphis how to brush their teeth, and he’d say, “This is a brush, and this is toothpaste, and you put it on like this and rub vigorously.” 

Meanwhile, Lawler is on the six-o’clock news in Memphis saying, “Hey, regardless of what anybody wants to say about wrestling, it’s my business and I take it very seriously. That’s the way I earn my living, and I’m not gonna let some little jerk comedian from Hollywood come in here and make us all look like idiots.” The newscaster says, “Jerry, are you gonna hurt him?” And Lawler says, “I think I have to hurt him.” 

Why would Jerry Lawler not wanna break this comedian’s neck if he’s making fun of the wrestling business? This is legitimately one of the biggest wrestling stars in the country and a network TV star. What is going on? For $5, we could find out.

Lawler’s fighting style helped, too, right? He kind of made it look like a barroom fight.

Yes, that’s another thing with Lawler. Now, you see all the guys like to do flips off the ropes and dives outta the ring and all that stuff. Lawler was a master of psychology, and that’s one of the things that any of the wrestlers that got in a ring with him universally said. He could control the crowd. He could put the match together with you where if you just listened and did what you were told, it would tear the house down. He could listen to the crowd and know what they wanted to see: when he should be down, when he should be up, when he should be fast, when he should be slow. In Memphis, they lived and died with Lawler and his triumphs and tragedies. 

At the end of the match, Lawler finishes him off with his dreaded pile driver, which was very cathartic but totally illegal. So Kaufman actually wins because Lawler is disqualified. What happened next?

Andy was lying there on the ground, not moving, and people were just ecstatic. They’re starting to throw garbage in the ring. The referee, Jerry Calhoun, goes over, and Andy says he wants an ambulance. So the referee asks Lawler if that’s OK. Lawler says, “Gee, we’ll have to pay for that. That’s like $300.” He said, “Just tell him that you can help him back.” And the referee goes back over to Andy and comes back over to Lawler and says, “Andy says he’ll pay for the ambulance.” Lawler gets on a microphone and says, “Hey, instead of calling him an ambulance, why don’t you call him a taxi?” And the people laugh again. 

Andy lay there in the middle of the coliseum with all those thousands of people throwing garbage at him for 20 minutes before the ambulance got there. Nobody was leaving, they wanted to see what would happen. Finally, the ambulance comes in, they get the gurney, they strap him onto the backboard, and wheel him outta the coliseum. And the people were just ecstatic over it. It made all the newspapers the next day. 

That night, I was staying at my cousin’s house, and his wife was a nurse on the floor at the hospital where they took Andy. When she comes home after her shift, she says, “So Lawler really hurt Kaufman, huh?” Everybody in the hospital believed it: Lawler hurt this guy for making fun of wrestling. Why else would a network television personality ride an ambulance to the hospital in Memphis and stay there for three days wearing a neck brace? 

They diagnosed him with, I think, a cervical sprain, or bruising. Any personal injury attorney will tell you that X-rays cannot disprove neck injuries. And so that’s why Andy did that. He stayed in the hospital for three days on his own dime, and he wore the neck brace not only then but everywhere on TV and for months. When they started the new season of Taxi, he tried to wear the neck brace on the show and they wouldn’t let him. 

Vince, Sr. was scared that if he booked Andy Kaufman in Madison Square Garden it would make wrestling look phony. But Jerry Lawler and Andy Kaufman in Memphis, because of the psychology that they approached it with and because of the way that they executed, they actually did more to make people believe wrestling was real than anything else done in the last 30 years. 

Decades later when you were training wrestlers, did you ever use the Kaufman-Lawler feud as a teaching tool?

Cornette: We did refer to it, and especially to Lawler. I used to give trainees—John Cena, Brock Lessner, Batista—tapes of great wrestlers, and Lawler was heavily featured. Even though wrestling now is more entertainment, and it’s more overproduced and overwritten with scripted interviews, the only way that anybody breaks through as a legitimate superstar is when they can transcend the material they’re given and make people believe that they are being legitimate in some fashion. Hulk Hogan, Steve Austin, the Rock, John Cena—the real money-makers in pro wrestling are now and always have been the people where you can say, “Yeah, wrestling’s fake or whatever you wanna say. But that guy, there’s something about him. He’s a real badass, or he’s really a good guy. You can tell he is a genuine human being.” In a preposterous scenario, the preposterous can become posterous.