Saturday night in the Rice Media Center was transformed into a Friday night at the old Sam Houston Coliseum as nostalgic fans relived a local spectacle from a bygone era.
Along the walls hung historical photographs showing spectators screaming for a fight. Garishly dressed competitors enter the arena as the audience yells for blood. Behind the ropes of a sporting ring, sweating athletes fly through the air and slam into each other in what looks like mortal combat.
“Now that … was wrestling,” said a fan waiting in line for an autograph, clutching his new copy of “Friday Night in the Coliseum.”
Almost a half-century has passed since longtime Rice photography professor Geoff Winningham devoted his Friday nights to documenting the phenomenon of professional wrestling at the Sam Houston Coliseum. Now his acclaimed 1971 book — praised by critics from The New York Times, the Village Voice and Newsweek — has been revived in a new edition with more than 200 photographs and new archival inkjet prints. And the Rice Media Center is showcasing his work with an exhibition open through March 24.
The show’s opening reception on Feb. 22 was a celebration of a lost era when professional wrestling was a weekly tradition in Houston. Television stations across the country carried broadcasts of local wrestling matches and made their promoters and announcers into citywide celebrities. In the 1980s, the World Wrestling Federation began to dominate the sport and locally produced American wrestling became lost to history. But visitors attending Winningham's exhibition said it felt like they'd taken a step back in time that put them right in their old front-row seats.
“That’s the magic of photography," Winningham said. "It’s a way of holding on to things that are going, that are gone. This would be all gone if it weren’t for photography and film to preserve this marvelous folk theater. I love that people can come and say, ‘I was there in the front row, this takes me right back there.'”
Timed to coincide with the publication of a new edition of his book, the retrospective features not only archival photographs but also video clips from Winningham’s rarely seen 16 mm black-and-white film of the Houston wrestling scene in the early 1970s.
Winningham has been a fixture at Rice for decades. As a student, he photographed President John F. Kennedy’s historic moon speech at Rice Stadium. After he earned his undergraduate degree in English from Rice in 1965, he stayed on campus to teach photography and became the Lynette S. Autrey Chair in the Humanities and Professor of Photography.
ningham’s work, heralding it as “The Rousin’ Rebirth of Rasslin’.”
“I returned to the coliseum each Friday night for nine months, continuing to photograph the drama, the beauty and the humanity of Houston wrestling,” Winningham said.
Winningham's exhibition is part of a series of events this year to mark the 50th anniversary of the Rice Media Center, which is free and open to the public from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Monday through Friday.
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