Rewind: Mark Fleming

Some readers of this blog may remember a time when professional wrestlers were typically very large and stocky strongmen. Some were former football players while others had amateur wrestling backgrounds,  One wrestler who excelled at both is Mark Fleming from Virginia, USA. Fleming was a top-notch football player and wrestler in high school; he skipped college and went into professional wrestling in the early 1980s through Crockett Promotions. Fleming wrestled for several promotions in the 1980s, most notably The National Wrestling Alliance (NWA), the American Wrestling Association (AWA), and Mid-Atlantic Championship Wrestling, among others. At the height of his career, he stood 6'1" (185 cm) and weighed 255 lbs (116 kg). After Fleming retired from the squared circle in the early 1990s, he put up a weightlifting gym and wrote a memoir called "It's Wrestling, Not Rasslin." He's now sixty years old. You can read more about his in-ring career here.