Claude “Thunderbolt” Patterson, a Black pro wrestler who was blacklisted from one of the most well-known promotions in the 1970s in part due to deeply ingrained racism in the business, will be inducted into the WWE’s Hall of Fame next month.
Patterson, 82, a burly, smooth-talking wrestler will join inductees Paul Heyman, Bull Nakano, the tag team The U.S. Express and boxer Muhammad Ali at the company’s ceremony on April 5 at the Wells Fargo Center in Philadelphia.
Patterson displayed one of the more unique promo voices in the business, speaking in a low, smooth and rhythmic cadence that mirrored that of Black actors during the blaxploitation era of cinema. His catchphrases included “Can ya dig,” “Let me tell ya somethin,” and “We gonna get funky.” His style was imitated by white wrestlers such as Dusty Rhodes and Brian “Road Dogg” James.
“I was the originator of the shuck-and-jive style,” Patterson told The Atlanta Journal-Constitution in 1999.
Patterson was born in Waterloo, Iowa, in 1941, working at John Deere Tractor Works before starting his wrestling career in Kansas City, Missouri, in 1964. After less than a year, he moved on to Texas to work with promoter Dory Funk Sr., the father of legendary hardcore wrestler Terry Funk.
Patterson would go on to work in countless National Wrestling Alliance (NWA) territories, the former governing body of pro wrestling, including Michigan, Ohio, Georgia, Florida and Charlotte, North Carolina, the territory run by legendary promoter Jim Crockett, whose promotion would eventually become World Championship Wrestling, or WCW, the chief rival to WWE in the 1990s.
In Charlotte, he teamed with Gerald “Jerry” Briscoe, who acted with Pat Patterson as the henchmen for the on-screen character of then-WWE chief executive Vince McMahon in the late 1990s. While traveling together on the road, Patterson and Briscoe were offered R&B singer James Brown’s private jet by the Godfather of Soul himself. Patterson also was in a tag-team with Ernie Ladd, who was inducted into the WWE Hall of Fame in 1995, in International Championship Wrestling out of Lexington, Kentucky, as the “Soul Patrol.”
While it was uncommon for Black wrestlers to win championships then — Ron “R-Truth” Killings was the first recognized Black NWA heavyweight champion when he won the title in 2002 — Patterson was a prolific champion. He won, among other titles, the Worldwide Wrestling Associates tag team championship, NWA Brass Knuckles championship, NWA Florida heavyweight championship and the NWA National Tagers championship with Ole Anderson, one of the founding members of vaunted stable The Four Horsemen.
But Patterson’s was significantly stalled after barely a decade in the business. By the 1970s, his bookings began to dry up due to his unflinching attitude toward his humanity and his working conditions. He advocated for a more equal pay system with promoters and better rights for the wrestlers. (After Patterson retired in 1985, he lobbied state governments to regulate wrestling as they do boxing, including ringside physicians, which the WWE employs today.)
Paul Boesch
When Patterson worked as a heel, his character was that of an aggrieved Black man, upset with his treatment by the white establishment, which mirrored the way wrestling promoters treated him.
In 2003, Patterson was a plaintiff in a federal lawsuit against WCW, which said that a company executive told Patterson that “we don’t need no n——” in the company. He was subjected to racial slurs and taunts from the audience, and on numerous occasions worked in territories that were notorious for being the home of the Ku Klux Klan.
While some wrestlers, like Jerry Briscoe, were understanding of Patterson’s position as a Black man in the industry during the Jim Crow era, not everyone was.
“He thinks you’re being prejudicial for anything you do. If you say hello, you’re being prejudicial. If you say goodbye,” Ole Anderson wrote in his 2003 book, Inside Out. In the WCW lawsuit, Patterson said, Anderson once called him the N-word.
After Patterson retired, he became a minister, a mentor to youths in Georgia, and a labor organizer for Coca-Cola janitorial workers in Atlanta. Patterson was inducted into the NWA Wrestling Legends Hall of Heroes (2008) and George Tragos/Lou Thesz Professional Wrestling Hall of Fame (2019).
“I give it all to God because I never would have imagined in my wildest dreams that I would one day be inducted into the Hall of Fame,” he told The Post and Courier in South Carolina in 2019.
“It’s one of the highest honors, but that’s why you start anything … to go to the top.”
