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As a young lad, professional wrestling was a huge part of my life. In addition to watching it with a passion – right after Soul Train and American Bandstand on Saturday afternoons – my friends and I even built a wooden rasslin’ ring in my back yard, which would have given our insurance agent a heart attack if he had seen it before Slim jumped off the top rope and brought the entire thing down around us.
My friends and I spent many a Monday night at the West Palm Beach Auditorium, watching such luminaries of the squared circle as Jack Brisco, Killer Khan, Ernie Ladd, Bugsy McGraw, Harley Race and Dusty Rhodes do their sports entertainment thing. The National Wrestling Alliance, the No. 1 company in Florida at the time, was always putting on some kind of special main event, from having an extended 60-minute time limit (never a good idea) to holding a steel cage match (always a good idea).
However, my favorite of these gimmicky events was the classic loser-leave-town match. This was the kind of match where the wrestler who lost – now follow me closely here – had to leave town afterward and not come back. For how long, who knows, but at the time it seemed pretty cool to be able to banish someone from the land by just pinning their shoulders to the mat for a three count.
I thought about those bloodletting matches for the first time in many moons while reading an article in one of our affiliate newspapers, The News Observer in Blue Ridge, Ga., about a man who has been banished from Fannin County, Ga., as part of a plea agreement. The man – Charles Ray Geyer, then 65, of Morganton, Ga. – was charged with aggravated cruelty to animals, two counts of cruelty to children, criminal damage to property and reckless conduct when the crimes took place on June 7, 2021.
According to sheriff’s reports, a Morganton woman told deputies she was cleaning her chicken coop, while her 9-year-old boy and his 1-year-old brother were playing with the family’s two dogs in the driveway, when Geyer came out of the woods and shot the German shepherd dog with the children nearby. Geyer told deputies the dog had come onto his property and killed his chickens, which clearly wasn’t a good enough reason to discharge a weapon around young kids.
Geyer was taken into custody following the shooting and released on a $21,000 bond. In addition to being banished from Fannin County, the plea he agreed to gives him a short period of time to complete anger management treatment. If Geyer does not meet all of these conditions, his probation will be revoked, and he will begin serving a prison sentence of 10 years, with five to serve. Just imagine how angry he’d be then.
In Cherokee County, when some people have had trouble with a neighbor’s dogs coming onto their property and acting aggressively, they’ve been told to carry a firearm and take care of the problem themselves. However, Geyer’s case shows what can go wrong when someone opens fire on an animal that is not on their property at the time.
After checking around, kicking someone out of the county has been a fairly common punishment sought in the tri-state area over the years, particularly among those whose crimes involved children. Of course, the offender could just move to the next county over and continue being a negative element in that community – but at least he’s no longer our problem, amirite?
And – just to confirm – yes, I know of law enforcement officials who have picked up specific individuals, dropped them off at the county line and strongly encouraged them to walk in the other direction. While that wasn’t a consensual, formal nor official agreement, it certainly seemed to get the message across.
Of course, when taken too far, that kind of approach can lead to things like First Blood, the movie that started mistreated U.S. military veteran John Rambo off on a series of adventures that ended with a lot of guys on the other side going to funerals. So perhaps banishments are better left to wrestling promotions.
David Brown is publisher of the Cherokee Scout. Call him at 828-837-5122 or email, dbrown@cherokeescout.com.