"Hot Stuff" Eddie Gilbert: The Uncrowned King of Professional Wrestling
New book and a tribute to a pro wrestling legend
March 8th, 1987, Tulsa, Oklahoma, UWF TV Title Match
“Hot Stuff” Eddie Gilbert (challenger) vs Savanah Jack (champion)
Eddie Gilbert struts to the ring wearing a bright, shiny red jacket that extends in the back to his hamstrings. Red wrestling pants with a yellow design running down each side, white boots and sunglasses complement the jacket to provide a lively display of ring gear that matches Gilbert’s lively wrestling persona in the ring and on the mic.
After the bell rings signifying the start of the match, it’s the defending champion Savanah Jack who gains the initial advantage with an arm drag that sends Gilbert sprawling several feet away. The challenger looks perturbed as he sits on the mats and looks up towards to his opponent.
Gilbert slowly rises, glaring at Savanah Jack, and then moves forward for a lock up. Savanah Jack quickly puts Gilbert in a headlock and then thrusts him towards the ring ropes. Gilbert bounces off the ropes and on the rebound he delivers a shoulder bump to Savanah Jack, but the champion doesn’t move. Gilbert looks stunned by this.
Neither wrestler gains any level of control for the next few minutes.
Then Savanah Jack whips Gilbert off the ropes and on the rebound Gilbert leaps frog over his opponent. When Gilbert’s feet hit the mat, he falls down clutching his ankle.
The ref goes to check Gilbert to see how badly he is injured.
Gilbert, sitting on the mat, scoots himself back to a ring corner, and Savanah Jack slowly approaches him. Suddenly, Gilbert leaps up and punches the champion, sending him down to the mat. Then Gilbert stomps him a few times. There was no ankle injury. It was all a ruse by Gilbert. When Savanah Jack finally rises to his feet, Gilbert promptly sends him back down to the mat with an uppercut.
The champion rallies back though after Gilbert misses an elbow drop, and a hard punch to the jaw staggers Gilbert. Savanah Jack goes to whip Gilbert into the opposite corner, but Gilbert partially reverses it, and then in very fast movement Savanah Jack does his own reversal, and the momentum sends Gilbert crashing into the ref. The force of the collision sends the ref through the ropes and out to the floor.
Savanah Jack delivers a superkick in an attempt to finish the match, but there’s no referee to make the count.
In comes Iceman King Parsons, with a white cloth and a spray bottle. He sprays the cloth with an unknown substance and then rubs the soaked cloth all over the champion’s face. Within seconds, Savanah Jack falls to the mat unconscious. Gilbert reacts quickly and makes the cover. His valet Missy Hyatt, who accompanies Gilbert to the ring, shoves the referee back in the through the ropes.
1..2…3 and we have a new UWF TV champion.
The commentator, Jim Ross, screams, “This is robbery!”
That match was my introduction to “Hot Stuff” Eddie Gilbert. UWF had just started airing on syndicated television on Saturday afternoons in my area. The promotion had undergone a rebranding the prior year in an attempt to go national and was formerly known as Mid South Wrestling.
UWF had great talent across the board and was different from the other national promotions of the time, WWF, NWA or AWA, because UWF had mostly competitive matches on TV where two stars faced each other. For the other promotions, you generally had to buy a ticket and attend a live event (called house shows in those days) to see the stars wrestle each other. The TV shows of that era from the national promotions largely consisted of quick squash/one-sided matches with the star wrestling one of the regular enhancement wrestlers (back then referred to as “jobbers”.)
“Hot Stuff” Eddie Gilbert quickly became one of my favorites on the UWF television show. He was the leader of his own faction, Hot Stuff & Hyatt International, when I first saw him, and I thought Gilbert exuded the personification of a confident, cocky heel who was full of charisma when he spoke and wrestled. In his faction, besides Missy Hyatt, were rising stars Sting and Rick Steiner. Gilbert acted in the capacity of both mentor and manager to the two other wrestlers and was excellent in the role.
I didn’t know it at the time when I first saw him wrestle in 1987, but despite being just 26 years old Gilbert was already a veteran pro wrestler having debuted ten years earlier. Prior to UWF, I would later learn that Gilbert had wrestled in several promotions including Continental Wrestling Federation and the WWF.
In the WWF, Gilbert did an angle where he was the protégé of champion Bob Backlund and got injured by Backlund’s adversary The Masked Superstar (who would be rebranded as Demolition Ax a few years later). The angle played off a real-life car accident Gilbert had been in a few months prior where he suffered severe injuries that were thought would end his career as a pro wrestler.
When the UWF was absorbed into the NWA, Eddie Gilbert was one of the UWF wrestlers brought into the promotion and he remained there for a few years. It was in the NWA where I finally got to see Gilbert wrestle live.
Eddie Gilbert also worked behind-the-scenes in the wrestling business as a booker, the person responsible for putting the angles/storylines together. He did this for UWF, NWA and several other promotions.
In 1995, at age 33, “Hot Stuff” Eddie Gilbert died from a heart attack. At the time, he had just begun working for the Puerto Rico based World Wrestling Council as both the booker and a wrestler.
A BOOK OVER A DECADE IN THE WORKS
In April 2025, Doug Gilbert, Eddie’s brother, and Gene Jackson released the book they co-authored "Hot Stuff" Eddie Gilbert: The Uncrowned King of Wrestling. It covers the life and career of Eddie Gilbert and is a book that was first began over a decade ago.
“I first started working on a book about Eddie back in 2009,” Gene Jackson told The Pro Wresting Exuberant. “I did a lot of research and spoke with a lot of people about Eddie including his parents. However, Doug was super busy at the time, and we never got together about the book. I ended up going through a divorce and a lot of personal issues and I put the book on hold and just never got around to picking it back up.
Last year, Doug reached out to me to inquire about whatever happened with the book I’d been working on years before as he too had been working on a book about Eddie for a number of years.”
That led to the two starting a weekly podcast together. They later added pro wrestling legend Tommy Rich to the show. During that time, Doug was approached by a book publisher about writing a book on the Gilbert family.
Tommy Gilbert, Eddie and Doug’s father, was a pro wrestler from 1969 to 1984 and worked in many different territories of the era. He died in 2015.
Doug Gilbert debuted as a pro wrestler in 1986 and has wrestled in promotions all over the world.
“[When] Doug was approached by a publisher about doing a book on his family, he asked me if I would be interested in being a co-author,” said Gene. “Eventually we decided we wanted to finally do the book [together] on Eddie that we both always wanted to do and would do another book down the line about the rest of the family,” said Gene.
Gene and Doug officially started working together on “Hot Stuff" Eddie Gilbert: The Uncrowned King of Wrestling in December 2024.
“We were able to combine the projects we had worked on separately [about Eddie] into one book that we rewrote together,” explained Gene.
They manuscript was finished in less than four months.
The narrative voice in the book is from Doug’s point of view on his experiences with his brother and it also weaves in other people’s stories about Eddie Gilbert based on interviews that Gene conducted.
“I’ve been asked for decades to write a book or get someone to write a book [about Eddie], but really with this being the 30th year of Eddie’s passing and people still asking, I thought this was the best time,” Doug told The Pro Wrestling Exuberant.
Many long-time wrestling fans, who have watched pro wrestling since the '80s, may know Eddie Gilbert best from his runs in UWF and NWA, like I did. Doug and Gene said the book covers both those runs and the entire scope of the period before and after.
“We certainly cover that [UWF and NWA] stage of Eddie’s career in depth but we managed to cover Eddie’s entire career from breaking in until his last run in Puerto Rico,” noted Gene.
What are some of the things long-time wrestling fans can expect to learn about Eddie Gilbert from reading this book that they may not have known previously?
“There’s a lot about Eddie’s time as a writer and photographer in high school and breaking into the wrestling business, his sports background in high school and his interest in politics throughout his life. Plus, Doug has a lot of insight into what went into a lot of the decisions Eddie made in and out of the ring. Not to mention insight into his booking philosophies as well,” said Gene.
Eddie Gilbert had a very diversified and broad experience in the pro wrestling business, not just as a wrestler but also as an on-camera manager and as a booker.
From reading the book, Doug says that wrestling fans will learn a lot about “what went on behind the scenes, especially when it comes to Eddie’s way of booking and how he creative he was.”
Gene notes that there’s not only a lot of stories about Eddie’s experiences booking in various territories but also about all the different wrestlers whose careers he influenced as a booker, manager, and mentor.
In covering the entirety of Eddie Gilbert's career, this includes the territory era of pro wrestling that many newer pro wrestling may be unfamiliar with. For fans that are not familiar with Eddie Gilbert's career, the authors feel that from reading the book they will not just learn about Eddie Gilbert but the pro wrestling business itself.
“I think fans will be interested in knowing how political the territory days were, yes Eddie worked in many territories, but what many wrestling fans don't know is how it worked behind the scenes in terms of jealousy, backstabbing, and again politics,” said Doug.
Gene notes how Eddie Gilbert’s pro wrestler career occurred in parts of three different decades.
“Starting out in the late 70s and wrestling into the mid 1990s, Eddie’s story spans across interesting changes in the business itself,” said Gene. “{It goes] from the territory days where wrestling on television only existed to promote that week’s local card, in whatever area it was airing in, to the era where wrestling was starting to be presented as its own television entity in an episodic way.
TV then not only aimed to sell tickets but also it was aimed at being a “must see” show each and every week that built upon itself. Eddie was very influential in that style of booking and that sort of television writing not only in Memphis and Continental but also in WCW and ECW when he was booking in those promotions as well, not to mention in Puerto Rico.”
“Hot Stuff" Eddie Gilbert: The Uncrowned King of Wrestling can be purchased via the publisher’s website at "Hot Stuff" Eddie Gilbert: The Uncrowned King of Wrestling or through Amazon, Barnes & Noble or Books-A-Million.
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Eddie could've even go back to ECW as a booker mending fences with Paul Heyman and having the ✏️ in their TNN era keeping ECW around past 2001 when the likes of AJ Styles, Abyss, Christopher Daniels, CM Punk, Jay and Mark Briscoe, Bryan Danielson, Colt Cabana and the 2000s indie guys coming up to give ECW a fresh coat of paint with RVD as ECW World heavyweight Champion even getting both Shane Douglas, Mike Awesome, Raven back from WCW.
Imagine Eddie Gilbert booking into the Monday Night Wars / Attitude era? He could've be given the book in WCW in late 1998 keeping the pencil ✏️ away from both Hogan and Nash and maybe save WCW the trouble of hiring Vince Russo as booker (maybe have Eddie filter out Russo's good ideas from his bad ideas that sunk WCW).