Professional wrestling, for all its glitz and LED screens now, used to be a dirty, smoky thing. It belonged to armories, to high school gyms with folding chairs, to nights where the crowd’s beer was warmer than the lighting. And out of that old world, few embodied it quite like Jimmy Golden — the Alabama-born journeyman who morphed into Bunkhouse Buck, a character that looked like he’d just crawled out of a honky-tonk brawl at 3 a.m. and was still swinging.
Golden’s career was long, winding, and stitched together with barbed wire and stubbornness. He wasn’t the biggest star. He wasn’t the flashiest worker. But he was the kind of guy promoters called when they needed Southern grit, a believable heel, and a man who could make a crowd in Mobile, Alabama want to climb the rail and try their luck.
Born Into the Business
Jimmy Golden didn’t stumble into wrestling. He was born into it, a branch of the Golden-Welch-Fuller dynasty that churned out grapplers like Tennessee churns out whiskey. His father Billy Golden was a wrestler. His cousins were the Fuller boys — Robert and Ron — and his family tree was a hall of fame of Southern promoters and talent. Wrestling wasn’t a career choice. It was the family farm, and Jimmy was expected to plow his row.
He broke in around 1968, cutting his teeth in Alabama. The kid had height, he had the look, and most importantly, he had that mean streak. He teamed with Robert Fuller in the early ‘70s and even made a tour of Australia for Jim Barnett, getting the kind of experience you can’t buy — long flights, short payoffs, and learning how to get punched in the mouth without losing your smile.
The Stud Stable and the Dirty South
By the 1980s, Golden was entrenched in Southeastern Championship Wrestling and later Continental, stomping around Pensacola and Mobile as part of the Stud Stable, managed by Ron Fuller. The Stable was a Southern heel machine: dirty boots, brass knuckles, and storylines that always seemed to end with someone bleeding all over Alabama.
Golden thrived as a heel. He wasn’t the cartoon villain. He wasn’t twirling a mustache. He was the guy you hated because he reminded you of the bully who stole your lunch money and then stole your girlfriend too. He was believable because Jimmy Golden didn’t play tough — he was tough.
The feuds of that era — Rock ‘n’ Roll Express, Tommy and Johnny Rich, Tracy Smothers and Steve Armstrong — weren’t technical showcases. They were knock-down, drag-out scraps, where half the fun was watching Golden spit on the babyface before getting his nose rearranged.
Smoky Mountain and the Old Grudge
When Jim Cornette resurrected old-school wrestling with Smoky Mountain Wrestling in the early ‘90s, Golden slid right in. By then he was a grizzled veteran, but still game to go toe-to-toe with the Rock ‘n’ Roll Express all over again. His feud with Robert Gibson — and by extension Ricky Morton — rekindled the same old dance from the ‘80s.
It was proof that Golden had staying power. He didn’t need pyro or catchphrases. He just needed a microphone, a bad attitude, and a forearm across the bridge of your nose.
Enter Bunkhouse Buck
In 1994, WCW came calling, and Golden — now pushing his mid-40s — reinvented himself as Bunkhouse Buck, a mean, grimy cowboy who looked like he’d wandered in from a cattle drive gone wrong. Managed by his cousin Robert Fuller, now flamboyantly rebranded as Col. Rob Parker, Buck feuded with Dustin Rhodes and teamed with Dick Slater to win the WCW World Tag Team Titles.
The gimmick was simple: Buck fought like a man who had too many unpaid bar tabs and too many ex-wives. His matches weren’t pretty, but they weren’t supposed to be. He’d throw wild punches, rake eyes, stomp boots into ribs, and cackle while doing it. He was the living embodiment of “southern-fried heel.”
In 1995, the Wrestling Observer named him and Slater the Worst Tag Team of the Year. But that’s the funny thing about wrestling: sometimes the worst team is the one you remember. Nobody recalls the midcard vanilla teams. But people remember Bunkhouse Buck, because he felt like he could actually be in the parking lot after the show, waiting with a chain in his hand.
Swagger’s Daddy and the Long Goodbye
Golden’s WCW run ended in the late ‘90s, and he drifted back to the indies, the familiar circuit of small-town promotions where his name still drew. Then, in 2010, he made one last bizarre splash in WWE — playing Jack Swagger’s father on SmackDown. Swagger promptly abandoned him to be tombstoned by Kane. Weeks later, MVP beat him up too. Welcome to Stamford, Jimmy.
But even that cameo fit. Golden always excelled at being the sacrificial lamb, the tough old bastard who took a beating so someone else could look like a monster.
He wrestled on and off into the 2010s, even grabbing the Tennessee Mountain Wrestling Heavyweight Title in 2011, before finally hanging it up in 2020.
Legacy of a Barroom Heel
Jimmy Golden won plenty of regional belts, but his true achievement was being one of the last great territory heels. He didn’t have Ric Flair’s robes. He didn’t have Hulk Hogan’s tan. He had something simpler: authenticity. When Golden sneered at a babyface, fans believed it. When Bunkhouse Buck threw a punch, people swore they heard the bones crunch.
He came from a family that built the Southern scene, and he carried that torch for decades. He was, in every sense, the working-class villain — the guy who showed up in dirty jeans, spat tobacco, and reminded fans that evil didn’t always come in flashy tights. Sometimes it came with a cowboy hat and a mean streak.
Epilogue
When you look back on the Bunkhouse Buck run, you don’t think about five-star classics. You think about the atmosphere — the jeers, the heat, the feeling that maybe, just maybe, this guy wasn’t pretending. That’s the magic of Jimmy Golden. He blurred the line between performance and reality until fans wanted to throw their folding chairs into the ring.
Wrestling needs its champions, its heroes, its high flyers. But it also needs its Bunkhouse Bucks — the men who make the good guys look better, who keep the business grounded in grit, who remind you of the barfight side of pro wrestling.
And in that regard, Jimmy Golden was the real deal: a brawler, a heat magnet, and one hell of a Southern heel, right up until the boots came off.