Either way, what’s indisputable is that Hogan felt underappreciated despite incredible fan support, and when Vince Jr. came calling, Hogan was eager to be snatched away. His debut on that 1983 card in St. Louis against the forgotten Bill Dixon wasn’t just a homecoming; it was the start of a new era.
The match was taped and aired a week later on local television as an episode of Wrestling at the Chase, the flagship television program of Sam Muchnick’s midwestern wrestling empire. In fact, the twenty-four-year run of Wrestling at the Chase had ended four months prior, and this was the first installment of a new iteration, put on by McMahon’s WWF. Much in the same way that Vince had tried to expand into the South by swallowing up Georgia Championship Wrestling’s Saturday night TBS timeslot, Vince’s earliest scheme for national expansion clearly was not so much a model of revolution as it was built on the idea of usurping existing wrestling institutions.
Not only was it an affront to the ethos of the territorial system for the WWF to be running a show in St. Louis, but McMahon himself was announcing that card* alongside “Mean” Gene Okerlund, who would become famous as an interviewer in the WWF but who, like Hogan, had just been stolen away from the AWA. There was an industry-wide stigma against stealing talent from other promotions, and if the talent themselves decided to leave, they were expected to stick around long enough to finish out their storylines. More often then not, this entailed losing in humiliating fashion on the way out the door. Neither Hogan nor Okerlund finished out their schedules; in fact, according to Verne Gagne, they were paid extra by McMahon to do the opposite.
With the reacquisition of Hogan, McMahon showed that he wasn’t averse to tearing down the status quo. And he was going to shake up the industry by shaking up the WWF itself. The night before Hogan’s match in St. Louis, world champion Bob Backlund lost the title to the Iron Sheik, the very kind of transitional heel champion that Superstar Graham was not. The Sheik took the title solely to pass it to Hogan, and it’s telling that the first half of the transition took place before Hogan even debuted.
On January 7, Hogan solidified his heroic bona fides by saving Backlund from a beatdown, and on January 23, he famously beat the Iron Sheik to claim the WWF title. His match with Dixon had actually been fairly technical, as Hogan showed off some of the chain wrestling skills he had learned in old-school AWA matches, but by the time he defeated the Sheik, Hogan had already perfected his new style of in-ring storytelling: an introductory offensive barrage, mostly consisting of punches, clotheslines, and an odd reliance on heelish illegal tactics, after which he would lose the upper hand, taking a severe beating from his opponent before finding his second wind, “Hulking Up,”* and disposing of his foil with an Irish Whip, big boot, and running leg drop.
After Hogan disposed of the Iron Sheik, announcer Gorilla Monsoon swooned: “Hulkamania is here!”
Hogan and Okerlund weren’t the only names that McMahon poached. Within months, almost the entire top-tier roster was made up of wrestlers who got their starts elsewhere: Jesse “The Body” Ventura and manager Bobby “The Brain” Heenan also came from the AWA; the Junkyard Dog and King Kong Bundy were most recently from Mid-South; Ricky “The Dragon” Steamboat, Greg “The Hammer” Valentine, and “Rowdy” Roddy Piper all had been wrestling in the Crockett territory; Wendi Richter was fresh from Stampede Wrestling; and Mike Rotunda, Barry Windham, and Big John Studd were from Florida. Most of those guys had moved around fairly frequently through their careers, but the binge of signings was unusual for the era—and an affront to those other prominent promotions that were left suddenly shorthanded. McMahon’s appeal to the wrestlers in question wasn’t just his vision; it was the promise of big money and a guaranteed contract—and it was the absence of such contracts that allowed McMahon to nab most of those stars without any sort of legal repercussion. Other promoters were so entrenched in tradition—or so convinced of the disposability of individual wrestlers—that it hardly occurred to them to offer comparable contracts to their own talent. It’s fair to say that in some ways McMahon didn’t so much reinvent the wrestling world as he just brought it up to date.
McMahon would not be content to be a big-time wrestling promoter; he also wanted to be culturally relevant—something the wrestling world hadn’t been in decades. A fortuitous meeting on an airplane between WWF (on-screen) manager Captain Lou Albano and pop star Cyndi Lauper—whose (real-life) manager and boyfriend Dave Wolff was a wrestling fan—led to Albano playing Lauper’s father in her “Girls Just Want to Have Fun” video, and then to Lauper appearing on WWF television. She feuded by proxy with Albano, who tried to take credit for her fame: They each chose a woman wrestler—Wendi Richter for Lauper and the Fabulous Moolah for Albano—to headline a card on MTV called “The Brawl to End It All.”
The interaction between the rising tides of music videos and of pro wrestling introduced the pop culture mainstream to McMahon’s new, Technicolor take on old-school rasslin’, and introduced the existing wrestling audience to the Rock ’n’ Wrestling Era, which led to further MTV bouts and a children’s cartoon that saw Hulk Hogan and his merry band of multiethnic buddies (“Superfly” Jimmy Snuka, Junkyard Dog, Andre the Giant, et al.) in outlandish hijinks opposite “Rowdy” Roddy Piper and his crew of dimwit toughs (the Iron Sheik, Nikolai Volkoff, etc.). Suddenly the WWF, with Hogan as its figurehead, was everywhere, and pro wrestling as a whole was once again emerging as a cultural force. As Sports Illustrated put it in 1985:
In the most recent Nielsen ratings, four of the nation’s 10 top-rated cable-TV programs were wrestling shows. Two of them are produced by Vince McMahon Jr., commander in chief of the WWF; on the USA Network, McMahon’s wrestling shows generate higher ratings than college basketball, tennis or hockey. The other two wrestling shows, which until last month were also McMahon productions, are on the WTBS superstation, where wrestling does better than college football. In Memphis,* a Saturday morning wrestling show is the third-highest-rated television program, trailing only Dallas and Dynasty.
On March 31, 1985, McMahon put on an event called WrestleMania.* Jim Crockett Promotions, which had a national audience from its TBS show, had already started running its annual NWA Starrcade show on Thanksgiving 1983, distributing it throughout its southeastern fanbase via closed-circuit television.* But McMahon was determined to set a new standard, showing his WrestleMania card nationwide on closed-circuit and, perhaps more centrally, loading his show with mainstream celebrities—Mr. T, Muhammad Ali, Liberace—who would attract an ever-widening WWF audience. In the end, more than a million people watched the event. According to WWF lore, McMahon’s investment in the event was such that, had it flopped, the WWF would have gone out of business.
Meanwhile, the other wrestling promotions were scrambling to make up some of the ground that McMahon had already claimed. The Crockett promotion joined up with Championship Wrestling from Georgia, the CWA from Memphis, and the AWA to form a confederacy called Pro Wrestling USA, but it collapsed under the weight of internecine squabbling.
The next year, WrestleMania 2—which featured Hogan squaring off against the blubbery King Kong Bundy—was broadcast on the new technology of pay-per-view television, which would prove to be a financial paradigm shift in the wrestling world. The main event of WrestleMania III featured Hogan going up against monolithic archrival Andre the Giant. That night, the WWF set an indoor attendance record at the Pontiac Silverdome.* In the years that followed, WrestleMania would become an annual tradition, and the WWF would add other annual events—soon simply called “pay-per-views”—that would serve as tentpoles around which the television product was structured.
The Survivor Series—a unique event format where teams of five battled, elimination-style, until one team was fully defeated—was launched on Thanksgiving night in 1987 as a bid to parlay the Hulk Hogan–Andre the Giant feud into a new, second pay-per-view and simultaneously steamroll the competition. The Crockett promotion by this point was
expanding drastically, buying out NWA affiliates in Florida, Georgia, and Bill Watts’s Mid-South territory, which had recently been rebranded as the UWF (for Universal Wrestling Federation) with an eye toward a national expansion of its own. In a show of national presence, Crockett decided to hold Starrcade 1987 in Chicago, far outside the promotion’s normal stomping grounds (previous Starrcades had always been in Atlanta or Greensboro, North Carolina), and to air the event for the first time on pay-per-view. With the WWF’s clout in the PPV arena already entrenched, McMahon saw an opening. He told cable providers that he was going to air his own show—the Survivor Series—that night, and if any of them showed Starrcade instead, he wouldn’t let them show WrestleMania IV. (Some retellings say that McMahon threatened that they’d never do business with the WWF again at all.) The cable companies by and large assented to McMahon’s power grab, and the NWA took a huge financial hit.
The following January, the NWA had scheduled a PPV featuring the Bunkhouse Stampede, a rough-and-tumble variation on the battle royal.* Again, McMahon went the route of cutthroat capitalism and put on his own battle royal–style event, the Royal Rumble, on free TV on the same night. (To see which wrestling promotion prevailed, check your cable package for NWA shows.) The difference between the two shows couldn’t have been plainer. The Bunkhouse Stampede was gritty and real, as if the NWA was using the PPV format to push wrestling back in the direction of its earlier days, when the violence was closer to wrestling’s surface. The Rumble, on the other hand, was shiny and contrived, a mainstream confection as only the WWF could produce. Again, the WWF succeeded. The NWA fought back by airing a Clash of the Champions card on broadcast TBS television on the same night as WrestleMania IV; the WWF show’s ratings were lower than expected, but the writing was already on the wall for the Crocketts. Facing bankruptcy due to overexpansion and profligate spending, they sold the company to Ted Turner in November 1988.
S.D. JONES
There had been wrestling megacards before WrestleMania, but they had been regional affairs, and even though they were in basketball and football stadiums, nobody would dare call them national ventures.
That all changed when Vince McMahon the younger took the reins of his father’s company, and, within a few years, bought out his partners, and wagered the whole operation on turning a New York–area wrestling company into a modern juggernaut. That first WrestleMania show wasn’t the multi-main-event card of its latter-day incarnations, but it was stocked nonetheless with epic battles: Junkyard Dog vs. Greg “The Hammer” Valentine, Andre the Giant vs. Big John Studd, Hulk Hogan and Mr. T vs. “Rowdy” Roddy Piper and Paul Orndorff. Earlier in the night, shuffled in among the pageantry and bloodlust, was a match between a titanic, hairless mountain of clay named King Kong Bundy and an unspectacular, upbeat WWF mainstay named S.D. (short for “Special Delivery”) Jones—or, as announcer Lord Alfred Hayes referred to him, with palpable awkwardness, “that great star S.D. Jones.”
Twenty-four seconds and the match was over: Jones charged Bundy; Bundy slammed him into the corner; Jones regained his footing; Bundy ran in and pancaked him; Jones fell to the mat; Bundy splashed his nearly 500 pounds down onto him. Before Bundy’s flab even settled, the referee was halfway into his three count: It was a fait accompli in a world of fixed finishes. Jones was only ever there to get beat.
The man who would one day become S.D. Jones, Conrad Efraim, worked for the phone company until he decided to take up the wrestling trade. He was trained by Johnny Rodz (né John Rodriguez), legendary for his decades as a trainer at Gleason’s Gym in Brooklyn if not so much for his unstellar career. Judging only on ignominy, he would be the perfect teacher for Efraim; as WWE.com puts it with characteristic earnestness, “While he may have lost more than he won, Rodz’ unorthodox abilities and willingness to face any challenger earned him the respect of fans and Superstars alike.”* After his training, Efraim found work in the Carolinas and was immediately inducted into African American wrestling semiroyalty as Roosevelt Jones, the “cousin” of area star Rufus R. Jones (real name: Carey “Buster” Lloyd) and the unfortunately monikered Burrhead Jones (real name: Melvin Nelson). The two had recently decided to decamp to Sam Muchnick’s Missouri territory, but Rufus’s stardom was sufficient to power another “relative” to relative stardom in battles against the nefarious Anderson “brothers,” Gene and Ole.*
He had some success, winning the NWA (Los Angeles) Americas Tag Team titles with both Porkchop Cash and (presumed relative) Tom Jones, before finding what would be his life’s calling: a middling role in the exploding world of the World Wrestling Federation. He sometimes won in preliminary bouts against other lesser lights like Rodz, but the chief role for Jones and Rodz and their other brethren in arms—forgettables over the years with names like Ron Shaw, Rene Goulet, Frank Marconi, Jose Luis Rivera, Bob Marcus, Gino Carabello, Brian Mackney, Steve Lombardi, “Iron” Mike Sharpe, Barry Horowitz, Rick McGraw, Mr. X, Bill and Randy Mulkey, and Jim Powers—was as reasonable but insufficient competition for the bigger stars. That’s not to say that Jones didn’t have some good days. He tag-teamed with Tony Atlas (known variously as “Black Superman” and “Mr. USA”) and, later, Andre the Giant, to some success. The former duo won the WWF tag belts; the latter, though high-profile, was mostly a means of featuring Andre without overexposing him, and Jones’s chief attribute in that tandem was his beatableness. He had to take the trumping to save Andre for the big finish, and moreover, he was singularly able to make a team with Andre on it seem conceivably destructible.
This was the beauty of what Jones and his ilk brought to those early WWF days. “Jobbers,” or, more politely, “preliminary wrestlers” or “enhancement talent”—industry parlance for guys who exist solely to get beaten—weren’t new to the wrestling world. But as with everything else in the WWF, they were new to a national stage. In the Territorial Era, the jobbers were often regulars, guys who the fans knew as well as the stars—the sort of guys who you could root for and, because of the structural and financial limitations of the territories, the sort of guys who fans had seen ascend the ladder of success before. The jobber in the WWF was something altogether different: Rather than a gatekeeper, a guy whom you could get legitimacy from beating, Jones was a space filler, an excuse to see a star wrestle without any real competitive risk at play. The elevation of S.D. Jones to the mainstream was an attempt at continuing the tradition of territorial jobbers, but it ended up being a meta acceptance of everything wrestling pretended it wasn’t. Long forced to toil under the condescending title of “exhibitions” in New York—an unsubtle implication that the outcome wasn’t in play as it was in other sporting events—wrestling now served up guys like S.D. Jones to showcase the biggest stars, and the endings were never in doubt: These were exhibition matches no matter what you called them.
In an industry where superstardom is the goal of all, the role player is the oddity. When everyone dreams of eating steak, the ham-and-egger is the exception. Jobber is an informative term, derived from the phrase “do the job”—that is, play your assigned role in a match, regardless of ignobility. But if for almost every wrestler the implicit career goal is the world title, S.D. Jones was notable because, for kids growing up watching him lose, it seemed like he probably just went home after the match and ate some dinner and watched TV the same way he would if he’d just gotten off work at the phone company. Like it was just his job.
Of course, on a stage that big, for a guy who had held big-time tag belts, who had won matches in Madison Square Garden, it was probably hard to reconcile to that role, even as he was defining it. When WrestleMania was first suggested, a guy with pedigree and loyalty like Jones probably thought he might at least get a win in an early match. So when McMahon approached him with the prospect of losing to Bundy in record time, Jones was taken aback.
He didn’t want to do it at first, but McMahon convinced him that it was good for business—because they were building Bundy up as a monster w
ho could go toe-to-toe with demigods like Hogan and Jones’s old partner Andre. It was good business for Jones too since that spot on the WrestleMania card made him “a big, big, big, big payday.”
Jones’s struggle with his destiny is moving. The thing that defined jobbers in the years that followed, more than anything else, was their indefatigable spirit, the sense that, even though you knew they were going to lose, the wrestlers themselves didn’t quite know it. That Jones himself was as confident in himself as his character evinced is testament to the vitality he and those that followed him offered the business. Before the match with Bundy, in a backstage interview, Jones said, “This is the moment I’ve been waiting for,” with no hint of irony, because irony isn’t part of the jobber’s playbook. That irrational confidence was key to keeping the competition minimally believable.
Believable being the key word, since none of it is real. That twenty-four-second loss to Bundy at WrestleMania? Immediately after the match—and for the remainder of WWF/WWE history—it was called nine seconds. If the reality wrestlers occupy is malleable, then twenty-four can equal nine. Where anything is possible, nothing is real, and vice versa.
In 2005, Jones told Canada’s Slam! Sports that “after a while you just get comfortable where you are, and that’s it. You’re doing a job, you’re making a living, and you just keep on going.” Assumedly he wasn’t using the phrase do the job ironically. The usage of job in wrestling lingo is a vernacular indication of the precise distance between wrestling and real sports. In football or baseball, your job is to try to win, but in wrestling, your job is to follow the script—and for some guys, a lot of the time the script says you lose. Even though all the outcomes are scripted, winning isn’t described with such workmanlike euphemism. Despite the predetermination of the enterprise, winning a scripted match is every bit as glorious as winning a true competition. Losing, though, is seen as workaday obligation. “Doing the job” is just doing your job.
The Squared Circle: Life, Death, and Professional Wrestling Page 11
