Years after Jones’s heyday, such as it was, the Monday Night Wars reshaped the industry, and reshaped fan expectations so as to make them demand competitive matches between established superstars. But even with such even footing, the outcomes of those modern matches are seldom in any more doubt than were Jones’s; they’re just squash matches dressed up as main events. What Jones did was every bit as valuable as what 90 percent of modern wrestlers do; the fact that he’s a functionary of a bygone era shouldn’t diminish his value.
And yet, of course, it does. Jones’s WWE.com obit reads more like a corporate press release about the retirement of an office worker than a stitch in the quilt of wrestling mythology: “Although Jones never attained elite Superstar status during his WWE tenure, no one could deny his unparalleled passion, dedication and efforts inside the squared circle.”
After S.D. Jones quit the WWF, he went to work driving a truck for the Daily News and later moved back to Antigua, where he was born. He died there the next year, on October 26, 2008, at the age of sixty-three. By then he had largely faded from the memory of wrestling fans. The last time he was on the big stage was in 2005, when he inducted his old partner and longtime friend Tony Atlas into the WWE Hall of Fame. Jones isn’t in the Hall, and he probably will never be, despite his tenure with the company; you can’t put a loser into the Hall of Fame.* It’s fitting, though, that Jones’s last appearance was on the eve of WrestleMania XXV, putting over another, more significant wrestler. He was there to make Atlas look good, just like he was there to make Bundy look good at WrestleMania I. Jones got up, entertained the crowd, and got a round of applause. But the bigger cheers came for Atlas, even though his WWF tenure was much less profound than Jones’s, no matter his winning percentage.
In subjugating himself, Jones made the product that much better, so of course he got his last moment in the spotlight for making somebody else look like a star.
RACE IN WRESTLING
In the earliest days of the professional wrestling enterprise, race played the same role it did in boxing and geopolitics: The Foreigner was bad. George Hackenschmidt was a villain simply by virtue of being the European set across from our American hero. But when the Terrible Turk made his way to the States, the otherness took on a whole new dimension. He wasn’t just on another team; he was from another planet. Crowds loathed him not just because he was Turkish but also because he was primitive, of indiscernible speech and unknowable intentions, and in possession of seemingly mystical techniques. In the decades that followed, the wrestling world has certainly seen its share of Hackenschmidts, generally respectable fighters who draw on their foreignness to draw boos from the crowd, but the legacy of the Turk is much more prominent.
In the Territorial Era, two trends emerged: the Ethnic Hero and the Evil Foreigner. In big coastal cities like New York, ethnicity became the calling card of otherwise unremarkable wrestlers who sought to harness the support of the various ethnic minorities that made up the bulk of the crowd. It wasn’t unusual for the wrestlers’ ethnic identities to be falsified; it wasn’t even that rare for a guy to play an Irishman one night and a Greek the next. Not that there weren’t authentics: Greek Jack Londos, Argentinean Antonino Rocca, and Italian Bruno Sammartino all ruled the New York scene at various times when their respective cultures held economic sway. But some promoters—most famously Jack Pfefer, who had spawned more from the sideshow than from the carnival—began to promote freaks from foreign lands to gin up public interest. The French Angel—a misshapen ogre of a man who was actually the model for the animated character Shrek—is a prime example. He was one of the nicest guys you’d ever meet backstage, but in the ring he was an unimaginable monster, the sort of creature that seemed more likely to tear his opponent’s arms off than apply any sort of textbook wrestling hold. If he didn’t directly draw on his Frenchness to terrorize the fans, there was a palpable implication that this sort of creature only emerged from the medieval dungeons of the European backwoods. Even in New York City, where tribalism reigned and ethnicity was a point of pride and means of popularity, certain more alien parts of the globe served as fictional spawning grounds for French Angel–esque wrestling monstrosities. From Asia came a cadre of mustachioed martial artists, underhanded Japs, and sharp-toothed Mongolian Neanderthals. Gorilla Monsoon (an Italian American who later became an articulate WWF announcer, always clad in sunglasses and a tuxedo) was a plus-sized Manchurian cannibal. The Middle East gave us nefarious cartoon Arabs like Sheik Adnan Al-Kaissie and, later, the Iron Sheik. (They were preceded in Detroit by the Sheik, and followed in Texas by devious manager Skandor Akbar.)
In the South and West, black wrestlers had begun to enter into the wrestling world by the ’40s. There was a semiofficial “World Negro Heavyweight Champion” beginning in the ’40s—the first on record was Ras Samara in Iowa—but the “title” was sometimes little more than a boast, disassociated from any sort of official championship lineage. Luther Lindsay claimed the title in the ’50s and went on to be a close friend and sparring partner of Canadian wrestling paterfamilias Stu Hart. The “Ebony Giant” Dory Dixon of Jamaica wrestled against the “Nature Boy” Buddy Rogers in the main event at Madison Square Garden in 1962, a match that ended in a double pin. (The two had wrestled a ninety-minute time limit draw the month before in Texas.) African Americans in the wrestling ring started out as the sideshow’s sideshow, but soon cards were being integrated, and matches were integrated soon thereafter.
The transition didn’t get off without complaint. Boxing had already begun to integrate by then, and wrestling—though it had evolved quite a distance from its Greco-Roman origins and even its early Iowa-centrism—was considered the “white man’s sport,” in comparison to its pugilistic parallel. Eventually, some audiences saw black wrestlers compete on otherwise-white cards, but always against other African Americans—black-on-white violence could have caused a riot—and some all-black wrestling shows were held for exclusively black audiences.
Such shows proved profitable, and soon economics made proper integration inevitable. With black customers willing to pay to see wrestling shows—even situated, as they often were, in crow’s nest balconies or other segregated sections of the audience—white promoters were willing to take their money.
Sputnik Monroe was a white wrestler who headlined Memphis in the ’60s. Sputnik (the name comes from an old woman who, upon seeing him with his arm around a black man, used the term as an insult, a sort of blend between “Hippie” and “Commie”) hung out on Beale Street in a period when it was entirely black and was arrested by the (white) police for vagrancy several times to discourage him from such audacious acts. His most defiant act, though, was forcing the integration of Ellis Auditorium, where the big wrestling shows went on. To that point, blacks had been segregated in a small balcony area, even though, largely because of Monroe’s popularity, there were often hundreds or thousands more African Americans waiting outside. Sputnik bribed the doorman to let more in than would fit in the balcony and eventually told the promoter that if he didn’t let his black friends sit where they pleased, he wouldn’t perform. This was at a time when most other public events in Memphis were segregated. Monroe was wrestling as a villain, but he made more money for the Memphis promotion than any other performer, and a younger generation of fans venerated him for his liberalism.
Often finding themselves in a position of being early adherents to public integration, promoters were in a sensitive spot when it came to crowd reactions. In “legitimate” sports, an athlete’s skill was measured by his performance, but in wrestling, even in those early days, the athlete’s promotability was a key factor. And “promotability,” such as it was, was hard to discern. Owners worried that white audiences wouldn’t cheer African American wrestlers, but they worried even more that black bad guys, provoking the crowd as part of their shtick, would cause uprisings. A few notable black wrestlers helped change the perception that they couldn’t be fan favorites and chart
ed the course for African American wrestlers for years to follow.
Bobo Brazil (real name: Houston Harris) is considered the Jackie Robinson of professional wrestling. He started wrestling in Detroit in 1951 as “Bubu Brasil,” the South American Giant; one has to assume that the Latin American Other was more acceptable an employee in those days than a 6-foot-6 black guy from Little Rock. Soon Brazil became a national star, traveling widely and frequently in places where he was banned from many restaurants and hotels. Brazil spent the early part of his career wrestling other blacks in regions where race was sensitive, but his greatest fame came when rivalries weren’t restricted by segregation; he became so popular everywhere he went that race hardly seemed an issue in his feuds. He was the first person to beat the Sheik for the title in Detroit’s Big Time Wrestling—his home territory and site of his greatest fame—and he fought Andre the Giant to a draw. He went toe-to-toe with the greats of the Territorial Era: Ric Flair, Dick the Bruiser, Rikidozan. (He also institutionalized the uncomfortable myth that African Americans have unusually thick heads with his popular headbutt finisher—the Coco Butt—that many black wrestlers still employ to this day.)
On October 18, 1962, Brazil beat “Nature Boy” Buddy Rogers to become the first African American NWA World Heavyweight Champion. It was a decision made by the local Newark promoter to gin up support for a return match: Brazil won after Rogers pulled a muscle in the match, and afterward Brazil refused to accept a tainted victory. The two had their rematch on October 30, and Rogers reclaimed the title. As the switch was made without the approval of the NWA governors—and because Brazil never formally “accepted” victory—Brazil’s reign isn’t recognized in NWA history. To be fair, this sort of unauthorized, storyline-tainted title change happened with frequency in those early days of the sport (Bruno Sammartino had a very similar win against Rogers), and since there was no national reporting of most verdicts, the wins could be kept off the record books. But Brazil is notable above all other crypto-champs in that he was the first black man to achieve even a tainted championship win.
The ascendance of Brazil and the black wrestlers who followed in his footsteps to headliner status in the territorial wrestling world served as a proxy of racial utopia: Rather than booing them because they were black, white audiences who may have been less liberal in their daily lives embraced the opportunity to root on the worthy black man in isolation. Promoters soon steered storylines in this direction, having white villains act as subtly (or occasionally overtly) racist bullies, making insensitive comments at which the crowd would universally boo. (One can only assume that some crowd members snickered first and then booed appropriately.)
When black wrestlers finally emerged as top-tier villains in the ’60s, emotional and metaphorical integration neared completion. “Big Cat” Ernie Ladd, a San Diego Chargers player who moonlighted as a wrestler in the off-season, was perhaps uniquely situated to explore these tensions: He was a legitimate professional athlete, so his acceptableness to white crowds was already somewhat established, and moreover, the very fact that he had a day job underscored the semi-self-evident put-on of the whole endeavor. Regardless of whether or not wrestling was fake, to most fans it was now unequivocally show business, and you could hardly fault a black man for playing the role. Despite his trailblazing—or perhaps because of it—Ladd was as much a racial provocateur as anyone in those days. In reference to foe Chief Jay Strongbow, he said that “the drunken Indian was out here again and I know he was full of whiskey. . . . He belongs back on the reservation in a tepee. . . . Brotha, I’m gonna pluck them feathers.” He separately referred to Wahoo McDaniel as a “drug store Indian with a cigar stuck in his mouth.” He called fan favorite Rocky Johnson (father of the Rock) “Uncle Tom Johnson.”
Eventually, the evil immigrants of the pro wrestling world came to include those from Africa, inaugurating a new era of racial insensitivity that relegitimized antiblack racism in a seriocomical guise. On one side were heathens like Abdullah the Butcher, the Sudanese sadist, and Kamala, the Ugandan Giant, who came to the ring with an animal-print loincloth, tribal painting on his face and chest, and, sometimes, a tribal mask and a spear. He was so “wild” that he needed a handler, so he was often accompanied by a masked fellow in a pith helmet who was called Kim Chee. On the other side were the earlier imports, the black superstars who played on America’s history of slavery as their own proud heritage, none of whom was more popular than the Junkyard Dog, the dog-collar-and-chains-wearing, jive-talking brawler who became the most popular wrestler in the Deep South prior to his famous WWF tenure.
JYD’s rise to regional celebrity was abetted by promoter Bill Watts, who, despite being a certifiable good ol’ boy, did more to advance the cause of equal opportunity in wrestling than just about anybody. He was running things in WCW in 1992, when Ron Simmons—a former All-American nose guard for Florida State—became the first recognized African American world champion upon winning the WCW World Heavyweight Championship from Big Van Vader. The fact that his number-one contendership was decided by raffle might have diminished the victory, but all that was lost in the celebration of the milestone. Simmons held on to the belt for five months.
Despite WWF’s late-’80s diversity, its vocabulary wasn’t exactly progressive. Though his English was faltering, Mr. Fuji threw around terms like yard ape and lawn jockey and honky in his prime. His protégé Don Muraco called Pedro Morales “a dirty Mexican pepperbelly,” and when it was suggested to him that Morales was actually Puerto Rican, he said, “Who cares? They’re all the same.” (He later attempted a more accurate bit of racism when he called Morales “a Puerto Rican hubcap thief.”) He was one of a few wrestlers for whom “Mexican wetback” was a throwaway descriptor of Tito Santana.
If the acts weren’t always bald-facedly racist, their matches were often peppered with the patently offensive bad-guy shtick of legendary color commentator Jesse “The Body” Ventura. At various times Ventura reacted to a Junkyard Dog interview by saying JYD had “a mouth full of grits,” calling his rope-a-dope in-ring routine “a lot of shuckin’ and jivin’.” He commonly referred to fan favorite Tito Santana as “Chico,” dubbed his finishing move the “flying burrito” finisher, and, when Santana was getting pummeled at WrestleMania IV, Ventura said, “I betcha Chico wishes he was back selling tacos in Tijuana right now!” He similarly referred to black wrestler “Birdman” Koko B. Ware as “Buckwheat” until eventually Vince McMahon himself put a stop to it.
“Rowdy” Roddy Piper, a Canadian who was billed to be from Glasgow, Scotland, was a one-stop shop for racial insensitivity. He became a top-tier villain in California early in his career by insulting the region’s Latino community. He once insisted on making amends by playing the Mexican national anthem on his bagpipes, but he played “La Cucaracha” instead. In the WWF, Piper exhibited a similar false apology when he invited Jimmy Snuka onto his “Piper’s Pit” interview segment to apologize for Snuka not getting a chance to speak on his previous appearance. Piper decorated the set with pineapples and coconuts and eventually smashed a coconut over Snuka’s head. (Piper’s indiscretion didn’t end there; he once talked soul food with Tony Atlas, said that Mr. T’s lips looked “like a catcher’s mitt,” called T’s fans monkeys, mock-fed bananas to a poster of Mr. T, and told him that he would “whip him like a slave.” At WrestleMania VII, he was wrestling Bad News Brown, who was presented as a black street thug but who was actually half black; Piper—who, it should be said, was the good guy in this feud—came to the ring with his body painted half black, down the middle.)
Piper’s racist grunts may have been part of a larger heel character, but it’s likewise a part of a broader history of villains gleefully playing up racist tropes to get easy boos from the crowd. There were virulent racist personas like Colonel DeBeers, the AWA heel known for his pro-apartheid politics, and John Bradshaw Layfield, the conservative Texan in the WWE who briefly railed against illegal Mexican immigrants. Michael
“P.S.” Hayes, ringleader of the Fabulous Freebirds, often resorted to race-baiting to intensify feuds: The Freebirds’ feud with Junkyard Dog turned on Hayes calling JYD “boy,” and the Freebirds once came to the ring in a major match against the Road Warriors at Comiskey Park with the rebel flag painted on their faces. In 2008, Hayes was suspended from his backstage duties with WWE for supposedly telling African American wrestler Mark Henry, “I’m more of a nigger than you are.” He was said to have used the N-word casually over the years without causing a stir. He is also credited with the notion that black wrestlers don’t need gimmicks because being black is their gimmick.
When you consider the recent history of African American wrestlers in pro wrestling, to simplify a performer’s character to his race isn’t as offensive as what’s come when promoters try to give black wrestlers personas with more, shall we say, idiosyncrasy. In 1987, a small-time wrestler once known as “Soul Train” Jones in Memphis was introduced to the world as the “Million Dollar Man” Ted DiBiase’s bodyguard-cum-manservant, Virgil. Over the years, DiBiase bought the services and the souls of numerous wrestlers, but Virgil wasn’t just a sellout; he was a slave, almost unabashedly. His name, purportedly coined by Bobby “The Brain” Heenan, was a subtle jab at NWA showrunner and star Dusty Rhodes, born Virgil Runnels, who was known for “acting black” in speech and mannerism.
The Squared Circle: Life, Death, and Professional Wrestling Page 12