TAKE THIS JOB and LOVE IT!!!

When I wasn’t watching cartoons like Scooby-Dooand Plastic Man, I spent my Saturday mornings watching WWF All-Star Wrestling, an hour-long TV show made up of wrestling superstars defeating jobbers.

Jobbers were wrestlers at the bottom of the professional wrestling pecking order, always losing to top-tier and mid-card talent. Of course, I didn’t know that back then. As a kid, I thought everybody had the same opportunity to claw his or her way to the championship. Then again, I also didn’t know wrestling was scripted.

If I knew then what I know now, I would have appreciated the special part the jobbers played in the wrestling hierarchy. By losing their matches week after week, the jobbers jump-started the careers of up-and-coming wrestlers and new arrivals to the WWF territory. Every loss was a way to sell their opponents’ greatness to the fans. Every loss got their opponent that much closer to success.

This past Labor Day I thought about the sacrifices the jobbers made in the ring. Not only were they purposely losing week after week, but also sometimes they faced humiliation in and outside the ring.

Poor Frankie Williams, a journeyman WWF wrestler turned jobber, was ridiculed and pummeled by “Rowdy” Roddy Piper during a Piper’s Pit segment simply because he regularly lost his matches. The segment was cruel and unfair. Williams had a Spanish accent and Piper made fun of him for it.

Then there were the jobbers who were paid to let a python slither over them whenever they fought Jake “The Snake” Roberts, and those who let Brutus “The Barber” Beefcake cut their hair. Sometimes the humiliations were things they didn’t get paid for, like taking cheap shots from abusive big name wrestlers bent on proving something to the help, just because they were bigger and stronger.    

To suffer all manner of indignities and lose every week, the jobber earned a measly $250 per match. Every job comes with its share of indignities but none so public as a televised professional wrestling match.

Casey, I sometimes wonder if the children of jobbers were embarrassed by the work their fathers did. Did they catch heat from their wrestling fan friends every time a bigger opponent squashed their dad?  Did they avoid watching wrestling altogether? Or did they just see it as dad’s part-time job, and nothing else?

I’ll never know the answer to that, but I always preferred knowing my dad was safer working in a factory that produced chemicals for screen-printing than he was squaring off against Sergeant Slaughter or Bruiser Brody.