Independent wrestling veteran Jerry Bishop and I are collaborating on an oral history project, and I couldn’t be more excited about it! My only disappointment is that no pictures exist of ‘White Trash Jerry’. Just wait till you get to that part.
Jerry started wrestling in 2008, and wrestled all over the midwest before moving to Alaska. He currently wrestles for 907 Pro Wrestling and WrestlePro Alaska. He’s also a trainer for the magnificent Fairbanks Ladies of Wrestling. Here’s the first chapter of his story. –KF
I grew up in a small town in southeast Ohio called Athens. It’s a liberal college town. But like five-minutes outside of town you find yourself deep in Appalachia.
Ohio University is a real party school. It’s one of the most haunted places. Their journalism program is famous, Ed O’Neill went there. I think Paul Newman was their most renowned graduate. Their Halloween block party gets more than a hundred thousand people every year, and the town only has a population of forty thousand. But right outside of town, the little neighboring towns are these redneck, close-minded, blue-collar places.
Where I grew up, unless you worked at the university, there weren’t a whole lot of opportunities. So many people were just born there and died there and spent their whole lives and if they were able to leave, it was only for a few years. And then, you know, that hometown just sucks you back in.
I had a lot of behavioral problems as a kid. I was one of those kids that fought a lot.
I was part of the Ritalin generation in the late eighties, early nineties. I learned about fighting from my cousins, and the biggest thing they taught me was “don’t be a tattletale.” So at school I would take shit from other kids and never say anything about it. Then finally I would have my fill and beat somebody up. I realize now that’s probably why I was looked at as a problem child, because none of the other kids would wait to go tell the teacher after I slapped them in the face. Somehow I just assumed the teachers knew all this was going on. In my mind, it was like they were letting these kids do things to me, because I got in trouble but there were never any repercussions for them. That made me even more anti-authority.
When I got older, I realized it’s hard for one lady to keep tabs on every single thing that goes on in a class of twenty-three kids. So they’d end up with a file that says I hit this kid, then two months later I hit that kid. They just didn’t know. They never had a record of all the things I didn’t report.
I mean, maybe I was a bully too. I remember my fuse got shorter and shorter and then I just didn’t care anymore. But yeah, I got in a lot of trouble. And I was on a lot of different medications as a kid. Not sure what kind of lasting effect that had on me. I was a guinea pig for all the different diagnoses and medications that were out there in the 1990’s. You name it, I was on it. A lot of that period is a big blur.
I was really little when I first watched professional wrestling. I specifically remember being allowed to stay up late at my grandmother’s to watch an episode of Saturday Nights Main Event when I was like three or four. The first match I ever saw was Rick Rude versus some job guy. My dad had that same thick Tom Selleck mustache and long hair, kind of rock and roll hair.
My dad wore spandex leather pants because it was the late eighties. So he was ridiculous. He kinda looked like a cross between Kip Winger and Barry Gibb from the Bee Gees. Now, I tell him he looks like Tony Orlando and he wants to kill me.
But anyway, I saw the big mustache and long dark hair on Rick Rude and thought, he kinda looks like my dad! I also remember these kids at my day care had little Hulk Hogan action figures. I thought that was the coolest. And I remember going to one of those mom-and-pop video stores and seeing one of those huge cardboard cutouts of Hogan in his shirt-ripping pose.
I lived about 30 to 40 minutes from the border of West Virginia and WCW would always do house shows at the Charleston Civic Center. They would go to Parkersburg, too, I was about 45 minutes from there. I was also about an hour and a half south of Columbus, Ohio. I didn’t get a chance to actually go watch wrestling live, but I was right in that part of the country where you could get all the TV programs, WCW and WWF both. As a kid I liked WWF more because, you know, Hulk Hogan and all that stuff is what got me into it. Oh, and my mom got me a Sargent Slaughter cake for my eighth birthday:
WCW appealed to me a lot, though. Unless I was catching Superstars on Saturday mornings or on the rare occasion getting to stay up for Saturday Night’s Main Event, I could always watch the WCW afternoon shows. I would get excited about those shows, because I could actually see a match between Ric Flair and Sting. Or Johnny B. Badd, or Paul Orndorff. Granted they would typically go to a time-draw or something. But on WWF shows back then there were mostly jobber matches. It would be Rick Martel vs. Jobber, Tatonka vs. Jobber. And then during the match, they would also show a promo from the back or on some side street with a guy talking about what he’s gonna do when he fights Rick Martel at a big match that was coming up. I never got to see those big matches, all I got was the job matches. I remember in like ‘92 getting so excited because there was going to be a match on Superstars—and I was so excited I set my VCR to record it—between Tugboat and Papa Shango. A match between two guys and I actually knew both of their names. Not a match with some guy with a mullet who looks like he works in the hardware department at the Kmart. That’s what you got back then, and you were happy to get it.
One of my favorites when I was a kid was Brad Armstrong. He was Road Dogg’s older brother. He had a reddish curly mullet, and he was a great wrestler. He could do any style. He’d be doing old school brawls with guys like Bunkhouse Buck and all these Tennessee guys. But you could also see him in there going high spot for high spot with Jushin Thunder Liger or Great Muta. He could work any style. He was phenomenal. Yeah, a lot of those WCW matches I really enjoyed watching. I was all about any wrestling program I could watch.
Then my mom got remarried when I was like six and we moved to Pennsylvania. In Pennsylvania I was like 45 minutes east of Philly. I would talk to my step cousins who were born and raised in Pennsylvania, and they would be talking about this promotion called ECW. And I would hear about all these other characters, like the Sandman. They were like, we don’t even watch WWF, we watch ECW. I couldn’t really find it, but it was exciting that it was out there.
In that era you really had to scrounge for information. Like, I didn’t really want to go grocery shopping with mom, but I would sometimes so I could run over to the magazine aisle and grab PWI to read about all these different wrestlings. I’d see guys from Japan that I didn’t know how to pronounce, like Shinya Hashimoto. I didn’t know how to say their names, but I knew them.
I used to memorize the almanac, too. At one point my family thought I might be on the spectrum. I could name off the entire title history of the WWE from 1963 to present. I haven’t done it in a while and there have been a few title changes since I last did it but if you want I can try it. We should see if I can still do it.
The guy who was my stepfather at that point used to tease me in a not so nice way when I would watch wrestling on Saturday mornings. I would be in my little whitey-tighties, and I’d pull my socks up like they were wrestling boots and run around with a cardboard belt that I made. My stepfather would tell me my wrestling name was The Twig, which low key deep down really hurt my feelings. He would also say, you can never be as big as the Ultimate Warrior. You can never be as big as Hulk Hogan. You’ll never be big. You’re always gonna be skinny. It wasn’t until I saw Edge on TV in 1998—at this time I was like thirteen—that I realized, this guy looks like he could naturally be kinda skinny if he didn’t work out a lot. If he didn’t work out he would be like me, tall and gangly. This was before anyone told me I looked like Edge, even.
I had to stop watching wrestling for a while, but it wasn’t by choice. I was a bad kid, and when I was a teenager, my mom ended up in a pretty bad relationship. Her boyfriend was mentally, emotionally abusive to her. When I was like sixteen, seventeen, I got tired of his shit and I started rebelling against him and his rotten kids. He convinced my mom to ship me down to Florida to stay with my uncle, who was crazy and really controlling. When I showed up I had leather pants and frosted tip hair that was kinda long and he was like, “I’m taking those damn pants!” He made me wear Wranglers and got me a cowboy hat. He said he was gonna make me get a flattop haircut like it was 1962. I ended up with a crewcut for a while.
When I lived with my uncle, I figured out that when I got really, really, really mad, I should start doing push-ups. I knew if I punched the wall, my uncle would beat me up or I’d get sent to jail or something. I felt trapped, and I just got so angry. Instead of doing like seven push-ups, I would do fifty. One day after I did fifty push-ups I was laying there, clutching my pecs, and a light bulb went off. I felt better and I thought, I can use this. I was channeling the negative into something positive. The problem was, I started relying on it. I used anger for motivation for a long time. It was a coping mechanism. I couldn’t go to the gym without anger.
Up until high school, my friends and I did internet wrestling e-feds, roleplay stuff. That was a lot of fun at that age because it got my creativity out. But then we started doing backyard wrestling. That’s actually how I got my wrestling name.
It’s funny how I got the “Jerry” name. I got it in 2002. In high school, my friend Pat—he’s an African-American gentlemen—smoked a lot of weed, stayed up late, hung out with girls, stuff I had no skills in. We’d been friends since sixth grade, though. When I met him I was wearing a Shawn Michaels shirt. And he was like, you’re my wrestling friend! So we would always talk about wrestling.
In high school, Pat started telling me about this backyard wrestling promotion he was gonna start calling World Ghetto Wrestling. I just rolled my eyes at it. I mean, I was still a wrestling fan but I didn’t really want to admit it in high school. But Pat was telling me all about his wrestling character. The Friday movies were just coming out, and there’s a part in one of the movies where Ice Cube is smoking a blunt. This girl comes in the room, he’s laying on a bed, he looks at her seductively and he says, “You’ve heard of El Niño. Well I’m El…insert racial slur…bro.” Ice Cube says that about himself in the movie, but my friend Pat was saying that’s what he was going to call myself.
This conversation went on while we were in English class and I was trying to do my work. Pat’s telling me all about this and he’s going on and on. “And my move is going to be the El…insert racial slur…Slam.”
I’m a little annoyed because I’m trying to do my work and he won’t stop talking about this. Pat would either sleep in class or he would talk to me about wrestling when I’m trying to do my work. I mean he was my friend, don’t get me wrong. But he’s telling me this and I said, “Well then, I’ll be White Trash Jerry, and we can have a feud.”
He starts laughing and we start naming off wrestling moves for this White Trash Jerry character as a joke. You know, like… the Honkey Bomb, the Cracka Smacka, all of these racial slurs, you know, I’m just throwing them out there as a joke. I’m not serious at all. And he’s laughing with me.
Then a few weeks later he convinced me to come over to his friend’s trailer. I wasn’t serious about calling myself this. I show up at his friend’s trailer and I’m like, “hey, what’s going on, I’m Jonesy.” My nickname was always my last name Jones, or “Jonesy.”
And they’re like, “Jones… Oh! Are you White Trash Jerry?”
I’m like, “No. No! I’m not seriously calling myself that.”
And then five guys, no—it was more like seven guys—came up to me, plus a kid’s dad even. They were all like, “You’re White Trash Jerry! We’ve heard all about you!”
And Pat’s was like, “You gotta do it! You gotta do it! I told them all about it!” And I didn’t want to, I was joking!
But sure enough, I was forced to become White Trash Jerry.
As time went on, I had to come up with every move that we were jokingly naming off at school, and it would become one of my moves. I had to do something and call it the Redneck Drop. I wore ratty old clothes. I put a piece of beef jerky in my lip like it was a pouch of chew. It looked like that in my lip, but of course I wasn’t really gonna chew. Or I sometimes instead of beef jerky I would put Big League Chew in my lip. I want to say I had this one move that was… You know how the Undertaker had the “Old School”? I had a move called the Old Skoal. Like Skoal, the snuff tobacco. Yeah.
Eventually I didn’t want to be this white trash character anymore. I needed to come up with a last name to go with Jerry. At that point I was eighteen and smoking weed, as a lot of eighteen year olds do. I had a guitar room where I used to keep my amps, it was an extension of my mom’s house, basically just a storage area. Nobody else went in there except me and my friends. We would smoke pot, and my mom and grandmother acted like they didn’t know what we were doing. We were sitting in there one day—my friend Craig and I, he was a wrestler—and we’re trying to come up with a name for Jerry. So he literally just starts naming off things in the room, and then he gets to a chessboard.
“Jerry Knight?”
“No.”
“Jerry Bishop?”
“That’s it!”
“Dude! Finally! It’s been like 25-30 minutes!”
And I’ve still got it.
The backyard stuff wasn’t in a ring. It was on a trampoline with parts of the springs taken out and four corners and like, makeshift ropes. Super dangerous stuff. My friends were doing the crazy stupid hardcore stuff. I was doing funny, silly characters to make my friends laugh, because I wasn’t gonna go fall through light tubes.
I didn’t do that until later.
At one point we got into in a backyard war with this other backyard promotion. Eventually we ended up being friends with those guys, but for a while we were mad because they got a newspaper article written about them and we didn’t. And we were mad because one time they posted on their website that we showed up to their show, but we didn’t. We considered that posting fake results. When somebody in the next county posted a link on an Athens website for a pro wrestling promotion we could actually join, we were like, “Eff you guys! We’re gonna go wrestle at a real wrestling place!” I added the email on Yahoo Instant Messenger and instantly got an email that said, “who’s this?”
I was nineteen at this point. That’s how my friend Rick and I joined a wrestling promotion that we thought was legit: XWE in Southeast Ohio.
We went to like one practice. They taught us how to take bumps, how to hit the ropes, how to hit the corners, how to tie up. They said “work the left side of the body” and told us we had to learn everything else on our own. Thank god none of those matches were recorded because they were godawful.
I mean, it was in an actual professional wrestling ring. And there were people that would pay to come, though not that many.
My second match in that promotion was with a guy I thought was legit because he was older than me. He was like thirty five. He was this big, burly construction worker who looked like Zakk Wylde. This guy actually came into the ring chewing a meth rock. Looking back on it, he didn’t know anything. He literally beat my fucking ass, that’s all he did, beat the shit out of me because he thought it was fun to beat up kids. We were doing shows every single week, sometimes twice a week because they rented a building. Other promotions didn’t want to use me because I didn’t know what I was doing, and because that promoter was a total piece of shit and a drug addict. But, you know, he gave me an opportunity. I just tried to learn as much as I could. I picked up a lot of stuff as I went, learned on the job.
Then I got legitimate professional training around 2008 with a guy named Brian Logan. That was with a school: AWA-MWA. At the time they were trying to reboot the old American Wrestling territory. Even though Vince bought the library back in the day, this guy named Dale Gagne or something in Minnesota paid for the rights to the AWA name, tried to rebrand it. But then WWE took them to court in like ‘08-‘09, and WWE kicked their ass. But when we were working for the fake AWA, any promotion with two hundred bucks could be an NWA promotion. You could have like a skeezy promotion in a little strip mall or flea market, send these people a check for two hundred bucks a year and you could be part of the NWA.
Even before I met Brian Logan, I was hearing terrible things. Everybody said he was legitimately scary. I met him in a locker room, when I was starting to get booked outside of the area I was in. I was willing to do whatever, so my tag partner Rick and I went to this promotion in a different state and they just used us as random Ohio talent jobbers for hire. They said, “We’re just going to beat your asses.” And the one thing I was always good at was selling my ass off. I took a great beating. I still do.
So I’m in the locker room at this promotion and I remember hearing one guy say, “Oh hey, Brian Logan’s on his way.”
Then another guy got up and was like, “Nice knowing you guys. See you all later. If he’s here, I’m out.”
He just up and left before Brian got there. So I was nervous. And I was told: when he gets here, if he comes through the curtain and he’s mad at all, just hug the wall. Don’t look at him. Stay away from him. I’m hearing all these stories before I ever meet this guy.
But when I finally met him, he seemed real nice at first.
That was the show when I almost broke my neck:
The scumbag promoter—he’s the one that hurt me—actually came to the hospital. Him and his tag partner. I’m laying there in a neck brace and he puts a $10 bill on my chest. I’m in a neck brace laying in the bed, and he’s like, “Here you go, Jonesy.”
Watch Jerry recite from memory the entire WWE title history, from 1963 to 2022. And be sure to check out Chapter 2 of the Jerry Bishop Oral History right here.
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