At long last, I present to you the second chapter of independent wrestler Jerry Bishop’s oral history. If you haven’t read Chapter 1, you can find it right here.
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. –KF
I’ve been really, really grateful for the opportunities I’ve had in the past few years, because I came up from the absolute bottom of the barrel. I’ve floated around in the septic tank. I mean, people who had no business giving anybody any shit were force feeding me shit sandwiches. And I took it, because I just wanted to be in wrestling, no matter what that meant. I would drive three hours trying to get a payday, and I’d be happy if someone gave me a five-dollar bill. And a lot of these people who were supposedly showing me stuff weren’t fit to teach anybody anything.
Brian Logan was, though. I trained with Brian Logan because I thought it was the only opportunity I had. He’d done a few dark matches with WWE, those matches that are on before RAW. He had been in OVW, which was at that time WWE’s developmental deal.
He was there with Bautista and Cena. People who were going to WWE were there. He was actually in a group with Bautista and Cornette’s wife, and I think Tyson Tomko—who would later be Christian’s bodyguard, in like 2005 or so. So was the guy who played the Mordecai character, and he was also the vampire character in the new WWE ECW.
So he was in a legit position. There are matches on YouTube of him wrestling Shelton Benjamin, Brock Lesnar, and the Hardy Boys.
After Brian Logan was released from developmental in 2001, he did this indie show in his hometown in West Virginia. I honestly can’t remember the real story of what happened at that show because I’ve heard so many versions of it. I just know that in the middle of a cage match, he kicked open the cage door, ran out to ringside, and hit a woman in the face. He laid her out. She was booing him, that’s why he did it. He got arrested: dragged out, maced, put in cuffs at the show. He did eighteen months in prison for that.
I started training with him seven years after that. By then everybody knew he was a nutcase. He had a reputation for beating on people in the ring, like really shoot beating on them. He would cuss people out in the locker room. He would abuse people physically, verbally. Any female wrestler in the locker room he would try to take to the hotel or whatever. I mean, yeah. He was… yeah. A real class act human being, but he knew wrestling.
One time my tag partner couldn’t make a show because he had to work his job. I think he was working in a restaurant. Brian Logan found out where the guy worked, called up his actual job, and cussed the guy’s boss out. So yeah, completely insane.
Nowadays, this stuff would never happen. Somebody would cry and flip out about the abuse, and he would be canceled. One time he threatened to rape a guy’s 9-year-old daughter. In a violent rage, on the phone. A bunch of people did flip out about that one.
I remember one time this ring announcer went to hand him his title after the match, and in the process the guy dropped the title on accident. So Brian slapped him in the face. It was a worked slap, but the ring announcer didn’t bump. The guy was a wrestling trainee. Afterwards Brian came in the back raging, like, “Why in the hell wouldn’t you fall down on a slap? You just buried the business!”
I was right there and I hit the wall, like I’d been told to do in these situations. The ring announcer said, “It was just a slap!”
Brian said, “Oh yeah?” And then he just blasted the guy, put him on the ground.
He was brutal. He broke a lot of people psychologically. He assaulted a sound guy once, too. Just like the ring announcer, hit this guy in the face. The guy was mouthy to him or something. These sound guys were obnoxious, nerdy types, you know, the kind of guys who would go see a Marvel movie in the theater, get mad at all the kids in the audience, and also get mad at the movie because that’s not how the story went on page six of comic #14. They were obnoxious, nobody could stand those guys, but Brian slapped one of them in the face. They were gonna call the cops but Brian freaked out, begged them not to. He knew he’d go back to jail if they did.
Once Jock Samson—he’s one of my best friends in wrestling, he’s still going, too, killing it—he was in training and he messed something up. Logan punched him in the nose. Bloodied his nose. They went through the spot and Jock took it—Jock’s a badass so he shrugged it off. Brian was like, “That’s what happens when I give you my body and you mess up something, you’re catching a receipt!”
Jock did shrug it off. I mean, he was a varsity football player in school, totally one of those country boys you could picture from Varsity Blues or something, tough as nails. A bloody nose was no big deal for Jock. But some of the other guys couldn’t handle the abuse. After a while, I got to where I couldn’t take it either.
But I mean, when it came to wrestling, Brian taught me so much. He was really the reason I became Jerry Bishop, the Modern Day Classic. That’s what he taught me, what he instilled in us. He was like, I want you guys to be studying tape. You’re not allowed to watch anything after 1992.
I had to watch all of this old school wrestling and I would look at the mechanics, little tiny nuances nobody else noticed. I realized I wasn’t as athletic as these guys who can do these crazy flips, but I figured out what I could do that would be different. I made the old become new again. That’s how, years later, I became a throwback to an older eighties style, the classic babyface professional wrestler. In this day and age there’s a lot of flipping and high choreography. I was doing a different type of style.
I really evolved a lot over the years. I was White Trash Jerry at the beginning when I was backyard wrestling, but when I started wrestling at that first actual promotion, I became British Rockstar Jerry Bishop. I had spent a whole summer watching Formula 51 and would talk with my friends in a British accent, which was actually pretty decent, I was told. I was really skinny and had dyed black hair. My friend would do face paint on me like David Bowie in Ziggy Stardust:
It was really weird being British Rockstar Jerry Bishop. I had a bunch of young female fans screaming and squealing, saying inappropriate stuff, holding up signs, the works. It made me uncomfortable. At that point I was nineteen.
I did some stuff with light tubes when I was British Rockstar Jerry. In this one match I was down on the mat in the corner, and this guy was over me, digging the light tube into my forehead a little bit. His manager was yelling, “Carve ‘LOSER’ into his forehead!”
I was like, “Joe, I will hit you right in the balls if you do it, I swear to god.” He realized that was a bad idea. It wasn’t personal, he was just trying to get heat, I think. The fans were upset and crying that this was happening to British Rockstar Jerry. Somebody keyed his car over it.
Then I was JB Magnum for a short time. My friend Rick and I were a tag team, and this one promotion was calling us Random Ohio Talent, the Jobbers for Hire. That’s what we were told was our name. No music or anything. We were just treated like shit.
But Logan wanted to do something more with us, so we went and got leather and stuff like that. We dressed up in like bondage outfits. I had a mesh shirt and wore leather pants. We were thinking about our gimmick and I wondered, has there ever been a tag team called S&M, and it’s the wrestler’s initials? Logan had been in the business since the mid-nineties and he’d never heard of a team like that. He liked the idea.
I had thought up a ‘S’ initial name and assumed it was a done deal. You know that whole thing back in the day, how you could come up with your porn star name? It’s your middle name as your first name, then the street you grew up as your last name. So using that idea I thought, what if I called myself ‘Sammy Avon’? And I thought Rick could be ‘Dirk Magnum’ for the ‘M’.
I pitched it to Mike Howerton, the actual promoter, and Brian, who was the trainer. Mike shit on it. Mike was a dumbass anyway. He’s the one who put the ten dollar bill on my chest when I was lying in the hospital after a show in which he almost broke my neck.
Mike was like, “I don’t like Sammy Avon. What about you just call yourself Superstar Rick Rage and Megastar Jerry Bishop?” I didn’t tell him because he was the promoter, but in my head I was like, that is the drizzling shits.
So I came up with something else off the top of my head, just to suggest something better: Rick could be ‘Ricky Lee Stonerock’ and I could be ‘JB Magnum’, JB being a reference to ‘Jerry Bishop’.
I knew Rick wouldn’t like it because that was his actual name: Ricky Lee Stonerock! But I was certainly not going to have us called ‘Superstar and Megastar’. Brian and Mike thought about Ricky Lee Stonerock for a minute, and then I said, “That’s his shoot name!”
“Bullshit!” they said. And Rick was mad at me, he was like, “What are you telling them my name for?” They made him take out his driver’s license. All the wrestlers were blown away. I never understood why he would ever call himself Rick Rage when his legal name was Ricky Lee Stonerock.
So we were the tag team of S&M: Ricky Lee Stonerock and JB Magnum. We worked the tri-state area for a while. Logan just screamed at us the whole time.
I told the guys you wrestle if you don’t start laying in your punches they need to kick the fuck out of you! And if they don’t, the moment you walk through that curtain I will punch you right in the mouth! You guys think you’re something special? I’ll go down to any little shit motel in West Virginia and find two little crackheads and put them in the ring, and they can take your spot!
Brian Logan is a born again Christian now. So is Mike Howerton, that scumbag promoter. He’s a preacher somewhere in Tennessee.
I finally quit training with Brian because I couldn’t take it anymore. I was really depressed. I wanted to join the military. One night I had a breakdown and shaved my head, just shaved it all off like Sinead O’Connor, and he flipped out. Brian threatened to bring guys over to my house to beat the shit out of me—and my family—if I didn’t work the show. Told me I would have to wear a wig.
I did go to MEPS to enlist and they kind of gave me the run around. I got a bad vibe. And I was like, I don’t think I want to do this. It’s probably better that I didn’t—and this is no offense to anybody who served—but now I work with a lot of people that served in the military during that time. Given my education level and place in life, I probably would have been infantry in Afghanistan. If I made it back at all, I would have been much more damaged than before I left. In hindsight, it was probably for the best.
I pretty much quit wrestling for a little while. It was ruined it for me until a dude named Viper—that’s the guy whose daughter Logan threatened—convinced me to come to his school: Ballistic Championship Wrestling in Rutland, Ohio. That school wasn’t around very long. Viper was actually really good at deathmatches, but he could really wrestle, too. He wasn’t doing deathmatches for free, either, he got paid good money. This wasn’t garbage backyard stuff, it was CZW style. He was on the IWA Masters of Pain Tour. He was wrestling all the big east coast deathmatch guys from that era ten to fifteen years ago—Brain Damage, Toby Klein, Nick Mondo, Necro Butcher. He was in these deathmatch tournaments where they’d sell a shit ton of DVD’s.
So I went to work with Viper to finish my training. But he said I was pretty much done. It turns out Brian Logan was keeping me and Rick in training because we were working his shows. He was keeping us as trainees because we were free labor. This sort of thing is really prevalent in Ohio, it’s a carny hustle. So Viper graduated me from his school and I worked all over the Midwest for a while.
During my time with Viper, I had gotten married. It was a chaotic relationship. I used wrestling to keep my mind off the chaos of my personal life. After the birth of my son, my then wife insisted I quit wrestling. I was out of wrestling for seven, maybe eight months. Then she served me with divorce papers. I was twenty-six.
Right after I got served with divorce papers, I did a deathmatch. I was like, I don’t give a fuck right now. This deathmatch was a Halloween-themed gimmick, and there was a ladder wrapped in barbed wire. There was a pumpkin hanging from a pole, and the pumpkin was full of thumbtacks. I got to use that in the match. I remember opening up the lid and looking in the pumpkin, and seeing all the thumbtacks. The heel was fed up with me at that point in the match, and then I said, “Trick or treat, motherfucker!” And I smashed the pumpkin over his head, and the thumbtacks went flying everywhere. We also had a table wrapped in barbed wire, and with a light tube taped to it. I got speared into that. I had a big gash on the back of my thigh that the paramedics who were on site checked to make sure I hadn’t hit an artery. It was a garbage match, but it was a lot of fun. I wasn’t really smart with some of the decisions I made in wrestling—and in life— back then.
I moved to Kentucky for about a year after that. I did really well there. It took me a little while to build myself back up, but I enjoyed Kentucky. I learned to be self-sufficient there. I learned how to use everything bad as motivational fuel, like in a positive way. I was still hanging on to too much stuff, but it made for good motivation. Before that I had always weighed around 160, but I started lifting angry and put on like fifty pounds. It was a fresh start, and I was Jerry Bishop again.
In Kentucky I was wrestling multiple times a week. I wrestled at UWF, WCCW, PTW, PWF, made it over to Pennsylvania and Tennessee. I made some great friends there and got a lot of experience.
That period of time helped me appreciate every opportunity I got later on. Because when you work the scrubbiest of scrubs and you spend so much time in places like that, you’re like, is this where I’m destined to be? Then when you get a good opportunity, you really appreciate it. Especially when you’ve been dealt a shitty hand.
The whole time I was in Kentucky I was really missing my child, who was a toddler at the time. My ex had moved him to Alaska by then. I was wrestling for UWF in Georgetown, Kentucky, in the most white trash venue ever: a bingo hall inside a flea market next door to a sex shop. And I was having these heart to heart conversations with the lady who owned the sex shop, in the sex shop, before the wrestling shows. Just her and me. There was penis and vagina and sex stuff all over the walls, and we would be having a heart to heart about my son. I would be getting ready to go wrestle in a couple hours, and this woman would be like, “Someday! Someday you’re gonna be in your son’s life!” And then some customer would walk in—and mind you she was always smoking a cigarette—and she would stop our conversation to direct the customer: “straight porn’s on this side, gay porn’s over here.”
In Chapter 3, Jerry drops everything and moves to Alaska. Stay tuned!
Recent Comments