ROANOKE, Va. (AP) - For as long as Jacob Brooks can remember, he wanted to be a professional wrestler.
The north Mississippi native had a shot in Memphis, Tennessee, with an outfit associated with Jerry “The King” Lawler. That lasted only a couple of months. Later, his grandfather took Brooks and his brother to fight for an independent outfit in west Mississippi. Brooks remembers the commissioner of that show banning them for life.
Later, they got a chance to learn their craft at a Dumas, Mississippi, school run by Dustin Rhodes, son of pro wrestling legend Dusty Rhodes.
“Man, the first time I got in the ring, I dislocated my shoulder,” Brooks said of Rhodes’ school. It made him wonder: “Maybe it was not meant to be.”
But it was. As Brooks, aka Lil Show the Redneck Brawler, told his story, at least 350 people were gathering at Parkway Brewing Co. in Salem, Virginia, to watch him and a troupe of pro wrestlers - all shy of 5 feet tall.
The crowd was thick around the ring that Brooks’ employer, Micro Wrestling Federation, brought into the room. Outside on a cold January night, even more fans stood on picnic tables, drinking beer from plastic cups while they watched the action through the venue’s garage door windows. It’s a dependable audience. Since 2017, such troupes have played the Roanoke Valley at least four times.
GETTING INTO CHARACTER
Brooks, who said he is 29, was on the undercard, opening the show with a match against Dominic Feldi, aka Disco Dom, from Pennsylvania’s Amish country.
Show’s first move? He called time out, then extended a hand of sportsmanship to Dom. When Dom offered his own right in return, Lil Show hopped in and eye-poked him.
As boos emerged from the crowd, Lil Show shouted: “Woooooooooo,” and soon had Dom down in a headlock. He rose and mocked his prostrate opponent with disco dance moves.
It was a classic “heel” scene from a wrestler who has been known as a bad guy for most of his career. Brooks said that he and his brother grew up beating on each other and developing athletic moves on a trampoline at their family home in Ashland, Mississippi.
“When I started out, I just kind of wrestled my brother a lot,” Brooks said. “He was the smallest. He went first by Kid J, then Kid Extreme, then turned into Baby Jesus. When he turned into Baby Jesus, I was Little Devil, so it’s like, OK, you’re a heel. I just kind of switched that over and made my own character with the redneck. I’m a country boy, but I’ll fight anybody.”
Baby Jesus, aka Jamie Brooks, still grapples and is sometimes a part of the Micro Wrestling Federation Troupe, Jacob Brooks said.
BRINGING FANS INTO IT
The heel held the advantage early on. But the match would turn, as matches do, multiple times - with dropkicks, body slams, spins, flips, leaps, chokes, gouges, a couple of moves that are indescribable in a family newspaper, and improbable recoveries.
More than halfway into the match, Lil Show threw a seemingly whipped Disco Dom against the ropes, but Dom caught him with an arm bar as he flew back to the center of the ring. Lil Show rolled off the ring to the floor, and Dom followed him, beating him and dragging him out into the audience as many in the crowd shouted, “Disco!” “Disco!” The action continued back and forth on the concrete floor near the tasting room entrance.
“We figure the more that we can bring the fans into it, the better they’ll like it,” Brooks said. “We try to bring it right there to the seats. We go all up through the crowd.”
CHANTING AND BOOING
The audience lapped it up like their Majestic Mullets and Get Bents, many holding phones at all sorts of angles to shoot as much video as possible.
Among what was heard and seen was this short exchange between two women in the audience.
Woman No. 1: “Oh my God, your dad is out there on the bench!”
Woman No. 2: “Hell yeah, he is!”
Another woman bent down, pretending to be a micro wrestler while letting loose a howling laugh.
It was clear that some people were there to get plastered on high octane beers and laugh at the show. Others treated it just like a World Wrestling Entertainment Event, chanting for their favorites, booing the heels and making guttural noises at wrestling moves that were inflicting obvious pain on the athletes.
“I thought it might be kind of an unusual activity,” Daniel MacDonnell, 55, said. “My wife thought that it was kind of unusually non-PC for Parkway to have it. My take was that these are guys that are doing what they love to do. … If they’re amusing and they’re doing it because they like to, why not support it?”
A small rumble emerged on social media when Parkway Brewing Co. tasting room manager Kimberly Salyers posted the event. Jack Darrell, who owns Micro Wrestling Foundation, chimed in to let naysayers know that these were performers doing something very difficult, that they had trained hard for, and which was earning them a living.
“I know it was one that had many of us on the fence, but the wrestlers were so nice, and it made me happy to help them make a living doing what they love,” Salyers wrote in an email exchange. The venue is considering the possibility of booking the show again, she wrote.
One word this reporter didn’t hear uttered among the crowd was the “m” word to describe the wrestlers. According to The Little People of America organization’s website, “the word ‘midget’ was never coined as the official term to identify people with dwarfism, but was created as a label used to refer to people of short stature who were on public display for curiosity and sport.”
Among the wrestlers, Brooks said that opinions vary on its use.
“It doesn’t bother me,” he said. “I heard it growing up. Some kids out here, it bothers. It bothers Micro (Jackson, who did a spot-on Michael Jackson dance impersonation during the show) a little bit. That’s fine. We’re all entitled to our opinion. It’s just like with anything. It all depends on how you use it. And ain’t nobody out here forcing us to go out there and go in this ring and beat the hell out of each other. We choose this. And we get paid a decent amount of money to do it.”
TAKING THE CHAMPIONSHIP BELT
After about 20 minutes of barely escaped pins and athletic moves that aren’t suggested for at least 90% of the population, a resurgent Disco Dom body-slammed the heel, finally getting a three-count to end it.
It’s all part of a pre-planned story, all part of a dance that has gone on for decades in all sorts of wrestling federations, one that requires education and skill to master.
Brooks said that after he graduated from high school, he joined Extreme Midget Wrestling, where he worked for about five years. From there, he was on to Florida-based Micro Championship Wrestling for two years, then back to EMW, fighting in Oklahoma and Texas.
“I got a lot of good training out there (in Micro Championship Wrestling) from my sensei, Pat Tanaka (Badd Company, The Orient Express),” Brooks said. “He was old school. I talked to him once a week, once a month now. He taught me a whole lot.”
A couple of years back, Brooks participated in Wrestlemania at New Orleans. For about the past five years, he has worked for Micro Wrestling Federation, based in Pigeon Forge, Tennessee. The troupe divides time between road trips and shows at its own venue, the Microtorium.
“And I have to say this is the best company out there,” he said. “Pay-wise, (they) treat you well. I mean Dude, we have El Torito, he’s straight from WWE. He wrestles all over the world. He’s like, major. He knows it, as well, that this is by far the best midget company, or little people company, wrestling out there.”
The black-clad, black-masked El Torito, whom Brooks said was the best of the group, sat nearby, preparing for the night’s headlining, championship match, in which he would fight Micro Tiger, a fellow masked fighter. The two Mexicans fought in the acrobatic and highly choreographed lucho libre style, before Lil Show and another wrestler, Jamaican Jo, came on unannounced to back up their confederates. Soon, it was a free-for-all, with up to six MWF members going at it.
In the end, it was down to Lil Show and Torito. After suffering a couple of minutes of abuse, Lil Show took a run at Torito, who ducked as Show leaped and fell out of the ring, thereby losing the match. El Torito took the championship belt.
‘’ALL EYES ON YOU’
Brooks said his body feels like it has about 10 more years of wrestling in it. During 15 years in the game and thousands of matches - at least two per night, up to five nights a week, in recent years - he has had five knee surgeries.
“I feel old,” he said. “It all depends on how I keep myself healthy, if I don’t take crazy-ass bumps no more or do stupid stuff. But when you’re in that ring there, if you ain’t ever been in there, you don’t know what it’s like. It’s adrenaline. That 20 minutes you’re in the ring, you’re somebody. You’re like a superhero. All eyes on you. You’re a superstar.
“If them fans go crazy, you’re gonna go crazy. To me, the object is, you want to be the best, you know. When that person leaves that night, you want them to remember the show, but you also want them to remember you. Wanna get your name up. Hey, I remember that guy. He was an asshole. I remember this guy. He did the flips and all.”
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