Cook’s Top 5: Wrestlers With Jobs

Steve Cook checks in with his look at the Top 5 Wrestlers With Jobs in honor of Labor Day! Plus, this is a great way to learn about Wendi Wheels…

I hope all of you had a fantastic Labor Day Weekend full of whatever you enjoy doing. Whether you watched way too much wrestling or way too much college football, or even got out of the house & did something in the outside world like shopping or going to fireworks displays or whatever. Enjoy your holiday the way you see fit.

At the same time, I implore you to remember the real meaning behind Labor Day. It is the celebration of the labor movement & the working person. Too often, we take the laborer for granted, or we view our own work as only a means to a paycheck. Those who have to work while others play during these weekends ought to be celebrated & appreciated.

Today, we show our appreciation for the worker by listing the Top 5 Wrestlers With Jobs. After all, it’s not like everybody can just pay the bills with their work inside the wrestling ring.

5. Wendi Wheels

It shouldn’t come as a surprise that many of the women involved in the original WOW: Women of Wrestling show needed a day job to make their rent payments. There was no guarantee the promotion was going to take off, and, well, it didn’t. So we saw teachers, lifeguards, ranchers & other folks representing their occupations in the ring from time to time.

My favorite was Wendi Wheels. Who doesn’t love a female mechanic? She was as good in the ring as she was under the hood.

4. Irwin R. Schyster

The only cheaper way to get heat from a crowd than slamming their local sports team is to say you represent the IRS. Nobody likes the people who make their living off taking the hard-earned money of the blue-collar crowd and giving it to the government for presidential golf excursions.

That being said, IRS should have been a one-note joke as a gimmick. Mike Rotunda made it work though. His general demeanor fit the occupation of evil tax collector much better than the occupation of ship captain.

3. Repo Man

This was one of those instances where the WWF was ahead of the curve. Decades before Repo Wars became a hit TV show, Repo Man was wreaking havoc & pestering WWF Superstars for their stuff on a regular basis.

This was also one of those instances where a wrestler took a gimmick that could have been pretty bad and made it memorable in a good way. Barry Darsow put everything he had into this, as he would later on in WCW when he was a truck driver & a golfer. Certainly one of the unsung wrestling heroes of the 1990s.

2. Dusty Rhodes

You could say that Dusty fell on some hard times after his tenure with World Championship Wrestling came to an end. With pretty much every NWA territory closed & the AWA more or less shut down, options for continued employment in the wrestling business were scarse. So, Dusty had to finally get a real job.

The only problem? Dusty couldn’t keep a job for very long. One week he was a garbageman. Then he was a plumber. He was a fuel jockey, a pizza delivery driver and a butcher, with none of these jobs ever lasting a week. From what I can tell, he was a model employee. Always full of enthusiasm, great with customers & willing to do the dirty work. Yet, he hopped around from job to job, seemingly because he couldn’t decide on one.

The American Dream? More like the Original Millennial.

1. Dr. Britt Baker D.M.D.

Dr. Baker wasn’t the first dentist to step into the world of wrestling. Jerry Lawler convinced the overgrown man working on his teeth in the mid-1990s to help him in his war with Bret Hart. Bret had several classics at SummerSlam, but his match with Dr. Isaac Yankem D.D.S. wasn’t one of them. The guy was greener than those iffy Memphis teeth he worked on.

Since the above video, Britt has graduated with a doctorate in medical dentistry & incorporated it into her wrestling personality. Baker appears to have more staying power in the dentist role, mostly because she is ACTUALLY A PRACTICING DENTIST! Yankem’s career went better once he embraced his true personality: a homicidal maniac.