Saturday, July 23, 2011

Loyalty - The Spoiler, Don Jardine

In my last 2 posts I talked about false loyalty. Tonight I want to talk about true loyalty. At the time we formed ICW Wrestling in Mississippi, going head-to-head in competition with Mid-South Wrestling, it was not an easy task getting wrestlers to come in and work for us, so we mainly started out with a few "old timers" and brought in some young talent from different areas who were not yet known here in Mississippi. One wrestler who did come in for us later was The Spoiler, real name Don Jardine. For those of you who have followed wrestling to any degree there is no need to say that The Spoiler was a main event card throughout the country and to this day is still considered by many as one of the greatest Masked grapplers of all time. He had worked for Leroy McGuirk and then for Bill Watts here in the South drawing huge crowds all over.
Now here's where the loyalty came in. Of course Bill was running Jackson and some other towns against us where he could, The Spoiler would come in for us on some of our cards but NEVER worked for Bill in towns against us during that time. How he managed to do that, I don't know. Maybe because he could pretty much do whatever he wanted to.
His reason for doing this? I don't know, because he didn't have to work for us, or for Bill. This man could have easily gone to any big territory anytime he wanted to, and make good money. It wasn't for the money. It wasn't for the exposure. I really think it was something more than loyalty. I think a better word would be RESPECT. Respect for my father.
RIP Don.

1 comment:

drx said...

who worked the cage in grizzly's place ? i can't remember. spoiler, osbourne ?