By Josh Katzowitz, WCI Content DirectorMost of us can agree that pro wrestling is a silly spectacle. From the flamboyance of Gorgeous George in the 1950s to the absurdist antics of Andy Kaufman of the 1970s, from the cartoon characters in the 1980s to the Attitude Era of Stone Cold Steve Austin and The Rock in the 1990s (and even into today where kayfabe is dead and Netflix made a $5 billion deal with WWE to showcase the product), the idea behind the sports and entertainment product is rather ridiculous.
It's basically this: men and women, engaging in soap opera-like storylines, pretending to beat each other up.
Pro wrestling is pretty stupid. But it’s also pretty awesome.
There have been three distinct times in my life when I regularly watched pro wrestling: 1) when I was a kid in elementary school years watching the southern wrasslin’ of the NWA and the Hulk Hogan phenomenon of the WWF (World Wrestling Federation; now known as World Wrestling Entertainment); 2) when I was in college during the Attitude era, where we recorded (on a VCR!) all the WWF and ECW (Extreme Championship Wrestling) shows we could handle); and 3) during the pandemic when my young kids and I passed the time by watching upstart AEW (All Elite Wrestling).
I’ve been to probably a dozen live shows (everything from TV tapings and pay-per-view events to independent shows where there were maybe 100 people in attendance), and I’ve interviewed a handful of pro wrestlers for various publications and outlets. (The Rock once stole a line from me that he used during a TV promo, and Scotty 2 Hotty did NOT like my question about what it was like to have once been a “jobber.”)
Despite its ridiculousness, I used to love pro wrestling, and in some sense, I still do. Especially when we can talk about ridiculous gimmicks, characters, and storylines.
Since we’re fresh off WrestleMania 41 from last weekend, today is the perfect day to reflect on the times when medical doctors were an important part of the wrestling script.
The Best Doctor Gimmicks in Pro Wrestling
Doctors have been used in pro wrestling for at least the last 75 years. Here are some of my favorites.
Dr. Jerry Graham
It’s hard to determine whether Dr. Jerry Graham was supposed to be a medical doctor (or had simply earned his PhD), but when he wrestled in the 1950s and 1960s, fans likely believed he was a real MD. During this era, many fans thought wrestling was “real,” so even though Graham didn’t exactly look like the perfect paragon of health (as you can see in the video below), we’ll assume most wrestling fans bought the whole doctor act.
Graham was one of the more popular wrestlers of his day. Along with the rest of the Graham family, including Eddie Graham and “Superstar” Billy Graham, Dr. Jerry Graham consistently helped sell out Madison Square Garden in New York. He was hated by fans so much that he inspired a riot in 1957 that injured eight police officers and destroyed hundreds of MSG seats.
Graham mostly played a heel character, and it’s always fun to watch him get his comeuppance.
But the story did not end well for Graham. He had real-life mental issues, including an incident in 1969 when he entered a Phoenix hospital with a gun and knife and stole his mother’s corpse, and he suffered from addiction issues.
“There was something inside the Good Doctor—maybe even a genetic malformation—that continuously forced him to sabotage himself. Sooner or later, you sensed, he was going to self-destruct,” Superstar Billy Graham wrote in his 2010 memoir, via Pro Wrestling Stories.
Isaac Yankem, DDS
Largely considered one of the worst gimmicks in WWE history (during a time when other wrestler characters included an IRS tax collector, a minotaur, a repo man, a friar, and a hockey goon), Isaac Yankem’s occupation was that of a dentist (get it?!? Yankem?!? Hilarious, right?).
Replete with nasty-looking teeth, Isaac Yankem, DDS, debuted in 1995. Before WWE owner Vince McMahon hired Yankem (real name: Glenn Jacobs), he asked the wrestler a simple question in their first meeting: “Have you ever been afraid to go to the dentist?” Jacobs said no, but McMahon was convinced he could get Jacobs over as a bad guy with the evil dentist gimmick.
“Here I am sitting across from Vince McMahon who’s the most powerful person in the wrestling industry and all I could think was, ‘Wait you flew me all the way up from Knoxville, Tennessee, to New York to tell me that you want me to be a wrestling dentist?’” Jacobs later recalled, via SE Scoops.
“. . . “But that’s where the industry and WWE specifically was at that time. it was pretty campy. You see some of the characters from that period. It was just cartoonish and it was really focusing on going for kids actually. The product itself was very sanitized . . . They actually thought it could be successful. But unfortunately I couldn’t sink my teeth into it.”
Unsurprisingly, the gimmick failed.
But it all worked out well for Jacobs. He went on to portray Kane, one of the most successful wrestlers in the late 1990s and well into the 2000s, and he was inducted into the WWE Hall of Fame in 2021. Today, Jacobs is the mayor of Knox County, Tennessee, and he’s ruminated about running for governor in the same state where lawmakers have considered a bill that prohibits fluoride from being added to public water systems.
Britt Baker, DMD
Unlike Isaac Yankem, Baker is actually a dentist who practices in Florida. Naturally, her real-life occupation is part of her gimmick, but it’s not the cartoony villainous version of Isaac Yankem. She got her biggest attention as a heel (wrestling parlance for a bad guy) in the upstart AEW earlier this decade. But she hasn’t abandoned her medical skills, though she now has to navigate which patients are concerned with their oral hygiene vs. just wanting a photo with their famous dentist.
Even before she graduated from dental school, she was putting in work on the independent wrestling circuit, building her in-ring skills. It almost certainly bled over into her academic studies. As she said, via Tech Talk El Paso, “Oh, yeah. I took my finals with a black eye.”
At an AEW show I attended in 2020, Baker introduced herself to the crowd by bashing their “chubby Whataburger faces,” and then gave the “horns down” salute, a huge insult to the Austin, Texas, crowd. It was a great promo, and less than two months later, Baker was part of one of the more iconic wrestling moments of the pandemic era when Baker, one of the longest-running AEW women’s champions of all time, broke her nose while wrestling Hikaru Shida and then smiled to the camera.
Warning: her face is a bloody mess.
The face of @AEWrestling’s women’s division. #RoleModel #DMD pic.twitter.com/j3Ylhr4qiv
— Dr. Britt Baker, D.M.D. (@RealBrittBaker) April 9, 2020
The blood was real (called “hard way” in wrestling parlance), and so are Baker’s doctoring credentials.
Stone Cold Steve Austin
One of the top-five most popular wrestlers of all time, Stone Cold Steve Austin didn’t use a doctor gimmick in the ring. But during his feud with Vince McMahon in the late 1990s, perhaps the most successful pro wrestling rivalry ever, he tricked McMahon into thinking he was one.
With McMahon in the hospital after another wrestler hurt his leg (kayfabe!) the prior week, McMahon thought he was receiving help from the staff. Until Austin, dressed as a doctor in scrubs, attacked him in his hospital bed. The best part: Austin smacks McMahon in the head with a bedpan in one of the funnier wrestling moments you’ll see.
Seriously, that clanging sound you hear at the 1:06 mark of the clip below will live in your head for a long time.
Austin later called it, “the funniest thing we ever did.”
As he wrote in his book,
“The story on the bedpan was that he wanted me to beat him up . . . Vince came up with the idea of me hitting him in the head with the bedpan while he was lying there in bed. I said, ‘Man, Vince, these things are pretty hard. They're solid stainless-steel bedpans. I don't know how to hit you with it and have it not hurt.’”
McMahon told Austin to give it everything he had. That shot to the head must have been painful, but nearly 30 years later, people are still talking about it. Maybe the pain was worth it.
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Money Song of the Week
When Hanson released its smash hit MMMBop in 1997, I didn’t pay much attention. The band of teen/pre-teen brothers was WAY too bubblegum for me, and though it was impossible to avoid the song completely—it was in the cultural zeitgeist for much longer than I would have expected—I did a good job of changing the radio station whenever it began to play.
I never cared what the song was about because I figured it was about something stupid. Or as American Songwriter noted, “The true meaning of the song often gets eclipsed by the babbling barrage of mmmbops and duba dops throughout the tune.”
Almost 30 years later, I was scrolling through Instagram reels when I came upon this dramatic reenactment of a fake conversation an influencer was having with herself about MMMBop’s meaning.
Then, I found this influencer producing something similar.
@james_mcnicholas 🎭 Dramatic Monologue: MMMBop by @HANSON #comedy #funny #acting #lyrics #songalogues #music
I had no idea the lyrics told a similar tale to what we’ve discussed before in Seasons of Your Life and Phase of Life Spending where we know we only have so much time experiencing one part of our lives or a certain group of family members and friends. Once that time is gone, we can never go back.
When Isaac, Taylor, and Zac sing the following, it’s actually a rather mature concept for a bunch of kids who hadn’t even gotten through high school.
“Oh, so hold on the ones who really care/In the end, they'll be the only ones there/When you get old, start losing your hair/Can you tell me who will still care?”
As Zac told GMA in 2018:
“A lot of people ask what ‘MMMBop' means. Well ‘MMMBop' as a word, it represents time. It represents the fact that time passes very quickly . . . And so in a story about reaching for what's important and kind of driving towards the impossible dream, ‘MMMBop' is telling you: go now, go now, go now, because in a moment, in an ‘MMMBop,' life will be over and have passed you by.”
I just listened to the song all the way through for the first time in years, and that confirmed I’m still not interested in hearing it on a regular basis (it is so very bubblegum). But now that Instagram and TikTok have taught me what the content of the tune is all about, I have a whole new respect for what those kids were doing all those years ago.
More information here:
Every Money Song of the Week Ever Published
Instagram of the Week
I’m just going to leave this here and back away from my computer screen.
[EDITOR'S NOTE: For comments, complaints, suggestions, or plaudits, email Josh Katzowitz at [email protected].]
Great article, brought back a lot of nostalgia. What line did Rock steal from you?!
I was interviewing him about his mic skills in about 2000, and he was saying something like, “I don’t want to be a wrestler who goes out there and says the same thing every time.”
I said, “Yeah, those guys are like one-trick ponies.”
He looked at me and said something like, “Yeah, that’s funny. I might have to use that some time.”
A few months later, I was watching Raw, and he was cutting a promo on Triple H. He said, “Triple H! You’re a one-trick pony in a cheap-trick circus!” And I fell off the couch.
About 20 years later, I was telling that story on social media, and The Rock saw it and said, “Thanks for the collaboration, J”
I also told that story once to Bruch Prichard, who was Vince McMahon’s right-hand man for many, many years. When I was done, he said, “Yeah, we’ll pretty much steal from anybody.”
Really loved this — crazy how wrestling always found a way to make “doctor” characters either completely nuts or just flat-out absurd. A few more that popped into my head:
Dr. Luther: Canadian dude who was a big deal in FMW (Japan’s hardcore scene) and pops up in AEW now and then. Not your standard “medical doctor” — more like a wild “mad scientist” type — but “Dr.” was always part of the act.
Dr. Death Steve Williams: Not a doctor in the gimmick sense, but he got the nickname after winning a “toughest guy on campus” thing at Oklahoma. Totally leaned into it — guy wasa monster in Japan and the U.S.
Dr. Zahorian (on the much darker side): Not a wrestler, but an actual dr who got busted for handing out steroids like candy to wrestlers in the ’80s. His trial basically kicked off the whole steroid mess WWE had to deal with. Definitely not a gimmick, but still part of wrestling’s weird history with “doctors.”
Kinda hilarious how “doctor” could mean evil dentist, insane scientist, technical machine, or real-life scandal depending on when you’re looking. Great post — now I’m gonna rewatch the Austin bedpan scene!
I thought about Dr. Death, but then I figured I’d have to bring up Brawl for All, and that is a whole other thing.
Dr. Luther would have been a good one. It’s unfortunate I didn’t get to see him in his prime. Only saw him in AEW.
dude tons of nostalgia! My favorite matches as a kid I remember was “Ravishing” Rick Rude vs. The Ultimate Warrior, Razor Ramon vs. Shawn Michaels, and Macho Man Randy Savage vs. the Ultimate Warrior. also my favorite tag team match was Hulk Hogan and Bruce “the Barber” Beefcake vs. Zeus and Randy Savage.
Josh love it man and yes, Hanson very bubblegum like but now when I here that song I keep thinking the beginning of Hangover 3 🙂 Up until that scene, it used to be nostalgia for high school.
Man, Rick Rude was so underrated. And you’re right. It got no better during that era than Razor Ramon and Shawn Michaels.
Too bad Ric Flair didn’t develop a doctor gimmick. Whooooooo!
I gotta say I really miss the names of these wrestlers from back in the day they were ridiculously creative and hilariously non-PC. The Honky Tonk man, Jimmy sugar fly snooker, hacksaw Jim Duggan, Jake the snake Roberts, and Bam Bam Bigelow
What, no mention of Dr. D Dave Schultz?(The guy that slapped John Stossel) Actually now that I think of it Sam Sheppard. Yes, the guy that the fugitive was based on became a pro wrestler at the end of his life and originated the mandible claw that Mick Foley made famous.