Remembering Paul Jones, the Believable Heel

Bruno Sammartino died last week, and was buried yesterday. Quite rightly, his death has dominated the wrestling news of the past week. He was a massive star and a legitimately likeable, decent man with a fascinating personal story. If you read one retrospective, David Bixenspan’s eulogy at Deadspin is beautifully written and comprehensive.

Sammartino was a giant and giants cast large shadows. In the shadow of his death, the news that "No. 1" Paul Jones had died the same day was muted. Jones, a tag team legend of the Southern territories and an even better heel manager after he was done as a full-timer, deserves a bit of a retrospective of his own.

I’d be a liar if I said I was well-versed in Paul Jones’s wrestling. His in-ring career was in the 1960s and 70s. The footage of him during his best years as a wrestler is grainy or overexposed, coming from darkened house shows in local coliseums around the South. It’s not the neatly produced pro wrestling which even the 1970s WWWF, the current WWE’s forerunner, created.

But the sound is still there. Listen to the clip below. The match is Paul Jones and eternal babyface Ricky Steamboat versus the heelish Ric Flair and Masked Superstar. From the time the clip starts, there’s a high-pitched shriek from the crowd which never stops. It’s the sound of a crowd buying into the proceedings, wholly and completely, with their lungs and hearts.

The work between Jones and Steamboat is smooth and fast, and if it would be foolish to say that Jones was the bigger star of the two, it would be equally foolish to say that Jones was simply a stand-in. The end of the match, which sees Jones take out Flair so that Steamboat can get the pin, reaches an absolute roar the second Jones’s hand connects with Flair’s flesh.

Despite serving as a moral Swiss army knife for whatever promotion he was working for at a given time, Jones was not a natural babyface. He kind of looked like an asshole, and he was a burly type built for brawling. When he turned on Steamboat in 1979, after three Mid-Atlantic tag team title runs as a team, he reached his internal equilibrium. They had what amounted to a blood feud which is, again, defined by sound: every clip of them wrestling around this time has the same heart-palpitating thrum to it. It’s the thrum of bloodlust, and it’s the sort of thing which didn’t and doesn’t just happen on its own.

Jones entered the modern pro wrestling consciousness when he retired in 1982 and became a manager. He formed a large stable called Paul Jones’s Army, a sort of holding pen for weirdo, violent heels which, in retrospect, seems like a forerunner of WCW’s Dungeon of Doom without some of the high camp weirdness (the Army was low camp and gritty, but still definitely camp). Abdullah the Butcher was part of it, as was Baron Von Raschke, a mild-mannered Minnesotan cosplaying as a Nazi in a cape. The Barbarian, a man made of face paint and muscles, came in. Less weird was “The Raging Bull” Manny Fernandez, a legitimately frightening and legitimately violent guy who teamed with Rick Rude as The Awesome Twosome under the Army’s auspices.

Jones took his barrel-chested physical presence and amped it up. He started wearing safari style khakis and carrying a riding crop. Alarmingly, he grew his moustache out but began cutting it shorter and shorter, until the entire ensemble of moustache, shock of black hair, and khakis had him looking like Hitler. Anything for heat, and if it doesn’t threaten to cause a riot, is it really pro wrestling? He was asked to stop trimming it; even Von Raschke didn’t go that far.

Jones’s defining feud would happen during his days as a manager, not as a wrestler. He was managing the Assassins, who were feuding with “Boogie Woogie Man” Jimmy Valiant. If you’re not familiar with Valiant, picture a guy who wasn’t the greatest wrestler in the world but who had a huge beard and seemed to be made of raw charisma. He’d dance with his valet, Big Mama, and shout a lot about the fans. He was awesome and a beloved mid-card act in the early to mid 80s.

The Assassins and Jones couldn’t really get one over on Valiant, so in 1984 they figured the best way to get him was to cut off his beard. So they beat him up and cut a big chunk out of it. This kicked off a legendary feud which lasted for years.

The best way to put it is that the feud was, ultimately, about hair. Valiant didn’t like losing his beard, so he started putting his hair up against the Assassins’ masks. His friend, Pez Whatley, turned on him—after Valiant qualified that Whatley was the best black athlete in the world rather than the best overall—and cut his hair. Valiant went on a rampage. He shaved the Army’s hair until only Jones remained.

Quite opposite of expectations, the feud remained white hot and buoyed the second and third tier stories of the era. At Starrcade 1986, Valiant put up Big Mama’s hair against Jones’s in a match between the two. Of course Valiant won and of course the crowd bayed and howled once again for a match involving Jones, years after his peak.

I remember being a kid and finding myself enthralled by the storyline. The 1986 vintage of Valiant vs. Jones and his proxies helped define my nascent pro wrestling fandom. Starrcade '86 is still my favorite pro wrestling show and the Valiant-Jones match one of my favorites on the card. Not because it’s a great match in any technical sense, but in a dramatic sense. It was one of the most perfect feuds in pro wrestling history and had a perfect ending.

Central to that was Jones. It’s hard to quantify, but despite never being the biggest, fastest, best, or most articulate, he felt believable. There are promos he cut during the Valiant feud and he seems so spittingly angry at the entire situation, so frustrated that he couldn’t get his final victory over Valiant and that damned beard, that he’s reduced to barely being able to speak. It rules.

That’s what Jones seemed to bring as well as any of his contemporaries: believability. He seemed real in a way an awful lot of his Army, in their capes and face paint, didn’t. And whatever character motives kicked off his hatred of Valiant, it seemed to boil down to frustration. That’s a relatable feeling, the way we don’t like something or someone and we just want to scream or shave a beard or punch a wall or just do something to let it out. That was Jones. He was the one who let it out. It made him a villain, but one that felt tangible and real, despite everyone loving Jimmy Valiant, and it made him and that feud one of the touchstones of mid-80s Southern wrestling.