Robservations: Recent arrival of ‘The Dumpster’ makes my day
Call me a fanboy, call me uncivilized. You can even call me a sucker for a great — even if somewhat cheesy — gimmick. But I love what the WWF did in the mid-1990s, when every wrestler they employed came from another vocation.
If you’re a fan of the squared circle, and have been for a while, you’ll understand what I mean. Back in the day, nobody could just become a wrestler. WWF writers didn’t think that was realistic enough, I guess (as silly as that sounds). So, every new “superstar” came from another line of work. You had Bob “Sparkplug” Holly, originally known as “Sparky Plugg,” who was a racecar driver by trade. You had “Doink,” the clown that would whip your hind end if you slighted him or his jokes, and you even had former “Fantastic One” Steve Kern slinking to the ring as the “Repo Man,” complete with a mask and a hubcap medallion, and then as “The Skinner,” apparently some sort of poacher who turned his sights from wildlife to the pro wrestling circuit.
Were these gimmicks silly? Yes, of course they were. No one would believe a dentist — “Dr. Isaac Yankem” (He’s Kane now, kids) — would leave the comforts of the medical field in favor of the squared circle. But they were still fun. They put a little more personality in a form of entertainment — check that, “Sports Entertainment” — that up until then was mostly made up of simple guys from simple backgrounds pretending to beat the devil out of each other. Sure, you might have the occasional cowboy, but pretty much everyone was just a big bruiser.
So they all got a gimmick, and they were watched by everyone, including your friendly neighborhood sports editor. I spent the majority of my college years following the exploits of Razor Ramon (a Columbian-born street punk, apparently), Diesel (former trucker/bodyguard) and the rest of the WWF’s crew of split-vocation grapplers.
Among my favorites, right up there with Three-Mile Island native Atom Bomb, was the “sanitation engineer” turned wrestler, Duke “The Dumpster” Droese.
He was a blue-collar, working-man’s hero, who made his living cleaning up the trash, and decided it was time to clean up the trash that had been giving the World Wrestling Federation a bad name. He hit the ring to the sounds of Mack trucks’ reverse alarms, and sent all the bad guys to the landfill with devastating maneuvers.
Not to sound too fan-boyish, but he was a great one. He played his part, played it well, and still displayed a great deal of athleticism in the ring. I can remember watching him on TV in my dorm room, with his poster smiling down from among the Yokozuna, Bret Hart and Alundra Blayze pictures we had taped up to the walls.
And Monday afternoon, right here in McMinnville, Tennessee, I found out where “The Dumpster” has been hiding himself for all these years since he left the ring.
Now simply going by “Mike,” he’s the new Warren County Middle School wrestling coach, and by the looks of things, he’s doing a great job. I’m looking forward to seeing him in action coaching the Pioneers, and if you’re a fan of the “Duke,” or just of Warren County sports in general, I recommend you check them out, too.
Just don’t be surprised if a certain sports writer you all know is there in the crowd, screaming like a schoolgirl for “The Dumpster” to “take out the trash.”