New Jack: The pro-wrestler who stabbed an opponent in the ring
Any pro-wrestling fan worth their salt knows exactly why people describe pro-wrestling as “fake”.
It’s a very specific choice of words and one that they wouldn’t apply to other forms of fiction like films or TV. It would be very strange to sneer at someone sobbing over the end of Hamnet and go, “They’re just actors, you know it’s all fake, right?”
If your family were white-knuckling the couch over some of the high points of Blue Lights, just remind them that it’s nothing more than actors following a script, and there’s no reason to get so worked up about it. See how well that goes for you.
Like…we know it’s not real, that’s why we like it. The storyline that got me into professional wrestling was an undead zombie wizard rising from the dead to seek brutal revenge on his demon half-brother for burying him alive in front of 20,000 screaming Canadians. At no point did I think I was watching an athletic competition, I wasn’t interested in athletics competitions. If anything, wrestling fans have no issue with the fiction of pro-wrestling, but someone ought to tell some of the wrestlers that fact.
There are a number of wrestlers who have kept the old school rule of kayfabe, the magic-esque rule that a pro wrestler should keep the secrets of the industry under wraps at all times, long after it became a problem for them. This seems to have lead to a total break from reality for some wrestlers. Which sounds like a decent joke, and in most cases, it is. In other cases, it leads to some of the most horrifying stories in a sport that’s full of them.
So, let’s talk about the man responsible for the lion’s share of them. A man born Jerome Young in Greensboro, North Carolina, but who was better known under the name New Jack.
Who was New Jack?
So much of the history of New Jack is an unflinching look at the dark side of professional wrestling.
This is a man who made his name in the tag team The Gangstas in the southern pro-wrestling territories of the USWA and Smoky Mountain Wrestling. This was a guy whose heel tag team would walk out to packed out high school gyms of people holding confederate flags high and calling them every racial slur under the sun. Which, since this was the early 1990s and this was pro-wrestling, the fact that they weren’t too pleased by that made them the heels.
As time went on, New Jack began to live the gimmick he was developing as a notorious death match wrestler with a profound, burning hatred of white people. One cringe-inducing promo he cut saw him “send a special shoutout to my homeboy OJ Simpson – keep up the good work, baby, two less we got to worry about, you understand? Keep up the good work!” Now, a number of wrestlers have a phase of living the gimmick when they’re really feeling their oats, but New Jack’s phase never really stopped. It began with one of the most notorious videos in wrestling, the Mass Transit Incident.
The Gangstas were by now working at the company ECW, a promotion known for blood-soaked deathmatch wrestling. At an ECW show in Revere, Massachusetts, the Gangstas’ opponents that night had to pull out, and a large aspiring pro-wrestler called Erich Kulas, who called himself Mass Transit, asked the booker, Paul Heyman, if he could take their place. Kulas was brutalised by the Gangstas, with New Jack cutting his forehead open with a surgical scalpel, nicking two arteries and causing Kulas to nearly bleed out in the ring. It was only after the show that anyone involved with ECW was told that Kulas was 17 years old.
If only that were the last time New Jack stabbed someone in the ring. The Mass Transit Incident made New Jack an infamous figure in wrestling. All but blacklisted from the major companies, but a big enough name to draw on the indie circuit. Thus, he kept working despite how often he’d go off script and legitimately hurt his opponent. This included a match against William Jason Lane in October 2004. In fairness to New Jack (a statement absolutely no one should ever make), Lane went off script first, landing some shoot punches on New Jack. However, that was when Jack took a metal blade from his gear and stabbed Lane a reported 16 times in the head.
Shockingly, none of this caused New Jack to be totally blacklisted from wrestling, no matter the clear and present danger he was to anyone he shared a ring with. All the way up to his death in 2021, he wrestled occasional indie matches. Hopefully by then he’d realised that wrestling is fake, but hell, I wouldn’t want to be the one to tell him that.