12 BRUTAL Wrestling Ribs That Made It To Live TV

5. Freddie Joe Floyd Is From The South

Tracy Smothers was a great act when he was playing Tracy Smothers. He was a genuinely funny bloke, too: he once peeked his head out of the curtain when working an indie, and said “Well boys, if there’s a riot, we got ‘em beat!”

Smothers was famed for working one of the best tag matches in the history of the genre - the Southern Boys Vs. the Midnight Express at the 1990 Great American Bash - and a great run in Smoky Mountain Wrestling before his gloriously incongruous run for Extreme Championship Wrestling. A hillbilly billed from “southern Italy” was a great bit that lampooned the fake country gimmick that could be traced back to the earliest days of the wrestling business.

As with a shockingly high number of wrestlers, for the market leader, Smothers was not marketed effectively by WWE at all.

Smothers was southern. Vince McMahon hates southerners. They remind him of WCW financer Ted Turner, who tried to put him out of business by using the exact same promotional methods deployed by, yes, Vince McMahon throughout the 1980s. Smothers was presented as an über-yokel so southern that he used the word “fixin’” several times in one sentence. A banjo-heavy music theme, heavy use of the word “son”, promos cut almost exclusively in rhyme: they couldn’t have made this guy more of a southern hick if he’d won the World title and held a live sex celebration with his cousin on Monday Night Raw.

Vince McMahon named Smothers Freddie Joe Floyd as a rib on two good Oklahoma boys: Gerald and Jack Brisco, whose shoot names were Floyd and Freddie Joe, respectively.

A guy's mainstream career was finished so that Vince could laugh at two well-respected and helpful front office employees.