My fellow bloggers have been gushing over one of the most perfect and ideal jobbers of all time — Bob Emory (and who could blame them?) That’s our boy with the white boots and big muscles, working over the dreaded “Dirty Dick” Murdoch.
The blogger from Inner Jobber kicked off our Emory love-fest with his recent “Beautiful Bob” article. He verbally drools all over: “the handsome face, the beautiful body, the constantly being put into submissive poses…”
At left is an image from the Inner Jobber website showing Emory in electric-blue briefs. You’ve got to have some love for a man who goes out in public wearing little more than underwear (but far more enticing…)
The next day, Joe from Ringside at Skull Island followed up with more Emory memories. Here is the handsome face dominating another muscle-jobber named Curtis Thompson.
Joe wonders why the hell he never blogged about Bob Emory — many people’s favorite jobber — until now.
Their blogs inspired me to check out whether I had written any articles about Emory. Sure enough, on my old website from before I started blogging, I had created a gallery of one match showing buff Bob getting his ass kicked by “Dirty” Dick in the (surprise, surprise) coal black trunks and boots.
I am talking about the famous match where Dick shoves Emory into a podium, and it busts into pieces, so the villain picks up a broken piece of board and illegally clobbers his victim repeatedly.
My old gallery, which I created back in 2007, is still available for your viewing pleasure. The match is your basic muscle-squash job (the best sort of squash job) with Emory getting his proverbial dick knocked in the dirt by big, fat Murdoch.
You can also see the video version of this video on YouTube.
I’ll jump on any bandwagon — but especially one with Bob Emory on-board.
80’s muscle jobber renaissance! Gotta love that.
One of the great things about Emory’s era in professional wrestling was the mix of old school booking patterns and new school broadcasting mediums to reach the audience. Back in the day bookers would put two wrestlers together who would then go from town to town working variations of their matches basing the outcome on where they were that night, while they got to work on their chemistry building up to their biggest match at the end of their time together. One wrestler might “win” in his hometown, and the other would win in his, for example, to get the big pop.
Appropriately enough, being booked to work repeatedly with the same guy was called being “married,” which gets an lol from me, lol. That still goes on today, most obviously at the WWE level where the two guys working toward a main event at the upcoming PPV wrestle repeatedly on TV, with most outcomes being screwjobs, hopefully to make people more likely to buy the latest iteration of John Cena vs. Ryback/The Rock/HHH, etc. where the fans will finally get a clean finish.
But, in the late 80s and 90s, bookers didn’t like giving away the biggest matches for free on TV, especially on the smaller, syndicated shows like WCW Power Hour or Main Event or even Saturday Night. So they filled much of those shows with matches taped from house shows featuring less popular talent. Thus, the jobber era so many of us remember so well. The cool thing was, since Emory or Kenny Kendall (or Tommy Angel, Trent Knight, Tim Parker…) weren’t going to anchor WCW’s next PPV, they were still considered good workers, especially for big or past their prime older wrestlers who needed to keep their skills up and angles going. So they’d be married to the B or C team heel o’ the moment (Murdoch, Kevin Sullivan, Bunkhouse Buck) who wasn’t in a program with a popular babyface, and they’d go around the circuit filming matches with the same outcome again and again. The result was, on a good weekend, you might get two, even three versions of Kenny Kendall getting squashed and hog-tied by Buck, or Angel getting double gut stomped by Sullivan or, in this case, Emory getting bashed in the ring and thrown through the announce tables by Murdoch on three different shows.
I’ve got a VHS tape featuring Emory I bought off Ebay years ago when I was in college, and it’s got three versions of his match with Murdoch. The most famous one has Emory getting thrown out of the ring and through the announce table before getting pinned in the ring. The most brutal had Emory getting thrown out the ring but then suffering Murdoch’s infamous brainbuster three times in the ring while Murdoch kept screaming about how he was going to do this to Dustin Rhodes at the next PPV and the announcers ranted and raved about how he’s “tryin’ to hurt this kid!” Good stuff. Anyway, thanks for the walk down Emory Lane. He’s vastly under-celebrated these days among us.