The first time Jacob Brooks stepped into a professional wrestling ring in Memphis, he was 13 years old and got paid with pizza and a handshake.
A little over two decades later, things have changed considerably for the wrestler known as Lil Show, the Redneck Brawler. Now he can buy his own pizza.
“I’m very blessed,” Brooks tells the Voice from his home in Denver. “I make a lot more money than what I did starting out, but that’s also called paying your dues. There’s a lot of guys who have been doing this for 20 years and they still do it for free because they love it. I love it, too. But this is also how I make my living. This is how I put food on the table for my family, and I try to get them to a life that I never had.”
It’s the typical tale for any pro wrestler. Pay your dues in high school gyms and dingy nightclubs, mostly for the love of the game, until, hopefully, the phone rings with a call from a big show. These days in the United States, that’s either the WWE (World Wrestling Entertainment) or AEW (All Elite Wrestling). But in Brooks’s case, his call came from Jack Darrell, owner and CEO of the Micro Wrestling Federation (MWF).
MWF lands in Staten Island University Hospital Community Park on July 1. Ringside seats and luxury suites are sold out already, and with the first season of the Discovery Channel reality series Big Little Brawlers preaching the Micro Wrestling gospel to the masses, Darrell has stumbled onto something big in something small — all wrestlers under the MWF umbrella clock in at under five feet tall. But maybe “stumbled” isn’t the right word, as the Floridian has been tirelessly pushing his business since he bought it from Chris Guyre, aka P.O.D. (Pissed-Off Dwarf), for $5,000 in 2008.
“I made money from the first day I got involved with this business,” says Darrell. “We’re always on the road. Last year we did 427 shows between two groups. Now I have three groups and we’re probably going to do close to 600 shows this year. So I have two full-time touring shows that stay on the road. And then I have a location in Pigeon Forge [Tennessee], where we filmed the reality show. I’ve got 32 little people working for the company right now. I’ve got a full-time wrestling trainer, Cody Hawk. He’s helped me out tremendously, but I’m pretty much just a one-man operation.”
Controlling the brand has been a pivotal part of Micro Wrestling’s rise, especially since it’s a touchy one, given the stigma attached to what used to be referred to as midget wrestling. Always a part of the action in pro wrestling, the names of Sky Low Low, the Haiti Kid, Little Beaver, Hornswoggle, and El Torito are familiar to fans, but they were largely a novelty act, used sparingly to lead into the night’s “real” matches.
Darrell was used to booking Chippendales-esque male revues, a gig he held from 1992 to 2008. He saw an opening for something more in the idea of little people wrestling, not as a one-off but as a consistent league with a home base (eventually, in Pigeon Forge), as well as a touring element. Why? Because he knew he could sell it, even if the world wasn’t ready for it.
“He (Guyre) always used the word ‘midget,’” says Darrell. “He taught me how to use the word midget as a marketing tool. I’m not going to say, ‘Hey, this is my Black friend Reggie,’ just like I’m not going to say, ‘This is my midget friend Short Dog.’ But in marketing, when I’m talking to people, ‘Hey man, have you guys ever had a midget wrestling show before?’ It was so much easier to roll off the tongue than not use that word. So he taught me how to use it.”
It worked locally in those early years, but Darrell had some dues of his own to pay, in the form of a seven-year stint in prison that began in 2009, for his role in an ecstasy shipment. “People go, ‘What did you go to prison for?’ I say, ‘Well, I had so much fun from ’96 to ’99, I had to do some time.’” He laughs. “Down here [in Florida], there’s a place called Ybor City [a neighborhood in Tampa]. Back in the ’90s, Ybor City was better than New Orleans, man. And there were so many raves and ecstasy, and it was just the funnest time of my life. So obviously, I had so much fun, I had to go to jail. But then I got out in 2016 and I was on a mission. I knew what I had to do, I knew exactly where I was going, and I knew how to get there.”
Darrell wanted to go nationwide; as he was doing that he was also trying to secure a reality show deal. To hit both marks, he had to soften the old marketing and refer to his athletes the way the majority of them wanted to be described. Before, the “M”-word was “midget,” but that doesn’t mean everybody’s happy with the updated “Micro.”
“There was a governing body of little people called the Little People of America,” says Darrell. “They wrote a letter to Discovery trying to get the show taken down. It was just so ridiculous. But we really don’t get any blowback. I don’t use the word midget. I don’t use anything derogatory. There’s nothing in my show that pokes fun at these guys. And I got 32 little people working for me right now. More than half of them are making over a hundred thousand dollars a year. I don’t care if you’re two feet tall or seven feet tall, dude, you’re making a hundred grand a year, you’re doing okay. And then when people come and see the show, they’re like, ‘Oh, this is not what I thought.’”
That’s the point. One look at a Micro Wrestling event and you’ll see a bunch of athletes putting on a show comparable to those of their counterparts in traditional promotions, with all the prerequisite drama and high-flying antics. In other words, these are legitimate pro wrestlers doing their thing, and the fans have obviously responded. But are they there for the right reasons? Are they there to see wrestling, or to see a novelty act?
“We have a lot of fans, but there are a couple people who are coming there to laugh,” says Brooks. “They think it’s going to be a sideshow. And that’s another reason why we’re out here training and why we bust our butts every night — it’s because we all have a chip on our shoulders. We want to prove to the world, to whoever’s there, that, hey, we can do anything that the big guys can do. And sometimes better. We just do it different. And for the people who say that we are getting exploited, there’s nobody putting a gun to our heads and telling us, ‘Hey, do this.’ This is how we put food on the table. This is how we take care of our families and pay our bills. And we’re all very blessed that we get to go out and make a living, that we absolutely love what we’re doing.”
It’s a classy response to what certainly can’t be an easy life to live when it comes to dealing with the public. Brooks laughs, admitting that he and his cohorts are human too. “It pisses us off sometimes, but I also love when people doubt me or doubt us, because we’re going to go out there and we’re going to prove them wrong every single time.”
Darrell doesn’t take any of this personally. And why would he? As a promoter, like P.T. Barnum and Don King before him, if the people are talking, whether positively or negatively, that’s good for business. And business is good these days. But how does Darrell top what’s already been done?
“Shit,” he responds, laughing. “I want to sell it to the WWE.” ❖
Thomas Gerbasi is currently senior editor for BoxingScene.com, Women’s Boxing columnist for The Ring magazine, a contributor to Boxing News (UK) magazine, and was inducted into the International Women’s Boxing Hall of Fame’s Class of 2022 in the non-participant wing. An award-winning member of the Boxing Writers Association of America, Gerbasi is also the author of five books. His amateur boxing record was 0-1.
