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 Special Feature #1 2/28/03 |
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| Jamie Noble has been to my House- Normally I don't pay much attention to the seemingly endless amount of product Jakks Pacific puts out, but it's not everyday you get the chance to purchase an action figure of a guy you knew back in High School! That is the opportunity I will be presented with when the Jamie Noble Jakks figure hits store shelves. Yes, I was a high school classmate of former WWF Cruiserweight Champion Jamie | ||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Noble. I'd be lying if I said we were best pals, but we were friends; friends through wrestling. I come from a very small school in Southern West Virginia, maybe around 400 students. It's the kind of school where everybody knows everybody, and all us guys who were avid wrestling fans were friends through that common interest. Someone seemingly always had an up-to-date supply of wrestling magazines readily available, just in case all the education got a little too boring. Today on the internet you can find a ton of "fantasy" wrestling leagues, but we were ahead of our time, running our own fantasy leagues long before anyone had ever heard of that term, or the internet for that matter. On special occasions we would all put some cash together and order a pay-per-view on Ricky's satellite dish. He was the only one who had a dish back then, one of those big C-Band deals, and pay-per-view wasn't available on our cable system. (As a matter of fact, we still don't have PPV access on cable!) Yes, we all loved the wrestling, but Doodle (as Jamie Noble was known back then) loved wrestling. As long as I had | ||||||||||||||||||||||||
| known Doodle i'd known of his ambitions to be a pro wrestler. Actually he was a pro as early as the 8th grade, when he was wrestling on the local independent circuits. In 1994, We found his name in an issue of Pro Wrestling Illustrated. There it was, in the "Arena Reports" section, listed in the results of a locally held card. I remember thinking "Wow, it doesn't get much bigger than PWI!" Oh, but it did. All throughout high school he would come in on Mondays and we would hear of who and where he wrestled that weekend. One particular story I remember had him teaming up with Ricky Morton to take on Tommy Rich & Doug Gilbert. For that one time you could say he was one-half of the Rock 'n' Roll Express! One day he came to school wearing his newly won TV Title belt from a local fed, WPW I think it's name was. Now, it's beyond me why a federation that probably wasn't | ||||||||||||||||||||||||
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| even on TV had a "TV Title", but regardless, he wore it with pride. The first time I watched him wrestle live was in 1996 or '97 in front of a massive crowd of about 25 people down at the local Little League field. And if it hadn't had been for us guys from school there to see our classmate, there would've been about 7 people there... counting the other wrestlers. Watching him then I knew he was far more talented than any of the other wrestlers around here, but it had never really crossed my mind that he could some day make the "big time". Besides, even if he was the most talented wrestler on Earth, how could a guy from deep in the hills of Southern WV get his foot in the door of one of the major organizations? So, naturally when I heard him say that he was going to one day be the WCW Cruiserweight Champion, I had a tendancy to dismiss it as nothing more than a wild dream. Well, I guess dreams really can come true. After he graduated, I never heard anything else from Doodle until around 1998-99 when pictures of him competing on the Florida indie scene surfaced on the internet. It wasn't too long after that when the local newspaper reported that he had signed a 3 year deal with WCW. I didn't know if that meant he would ever get any TV time or not, but sure enough "Jamie Howard" began popping up on WCW's Saturday Night show. From there it was a stint under a mask as one-third of the Jung Dragons, some time in the WWF's developmental system after the WCW buyout, and eventually to the 2002 King of the Ring where he defeated Hurricane Helms for the Cruiserweight belt, just like he said he would some 5 or 6 years ago. I ran into Jamie Noble during his time home for Christmas and he, of course, seemed very happy with the way things have went in his career. I really get a kick out of his character and yes, people really do talk that way around here. Who would've thought he would go from battling the likes of "Psycho" and "The Cuban Assassians" in Little League parks and Fire Departments to having his action figure hang on the same racks as Hulk Hogan, Ric Flair, and Shawn Michaels down at Wal-Mart. Go figure!....no pun intended. | ||||||||||||||||||||||||
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All Jamie Noble figure photos courtesy of wrestlingguide.com
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To check out Jamie Noble's WWF (yes I know I said WW"F") bio, click here
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email Gartwo: robertga@concord.edu
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