I want to take you on a ride through the life and times of one of wrestling’s most notorious villains. It will be long and windy, but by the end I hope we’ll both have learned something about the wrestler and perhaps ourselves.

For those of you who don’t know, “New Jack” was a wrestler played by Jerome Young who was quite popular in the late 90s. Or rather, he was the opposite of popular, he was hated because he was a bad guy wrestler aka a “heel.” The character of New Jack could be charitably described as “racially charged,” promoter Jim Cornette created the New Jack character as a black “bad guy” who could be easily hated by the mostly white, mostly racist audience of his Smokey Mountain Wrestling promotion based in Appalachia.

To this end, New Jack would do a lot of bad guy things to make the fans hate him. But New Jack (and his tag team, “The Gangstas”) brought a novelty and an edge that made him stand out from every other bad guy around. For example, a wrestling match usually ends when one wrestler pins their opponent to the mat for 3 full seconds. The Gangstas demanded that they be allowed to win after holding their opponents down for just 2 seconds because of affirmative action. Also in wrestling, the punches and throws are usually fake so neither wrestler ever gets hurt. But New Jack is best known for his time in ECW where a large part of the allure was the wrestlers genuinely maiming each other, such as when New Jack threw Vic Grimes off a 20 foot high scaffold and onto concrete.

ECW is what made New Jack famous, gone were Jim Cornette’s racially-charged stipulations, in was New Jack stabbing and mauling his way into superstardom. Or at least “superstardom” as far as wrestling is concerned, 99% of people have never heard of him. But if you like wrestling enough to talk about it online you will eventually be told about New Jack and just how good of a heel he was. Because when he wasn’t hurting people for fake and for realsies, he was also a charismatic and innovative talker who could make you believe that he was a real sociopath who would do anything at any time just because he could.

Unfortunately his ability to make people believe backfired on him after the “Mass Transit incident.” In 1996 New Jack and Mustafa Saed (his tag team partner in the Ganstas) faced D-Von Dudley and Erich Kulas. Kulas was a 17-year-old fan who had lied about his age and credentials in order to live every fans dream of wrestling in the ring. To make the match look more “real” Kulas asked to be bladed, which is when a wrestler gets cut in the forehead to release a trickle of blood. The nick barely hurts but the stream of blood covers the wrestler’s face and makes them look like they’ve been beaten to a pulp. But when New Jack bladed Kulas, the knife cut far too deeply and Kulas collapsed, bleeding profusely as medical assistance had to be called.

If you know about wrestling, then you can see one side of this story. It’s really nothing more than a stunt gone wrong. Wrestlers blade themselves often because making things look “real” is part and parcel to wrestling. Kulas was completely untrained however, and so while almost all wrestlers cut their own face, Kulas asked New Jack to cut him. Whether due to Kulas moving at the wrong moment or just a mistiming, this led to what is normally a painless nick becoming a near fatal wound.

If you don’t know about wrestling but saw the news afterward, you can see another side. Kulas was underaged and undertrained, and New Jack is a sociopath who likes to hurt people. While blading oneself may be common, Kulas asked for New Jack to blade him, which is rare. New Jack took this opportunity to genuinely hurt someone because he enjoyed doing so.

And unfortunately, the second side is what most people saw. New Jack was eventually arrested and charged for the incident, although he was acquitted when his fellow wrestlers took the stand in his defense, saying that blading was common and this was just an unfortunate incident. New Jack passed away in 2021, but even up to his death he defended himself on twitter and in interviews saying Kulas was at fault and he meant no harm.

But what if it was all real? If you don’t remember the beginning of this post, New Jack’s real name is Jerome Young, and Jerome Young has also given numerous interviews (sometimes calling himself New Jack, sometimes calling himself Jerome Young) where he instead claims that he hated Kulas for being arrogant and disrespectful, and cut him deep to intentionally hurt him. Many of these interviews have been so called “shoot” interviews, in which wrestlers will drop their persona and talk about their real lives, real families and the truth behind the cameras.

So if Jerome Young gives a shoot interview saying he was an actual sociopath, where does that leave New Jack? Now it could be said that even “shoot” interviews are often “in character.” New Jack still had an audience and was still working as a wrestler even late into his life. Leaning on his notoriety to maintain image, fame, and a bit of money just makes sense. And saying “it’s all real” and then showing you something fake is the oldest trick in entertainment. As far back as the Epic of Gilgamesh, authors have gone to great lengths to ensure the audience that everything is real. The epic even implores the reader to go to the walls of Uruk and see the stone tablets where Gilgamesh himself recorded his autobiography.

So perhaps Jerome Young is still playing a character in those interviews, he’s still New Jack only now people want to hear the “real truth” so he tells the life story of Jerome Young but from the perspective of New Jack. But if that’s true, where does New Jack end and Jerome Young begin?

A lot of wrestlers seem to “become the mask” over the years, or maybe their mask was just their real face. How much of “New Jack” is also Jerome Young and vice versa has captivated fans for years. Wrestling is *clearly* fake, the punches aren’t real, the spots are choreographed, but there’s a real person going up there to play the hero and the villain. And while some lifelong heels love the fact that they can get genuine hatred from fictional acts, some of those same wrestlers use the idea of “it’s all a character” to defend their real life horribleness.

Jerome Young was an actual felon who actually stabbed a wrestler during a match. Not the kid Kulas from above, a different wrestler. And not during a botched spot, he pulled a knife out during a match and stabbed his opponent 15 times (though New Jack says it was only 9). Stabbing people may be central to the New Jack mythos, but it’s also something Jerome Young has done on multiple occasions.

So when New Jack would go on shoot interviews and talk about how he’d bladed Kulas on purpose and wasn’t sorry for it (only to in other interviews defend himself saying it was an accident) how much of that is him staying in character and how much of that is the genuine feelings of Jerome Young? The Jerome Young who also stabbed a wrestler in the ring on purpose and then would later say “hey it’s all an act” and “yeah I stabbed him because he pissed me off” at various times? How much of this is a genuine psychopath who uses “it’s all fake” as a defense vs a wrestler who really takes it way too far? And does he say both at different times simply because he’s “in character,” or does he sometimes tell the truth and sometimes lies to defend himself?

Because really, if you’re always in character, you’re never in character. And when you do something terrible on purpose only to later say it was just a mistake… that’s called being human. Everyone does that. It’s easy to believe that New Jack made a genuine mistake, he even asked Kulas if he was ok during the incident and this can be seen on video. It’s also easy to believe that Jerome Young wanted to hurt someone but didn’t want to be punished and hoped that Kulas wouldn’t die and cause a murder investigation.

I did this long intro on New Jack because I actually wanted to talk about someone else but needed my audience to understand wrestling before I did so. Nathan Fielder is a comedian with a few popular TV shows that I’ve never watched, but a friend of mine showed them to me and when I didn’t laugh at the joke, he spent the next hour explaining Nathan Fielder to me so that I could more better appreciate or “get” the joke. He also told me I had to watch this video by SuperEyepathWolf in order to see the “real” story.

Nathan Fielder plays a character who is socially awkward, uncomfortable around people, and doesn’t pick up on cues. He plays an autist. But he is also an actual man who in interviews and unscripted segments also has all those traits.

My friend loves watching Nathan Fielder not only because he finds the cringe-inducing humor genuinely funny, but also because he’s fascinated by the artistry and “mythos” if you will of an autist playing a comedian playing an autist. Part of the magic of the show is that it isn’t a “show,” it’s reality TV. The plot of every episode is Nathan Fielder trying to help a struggling business, but his ideas are things like “sell TVs for 1$ to abuse Best Buy’s price match guarantee” or “shame children into buying a toy by saying they’re babies if they don’t.” The insanity of the situation is only heightened when the business actually tries implementing these ideas.

The show has genuinely made the news because sometimes those ideas actually work. As with all reality TV, it may be scripted but it’s also “real.” This episode may have been chosen specifically for Nathan to have a wacky idea and cringe-inducing interactions, but he really used those ideas and didn’t script those interactions. The names, places, people and events are all true, only the facts have been changed.

And yet when you go deeper you realize that everything is an act. Nathan has has many interviews in which he’s far more relaxed and sociable. And you can even see elements in the TV show where something so funny and unpredictable happens that he momentarily drops the act, and it feels like the “real” Nathan shines through.

But even when you see the “real” Nathan, whether in interviews or in moments of the show, you still see a lot of the character of Nathan Fielder. A somewhat awkward man trying crazy ideas because he thinks they will work and doesn’t understand why people would object. Is he playing it up for a laugh, or does he just know that people laugh at what he normally does?

I think from what I’ve seen and heard, Nathan Fielder is bringing the art of wrestling to another medium. Wrestling was always about making you believe that what you were seeing was 100% real. In the modern age, part of that reality can come from the kinds of interviews or backstage segments where the wrestler admits “OK, all that was fake, but here’s the real me,” and then just keeps playing the character. Being “always in character” is a hard thing to do, but it’s made that much easier when the “character” is still the real you.

Sometimes a person seems to become their character, and sometimes a character is just a real person given a microphone and an audience. The allure of “it’s all real!” is a strong one for fiction, and making most of it actually real is one of the strongest ways to keep that allure. I don’t know about the “real” Nathan Fielder, or the “real” New Jack. But it’s fascinating to look at someone’s actions and not be entirely sure whether what you’re seeing is real or not. And I think that’s what makes wrestling and Nathan Fielder so popular.