‘Wrestlers’ Jessie Godderz Hopes To Follow The Same Reality-To-Wrestling Playbook That Made The Miz A Superstar

There’s a lot of different paths that people can follow to the wrestling ring — whether it’s playing football like The Rock and Brock Lesnar, starting out as a mixed-martial-arts fighter like Ronda Rousey, or following in the footsteps of family members like Randy Orton.

Jessie Godderz is forging his own path.

A former railway conductor and professional bodybuilder, Godderz first gained widespread public notice as a contestant on the 10th and 11th seasons of Big Brother, followed by numerous surprise guest visits to the house over the ensuing years. From there, though, he took a left turn, entering the world of professional wrestling, where he’s worked rings as “Mr. PEC-tacular” for more than a decade now. Today, Godderz is one of the top talents with Ohio Valley Wrestling, the Louisville, Kentucky-based wrestling company that’s the focus of Wrestlers, a new seven-part Netflix documentary miniseries from director/producer Greg Whiteley (Cheer, Last Chance U). 

The series follows Godderz and his fellow wrestlers — Mahabali Shera, Cash Flo, Freya the Slaya, HollyHood Haley J, The Amazing Maria and more, along with their trainer, former WWE star Al Snow — through a crucial summertime build-up to an event they’ve dubbed “The Big One,” Ohio Valley Wrestling’s version of WrestleMania. The event promises to be a make-or-break play for a struggling gym whose new owners are demanding a financial turnaround, and viewers get an up-close-and-personal look at the wrestlers both in and out of the ring as they prepare.

In advance of Wrestlers’ release, Decider sat down with Jessie Godderz ringside in Ohio Valley Wrestling’s Davis Arena for a discussion prior to a live taping of OVW’s Saturday night show.

DECIDER: What was the experience like for you filming Wrestlers?

JESSIE GODDERZ: I’m no spring chicken when it comes to filming things, but this one definitely had a different feel to it, because it was a docuseries. Obviously, the platform of Netflix is no joke, and I think everybody kind of minded their P’s and Q’s. It took a little bit for everyone to get acclimated to the production crew, which was anywhere from ten to twenty people following us around — I don’t know if you’ve gone in the back here, but there’s not much space, so if you add another twenty people back there, it gets a little tight, and I mean tight like a tiger. Once people got acclimated to those guys walking around, and familiarized themselves with the cameras…  a true reflection of everybody’s life, and getting that window, it started to come out. I appreciate just being able to have a platform like this to showcase the realness of our families and the things we go through.

How did you first get into professional wrestling?

My story’s a little bit different — there’s more than one way to skin a cat. Because of me taking the fame and notoriety of reality television and parlaying that into a career — I was the youngest natural professional bodybuilder in the country through the WNBF, which is the World Natural Bodybuilding Federation. I started off with that, I was in Iowa, I moved out to California, got on reality television, took that success and I actually met, of all people, Ric Flair in Gold’s Gym Venice. This was at the peak of the Miz feuding with John Cena during that WrestleMania, and I saw that and knew, if he could do it, why not me? When I saw Ric Flair, I did what anybody would do, which is go up and say, “hey, how do I get into this wrestling business?” 

What’s your dream for what happens when Wrestlers comes out?

A dream is obviously to make this a competitive company to AEW and WWE, and I think that literally, overnight, that is plausible. The platform that they have–233 million homes have Netflix. So, to say that the ten million that WWE draws every single week–if we do something that’s seven times that… this is going to be a show that is going to be widely accepted in every home, because of the storytelling, but because it’s true and it’s raw and it’s real and the stories that we have, when it comes to the relationships that we’re enduring outside of coming through that curtain–the financial struggles we all have, we’re all trying to pursue a dream. 

Just following a dream is admirable in and of itself, because — a lot of people’s dreams, they might not have died, but they might have given up on them. And for people to actually watch us continue to pursue it on a day-to-day basis, and what we’re going through while juggling those life struggles that everyone’s enduring, I think it’s going to resonate, and elicit true emotion with people.

People are going to know who we are now. We’re our own business. We’re our own entity. If any other company wants to put stock in us, they need to see value in us as a brand, as that company. So when they bring us on and we sign a contract, whether it be somebody else other than OVW, they obviously see potential to make money off of our likeness, off of our brand, off of everything else that we’ve accomplished. We don’t even know, to explain what it could potentially be like.

I have more first-hand personal experience with live theater than wrestling, but I see a lot of parallels in what you’re doing here–the same challenges, and part of that is that you have to get people in the door once. Once you get them in, you’ve got them, but you’ve got to get them in the door once.

We’re able to elicit true emotion out of people that come for the very first time — every show is its own show. Yes, there’s other background stories that have obviously accumulated and turned into what it is in the present day, but we have to tell the best story we can for that day. It’s not like theater where it’s Cats, and it’s the same story, and we know what you’re going to do. This is a brand-new live show, every single Thursday. Anybody that’s in music, theater, anybody that’s in video production, or a journalist — should be coming here as an intern to learn what live television is like on a constant, daily basis. You can go from here and get injected into any other production that’s live-to-tape or taped, and it’ll be a breeze, because this is live television. 

Things will go wrong. It’s Newton’s Law, and that’s a fact.

For us to be performers — we’re our own management companies, we’re our own wardrobe, we’re our own makeup artists, we’re our own agents, we’re our own nutritionists, we’re our own dieticians, we’re our own personal trainers, we’re our own managers — we do all of this, and then you only so us for a blip between when we come through that curtain, go inside that ring, and head back out. I’m a dad. My kids don’t care what has happened to me. When I get back home, I need to be their dad. What we don’t show, when we walk through that curtain — you guys don’t know that I just drove seven hours up here and I’m doubling back at the end of the show that ends at 10 o’clock and I drive back seven hours back home and I get home at four or five in the morning. You guys don’t see that, but I’m doing that on a constant, daily, weekly basis to be able to come here and use the vehicle of OVW… this is the wrestling business. That’s the stuff that actually genuinely happened, the sacrifices that were made to keep this dream alive, and use this vehicle in Louisville, Kentucky to hopefully project us into that superstardom that everybody’s striving for. 

Once you feel that actual, elicited emotion, and it comes genuine, you then continue for the rest of your career trying to chase that dragon, that high. 

Scott Hines, publisher of the widely-beloved Action Cookbook Newsletter, is an architect, blogger and proficient internet user based in Louisville, Kentucky.