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Jim Ross, legendary announcer and Sooner fan, talks wrestling and brushes with death

Posted: May 12th 2014 By: Home Tulsa World Sports Extra Sports Colum

Dishes and silverware clink and clank. The cook sizzles some bacon and scrambles some eggs and flips his famous pancakes. The waitress brings another pour of coffee and a round smile.

Jim Ross is digging into his Eggarito, and while other patrons are buzzing about their kids' soccer rival or that load of hay that got left out in the rain, Good Ol' J.R. talks about death.

Ross considers his own mortality, which has come far too close in the last decade.

He describes the impossibly real scenario in which he almost became an accessory to murdering wrestling's "Million Dollar Man."

And he still, after 50 years, chokes up talking about the day his father gave him a hammer and a burlap sack of inbred puppies and told him to handle his business.

"My journey," J.R. says, "has been very unlikely."

Reluctant celebrity

Jim Ross is the voice of pro wrestling, a 2007 Hall of Fame inductee, the man in the black hat, immortalized behind the microphone in Wrestlemania and "Raw" and "Smackdown" and countless other events, co-architect of a marketing, entertainment and multimedia empire that has spanned the globe, best-selling author, beef jerky magnate and erstwhile restaurateur.

But before any of that, J.R. was an Oklahoma kid, Okie to the core, a descendent of Dust Bowl survivors who grew up country tough on a 190-acre farm outside of Westville, one-eighth Cherokee and all Sooner.

His parents are dead now, but Ross still owns the farm, nestled along the Illinois River in north Adair County. It's been in his family since 1880, a Bureau of Indian Affairs land grant nine years before the Oklahoma Land Run.

"I have the deed. The original," he said. "It's pretty cool."

It's almost a challenge to get through a day without seeing Ross' face.

He's host of the worldwide No. 1 podcast on iTunes, "The Ross Report." He has more than one million followers on Twitter. He writes a pro wrestling blog on FoxSports.com. He'll soon sign a contract to call boxing for Fox. He has a line of sauces, seasonings and beef jerky in Norman grocery stores.

And last summer he began a series of one-man shows ("spoken word tours," he calls them) that began with four sellouts in England, stopped last month at Wrestlemania in New Orleans, last week put him in Toronto, and this summer will land him in Australia.

And of course, college football fans can spot him Saturdays on the OU sidelines, often standing near Bob Stoops, wearing his black cowboy hat and pulling hard for the Sooners.

"I'm the worst celebrity in the world," Ross told the Tulsa World over a recent breakfast at Norman's Main Street icon The Diner. "I can't get comfortable with that whole deal. I can't get the Westville out of me."

That's not a bad thing. It made him who he is.

Growing up J.R.

Ross' parents, J.D. and Elizabeth Ross, taught their only child to be disciplined and responsible. And tough.

They wed in 1951 and drove Route 66 to California for their honeymoon. J.D. got a job in logging with cousins who had fled Oklahoma during the Dust Bowl, and James William Ross was born in Fort Bragg, Calif., in January 1952 — probably conceived somewhere along the Mother Road, he thinks.

After moving back to Westville, young Jim mowed the yard and got a haircut every Saturday, tended to the meat smoker while his parents were at work, bounced baseballs off their concrete block home and once fled, trousers at his ankles, from a copperhead rattlesnake that had slithered into their two-holer outhouse.

The family raised hogs and cattle and kept horses, and his daily routines made him a natural Future Farmers of America leader. But he also lost himself in the mesmerizing tones of Cardinals broadcasters Jack Buck and Harry Carey on St. Louis' KMOX.

"That," he said, "is who I wanted to be."

But before he could become J.R., he had to be who he was: a kid with hard lessons to learn.

The puppies and the hammer

J.D. Ross worked for the Adair County highway department and was gone sunup to sundown. That meant young Jim had lots of summer chores. The Rosses supplemented their income by breeding J.D.'s prize bird dog and sold the pups to hunters around the county. A good litter might fetch $50 a dog, upwards of $300 or more — huge money for a Westville farmer in 1964.

But one day, with the bird dog in season, 12-year-old Jim forgot to close her gate and one of her own offspring from a previous litter found his way in.

The results were disastrous, a litter of inbred puppies and a year's worth of breeder income lost. J.D. Ross was a tough, hard man, but mostly fair. His punishments, however, were swift and often severe.

He put the pups in a sack and handed his son a hammer.

"I can still see my mom today," Ross says, "looking in the back door into the kitchen, crying through the screen door."

Ross said he thought about just leaving the sack at the dump a mile away, but knew his father would find out. Even today, it hurts him to talk about it.

"I had to stop and wipe my eyes to see what I was doing," he said.

When he got back home, he got his whipping — and his awakening.

"I said, 'When I get big, I'm not gonna ever have to do anything like this again,'" Ross said. "I wanted to get off the farm."

School days

Ross played football, basketball and baseball (he was a 1969 Tulsa World honorable mention All-State defensive end) but became a statewide FFA star, renowned for his stirring speeches. He enrolled at Oklahoma State on academic scholarship, but, thanks to time lost between his frat house and sorority row in the — ahem — sprawling metropolis of Stillwater, managed a "one-point-something" GPA at mid-term.

His dad said his help would be welcome back on the farm, so he boosted his GPA to 2.8 by the end of the semester and transferred to Northeastern State, where during the promotion of a charity wrestling event, he met Cowboy Bill Watts and Leroy McGuirk, a couple of Tulsa-based maverick wrestling legends who ran the Mid-South Territory.

Ross' zeal and effectiveness promoting the NSU event with local radio and newspapers impressed Watts so much he offered him a job upon graduation.

"I didn't know what that meant," he said. "I knew I wasn't gonna be a wrestler. I knew there was no money seeing me in wrestling tights."

Thanks to good spelling and penmanship, Ross joined Mid-South as a note-taker, driver, gopher — and near murder conspirator.

Million Dollar Murder

One time while driving McGuirk (who became blind) to a show in Shreveport, Ross breathlessly called ahead to tell Watts his partner was drunk, had discovered his daughter was dating a wrestler by the name of Ted DiBiase (not yet the Million Dollar Man) and was waving around a loaded .38.

McGuirk had instructed Ross that when they got to the hotel to point him toward the door and send DiBiase in, and when DiBiase spoke, he would fire until the gun was empty.

"I'm getting very uncomfortable," Ross recalls. But Watts told Ross to let McGuirk keep drinking until he fell asleep, then hide the pistol.

And that, 40 years ago, is how Jim Ross broke into professional wrestling.

In the 1980s, Watts sold Mid-South to Jim Crockett, who ran a larger territory out of Charlotte, West Virginia, and produced content for a little Atlanta television station called WTBS. In the 1990s, Crockett sold his wrestling holdings (including Ross' contract) to television innovator Ted Turner. Turner, who started CNN and reinvented cable TV, launched WCW onto his cable network, made Ross his lead announcer and a legend was born.

"The Turner thing was really, really good for me because TBS was a fixture on basic cable," Ross said. "Wrestling, the Braves and Andy Griffith."

In 1993, Ross went to work for Vince McMahon and WWE, and the legend became an international sensation. Ross became the man who discovered megastars like Stone Cold Steve Austin, The Rock, John Cena and Brock Lesnar.

But fame and fortune nearly killed him.

Getting well

That farm boy work ethic plowed Jim Ross' path to success. But it also left him damaged.

"Ambitious," he describes himself. "Overambitious. Workaholic. Enough that there's never enough. Leads into today, how I'm wired. And I'm not bragging about that."

Through much of 2005, he ignored stomach pains ? a perforated intestine that nearly poisoned him to death. In 2010, a heart catheterization was "scary as hell." And three times, he has suffered a debilitating bout of Bell's palsy that left his face drooping and unresponsive and twice cost him his job as wrestling's premier announcer.

"I would blame it on my schedule or my eating habits or ulcers or genetics," Ross said. "Excuse, excuse, excuse. Never went to the doctor."

Both of his parents died at 64. Ross is 62, and all the ailments have forced a lifestyle change. Now, happy hour is spent at the gym, not the bar. He quit smoking. His third wife, Jan (they're married 20 years now and she's the "best thing that ever happened to me," he said), has him eating healthier than ever, although she might not know about the Eggarito.

Most importantly, he has cut the stress. No more seven-day work weeks with three flights and four hotels. He's retired now, and does what he wants, which is writing, cooking, speaking, podcasting and Sooner football. Nowadays he travels for fun.

Death is a painful and frightening part of life. For Jim Ross, death already has made so many unwanted visits.

"I think about it all the time. Every birthday," he said. "The closer you get to the age your parents passed, the more you think about it."