We’re taking a trip in a time machine today, back to the days of TV tapings held inside Atlanta’s Centerstage Studio in the late 80’s / early 90’s. While most fans who think back to the enhancement talent days gone by tend to think of the higher profile WWF wrestlers like Lombardi, Horowitz, Sharpe, I myself always had a soft spot for the WCW crew. Sure they had bigger mullets, rounder pot-bellies, and more mismatching outfits, but it was their ring names that sealed the deal for me. They may have gotten squashed in under two minutes while Jim Ross totally ignored calling the action, spending his time having audio boners over Nancy Sullivan, or shilling some Roos sneakers, but dammit, their nicknames made them SOUND like they were main eventers. Roaming the rings in the south we had such grapplers as Mike Justice, Rock Hard Rick, Tommy Angel, “Scrap Iron” Bill Ford, “Nasty” Ned Brady, and perhaps the most Godly of them all, this week’s Jobber Of The Week – Mike Thor.
Named after the mythological Norse God of thunder and the son of Odin, Mike Thor was no stranger to descending from the heavens to the Earth. Well, actually his descending from the sky was usually the result of being flung in the air by a NWA / WCW superstar and crashing hard down on the mat. While Marvel Comics’ Thor vanquished many tough enemies by wielding his mighty hammer, the only “hammer” the big and burley Mike Thor may have been carrying was a box of Arm & Hammer baking soda, probably to ease the indigestion he suffered upon pushing Lee Scott and Agent Steel out of the backstage buffet line to get second and third helpings of grub.
While Mike may not have had the buffed bod and long, flowing blond locks of his comic namesake, he was slightly above being a mere mortal jobber. For the better part of decade, Thor would go to battle with every top name from Atlanta, whether it was Jim Crockett’s NWA Russian Army, or the mid 90’s WCW cheese of Johnny B. Badd. Ironically, Mike’s biggest moment in WCW would be the time he actually donned a blond wig, which was similar to his namesake’s. At the Clash Of The Champions XXI in November of 1992, Mike put on a wig in an attempt to fool everyone into thinking he was Medusa, who was set to have a match against Paul E. Dangerously that night. As usual, Mike, as the impostor Medusa, went down in a heap after getting nailed by Dangerously’s cell-phone.
Maybe Mike Thor would’ve had more mainstream success in wrestling had Jim Crockett went out on a limb and acquired the license the the name, Thor, much like the WWF was forced to do when Marvel sued them over the likeness of the Incredible Hulk in regards to one Terry Bollea.
Then again, judging from that Photoshop picture, maybe that wouldn’t have been such a great idea. Nevertheless, Thor, whose real name was Mike Prather, had a long and respectable career which also saw him having stints in various other territories wrestling as a face-painted Mighty Thor, and as a masked wrestler named Super D. As for the present day whereabouts of Mr. Thor, who knows? It appears that as time has gone on, Mike has become more like Thor’s main nemesis, the evil Loki. As in he’s keeping things “low key.”
Sigh, Odin forgive me for that blasphemous pun.