'The Mormon Giant' live documentary busts open religious stereotypes in wrestling

LAUREN GILGER: Don Leo Jonathan was better known as The Mormon Giant — a second-generation professional wrestler in the mid-twentieth century. And he was, quite literally, giant.

He stood at 6 feet, 6 inches tall and weighed more than 300 pounds. The Mormon part of his moniker he inherited from his father, a wrestler who went by “Brother Jonathan” and played off of Mormon stereotypes to get the boos of the crowd.

DAVID WALKER: So he had an oversized Book of Mormon that he would hit you with. He started carrying around a 7-foot rattlesnake onto whose head he grafted a fake horn to make it look more menacing and which he described as the snake from the Garden of Eden. He would bring women around and introduce them as among his wives.

LAUREN GILGER: That’s David Walker, an associate professor of religious studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara. He tells the whole story of the the Mormon Giant and his father in a new live documentary that he’ll be performing at Arizona State University Thursday night.

And he told me The Mormon Giant was coming to fame as the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints was becoming more mainstream. And it reveals a lot about how religion and entertainment influence — and reflect — each other.

I spoke with Walker more about wrestling, religion, the Mormon Giant and Brother Jonathan.

Chad Seales

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DAVID WALKER: He would dress in the sort of the attire of a 19th-century Mormon missionary to play a sort of old-school Mormon missionary precisely again at this moment of the church's turn towards a respectability politics. He was playing its shadow side. And he did so precisely to get the boos of the crowd. He would come in and he would say, "Are there Mormon brethren among us? Fellows, I come to do the faith honor and justice." And then he would proceed to do something bad.

So he would just get, you know, booed vociferously and including by the Mormons in the audience who loved to sort of see this own part of their tradition that had been sort of swept under the rug represented in this particular way, either to sort of live vicariously through its continued representation or to just cheer when it just has its snot beaten out of it.

LAUREN GILGER: So he played the villain in the wrestling scheme, which has always got a good villain, right? But it sounds like it was a little different when it came to his son, who became known as the Mormon Giant. Like, he was a little, it sounds like, ambivalent about his moniker.

DAVID WALKER: Yeah, absolutely. So when Don Leo Jonathan — Don Leo Heaton was his birth name, but he took on his father's ring name: Brother Jonathan to Don Leo Jonathan and then started becoming known as the Mormon Giant. And he first sort of didn't know what to do with the moniker. It was a way of him sort of inheriting and being brought up into the sport by his dad.

But he not only wanted to get away from his dad's legacy but also had a sort of ambivalent feel about being called endlessly the Mormon Giant too. He sort of embraced that moniker. He learned how to roll with it, but he found two things. First, that he had an ambivalent relationship to the church too, and he wanted to be known beyond that. But also frankly that the church itself in the 1950s and '60s context of its own cultural mainstreaming and indeed sort of international growth was known differently in different times and places.

And thus also the Mormon Giant moniker played differently in different times and places. Sometimes it would mark him as a heel, sometimes as a hero, sometimes it played sort of ambivalently or neutrally. And so I'm trying to tell also the history of the church itself by way of the way that that gimmick was both sort of thrust upon people but also the way that either played or did not play in different times and places and thus again to sort of map these gimmicks alongside and as a way to understand the reception of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints itself in the 20th century.

David Walker

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LAUREN GILGER: That's fascinating. I want to back up for a minute, David, and talk about the way that you present this, right? Like, it's very innovative and sort of, I guess, genre-busting in terms of academia. You're calling it a live documentary, and there's music involved. You're narrating the whole thing live. It's on a screen, but you're in the room. How does this work?

DAVID WALKER: Yeah, so when I started this project, I started working on a documentary component. I worked on actually a number of different outputs: so both a written component, a sort of lecture component and then a documentary component. Eventually sort of pushed pause on the documentary component and pulled a lot of those materials into this sort of live presentation.

So what I do is I deliver what would otherwise be sort of the voiceover of a documentary along with these sort of clips that I've edited to that purpose that have their own soundtracking or their own audio as people themselves give their own histories of wrestling or the church itself or give a sort of theory of religion. I interact with them, and then I have all of this sort of production live soundtracked by a good friend and extraordinary musician named Tim Albro.

So this is — I mean, it's a different mode of academic presentation. I wanted to keep it as an academic presentation and indeed sort of own my own status as an academic as the professor of this material but also play with genre and form a little bit in a way that I hope also gives us the opportunity to think more critically not only about the forms and the presentations and the performances of scholarship but also indeed the way that wrestling itself has its own sort of presentational theories and cultural dynamics and think of a way of being able to sort of mimic as metaphor the one to the other in order to comment a little bit more on both.

LAUREN GILGER: What kind of reaction have you gotten? You're doing this live documentary at universities, it sounds like, around the country. Are people excited about this, especially in academia when it feels and looks a little different?

DAVID WALKER: Yeah, I mean, to use a wrestling term, it's been getting over pretty well. But it has been getting over differently in front of different audiences too, and that's been really fun to track with. So we'll riff a little bit differently if we're speaking at Brigham Young University than we will at a bookstore in Santa Barbara. I don't change the argument in front of any of these audiences, whether they be sort of institute groups from the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints itself or, again, sort of different audiences in a bookstore in California.

But really, I find that the stories, they resonate. They resonate with different groups in different ways. Latter-day Saints themselves often sort of appreciate some of the stories about church leadership at a particular time, a particular transitional moment in the church itself called correlation, a movement during the 1950s and '60s led largely by the church president and prophet named David O. McKay to really sort of standardize the aesthetics of the church and really sort of push a certain respectability politics also at that time.

Church audiences will learn, for instance, that David O. McKay was actually a closet wrestling fan, a huge wrestling fan. And he loved actually some of the work — the cultural work — that even these Mormon heels did because he understood what wrestling was all about. He understood that it was a "sport" that proceeds through portraying certain stereotypes and ideals that it simultaneously questions as such.

So even though these folks are playing like bad Mormon stereotypes, they're also doing so in a space that's specifically designed to invite questions about whether that stereotype is really real and thus whether things might be otherwise. So he realized, not only in a sort of "all press can be good press" kind of way but also in a very smart, ritual theorist kind of way, that this could be a space to really sort of play out these ideas and get people talking.

LAUREN GILGER: So do you know, is there any of this happening today? Are there Mormon or LDS, as they are called today, wrestlers around?

DAVID WALKER: Oh, absolutely. So the coda of the story is about modern iterations of Mormon gimmicks, the way that these gimmicks sort of play on and shape now, especially local wrestling cultures, the sort of emergence of new territories of wrestling. The coda is about a group of wrestlers who have the gimmick the Brothers Smith. And they play a very sort of "Book of Mormon" musical-inspired sort of "Hello!" good missionary character that immediately belies their good missionary status by proceeding to be heelish and fight and behave dirty.

They do their own version of the 1940s Brother Jonathan gimmick when they announce that they were there to honorably defend the faith and then proceed to cheat and hit people with the Good Book and so on and so forth. And it looks at how that gimmick sort of plays out not only in Salt Lake City — as one of my interviewees says, the Mecca of that culture — but also regionally and also nationally at this particular moment too, the sort of media mainstreaming moment of the Mormon Church.

LAUREN GILGER: Yeah, very fascinating stuff. All right, we'll leave it there for now. David Walker, writer, narrator, executive producer of "The Mormon Giant: Wrestling with Religion in 20th-Century America." He's also an associate professor of religious studies at the University of California Santa Barbara. David, thanks so much for coming on. This is fascinating stuff.

DAVID WALKER: My pleasure. Thank you.