MFT: Jerry Lawler's Mysterious "Donut Hole" Trick

One of the delights of Professional Wrestling is that it presents heightened reality that is inches away from being ridiculous but still more or less plausible and manages to make every single "waka-waka, da-roon-ron-ron - sha-ba-dab-a-duh" seem to be mysteriously logical and extremely poignant no matter the "out there" factor. And there are lots of shenanigans going on in-between spots. Sometimes they are grounded in reality but then there are some that are straying straight into the realm of absolute abstraction, transcending beyond all boundaries of its genre into being something akin to conceptual art piece in a manner of Fluxus Dada. Because reasons, i suppose.

All that counts for Jerry Lawler's Mysterious Donut Hole gimmick. What is it? You need to see it in order to understand. But there is a problem. There are no known footage of Jerry Lawler performing it. The only thing we have is a clip from Jim Cornette's podcast where he jumps of a question about chewing gum while performing a match and tells a funny story about it.

In short - Mysterious Donut Gimmick is a way of making time over the course of a match. It is an entertaining routine of make-believe diversion. The gimmick itself is nonexistent. But it is extremely powerful and used to gain advantage over the babyface. It is designed to thrizzle and baffle and bring a laugh or two afterwards. It comes from Lawler's Memphis pre-WWF/WWE days and was usually performed when Lawler was a bad guy.

Here an approximate description of how it goes:

• The gimmick is situated in the tights. Heel pulls it out and puts it into his fist and hits the babyface who sells it big time;
• Then heels turns to the crowd and sticks the gimmick back into his tights so that the crowd can point it out to the referee who comes to search over heel's hands for foreign objects; 
• Upon finding nothing referee turns back while heel pulls the gimmick back from his tights, grabs the babyface in a hold and pops him in the forehead;
• Then heels jumps back and hides the gimmick in his kneepad. This time referee searches over heel's hands, tights and waistband. Still finds nothing and goes back to check the babyface while the crowd cries foul;
• Heel pulls the gimmick from the kneepad and throws the babyface to the corner, roughens him up and then immediately jumps back and hides the gimmick under the arm;
• Considerably irritated referee goes over heel's gear. Still finds nothing, informs the crowd who still cries foul;
• Then heel takes the gimmick from underneath his arm, hits the babyface again and hides the gimmick in his mouth;
• This time annoyed referee thoroughly checks every conceivable place in heel's gear. Finds nothing, crowd points out that the thing is in the heel's mouth, referee seems to be unable to understand what are they talking about. In the same time babyface bound back and slaps the heel in the back;
• that makes the bad guy choke on the gimmick. He grabs his neck with both arms, his face goes red, he can't breathe, he calls for help. Referee is baffled, crowd is satisfied with the payback and pops hard.
• Then babyface can finish the heel off or heel can swallow the gimmick and strike back.

The result - significant portion of the match is covered and the crowd is entertained. The fact that you can't see it makes it even better. With the description only you can reconstruct it in your head and it will be better than the real thing. Mainly because there are no things that can make it go wrong such as common sense or laws of physics.