#Wwe crime tyme pro#
Related Story It’s a New Day at the WWE Read nowīy age 15, Gaspard was living with relatives in Atlanta when he met Harrison Norris Jr., better known as former pro wrestler and bodybuilder Hardbody Harrison, who encouraged Gaspard to take up wrestling.
Not knowing the matches were scripted and choreographed, he wanted to be Hulk Hogan and become a wrestler when he grew up. After his family moved from Haiti to New York in the mid-1980s, Gaspard’s father took him and his brother to Madison Square Garden for untelevised WWE shows.
#Wwe crime tyme professional#
His father wanted him to be a lawyer, like Gaspard’s grandfather in Haiti.īut Gaspard also took a liking to professional wrestling. “My father looked at me and he really wanted me to be everything that he could have been, because he didn’t have the opportunity,” Gaspard told me. He would eventually take up jiujitsu and kickboxing as well. Gaspard’s mother was a kickboxer trained in Muay Thai.ĭespite protests from his father, Gaspard gravitated to fighting, too, picking up boxing when he was 5 years old. His father used to fight for money on the streets of Haiti before turning professional as a boxer at the age of 18. For Gaspard, like many black wrestlers before him, perpetuating racist stereotypes as a member of Cryme Tyme was the balance he had to find between being a professional wrestler in the largest sports entertainment company in the world and adequately representing his race on screen. They were examples of the worst perceptions of how black people act in America, from vernacular to wardrobe.īut when I spoke with Gaspard that day back in 2016, he was neither ashamed nor apologetic about his time in WWE. The characters that Gaspard and Paul played sexually harassed white women, constantly ran financial scams on the other wrestlers and were the butt of every joke about race. In the long history of racism in professional wrestling - a history that included blackface, Confederate flags and the on- and off-screen use of the N-word - Cryme Tyme felt like the zenith. They had finishing moves called “Thugnificent” and “Da Shout Out.” Pop a 40 and check your rollies, it’s Cryme Tyme.” Gaspard and Paul would dress in oversized denim jeans, Timberland boots, white tank tops and grillz. The duo’s theme music started with the lyrics, “ Yo, yo, yo, yo. Cryme Tyme, at the time and in hindsight, was viewed as one of the most racially offensive acts in the history of professional wrestling, two perceived gangbangers menacingly running roughshod through WWE.
Gaspard, whose death was confirmed Wednesday morning after he was caught in a riptide with his 10-year-old son last weekend (his son was rescued), was best known for his work in the tag team Cryme Tyme alongside fellow black wrestler Jayson “JTG” Paul. I was interviewing the former WWE wrestler in the summer of 2016 for a story on The New Day, a trio of black professional wrestlers who had improbably become the most popular act in the company despite WWE’s tawdry history surrounding race and the treatment of African American performers. Shad Gaspard wanted me to know he was, in fact, a gangster.