Before They Were Stars: Jesse “The Body” Ventura in Pacific Northwest Wrestling in 1978

This is probably the earliest existing footage of everyone’s favourite wrestler-actor-governor-conspiracy theorist, Jesse “The Body” Ventura. He started out his wrestling career in the late 1970s as Jesse “The Great” Ventura, performed in Portland’s Pacific Northwest Wrestling promotion. Given that Ventura was known for being an obnoxious heel (bad guy) virtually his entire career, its pretty surreal to see him playing a babyface (good guy) here and hyping a feud with the promotion’s top heel at the time, “Playboy” Buddy Rose. It’s also amusing to see that even at a relatively young age, Jesse Ventura never had a full head of hair.