Before It Was Prime Time

By Cliff Potts, CSO, and Editor-in-Chief of WPS News

Baybay City, Leyte, Philippines — March 22, 2026

I got told I look like Sergeant Slaughter.

That’s not a sentence I expected to hear at this point in my life.

My time frame is the 1970s. We didn’t grow up with cartoon wrestling characters shouting at each other on national television. When that whole thing showed up later, my reaction was simple: what the hell is this?

So I looked him up.

Campaign hat, mustache, drill instructor energy, yelling at people for a living. A character built for television, designed to look like authority.

And then I looked at the photo again.

If I’m being honest, the resemblance is mostly hat, mustache, and a general lack of enthusiasm for nonsense.

The hat’s been around longer than the comparison. I’ve been wearing some version of it since the 1970s—Aussie bush hats, Vietnam-style field hats, boonie hats. Not as a look. Just because they work. Sun, rain, whatever the day throws at you.

If you wear something long enough, eventually it stops being clothing and starts being part of you. That’s what I’ve been told.

The one in the photo? Chinese-made boonie hat. Nothing special. Just does the job.

The mustache isn’t for style either. It exists because there’s a mole under it, and shaving it turns into a bloodletting exercise I decided to stop participating in. It’s not a fashion choice. It’s a medical workaround.

And the expression? That’s not acting. That’s what happens when you’ve worked security long enough to make sergeant in more than one outfit. You stop reacting to things the way people expect you to. You conserve it.

That part doesn’t translate to television very well.

Professional wrestling in the 1980s figured out that people respond to symbols. A hat, a voice, a posture—it all signals authority before a word is spoken. That’s what made those characters work.

But those characters were built to imitate something.

Guys who didn’t need a script.

So when someone says I look like a cartoon sergeant, I don’t take it as an insult. It’s just a reminder of how easily real-world experience gets simplified into something that fits between commercial breaks.

It’s close enough.

But it’s not the same thing.

Because the truth is, the character came later.

The real version was already out there.

And sometimes, without even trying, it still shows up in a photograph.

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