How ‘Heels’ helped heal Dick Steinborn’s daughter

Jodi Williams avoided the first season of Heels. Embroiled in family drama, having just learned she was one of Dick Steinborn’s many children, she was already in too deep into the wrestling world.

Then she got hired as First Team Production Assistant (PA) on the Assistant Director (AD) Team to work on the second season of the Starz hit show about a small-town wrestling promotion. Since it was now for work, she binge-watched Heels to get caught up on the characters and plot.

What she didn’t expect, though, was the on-set healing journey Heels would take her on, and a chance to get to know a father she only met three times her in life, just before his death at age 86 in April 2020.

* * *

For 49 years, Williams thought she was an only child, and her mother, Helen, had shielded her from the truth — but not from professional wrestling.

Born on October 8, 1970, in Moultrie, Georgia, Williams grew up outside of town where there was one stop light. They were wrestling fans, and would make the trek to Tallahassee, Florida, about 90 minutes south of their home. The passion that her mother and her aunt, Lucile — who everyone called Noon — had for the action in the ring led to many friendships with the roguish vagabonds from the pseudo-sport.

Young Jodi would go to the matches, but wasn’t always into it, drifting off to crush Coke cups under the bleachers. But as Jodi got a little older, and started asking questions, she tried to piece it all together.

One photo in the house seemed to be a clue. It had Jackie Welch, one of a myriad of the wrestlers who came out of the Welch-Fuller-Fields clan, with her mother, who is clearly pregnant. Also clear to Jodi was that Jackie and her mother were more than just friends.

So she ran with the narrative.

At the matches in Tallahassee, Florida, Jodi would sometimes attend without her mom. “I would grab the fence and I would scream, ‘Jackie, let me in!’ Because Jackie Welch, who I thought was my father for a long time, would come out and let us in,” Williams told SlamWrestling.net in one of several lengthy interviews.

Helen was a woman of the 1970s, unmarried and shamed out of her church, not telling her daughter about her father. What people thought of her wasn’t important, noted Jodi. “My mother, who had an illegitimate kid with a wrestler, didn’t give two f**ks because she continued to go to wrestling matches and didn’t care.”

It was a family choice not to fill Jodi in about her father. “I never asked who my dad was, because somehow down deep I knew that it was disrespectful to them,” Williams said. “I just let it go. And I never wanted for anything. We grew up in a poor household, but my mom did it.” For 38 years, right up until her death from melanoma, Helen worked in the factory for the Riverside Manufacturing Company.

* * *

As she became an adult, Williams started her own careers. Initially, the goal was to become a lawyer, enrolled at the University of Georgia. “I decided that law was not how I was going to make things happen, because lawyers weren’t really the ones who made things happen. The politicians did,” she said. Pivoting, Williams got a degree with a major in Political Science, and a minor in Speech Communications. Almost right after graduation, she was hired to work at the New York State Senate, where she helped write legislation and run campaigns.

A template was set where Williams was rigorously challenging herself, including studying taekwondo and karate. She enjoyed things that women often didn’t do (or didn’t talk about), like playing the drums, watching sports, or excelling in poker. Years later, a male friend noted that she excelled in male-dominated areas, that it was perhaps because of the lack of a father figure.

“He was 1,000% right. I gravitated towards my whole life relationships that were not healthy because I was gravitating towards that father type thing,” accepted Williams.

* * *

Over time, the thrill of politics waned, and Williams moved into the event planning world, not all that different than politics really, as both require people pleasing and organizational skills. In 2004, after her grandmother died, Williams was back living in Georgia, and worked with big name bands that came into the Atlanta country bar, Cowboys.

In 2008, while working in California, she was in a car accident, which forced her to take time off. “I had two shoulder surgeries,” describing the mess that was made. “It was a brutal year and a half.”

The next career began due to that accident.

“A friend of mine said, ‘Hey, do you want to make $100 bucks being an extra in Halloween?’ And I said, ‘Sure,’ because I couldn’t really work so I had to do something that didn’t have a whole lot of movement in it. And so I did that,” said Williams. “Then I thought, Oh, my God, I can do this and I can get paid, and I don’t have to really do anything, and they feed me three meals a day. This is fantastic.”

Not unsurprisingly, the background work wasn’t enough for the whip-smart — and people-smart — Williams. She summed up the next step: “The people in the industry realized I wasn’t a dummy. They said, ‘Hey, do you want to have a walkie and work as a production assistant?’ And I said, ‘Yeah, sure, why not.’ That’s how it all got started.”

Since then, her roles and responsibilities have only increased. These days, Williams is known as an AD, or Assistant Director. The next step is to put her “book” together to become a member of the Directors Guild of America.

She described what an AD does:

What I do on a daily basis is I handle the actors. On Heels, I basically was in charge of every single actor from when they landed in the morning, on set, to making sure they had the right costume on when they came to me on set. I would tell them what they were going to do. I would tell them if they needed to go change. I would tell them when they were going to lunch.

My job is basically a giant daycare for adults, and 90% of the actors are used to being told what to do. They’re used to it. And so if I send them back to their trailer, and I don’t tell them to change clothes, even if there’s a costume in their trailer, they will sit in their trailer until I tell them what to do.

It’s a fantastic job. It’s a great job. I am really good at it because I am good at playing Tetris and I’m good at chaos.

* * *

Williams wasn’t much of a wrestling fan after leaving home (though she did sell advertising for Smackdown while working at a TV station in Huntsville, Alabama), but being in the movie business meant coming across many connections — including “DJ.”

To most people, DJ is Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson, but on set, he’s just another actor, said Williams. “I’ve worked with him and the public image that he has is one thing, and it is amazing, and he is a huge, great person. But I know, behind the scenes, who he is, who his dad was, and all those things, because it’s who my dad was.”

She worked with DJ on the Netflix-release Red Notice, a long shoot since it paused production for six months during the COVID-19 pandemic, and on Jungle Cruise and the related Jungle Cruise commercials and promos.

Which is why when, in June 2022, Williams found herself sitting on the floor in an aisle at Hobby Lobby, crying while reading on her phone.

A friend had sent her the story of DJ’s father, Rocky Johnson, and his unacknowledged children that Rocky had left in his wake, from one end of Canada to the other. This piece, which ran on SI.com, and was written by this author, hit her in the gut.

For the first time, Williams felt like her own tale, one of not knowing her father until the last years of his life, was worth telling.

In a Twitter direct message to this writer, she posited: “I’m actually reaching out because I have struggled for three years as to how to piece all of this together. I was hoping to have some type of insight or hopefully a little advice as to what to do with all of this information I have inherited. It’s quite clear to me that my story and Rocky’s isn’t an anomaly. It happened all the time in an era that sucks media and cell phone cameras couldn’t catch these guys. I’d love to talk to you or text/chat if you’re interested,” she said, acknowledging that her story was very different than Rocky’s kids, who found a family in each other that they never had with the wrestling star with the ultra-famous wrestler/actor son.

Williams revealed that she had worked on Heels as well in the initial string of DMs. “Seeing your article truly has given me motivation to try to do something with this. I don’t know what, but something. I will email you! Talk soon.”

* * *

The story of discovery, learning about her father and her eight siblings, began in grief for Williams.

Her mother, Helen, died in 2000, then Grandma Beatrice in 2003. Auntie Noon had no children of her own, so it fell to Jodi when, in 2017, her aunt fell, struck her head, and was incapacitated to the point where her niece had to make the decision to take her off life support.

“It was Thanksgiving 2019. I went to visit my family’s graves in south Georgia. And I had just got my aunt’s grave taken care of because I was the only one left. I was crying like a hysterical crazy person, on their graves, because I see my mom, my grandmother, my aunt, all of them there, and I have nobody left,” began Williams.

In the cemetery, she lamented out loud: “I hope to God all of my girlfriends outlive me because if they don’t, I don’t know who will ever come and sit on my grave and weep, because I don’t have anybody. I have no more family.”

A week after Thanksgiving, the results to the DNA test Williams had submitted on a whim — the sample test itself having sat in her purse for a couple of months prior — to 23andme.com arrived. Williams was in Tampa Bay, staying with a friend.

The result said that she had roots in Germany, and, after clicking on the “Possible relatives” button, Williams learned that she had seven brothers and sisters (one more would turn up later).

“I was like, Jesus Christ, be careful what you wish for,” she whispered.

Channeling her inner-Nancy Drew, Williams started researching one sibling, Bradley Steinborn. She found him, learned a little about what he’d done, like mixed martial arts, and made the gutsy leap to get in touch.

Eventually.

“I started typing this really extensive email to him, because you can do that on 23andme. And then I erased it. And then I started typing something a little shorter. And then I erased that, and I did that for 30 minutes. And then finally, I was like, What do you say to someone who all of a sudden is your family that you never knew you had? All I typed is ‘Hi,’ and I hit Enter, sent that. I slammed my laptop shut. And then I cried myself to sleep that night.”

It was Bradley Steinborn who helped her piece it all together.

“I woke up the next morning, and I got an email from Bradley that said, ‘How cool is that? I have a half sister … I’m pretty sure this means that we shared the same dad. Our dad was probably Dick Steinborn. He spent a lot of time in Atlanta,’” recalled Williams.

Her new half-brother added: “I would love to talk to you. Here’s my number. But before you do, you should probably look up Milo Steinborn because you were born into a pretty amazing legacy.’”

The journey had begun.

“I’m a psychopath, because I’m all about research. So I put in, like conception calendar, like, ‘Hey, if I was born on October 8, when would I have been conceived?’” Williams said. “Then I Googled my dad’s whereabouts on those dates, in January, and he was exactly at the same exact municipality, where my mom would have gone, Tallahassee. Then I knew it was real.”

Williams quickly befriended Bradley, who invited her to Nashville to visit, the beginning of the Steinborn Family Experience, co-starring Jodi Williams. “I can’t even explain how I thought this was going to be greatest thing I’d ever found because it was going to be family — because I’d just lost everyone and I felt like they had given me this new life,” she recalled thinking.

The new siblings, nicknamed by Dick, were Candi (Donna), Cooki (Debra) Gilbert, Taffy (Vivian) Keller, Ginger (Virginia) Battle, Brooke Baker, Bradley Steinborn, plus a myriad of nieces and nephews.

After meeting Bradley, and his wife and daughter, she was struck by how much they were alike. Their baby photos were almost identical, and personality-wise, they are both stable, analytical, yet neither likes having their food mix on their plate. Bradley and Jodi drove to Alabama to meet a couple more sisters; those interactions were not quite as welcoming.

Then she got to meet her father.

* * *

Dick Steinborn was the son of famed pioneering weightlifter Milo Steinborn, who also was a pro wrestler. Following his father into wrestling when he was only 17 years old, the curly-haired and fair-skinned “Tricky” Dicky was a classic babyface, with the technical ability to match. The light-heavyweight was considered one of the best mat artists of his time, working from 1951 to 1985, only stopping because of serious back issues.

He married four times, including a wedding — and then a divorce — in the ring. According to a few wrestlers, Steinborn not only bragged about his conquests, but had a photo album of women he’d slept with — Steinborn was a celebrated photographer — and their pubic hair. A health-fanatic, Steinborn continued to workout throughout his life. He was also a walking history lesson on pro wrestling, able to spin tales tall and true with color and conviction.

Dick’s brother, Henry, was an accomplished amateur wrestler, but did not get involved in pro wrestling. “Henry is a great storyteller, once you get him going. He was around his father for many years. Dickie can tell stories too, but then you have to take the fact from the fiction with Dickie,” explained Dotty Curtis, widow of Florida promoter Don Curtis.

* * *

At the time Jodi initially met her father, he was living in Columbus, Georgia, with Ginger, acting as his guardian. That gave her control of the situation — to a degree. Initially Ginger wanted the local news stations to come out and celebrate Steinborn meeting a long-lost daughter. Jodi nixed that.

“I said, ‘This is not going to happen, no. I am going to be in this room with him by myself. It is going to be his and my story,’” recalled Williams. “We did that and she didn’t really like it. She came in halfway through our meeting, and said, ‘Look, this is over. He’s tired.’ … And she was basically his guardian so there was nothing anybody could do.”

Though the meeting on December 27, 2019, was relatively brief, Williams recalls details like it was yesterday. Her heart was racing so much that she mused that there could be a heart attack before she even got in the door.

As she entered the room with Steinborn, he said, “I am your Daddy, come sit next to me.”

In her heart and mind, everything was okay.

“It didn’t matter that he had been a philander and had slept with, like, 800 women. None of that mattered, none of it mattered. The only thing that mattered was I was not rejected,” said an emotional Williams.

Steinborn explained how he knew Jodi’s mother, Helen. “The story he told me was 1,000% true, because there’s no way he could have known the little tidbits of information I knew,” said Williams. The puzzle pieces continued to come together.

He asked her if she had a photo of her mother, and she raced to the car to get a baby photo.

“I recognize your mother, but her hair wasn’t really this dark, right?”

“No, you’re right. It wasn’t,” replied Williams, as the photo would have been a couple of years after Steinborn was around.

“Well, I remember her. She was dating a wrestler who got called to the Oklahoma territory, and he told me to look out after her. And I did.” Steinborn, always a wonderful storyteller, smirked.

“Was it Jackie Welch?”

“Oh God, I can’t remember. … All I remember is that he had to go the Oklahoma territory.”

Though she didn’t tell Steinborn, Williams had written to Welch about 15 years earlier asking him point blank if he was her father. He wasn’t — but he was, indeed, a part of the story. Looking up results from the time period, there’s Jackie Welch in Oklahoma at the time.

The conversation made Williams think back to a story that wrestler Jerry Oates had once told her. Oates, who often teamed with brother Ted, was a pal of Steinborn’s, and in fact the Oates’ sister, Jan, was Dick’s second wife. Jodi called him “Uncle Jerry.” There was a time when Jerry was with Steinborn in a restaurant in Puerto Rico. Steinborn bolted when a very pregnant woman came in the door. Later he told his brother-in-law, “Did you see that pregnant girl in there? I slept with her nine months ago.”

In that one visit with Steinborn, Williams said there was a true bond. Which was an issue.

“The real problem was he liked me,” she said. “He didn’t really think that I was his kid until we talked and I told him my blood type, and he’s like, ‘Oh, my God, you’re the only child I have with the same blood type as me and Milo.’ And at that point, all my sisters decided that they didn’t need me in their life.”

* * *

Steinborn was in failing health.

Williams did her best to see her father in the hospital or the rehab facility, but it didn’t always work. One sister called the police on her. She was put on a no-visit list.

“I would be escorted out of the rehab facility by the police, because I was told that I was not good for my dad. I could hear him crying in the background and screaming for me,” swore Williams. The last time she saw him was on March 9, 2020, having snuck into the rehab facility. His last request to her was to get him a Milky Way candy bar from the gas station across the street.

In this new family dynamic, Williams found it hard not to “Jodi everybody.” She’d spent years wrangling politicians, musicians, actors. She should be able to manage family.

“I know I’m a lot. And when I say that, I now know where I get that from, I know that my personality is a lot like my dad’s. My mom was always very contained and very funny. She would not overtly put herself out there to do something,” said Williams. “But I now know where I get this want and this desire and this thing inside me, that’s just like, larger than life.” In another life, Williams figured she might have been a wrestler or a valet.

She argued to see him. She argued for a different facility. She argued to be heard. There were even a few court appearances where the family sought arbitration to find consensus.

Dick Steinborn had lived a quiet life in recent years, and here was one of his daughters making a lot of noise in a small town, where things were often just swept under the rug.

“I’m never not going to be who I am but I think (about how hard) that must have been for them. This newcomer coming in, trying to save our dad and trying to ride the white horse and do the right thing. It’s the Libra in me, balance and reasoning, logic and fairness,” she tried to explain.

For all the effort, Jodi Williams only got to see her dad two more times before he died on April 18, 2020, during the COVID-19 pandemic.

There was no funeral because of the limits on gatherings, just an online service. Steinborn was cremated. With nine siblings getting a vote — the 10th came around in the fall of 2022 — they voted on what to do with the ashes. They divided the remains up. When Williams picked up her portion in Columbus, Georgia, she drove home with her father in her passenger seat.

There was a small inheritance, not much, but now split into more portions.

“I have thought back a lot about where things went wrong with everybody. Of course, the money is one thing, and greed and jealousy does crazy things to people,” was all Williams could say.

Still, family was family.

Jodi remains close with Bradley. It was Bradley who convinced her that her AD-ness was what was needed as their sister Candi faced her own closing chapter. Jodi took care of the half-sister she hadn’t known until her death.

Through the process of getting to know everyone, Williams realized she was an outlier. “They just never had anybody. They never had a dad who did it, they never had mothers who did it. They were all left to their own work devices as children. And I didn’t. I was completely the opposite of that.”

It was a start on Williams’ healing process, the realization that she grew up surrounded by love, grounded and supported. It could have been something much different, something like her siblings experienced.

* * *

Before Williams found the family she needed on the set of Heels, though, she suffered through the loss of her mentor, Chris O’Hara. A long-time assistant director, they had worked together on numerous projects. He was her advocate in the hiring process, often with other people he knew and trusted. O’Hara took his own life in January 2022. “He always looked out after me,” said Williams.

The call to work on Heels came from someone she didn’t know, which is a rarity. Her name had come up somehow; they didn’t even have her resume on file. Williams second-guessed herself, but with some friendly prompting, she dove in head-first to Heels.

Williams knew she could handle the actual job, it was the wrestling aspect that worried her.

“The first time we did a wrestling thing, it was like the room started spinning,” she recalled. Williams asked a colleague to cover for her and went to the bathroom and started sobbing. “I thought, This is the first time I’ve been in a wrestling ring since I found out. This is like I’m the four year old kid again, grabbing the fence, yelling for Jackie Welch to let me in. This is nuts. What am I doing here?” Steeling herself up, Williams went back to work — and learned the wrestling business through a show about the old-school, regional wrestling business, just like her father.

When the lead couple in the series, Stephen Amell and Alison Luff as Jack and Staci Spade, filmed a segment talking about wrestling, Williams had a revelation. “When I saw that scene playing out with Stephen and Alison, I was like, This is my life, and I am living right now in my father’s world. I am 1,000% living in his world.”

It was an insanely busy set. By Williams’ count, at one point she had 29 actors in a single day that she was responsible for, including actors, stunt doubles and the opposing wrestlers, generally veteran indy workers, day players. There’s a skill to managing them, their egos, their needs, whether it’s asking Amell to go to the gym early so he could be on set when needed, or convincing CM Punk to remove a raccoon hat he just happened to find and thought suited character, Ricky Rabies.

 

Williams said she bonded with Mike O’Malley, the writer, show runner and executive producer. At one point, they had a quiet moment together, and Williams turned off her walkie and took out her ear piece and confessed it all, the first time on set that she had done so. She recalled saying to him:

My father was a heel. He made a living as a wrestler. I am blown away sometimes by the things that you write, because it sounds exactly word for word, either what my father said to me verbatim, or what his wives had said about him. It is unreal to me that you were not in that industry. …

That is what I have to believe my father was, that he was a heel, he was a heel in the ring, and he became a heel outside the ring, he became a heel at home, he became a heel in his personal life. But I have to believe in my soul — to make my own mental self okay — that he always tried to be a face.

According to Williams, O’Malley took his glasses off, and said, “That may have been the greatest compliment I could have ever gotten. I sit alone in a room, and I write what I think fans and what I think people will really feel and what it’s really like. For you to say that to me, different things that I’ve written, it means more than anything I’ve ever, ever heard.”

He said, “It’s so crazy to me that your dad was a heel, because you are the complete opposite.”

Day by day, Williams became more comfortable sharing her story, the child of a wrestler who never got to know her father. Amell was an early confidant (though he had to decline commenting for this article due to the actors’ strike).

On set, Fridays were a theme day, where cast and crew would dress in a similarly, like their favorite baseball players. Williams was the one to suggest that they have a Wrestling Friday. Amidst the Randy Savages and Hulk Hogans, she stood out.

“I went as Dickie Steinborn.”

RELATED LINKS

• Apr. 19, 2020: A piece of history passes with Steinborn’s death
• Slam Wrestling’s Heels story and review archive
• Check out the STARZ-created website for the Duffy Wrestling League
• Watch episodes of Heels through the STARZ website