The Squared Circle: Life, Death, and Professional Wrestling Read online

  Greensboro Coliseum (Greensboro, North Carolina). Home to many of the biggest cards in the Crocketts’ Mid-Atlantic territory in the ’70s and ’80s, and subsequently to the centralized NWA, the Greensboro Coliseum hosted the first four Starrcade cards. In the first, Ric Flair beat Harley Race to signal the changing of the guard atop the NWA.

  Madison Square Garden (New York, New York). When pro wrestling made it to MSG, it was taken as a validation of the form. And wrestling has been a part of MSG’s proud history, from the early days of the “Solid Man” William Muldoon, who wrestled there as early as 1880, to the days of Jim Londos and Antonino Rocca, whose fame stewarded a return of wrestling to the Garden in 1950 after a twelve-year hiatus, to WrestleMania I, and through to today.

  Kiel Auditorium (St. Louis, Missouri). In the middle of the century, nowhere besides Madison Square Garden was a bigger draw than Kiel Auditorium, home twice a month to Sam Muchnick’s NWA headquarters, the St. Louis Wrestling Club.

  ECW Arena (Philadelphia, Pennsylvania). The onetime freight warehouse repurposed for low-rent sports shows, previously known as Viking Hall, was the site of much of Extreme Championship Wrestling’s bloody history, including its first ever pay-per-view event, Barely Legal.

  TERRY GORDY, OF THE FABULOUS FREEBIRDS

  In 1977, thirty-nine-year-old San Diego Chargers star turned wrestling bad guy Ernie Ladd squared off against a lanky, bleached-blond sixteen-year-old kid named Terry Mecca. It wasn’t really a fair fight; that was the point. Unfair fights are great for getting bad guys over. The 6-foot-9, 307-pound Ladd was one of the most physically fearsome grapplers of his (or any) generation, and after watching him manhandle young Mecca, nobody in the building would have predicted that the teenager would go on to be one of the most intimidating brawlers of his own era. Of course, nobody’s ever heard of Terry Mecca, but lots of people have heard of Terry Gordy, and they’re the same guy. As far as he would go in the pro wrestling world, Gordy would always be the overgrown kid getting himself knocked around.

  The Von Erich clan ruled the Texas wrestling territory and, for stretches during the ’80s, the late-night spot on ESPN. Compared to the more mainstream, over-the-top mode of the WWF, World Class Championship Wrestling seemed like documentary footage of a bar fight. Even set alongside the NWA, which was physical and gritty, the old-school television production of WCCW made matches feel as if they emanated from a separate reality—our reality. WCCW wrestlers may have moved around in the same ways that the fake WWF wrestlers did, but late at night on the channel reserved for real sports, the danger felt so much more severe.

  In 1982, the Von Erichs introduced us to Michael Hayes. With his dark beard growing out from under his blond mane and his profligate pelt of chest hair, he was a virile epiphany in juxtaposition to the nearly sexless crew of Von Erich Adonises. An issue of Inside Wrestling magazine had Kerry Von Erich and Hayes posed together, Kerry holding a quart of milk and Hayes holding a bottle of Jack Daniel’s. The Von Erichs were more Chippendales than chick magnet, with their cool demeanors and waxed (and waxen) bodies—and their healthy contingent of older-female-demographic admirers didn’t help them seem any cooler. They seemed like automatons built for princely virtue.

  So perhaps it should have been obvious that someone as contrary to the Von Erich aesthetic as Hayes would turn on the brothers Von Erich. When he did, he imported a couple of his buddies to even the odds against David, Kerry, and Kevin (and Chris and Mike and Daddy Fritz). Those buddies were Buddy “Jack” Roberts* and Terry “Bam Bam” Gordy. (Hayes himself appended the nickname “P.S.,” which was unnecessarily short for “Purely Sexy.”) Together they were called the Freebirds, and they came to the ring to the strains of the Lynyrd Skynyrd classic—they were the first wrestlers to use rock ’n’ roll music to mark their entrance.* Previously there had been some other music-accompanied entrances, most notably Gorgeous George’s use of “Pomp and Circumstance,” but still, the vast majority of wrestlers entered only to the cheers or boos of the audience, and the use of anything remotely contemporary was a revelation. In short order, the Von Erichs all had intro music—Kerry’s was famously “Tom Sawyer” by Rush—and then the WWF caught on, and the rest is history.

  Set opposed to the wholesome Von Erich boys, the Freebirds served as the closest thing to polar opposites that any promoter could muster in those days: They were proud Southerners of the arch variety (contrary to the assumptions of most Northerners, every person who has lived in the South or in Texas can attest to the fact that those are two totally separate regions), unapologetically brash and crass, and, above all, human—in all its flawed glory. Even though they debuted as friends of the Von Erichs, they were never cut from the same cloth.

  The precise moment of the Freebirds’ apostasy came on Christmas night in 1982. Kerry Von Erich was facing NWA champion Ric Flair in a steel cage match, and the fans had selected Hayes to be the special referee. Hayes in turn brought his cohort Gordy to ringside, apparently to further skew the odds in Kerry’s favor. As the match progressed, Hayes—taking his job very seriously that night—got physical with both wrestlers. He finally punched Ric Flair in the face and begged Kerry to pin Flair, who lay prone on the mat. Kerry, good citizen that he was, refused, and when Gordy opened the cage door to let Hayes leave, Kerry went to close it, and Flair shoved Hayes into Kerry. Gordy brutally slammed the cage door on Kerry’s head, allowing Flair to get the win. The staging here was immaculate: Hayes was disgusted with Kerry, but he was inclined to walk away; it was Gordy who took it upon himself to sever the Von Erich–Freebird friendship with a singular act of violence.

  The Freebirds were immediately the biggest villains Texas had ever known, their turn signaling that no one was safe from the temptations of the dark side.

  Before any fan knew what was happening, the Freebird trio set about whaling on the Von Erichs with a tenacity unusual even in World Class, where grudge matches were the norm. The feud would span years. Hayes was the outrageous talker of the trio, Roberts its incorrigible, angsty pest, and Gordy was the monster, the scariest guy in every bar you’ve ever walked into. At 6-foot-4 and 300 pounds, he was the unapproachable id to Hayes’s ego and Roberts’s superego, the mountain of instinctual violence that defined the Freebirds as not simply an irritant but a diabolical force. That he was only twenty-one years old wasn’t just beside the point; it was unthinkable. Compared to the other guys in WCCW, he was a leviathan, and compared to some of the other monsters roaming the territories in those days who could scarcely punch or kick in a believable way, Gordy was a more natural, believable combatant than even A. J. Liebling could compose.

  But the fact of his youth is central to his biography even if it was negligible when he was on stage. He started wrestling at fourteen years old—trained by Archie Gouldie, a.k.a. the Mongolian Stomper*—and partnered up with the charismatic Hayes a few years later. The two started making their name in George Culkin’s Mississippi promotion,* which was a territory that had been part of Bill Watts’s Mid-South empire until a blow-up with Culkin, who had been his state organizer, led to Culkin striking out on his own. When Watts reestablished himself as a power player in the state, he brought the Freebirds onto his tour. Watts was famously serious about his wrestlers being legitimate brawlers,* and it was probably that tendency that led him to decide that Hayes was more of a mouthpiece than a wrestler, so he joined Hayes and Gordy up with Roberts and situated Hayes as their functional manager. Upon leaving Mid-South, Hayes would return to regular ring action but maintain his role as the group’s barker. With this tag team now a three-man unit, what evolved was a revolution in pro wrestling rule-bending: the “Freebird Rule,” whereby three-man units could defend tag team titles with whichever two members it saw fit on a given night. It was a mostly nonsensical rule, but—as with the Ladd match years before—unfair fights made for great bad guys. The Freebirds could pick their most advantageous combo or leave the decision up in the air until the last minute to
addle their opponents—and, more important, the crowd. In such situations, each Freebird filled a defined role—Hayes was the rock star, and as such the prime target for eventual comeuppance; Roberts was the workhorse, the best mat man of the bunch, the guy expected to spend the bulk of the match getting beaten upon; and Gordy was the brawler, the force of nature. With his presence and his youthful exuberance, Gordy was rarely the odd man out under the Freebird Rule.

  His nickname may seem arbitrary compared to the pointed jokes inherent in those of his compatriots—Hayes was the playboy, Roberts was a real-life drinker—but I like to think that Gordy’s wasn’t just a measure of his tendency toward fisticuffs. Just like the late-run Flintstones character, he was at his very core a cartoon roughneck, the troupe’s baby with a big stick. He was the overgrown kid with the bad attitude and the perpetually skinned knees. Those skinned knees would come to play as big a part in his career as anything else. The best wrestlers are archetypes, and many of them are well worn; Hayes and Roberts, despite the charisma of their specific presentations, were characters the wrestling world has seen many times over. But Gordy was unique in how he was at once “other” in his ridiculous size and yet also familiar. Despite his physical presence, he was always just an overgrown schoolyard punk. And what a punk: In the ring with Kevin or Kerry Von Erich, he was fully monstrous and fully human all at once, the sad, injured Cyclops. Unlike the other leviathans of his era, he wasn’t a foreign terror or a caricature from Parts Unknown; he was simply a dissatisfied kid with bad intentions. And unlike his partners, whose presence in those gritty brawls served mostly to signify recompense, Gordy personified the sort of wrath that most of us are blessed not to encounter with any frequency.

  Despite their celebrity in Dallas—their on-again, off-again home for many years—the Freebirds would never be tied down. They were among the last of the itinerant generation of Territorial baddies, and they also played in the major promotions with as much success as anyone else. They had noteworthy stints in the AWA (Minneapolis), Georgia Championship Wrestling, and Jim Crockett Promotions—and a cup of coffee in the WWF during the Rock ’n’ Wrestling Era.* When they returned to Watts’s regime, now called the Universal Wrestling Federation, or UWF—rechristened in an attempt at competing in the new national federation world pioneered by Vince McMahon—they had the run of the place. While Roberts won the Television Title, Gordy won the Heavyweight Championship and only lost it due to injury. When a real-life car wreck left him in uncertain health, an angle was booked wherein Gordy’s arm was “broken” during a melee by “Dr. Death” Steve Williams, and Gordy was forced to forfeit the belt to the monstrous One Man Gang.

  As with many American giants of his day, Gordy would eventually find work in Japan, where he was esteemed for his size and his hard-knocks style. In All Japan Pro Wrestling, owned by Japanese wrestling legend Giant Baba, he teamed up with Dr. Death—putting aside their UWF history, apparently—to form a tag team that was immaculately dubbed the “Miracle Violence Connection” (God bless rough Japanese translations into English). The two shaggy goliaths ran roughshod over the Japanese competition before they returned stateside as a duo, coming to WCW in 1992 and feuding with the Steiner Brothers (Rick and Scott)—the other most significant team of gaijin in the Japanese game—until WCW went into a copromotional agreement with New Japan, All Japan’s rival fed, and Gordy and Williams left WCW in solidarity with their old boss Baba.

  Somewhere around this time, Gordy’s substance abuse issues grew to the point where his coworkers couldn’t use words like recreational with a straight face. People tried to intervene, but Gordy wouldn’t listen; he was a kid, he was a monster, he was indestructible. In 1993, during a plane flight to Japan, Gordy overdosed on painkillers and fell into a coma; he was hospitalized and suffered permanent brain damage. For most people—for most wrestlers, even—this would have ended a career. But for Gordy it was just another scraped knee.

  He was soon back in the UWF with the Freebirds, though by this point Roberts had been replaced with Jimmy “Jam” Garvin, which formalized the group’s turn from redneck brawlers to glam rockers, and Gordy was a bad fit for this new troupe. He rebelled, veering further in the direction of masochism, headlining in Extreme Championship Wrestling and competing in the grueling deathmatch circuit in Japan.

  In 1996, he turned up in the WWF as the Executioner, a new player in the Undertaker-Mankind feud. He wore a mask—which was just as well, considering that he was a shadow of his former self and the gimmick was laughable—and carried an obviously plastic ax to the ring. Terry Gordy should have been competition for the Undertaker, but this was not the Terry Gordy we had been so scared of ten years before—this was Terry Mecca with a gut. When the Undertaker beat him in their “Armageddon Rules” match at the WWF’s December ’96 pay-per-view, it wasn’t the start of a larger story; it was an overdue period at the end of Gordy’s sentence. It was the end of Gordy’s career. That he kept wrestling in small independent shows thereafter doesn’t amount to much more than a depressing ellipsis.

  Gordy died on July 16, 2001, from a heart attack brought on by a blood clot. He was forty years old. He was survived by Hayes and Roberts—who died in 2012—and by his son, Ray Gordy, who, like an oddly high number of other second-generation wrestlers, competed briefly as a white rapper.

  It’s an ignominious ending for such a leviathan, but then, humanity was always Gordy’s calling card. His physical presence amounted to the first violent and real threat the Von Erich family encountered. His legend in Japan—the land of borderline shoot fighting and deathmatch gore—was one of incomparable physicality. So it’s hard to look too sadly upon his later years, when the weight of humanity overtook the man—or, rather, the boy. Despite his size and his might, Terry Gordy never grew up. So maybe it’s fitting that he never grew old.

  BRUISER BRODY

  Not long before Bruiser Brody was killed in 1988, he gave a no-holds-barred interview on the state of wrestling and what goes on behind the scenes. He talked at length about his days producing the WCCW telecast. After the interviewer asked if anybody outside of the business knew that he had done that, Brody paused, mild consternation creasing his grotesquely scarred forehead. “I don’t think it’s good that anybody knows that I produced that show,” he said. And then, suddenly remembering that he had said his real name earlier in the conversation: “I don’t think it’s good that anybody knows I’m Frank Goodish.”

  In 2009, somebody uploaded this video to YouTube, and thus pro wrestling had its Dead Sea Scrolls of postmodernism: the first “shoot interview.”

  To many in-the-know wrestling fans, the shoot interview inhabits a place of great significance in the appreciation of the sport. It’s that rarest thing in the unreal world of pro wrestling: realness, raw and divorced from any narrative manipulations. According to A&E’s documentary The Unreal Story of Pro Wrestling, the word shoot comes from the old carny term straight shooter, which referred to rifles on the sideshow shooting range that were not tampered with to work against their operator. Hence, just like a straight shooter, a wrestling shoot was (and is) a rare moment of honesty in an otherwise thoroughly gimmicked game.

  Sometimes these shoots occur during a wrestling event, though the general rule of thumb in the wrestling world is that if you see something on TV, you were intended to see that thing. More often than not, shoots—in the form of shoot interviews—are conducted away from the wrestling world, usually by enterprising wrestling websites, and always feature an unemployed wrestler of some former eminence giving the real stories behind the wrestling storylines. What goes unsaid is that all personal recollection is by its nature subjective, and particularly in the world of pro wrestling, where unreality is the status quo, even honest recollection often serves a greater purpose of buttressing an industry frequently uneasy with its own illegitimacy.

  Which is all to say that Bruiser Brody was the first wrestler to go on camera and discuss the behind
-the-scenes realities of the wrestling world. It was fitting that Brody would be the guy to do it: In the Territorial Era, no one straddled the line of vicious realism and outright fantasy more fully.

  Frank Goodish was a college football player at Iowa State and later at West Texas State, the latter of which churned out wrestlers in those days the way that gamma rays produced comic book superheroes: Tully Blanchard, Ted DiBiase, Manny Fernandez, Dory and Terry Funk, Stan Hansen, Dusty Rhodes, Tito Santana, and Barry Windham were all alums. (Maurice Cheeks and Georgia O’Keeffe went there too, for the record.) Goodish had a cup of coffee with the Redskins and a brief tour in the CFL before he was discovered by Texas wrestling mogul (and fellow Texas college footballer) Fritz Von Erich. He had successful runs through a few of the regional territories until Vince McMahon Sr. brought him in and renamed him “Bruiser” Frank Brody. “Frank” soon went by the wayside. Bruiser Brody was a legend from the moment he came into existence. He was huge; he sported a feral black mane; he fought viciously. In the ring he seemed near lunatic, but in interviews he was shockingly coherent, his growl often bordering on eloquence. Which made him all the more frightening—like, wow, this guy has made a logical and empirically sound decision to dismember somebody.

  The monster heel was a central figure in the Territorial Era. The top good guy in a region usually stayed at home as the promotion’s mainstay, and certainly there were some baddies who stuck around as ongoing foils. But to compel audiences—to make them believe that their hero had a chance of losing—foes were imported from other regions and billed as top-notch competition. With the advent of television, the tone shifted from athletic competition toward the mythological epic. The imports went from storied grapplers to grotesque beasts more suited for a nightmare than a gymnasium. Brody was a transient leviathan of this latter sort. Before long, he was a scoundrel in high demand across the country. He epitomized the wanderlust—and economic model—of the period better than anyone (with the possible exception of his longtime rival Abdullah the Butcher), traveling from Central States Wrestling to Windy City Wrestling to San Juan’s World Wrestling Council, hardly staying in any place long enough to get comfortable.