by Bill Gutman
When Watts left the ring he was greeted by a cascade of boos for the first time in his career. But in the dressing room he said he knew exactly what he was doing.
"I felt I was getting the short end of the stick in this partnership," he said. "So I decided he wasn't worth being my partner. I just bided my time and studied his moves. When he came over to tag me, I said, 'Let's see how tough you really are,' and I began hammering away. And now that this is done with, I want his belt."
Though Watts said that the move was planned and that he didn't regret it, he probably didn't expect the reaction he got. In the course of one night, the cheers changed to jeers. And they stayed that way. What's more, when he regained his senses, Bruno Sammartino became enraged. He wanted revenge and was ready to meet Watts on a one-to-one basis.
Whenever that happened, Sammartino would batter Watts, turning violent. In fact, on several occasions Bruno was disqualified, something very rare for him, indeed. One time he had the match won, but wouldn't stop battering his fallen opponent until the ref was forced to disqualify him. Yet Watts continued to stand by his actions.
"If I had to do it again, I wouldn't hesitate," he said. "I had to make a big bid as a challenger, and that's why it had to be done that way. I don't care what any fan thinks, either."
But it was a move no one would ever forget, a double-cross that shocked the wrestling world. And while Bill Watts claimed he didn't regret it, he certainly paid for it . . . especially each time he met Bruno Sammartino.
A VERY PRECIOUS PARTNER
There was a time when a wrestler came to work, got in the ring, and did his thing. Unless it was a tag team match, the gladiator came and went alone. There was no such thing as a manager coming in with him and more often than not wreaking some of his own havoc during the match. But today it's all different.
Managers are everywhere. Renowned molders of men, such as Captain Lou Albano, Freddie Blassie, Bobby "The Brain" Heenan, and Gary Hart are nearly as well known as the men they manage. But in the world of big-time wrestling, something new happens nearly every night. Instead of a manager, a few wrestlers began coming into the ring with a woman.
Gorgeous Jimmy Garvin poses with his "personal valet," Precious, before Garvin challenged Rick Martel for the AWA title.
One of the first was "Gorgeous" Jimmy Garvin, who introduced a beautiful blonde named Precious as his personal "valet." Precious would enter the ring with Garvin and help him get ready, removing his bright sequined pants and cape. Then she would strut around the ring and brag about the wrestling abilities of "Gorgeous" Jimmy. During the match, Precious became a cheerleader, urging Garvin on and defaming his opponent.
Then came a night in March of 1985, when Garvin was challenging the popular Rick Martel for the American Wrestling Association Heavyweight championship at the Meadowlands Arena in New Jersey. It was not only a rugged match between the two men, but also a night in which a woman may have directly influenced the outcome of a title bout.
The two wrestlers were evenly matched to begin with. Though Garvin is known as something of a rolebreaker, he also has natural wrestling skills and the quickness to compete with a highly scientific wrestler like Martel. What the champ didn't expect was the contribution of Precious. From the outset of the match she was shouting—encouragement to Garvin, and discouragement to Martel. In fact, the champ claimed that the things she said to him were a lot less than ladylike.
Being a pro, Martel could have coped with the verbal abuse, unnerving as it might have been. But then something else happened. The champion was on the verge of pinning "Gorgeous" Jimmy when Precious suddenly leaped over the ropes and attacked him from behind, just enough to allow Garvin to escape the pin attempt.
Gorgeous Jimmy proved a worthy opponent for champ Martel, and when he found himself in trouble he had Precious to bail him out. She attacked Martel on several occasions until he responded and was disqualified. Because there was no pin, however, Rick Martel retained his title.
Moments later it happened again. Then again. What was Martel to do? He wasn't the kind of guy to turn around and belt a lady, and a very pretty one at that. But he also knew that it was possible to lose the match—and his title—because of this meddlesome woman.
Finally, Martel couldn't take it any longer. He tried to keep Precious out of the way by the best means he knew . . . and he wound up disqualified! It was unreal that the title match should end this way. Garvin and his Precious strutted around the ring, the winners, though the title remained with Rick Martel because it cannot change hands on a disqualification. But that didn't make the champion feel any better.
"I was disqualified for being ungentlemanly to a lady," he said afterward. "Can you top that one? Whenever I caught up with that weasel Garvin, that blond-haired maniac would scream at me. I've been around and I never heard a lady use language like that.
"But that wasn't the worst part. Every time I almost had him pinned, she came into the ring and attacked me. She must have jumped on me at least six times during the match. And I was disqualified!"
Rick Martel soon began a crusade to have women banned from working the corners during matches. "Gorgeous" Jimmy Garvin would never agree. His female valet is certainly an asset, and certainly aptly named. In fact, during his match with Rick Martel, she turned out to be the most precious ally he could hope to have.
YOUR HEAD OR MINE?
One of the most hated managers in the sport of wrestling today is Gary Hart. By contrast, one of the most beloved wrestling families today is the Von Erichs, Papa Fritz and his grappling sons, Kerry, Kevin, and Mike. When the two appear on opposite sides of the ring, it doesn't take long for the fireworks to start.
The Von Erichs always put on a huge show in their home state of Texas in memory of another son, David, who had died. It was the second annual David Von Erich Memorial Parade of Champions on May 5, 1985, at Texas Stadium, that really saw the Von Erich-Gary Hart feud come to a head—literally.
Hart was managing a mammoth, 468-pound wrestler aptly named One Man Gang. He figured the Gang was just the man to take apart one of the Von Erichs, and he decided to challenge them before their home fans. It didn't take long for Fritz Von Erich to accept. He saw this as a chance to go one up on his longtime nemesis. His son Kevin was meeting Ric Flair for the NWA title, so Papa Fritz decided to send son Kerry against the One Man Gang.
So the match was made. But it wasn't an ordinary matchup. There was a strange clause put into the contract. If One Man Gang won the match, then the Gang and manager Hart would have five minutes in the ring with Fritz Von Erich, himself a former wrestler. But if Kerry Von Erich emerged the winner, the Von Erichs would have the pleasure of shaving Gary Hart's head bald in front of 30,000 fans. And during the course of the match, Gary Hart and Fritz Von Erich would be handcuffed to each other, so neither could escape his punishment at the end of the contest.
Kerry Von Erich is like Samson, with long flowing hair and a perfectly developed, muscular, 260-pound body. He is a former NWA champ and one of the strongest wrestlers in the world. With his father's pride and possibly good health at stake, he was not about to let One Man Gang take control of the match.
Early in the match Kerry got the Gang in a headlock and showed he could match the giant strength for strength. He continued to dominate the match, putting the Gang in a painful claw hold as Fritz Von Erich smiled and Gary Hart appeared nervous. He didn't want his head shaved in front of all those screaming Texans.
The strange end to the match between Kerry Von Erich and One Man Gang. After Von Erich won, his father-manager, Fritz Von Erich, collected on a bet by shaving the head of One Man Gang's manager, Gary Hart.
So several minutes later, as Kerry started to lift the One Man Gang for a bodyslam, Gart Hart managed to reach into the ring and trip Kerry Von Erich. That started it. Papa Fritz, handcuffed to Hart, began beating on the manager, and in the ring, One Man Gang took advantage of the unexpected help to slam Kerry to the mat.
No
w the giant moved toward the ropes to get ready for the big splash. And with 468 pounds behind him, the Gang could deliver a splash that would bury any opponent. Only this time Fritz Von Erich paid back Hart. He tripped up the One Man Gang and gave his son a chance to escape. Kerry quickly turned the match back around and got the pin. He was the winner.
With 30,000 fans screaming and cheering, the Von Erichs went to work. First they uncuffed Fritz and Hart. Then, while one of them held the manager, the other managed to handcuff One Man Gang to the ring post, so he wouldn't interfere. Then they turned back to Hart.
The fans roared as the Von Erich boys held the struggling manager while Papa Fritz got a pair of electric clippers and went to work. Slowly he shaved the manager's head as the crowd roared. The One Man Gang was going berserk, trying to escape the cuffs to help Hart. He slowly dismantled the entire ring post, but by the time he got free it was too late. Gary Hart had been shaved bald. Hopefully, he had learned a lesson. When you mess around with the Von Erichs in Texas, you're looking for trouble. It could even cost you every hair on your head!
AS BIG AS A HAYSTACK OR BIGGER
Would you believe there was a professional wrestler who weighed 625 pounds? His name was Haystack Calhoun, and while he wrestled successfully during the 1950s and 1960s, his biggest battle was convincing people that he was a legitimate athlete, not some oversized freak. Of course, that wasn't always easy to do when fans saw him win matches by simply sitting on opponents and crushing them.
Haystack weighed nearly 12 pounds at birth, and went on from there. His father weighed 230 pounds and his mother 135. But he had an Aunt Cara who tipped the scales at 510 and she's the one Haystack took after. By the time he was 15 he weighed 385, and when he turned 19, he had reached 500 pounds. And he was still a growing boy.
When he first decided to try wrestling, several trainers and promoters sent him packing. They, too, felt he had too much size and couldn't be effective. But Haystack had played high school football and could move as fast as much smaller players. Finally he met a former wrestling champ named Orville Brown, who decided to give the youngster a chance. But Brown also knew that the big kid would have to be promoted right.
"I can't present you like just some ordinary wrestler," he told him. "You just aren't built ordinary. What I'd want to do is make you a farm-boy wrestler. You'll grow whiskers, put on overalls and I'll call you Country Boy Calhoun."
So that's how it started. William D. Calhoun became Country Boy, and later Haystack, when someone in the audience hollered that he was as big as a haystack. And he fought against the best, claiming that Bruno Sammartino was the strongest man he ever met and the only one to ever take him off his feet.
Big as he is, Haystack suffered his share of injuries, including broken ribs, a slipped disc in his back and muscle spasms in his neck and shoulders. And because of his immense size, he hurt his ankles numerous times. For the record, he had a 68-inch waist, 54-inch thighs, 24-inch biceps and a 24-inch neck.
Fortunately for his opponents, Haystack was basically easygoing. Otherwise, many of the men who wrestled him might have been hurt. Haystack didn't like hurting people. He just wanted to win matches and convince people he wasn't a freak. In fact, he was a hard-working athlete who took good care of himself. The 625 pounds were just his natural weight.
"I don't gorge myself on food," said Haystack. "I eat sensibly and not much before a match. My main meal comes afterward. Doctors who have examined me have said I'm doing the right thing. I'm a big man, but there's nothing wrong with me."
But there are special needs for a man so large. When he travels by air, Haystack has to buy two plane tickets because he takes up both halves of a double seat. He owns a specially made station wagon built on a pickup truck frame with extra-heavy-duty shocks and springs. Because he broke so many beds in hotel rooms, he took to sleeping on the floor.
Yet maybe the strangest thing that happened because of his weight was the time in Boston when he caused an elevator to snap its cables and fall to the bottom.
"I think the elevator girl got so scared when I got on that she forgot to push the stop button. We hit the bottom pretty hard and it was kinda scary."
Haystack Calhoun often faced two or three men at a time during his career. That evened the odds a bit, though he still emerged victorious most of the time. Yet there was a time when he met a man bigger than he was. And that's still another story.
THE SAD SAGA OF HAPPY HUMPHREY
The one man Haystack Calhoun wrestled who was bigger than he was William Cobb, professionally known as Happy Humphrey. Unbelievable as it may be, Happy Humphrey wrestled at a weight that sometimes exceeded 800 pounds. Even Haystack must have felt small alongside this largest of all men. But there was a difference, as Haystack mentioned some time after their match.
"When I wrestled Happy he weighed about 700 pounds," Haystack said. "But I could see as soon as we squared off that he was a fat 700. He had very poor balance and he was easy to move around and handle. I slammed him easier than the average-size fellow. When I learned he had gone up to 800 pounds I warned him it wasn't healthy."
As it turned out, Haystack Calhoun was right. But backtracking a bit, it's not hard to see why Happy Humphrey became a professional wrestler. It seemed a natural after he lasted 28 minutes with a 600-pound bear!
That happened back in 1954. Happy was a big twenty-six-year-old then. He's always been big, weighing 18 pounds at birth and passing the 300-pound mark by the time he was twelve.
"I could out-eat two men back then," he remembered.
By the time he was a teenager, Happy had the strength to match his weight, and could carry a 500-pound bale of cotton on his back. So by the time the guy with the bear stopped in Macon, Georgia, with his challenge, Happy Humphrey was ready. The deal was that the promoter would pay a certain amount of money for each minute a man could stay in there with the seven-foot bear known as Big Ginger.
Young Happy astounded everyone by lasting 28 minutes. For his Herculean effort he was paid the grand sum of $200. But it got him to thinking about wrestling, and pretty soon he was out touring around. By 1956 he had turned professional. For a few years his career was in high gear. In Oklahoma City he met and defeated eleven top wrestlers, all at one time. Not too many survived Happy's "Squash," which simply meant the 800-pounder would sit on them.
Between 1956 and 1962 Happy wrestled all over the world, traveling about 90,000 miles a year. Like Haystack Calhoun, Happy often traveled in a specially made car.
"I had an old model Chrysler with big doors and an extra set of shock absorbers," he said. "Someone else always had to drive because I couldn't fit behind the steering wheel."
There were other places Happy couldn't fit, either. One time in Montgomery, Alabama, he went into a phone booth to make a call. That part went all right. It was when he turned to leave that things suddenly went sour. He couldn't get out. He was stuck tight in the booth. Someone called a cop, and they eventually had to get the telephone company out to take the booth apart.
Another time, in New Orleans, Happy went to the movies. He said he usually sat on the edge of the seat to avoid problems, but this time he became so absorbed in the movie that he relaxed and slowly sat back.
"Before I knew it I was wedged into the seat. It took seven cops to get me outta there. They had to cut the seats all around me and by the time they finished there were something like eight fire trucks outside and a whole crowd of people trying to figure out what was going on."
Happy could live with these mishaps as long as he was a top-flight grappler and felt all right. But in the early 1960s all that weight began to cause problems for him.
A number of years earlier he had undergone a surgical procedure to pare a hundred pounds off his immense frame. But he had put the weight back quickly. Then in Oklahoma, in 1962, it all caught up with him. He was just thirty-four years old but suddenly he couldn't move without help.
"I needed a cane to walk," he said, "and I couldn't
even get across a room without stopping to rest. I even needed help to get off my bed and move to the table."
Happy's lifestyle and legendary appetite had caught up with him. The man who had eaten fifteen fried chickens at one time, and eighteen pounds of fried catfish on another occasion, would never eat like that again if he wanted to live. Nor would he ever wrestle again.
To save his life, Happy Humphrey became a volunteer patient at the teaching hospital of the Medical College of Georgia, where he went on a carefully supervised diet. He would eat just one meal a day of just 1,000 calories. His goal was to get down to 240 pounds, which would make his total weight loss nearly 600 pounds. Incredible!
But Happy Humphrey worked at it, trying to make the best of an unhappy situation. His size 90 trousers were a thing of the past, and the weight came off, under the watchful eye of the doctors. Within two years, Happy made it. He was down to 230 pounds and able to resume a normal life. But he acknowledged that he'd always miss wrestling.
"Wrestling was good to me and I miss being in there and mixing it up," he said. "It's a sport for tough men and I loved it."
So William Cobb, a.k.a. Happy Humphrey, would no longer be able to apply the squash to another wrestler. But the new Happy was able to do something that he had never before done in his life. He could sit in a chair and cross his legs.
NOW YOU SEE IT . . .
Back in the spring of 1963, the World Wrestling Federation champion was a fair-haired grappler named Buddy Rogers. His nickname, the Blond Devil, should tell you about his style in the ring. There were plenty of villains on the East Coast then, men like Killer Kowalski, the Crusher, Karl Von Hess, and Skull Murphy. But it was Buddy Rogers who got the fans' blood boiling the most.
