Physical Chess

by Billy Robinson

  Winning IWA World, 1969.

  We had a guy that came into Milwaukee in the early ’70s. I forget his name. He was trying out all

  different sports—pro football, basketball, and boxing, and then he wanted to try wrestling. So Gagne asked me to take care of it, and I agreed. We discussed it with the promoter there, Dennis Hilgart, because they were taping it. Gagne said to me, “Billy, let it go 10 minutes. Don’t just go in and beat him.” I said, “You’ve got to be joking. I could get poked in the eye, or kicked in the balls.” You never know what may happen. He said, “No, no, Billy. We need it for publicity.” Had I known better, I would never have done that, especially for a guy like Gagne, who later double-crossed me in many ways, money-wise. But I didn’t know better.

  I went in and I played with the guy for 10 minutes. Back then, the timekeeper used to tell the referee the time, so I told the ref, “Tell me when it’s nine minutes.” So in nine minutes, he said, “Nine minutes, Billy.” I said, “Okay.” Bang. I took the guy down, cranked his neck a little bit, and he was already screaming. So I finished him off with a top wristlock, and instead of grabbing the hands, I got the wrist bone over and pulled it in, basically cranking his head and the arm at the same time. As I do so, he’s crying, and he’s tapping me with his free hand, and he’s saying, “Yeah, yeah, yeah!”

  I said, “Ref, can you hear that?”

  “I don’t hear it, Billy. Did you say something?”

  The guy is screaming. I could hear his elbow going. Just before it’s going to break I told the referee to say “okay.” The guy got on live television later and said, “Listen. I’ve tried pro football; I’ve tried pro boxing. There is no doubt whatsoever that pro wrestling is the nastiest, hardest, most dangerous sport there is.” What he didn’t realize was that he was with a guy who knew what he was doing.

  Recently, I was watching a television talk show and the host was interviewing the famous pro wrestler “the Rock.” He talked about a street fight that his grandfather, Peter Maivia, who was also a pro wrestler, got into. Well, he didn’t mention that I was the one that his grandfather got into the street fight with; besides, he got the facts wrong. As the Rock correctly said, Peter Maivia would want to fight anybody whenever he’d had a couple of drinks. When this incident happened, we were in Japan doing wrestling shows.

  After the matches, we went to a restaurant to eat. Peter Maivia, John da Silva, George Gordienko, Frank Valois—national champion, Olympic wrestler, and a very good catch wrestler—and a few other guys were there. In Japan in those days, they had this set menu that you had to order from in a certain way. For example, if the menu had fish and chips or roast beef and mashed potatoes with peas, there was no way you could get the french fries with the roast beef, or the mashed potatoes with the fish. Something upset George about this menu, and he went off. Peter joins in with George. So it’s an hour and a half, with 10 of us there plus the interpreter, waiting just to get our orders in, and Peter keeps messing it up. So I say, “Peter, keep your big mouth shut. Let everybody order. Let’s get our food and then go our separate ways,” which finally we did.

  Peter and George leave and go one way. John da Silva and I go the other. We end up close to the hotel, and George and Peter see me and John walking up. John must have known something was going on. He said, “Oh, shit. I don’t have anything to do with this.” John leaves me and goes into the hotel. I walk up and say, “Peter, George, what’s happening?” Peter starts screaming and shouting at me and pushing me. I say, “Peter, you’re drunk. You messed everybody up.” But he wants to fight.

  He throws a couple of punches, which I block easily; I grab him and hold him around the waist. I say, “Peter, stop it. I mean, I really don’t want to hurt you.” He then tries to bite me on the neck. Luckily, I pull my jaw down because I’ve been trained. However, he bites me straight through my cheek—I have four or five holes in my face where his teeth went through. Blood is spurting out.

  When I see the blood, I flat out end the fight right then and there. It lasts all of 15 seconds. Peter is knocked out and stays out for 20-odd minutes. Gordienko pulls me off because he thinks I am going to do more damage. Peter has his nose broken and two black eyes, but I have to go to the hospital to get my face stitched up and get injections for the human bite. When I’m going back to the hotel, some guys warn me, “Oh, don’t go back. Peter’s going to kill you. We’ve got a new hotel for you.” I say, “Fuck you.” I make them take me back to the hotel.

  The next morning, I beat on his door. He opens it. I push him into his room and lock the door. I said, “You tried to kill me. You tried to bite me in the neck. You bit through my face. You’re lucky you’re not in the bloody hospital or dead. But if you want to try now . . .” But he’s sobered up enough to know he has no chance. Then I walk over to Gordienko’s room and do the same thing with Gordienko. It later came out when I was talking to Peter that George had instigated the whole thing.

  The Rock said his grandfather bit my eye out. The only eye operations that I’ve ever had were when I got hit in the eye as a young kid and switched from boxing to wrestling. It’s likely that Peter’s wife, the Rock’s grandmother, spread that story. The Maivias later became promoters in Hawaii. In fact, Peter invited me to Hawaii to wrestle for him, which I did. We became friends afterwards. It was just that Peter, like the Rock said, used to go bonkers.

  It is common to hear guys say, “This guy beat that guy.” But they would have never seen the fight in the first place, and they don’t know anything about real street fighting or real catch wrestling. Sometimes, you may have just showed someone a couple of things, and all of a sudden they “trained with Karl Gotch” or “trained with Billy Robinson.” That happened all the time. For example, a close friend of mine, Johnny Eagles, came over to the States. Cowboy Bill Watts, a booker for Leroy McGuirk, called me in Minnesota and asked me how good Johnny Eagles was, since he’d gone to Wigan and wrestled with me. I burst out laughing. I said, “He came to my gym and had two workouts with me, because he wanted to borrow money from me to buy a car.” He paid me back the money later, but he never came back to the gym. He never catch wrestled in his life, but he was a great worker.

  Once, I told Karl Gotch that I was going to go in for Verne. He said, “That bald-headed, spindly legged old bastard can’t wrestle his way out of a paper bag. He’s just a bully. If he knows that he can beat you, he’ll beat the living shit out of you.” But all bullies are that way. Gagne has a great heart to win, but when he knows he’s with somebody better, he will make an excuse to make sure he doesn’t get beat.

  Gagne had a shoot with Ruffy Silverstein and couldn’t beat him. Afterwards, he said, “Oh, the only reason I didn’t beat Silverstein is I hurt my ankle and broke three of my fingers.” They were supposed to do a draw, and Gagne didn’t want to do a draw. Silverstein didn’t want to do a job or lose. So Verne said, “Fuck it, try.” He couldn’t beat Silverstein. Now, Silverstein was in a bad situation. He was getting older, and Gagne was a promoter of the sport, so if he upset Gagne, he’d have been blackballed. So he said, “Okay, I’ll do what I said. I’ll do a draw, but there’s no way you’re going to beat me.”

  As much as Gagne tried, he couldn’t get the job done. I know Lou did shoot with Silverstein and won, but then, Lou was a lot bigger than Silverstein. I asked Lou about that, and he said to me, “Billy, Silverstein was very capable and very dangerous for 20 or 25 minutes. But over the long haul, he faded away.”

  My journey in the usa started in Hawaii. There, I went to visit Lord James Blears—a very good friend of my uncle and father, having gone to the same school. Blears was a very good swimmer—senior Hawaiian champion—and loved Hawaii. One of his sons became a world champion surfer. He was highly decorated.

  Because he was too young to enter the Second World War in the British navy or army, he joined the Dutch navy as a radio operator. He was torpedoed three times and
taken prisoner aboard a Japanese submarine. The prisoners were all tied together, and the Japanese were chopping their heads off. Blears managed to escape and even saved the lives of a lot of the other prisoners. He got medals from the king of England, the Dutch queen, and the Americans. At the war trials for the Japanese, he was called in to give testimony about the submarine incident.

  Lord Blears was in with the local wrestling promotion. At that time, he was a co-promoter with a guy named Ed Francis. He got me to stay in Hawaii for about 18 months. There, I met Verne Gagne when he came over with his family on vacation. We were tag team partners in one of the matches, and then he watched me wrestle single matches. Verne gave me the opportunity to live in America. He asked me to train his son. I landed on the U.S. mainland in 1972. Later, Verne had a camp with people like Ric Flair, Jim Brunzell, the Iron Sheik, Sgt. Slaughter, and Ken Patera.

  The Iron Sheik (Khosrow Vaziri) was a six- or seven-time national champion on the greatest amateur team in the world in those days. He managed to escape from Iran at a time when Takhti and other wrestlers on the Iranian Olympic wrestling team, who were also bodyguards of the Shah, were murdered. Takhti was probably one of the greatest light heavyweight Olympians and freestyle wrestlers of all time. Ayatollah Khomeini was coming back from Paris; the revolution was about to start in Iran, and a lot of the wrestlers were going to back Ayotallah Khomeini, so the Shah gave the order. Fortunately, Khosrow Vaziri wasn’t there at that particular time. He was brought in to coach the Greco-Roman team that was starting at the University of Minnesota, which still has a great Greco team. They wanted to be able to pay Khosrow a bit extra, so they got him into pro wrestling; that’s how he came to the camp.

  The Iron Sheik was a very good amateur, but with a big head and a big mouth. Amateur doesn’t match well against catch-as-catch-can. He thought he could beat me, so he said, “Get behind me. You can’t turn me over or beat me.” He went down in the defence position. He didn’t know about catch-as-catch-can, ankle submissions, neck cranks, and double wristlocks, so I just knelt on his thigh in the way that we do in Wigan. He couldn’t walk for nearly two days and couldn’t work out or come to the camp for two weeks. The coach from the University of Minnesota called Gagne and said, “Listen. We want Khosrow to learn how to wrestle, not get hurt.”

  Hall of Fame 2003, with Destroyer.

  In Minneapolis one day, they told me to be at the tv station at two o’clock. When I got there, they had done a lot of taping. Of course, I’d been to Europe and Asia, where we didn’t have television. Even when they televised wrestling matches, they didn’t do interviews like the Americans do, so I didn’t know anything about that yet. So I was in the ring, and I think it was with a Japanese wrestler called Kobayashi, and it was my first match on television. I beat him, but what ruined the match was somebody saying, “Oh, Nick Bockwinkel can beat you.” The guy was really obnoxious. He was really screaming into the ring—you know, an excited fan. So I jumped over the top rope and paint-brushed him—picked him up and slapped him to and fro, and then I set him down. He was quiet for the rest of the day.

  When I got into the dressing room after the match, Gagne was with Wally Carbo, the promoter, and they were going crazy. “You can’t do that in America. Anybody can sue anybody else in America, and we could lose our licence!”

  As it happened, they gave the guy a few free tickets to the matches that were coming up, and everything was fine. I didn’t know that the station could have been sued; I had never heard of anybody suing another person in England.

  Anyway, we had fun in those days. I don’t know how we all got together, but Nick Bockwinkel, Harley Race, Dory Funk Jr. (from the nwa), and I (from the awa) were all on the same tour. The ski season was coming up, so we decided to go out and ski together. Of course, each of us thought we were better than the other at skiing. You should have seen us! Everything was a contest. Especially when you got Harley Race and Dory Jr. together. Nick and I were doing all the nice, beautiful turns, but with Harley and Dory, it was like the Indy 500. Because they went so crazy and challenged us, you got four professional wrestling world champions going down a hill like runaway express trains—crossing each other’s paths, knocking into each other, and taking bigger bumps and falls than they had ever done in the ring. Afterwards, we said, “What were we doing?” But that competition was always there between us.

  The champion in Florida.

  Those were great guys—Dory and Harley and Nick. In pro wrestling, unlike in football teams, the guys usually do not go out together; you very rarely socialize with people that you’re going up against, unless it’s for charity or a dinner and you’ve both been invited to. Then it’s cordial, but there’s no friendship lost between any of the top competitors.

  So these guys were special, but not everyone was like that. It reminds me of an incident in Calgary, when I wrestled Jack Bence. I got into Calgary a few weeks before the Stampede. I went to the dressing room one day, and there are four big guys in the dressing room. Now, of course, this being my first time in North America, I didn’t know any American or Canadian wrestlers other than those I’d met in my travels around the world. Well, they were huge guys, so I thought, they’ve got to be wrestlers.

  They were talking while I was getting dressed and just starting to warm up, and I realized that the conversation was not like a wrestler’s conversation. It was more about football. They were football players from the Calgary Stampeders. I asked, “Excuse me. Are you guys wrestlers?” They said, “No, we’re football players.” I said, “This is the wrestling dressing room. Could you step outside?” One of them replied, “No, we want to stay in here. We want to see Stu Hart.” “You can wait for him outside,” I said. “This is the wrestling dressing room.” The same one replied, “Well, who do you think is going to put us out?” I explained to them very nicely that I’d like them to get out while I’m getting dressed because I didn’t know them. I mean, they may steal from me or my clothes or whatever. There were few words said, but they left shortly afterward. One of them, Wayne Coleman (better known later as Superstar Billy Graham), left with a little more than his feelings hurt.

  By the time Coleman became a pro wrestler, I had already moved to Minnesota. Gagne and Carbo wanted him to come up from California, but Coleman insisted that I had to sign a contract with Verne saying we wouldn’t have any matches against each other, and if a match did come up where we were both in the ring, like a battle royale or a tag team match, then I wouldn’t hurt him. Superstar Billy Graham had to have that on paper before he’d come up to Minnesota.

  I worked with the awa (American Wrestling Association) for a number of years. I was world tag team champion, once with Gagne and once with “the Crusher.” Then I was awa champion for 24 hours, until they changed the decision on me. In 1974, Gagne produced the movie The Wrestler. It featured Ed Asner, Verne, Dusty Rhodes, Dick Murdoch, Harold Sakata (Oddjob from Goldfinger), and me.

  Harold Sakata (a.k.a. Tosh Togo) and I were close friends even before I came to the States. When they were casting Goldfinger, an Indian-English actor named Milton Reid, who made a lot of movies in those days, was in the running for the character Oddjob. When the producers brought Sakata in, Milton Reid—who was a lot bigger than Harold—told him that if he ever wrestled anywhere in England, Reid would challenge him. So the promoters put me on every card that Harold did, and I travelled around with him so that if this guy challenged, they’d say, “Well, okay, you have to wrestle and beat Billy Robinson first,” and I’d take care of the situation. That’s how Harold and I became friends.

  I used to do the same with Primo Carnera when we were both in Spain. I used to go around with him as a policeman, in case somebody played smart. He was older then and was just doing exhibition matches anyway. But you always get somebody that thinks they’re tough, and they’re going to take a shot at a guy that was the world boxing champion. Of course, he was a wrestler fir
st before becoming a boxer.

  Billy Robinson applying the Boston Crab.

  Jack Brisco was another champion that I met. The first time I was in a match with Jack, we were in Brisbane, Australia. I had just won the World Championship. During the match, Jack was trying to show how good he was, so I kind of showed him a Wigan hold in the ring, and he ended up in the hospital. He was a very good amateur champion and a super nice guy. He became the nwa champion after Dory Funk.

  In Australia, we stayed at Southern Star, a big hotel in Melbourne. It was a big name then; it was one of those very posh old English-type hotels. Anyway, it’s late at night, and Jack Brisco calls me over to his room. I come to the room, and we start talking about American and English amateur wrestling and catch wrestling, and then the old American shooters and British shooters. I don’t know what a “shooter” is; they are just catch wrestlers to me. Anyway, once I figure out that a shooter was just an American word for a catch wrestler, we get into it. He has been introduced to a couple of wristlocks, but he doesn’t know how to do a double wristlock. So I show him a few, and the cross-faces. I show him how to really crank it up, and the different angle submissions. And we’re laughing and joking.

  Now, I should have known better because, just a week earlier, Brisco and Dick Murdoch had pulled a nasty practical joke on me. They had introduced me to American football. A game between Texas and Oklahoma was being shown in Australia on television. We were watching it live. Dick Murdoch was from Texas, and Jack was from Oklahoma. They were chewing tobacco and drinking bourbon and Coke. I had never done any of this. They had me drinking bourbon and Coke, which I hated, and Jack introduced me to chewing tobacco. As I was chewing it, I asked “What do you do?” They said, “Oh, just swallow the juice, and spit the tobacco out.” So I believed them and drank the juice; I not only spit the tobacco out, but I also puked all over the place. They pulled this rib on me a week before, so I should have known better.