The Squared Circle: Life, Death, and Professional Wrestling

by Shoemaker, David

  In the Territorial Era, in the world before international interconnectivity, the local wrestling stage was by and large the wrestling stage. After wrestling stopped airing on DuMont and before it came back on national cable networks, many of the regional promotions had TV shows that aired throughout their local territories. Even if fans in each area thought that they were watching the biggest wrestling show in the country, no territory was more rapturous about the local heroes than Dallas.

  There wasn’t any absence of charisma in pro wrestling in those days: Harley Race was around, Ric Flair was ascendant, and Dusty Rhodes was splitting his time between his Florida territory home, sellout houses all over the South, and Vince McMahon’s New York City, where he battled against “Superstar” Billy Graham. But the heroes and villains up till then had been full-grown men, guys who had largely had careers in sports or the military before coming to wrestling, or at a minimum guys who had paid their dues wrestling through the territories, moving up from jobber to supporting act to tag team player before climbing up to the singles-champ tier.

  But Fritz had control of Texas, and he had a different vision: If he was too old to be the star himself, he would push his boys as the stars. It was the standard modus operandi in the territories for the biggest star to be co-owner of the promotion. It was a vicious cycle: The bosses would give the wrestlers a stake so as not to risk them leaving, and then the owner-wrestlers would stay on top interminably because they were the only people they could trust not to leave. Fritz was only one of many who positioned their sons as heirs apparent to the throne for the same practical (and, one assumes, egotistical) reason. But he was by far the most successful at turning his sons into stars.

  A BRIEF HISTORY OF NEPOTISM IN WRESTLING

  In the Territorial Era regional superstars owned (or co-owned) the promotions in which they competed. The rationale was simple: In a time when wrestlers regularly traveled from city to city, seeking better money or fame (or simply indulging the wanderlust inherent in the sort of person who seeks out that line of work), and in a period in which few if any wrestlers or promoters bothered with binding contracts, the only wrestler a promoter could trust to not leave him in the lurch was a wrestler with an ownership stake. Thus the earliest promoters started letting their stars buy into the business side, and in almost every instance, once the original owners started aging out, the star ended up being the sole—or at least operational—owner.

  By the 1980s, once the previous generation of stars were too old to present themselves as realistic champions, many promoters turned to the only other wrestlers they could trust not to leave: their sons. Of course, the first generation of territorial stars who became owners built themselves into stars prior to becoming promoters—which is to say, they earned their spots atop the card—but their children were not necessarily so compelling.

  David, Kerry, and Kevin Von Erich are the exceptions that prove the rule, of course—they’re the best example of a promoter successfully promoting his sons. But the contrasting examples—like their brothers Chris and Mike—are so much more plentiful. (“Macho Man” Randy Savage and “Leaping” Lanny Poffo—sons of renegade promoter Angelo Poffo—were exceptions as well, although their International Championship Wrestling promotion was less of an institution and more of a platform for the sons and a vehicle for the father to make money.)

  Consider Greg Gagne (son of Verne) in the AWA. Greg was a scrawny, charisma-less guy with good acrobatic skills and a good head for the business. Nonetheless, he was pushed as a championship contender (after serving mostly as a tag team competitor for years) once AWA talent started defecting en masse to the WWF. Viewers were already bored by Verne Gagne’s run as the top star into his sixties, and the ascendance of his middling son didn’t do much for ratings. The lack of believable “heavyweight” contender size is a common thread through the nepotistic list. (Even passable performers like Mike Graham, son of Florida promoter Eddie Graham, were often too small to make it through to the main event.)

  Tennessee was a particularly significant spot for wrestling nepotism. George Gulas was the son of Tennessee promoter Nick Gulas. Nick pushed his son as a top star despite the fact that he looked eerily similar to Andy Kaufman during his wrestling days, but without the taste to wear thermal underwear over his bird chest. When Gulas’s allegiance to his son’s success forced a split with his partner Jerry Jarrett, Jarrett partnered with wrestler Jerry “The King” Lawler, whose own son, Brian Christopher, would debut for his dad’s promotion years later when it had morphed into the USWA. Despite his relatively small stature, he went on to a fairly successful WWF career as a white-guy hip-hopper (known as Grand Master Sexay)—but it’s worth noting that, a few latter-day Memphis shoot interviews aside, he never traded off his father’s name. Also notable was the bizarro career of Jamie Dundee, son of longtime Lawler frenemy “Superstar” Bill Dundee. And the Poffo family was briefly a Tennessee institution as well.

  Of course, your dad doesn’t have to own the company for you to benefit from nepotism in pro wrestling. Second-generation stars aren’t unusual in the wrestling world, but even the most pedigreed offspring usually still have to prove themselves worthy of a spot atop the card. Those examples that succeeded due to their father’s fame alone are often groan-inducing memories in wrestling lore. Like, say, Erik Watts. Erik was a legitimate athlete, the quarterback for the University of Louisville football team, but more significantly, his dad was Bill Watts, former Mid-South Wrestling guru and mid-’90s booker for WCW. It was during his father’s WCW tenure that he was signed by the company and allowed to repeatedly hammer on Arn Anderson, and when his dad left for the WWF a few years later, Erik went along there too, where he was outfitted in a silvery smock and put into a tag team called Tekno Team 2000.

  Other notable examples include Ric Flair’s son David, who was inexplicably a significant midcard player in the latter days of WCW, despite his lack of discernible training, charisma, or, for that matter, wrestling gear; Scott Putski, son of the “Polish Hammer” Ivan Putski; and Lacey Von Erich, daughter of Kerry. Garett Bischoff, son of Eric Bischoff, who was WCW’s showrunner in its late-’90s heyday, is now seeing the spotlight in TNA Wrestling, where his father is presently in charge.

  David and Kevin and Kerry toured around Texas together, causing Beatles-level crowd freak-outs at their every entrance. Fans of the old WCCW programming on ESPN might recall the fairly shocking sight of those Von Erich boys wading through the throngs of wrestling fans—not just guys, not just nerds, but real, everyday people—in Dallas’s Sportatorium,* in Texas Stadium, wherever they could hold a frenzied mob, and being treated like conquering heroes. Women in the crowd grabbed them and kissed them—Kevin says he’d sometimes walk through the crowd with one hand over his mouth and one over his crotch—and handed them bouquets of yellow roses on the way to the ring. People like to call successful wrestlers “rock stars,” and it’s an overstatement despite being a metaphor. But these kids, they were rock stars. Even that slightly underestimates the reality of their stardom because Texas didn’t have rock stars, really; they only had football. And for a few years in the ’80s, the Von Erichs were bigger than the Dallas Cowboys. Sure, they were sheltered, but their shelter was a bodyslam paradise. That little enclave in Dallas, Texas, might have been the only world they knew, but they had that world on a proverbial string. Or, to put it another way, they ruled the Southwest with an Iron Claw.

  The three eldest Von Erich boys—sometimes with Fritz at their side—were such straightforward good guys that goodness itself was their organizing attribute. “We were the only guys who didn’t have gimmicks,” says Kevin in the WWE’s Triumph and Tragedy of World Class Championship Wrestling documentary. They never needed to play a character; they were beyond characters—they were Von Erichs, after all.

  They feuded with all sorts of baddies that Fritz imagined up or imported from other territories. Their most memorable rivalry was with
the Fabulous Freebirds, a trio of toughs who repped the state of Georgia in the same way that Fritz once did Germany. Michael “P.S.” Hayes was the fancy-boy front man, Buddy “Jack” Roberts was the unstoppable little asshole, and Terry “Bam Bam” Gordy was the permed, brutish man-child. Hayes came in first and won over the crowd with a variation on the bleached-blond, jive-talking white man act that had worked for both Dusty Rhodes and Billy Graham (among many others), but he soon imported his cronies Roberts and Gordy and turned against the Von Erich clan in a legendary match on Christmas night in 1982. The feud was epic, and the gritty irreverence of the Freebirds played perfectly off of the Von Erichs’ institutional innocence. They played it as a Texas vs. Georgia issue, a matter of regional pride akin to a college football rivalry, but the subtext was Good vs. Evil. If, to the modern eye, the comparison to the Freebirds underscores the Von Erichs’ robotic heroism, that was beside the point in 1982. This was still unequivocally the Territorial Era, the premodern wrestling world, a time of simple duality.

  Things weren’t always simple for the Von Erichs, and the good guys sometimes got the worst of it. In early 1984 David—at just twenty-five years old—was without his brothers on the first night of a tour through Japan. The morning after he arrived, he was found dead in his hotel room. The first reports in the Dallas papers called it a stroke. Referee David Manning, who was on the trip, says that David ate so much the night before, he wouldn’t be surprised if he had taken some painkillers and choked on his own vomit. The Japanese coroner eventually called it acute enteritis, a disease of the intestines, which may or may not have triggered a heart attack, depending on who you listen to. The widespread rumor was that the death was drug-related. Ric Flair’s autobiography implies that Bruiser Brody—also on the trip, in Flair’s telling—flushed David’s stash before the police showed up. Reporting from a local show after David’s death, the Dallas Times Herald keyed on the uncertainty promulgated by the unreal world that the wrestlers inhabited: “The rumor of death hung over the crowd like the cigarette smoke in the Sportatorium arena on Industrial Avenue Friday night. He was killed, one said. A drug overdose, said another. Many dismissed it all as a wild rumor or a publicity stunt.”

  With the huge success of the Dallas promotion and his sheer talent, David had been in line for a run with the NWA championship. After his death, both the Texas territory and the NWA overall were thrown into disarray. A supershow in Texas Stadium in May 1984 that had been meant to have David winning the NWA title from Flair* was rewritten to put Kerry in David’s slot, and Fritz came out of retirement to team with Kevin and Mike against the Freebirds. The venue was packed, 50,000 people strong, come to pay tribute to the Von Erich family. Fritz and Co. beat the Freebirds, and Kerry won the belt in almost inexplicable fashion with the most unspectacular conceivable maneuver—not the Iron Claw but a simple backslide pin. It was an affecting match, but that ending was perhaps coincidentally somber. The crowd cheered his win, but it seemed even they could tell that it was a tribute to David and not a real victory for Kerry.

  His title reign didn’t last long (it was eighteen days, to be exact); on the national scene, he quickly earned a reputation for being “flaky,” which in just about every retelling is a word laden with implications of drug use.

  It should be said that, despite his innate charisma, Kerry didn’t have the verbal prowess of his father or of David. He was the dumb jock of the family, slightly Neanderthal in both looks and spirit, and the villains in World Class weren’t shy about pointing it out—pretty boy heel Gino Hernandez would call Kerry a “baboon brain,” and Michael Hayes once said that “he’s just as stupid as he looks. It takes him an hour and a half to watch 60 minutes.” In the end, Kerry’s win could do little to dampen the depression that was setting in with the Von Erich clan and its fans.

  Mike Von Erich was only ever conscripted into main-event duty because of David’s death. The Von Erichs were a three-man unit, and purportedly, Fritz pressured Mike into the role, despite the fact that his only ambition in wrestling was to be a cameraman. In 1985, during a tour of Israel,* Mike hurt his shoulder and, after surgery, ended up with toxic shock syndrome. He survived a near-death scare, but he was left weakened and with brain damage. On their TV show, Fritz valiantly predicted an imminent return to the ring. Months later, Mike would appear, bone-thin and glassy-eyed, announcing his full recovery. He did return, but as a shadow of his former self.

  His roster of sons depleted, needing to fill Mike’s spot on the card, Fritz birthed a new kin. In late 1985, he unveiled Lance Von Erich to the world—a Von Erich cousin, he called him, Waldo’s son. Everybody knew it was a put-on, not least because Kevin Vaughn was a local footballer who most fans recognized. But everybody knew that wrestling was fake. They just didn’t want to be insulted. Fritz soon recanted, admitted on air that Vaughn was never a Von Erich, and promised never again to speak his name.

  On June 4, 1986, Kerry wrecked his motorcycle, crushing his right leg. The doctors saved his mangled foot—and, in an unfortunate echo of Mike, Kerry videotaped a guarantee of full recovery that aired on WCCW television. After surgery, he reinjured his foot. The Von Erich family account is that, in the hospital, doped up, he tried to walk across the room; the conspiracy theorists insist that the foot was reinjured when he attempted a comeback ahead of schedule, shot up with painkillers to get him through the match. Regardless, his right foot was amputated. Nobody outside of the hospital staff and the Von Erich family could know. It didn’t fit with the storyline.

  After his own surgery, Mike had had several run-ins with the law for increasingly odd and unpredictable behavior—reckless driving, disorderly conduct, etc.—but in April 1987, he was pulled over and found to have a bottle full of nonprescription pills. The Von Erich family lawyer bailed him out. A few days later, on April 12, 1987, Mike deliberately overdosed on sleeping pills and ended his life. “PLEASE UNDERSTAND I’M A FUCK-UP! I’M SORRY,” read his good-bye note to his brothers.

  On Christmas night in 1987, at the annual WCCW Star Wars show, the Von Erichs were battling Freebirds Terry Gordy and Buddy Roberts and their associates “Iceman” King Parsons* and the Angel of Death. Fritz tried to help but was beaten down; upon exiting the ring he collapsed dramatically. He seemed to be faking a heart attack, but the Von Erichs claimed that it was a mere collapse from exhaustion and that nothing in such poor taste was implied.

  When David died, the fans stuck with the Von Erichs. When Mike was hurt, then Kerry was hurt, and when Mike died, the Dallas fans were squarely in the Von Erich corner. But with Lance Von Erich and then Fritz’s “heart attack,” the Von Erichs had turned their backs on the unspoken agreement between the actors and the audience. They treated the fans as dupes instead of coconspirators. As World Class staggered onward, they were for the first time facing a wary audience. With the audience within the comfortable confines of the Sportatorium waning, the world outside seemed to turn on the Von Erichs too.

  In 1990, Kerry was hired by the WWF and wrestled there to fleeting acclaim. He stuffed the bottom of his right boot and laced it tight, and the world was unaware that he was working on one foot. It was undoubtedly excruciating, and it’s little surprise that this is when widespread rumors of Kerry’s painkiller abuse began to surface, along with rumors of cocaine and other illegal drugs—but it’s also probably no coincidence that these rumors were only allowed to surface once he was out from under the protective umbrella of his father’s Dallas kingdom. Kerry won the Intercontinental Championship from “Mr. Perfect” Curt Hennig and lost it back to him three months later.

  On September 12, 1991, Chris Von Erich, the smallest of the family, shot himself in the head in a remote area of the family ranch. He had wanted to be a wrestler more than any of his brothers, probably, but—aside from a few feel-good tag team bouts, one of which left him severely injured—he couldn’t do it, and that, presumably, wasn’t good enough. And he had been closer to Mike than anyone. Kev
in and their mother found him.

  By 1992, Kerry had come back to Texas. He wrestled in the GWF, which had staked its claim on the foundering Dallas territory. Kerry too had run-ins with the police, and when he was arrested in February 1993, he knew that a lengthy jail term was on the horizon. He couldn’t handle that, or handle the disappointment it would mean to his fans, or his family, or whatever. He went to his dad’s house, told him he was going for a drive, and then shot himself in the chest under the tree that all the Von Erich brothers had played on in their youth. That was February 18, 1993. When they held his memorial service, his name was still on the marquee outside the venue where he was scheduled to wrestle that weekend. His opponent, in perfect wrestling tragicomic irony, was the Angel of Death.

  Fritz died in 1997 of brain and lung cancer. When the family was inducted into the WWE Hall of Fame in 2009, Kevin accepted all six rings himself.

  THE LEGENDARY VENUES OF WRESTLING

  The Sportatorium (Dallas, Texas). Castle of the Von Erich dominion, this tin-sided barn was, in its early going, home to the Big D Jamboree, Texas’s answer to the Grand Ole Opry, but it soon was known foremost for its wrestling shows. Its prominence was such that, in May 1953, the building was set on fire, (supposedly) by a rival wrestling promoter. They rebuilt. When it caught fire again in 2001, the wrestling crowds had diminished to the point that it hardly seemed necessary. The building was formally demolished in 2003.