On March 16, 1969, lady wrestling returned to New Jersey after more than fifteen years.* The New York Times’s legendary sportswriter Robert Lipsyte was on the scene: “Twice Moolah had belted the referee, precipitating rollicking free-for-alls in which all four girl wrestlers ended up sitting on the poor man’s head. . . . The sly, self-mocking humor of good burlesque was in the show, as well as a brisk and bouncy athleticism that was missing from most of the men’s bouts.” After their run in New Jersey, it was only a matter of time before the lady fights had their New York homecoming, despite the stingy sporting rules of Madison Square Garden and the state at large.* On July 1, 1972, lady wrestling returned to Madison Square Garden, and Moolah—at that point the recognized titleholder in the Northeast for sixteen years—was the feature attraction. Moolah, already the sport’s matriarch, was described lovingly by fans as looking like “a tough, middle-aged bird” and “a beaten-up old broad.”
In 1983, during the WWF’s national expansion, when Vince McMahon set out to buy national legitimacy by hiring the superstars of other territories, as well as other promotions and their TV timeslots, he formally hired Moolah and absorbed her women’s title into the WWF championship hierarchy. Moolah had been working at least part time for McMahon’s father since he bequeathed her the “Fabulous” all those years before.* If it wasn’t exactly a retirement plan—Moolah would wrestle for several more years, despite being sixty years old—it was a means of cementing her own legacy. Sure, the WWF had selected a new girl, Wendi Richter, to be the female face of the company, and with her modelesque build, neon spandex, teased hair, and trapezoidal sunglasses, she certainly looked the part of a Rock ’n’ Wrestling heroine. Moolah would be her antagonist. It was a role Moolah knew well—Richter was a student of Moolah’s, so their new act was really just the old territorial routine transplanted onto weekly television—and one she was more than willing to play for the sum McMahon was offering, even if the fans detested her: “They called me all kinds of names. I said: ‘Call me anything you want. You don’t write my check.’”
Upon her arrival, Moolah was announced as having held the title for twenty-eight years, and even though that wasn’t exactly true, it seemed silly to take away those brief losses when Moolah herself had willingly let the title go. All of her losses were quid pro quo title trade-offs, the sorts of story turns that are scripted to build the excitement—and the potential gate—for the rematch, at which point the status quo would be reinstated. She dropped the belt to her sister-in-law, Bette Boucher, in 1966, only to regain it a few weeks later, and did a similar swap with Yukiko Tomoe on a Japanese tour two years later, and then again with Sue Green in 1976 and Evelyn Stevens in ’78—at which point, it should be noted, Moolah owned the women’s title (and all decision-making that went with it) outright.*
Moolah’s feud with Richter was a proxy for a feud being waged in interviews between bad-guy manager Captain Lou Albano and mainstream crosser-over Cyndi Lauper. They had teamed up in Lauper’s video for “Girls Just Want to Have Fun” but had since become at odds, as those in the wrestling world are wont to do, with Albano backing Moolah and Lauper in Richter’s corner. The culmination of their rivalry was on July 23, 1984, at “The Brawl to End It All,” a wrestling event broadcast to the masses on MTV. Richter vs. Moolah was the main event, which is an enormous anomaly in the spectrum of WWF/WWE history, but just as Waldek noted about the early days of lady wrestling, sometimes promoters just have to acknowledge that the women’s match is going to be the biggest draw. Richter won the match, and a new era seemed to have commenced, with Richter as McMahon’s female counterpart to Hulk Hogan and Moolah set to ride off into the sunset.
Of course, by that time Moolah knew her way around wrestling politics better than anyone, and once she saw her role being squeezed out, she reinserted herself. When McMahon was prepared to feature another Moolah student, Mad Maxine, as his top villainess, Moolah somehow took her out of the picture and claimed the post for herself.* And when Richter’s relationship with the WWF began to fray during a contract dispute, Vince called upon Moolah to set the wrestling world right.
On November 17, 1985, Moolah regained the championship in one of modern wrestling’s most overlooked controversies. Richter was set to defend her title against the masked Spider Lady, only to have Moolah come out in the Spider Lady’s outfit. As she enters the ring, you can see Richter’s real-life anger; she can tell who’s under the mask and begins to realize something’s afoot. When wrestling was at its most popular, its fakeness was most pronounced, or at least most widely presupposed. At this peak of pop-cultural relevance, wrestling was so widely known to be “fake” that that euphoric awareness clouded the fact that an actual double cross—and an actual shoot—was taking place. Moolah muscled Richter into submission, and the complicit referee counted a quick three. Richter yanked off the mask and exposed Moolah, but to little avail; Richter was never seen in the WWF again, and Moolah’s malevolent star rose all the more for her deception.
Moolah continued to wrestle, but without the tension she and Richter had together, the women’s division in the WWF began to founder. Moolah finally relinquished the belt to Sherri Martel in 1987, ending her unprecedented decades-long reign atop the division.
In his review of that 1969 card, Lipsyte said that Moolah planned “to wrestle as long as the flesh is willing.” And she did. She appeared in the WWF/WWE throughout the ’90s and 2000s in various roles—as a comedic prop, as a living legend, as a heat-inducing punching bag. Well into her seventies, she was being hit with guitars and bodyslammed on television. And on October 17, 1999, at the age of seventy-six, Moolah defeated Ivory to regain the women’s title—her women’s title. And just as things went in the old days, she lost the title back to Ivory a week later.
Moolah retired to her South Carolina estate, where she then lived with fellow legend Mae Young and a former midget wrestler named Diamond Lil—both onetime students of Moolah’s. It was a nice little kingdom for the queen of lady wrestling, a physical trophy of the success she’d had and the money she’d made: twenty-five acres, a ten-acre lake. As Moolah put it: “It cost a lot of pain to get that place. Every bit was worth it.”
THE GORGEOUS LADIES OF WRESTLING
While there have been any number of star female wrestlers over the decades, there has been perhaps no greater flashpoint in the women’s wrestling world—on a cultural crossover level, anyway—than GLOW, short for Gorgeous Ladies of Wrestling, a syndicated psych ward of pro wrestling fairer-sex silliness.
GLOW was started by an impresario of the oddball sports world named David McLane—who would later go on to produce shows about sports you’ve never heard of, like roller hockey—who teamed up with Sly’s mom, Jackie Stallone, to start an all-female wrestling company that was originally conceived as a spin-off of her gym, Barbarella’s. As the concept evolved, GLOW became an entirely different animal. Launching in 1986, it called back to the wrestling studio shows of the dwindling Territorial Era while embracing—and amplifying—the outsize silliness of the emergent WWF. The initial roster of twelve girls was trained by Mando Guerrero (brother of Eddie and Chavo Sr.) in the weeks leading up to the first TV shoot, and the characters they portrayed—Americana, Colonel Ninotchka, Matilda the Hun, Sally the Farmer’s Daughter, Tina Ferrari, and of course the sisterly duo of Mt. Fiji and Little Fiji—were as broad and comical as their names suggested. But clowning aside, fight these ladies did, with glee and relative abandon. If the style was more slapstick than the pro wrestling mainstream, it hardly felt over the top within the confines of their Las Vegas Riviera Hotel arena, amid the freewheeling absurdity of the emerging direct-to-syndication television market, which was occupying odd hours on major stations with all variety of unusual content.
The confluence of GLOW’s launch with the cultural relevance of pro wrestling as provided by the WWF’s Rock ’n’ Wrestling Era—and its concurrent push of female superstars like Wendi Richter—certai
nly helped GLOW’s positioning, but their attraction didn’t end there. With a “Super Bowl Shuffle”–style group-rap intro and an utter disregard for convention, GLOW became a minor national phenomenon, capturing the “serious” wrestling fans, a crowd of younger girls, and more general viewers who were taken in by what could only be perceived as a much lower level of self-regard than the wrestling they were used to. When it came to GLOW, there wasn’t any question of whether it was real; one could be forgiven, though, if one wondered whether some of the wrestlers were actually as affected as they seemed. The organizing principle of GLOW, above all the craziness, was fun—a concept often lost in the broader world of wrestling.
Alas, something so countercultural couldn’t last forever. As the novelty wore off and the mainstream had its fill of pro wrestling, GLOW closed up shop. McLane tried to replicate his success several times over the years, but it was never to be. That doesn’t stop fans from remembering fondly those days when crazy women in spandex and sunglasses ran wild.
THE VON ERICH FAMILY
Some kids dream about running off to join the circus, ditching their families, their friends, their boring lives, and setting out in search of something different, something new, something exotic. Jack Adkisson was kind of like those kids. But Adkisson didn’t grow up to be a trapeze artist or a lion tamer. He became a Nazi impersonator. And when he came home, he brought the circus with him.
Adkisson grew up playing football in Texas, and he played sparingly in the offensive line that protected the legendary Doak Walker at Southern Methodist University, then briefly for the Dallas Texans before striking out for the Canadian Football League. In Canada he met another legend, Stu Hart, progenitor of the Hart family of wrestlers and owner of Klondike Wrestling.* Adkisson had done some wrestling in Dallas for a brief spell before heading north—it sometimes seems like every football player did back then—and Stu looked at Jack’s enormous frame and blond hair and decided he’s make a good Aryan bully. He paired Adkisson up with a German immigrant’s son named Walter Sieber and redubbed them Fritz and Waldo Von Erich, Prussian Nazis. This was the ’50s, and just like in movies and comic books, Nazis (or, more broadly, evil nationalist Germans) were still a powerful foil. Neither Jack nor Walter was really a Nazi, but in the wrestling world, fact is rarely a disqualifier. The two toured the country, wrestling in many regional promotions that had grown up in the recent years, turning the still-palpable resentment toward the Axis powers into box office gold. Few heels in those days were as despised as the Von Erich brothers, but that animosity wasn’t necessarily misplaced; by some accounts, the vitriol wasn’t so much based in the fans’ belief that the Von Erichs were Nazis but in anger that the wrestlers would seek to commercialize and monetize those fresh wounds—semiliterally, as any wrestling crowd in those days was sure to count a hearty contingent of veterans in its number.
The character suited Adkisson. He was known to be a brute in the ring and a bully outside of it. He roughhoused with his opponents and pushed around fans; he seemed to take delight in imposing his physical will on the world. It should be said that this is not an unusual character type in the wrestling world; Fritz, though, was notorious even in those brawny circles. As frequent opponent (and Mid-South wrestling mogul) “Cowboy” Bill Watts once put it, “The German gimmick was a natural. With that scowl of his, he was an easy guy to hate.” Like so many other tropes in the wrestling world, the Nazism was a lie told to advance a greater truth about the existence of evil in the world and the need to overcome it with headlocks and such. It was a lie that Jack Adkisson embraced.
There’s a crazy, apocryphal story about Fritz sitting in the dressing room in Chicago after a card. (Bear with me on this.) It was late. The rest of the wrestlers were busy taking down the ring. A small man appeared at Fritz’s door and asked him about his service in the war. Fritz gruffly told the guy to go away. When the man persisted, Fritz told him it was an act—a gimmick—and the man wondered aloud if Fritz knew that gimmick was a Yiddish word. Fritz and the man went back and forth a few more times, with Fritz getting increasingly frustrated with the man’s quiet insistence that Fritz realize the gravity of his offensiveness. Finally, Fritz threatened the man a last time, and the man rolled up his sleeve to expose the tattoo that proved him to be a survivor of the Holocaust. He told Fritz that he’d lost all seven of his sons in the death camps, and—here’s where it gets good—he said ominously that he sincerely hoped that nothing like that would ever happen to Fritz. Adkisson went pale and tossed the man out of the locker room, running him into the door frame, cutting his arm, and tearing his coat, from which fell a scrap of cloth with a six-pointed star imprinted and a few drops of the man’s fresh blood. By the time Fritz looked up, the man had vanished. A locker room attendant watched the scene from the shadows and recovered the patch from the trash can after Fritz left.
Of course, the wrestling world is a world of mythology, and even the “real life” side of it is filled with its own myths and legends and tall tales. But this story stands out not just for its allegory but also for its angle. Almost all of wrestling’s fables are written by its historical victors. Rarely do you hear tales in which the player—Fritz in this case—isn’t depicted in a good light, or doesn’t have something to gain by its retelling. To be sure, this isn’t a widespread story, but its very existence is telling: As hard as he would try over the rest of his life to script reality to suit his fantasy, Adkisson would never wholly succeed.
In 1959, Adkisson’s firstborn son, Jack Jr., died at the age of six after being electrocuted in the bathtub. Fritz and Waldo didn’t strictly split up when Jack Jr. died, but Fritz stopped traveling as much, reluctant to go back to the East Coast. Both took their fearsome German characters with them—Fritz with his Sieg Heil and dreadful Iron Claw finisher, Waldo with his goose step and cartoon villainy.* Fritz moved on to St. Louis where he worked for Sam Muchnick, the NWA macher in the area. Muchnick was a central figure in the NWA power structure, and for years, as long as the power in the northeastern wrestling scene remained scattered, Muchnick was the closest thing they had to a pro wrestling godfather.
Fritz finally decided to go home to Texas, to get a real job and quit playing around with the fake fighting, but he couldn’t quite let the fantasy go. He decided to work a match or two for Ed McLemore at the Dallas Sportatorium to make some cash, and ended up backing into an ownership stake in the promotion. Just as in any other consortium of that ilk, who you know is always as important as what you know: Jack’s old boss Muchnick had the sway to give him the approval he needed, in that oddball underworld, to take the reins there. Von Erich partnered with McLemore, and they split off from Paul Boesch’s south Texas office, and after McLemore died, Fritz took control. By the ’80s, Fritz was a local legend—between his wrestling fame, his place in local football lore, his born-again Christianity, and his real estate dealings, Fritz was a proud member of Dallas’s upper crust—and Fritz Von Erich went from Teutonic heel to Texas hero.
It took coming home for Fritz Von Erich to find himself. It’s probably more accurate to say that Fritz Von Erich found himself by embracing his inner Jack Adkisson. After all, Jack was from Texas. Jack’s dad was a constable, for Pete’s sake. How’s this for a subconscious act of rebellion: Jack Adkisson—good ol’ Texas boy, son of a lawman, SMU footballer—went up to Canada and became a Nazi. He finally came home, but he never gave up the Von Erich name. He had chosen pro wrestling over family. But soon he would have a family of his own, a battling troupe of Von Erich boys built in his image, molded into Texas royalty by the exposure afforded them in the World Class Championship Wrestling territory. That territory, it was going to be their whole world.
Kevin Von Erich—the eldest son after Jackie died—started wrestling for his dad in 1976. David followed a year later, but beat Kevin to wrestling stardom because Kevin was busy playing college football. (David dropped out of school after he got the wrestling bug.) David was the supersta
r from the start, 6-foot-7, strong and agile, the complete package, a pre-steroid-era wrestling messiah. In a stride of individualism unusual for the Von Erich progeny, David defiantly left Texas for a few years early in his career and wrestled around the country, where he earned credibility among the big names of the era and, mostly by playing a bad guy, learned much of the ring psychology that his brothers never mastered. He followed in his father’s footsteps, against his father’s wishes, and only in doing so was he poised to surpass his father.
The other brothers followed their dad’s decree and never left home. Kevin was barefooted and bowl-cut, the highflier of the family, a free spirit who would eventually become its emotional rock. After David came Kerry, the muscle-bound Prince Valiant with sleepy eyes and a powerful sort of charisma that emanated from his posture (and certainly not from his promos—Kerry was always halting on the mic). Then came Mike, and then Chris, the former the smallest of the bunch who frequently wrestled, the latter the smallest full stop. Chris was afflicted with medical issues that left him undersized and fragile; Mike, though healthy, wasn’t the physical specimen that his older brothers were, and was transparently outmatched by most of his opponents in the ring. If the first lie of the Von Erich family tree was Fritz’s Nazism, the second was Mike’s legitimacy. It wasn’t that he had no business being in the ring; it was that he had no business being successful in the ring, being booked as anything but an underdog, and the Von Erich brothers were largely put over as superheroes. Even to the believing eye and even during his brief physical peak, his tiny frame stacked with suspicious muscles, Mike wasn’t the character he was portraying. He wasn’t up to the standards of David or Kevin or Kerry, and certainly not the mythic spectre of Fritz. But the fans didn’t object; they were too enthralled by the Von Erich clan to question.
The Squared Circle: Life, Death, and Professional Wrestling Page 6