The Squared Circle: Life, Death, and Professional Wrestling

by Shoemaker, David

  In a run back in Von Erich’s WCCW, Brody split with his on-screen manager Gary Hart and took his first turn as a good guy, and from there the Bruiser Brody legend only grew. He kept touring, running the road just like he always had, but now he could split his time between the roles of monster villain and godlike babyface. He wasn’t exactly a ring technician, but he was an imposing figure and one of the best in-ring storytellers of all time. He could get a near-epic match out of just about anybody he wrestled, and that list of opponents reads like the index in the Iliad: Sammartino, Flair, Bockwinkel, McDaniel, Dick the Bruiser, Jerry Blackwell. Whereas most monster wrestlers of that era were mythic beasts whose opponents were made legend by defeating him, Brody was both beast and poet: He wrote the epics in which he featured. He could turn any night at the wrestling show into a major event.

  The earliest grunts of the hardcore wrestling movement began at midcentury as the facade of the sport started cracking and promoters looked for new ways to establish the grimness, the realness of the fights. And so came gimmick matches—street fights, bullrope matches, steel cage matches—and more or less parallel with those came the earliest instances of intentional bleeding in matches. The first hardcore star of note was Bull Curry (né Fred Koury), a Lebanese American who started out as a toughman on the carnival circuit, started wrestling in the ring in Detroit in the late ’30s, and took his act to Texas in the ’50s. With his unibrow and lunatic expressions, Curry was as wild-looking as he was wild in the ring, where he commonly employed steel chairs, brass knuckles, and, at least once, a cinder block to fell his opponents. (Although he was a good wrestler, he wasn’t as creative with his moveset as he was with his plunder; Wikipedia lists his finishing move as the “punch to the face.”) He was roundly despised by the crowd and was famous for causing riots among the morally outraged audience. It was a quandary considered by Roland Barthes—whither the gall of the villain who places himself “outside the rules of society? Essentially someone unstable, who accepts the rules only when they are useful to him and transgresses the formal continuity of attitudes. He is unpredictable, therefore asocial. He takes refuge behind the law when he considers that it is in his favor, and breaks it when he finds it useful to do so.” Curry left not just carnage in his wake but also the institution thereof: After he rose to fame in Detroit, the hardcore style was institutionalized by promoter-star Ed “The Sheik” Farhat, and in Texas a Brass Knuckles Championship was created expressly for Curry. Many others there would hold the title over the years, establishing the brawling style as a Texas favorite for decades thereafter. Soon the rough-and-tumble style was being featured throughout the South and on the West Coast, and in Japan and Puerto Rico.

  Once he (and his brutality) became established, Brody toured the no-holds-barred-loving regions of the country and the world, overlapping with a loose troupe of the early purveyors of the modern hardcore style like Abdullah, the (original, aforementioned) Sheik, and the Funk brothers. Brody, less horrifying and less an eyesore than most of these compatriots, found himself repeatedly used as the monster slayer, the fan favorite against a cadre of fellows like Kamala the Ugandan Giant, the One Man Gang, and, most famously, Abdullah. Once Brody and Abdullah started feuding, they could hardly be stopped, territorial separation and ring parameters be damned; one wonders if it was a matter of chemistry or simple physics—gravity bringing and holding the two great masses together. They battled across the country and world, their hatred seemingly unconfined by regional storylines and unmoored from traditional wrestling unreality. Wherever one of them went, the other was likely to follow, as was carnage.

  They had one particularly memorable match in February 1987 in San Juan.* It was at Hiram Bithorn Stadium, a baseball park; the stands were filled, and the infield was a pulsing mass of fans moving organically to let the wrestlers into and out of the ring. For their part, Brody and Abdullah hardly acknowledged the ring at all.

  When the only existing video of the fight picks up, they’re already brawling in the crowd, hitting each other with the folding chairs set up as infield seating. Brody looks as if he’s already bleeding. The crowd is cheering relentlessly, unremittingly, and yet they’re giving Abdullah and Brody space, clearing away from a fake fight to let the two combatants perform. It’s not a fear of either man so much as it is a fear of becoming collateral damage. When the wrestlers are momentarily separated, the crowd uneasily orbits a bewildered-looking Abdullah, and a mob of zealous boys gathers around Brody as he clutches his bloodied eye, as if to will him back into battle.

  Back in the ring, Brody removes his furry boot to use as a weapon, revealing underneath a simple striped tube sock: the Norse god in a simple act of violence becoming an average Joe—and, moreover, an admission of galling humanity. His violence is a choice, which is why it’s a worthy spectacle. By the time he and Abdullah venture back into the crowd, they’re both near blind with blood. The camerawork—which was shockingly competent through the first half of their melee—loses track of them almost instantly and doesn’t fully find them again for three or four minutes. It’s a blurry, grotesque, confusing mess, the two brawlers passing in and out of range and focus like so many legends before them: It’s one part Bigfoot sighting and one part snuff film. Finally they collide in the middle of the crowd and are knocked in separate directions. One expects them to reengage, but they don’t. The two behemoths stagger back inexplicably to whence they came—the depths of the sea, the fires of hell, the dressing room, a hotel in north San Juan. That’s the whole fight. Or rather, that’s the whole chapter. The story doesn’t end because the story never ends. Theirs isn’t a match; it’s a mythology.

  Brody, ever looking to find use for his mind in a persistently physical world, went back to Texas to become the booker for WCCW. (He soon brought his nemesis Abdullah to join him.) That’s when he gave the interview that has since been immortalized online. In broad terms, it was a plain violation of kayfabe, the law that ruled the wrestling world from its earliest carny days until the Modern Era, holding that the artifice of wrestling must be upheld at all costs, even in the face of audience skepticism: Good guys and bad guys couldn’t be seen together in public, and the inner workings of the game were never divulged to the uninitiated. More particularly, Brody’s interview was a direct affront to Fritz Von Erich and WCCW, but that was no surprise; Brody made a habit through his career of alienating the promoters he worked for. There were disputes over money and billing and over his usage, but all of the grievances likely stemmed from Brody feeling that he was smarter than the guys he was working for. He was probably right.

  During a brief tour back in Puerto Rico the next year (1988), he was repeatedly stabbed by fellow wrestler Jose Gonzalez (a.k.a. Invader I)—a close confidant of World Wrestling Council promoter and star Carlos Colon—while having a “business discussion” in the shower. They had been arguing over something—nobody knows what—and had moved the conversation to the showers for privacy. A wrestler named Dutch Mantel* who was there wrestling on the same card tells the story:

  We all heard a scream, and [through the frosted glass shower wall] saw someone’s hand with a knife go into a bigger guy. Gonzalez ran out a secret hideaway in the back and we all ran in and I knew it was pretty bad. Brody’s main chest wound had blood that was bubbling—so I figured his lung had been sliced open. He kept asking Tony [Atlas] to take care of his wife and kid. He knew he was dying, but could talk. It took well over an hour just to get an ambulance there, and it was a Mickey Mouse one at that. . . . I called Mrs. Goodish and told her she better come down a few hours before he died, that the rumors she heard were true. Abby met her at the airport as he was boarding a plane home for the U.S., and told her the news.

  Brody had died in the hospital the day after his stabbing. The “Abby” in that story—the man tasked with delivering the news of Brody’s death to his wife—is none other than Abdullah the Butcher, the man who in and out of the ring tried to kill Brody over and over
again, in probably every major city in America.

  Gonzalez was charged with murder, but the charges were reduced before trial, and neither Mantel nor Atlas nor any other American wrestler on hand that night was brought back to San Juan to testify. (Mantel says his court summons wasn’t mailed until after the trial had occurred.) Gonzalez claimed to have been acting in self-defense, and after Colon, a local hero without equal, testified in his defense, Gonzalez was acquitted.

  If you go back and watch the endless string of Brody-Abdullah matches, you can see that they were doing something magical, bringing together two forces in a brutal chemistry. Watch Brody against other people, and you start to see the real element of fear that he inspired. Brody could make you believe, if for a brief moment, that the danger was real. Partly it was his violence, his stiffness, his otherness, but mostly it was the look on the faces of his opponents, who, in their unguarded moments, so often seemed to be trying desperately to get away.

  Wrestling’s fake fighting has to look “real” in a really unreal way; a certain hamminess is required to meet an audience’s expectations of what a fight should look like. It’s a little like how Hollywood audiences became so accustomed to stylized movie fights that, after a while, the least-believable punches were the ones without all the editing and sound effects. In movie fights and in the wrestling ring, realism looks weird, a little off. But in an artist’s hands, it can be terrifying.

  Brody was a purveyor of an oddly specific sort of realism that wouldn’t quite be suited for the modern wrestling world. He was a legend tethered to a fleeting era and a fleeting concept of violence—a violence so real that it ended up reality.

  THE CHIEFS:

  WAHOO McDANIEL AND JAY STRONGBOW

  On the March 7, 1994, broadcast of WWF Monday Night Raw, an up-and-coming Native American wrestler named Tatanka was presented with the “Sacred Feathers” of a vague Native Americana by two legendary wrestlers of a bygone era: Chief Jay Strongbow and Chief Wahoo McDaniel.* It was a none-too-subtle passing of the torch from one generation’s Native superstars to the next. But to the wrestling fans who knew McDaniel or Strongbow from their heyday, the comparison seemed almost an insult: Headdresses and war paint aside, these were two of the greatest stars of the Territorial Era, two men who overcame potentially cartoonish characters to achieve mainstream greatness; Tatanka, for all his success in the WWF, always seemed too preoccupied with living up to the caricature to overcome anything at all. Strongbow and McDaniel were certainly aware of this as they stood there, rumpled and complacent, halfheartedly engaged, like, well, two cigar store Indians. Their reward after years of legendary exploits was to be the cartoon characters that they had deconstructed during their careers.

  Note that I said “McDaniel or Strongbow” deliberately. Professional wrestling fans who grew up in the ’70s generally come in one of two varieties: those who grew up with Big Chief Wahoo McDaniel and those who grew up with Chief Jay Strongbow. Their timelines don’t exactly line up, but their territories were mostly distinct and their roles largely similar. You can count me among the former group—which isn’t to say that I lack respect for Strongbow, né Joe Scarpa. He was a near giant in the Golden Age of New York wrestling, an icon of an evolving American identity. But his comparison to McDaniel is telling.

  Ed McDaniel wasn’t a full-blooded Native American (“My father was one-sixteenth Choctaw and one-sixteenth Chickasaw,” he once said. “My mother was German. So you can do the math and determine what that makes me”), but his father identified as such; it was actually his dad who was called “Big Chief Wahoo” when Ed was growing up. After they moved from small-town Oklahoma to Texas, the Big Chief told his son tales about the mighty Native American Jim Thorpe, and Ed caught the sports bug. He was purportedly a standout decathlete himself until his ineptitude at the pole vault scuttled his Olympic dreams. He found a place for himself on the gridiron, though, and he would go on to play football for the Oklahoma Sooners, and the Oilers, Broncos, and Jets of the AFL—making him that most treasured sort of pro wrestler: the professional athlete convert. Moreover, he was a legit tough guy—stories abound, like the time he beat up two cops one drunken night, which got him traded to the Chargers.

  The sports pages were likewise full of McDaniel mythmaking once he found a place on the New York Jets squad and got his first taste of fame. He was serenaded on several occasions by Sports Illustrated, the first time being in his Jets heyday, by Bud Shrake, who put it beautifully: “While the public address system was still booming his name, the chant began: ‘Wahoo! Wahoo! Wahoo!’ It was as if 50,000 people had sat on lighted cigarettes at the same instant.” The fans adopted Wahoo as their favorite because of his energy and passion, and because of the catchy nickname that he had boldly had stitched on his shoulders in place of “McDaniel.”* He enjoyed the fame, but the real upside, as Shrake notes, is that being famous meant he could charge more money for his off-season job: being a professional wrestler.

  He started out in 1961—early in his pro football career—when a promoter* needed a Native American wrestler for a show in Indianapolis, and Wahoo took to the wrestling craft as surely as he had taken years earlier to decathlon and football. Training with Dory Funk, he developed such stereotypical moveset standards as the Indian Death Lock and the Tomahawk Chop. By 1966 he was making more money from wrestling than from playing pro football.

  He was a huge draw throughout the Southern and Southwestern territories, claiming championship gold in Georgia, Texas, Florida, and, most notably, in Mid-Atlantic, where he would spark a feud with U.S. Champion Johnny Valentine. In 1975, Valentine was in an airplane crash along with promoter David Crockett and wrestlers Tim “Mr. Wrestling” Woods, Bobby Bruggers, and a young upstart named Ric Flair, who had been teaming with Valentine. Valentine’s career was over, and Flair broke his back in the crash and was told he’d never wrestle again. Wahoo was one of the first people to visit him in the hospital, and when Flair made a miraculous comeback the next year, Wahoo greeted him in the ring; the two had a brawl that spilled outside the ring, destroying a ringside table, and when Flair grabbed a broken table leg and swung it, Wahoo was left with a gash by his eye that took forty stitches to close.

  From Shrake’s piece: “‘He has an Indian stoicism toward pain,’ said Cowboy Trainer Clint Houy.”

  That sort of quote attended Wahoo throughout his career. As a kid, he had been uncomfortable with his heritage, but by adulthood, McDaniel had embraced the stereotype with subversive aplomb. His affect was almost comical, but the seriousness with which he approached his craft—and the brutality with which he dealt with his opponents—balanced the crass iconography with a grim pride. He wore the headdress—and fought in defense of its honor—but he stayed away from the halting movie-Indian speech that other Native wrestlers adopted. Wahoo might have been wearing leather fringe, but his roughness in the ring and outside of it was a challenge to any wrestler or any fan to see him as anything less than unique.

  McDaniel took on top heels—and sometimes the top babyfaces—wherever he traveled: Harley Race in Florida, Tully Blanchard in Texas, Nick Bockwinkel in the AWA—even Roddy Piper when Wahoo returned to Mid-Atlantic, plus other luminaries from around the country like Sgt. Slaughter, Curt Hennig, Jerry Lawler, Rick Rude, Jimmy Garvin, and Larry Zbyszko. His matches were bloody affairs, the feuds often culminating in “Indian Strap Matches” wherein he and his rival would be tied together with a leather strap—another case of him taking a bit of cartoon prejudice and undermining it through sheer force of violence. While other Indians in pop culture were doing rain dances, McDaniel was drawing blood.

  At the same time that Wahoo was working his way through the territories in Texas, Mid-South, and the AWA, Chief Jay Strongbow was a headline attraction in Vince McMahon Sr.’s WWWF.* (McDaniel wrestled there too, but Strongbow was the regional mainstay.) In contrast to McDaniel’s Native American heritage, Strongbow’s ethnicity was largely a contrivance. H
e had started his career in the South under his real name, as “Joltin’” Joe Scarpa. He won some titles but made little lasting impact; it was only after being recruited to the Northeast and repackaged as a Native American that he became legend. It was an age of both racial stereotype and broad-stroke ethnic tribalism; guys like Pedro Morales and Bruno Sammartino and Spiros Arion were icons in New York’s Hispanic and Italian and Greek communities, respectively, whereas foils like Mr. Fuji and the Iron Sheik were villains in straight Hollywood fashion. But suffice it to say that their ethnicity painted them as evildoers not so much because of geopolitics as economics; if there had been paying Japanese or Iranian fans clamoring for tickets, McMahon almost certainly would have painted their ethnic champions with more nuance. (Later, Vince McMahon fils would follow his father’s rubric closely. Every star of the ’80s WWF represented a stark ethnic or geographical group.)

  Into this world of screwball diversity came Jay Strongbow, the Italian in chief’s clothing. A few outlets indicate that Scarpa’s mother was Cherokee, but I haven’t seen that stated anywhere conclusively, and it sounds rather like the sort of story a wrestler would tell to embellish his backstory; regardless, it’s significant that Scarpa’s previous in-ring incarnation had no Cherokee affectation—or acknowledgment—at all. Scarpa was born in Philadelphia, but Strongbow would be from Pawhuska, Oklahoma (which, at least, is an actual place). Scarpa himself said fairly explicitly that the Indian persona was nothing more than a role: “A gimmick is what you make out of it. Saying you’re a pilot doesn’t mean you can fly a plane. You have to learn to fly the plane as well. Same with the Indian gimmick.” Or as somebody else put it, “All the world’s a stage, and all the men and women merely players.”