BRIAN “CRUSH” ADAMS
Brian Adams’s mainstream wrestling career started in medias res. A former soldier who’d learned how to grapple while stationed in Japan, Adams was plucked out of the indie scene of the Pacific Northwest in 1990 and thrust into top-level WWF storylines as the third member of Demolition, one of the most successful acts in the WWF. Demolition was a semisanitized, commercialized version of the Road Warriors—smaller spikes, less anabolically grotesque physiques—and the connection was perhaps even stronger than that. The members of Demolition swiped their look directly from the character Lord Humungus of Mad Max 2: The Road Warrior, the very film from which Hawk and Animal had years earlier lifted their postapocalyptic shtick.*
While the addition of a third member to their crowd-pleasing roughneck S&M routine was an interesting twist, it chiefly served to reestablish Demolition as a villainous stable. They had debuted as baddies, but—just as with the Road Warriors before them—their unique and brutal style made them fan favorites in relatively short order. After WrestleMania VI, though, they had brawled their way through all of the legitimate heel opposition, and the decision was made to bring them back over to the dark side. And so came Crush. Demolition was so dominant it hardly seemed fair—Ax and Smash were huge, and Crush was the biggest of the three—but that was exactly the point: It was just a case of monsters being monsters.
There’s some minor dispute as to the real reason for Crush’s addition to Demolition. It’s usually accepted that Ax (Bill Eadie), the team’s elder statesman, was getting older and steering toward a backstage role in the company—although there’s also some question over whether he agreed to the plan or whether it was forced upon him—but there are other reports that cite things such as a serious shellfish allergy as the cause of Eadie’s semidemotion. Either way, Demolition invoked the Freebird Rule—named for the legendary Fabulous Freebirds—wherein a three-man squad can defend the tag belts with any two members on any given night. And, as if that weren’t enough, they proceeded to flout even those tenuously legal rules by regularly switching the nonactive member into the match in dire situations.
This was, it must be said, a point of serious consternation for the more earnest young fan. All three members dressed alike and had full facepaint, but their paint patterns were distinct and their physiques were significantly dissimilar. It was only through the willful negligence of the referees that these shenanigans were possible, though it goes without saying that such negligence is at the core of a high percentage of bad guy in-ring machinations.
In retrospect, Crush’s whole run with Demolition was the only time his career made sense. He was a creature of wrestling’s 1990s; nobody better embodied the gonzo eclecticism of the day. He played so many archetypes of ’90s wrestling mythology that he became legendary at none of them, moving from persona to persona without ever fully leaving the last behind, though no real mention of his previous lives was ever made. He was a man without a history, unstuck in time.
Demolition battled against the cream of the fan-favorite crop—the Rockers, the Hart Foundation—before the team found itself at odds with its forebear, the Road Warriors, who had finally arrived in the WWF, going by the Legion of Doom. This was a big moment for wrestling. Many wizened wrestling fans were eager to see the copycats get their comeuppance, but even to the less-worldly fan who didn’t know that Demolition was a knockoff of the Warriors, both teams were famous enough that this rivalry seemed inevitable even when they were contractually and geographically detached. To finally see them face-to-face was exhilarating.
Unfortunately, the feud crumbled under the weight of its own hype. Both teams were competent, but neither was built around technical wrestling mastery. And while either faction could cut growling, threatening promos with the best of them, there was something unimpressive and almost laughable about hearing them growl so monotonously at each other. Each team had built its legend by having an everyman duo to stand in opposition. The Demolition–L.O.D. feud had all the hype of King Kong vs. Godzilla and the payoff of Alien vs. Predator.
Although it was never said aloud, the final confrontation was basically an old-school Loser Leaves Town match: Once dispatched by the L.O.D., Demolition’s fate in the WWF was all but sealed. The team hung around for a while after, but soon Ax, Smash, and Crush went their separate ways.
Adams reappeared in the WWF soon after, still going by Crush but otherwise completely repackaged. He was now a blandly straightforward babyface: fluorescent orange tights, bleached tips on his mullet, golden tan, and an easygoing Hawaiian surfer disposition. They called him Kona Crush, and to drive the point home he did the traditional surfer’s “hang loose” hand gesture. If he was less easygoing in the ring, it was mostly to comical effect: His finishing move—wherein he grabbed either side of his opponent’s head, lifted him off the ground, and then smashed him back down—was called the Coconut Crush.* He soon began a feud with Barry Darsow, formerly Crush’s old Demolition running buddy Smash, who was now portraying a wrestling repo man called, unimaginatively, the Repo Man.
It was at this point in Adams’s career that the repackaging became something of a gimmick in and of itself. Wrestling fans are persistently willing to turn a blind eye to familiar players in new garb; whereas one might think that keeping the “Crush” moniker would establish some sort of “reality-based” consistency, in fact it did little more than confuse the whole structure of wrestling reality. Were we supposed to recognize this new character as Crush from Demolition? Were we supposed to pretend that the former iteration had never existed? If fans reacted less than exuberantly to Crush’s re-debut, perhaps it was because they were busy trying to sort out the schism. The storyline was edging toward the meta; Crush was changing clothes and speech patterns with every chapter while the background remained stubbornly immutable. He had become the middling protagonist in a Philip K. Dick paradox.
The only memorable part of Crush’s Hawaiian-heritage run—and I guess it bears mention that Adams actually was from Hawaii, though he wasn’t discernibly ethnically Polynesian, and his Kona Crush persona was so inauthentic as to render that fact almost irrelevant—was his feud with the evil clown Doink. If it’s not clear by now that this was an era of unbearably Philistine wrestling personas in the WWE, let it be known that Doink wasn’t just a wacky creation of the WWF think tank that was bestowed upon some unknown schlub; it was a character given to “Maniac” Matt Borne, a borderline legend of the ’80s indie scene.* (One imagines Vince McMahon seeing Borne’s psychopathic cackle and saying, “Has anybody seen that Stephen King movie with the clown?”) Crush fell victim to an attack from Doink’s prosthetic arm—he had all his natural limbs; the prosthetic was a gag—and later, at WrestleMania IX, he was double-teamed by Doink and a Doink look-alike, the latter of whom, as if to add to the mirroring effect, also attacked Crush with a prosthetic arm.
After falling victim to a sternum-crushing attack at the hands of Yokozuna, Crush disappeared for several months. He returned as a heel, shockingly aligning himself with Yokozuna and manager Mr. Fuji and bristling at his former friend Randy Savage for not contacting him during his recuperation. This was taken (for whatever reason) as nothing less than an attack on America itself. Crush fashioned himself an anti-American Japan sympathizer, now with darkened hair, a goatee, black-and-purple tights, and a return to facepaint (naturally). If the switchover to the dark side didn’t pass the groan test, again, that was beside the point—why simply reposition Crush when a complete and inexplicable makeover would do? And while you’re at it, why not have a native Hawaiian take up the banner of Japan? It’s a mindfuck on the order of The Man in the High Castle. Crush feuded with Savage through WrestleMania X and then faded from the main event scene until late 1995, when he was arrested in Hawaii for carrying an illegal firearm and purchasing steroids, which landed him briefly in jail.
While this might have spelled the end for a lesser (read: smaller) performer, Crush was
welcomed back to the WWF in 1996, probably in large part due to the beginning of the WWF’s Monday night showdown with WCW and WCW’s consequent raid of the WWF roster. With ECW’s indie success and Scott Hall and Kevin Nash’s “invasion” of WCW as the Outsiders, this was an increasingly “reality-based” period in pro wrestling. And so, as if to prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that the WWF didn’t quite get it, Adams was brought back in a new role that maintained his continually unacknowledged backstory but also capitalized on his newfound lawbreaker status: Crush was now an ex-con—and a grizzled caricature of an ex-con, to be sure.* He was still called Crush, of course—and while he was portrayed as a man changed by his recent past, the specifics of his previous incarnations were left for the most part unmentioned.
This was an odd era of WWF programming, one in which every wrestler seemed to be part of a gang or faction, so Crush was lumped into the antiestablishment group the Nation of Domination (which would later become a more straightforwardly Black Power outfit) and then subsequently put in his own quartet of bikers called the Disciples of Apocalypse, or, for short, DOA. He was joined by Brian Lee, formerly the infamous fake Undertaker, and the Harris twins, who both sported shaved heads. If that and the motorcycles and the tattoos didn’t evoke a vague sense of white nationalism, the Disciples’ subsequent feuds with the (now all-black) Nation of Domination and the Puerto Rican nationalist posse Los Boricuas made the insinuation plain. But the gang-warfare era petered out, and so did Crush’s renaissance. Soon after, supposedly in reaction to Bret Hart’s treatment at the infamous Montreal Screwjob, Adams left the WWF.
He materialized soon thereafter in WCW, under his real name—the norm for WCW, which had pushed “reality” programming to its thudding end point, although as with every other real name, “Brian Adams” was just a wink-wink way for WCW to imply “Crush” without violating copyright. He debuted to fairly significant but momentary acclaim. This too was the standard in WCW: introduce a familiar face, put him in street clothes, have the announcers scream things like “That’s Brian Adams!! What on earth is he doing here?!?” and then bury him in the back of a crowded in-ring promo two weeks later, seldom to be heard from again. (Sorry, spoiler alert.) Adams teased an alliance with Bret Hart, then betrayed him and joined the nWo’s villainous platoon, and basically disappeared from the spotlight.
He had a brief resurgence in 2000 as part of the tag team KroniK alongside Bryan Clark. In this tweaked persona, Adams seemed to have adopted his real-life buddy Randy Savage’s style regimen of that day: minimal body fat, bulging muscles, black-dyed hair, and sunglasses fit for an asshole teenager. KroniK was basically mercenary, which meant Adams and Clark switched allegiance for little or no reason, which ironically rendered them the most internally consistent characters in all of WCW’s helter-skelter storytelling. When Vince McMahon bought WCW a year or so later, KroniK had a brief feud with the Undertaker and Kane, but, the (real-life) story goes, their performance in the payoff pay-per-view match was so lackluster that the Undertaker lit into them backstage, and neither member of KroniK was asked to return thereafter. The duo did some work in Japan, but that functionally spelled the end of both of their mainstream wrestling careers.
Soon, Adams was trying his hand at pro boxing. He had been a boxer during his military days, and he seemed to be serious about a second ring career, even if having Randy Savage as his hypeman made it all seem rather silly.* But Adams injured himself in training and called it a career. He settled down and collected on a Lloyd’s of London insurance policy—a station of the cross for the wrestler in decline—and thought about opening a gym (another station of the cross) in Florida. Sadly, that never got past the planning stages. He died just two months after Chris Benoit murdered his family and took his own life, so Adams’s death, at age forty-three, was covered widely in the mainstream media—notably on ESPN—which lost interest in dead wrestlers almost immediately thereafter.
Extreme as it was, Benoit’s case was taken in the mainstream press as somehow pervasively illuminating of the wrestling world, whereas Adams’s death was merely a footnote. In a lot of ways, that gets things exactly backward. Crush was as pure a product of his era and his sport as any professional wrestler. If you want the short-form version of the modern wrestling career arc, in all its weird glory, look no further than Brian Adams. He was, in order, a paint-faced monster; a neon-clad, bleached-blond do-gooder; an unpatriotic scoundrel; a gritty ex-con biker; and a black-clad nWo turncoat. He wrestled in the territories, in Japan, in the indies, in the WWF, and in WCW. He was American; he was a tropical exotic; he was un-American; he was a beast from Parts Unknown. Outside the ring, Brian Adams was a military man, a bodyguard, a wannabe boxer, and a prospective gym owner; post-career, he lived off the dividends of his insurance policy. And then he died in his bed, having swallowed a bad mixture of painkillers and muscle relaxers that he took for his lingering back injury.
We know this story by heart even if we didn’t know the man, and there’s something both pathetic and heartbreaking in that. He was everything he could have been, for better and for worse. He was a stereotype right down to his sad end. For all the incoherence of his in-ring career, his life outside the ring played exactly and tragically to type.
GEOPOLITICS IN WRESTLING
The pro wrestling world has rarely shied away from borrowing from the arena of current affairs in crafting its on-screen politics, the brawny egoism of faux fisticuffs working as the stand-in for geopolitical conflict in the same way that it does, at other moments, for love and hate or good and evil. From the early days of the Territorial Era, crowds filled with World War II veterans gathered to ceremonially berate the phony Nazi Krauts and scurrilous Japs who paraded to the ring in mock splendor.
In the early ’50s, Boston promoter Paul Bowser—himself a German, but a capitalist first and foremost—repackaged a Quebecer named Guy Larose as German malcontent Hans Schmidt. Soon the “Teuton Terror,” as he was known, was riling up crowds all over the country and, most famously, on the earliest days of nationwide television, on the DuMont Network; in the mid-’50s, Schmidt may have been the most recognizable German villain in the world after Adolf Hitler. His denunciation of the American concept of good sportsmanship earned him a mention in an op-ed in an August 1953 issue of The Oneonta Star newspaper in New York—“This country has no place for a sports figure who refuses to recognize the code which made this country great”—and his general despicableness earned him a few stab wounds and more than a few wild punches from irate wrestling fans. This was an indelible sign of success. By 1960, rings the nation over were regularly populated by the likes of Karl von Hess, Ludwig von Krupp, and, of course, Fritz Von Erich.
Von Hess started a riot one night at the Capitol Arena in DC when he choked Wildman Fargo (who would go on to be known as Jackie Fargo of Memphis fame) with a wire and attacked the referee. When the local government sought to regulate away wrestling’s seeming lawlessness, promoter Vincent J. McMahon did his best to publicly walk back the villainy of the episode. “Von Hess is no Nazi,” he said. “He uses that silly salute to point up the act he is the villain. Each wrestling exhibition has a hero and a villain. Von Hess isn’t much wrestler so he must use props or gimmicks. . . . Half an hour after the people thought Wildman Fargo was fighting for his life in a hospital somewhere as a result of being strangled with a piece of wire, Fargo was in Goldie Ahearn’s restaurant polishing off an inch thick steak that was almost a foot wide.”
When Von Erich returned to his home state of Texas, eventually to become the scion of Texas’s wrestling royalty, he switched sides, embracing his home country but not forsaking his German alias. It was semisymbolic, proof that in the unreal world of wrestling, even an evil foreigner could assimilate just like any other immigrant.
The Japanese wave of wrestling baddies lagged behind their Axis power cohorts, probably due more to the lack of availability than anything else. When they did finally come ashore, they walked
a fine line between being vague geopolitical scourges and foreign beasts, indiscernible masters of steely resolve and mystical manipulation. Two early baddies of this sort were fearsome martial artists Toru Tanaka and Mr. Fuji. Though both were born in Hawaii—the homeplace of a great number of faux Japanese, both in wrestling and in Hollywood—they played Japanese foils in the 1960s, drawing jeers by throwing salt in their opponents’ eyes. They were followed by such symbols of a growing Asian market dominance as the Great Kabuki, who terrorized the United States starting in the ’70s, had a painted face, and spat green mist into his opponents’ faces; and the Great Muta, who used the same gimmick when he debuted in the NWA in 1989. After his wrestling career wound down, Mr. Fuji became the WWF’s go-to manager for foreign (or otherwise frightening) menaces of just about any sort. It was almost a devolution of the caricature: His previous Japanese martial artistry was replaced with a bowler hat and bow tie, a Jerry Lewis sketch into perpetuity. Over the years he sired to the ring such Asian caricatures as the Orient Express (Tanaka and Sato), the Hawaiian Japanese sympathizer Crush, and the sumo behemoth Yokozuna. Yokozuna—actually a Hawaiian named Rodney Anoa’i—was a major player in the WWF for several years, but his prominence can’t exactly be called political correctness. When he first became WWF champion by beating Bret Hart at WrestleMania IX in 1993, Fuji threw salt in Hart’s eyes to allow Yokozuna to get the win.
In the ’60s and ’70s, the looming threat of the USSR on the national scene resulted in a quick immigration of Russian surnames and beards into the wrestling ring. A pair of “brothers” named the Kalmikoffs first emerged in the ’50s in Texas, but the next decade would see a more significant Soviet menace as the Russian threat continued to mount. Boris Malenko—an American named Lawrence Simon posing as a Russian—fought Buddy Rogers for his championship in 1961. In 1967, Canadian Jim Parras, who had previously competed as an Irishman named Red McNulty, adopted the moniker of the “Russian Bear” Ivan Koloff, and by 1970 he was embroiled in a heated feud with WWWF champ Bruno Sammartino. In January 1971, Koloff beat Sammartino for the title, ushering in a new era of anti-Soviet fearmongering that was only slightly less fearsome than the Red Scare in real life. A red singlet, a goatee, a bearish growl—rarely has villainy been so easy to manufacture. Koloff lost the belt a few weeks later to the new hero du jour, Pedro Morales. Morales was a Puerto Rican and Sammartino was Italian, but that didn’t make them necessarily bad; like the Axis holdouts who came before him, Koloff wasn’t bad because he was foreign but because he was that certain kind of diabolical, dream-crushing foreigner that only international conflict can scare up. (And what’s more, Morales and Sammartino had important ticket-buying constituencies in the New York market.) With his shaved head, geometric beard, and stocky, utilitarian physique, Koloff set the mold for the wrestling Russians who followed. He also shepherded in a new generation of Russian baddies in the ’80s, as his “nephew” Nikita Koloff (né Scott Simpson) and confederate Krusher Khruschev (Barry Darsow) ran roughshod over the NWA under Koloff’s guidance. (Khruschev was later replaced by the “Russian Assassin” Vladimir Petrov, whose real name was Al Blake.)
The Squared Circle: Life, Death, and Professional Wrestling Page 25