The Dead Wrestlers Society
By Michael Frissore
Illustration by Derek Evernden
Major League Home Run King Barry Bonds has been indicted for perjury and obstruction of justice. Former NFL Quarterback Michael Vick faces jail time for being involved in dog fighting. NBA referee Tim Donaghy resigned after admitting he gambled on games that he was refereeing. Some are saying professional sports are out of control. But what if athletes in one of these sports were dying by the dozens? What if baseball players and football players were dropping at the rate that professional wrestlers have for the last 25 years? What if every year at least two or three top athletes in a major sport, plus a handful of young minor leaguers, died? Then people would really pay attention, and not just when one took his wife and son with him.
Wrestling legend Bruno Sammartino, sportswriter Phil Mushnick and a few others were posing this "what if" scenario as long as 15 to 20 years ago. Still, it took the double murder/suicide in which star wrestler Chris Benoit took his own life and those of his wife and his son for the mainstream media to begin saying that there may be something wrong here.
In January and February of 2007, wrestling stars Scott "Bam Bam" Bigelow and Michael Alfonso, who wrestled as Mike Awesome, died young and no one in the media blinked. Weeks after the Chris Benoit tragedy, wrestlers George "Kronus" Caiazzo and Brian "Crush" Adams both passed on to heavy media coverage — that is, for a wrestler. Until Chris Benoit the attitude was: Who cares? They're wrestlers. Cartoon characters. Circus geeks. After all, professional wrestling has its roots in the old carnie days. Winners of the matches are predetermined. They're just a bunch of fakers. They don't really get hurt. It's certainly not a sport. It's this attitude that has kept pro wrestling unregulated for years, which has led to the deaths of scores of wrestlers. Only months after the Benoit story, the media has already forgotten. We won't know for sure until the next major death.
Two summers ago my wife and I were walking around Hampton Beach in New Hampshire. At an arcade we happened upon a game called WrestleFest, featuring twelve WWF wrestlers circa 1990 and '91. I reviewed the wrestlers and said to her, "Four of these guys are dead. Thirty-three percent." And it was true: John "Earthquake" Tenta, "The Big Bossman" Ray Traylor, "Mr. Perfect" Curt Hennig and Michael Hegstrand, known as Road Warrior Hawk, had all passed on by the summer of 2006. A fifth, Jake "the Snake" Roberts, had a well-known drug and alcohol problem. It was a wonder he was still alive. In August 2007, a fifth one died: Brian Adams, who was Crush of the tag team Demolition.
After more than 20 years as a wrestling fan, I have a catalogue of matches in my head. This WrestleFest game was nothing. You could make a DVD of matches with nothing but dead wrestlers from the WWF of the late 80s and early 90s alone: Andre the Giant, the Junkyard Dog, Big John Studd, Adrian Adonis, Kerry Von Erich, "Ravishing" Rick Rude, Owen Hart, Davey Boy Smith, Yokozuna, Bam Bam Bigelow, Hercules Hernandez, Dino Bravo, Miss Elizabeth and Sensational Sherri. All dead.
It's very easy to go after World Wrestling Entertainment (WWE) Chairman Vince McMahon, as the media, especially Mushnick, often does; he's been the main game in town for years.
But one could just as easily point to World Class Championship Wrestling, an organization that was based in Dallas, Texas in the late '80s and run by former wrestler Fritz Von Erich. Some call this organization "cursed," because of the deaths of wrestlers who worked there: Fritz's sons David, Mike, Chris and Kerry are all dead, as are Rude, Gino Hernandez, Chris Adams, Terry Gordy and others. Or Stu Hart's Calgary Stampede, which featured not just Hart and Smith, but Benoit, Brian Pillman, Gary Albright, and a handful of others, all of whom are gone.
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This is not to say that other, "legitimate" sports haven't had their share of deaths over the years. Pro football players have died from neck injuries, heart failure, heat strokes. Before All-Pro defensive lineman Lyle Alzado died in 1992, he said steroids were what caused his brain cancer, though that has been debated ever since. Major League Baseball has seen Darryl Kyle, Steve Belcher and Ken Caminiti all go in the last five years. Basketball had famous cases like Len Bias, Hank Gathers and Reggie Lewis. Soccer players from Brazil, France, England, Hungary, Egypt, Romania and Cameroon have died from heart attacks in the last ten years. Jockeys fall off horses and die; boxers collapse and die after fights. Heck, cricket players have died during matches.
Athletics is a rough business. It's different with professional wrestling. There's a lot of secrecy. For years the main "secret" was that wrestling was fake. Keeping this secret was called "kayfabe," part of the carnie language used in pro wrestling. Wrestlers also used the word to signal each other when an outsider was approaching. The term is loosely based on the Pig Latin pronunciation of the word "fake" ("akefay"). Then, from about 1996 or '97, when that secret was abandoned, until the Benoit tragedy, the secret was the death toll, no matter how many died. Even back in the kayfabe days, there was no pro wrestler's union that might have helped. And, while wanting wrestling to appear as a sport, wrestling promoters always tried to work around state athletics commissions.
PART II: OLD DEAD BOXERS AND "THE SICKNESS"
