WR3ZTLING

Herv100 · Post by **Herv100** » Mon Feb 24, 2014 5:33 am

Speaking of Dusty on the mic, I remember a great episode of Crocket's NWA Saturday Night. Dusty was booker at the time, and he booked himself and Flair, who was champ, at the Superdome in New Orleans later that night at a house show. NWA Saturday Night was taped Saturday morning in Atlanta, and after the taping the wrestlers were to fly to New Orleans for the Superdome card. Flair comes out first and cuts a promo fucking with Dusty and broke kayfabe a little bit and says to Dusty he don't do no jobs in front of 70,000 people. Dusty comes out next and during his promo and he's all pissed and says he don't don no jobs either, so now where we at? LOL They were just always great with their back and forth promos

Here's a vid of that episode, the 2 promos are in the first few minutes:

Here's some more good back and forth promo's for Flair and Dusty from a couple months later
"The four horsemen need to riiide on a another planet, because I reserved the stratosphere for me and you"
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vdCkgCeTRgo

Herv100 · Post by **Herv100** » Mon Feb 24, 2014 5:35 am

Oh, and here's a random Legends Rountable

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qSa8V6QzPRA[/youtube]

Turdacious · Post by **Turdacious** » Tue Feb 25, 2014 2:47 am

Because it's Black History Month, but mostly because Ernie Ladd.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4o_VhHXZoYk[/youtube]

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UDFsK7t813E[/youtube]

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zNVUsQj5OCQ[/youtube]

T200 · Post by **T200** » Tue Feb 25, 2014 12:19 pm

The Nature Boy's birthday today

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FCxWUKMJfEI[/youtube]

T200 · Post by **T200** » Thu Feb 27, 2014 2:22 am

World champion/murderer Verne Gagne turns 88 today

Versus Billy Robinson
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lmovwWxMX0Y[/youtube]

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=93D1pVPXUZo[/youtube]

Versus Nick Bockwinkel
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_pG61YbxhG0[/youtube]

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eY0NY2kCt3A[/youtube]

Turdacious · Post by **Turdacious** » Thu Feb 27, 2014 3:22 am

We missed a legend's birthday on 20FEB:
With two other legends (and Hulk Hogan):
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cpD2X6pHi9I[/youtube]
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vNBMXVkwUMg[/youtube]

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gwv3R5e7oHs[/youtube]

T200 · Post by **T200** » Thu Feb 27, 2014 10:34 pm

The great Luchador El Hijo del Santo announced his retirement. From Wrestling Observer:

For the second straight week, one of the biggest international wrestling stars of the last three decades has announced his retirement.

On 2/20, Gabriela Obregon, the wife and business manager of El Hijo del Santo, Jorge Guzman, announced that her husband had gotten bad news when his back was examined by doctors in Houston, including finding a spinal lesion. Super Luchas reported that his neck was so bad he would retire, but pegged it at the end of the year, and that he would need surgery which he is postponing until that time to work a few final matches.

Guzman, 50, the son of Mexico’s all-time most famous wrestler, movie star and sports hero, Rodolfo Guzman Huerta, the original El Santo, was Mexico’s biggest drawing card as well as a huge Hispanic draw in a number of U.S. markets during the 80s and 90s. While not having the charisma of his father, we was a far better wrestler. Of the true top ten or top 20 wrestlers of all-time, Santo was by far the most successful son both as a worker and a drawing card.

He and his father comprise one of only four father-and-son Hall of Fame combinations, along with the Guerreros (Gori and Eddy), the Harts (Stu and Bret) and The Funks (Dory Sr. along with Terry and Dory Jr.).

Santo, like his father, had managed a pristine reputation within the business until recent years, when he picked up a lot of detractors. His wife had gotten a lot of heat for pricing him out of the market. He had bad blood with both CMLL and AAA, both of which had promoted him as a top-of-the-line star over the past two decades. He had complained about the modern product and how the traditional Lucha Libre was dying off. This past year he was heavily criticized for pushing for months the idea of an ultimate three-way match, with himself, L.A. Park and Dr. Wagner Jr., where the loser would unmask, would take place late in the year. When the match never happened, he blamed a legitimate national tragedy, a hurricane that hit Mexico City. The real reason is Wagner Jr.’s asking price to lose his mask, of several hundred thousand dollars, was more than any promoter could afford to pay unless they were planning on running a money losing show for ego or to launder money, and nobody like that came out of the woodwork.

He also had issues with family members for trademarking and guarding the Santo name, and in particular, not allowing the wrestler known as Axel, the legitimate grandson of his father and his own nephew, from going as El Nieto del Santo. He had said he was guarding that name and would only allow someone from the family to use it if he could live up to it. His nephew, who wrestles as Axel, never made it big. He had said he hoped he could pass the name to his son, but would not allow him to use it unless he was good enough.

Still, even his detractors would say he was one of the great babyfaces in Mexican wrestling history, starting from the day his father allowed him to take the Santo name in 1982.

Obregon indicated that Santo may be able to do one or two farewell matches, but his back was so bad that may not even be possible. If possible, his retirement match would be on or around 10/18, the planned debut of his son, El Nieto del Santo, who trained last year in Pro Wrestling NOAH. That would be 32 years to the day of the debut of El Hijo del Santo, using that name, at Arena Nuevo Laredo in Tamaulipas.

Santo was the tenth and youngest son of Rodolfo Guzman, whose brother, Miguel “Blackie” Guzman was one of the biggest wrestling stars in Texas during the 40s and 50s. Roldofo Guzman began wrestling in 1934 or 1935, and took the name El Santo, as a heel, in 1942. While people today think of Santo like a Bruno Sammartino, a career babyface, he was actually Mexico’s top heel, often teaming with Gori Guerrero (the father of Chavo Sr., Mando, Hector and Eddy and grandfather of Chavo Jr.).

It wasn’t until the early 60s, after he became Mexico’s most popular movie star for appearing in campy “B” movies as a crime solving detective in a silver mask and wild suits, battling mummies and vampires, that he turned and became wrestling’s most beloved iconic character in history. Even today, 30 years after his death, if you were to ask people on the street in any major city in Mexico to name one wrestler, by far the name that would come up the most would be El Santo.

El Hijo del Santo began wrestling in February 1982, after earning his college degree in communications. He was Santo’s only son that wanted to become a wrestler, and his father would not open any doors for him to do so until he got his degree, and also learned wrestling without fans knowing who he was.

He wrestled for several months under a mask as Korak. The elder Santo was suffering from heart problems by that time. He had a heart attack during a match in 1980 where he teamed with Blue Demon and Huracan Ramirez against the country’s hottest young trio, El Signo & El Texano & Negro Navarro. He was rushed to the back in the middle of the match where he was worked on and his life was saved. The heel trio was given credit for nearly ending Santo’s life, and revolutionized the business where trios headliners became the norm, paving the way for the modern era. They became known as Los Misioneros de la Muerte, or, The Death Missionaries, even coming to California with the reputation. In 1982, Santo did a movie where, in the final scene, his son, wearing the same silver cape and silver mask, was introduced as El Hijo del Santo. When Santo did his retirement tour in 1982, his son was introduced at every city. Five weeks after his father retired, El Hijo del Santo debuted and immediately became the hottest young star in Mexico.

There was natural resentment at the time, as Santito, as he was known at the time, was a lightweight, and historically men of his size were relegated to prelims and didn’t draw. Even then, on the loaded UWA shows that were held at the El Toreo Bullring in Naucalpan, and stealing the shows with his big rival, Negro Casas, they usually worked mid-card unless there was a title or mask at stake. The heavyweights, like Canek or Dos Caras, as well as the big-name foreigners, worked the main events.

By 1987, when he started wrestling regularly on independent shows out of the Olympic Auditorium in Los Angeles, he first established himself as a draw. His feud with Negro Casas, culminating in a mask vs. hair match on July 18, 1987, sold out the Olympic Auditorium (at the time the building had been redone and held 6,000 fans), an incredible number for a local independent group with no television.

Santo’s specialty was in matches where his mask was at stake. He was the Mexico version of the Undertaker, as from the first time he put his mask at stake, 13 days after debuting with the name, beating the original Pierroth (the 90s Pierroth was originally called Pierroth Jr. and was not this wrestler) in Veracruz on October 31, 1982, through when he defeated Angel Blanco Jr. on March 31, 2012, in Mexico City, he went 66-0 in mask vs. mask and mask vs. hair bouts.

Attempts to make him like his father as a movie star never fully took. He was the lead in a few Santo movies, but they never had the popularity his father’s movies had.

Without a doubt, his most famous match in the United States would have been on November 6, 1994, in a double mask vs. double hair match where Santo & Octagon beat Eddy Guerrero & Love Machine) before 12,000 fans at the Los Angeles Sports Arena in the main event of the “When World’s Collide,” PPV. Even though the match was in the United States, a television special on the greatest matches in the history of Mexican wrestling saw this make the top ten.

The feud actually started when Santo & Guerrero were a babyface tag team, the new Parejas Atomicos (the name El Santo & Gori Guerrero used as heels in the 50s). Santo & Guerrero had teamed up in Ciudad Juarez from the start of Eddy’s career, and in other parts of the country, but had been put together as a regular team on AAA’s national television show. Guerrero eventually turned on Santo to team with Love Machine, a popular babyface who became a superstar as a heel. That feud could have continued for years, but two weeks after the match, Barr died under strange circumstances, in bed with his five-year-old son Dexter in his arms (later Dexter died at 12 in a horseback riding accident).

Antonio Pena then created a new character called El Santo Negro. There had been a black clad El Santo Negro in the 70s who wrestled in Texas. However, Santo’s family was mad about someone using the Santo name and being a heel with the name. Because of all the hassles, Pena changed him to Pentagon, to instead rival Octagon.

Soon after, when AAA was falling apart, Santo returned to CMLL in 1995, and was the biggest draw for the promotion for many years. He even did a heel turn in 1996 and 1997 against a face Casas, which included a Santo vs. Casas vs. Dandy three-way with two hairs and Santo’s mask at stake, with Dandy losing, and a Santo vs. Casas mask vs. hair match on September 19, 1997, which sold out for that year’s Anniversary show. Santo was still a babyface everywhere else, though.

He also had a classic face vs. face WWA welterweight title feud with Rey Misterio Jr. (WWE’s current Rey Mysterio) in Tijuana in 1997. What was notable, and this really showed how beloved Santo was, is that even though Santo was a heel at Arena Mexico, and Misterio Jr. was billed from Tijuana and started his career learning to wrestle from his uncle at the Auditorio, the crowd cheered Santo slightly more than Misterio Jr. during that program.

He came and left CMLL, and was usually on a rotation where he’d leave for a long period of time, come back, and pick up the gates big. He was part of a big run that started about nine years ago, starting with his feuding with Perro Aguayo Jr. Eventually, in an attempt to make a new star, he began teaming with Mistico, winning the Gran Alternativa tournament. Santo and CMLL had a falling out where CMLL turned down his financial demands once Mistico got so hot that he didn’t need to team with Santo to draw 15,000 and up on a weekly basis against people like Aguayo Jr. and Ultimo Guerrero.

He returned at one point to AAA, but that wound up in the court room. Santo was brought in by babyface owner Dorian Roldan in an angle where he was battling Konnan for control of the company, essentially the same angle TNA is doing. The climactic match was in a Domed cage on June 13, 2009, before 15,500 fans Los Palacio de los Deportes in Mexico City. Santo scored the winning fall as the face team of Santo & Jack Evans & Octagon & La Parka & Vampiro beat Chessman & Electroshock & Teddy Hart & Silva King & Kenzo Suzuki. After the match, Santo sued the promotion when they put a DVD of the show for sale, claiming he didn’t know it would be released as a DVD. The promotion was furious at him, claiming it was made clear to him from the start, plus the reason they had him win the fall was he was going to come back as a regular. Instead, he did the one big show, left, and went to the press saying how bad the promotion was.

***************************************************************

EL HIJO DEL SANTO CAREER TITLE HISTORY

UWA WORLD LIGHTWEIGHT: def Negro Casas October 28, 1984 Naucalpan; lost to Aristotle I July 14, 1985 Naucalpan; def. Aristotle I September 1, 1985 Naucalpan; lost to Espanto Jr. July 26, 1987 Torreon; def. Espanto Jr. May 1, 1988 Naucalpan; Vacated title January 1990 when moving to welterweight division

UWA WORLD WELTERWEIGHT: def. Charles Lucero April 27, 1990 Monterrey; lost to Espanto Jr. May 12, 1992 Monterrey; def. Karloff Lagarde Jr. May 25, 1994 Tlalnepantla; lost to Norio Honaga November 18, 1994 Hiroshima

WWA WORLD WELTERWEIGHT: def. Fuerza Guerrera June 7, 1990 Tokyo; Vacated title November 1991; def. Espanto Jr. March 19, 1993 Tijuana; lost to Heavy Metal May 14, 1993 Mexico City; def. Heavy Metal 1993; lost to Psicosis February 16, 1994 Aguascalientes; def. Rey Misterio Jr. February 21, 1997 Tijuana; lost to Felino July 4, 1994 Mexico City; def. Felino October 8, 1997 Leon; lost to Felino January 31, 1998 Mexico City; def. Felino July 13, 1994 Puebla (title had been held up after March 8, 1998 match); lost to Blue Panther April 9, 2000 Monterrey; def,. Blue Panther June 2000; lost to El Hijo del Diablo November 23, 2000 Iguala; def. El Hijo del Diablo October 31, 2002 San Luis Potosi; lost to Cobarde January 25, 2005 Ciudad Juarez; def. Cobarde September 9, 2005 Ciudad Juarez; lost to Blue Demon Jr. July 2, 2008 Valencia, Spain; def. Blue Demon Jr. July 5, 2008, London, England; Vacated title 2011

MEXICAN NATIONAL MIDDLEWEIGHT: def. Blue Panther May 27, 1994; lost to Fuerza Guerrera September 15, 1996 Saltillo

MEXICAN NATIONAL WELTERWEIGHT: def. Heavy Metal October 21, 1993 Mexico City; lost to Psicosis February 16, 1995 Aguascalientes

AAA WORLD TAG TEAM: w/Octagon def. Love Machine (Art Barr) & Eddy Guerrero November 5, 1993, to become first champions; lost to Love Machine & Eddy Guerrero July 23, 1994 Chicago

CMLL WORLD TAG TEAM: w/Negro Casas def. Bestia Salvaje & Scorpio Jr. February 5, 1999 Mexico City (titles held up because Santo didn’t accept the title change with a win via DQ, which is allowable in Mexico); lost to Bestia Salvaje & Scorpio Jr. February 26, 1999 Mexico City; w/Negro Casas def. Bestia Salvaje & Scorpio Jr. April 2, 1999 Mexico City; Titles vacated when Santo left CMLL; w/Negro Casas def. Ultimo Guerrero & Rey Bucanero November 2, 2001 Mexico City; lost to Ultimo Guerrero & Rey Bucanero May 31, 2002 Mexico City

WWA WORLD TAG TEAM: w/Perro Aguayo Jr. def. Los Villanos IV & V for vacant title in tournament final November 21, 2003 Tijuana; Santo & Rayman became champions when Aguayo Jr. turned heel; lost to Ultimo Guerrero & Perro Aguayo Jr. August 16, 2005 Puebla

MEXICAN NATIONAL TRIOS: w/Angel Azteca & Super Muneco def. Los Payasos May 22, 1994 Jalisco; lost to Los Payasos September 23, 1994 Tijuana

1996 INTERNATIONAL WRESTLING GRAND PRIX TOURNAMENT WINNER

1999 LEYENDA DE PLATA TOURNAMENT WINNER def. Scorpio Jr. in finals

2004 GRAN ALTERNATIVA TOURNAMENT WINNER w/Mistico

WRESTLING OBSERVER AWARDS

1994 FEUD OF THE YEAR: w/Octagon vs. Eddy Guerrero & Love

WRESTLING OBSERVER HALL OF FAME 1997

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yOYUfsnhKw4[/youtube]

Holland Oates · Post by **Holland Oates** » Fri Feb 28, 2014 12:06 am

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UVOvZOWOqrg[/youtube]

Herv100 · Post by **Herv100** » Fri Feb 28, 2014 5:37 pm

T200 wrote:The Nature Boy's birthday today

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FCxWUKMJfEI[/youtube]

Classics:

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_1LcJ6N9vwo[/youtube]

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=em_WYo4sVg8[/youtube]

Turdacious · Post by **Turdacious** » Fri Feb 28, 2014 6:40 pm

Dusty could hold his own with anybody. Title of the video says it all.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bR6KNTQb5Qo[/youtube]

T200 · Post by **T200** » Sat Mar 01, 2014 3:59 am

Ricky Steamboat turned 61 today

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=07SACc4s86I[/youtube]

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=83rdPC-aEC8[/youtube]

T200 · Post by **T200** » Sat Mar 01, 2014 6:05 pm

New Kevin Von Erich interview on Wrestling's Glory Days podcast:

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kt9f6GDj4JY[/youtube]

Listening now so I can't say if it's good or not yet. I've only heard one of these dudes' podcasts and it was with Ronnie Garvin. It was interesting because he is a rare guy who mad a complete break from wrestling and doesn't care to come back.

They have a bunch of guys on there though. Gonna listen to Kevin Sullivan too.

T200 · Post by **T200** » Sun Mar 02, 2014 3:52 pm

Manami Toyota's birthday today. In the conversation for top 2 or 3 woman wrestlers ever.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f43YTQkJnQo[/youtube]

Also Doug Furnas died this day in 2012.

His Observer obit:

Doug Furnas, man whose combination of power and agility was freakish in nature, and matched by few men in history, was found dead in his home in Tucson on 3/3, at the age of 52.
Furnas wrestled professionally for 15 years, best known for his tag team with Dan Kroffat aka Phil Lafon, as part of the Can-Am Express with All Japan Pro Wrestling. Furnas was actually the second choice for the spot, as the original team was to be Kroffat & Tom Zenk, but Zenk signed with World Championship Wrestling. The move opened the door for Furnas to be a full-timer with the promotion during its most successful business period, which was really the perfect place at the perfect time for him to have a successful career.

The team during its All Japan days was one of the greatest in-ring teams in pro wrestling history. Kroffat was among the most underrated in-ring performers of this generation. Furnas was the guy who get the “whoa!” reaction for his athletic ability, for a combination of power moves and freakish agility.

Furnas was found dead on Friday morning at 10:16 a.m. according to the Pina County Medical Examiner’s office. His body had been badly decomposed by the time it was found, to the point that the examiner’s could not even estimate when he actually passed away. Furnas was a supporter of the Sports Legacy Institute, and had signed to donate his brain after death because of the belief that the number of concussions he had suffered between football and pro wrestling may have caused the Parkinson’s disease that he had suffered with for the past several years. Sadly, decomposition had set in to the point that examination of any of his organs would not be possible.

The cause of death was atherosclerotic disease and hypertensive cardiovascular disease, with Parkinson’s Disease being a contributing cause. In short, the arteries pumping blood from his heart to his internal organs had narrowed and it forced his heart to have to work extra hard to pump, which resulted in heart failure. That is a common cause of death of pro wrestlers, and is very similar to the cause as the death of Eddy Guerrero. The coroners were unable to establish the size of his internal organs, but he was about 250 pounds at the time of his death, and the kind of strength athlete that he was would likely have an enlarged heart and possibly other organs. There were no toxicology reports taken and the case was considered closed.

His life in recent years had been a struggle. According to his wife, Martha Furnas, he was still a freak in being able to recuperate from physical problems because he had an amazing mind to muscle connection, developed from being one of the strongest men in the world in the 80s. Due to injuries from football, powerlifting and wrestling, he had both of his shoulders replaced, his hip replaced after he suffered a fall and broke the hip (the replacement was from damage from all the sports, not the fall itself), and one knee replaced. But he had recuperated to where, on a good day, he’d wake up in the morning and do “the century,” which was his term for going out in the morning, riding his bicycle 100 miles, and getting home at night. He recovered from the surgeries in ridiculous amounts of time, to the point his doctors talked with him about coming to symposiums to explain how he did it. After his hip replacement, he was off the walker in three days and off the crutches soon after that, and bicycling in record time. When he had one of his shoulders replaced, he ditched the sling three days later. He also had a ridiculous tolerance for pain, and was quiet, internalizing things and never complained. In the shoulder replacement, the surgeons cleaned out a full pound of bone spurs.

But the Parkinson’s, and medication to combat it, was making it impossible to keep his training program. He insisted on taking what was told was the strongest medication possible to alleviate the disease, even though after taking it at times he would be throwing up for as long as two days straight. He had always had some form of a consistent training program since high school and didn’t do well when he couldn’t control his fate.

He was diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease in 2004, but knew something was wrong long before that and believed it had started years earlier. At the time, he was living in Tucson and working as a social worker with troubled teenagers. But he was told that in battling the disease, he had to avoid all stress, and hearing the stories constantly of kids in trouble weighed too heavily on him and in recent years he had to stop, and became frustrated with his limitations. In particular, he was keenly aware that no matter the medication, the Parkinson’s was not a broken leg or a broken back, and something he could will his way to recovering from.

Furnas had set more than 20 world powerlifting records over a four year period. What would happen is that during that run, in just about every meet, he’d break one or more world records that he had set in the previous meet. It was during this period when he met Kevin Sullivan in a Knoxville gym.
Sullivan was the booker and top heel for Ron Fuller’s Continental Championship Wrestling in a gym. Furnas was living in Knoxville after college. He was a star fullback at the University of Tennessee a few years earlier who had a lot of local and some national notoriety, first, for being the strongest college football player in the nation in 1981 and 1982, and later, for being one of the strongest men in the world.

Football was like a religion there, with every home game drawing in excess of 90,000 people. Football stars and strongmen had often been big draws in pro wrestling, and Sullivan saw a local guy who was both, but with Furnas, there was something different. Sullivan recalled that once, in the gym, he saw Furnas effortlessly jump from a standing position to the top of a 30 inch high box, and realized this guy was an athlete like nobody he had ever seen in wrestling. Sullivan, who teamed with “Dr. Death” Steve Williams, and wrestled with and against Jack Brisco, said he considers Furnas the greatest athlete he was ever in the ring with. Furnas had 35 inch thighs, but was ridiculously flexible, able to do the splits, run a 4.6 40 at 5-10 and 240 pounds, and had a 36 inch vertical leap. Unlike most powerlifters, he was built almost like a bodybuilder, except with his disproportionate gigantic legs.

Sullivan recalled seeing Furnas in the gym doing two reps on the squat with 1,005 pounds. It was not in a regulation meet and may not have been a full competition squat, but Sullivan said he went pretty deep.

Before meeting Sullivan, Furnas knew Bob Polk, who was the local wrestling promoter. They did a number of angles to build to his debut. The first was never on television, the type of angle that would be done in a different era, or maybe in this era, but not in this business. Furnas went out to dinner with Polk at a well-known restaurant in town. Sullivan “ended up” at the restaurant at the same time. Normally the idea of the promoter and the lead heel being seen in public in the same place was a no-no, and in those days that garnered some weird attention from the people who watched local wrestling. Then Sullivan, after finishing eating, sent his check to Polk to pay for it. Polk said he wouldn’t. Sullivan came to the table, got loud, and caused a scene saying how, “You’re buying this goof’s dinner and you won’t buy mine.”

Furnas got up, and Sullivan called him a football player muscle-head goof, but then left. The word of the incident got all over town and even made the nightly news one night where Phillip Fullmer, an assistant coach at the time who later became a nationally known head coach, was asked about the story and said how pro wrestling may be fake, but Doug Furnas is very real.

They did a few more things. Furnas started attending the weekly shows at the Knoxville City Auditorium. He would sit with Polk at the matches and it was established the two were social friends and he was a wrestling fan. He also made one television appearance, where they brought him on as the world’s strongest man, he did an interview, and when they asked if he was ever interested in being a wrestler. He said he’d thought about it, but was training for the world championships in powerlifting.

It led to a cage match where Sullivan was wrestling and beat down his opponent and continued after the match. Sullivan also posted the ref. Polk, who had the cage key, opened the door to stop it. Sullivan didn’t stop. Polk had left the key in the door and Sullivan got it, slammed the door shut and attacked Polk while putting the key in his trunks so nobody could get in. Polk had never bladed before, and was carved into being a bloody mess. Furnas hopped the rail and tore the gimmicked locked door off the cage and made the save.

The novelty of Furnas wrestling at first drew big houses in Knoxville, selling out the first week with 6,500 fans, and doing more than 5,000 fans several straight weeks. Furnas was not a full-time wrestler at the time, working maybe one or two shows a week as a sideline while continuing his powerlifting career.

At the next world championships of powerlifting, on June 28, 1987 in Bloomington, MN, Furnas did a 980 pound competition squat, a 600 pound bench press (pausing with the bar on his chest for two seconds) and an 823 pound dead lift. His 2,403 pound total was yet another world record in the 275 pound weight class, his 29th world record. For a comparison, Mark Henry, who is considered among the strongest men who has ever lived, and outweighed Furnas by more than 150 pounds, totaled 2,335 pounds at his peak. Furnas was only 27 at the time, and had he stayed in the sport, he very well could have continued setting records. Even today in the 275 pound weight class, the three-lift total record is 2,468 pounds, and if you consider Furnas’ rate of improvement year-by-year, had he avoided a serious injury, it is in the realm of possibility he could still hold the record a quarter-century later.

But at that time, it was the second highest total in history for anyone of any size at that point, trailing only Bill Kazmaier, who had totaled 2,425 pounds in the three lifts six years earlier. Kazmaier was 330 pounds when he set the super heavyweight world record, while Furnas was 260 pounds when he set the 275 pound weight class world record. Even today, only three men in his weight class and one in the class underneath him has ever topped that mark in drug tested (which is not to mean drug free) competition. That’s astonishing when you consider all the advances in training, nutrition, supplementation and drugs as well as humans in general over time becoming bigger and stronger.

The key, besides, obviously strength and his mind-to-muscle focus ability was an unusually thick bone structure, in that he actually weighed more than he looked to weigh. That really wasn’t known until he had body parts replaced and the surgeon remarked how he had never had to cut through bones so thick.

It’s more amazing when you consider that at the age of 15, he was told by doctors that he would never walk again.

Furnas was born on a farm in Commerce, OK, and would go on to become the second most famous person to ever to live in the small community. The town of farmers and ranchers had 2,378 people when Doug was born on December 11, 1959. But it was undoubtedly the single most famous town of its size in the United States. When Furnas was growing up, the most popular athlete at the time in the United States was the “Commerce Comet,” Mickey Mantle of the New York Yankees.

He and his brother, Mike, who was also a football star, a powerlifter and later became a pro wrestler, became super strong from a young age throwing around 100 pound bales of hay and doing heavy work on the farm.

Doug and his girlfriend, who later became his first wife, were in the bed of a truck as their parents came back from a rodeo and got in a terrible auto accident. Doug broke both of his legs, broke his back and suffered head injuries. He had multiple surgeries and was told he would never get out of his wheelchair. It was a full year before he could return to school. Most people thought he and Mike were twins, since after he missed the year of school, they were together in the same grade in high school, junior college and major college, playing on the same football teams.

It was after recovering from the accident that he took up lifting weights. He became a star fullback, with his brother, an offensive guard, as his lead blocker, at Commerce High School, Northeast Oklahoma A&M, a junior college, and later at the University of Tennessee. In 1980, Doug & Mike led the Northeast Oklahoma A&M Golden Norsemen of nearby Miami, OK, to an undefeated national championship season, and Mike was a first team JC All-American offensive guard. This June, both were to be inducted together into the school’s Hall of Fame.

They both went to the University of Tennessee. Furnas was starting fullback, described in news articles at the time as a bruising runner who was used mainly as a powerhouse blocker. He gained 630 yards on 136 carries (4.6 yards per carry) on a team that included future NFL stars Willie Gault and Reggie White. In his junior year the team went 8-4, winning the Garden State Bowl, beating Wisconsin.

During the off-season, he concentrated on powerlifting. On March 26, 1983, at a meet at the University of Tennessee, he did an 882 pound squat, a 766 pound deadlift and a 425 pound bench press, setting college records in the latter two lifts as well as a record with a 2,073 pound total in the 242 pound weight class. Nearly three decades later, the squat and deadlift college records still stand. He focused his concentration on the bench press, his weakest lift, over the next few years, training it with narrow, medium and wide grips heavy to directly stimulate different sections of the chest, shoulders and triceps, which resulted in 175-pound gain in the lift in the next four years.

He went to the Denver Broncos in 1983 as a free agent but suffered a hamstring injury and never played in a regular season game. He decided against continuing to pursue a pro football career in 1984 to concentrate on powerlifting, which was his mentality. In all of the sports he did, as well as pro wrestling, he did them, and when he felt he had accomplished all he could, he left, and never looked back, figuring it was time to start a new phase in life. Some 18 months later, he won his first national championship in his new sport.

He gave up powerlifting in competition when his wrestling career took off when he started as a regular for All Japan Pro Wrestling.

While Dan Kroffat & Doug Furnas never main evented at Budokan Hall, they were inside the ring, one of the greatest tag teams of all-time. They headlined house shows, but on the big shows, worked in the middle, mostly against Japanese opponents, including regularly with Mitsuharu Misawa, Kenta Kobashi and Toshiaki Kawada on big shows when all three were climbing the ladder. They had a long program with a tag team called The Foot Loose, named after the song from the 1984 movie, of Kawada & Samson Fuyuki over the All-Asia tag team title.

Furnas always maintained during the early 90s, that working for All Japan was the greatest job in pro wrestling. The tours were stress fee. Your hotels were taken care of, transportation was taken care of, Japan became like a second home, and he learned how to live cheaply on the road. While most of the American stars from that era were party animals, Furnas was known for not being wild, and for being good with his money. He avoided eating out as much as possible, and was known for bringing cans of tuna from the U.S. in his luggage every tour. The money was very good, not great, but he’d note that he had 24 weeks off per year. With most of his road expenses taken care of, the money he could save was equivalent to what main eventers were making in the United States at the time plus have time to get completely away from wrestling and lead a normal life for weeks at a time.

At the time in All Japan, there was great competition, particularly at the big shows, to have the best match. Even though Kroffat & Furnas were in the middle at most of the big shows, they usually worked with top notch workers and often were in matches that stole the show. In 1992, a match where Kobashi & Tsuyoshi Kikuchi beat them for the All-Asia tag title was named match of the year.

Kroffat, who had more experience, laid out the in-ring in their matches. Furnas was there to do impressive physical things, whether they be power moves, or agility moves. While Furnas would often press opponents overhead, he didn’t do the typical strongman spots because his agility spots were far more impressive. His leapfrogs never failed to shock the crowd. He could fly off the top rope with the best of them. He could snap a Frankensteiner in the middle of the ring out of nowhere. And his dropkick, where he would not only get high, but spin on contact and almost land on his feet, was right at the top tier of the best dropkicks in the history of pro wrestling. He was a great athletic worker, but he lacked facial expressions and Kroffat was the better pure worker. But the mix, inside the ring, was one of the best. In Japan they didn’t have to do interviews, and they complimented the other, and had the advantage of working with some of the greatest pro wrestlers in history, many times on a nightly basis.

The partnership was that Lafon handled everything that happened inside the ring, and Furnas, one of the most intelligent men in the business, handled everything outside, such as the contract negotiations. For years Furnas would praise Giant Baba as the best boss in wrestling, saying simply, “Baba’s word is always good.”

The relationship with All Japan ended because after years in the middle, Baba told them that as a reward, he was going to move them up to the main event level. After a year, when it didn’t happen, I can remember Furnas calling me and telling me that they were going to leave. A man of few words, he said, “For the first time, Baba’s word wasn’t good.”

They had frequent talks with WCW about coming in, since Furnas had worked in WCW between tours a few years earlier but when pressured to make a choice about full-time chose All Japan. What they were making in Japan for 28 weeks was more than they could make in WCW working a full year at the level they would be expected to be at. Plus, until the collapse of the peso, they were able to augment that income by frequently working for Carlos Maynes in Mexico between tours, where they were used and paid like main eventers.

Jim Ross, who first knew of Furnas as a high school football star at Commerce High in the 70s, and actually officiated a few of his games, signed them for what was by the standards of that era, a pretty high-end guarantee, since Ross was determined to make it worth their while to get out of Japan. The two were to come in as babyfaces and work with the company’s top heel team, Owen Hart & Davey Boy Smith.

For a number of reasons, it didn’t work out. By that time both were physically beaten up by the hard style of All Japan. Kroffat, who went by his real name, Phil Lafon, in WWF, had slowed down significantly due to serious knee problems, and he was the real workhorse of the team. Plus, neither were good on interviews. The obvious role for them was to be heels with a manager doing the talking, similar to The Midnight Express with Jim Cornette years earlier. It was talked about, and Cornette, who Furnas knew from Smoky Mountain Wrestling where he sometimes worked between Japan tours, was in WWF at the time. But it never got past the talking stage. He was considered a model employee, who did his job and never complained, but he was not at home in entertainment wrestling.

Furnas didn’t like the difference between WWF and All Japan. Although the contract was good, very good for its time, he was frustrated by a lot of things. Mentally, he was more athlete than actor, and the nature of Japanese wrestling was such that he could view it as an extension of his competitive sports career. WWF was not that. Instead of the mentality of going out and stealing the show, Owen Hart & Smith, who were both talented when they wanted to be, wanted to do the exact same match every night at the house shows. That’s just how it was done in WWF in those days. That frustrated him because they came from a different environment with a totally different mentality. He also complained how in All Japan, you were sent out there with an idea of how long you were to go but the rule was to build the match until you hit the peak of the crowd and then go home. In WWF, while that was nice if it happened, he felt that the agents never cared if the match was good, bad, or terrible, and only cared if you hit your time cue perfectly.

In 1997, he was in the backseat of a rental car driven by Sid Eudy (Sid Vicious) near Ottawa when they got into a bad accident. Furnas was taken to the hospital, and quickly checked himself out, said he was fine, and flew home. His wife, Martha, herself a competitive powerlifter, noticed that while he was acting like he was fine, he was having trouble putting on his clothes the next day, and she made him go to the hospital. He had both another broken back and a broken shoulder. Lafon suffered serious injuries as well. They came back, but the injuries didn’t help things. After the Montreal incident in 1997, there was talk of putting the two of them in Owen Hart’s New Hart Foundation stable, but the decision was made to drop the idea of a New Hart Foundation without Bret, so they again had no role. They were instead given the kiss of death, heels where their gimmick was that they were boring.

Eventually they had a run in ECW, which included one day as transitional ECW tag team champions between the FBI and Chris Candido & Lance Storm. Furnas lasted longer than Lafon in ECW, but his body was banged up, and when ECW stopped booking him, at 40, he retired from wrestling and like with the other sports in other phases of his life, didn’t look back.

He and his wife had no children. After wrestling, he ran a group home for troubled teenagers out of his house in San Diego, while his wife worked her way up the corporate ladder with Geico Insurance. When she was transferred to Tucson, eventually working her way up to a Vice President and overseeing a staff of 830 associates, he continued to work with troubled teenagers, doing social work.

Mike Furnas, the younger brother of Doug Furnas, who followed his brother into football, powerlifting and even pro wrestling for a spell, has a lifetime worth of stories about his brother.
Perhaps the most fitting was when he called Doug up recently and told him that Northeastern Oklahoma A&M, the junior college they both went to that the brothers led to winning the football national championship in 1980 was going to induct them together into the school Hall of Fame in June.

“I called him and told him, and he told me, `Thank you for letting me ride in on your coattails all those years.’

“Of course, it was really the opposite,” said Mike Furnas.

Doug Furnas was quiet, intelligent, in many ways completely different from almost anyone who ever had long-term success in pro wrestling. In a world where it’s all about self-promotion, flashiness and bragging, he wanted none of that. In his mind, pro wrestling was the extension of his athletic career that was founded on being the ultimate team player. He was the quiet guy who trained harder and was more disciplined than anyone else on the team. In doing so, became a team leader, and those who followed became just a little better because of it.

Mike noted that when he played with his brother at the University of Tennessee, being one of only two brother combinations ever to be starters on the same team in the school’s history, that from the start of spring practice until January, after the bowl game, he wouldn’t touch alcohol.

“That wasn’t easy, because you know how wild college football players could be,” he recalled. “But Doug never drank. But at the same time, he never looked down on anyone who did.”

That attitude would serve him well in pro wrestling, particularly in the early 90s in All Japan Pro Wrestling. Like in football, where he was mostly an I-formation blocking fullback, known for a bruising style and being good in short yardage situations, Furnas was a great player on an all-star team.

While Doug Furnas & Dan Kroffat were written up in Japan this past month as one of the greatest tag teams in that country’s history, they rarely worked main events, and never were on top on the big shows at Budokan Hall. They usually worked in the middle, usually defending or challenging for the All-Asia tag team titles. The belts, which date back to 1955, are the single oldest still existing championship in that country. In holding the titles five times between 1989 and 1994, no team in the history of those belts held them as many times. The only other foreign tag team to ever hold major promotion titles five times were their contemporaries, Terry Gordy & Steve Williams. The only teams in Japanese history to have held more major tag team titles in Japan are two native teams, Giant Baba & Jumbo Tsuruta in the 70s and 80s, and Toshiaki Kawada & Akira Taue in the 90s.

In wrestling, Furnas & Kroffat, or Furnas & Phil Lafon, Kroffat’s real name, are remembered together. The two couldn’t have been more different. Most great American teams in Japan were long-time friends, like Gordy & Williams, Dick the Bruiser & The Crusher, Bruiser Brody & Stan Hansen, The Road Warriors, or brothers like The Funks or The Steiners.

But in this case, they were just two guys on a tour. Kroffat was a great worker, breaking in with Stampede Wrestling and that hard athletic style that transferred well to Japan. But he didn’t have the kind of size they wanted in their foreign headliners, so it made sense to put him in a mid-card tag team. It was a spot in the promotion really made famous years earlier by The British Bulldogs, Dynamite Kid & Davey Boy Smith, who were usually kept in the middle, working with the younger Japanese wrestlers doing highly athletic matches that often stole the show. It was only in the big year-end tag team tournaments that they would work with headliners. Other teams came along, like the Malenko Brothers, in a similar role. Promoter Giant Baba saw Furnas, a powerhouse who could do incredible athletic moves, and figured he would make a good partner for Kroffat.

“I didn’t even know who he was when Baba put us together,” said Lafon, who even this past week didn’t want to talk much about the person his career was also synonymous with. “We all have our different ways of grieving. All I can say is that I loved Doug very much and I will miss him.”

“They complimented each other perfectly,” said Martha Furnas, Doug’s second wife, a Vice President at Geigo Insurance. The two married in 1995 after they met in 1988 when both competed as powerlifters. “They each had something that the other didn’t have, which together made them both better.”

But even with their differences in lifestyle, the two became best friends. Once the team was established, Lafon left the business end to Furnas, who booked the two together between Japan tours, most notably a strong headline run for the UWA in Mexico, where they twice held the world tag team titles. The two started there as a masked team, although the name the Can-Am Express, the same name the team used in Japan, was a giveaway as to who they were. They worked with most of the country’s top teams of that era, particularly Silver King & El Texano, Los Cowboys. Furnas also put together the deal where they would come in as a tandem to WWF.

Furnas handled the business, and Lafon took care of everything that happened inside the ring. Outside the ring, they didn’t socialize that much. Lafon was like most of the wrestlers in Japan, enjoying the nightlife that being a genuine celebrity in Japan afforded you. Furnas was completely different.

Furnas was legendary among the wrestlers of that generation for what he didn’t do. He was as strict as anyone about what he ate. He never drank. Among the people really inside of Japanese wrestling, they would tell the stories about Furnas coming to Japan with his suitcase filled with cans of tuna.

“We’d go to Costco before every tour and pack the luggage with as many cans of tuna as would fit,” Martha Furnas laughed.

The reputation was that Furnas was smart with his money, because eating in Japan could be expensive. And while he was always thinking business, Martha Furnas said it was more about how strict he was about eating than the money.

“He thought he could never get the right type of food in Japan on the road,” she remembered. “It wasn’t so much the money. He’d eat rice, and then put yogurt on his tuna in the morning for breakfast if you can believe that. He was a Medallion traveler with Delta so the weight of his luggage wasn’t an issue.”

She noted for all the talk about how he was not going out at night and saving money, when he was in his hotel room, he was always calling home.

“We’d talk on the phone all night. We had thousand dollar monthly phone bills, so whatever he was saving by not going out, he was spending on the phone.”

But because of that reputation, those in Japan were shocked when the news broke.

“I hate to say it, but when you hear about guys like Mike (Hawk), Terry Gordy, Bam Bam Bigelow, Curt Hennig, you would accept the news right away,” said one Japanese insider from that period. “But for Doug, all the people around the business, even the ones who didn’t know him, everyone knew that he was a very straight serious athlete.”

That early 90s period is remembered in many different and conflicting ways with the benefit of hindsight. The promotion was as hot as nearly any promotion in history at its peak. Its centerpiece were the final shows of most of the tours, held at Budokan Hall. While old-timers sometimes like to talk about pro wrestling in their day and give the impression that every show was a sellout and every match was a shoot, from June 8, 1990, the night that Mitsuharu Misawa pinned Jumbo Tsuruta in what turned out to be a legendary match which came about 500 people shy of a sellout, until the streak ended in early March of 1996, every All Japan show held in the city of Tokyo sold out. The string of more than 200 consecutive sellouts in the same major city is believed to be unprecedented in the history of pro wrestling anywhere.

Furnas & Kroffat were the guys who helped pave the way for the superstars who ended up carrying the company during its glory period. They were the key opponents for people like Toshiaki Kawada, Mitsuharu Misawa, Jun Akiyama and Kenta Kobashi when they were on the rise. The program that put them on the map was in 1989 and 1990 with the Can-Am Express vs. The Foot Loose, Kawada & the late Samson Fuyuki. They also regularly put over Tiger Mask, with various partner, before he unmasked as Misawa, and worked with Kobashi all the time until Kobashi had risen to full-time main event status.

At times, Budokan Hall was such a hot ticket that when they would put tickets on sale for the next show, just among those in the building, they would almost all get in line to buy tickets, for themselves and their friends. The 16,000 seats would sellout to the tune of as much as $1 million from only those fans in the arena that night. The matches were physically hard. They were some of the greatest matches ever held, but the physical toll was terrible.

The promotion was filled with young deaths and destroyed bodies. Few from that era, like Stan Hansen, Johnny Ace (John Laurinaitis) and Dory Funk Jr. got out relatively unscathed, although likely all feel the repercussions of those matches.

Many passed away, some legends who were there all the time, others who passed through. They died of various reasons, some directly related to wrestling or drug use, and others due to unlucky genetics, from Giant Baba, Jumbo Tsuruta, Misawa, Gary Albright, Big Bubba Rogers, Terry Gordy, Steve Williams, Davey Boy Smith and Steve Doll. Many of the rest were left with crippling injuries and replaced body parts, like Lafon, Danny Spivey, Kenta Kobashi and Dynamite Kid. Many others had to battle severe pain killer addiction problems.

Furnas’ problems later in life could at best be only partially attributed to wrestling. His father battled heart issues in his 40s. Furnas suffered serious injuries in two very bad car accidents. He played a bruising style of football from third grade until his early 20s. Between football and pro wrestling, particularly the All Japan style, likely suffered countless concussions, and he had the mentality that he would likely never tell anyone about them and keep going. It wasn’t until much later in life that he understood the repercussions.

There were enough that it was very important to him that if something happened to him that he could donate his brain to the Sports Legacy Institute. It was heartbreaking that the brain wasn’t preserved well enough after death due to the time lag from when he died until when his housekeeper discovered him where it could happen. He also lifted ridiculously heavy weights, the toll of which had to take its toll on his joints, that couldn’t have been helped by all the football and wrestling.

Since retiring from wrestling in 2000, he had one hip replaced, one knee replaced, and both shoulders replaced. He made remarkable recoveries from all of them, so quickly that his doctors were amazed. He never complained, and only his closest friends were aware of any of this. To show the extent he internalized and tried to keep his health issues private, in 2005, when he decided that as a way to battle Parkinson’s Disease, he was going to become an avid bicycle rider, he went in for a check-up and stress test.

He failed the test, due to 80 percent blockage in one of his arteries. He told nobody, not even his wife. He scheduled a surgery when she was on a business trip to Washington, DC, so she wouldn’t worry, or perhaps even find out. She might not have except after his heart surgery that included an angioplasty and having a stent put in his heart, he wanted to go home and feed his dogs. When they wouldn’t release him due to risk of bleeding, the usually quiet and mild-mannered former superman of the iron world insisted on leaving. It was only then that his wife was contacted and found out about it.

But even after all those surgeries, and battling Parkinson’s Disease, he became an avid bike rider, often going 80 to 100 miles a day. Even until the end, when the Parkinson’s medication was taking such a toll on him that he would be throwing up for several days after treatment, once he’d recover, he’d get up in the morning and ride all day.

T200 · Post by **T200** » Sun Mar 02, 2014 3:54 pm

Furnas continued

Mike Furnas remembers one day around 2000 when he came to visit his brother in San Diego and instead of going to the gym in the morning, something they did religiously, he took him out to breakfast at a local restaurant. In the discussion, he said he was retiring from wrestling, and talked about opening up a group home for teenagers who had problems. He didn’t want to be the guy who stayed too far past his prime as his athletic skills were waning. He walked away, and never looked back. With the exception of some contact with a few friends like Jody Simon (Joe Malenko), who he shared a lot of non-wrestling interests with, he kept in contact with almost nobody from wrestling. But quietly, and from afar, he felt every tragedy.

“The last time I was at his house in Tucson, on the desk in his office was a piece of paper,” remembered Mike Furnas. “I went to look at it, and he told me not to because it would only get me sad. It was a list of his friends in wrestling that had already passed away.”

Martha Furnas remembered that he felt a closeness to all the wrestlers who passed away that he knew, and noted that he had saved as a keepsake Terry Gordy’s Delta luggage tags.

“Every time he heard of someone he knew passing it broke his heart,” said Martha Furnas. “You know about the mortality rate of wrestlers.”

Dwight Douglas Furnas was born December 11, 1959, growing up as the fourth of five children of Wayne and Mary Furnas on a farm in Commerce, OK. Mike was born 16 months later. In the early 60s, Commerce, population less than 2,500, was as famous as any small town in the United States because it was where America’s golden boy sports idol of that period, Mickey Mantle of the New York Yankees, grew up.

In fact, Wayne and Mary Furnas went to Commerce High when Mantle was the school’s star athlete. Mary knew him well, sometimes covering for him.

Mike’s oldest memories of he and his brother playing together on the farm include his father calling them in to watch the black and white television set and seeing Mantle at the plate. Although several of Doug’s friends couldn’t remember Doug, a man of few words, ever bring up Mantle’s name, Mike said when they were kids he was their inspiration.

“We’d see him and knew that if he came from Commerce and made it big, then there was no limit to what we could do,” he said.

Doug was always athletic and competitive, and while those who competed alongside him marveled at his mental strength and discipline, Mike noted there was a lot of help in the genetics. Their grandfather, legend had it, was the toughest guy in the area. As far as the people in the area were concerned, they would tell you he was the toughest guy in the country.

Mike remembers racing bicycles with him at a young age, and if by some chance he could keep up or was about to go ahead, Doug wasn’t adverse to reaching out and shoving his bicycle over. He hated losing that much. But when he got older, that changed and he developed a sense of fair play.

On the farm, his father set up goal posts and Doug as a young kid started kicking soccer style field goals, and by high school could consistently nail them 40 and 50 yards. He was actually a better kicker than he was a running back. As a senior he was considered the best high school place kicker in the state. He was also a champion bullrider. But it was the work on the farm that set the foundation for his success in sports. Mike noted that even when they did three-a-day practices in football, it was nothing that tough for them because of how hard they were used to working at home.

He was the team’s star running back and kicker as a sophomore in high school. After the season, at 16 when he and Jodi Thompson, his girlfriend at the time, and later his first wife, were in the bed of a truck with his parents driving back from a rodeo event Tulsa, when they got a serious accident that saw him break both of his legs, and his back, rupture his spleen as well as hit his head hard.

He was in the hospital and throwing up red. Mike remembered that he immediately recognized it was blood being thrown up, since the two of them spilled each others’ blood regularly while roughhousing. They found out he had ruptured his spleen as well, and had they not realized it, he could have died, but they removed the spleen. He was told that he may never walk again, but it was clear very quickly that wasn’t going to be the case. He was also told in no uncertain terms that he would never play football again.

“He was a tough kid,” said one of his best friends, Ed Coan, considered by many to be the greatest powerlifter who ever lived. “How are you going to tell a kid that you can’t run or jump again? No matter what, he’s going to try and do it. A lot of doctors don’t know what the fuck they are talking about. You don’t know what the human spirit will let you do, and usually athletes are the ones ahead of the game anyway.”

Even though it was 1976, Mike vividly recalls his brother coming back, first walking with metal braces. He got rid of them and the crutches quickly. One leg healed faster than the other. He dumped the crutch and at home, and even at school, when the bad leg wouldn’t let him walk, instead of using a crutch, he would hop on his good leg. He missed a year of school. Not only did he come back to play football, but he also competed in the long jump and high jump in track. It was that jumping ability that was really his in-ring trademark as a pro wrestler, most notably his high dropkick where he would nail the opponent high in the head, make contact and flip over in the air and land on his feet. It was among the best dropkicks, and perhaps the most amazing, because of the spin and landing, in pro wrestling history.

By the time he was a senior, he was an All-state football player, who led Oklahoma to a 14-6 win over Texas in the annual Oil Bowl game in Wichita Falls, TX, where the high school all-stars of each state played. Furnas kicked two field goals in the game. High school football is huge in that part of the country and that got him media attention throughout both states.

It was at that point he had to make a few decisions about sports. In what would turn out to be the pattern of his life, he made the decisions and never looked back. The first was that he had to make a choice after high school, of either bullriding, where he was considered good enough to have a professional career, or football. He chose football and was able to make a complete break from bullriding. But in football, he caught more college attention as a place kicker than as a running back. He insisted on being a complete player, and didn’t think just being a place kicker constituted that. So he stayed in the area, going to Northeastern Oklahoma A&M, a junior college in nearby Miami, OK, as a running back. Mike was an All-American guard in 1980, when the brothers led the team to an undefeated national championship season. They were recruited together by Doug Matthews, now a Knoxville media personality but then an assistant coach at the University of Tennessee.

Because of his powerlifting exploits, when he was in college, he was known as the strongest man in college football. During football season, he would train to maintain, and once the season was over, he would into his heavy lifting mode.

Mike remembered once when his brothers’ pro wrestling jumping ability was used on the gridiron, in a short yardage situation. Instead of his usual run right at the defensive player style and punish them when they tried to tackle him, he took off and leap frogged over a pile of humanity, with absolutely no concept of how he would land, other than he was going to pick up the yardage.

During the spring of his senior year, on March 26, 1983, in the collegiate national championship meet held in College Station, TX, he set collegiate records in the 242-pound weight class in the squat (881.75 pounds), the deadlift (768 pounds) and overall total (2,074.75 pounds). He also led the University of Tennessee team to the national team championship. His three records haven’t been broken in the ensuing 29 years.

“He was way ahead of his time,” said Coan. “He was extremely regimented in his training and set up his own routines.”

Powerlifting was his next obsession, and he mentally left football behind after a hamstring injury ended his stint with the Denver Broncos in 1983 without him playing in a regular season game. After that, he geared himself completely to powerlifting, building his gigantic thighs with his heavy squats. He actually did try football one last time in 1984, going to camp with the Memphis Showboats of the USFL with his brother, a short-lived league that tried to compete with the NFL.

But by that time his legs were so huge that when he would sprint in football, the hamstring injury would come back. He really had mentally left football behind after being cut by the Broncos, and may have been doing it as much to have one final fling being on the same team with his brother. But his brother, who went on to play pro football in Europe for a number of years, said he was grateful that the two had one last hurrah as a tag team in pro wrestling in Smoky Mountain Wrestling and some other places between Doug’s Japan tours.

He learned from the injuries, and in his pro wrestling days, would concentrate on stretching, to the point he could do the splits, and he rarely had those injuries come back.

“He had so much muscle that he had an imbalance and when he’d run all out, the hamstring would pull,” remembered Mike, about that 1984 period when they were in the Showboats camp together.
“He stretched an hour a day,” said Martha Furnas. He made sure he was limber. It was the only way to prevent injuries.”

Coan noted that Furnas was unique among powerlifters in many ways, besides the obvious all-around athletic ability. He was as mentally driven and disciplined as anyone. During his competitive career, he coached himself, which was almost unheard of for the world-class powerlifter.

“His technical aspect was flawless,” said Coan. “And I’ve never seen anybody with that athletic ability at that bodyweight.”

A little known fact about his career is that he was allergic to chalk. Layers of his skin would come off in training if he used it. That hurt him in particular in his dead lift. Because of that he couldn’t train it like his bench press and squat. Within the powerlifting world there were stories about how the guy was so strong he didn’t even train his deadlift much, but it was more that he couldn’t than he didn’t as part of a unique training regiment.

He was known for his muscular 35-inch thighs, a product of his world record level squatting ability. Coan noted that Furnas’ leg workout consisted of nothing but squats, going extremely heavy each workout in sets where he would eventually escalate weight and do five, three and one rep, and then finish with three sets of five.

“His philosophy was that if you could do more leg exercises after your squat workout, that just meant you didn’t train your squats hard enough,” said Coan.

Coan remembered in 1985, the two competed in a national championship meet in Honolulu. Furnas had a shoulder injury and hadn’t trained in six weeks. He showed up, and set world records in both the squat (942 pounds at that time) and overall total.

He tried one World’s Strongest Man contest in Canada in 1986, but didn’t like it, recognizing that lifting heavy unbalanced things had a significant injury risk potential, and never did another one.
Although to this day Furnas is considered an all-time legend as a powerlifter, he only competed at the national level for five years, from 1983 to 1987. Professional wrestling and the opportunity to make money took him away from the sport at 27, with 29 world records to his credit.
Coan noted that he had the capability of doing considerably more.

“I was there when he squatted 986 pounds (his personal competition best although he did more than 1,000 pounds in the gym) ,” Coan said. “He did it like it was nothing. He never didn’t complete a lift. If he missed a lift, it was always due to a technical issue, not being unable to do it. He usually did his lifts in perfect form and looked like he could go heavier. I’d ask him why he didn’t go heavier and he’d say, `I didn’t have to that day.’”

Furnas instead would in each meet, try to gradually break the world record he had set the meet before. He was winding down his powerlifting career and already pro wrestling regularly in the Eastern Tennessee and Alabama territory when he entered the national championships held on June 28, 1987, in Bloomington, MN. He did a 980 pound squat, a 600 pound bench press and an 823 deadlift for a 2,403 pound total, setting two more world records, for the squat and the total.

Coan estimated that had he continued in the sport, he’d have worked his way up to a 1,050 pound squat, a 640 pound bench press and an 840 pound deadlift, only because of his allergy to chalk limited his training and progression. A total of 2,530 in that era would have set a world record for any weight class. Under the same set of circumstances, in drug tested meets (which is not to say drug-free, because Furnas was open about the steroid use in drug tested powerlifting meets, joking in 1992 when Vince McMahon hired Dr. Mauro DiPasquale to head their drug testing program that it was the same DiPasquale that he and the top powerlifters would go to for advice on beating the sport’s drug testing) with the same type of equipment, and rules, that total would have been, to this day, either the first or second highest of all-time. For a comparison, in the 275-pound weight class in 2011, the winning national championship total was 2,039 pounds, less than he was doing after ten weeks of training after football season ended while a senior in college.

There are modern suits that can add 200 or more pounds to your bench and squats that are part of some anything goes non-drug tested meets, where some modern numbers are significantly higher.
Coan noted that Furnas maintained a bodybuilder’s upper body, along with legs that proportionately looked like they were twice the size they should have been, rare for a world champion powerlifter.
“But for a guy who could bench press 600 pounds, he had the smallest arms.”

Mike Furnas noted that the mentality that made him not want to be just a place kicker in football extended when he moved into pro wrestling.

“He didn’t want to be that guy who would flip his long hair and kiss his biceps,” Mike Furnas noted. “He wanted to be the guy who, with nothing but his athletic ability, would do things in the ring that you couldn’t believe.”

Furnas, because he was a local legend in Knoxville from football and powerlifting, was a genuine drawing card in the city. But he really didn’t have the attributes that would have made him a major star outside of Japan. He was far too quiet on interviews and too soft-spoken. Plus, he wanted to let his athletic ability do his talking, which is not the right mentality for an American pro wrestler.
Still, he was well liked and after he made his name in Japan, was brought into WCW between tours in 1990, on the recommendation of Kevin Sullivan, who helped start his career. Jim Herd learned of his background and brought up if he could set a world record in the squat and do 1,000 pounds. Furnas, who had dropped weight for agility in wrestling, said he thought he could do it but would have to do a few months of training to get there, which would be difficult with the Japan tours. Herd may have been thinking he wanted to do it right away as a way to get him over, but due to timing issues, nothing ever materialized on it past the conversation.

Eventually had to make the decision between WCW and All Japan, and chose the latter. He remained in contact with Sullivan through the Japan years, but WCW would never offer him the kind of money he was making in Japan, let alone the kind of money he made with 24 weeks off to live in San Diego.

A story that epitomizes Japanese wrestling came in the 1994 Champion Carnival tournament. Furnas had a singles match with Misawa in a main event about a week into the tour. During the match, Furnas pulled out his Frankensteiner from a standing position out of nowhere, and in taking the bump, Misawa landed right on his head. They quickly went to the finish, with Misawa winning, of course, as Furnas was never booked in a way where he was going to beat Misawa in a single or a tag match the way booking was done in that era.

It was then announced the next day that Misawa suffered a severe neck injury and would be out the rest of the tour. Furnas was depressed. It was one thing to joke about his dropkick knocking out a tooth of one of his best friends, Joe Malenko, but giving a guy a serious neck injury was something different. Plus, when he got to the building that night, he got a stern lecture from Stan Hansen, about being sloppy, about how Misawa is the company’s biggest star, biggest draw and by injuring him he hurt the company that enabled him to make such a good living. He felt as low as he ever had in his career, and then one of the young Japanese wrestlers came to the American locker room and said that Misawa wanted to see him.

Now he was really scared. He came to the dressing room where Misawa was sitting in a chair, his neck in a brace, his usual stoic face but seemingly immobile and in great pain. It was like he was a bad dog who had gone to the bathroom in the house and now he was getting his nose rubbed in it. Misawa made a motion with his hands, and all the Japanese wrestlers left the room, so there was only the two of them. Misawa got up from his chair, smiled, took off his neck brace, walked around like nothing was wrong, and told Furnas it was all a work.

Giant Baba had Rubik’s Cube booked that year’s Champion Carnival tournament for Kawada to win it for the first time, beating Steve Williams in the finals. Because Misawa was the top guy and shouldn’t lose, except maybe once to a key guy and they probably didn’t want to pull the trigger on Kawada or Williams being the guy yet, the only way they could make it work was for Misawa to be injured early in the tour and forfeit all the rest of his matches.

Misawa then put the neck brace back on, sat back in his chair, told Furnas he could leave, and to let everyone else know it was okay to go in the room.

The weight of the world was lifted off his shoulders. He went back into the American locker room, where Hansen continued to brow beat him, telling him how he hoped he’d learned his lesson. This time, Furnas protested back, telling Hansen what happened when he went over there, that Misawa is fine and it’s all a work. Hansen shot back, “Not only did you hurt the top star, but now you’re making up some story and lying about it.”

By 1996, that Camelot period of All Japan Pro Wrestling was showing creaks. Budokan Hall shows still did well, but it wasn’t always sold out, let alone sold out by the end of the previous card. The spot shows were down from the peak of a few years earlier. At the end of 1994, Furnas & Kroffat vacated the All-Asia tag team championship, with the idea that they had moved past that title and would be contenders for the world tag team titles and work as main eventers. Baba told them that for their years of being the great team players, they deserved and were going to get a higher spot.
And it never happened, and resulted in the bitterness that saw them leave the promotion and sign with WWF.

Furnas would speak in short sentences with me that would say a lot. As far as his boss, Furnas would always say, “Baba’s word is good.” It’s why for years, he never considered leaving despite having built up a big name and having interest from other groups. He would say it was the best place in wrestling to work and the best person to work for. In 1996, when he started talking seriously to Jim Ross at WWF, as well as to WCW, he talked of the promises made more than a year earlier, and not kept, and said, “For the first time, Baba’s word wasn’t good.”

The problem was that for six years, Furnas & Kroffat had worked the middle, with their roles being to put over the rising stars, and have hot matches with them. They’d work some back-and-forth programs with the smaller Americans who could go. As much as they deserved for their efforts a shot at the top, from a business standpoint, it just wasn’t going to work. They had been there too long, and had lost to far too many people. The perception of the fans was too strong as to what level they were. Fans knew they were a great team, but had taken them for granted and weren’t going to now buy them in programs with the main eventers. In hindsight, one Japanese insider blamed the fans, saying it was a perception that couldn’t at that stage be broken. It was a lesson, and Furnas thought it was just time to go.

Their style and mentality was more suited for Japan. Once, while doing commentary during a Furnas & Lafon vs. Owen Hart & Davey Boy Smith match, Vince McMahon talked about how Smith, who was a powerful guy but not nearly in Furnas’ league, was the strongest guy in the match. But how would he know better? It wasn’t like Furnas would be the guy who would tell anyone about his world records. In WWF, he’d quietly listen as guys bragged about how much they could bench, never saying a word.

He was frustrated in WWF, but was a model employee and never complained about it, and more just joked about it. The only time I can ever call him being mad, and he was furious, was the night of the 1997 Survivor Series.

Furnas was probably the second or third wrestler who called me that night from Montreal, and possibly the maddest, but for different reasons than everyone else.

He called me and said, “You don’t understand what happened,” and I said, “I saw it, I’ve heard it, I know what happened. They double-crossed Bret on the finish” And he shot back, “No you don’t, you don’t understand what happened. You don’t have a clue.”

He was mad about Bret Hart being double-crossed, the utter chaos and distrust that was going through the locker room. But he was more focused on Blade Hart, Bret’s young son, who he saw crying in the corner in tears. His concern wasn’t the wrestlers, and it certainly wasn’t the fans. It was about a father humiliated for, in his mind, no good reason, right in front of his son, and a conspiracy of a number of people in the company to do it who never even thought for a second about anything but themselves, and that they did it with no qualms. He explained that scene, in vivid detail, such that to this day I have it etched in my mind, even though I never actually saw it.
Lafon was having knee problems by the time they hit WWF, although they had good matches in both WWF and ECW early on. Furnas wasn’t the same in the ring after the 1997 auto accident where he broke his back and his shoulder. When the decision was made to drop the Hart Foundation or Team Canada, where Furnas & Lafon were to get in a group led by Owen Hart after Bret Hart left the promotion, WWF had no real ideas for them. Paul Heyman wanted to use them because his audience was aware of their success in Japan, and WWF sent them to ECW as part of their working relationship. But WWF eventually released them. Lafon went back to Canada. Furnas worked a short period as a singles wrestler in ECW but knew it wasn’t clicking and that it was time to move on.

“We brought Doug and his tag team partner, Phil Lafon, to WWE in 1996 and they never disappointed with their work ethic or professionalism,” wrote Jim Ross, who put the deal together, shortly after his death.

“Doug was a soft spoken, highly intelligent man who was battling Parkinson’s Disease. I’ve been around many great athletes in my career, but I can’t recall seeing anyone with more of a combination or strength, speed and agility as Doug Furnas. His powerlifting numbers were off the charts. His dropkicks were pieces of art. And his speed was amazing for someone as thickly muscled, especially his freakish quadriceps.”

Mike recalled that when Doug would come back to Commerce and visit the family, even with all his success, he did just as he always did as a kid, and would get up early and work all day on the farm. Another time when he returned home, he caught up with an old friend who had cancer and chemotherapy had caused her to lose all her hair. To show support, Furnas shaved his head on the spot.

After wrestling, Furnas at first went into social work, at a center for abused girls and boys in San Diego. He had no care about salary, just wanted to get started in the job as soon as possible, feeling this was the next stage of his life.

He also invested in the bull breeding business.

Lance Hickman, who hired him for the job, felt limited in what they could do and Furnas asked him what it would take for them to start their own group home. Hickman told him it would take $100,000 cash to get started. Furnas wrote the check and they started a group home out of his house in La Jolla, CA, an expensive San Diego suburb, where he and his wife lived. Martha ended up being transferred to Tucson, so Doug would work with the children during the week, and have employees take care of them and the house on weekends when he’d go to Arizona. But he had to give up on the business because he was told he had to remove all stress in dealing with the Parkinson’s disease when he was diagnosed in 2004. He lived full-time in Tucson, which also had some of the best doctors when it came to treatment of the disease.

The funeral of the second most famous person to ever come out of Commerce, OK, was held on 3/10 at the Commerce High School Gym, not far from the statue of Mickey Mantle.

“It couldn’t have gone any better,” said Martha Furnas. “He had friends that came from all different parts of his life. Jody Simon (former wrestler Joe Malenko),a lot of friends from Knoxville, coach (Phil) Fulmer (his position coach who later became a well known head coach and is now a national television announcer), coach Doug Mathews. It was great, wonderful.”

“Everyone sat around and told old stories until it was really late. Everyone in town had the same stories. All they talked about was how intensely loyal he was to his friends and his work ethic.”

*****************************************************************
DOUG FURNAS CAREER TITLE HISTORY
ALL JAPAN ALL-ASIA TAG TEAM: w/Dan Kroffat def. Toshiaki Kawada & Samson Fuyuki June 5, 1989 Tokyo; lost to Toshiaki Kawada & Samson Fuyuki October 20, 1989 Nagoya; w/Dan Kroffat def. Toshiaki Kawada & Samson Fuyuki March 2, 1990 Nagoya; lost to Tiger Mask (Mitsuharu Misawa) & Kenta Kobashi April 9, 1990 Okayama; def. Dynamite Kid & Johnny Smith April 20, 1991 Tokyo; lost to Kenta Kobashi & Johnny Ace (John Laurinaitis) July 8, 1991 Osaka; def. Billy Black & Joel Deaton July 26, 1991 Matsudo; lost to Kenta Kobashi & Tsuyoshi Kikuchi May 25, 1992 Sendai; def. The Eagle (Jackie Fulton/George Hines) & The Patriot (Del Wilkes) September 9, 1993 Saitama; Vacated titles December 5, 1994 to concentrate on winning World tag team titles
UWA WORLD TAG TEAM: w/Dan Kroffat def. Silver King & El Texano June 28, 1992 Naucalpan; lost to Los Villanos IV & V November 8, 1992 Naucalpan; w/Dan Kroffat def. Los Villanos IV & V March 2, 1993 Naucalpan; lost to Los Villanos IV & V April 1993
ECW WORLD TAG TEAM: w/Phil Lafon (Dan Kroffat) def. Tracy Smothers & Little Guido December 5, 1997 Waltham, MA; lost to Lance Storm & Chris Candido December 6, 1997 Philadelphia
NWA USA HEAVYWEIGHT: def. Bill Dundee in tournament final July 4, 1988 Knoxville; lost to Mongolian Stomper July 21, 1988 Knoxville
NWA TENNESSEE HEAVYWEIGHT: def. Tony Anthony in tournament final July 17, 1987 Knoxville; lost to Buddy Landel March 19, 1988 Knoxville

T200 · Post by **T200** » Mon Mar 03, 2014 2:36 am

ON THIS DAY IN PRO WRESTLING HISTORY (thanks to Brian Hoops)
1936 - Dick Shikat beat Danno O'Mahoney to win the world title. This is one of the most important matches in pro wrestling history. O'Mahoney was a gigantic draw, biggest of all-time at that time. Shikat beat him by double-crossing him and making him submit, stealing the title. O'Mahoney never came close to recovery and was all but gone from the U.S. within a few years. Court documents on how this went down hurt the popularity of wrestling greatly. It also, in a sense, opened the door for 21-year-old Lou Thesz to become world champion in 1937.

T200 · Post by **T200** » Mon Mar 03, 2014 3:13 pm

The ultimate sacrifice - An honor roll of wrestlers who gave their lives for Uncle Sam: slam.canoe.ca/Slam/Wrestling/2005/11/10/1301210.html

If that link doesn't work and anyone cares let me know and I will try harder to fix it. Seems like it's fucking up to me when I try to post it.

Turdacious · Post by **Turdacious** » Mon Mar 03, 2014 4:39 pm

http://www.slam.canoe.ca/Slam/Wrestling ... 01210.html

T is right, very cool read.

Kazuya Mishima · Post by **Kazuya Mishima** » Mon Mar 03, 2014 6:26 pm

Just heard that Billy Robinson passed in his sleep last night.

Fat Cat · Post by **Fat Cat** » Mon Mar 03, 2014 8:46 pm

Is there an Observer obit for Billy?

T200 · Post by **T200** » Tue Mar 04, 2014 12:40 am

Not yet. New Observer generally comes out Wednesdays. He will for sure have a massive one for Billy Robinson. Pretty sure Meltzer is friends with him.

RIP Billy

versus Karl Gotch
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1hokYoUuZ38[/youtube]

versus Verne
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lmovwWxMX0Y[/youtube]
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=93D1pVPXUZo[/youtube]

versus Abdullah
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=APurgUotlxY[/youtube]
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MC392EnLWcA[/youtube]
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CFEheNz1uK8[/youtube]

T200 · Post by **T200** » Wed Mar 05, 2014 3:42 am

Fat Cat wrote:Is there an Observer obit for Billy?

-- Pray for Dave as he attempts to get a Billy Robinson bio completed with over 100,000 pages of notes.

T200 · Post by **T200** » Thu Mar 06, 2014 2:08 pm

Billy obit

A few years back, when Josh Barnett and I were in a discussion about Billy Robinson, he made a remark about something, which, ironically was something Robinson himself had bemoaned to friends years earlier.

Robinson, getting older and physically broken down from decades of working, shooting, training and drinking, recognized he was not going to last forever, and that he had a lifetime of knowledge about aspects of body mechanisms and a different form of submissions than were being taught in the modern world. But it appeared that his art, catch-as-catch-can wrestling, Wigan style, for lack of a better term, would to a great degree, go to the grave with him since its leading practitioners had almost all passed away.

The conversation reminded me also of one I had with Jim Barnett before he passed away when Barnett was wanting, in his last act on Earth, to write a book about his experiences in pro wrestling. He noted, with the death of people like Sam Muchnick, Paul Boesch, Fred Kohler, Al Haft, Frank Tunney, Vince McMahon Sr., Toots Mondt, Jack Pfefer and their ilk, that so much of what happened between closed doors with the movers and shakers that had never gotten out, and which shaped the history of an era of pro wrestling, would be gone forever.

Robinson was hopeful of finding the full-time protege who he could teach, like Billy Riley and the shooters at Wigan had taught him, and win at the top level, to popularize his art. He was worried that all the knowledge he had picked up, when he was gone, would go with him.

"That holds true for all masters of whatever their disciplines," noted Barnett, who trained under Robinson a few days a week in Japan at the UWF Snake Pit starting in 2003, after he had already captured the UFC heavyweight championship in 2002. "I can say I didn't learn everything that Billy could teach. I don't think I'm capable of holding all that knowledge, but I think I've held a lot. What Billy knew personally was his own style. But I felt he was teaching me ideas and concepts that had been forgotten, some about being a better athlete or a stronger athlete. But a lot of Billy's stuff didn't rely on athletic ability. A lot of it was pure mechanics. He'd get on people really tough when teaching because he'd tell you when you were doing something wrong. When you did it as intended, you could feel the mechanical advantage. It felt effortless. He was a great teacher who could help you refine and hone everything that you do."

Granted, since Robinson made the statement himself to a mutual friend in the 90s, he did more teaching of his art and philosophy of catch wrestling, working with Jake Shannon of Scientific Wrestling to do seminars all over the U.S. The seminars closed the same gap Robinson himself did between the worlds of show pro wrestling, where he was one of the greatest in ring performers of all-time, and very real submission wrestling. Even though the seminars were for catch wrestling, real submission wrestling, they would be attended by both independent pro wrestlers and aspiring MMA fighters.

Robinson is said to have passed away in his sleep on 3/3 at his home near Little Rock, AR. Robinson had lived all over the world during his 75 years, but ended up in Little Rock at the end, because that was where his son Spencer lived. Besides his seminars, he taught catch wrestling at a gym run by former UFC fighter Roli Delgado.

Shannon, who co-wrote Robinson's autobiography, "Physical Chess: My Life in Catch-as-Catch-Can Wrestling," noted on Facebook:

"I am unbelievably sad to report that my very good friend, Billy Robinson, has passed away. I hadn't heard from him in days, so I contacted his apartment complex to check in on him. When I called back for a progress report, the apartment manager put the police on the phone. It seems he passed away peacefully in his sleep. He was a lion of a man, bigger than life in so many ways. My wife and I named our youngest son, Liam, in his honor. You will be sorely missed, my friend. Thank you so much for living the life you did."

The actual date of the death may not be accurate, as that was when he was found. It is believed that, like Shannon, nobody had heard from Robinson for a few days, so at press time it wasn't certain exactly when he passed away. Robinson was scheduled to come to Japan on 3/25, for the UWF Snake Pit Gym's 15th anniversary party. Robinson was the original head trainer at the gym, run by former pro wrestler Shigeo "Yuko" Miyato.

The plan was for Robinson and Antonio Inoki to announce the formation of a new promotion, the CACCA (Catch-As-Catch-Can Association). They would be the public faces of the promotion, an alliance dating back to their one-and-only singles match, a 60 minute draw in 1975 that was generally viewed as one of the greatest matches of that era. This would have put Robinson back in the spotlight, since Inoki has his own promotion as well as being in the Senate. The wrestlers would come from Miyato's gym, several wrestlers trained by Kazushi Sakuraba and wrestlers trained by Kiyoshi Tamura at his U-File Camp. The idea was to be like a modernized version of the 80s and 90s UWF style pro wrestling. The matches were to be worked, and with relying on all new talent, it would have been at best just another of the dozens of pro wrestling groups in the country that are indie level that almost nobody is even aware of. With Robinson having passed away, since he was to be a key part, there is no word on the future of this plan.

It was in Japan where Robinson's death got the most publicity, as writers in many of the country's biggest newspapers were working on major features on him after the news broke.

Robinson was viewed somewhat like Karl Gotch in Japan, as this larger than life master of pro wrestling, similar to a legendary older martial arts master. Even though pro wrestling is readily acknowledged in Japan as not real, in the culture, people like Robinson, Gotch, Lou Thesz and Inoki were always viewed as real, equivalent to the greatest athletes of the 50s, 60s and 70s in the culture.

When Gotch and Thesz passed away, while everyone from their generation, in or out of wrestling, knew their names, Robinson was different. It was because so many more people in Japan had actually met him, since he lived in Tokyo for years while working at the UWF Snake Pit Gym.

"He was more of an urban legend," said Japanese historian and reporter Fumi Saito. "If you go to the Koenji area of Tokyo, you might run into Bill Robinson. He used to walk around the Koenji train station every day. He used to sit at Mr. Donuts coffee shop, reading newspapers in the afternoon. He used to come to these really neighborhoody bars at night and talk to people all night long. He wasn't exactly super friendly, but more of a cute grumpy old man type, but the people liked him that way."

Robinson was the first true foreign superstar babyface in Japan, before The Funk Brothers or The Destroyer.

Robinson debuted in Japan in April, 1968 for the International Wrestling Enterprise promotion headed by Isao Yoshihara, which had a one-hour network TV show on TBS (Tokyo Broadcasting Systems) on Wednesday night at 7 p.m., which did big ratings.

At the time, the big promotion was Japan Pro Wrestling, better known by fans as the Japanese Wrestling Alliance, which booked all the big name Americans at the time. Yoshihara, whose promotion was just getting started, turned to Europe, and built the company around Robinson as the polite, well-dressed gentleman from England, in the role of a younger version of Lou Thesz. Robinson usually teamed with the Japanese wrestlers against the evil foreigners.

At the end of the year, the promotion ran a tournament to crown its first IWA world champion. Robinson won, with big wins coming over George Gordienko (whose shooter reputation as the toughest pro wrestler of the 50s led to him being a worldwide star. Political issues, Gordienko being accused at one time of being a communist in the McCarthy era kept him out of the United States, even though Lou Thesz actually wanted to drop the NWA world title to him in 1957), Toyonobori (who was the top star in Japan for the short period after the death of Rikidozan and the rise of Giant Baba) and Thunder Sugiyama (who represented Japan in the 1964 Olympics, held in Tokyo, as a Greco-Roman heavyweight and everyone in the country watched the Olympics that year so Sugiyama and Masa Saito, the freestyle heavyweights, came into pro wrestling with great name recognition). Robinson lived in Japan for more than one year, appearing on television as the top star and world champion weekly until losing the title to Sugiyama via count out on May 19, 1970, when he decided to move to Hawaii, which preceded his AWA debut in 1971.

It was during that world title tournament that the most-talked about Robinson fight took place, one of the most savage brawls among superstar pro wrestlers of the last 50 years.

Peter Anderson, the grandfather of Dwayne Johnson, was a Samoan born pro wrestler who gained his first major fame, like Robinson, wrestling in the United Kingdom, under the name Peter Maivia. Promoters in the U.K. felt Peter Anderson hardly sounded like a Samoan name, and the name likely came from the most famous Samoan pro wrestling star that preceded him, Neff Maiava.

The incident took place in Hokkaido, likely on November 5, 1968. Any wrestler who was around in the 70s heard the legendary story. Although whatever actually happened was clearly not the story that became legendary. The story was always that Maivia, in the fight, ripped out Robinson's eye.

In reality, Robinson lost his eye years earlier, when he was 11, when a neighborhood kid in Manchester threw a tin Coca Cola plate like a boomerang and it hit Robinson in the eye, and he needed an operation. Ironically, it was that accident that led to Robinson becoming a wrestling star, since he grew up in a boxing family and from childhood was always planning to be a boxer. Due to the accident, he couldn't get licensed to box, so switched to wrestling.

It was an out of control street fight and Robinson did go to the hospital. But neither he nor Maivia missed any matches on the tour.

Ata Johnson, Peter's daughter, noted to us years ago that her father would never speak of the subject, but she would hear other wrestlers talk about the legendary brawl, like Ray Stevens and Pepper Gomez, and then they'd go quiet when they saw she was there. Once, she spoke to George Gordienko on the phone, who was there when it happened.

He started telling her the story that Robinson was making fun of Maivia for eating chicken with his fingers and made a joke about it being disgusting and like a savage, and he should learn to use a fork. George said that Peter threw Robinson through a restaurant window, glass was everywhere, and blood was everywhere. At that point in the story, her father came into the room, recognized they were talking about the story he never would talk to his daughter about, grabbed the phone from her and was mad at Gordienko and his daughter.

In his 1990 book, "Everybody Down Here Hates Me," Pat Barrett claimed Robinson would rib Maivia, who would laugh it off. The two were in a hotel restaurant, drinking together, as friends, when Maivia brought up to Robinson he had made a comment earlier that night that Samoans were slow and stupid. Robinson then wouldn't apologize for the comment. He said Maivia punched Robinson through a glass panel. But it didn't end there. Robinson, covered in blood, came back, underhooked Maivia's arms, and set out to suplex him on his head. In his version Maivia bit Robinson in the cheek, clamped down hard and wouldn't let go. Robinson let go of Maivia. Three other wrestlers who were there, Gordienko would have been one of them, broke it up. Barrett also wrote that Robinson went to the hospital and lost his eye, a part of the story that every wrestler in the business and many fans of that generation had heard, but wasn't true.

The story resurfaced on a national basis in 2010, when Dwayne Johnson, promoting the movie "Faster," told the story about his grandfather being a legendary street fighter, which he was for a number of stories regardless of what happened that night in Japan. He brought up the incident with Robinson, with how most of those in wrestling in the 70s heard it.

Robinson wrote a letter about it, saying, he had not talked about he subject since 1969 (not true as he was asked about it many times in Japan), and said, "Peter Maivia was a great guy. I knew him in England, and got him and George Gordienko booked in Japan for that tour. Peter was a little wild when he had a few drinks. We were in the south of Japan (actually it was in Hokkaido, the northern island of Japan) and in an area where not too many people spoke English. Peter got impatient and started to act up, which was making things worse, and nobody was getting served at the bar. I told him to grow up and shut up so that we could all get served, which he did. But Peter being Peter, it played on his mind. On the way back to the hotel, Peter, for some reason, wanted to fight me, and started throwing punches. I grabbed him and held him so he couldn't move. He then tried to bite me in the neck, so I pulled my jaw down so he couldn't do any real damage, but he bit through my cheek. When I saw the blood, I got angry and knocked him out...he was unconscious for 25 minutes. I had to go to the hospital and get a shot for the bacteria. The next day, I found out that George had instigated the whole episode, so I went into both their rooms, locked the door, and challenged them. Neither wanted anything after that. And a couple of days later, we were good friends again. As for the eye story, I had an operation on my right eye when I was 11 years old. Peter did not have the ability as a street fighter to get close to my eyes and the reason I got bitten was because I didn't want to hurt him. But as you know over the years, stories get exaggerated. Reputations are usually made by people who have never been on the mat, or in a street fight. Like most pro wrestlers/workers they start to believe they know how to wrestle, and are really tough. But they never seem to have fought or beaten anyone."

Gordienko, who passed away in 2002, did an interview in 1994 with Koji Miyamoto, and said: "I was there. Me and Gil Voiney. Peter started the fight. Billy was trying to stop him, but Billy likes to fight, you know. So it ended up a fight. Billy tried to twist Peter's arms and Peter was just defensive, so he bit Billy's cheek and it was bleeding. Then me and Gil tried to pull them apart right away."

Robinson was born September 18, 1938 (it has been reported in most places as 1939, but we've been told by close friends that was incorrect) in Manchester, England.

He came from a fighting family. His great-grandfather, Harry Robinson, was a British bare knuckle boxing champion. His uncle, Alf Robinson, was both a pro boxer and a pro wrestler, although stories that he once fought one-time world heavyweight boxing champion Max Baer don't seem to be the case because no such bout is listed on Baer's record. However, Alf Robinson was a European heavyweight pro wrestling champion, and as a boxer, won professional tournaments and was described during his time as one of Britain's best heavyweights. His father, Harry Robinson, was a light heavyweight boxer.

He moved to Wigan at 15, largely to train at Billy Riley's snake pit. He got roughed up as a youth there, but soon became the star amateur at the gym, and was sent to represent the gym in wrestling and other tournaments. He was British national light heavyweight amateur champion at 18, in 1957, winning a tournament at Royal Albert Hall in London. The next year he was the European open light heavyweight champion, and then turned to pro wrestling.

The earliest recorded pro match for Robinson was June 7, 1958, in Stoke-on-Tent, Staffordshire, where, under the name Bill Kenton, he beat Alec Bray. In 1961, as a pro wrestler, he won the Royal Albert Hall heavyweight trophy in a tournament, and was lauded as a rising star. Before long, he was considered the best heavyweight in England. He rarely lost, but was never pushed as a superstar as the biggest television stars of that era were the lighter weights, wrestlers like Mick McManus and Jackie "Mr. TV" Pallo. On June 12 1965, in Manchester, he defeated fellow Wigan submission artist Billy Joyce, to win the European heavyweight title. In 1967, he defeated Joyce for the British Empire heavyweight, before he left England for good in 1968, when he left for Japan. Since he never lost the title, at various times in his career in North America, he was billed as the British Empire heavyweight champion.

There was a story that Gotch gave Robinson a bad beating in a gym match at Wigan that pro wrestlers and those in Japan talked about because of how the two men became legendary in that country. Robinson's version was that Gotch did stretch him, but it was in 1954, when Robinson was just starting training at 15 and Gotch was already a star pro wrestler, and had participated in the 1948 Olympics and had already spent years learning the submission game. But Robinson was always bitter about that day, until the two met in Japan in 1972 in the IWE, where they had three 60 minute draws.

Robinson is considered by most historians as the greatest British heavyweight wrestler of all-time. The U.K., the historians on the Wrestling Heritage site felt that Robinson should be rated ahead of Bert Assirati, the legendary shooter of a prior generation, Joyce, or later television star Kendo Nagasaki as the greatest heavyweight ever. There is no real argument that as far as a worldwide basis goes, Robinson would be far and away ahead. But in the U.K. itself, Robinson was described as a prophet without honor in his home country, in the sense that he held championships, but never was promoted as one of the biggest stars of his era. The idea seemed to be, that he was the best actual wrestler, and the greatest technical worker of any British heavyweight in history, but his weakness was as a drawing card.

If a man is measured by the success of those he's taught, Robinson was a giant in two walks of life. He was the original teacher, at Verne Gagne's barn in Minnesota, who started from square one the pro wrestling training of men who became the greatest pro wrestlers of an era, Ric Flair, Ricky Steamboat, Curt Hennig, Sgt. Slaughter, the Iron Sheik, Jim Brunzell, Ken Patera and Buddy Rose, just to name a few. He also trained Kazushi Sakuraba, who was the man who largely popularized Japanese MMA during its boom period, as well as Kiyoshi Tamura, who went on to become both a very competent MMA fighter and one of the greatest working pro wrestlers of his era. Another protege was Megumi Fujii, who in her prime was considered by many as the pound-for-pound best female MMA fighter in the world.

"He often came to see Pancrase shows because many of his students fought there," said Japanese reporter Tadashi Tanaka. "In particular, a very small sized Manabu Inoue was his favorite student. When Inoue won the Pancrase bantamweight championship against Seiya Kawahara on December 7, 2008, at Differ Ariake, Sensei Robinson cried, cried, cried in joy. Sakuraba and Tamura are well known worldwide, but for Sensei Robinson, I believe Inoue's win was the most rewarding moment as a coach."

Robinson was a main eventer all over the world. He was the British heavyweight champion in the 60s, who went to Japan and Australia later in the decade. His forays into North America came later, as a top babyface and champion in Hawaii and Western Canada, before debuting in the AWA in 1971.

In the original movie, "The Wrestler," Robinson, was a co-star, essentially playing himself. He played the role of a British Empire champion, who went to Japan and beat everyone to win their world title, and then came to Hawaii, and did the same. In the movie, Lord James Blears, the co-promoter in Hawaii showed up at the wrestling office in Minneapolis, with an old reel-to-reel film of Robinson, who he is recommending to the promoter, played by actor Ed Asner, as the next sensation of the mat game. Asner, who by that time had already long been established for his role as Lou Grant, on "The Mary Tyler Moore Show," played the role of Verne Gagne, the promoter, and in the movie, was amazed at what he saw on that tape. Verne himself played the role of Verne Gagne, the aging world heavyweight champion wrestler (using Verne's own NCAA titles and pro wrestling world titles as his credential, only embellishing the real Gagne to being an Olympic gold medalist when Gagne was actually an alternate in 1948 to Henry Wittenberg, among the greatest U.S. wrestlers of all-time, who won the gold). Gagne, using the name Mike Bullard, who was going to have to face Billy Taylor, the name Robinson went by in the movie, in what was the ultimate battle over the world title that ended the movie. It was also the ultimate AWA world heavyweight championship match of that time period.

Whether Gagne found out about Robinson because Blears came in with footage, or he heard about Robinson through the grapevine from wrestlers who had seen him in England, Canada or Japan, is unknown. The company Robinson worked for in Japan, the IWE, also had a business relationship with Gagne, so it's very possible Gagne first became aware of Robinson, as he first learned of Andre the Giant, through the IWE.

Robinson was introduced in a unique fashion. Because he had never worked in the continental United States, and magazine coverage of Europe, Japan, Hawaii and Stampede Wrestling, was minimal, past the hardest of the hardcores, none of the AWA fans would have heard the name.

Robinson appeared to be a job guy, portrayed as such when he came out, to be slaughtered by longtime star heel Shozo "Strong" Kobayashi, who was coming off a world title run with Gagne, in a TV match from the studios in Minneapolis. Robinson shocked everyone winning that one with the one-armed backbreaker, which later became known in wrestling as the Billy Robinson backbreaker. He repeated it in his next appearance, when facing Larry Hennig, a territorial fixture as a top heel. He was off to the races from there, and was a top star in that part of the country, on-and-off, for the next 15 years.

Robinson was a polarizing figure in wrestling. Some will praise him to no end, stating he was one of the most talented men and greatest worker that they were ever in the ring with.

"Billy's rep was as a shooter, but he was also one of the greatest workers in the wrestling business," said Dory Funk Jr., who first met Robinson as world champion when he went to Calgary for Stampede week in 1969, and Robinson was the promotion's top star, somewhat by default, since its best draw at the time, Archie "The Stomper"Gouldie quit the week before, walking out of the ring in frustration after a match with Robinson. "Competitive working, I loved working with Billy."

"His repertoire of quasi-amateur moves, such as suplexes and saltos, combined with the high tech European style, made for a compelling hybrid, the likes of which fans in our neck of the woods had never been exposed to before and were captivated by," said Bruce Hart.

But Dan Kroffat (the original, not Phil LaFon, who used the name in the 90s), a booker and top babyface in that era, did not have fond memories of him.

"He wanted everyone in the world to think that wrestling was real, because of his background," said Kroffat to Slam! Wrestling. "I hated the guy. He was a bully. He was an antagonistic sort of guy. He bullied guys. He stretched guys. He was really not a likeable guy. Then Robinson, if he had respect for guys who were shooters, of course he would give them great matches. He went to Minnesota where Verne Gagne was a shooter. He fit right in with Verne Gagne's thinking. But in Calgary, Jesus, nobody wanted to work with him. I had him seven nights in a row. It was the closest I ever came to quitting the business in my life. He just stretched me night after night."

Robinson's program with Dory Funk Jr. over the NWA world heavyweight title was one of the most remembered in the history of Stampede Wrestling.

Funk Jr. was brought in for two weeks, with the idea he'd work with Robinson, at the time the territory's top face, and Gouldie, the top heel, in his two Calgary matches. The week before he came, Stomper, then the North American champion, was supposed to do a disputed ending match with Robinson, with each claiming to be the top contender, leading to the two matches. However, Stomper was so furious at what he believed was Robinson's lack of cooperation and roughing him up, that he walked out of the match and quit, giving Robinson an unplanned North American title win.

"The incident with Archie Gouldie was a mess," remembered Stampede official and historian Bob Leonard. "Archie was cued to work with Dory in Calgary during Stampede week, having done a hot double disqualification with Dory a month earlier. I believe Archie, as the top heel and one of the best draws we ever had, was going to go over Billy one way or another in Calgary in the run-up to Stampede week. The two did not mesh at all, and Archie abruptly walked out in mid-match, and gave Stu (Hart) his immediate notice. Whether Billy was no-selling or shooting a little, or what, I don't know. All I can tell you is Archie was bitterly disappointed the Stampede week plan didn't turn out as he had great chemistry with Dory."

Ironically, even though not planned, it was better than what was planned. Fans had never seen anyone make Stomper simply give up and quit like that in a fight, since it was completely against the reputation he'd built up.

The first match went to a 60 minute raw, which Funk Jr. described as the single most grueling match of his career. While Funk Jr. wrestled 60 minute matches regularly in that era, he said nobody ever pushed him to a harder and faster pace in such a long match. That match was also considered one of the greatest matches in Stampede Wrestling history, as was another match that week, a long match that Robinson lost via count out, before a relatively small house in Saskatoon. In all, the two did at least four one hour draws over the two weeks. The rematch in Calgary, a week later, after word had gotten around town about the first match, which was one of the four biggest crowds in the history of the promotion.

"The two (Dory and Robinson) hit it off real well both personally and in the ring, and came out of the week with great respect for each other," said Leonard.

It was the same in the AWA. During the early 70s, a boom period for the promotion, Robinson frequently worked singles and tag team matches with Nick Bockwinkel & Ray Stevens, the premier tag team of the era. Usually, the match came down to his partner doing the job. Both men had nothing but praise for Robinson's in-ring ability. However, their manager, Bobby Heenan, was more reserved in his praise.

Heenan would joke, kind of a rib on the square, when people would knock Crusher for how limited he was, even though he was the biggest drawing card in the promotion, saying, "The people don't want to see The Crusher wrestle like Billy Robinson. They didn't even want to see Billy Robinson wrestle like Billy Robinson."

But in fairness, Robinson, while not Crusher's equal at the gate, was a solid main event draw for the AWA due to a combination of Gagne promoting his wrestling so strongly, booking him favorably, and Robinson delivering in the ring. For obvious reasons, Gagne vs. Robinson was a rare occurrence–Gagne didn't want to lose the title to Robinson, but he didn't want to beat Robinson either, but it did very well at the gate. Robinson got over big in Hawaii as a babyface draw, including selling out the HIC Arena for a 60 minute draw in 1970 challenging Funk Jr.

Gagne not only played the subtle heel, but the first few years, would always put Robinson over in two straight falls, losing the first fall clean to the backbreaker, and then, on the verge of dropping the second, saving his title with a disqualification, either for throwing Robinson over the top rope as it appeared Robinson was about to win, or the controversial not breaking a choke after being warned by the referee, which Gagne would claim was his legal sleeper finish.

But Superstar Billy Graham, the top singles heel, almost never worked with him solo, only doing a handful of matches and never a prolonged program.

Graham noted that Robinson loved to show off his skills by bullying football players, powerlifters and bodybuilders, and he was all three. As crazy as it sounds today, Graham taped his fists with small blades and told Robinson about it (that isn't as unusual as it sounds, The Sheik did that regularly, although for him it was about fighting his way out of the ring and not in this case, to slice up his opponents if there was a shoot) ahead of time.

Lou Thesz, on the other hand, considered Robinson as one of the 25 greatest pro wrestlers of all-time, noting he'd rank him in that category of greatest workers, and called him the last of the hookers.

When I was a young kid, there was a local guy named Jack Laskin, who wrestled all over the world, who loved to talk wrestling with us. He had wrestled in England and raved about Robinson, saying he was the nicest guy in the world. He also said that there wasn't a man alive who could beat him. He also said that Robinson couldn't draw flies, which was the first time I ever heard that expression.

Flair wrote about Robinson and his confrontation with the Iron Sheik, then amateur wrestling great Khosrow Vaziri, who started out in the same training in the same camp as Flair.

Vaziri was an Olympic hopeful and nationally ranked wrestler in Iran in 1968 for Iran (the stories of him making the Olympic team or medaling, as has been written for years, are exaggerated). He came to the U.S. where he won a national Greco-Roman championship in 1971, and was helping coach the U.S. team, while learning pro wrestling in a camp that included Flair, Patera, Jim Brunzell, Bob Bruggers and Greg Gagne.

Whenever he would be asked about the situation years later, Robinson said that Vaziri had a big mouth and he would always brag that in a shoot, he could beat Gagne (who was 46 years old at the time, but was the AWA champion), or himself. Gagne still continued to train as a wrestler, and still loved to bully the young guys around. Robinson said Vaziri came from Iran, and the Iranians and Russians were the best amateur wrestlers in those days, and Vaziri felt that if he was one of the best wrestlers in Iran, there was nobody outside Iran or Russia, particularly a 46-year-old American or a Britishman, who could beat him. Flair has also, many times, confirmed the story that Vaziri, who was clearly the toughest guy in the camp, would say he could beat Gagne or Robinson.

"Verne Gagne or Billy Robinson couldn't beat me on their best day," Flair said many years ago is what Vaziri would say to the others in the camp, when describing what led to the situation.

Robinson got wind of it, and in front of everyone, challenged Vaziri. Robinson said he used a shoot move that Vaziri had never seen before in amateur wrestling, and when it was over, Sheik couldn't train again for six weeks.

Flair's description was that Gagne and Robinson would train with and blow everyone up in training, but Vaziri, a phenomenally conditioned athlete at the time, would never get tired.

It was not a fight, and it wasn't even a competitive wrestling match according to Flair. Vaziri just responded to Robinson's challenge by saying Robinson couldn't turn him.

"Robinson had him get down, spread-eagle, in amateur position. He got on top but didn't have the leverage to turn Khosrow over and pin him. But Robinson was an expert on hook style, which was illegal in the amateur ranks, and after about ten minutes, he brought the point of his knee down into Khosrow's thigh, fucking up his hip. Khosrow was in agony as Robinson turned him over and pinned him."

Robinson essentially intentionally dislocated Vaziri's hip. Vaziri was furious, feeling that a coach should never take those kind of liberties with his student, although by all accounts it was Vaziri who issued the rules of the challenge. The national amateur bigwigs, who had a good relationship with Gagne since he donated money to help the team, were also furious about one of the national team's coaches being hurt. Gagne told Robinson that the national team asked him to please train Vaziri for pro wrestling, but not to hurt him again.

Patera said that Vaziri hated Robinson from that point on. Having been a coach himself, he said that no coach should ever do that to one of his students. Flair, seeing Vaziri hurt so badly, quit the camp, thinking this wasn't a business he wanted any part of. Gagne, seeing the potential in Flair, talked him into coming back.

Flair noted in his autobiography that he'd try everything he could to avoid the wrestling drills with Robinson, saying, "It was that bad."

Years later, when the story of an infamous bar fight where Robinson, working for International Wrestling in Quebec in the latter stages of his career, was laid out and urinated on by the 350-pound Sailor Ed White, an Eastern Canadian star who briefly worked in the U.S. as WWF tag team champion Moondog King, the story some of his former students, like Patera, happy, not sad, and one Robinson detractors loved to tell.

The actual incident took place in the summer of 1983, by which time Robinson was 44 years old.

According to promoter Gino Brito, the crew was in Jonquiere, a town two hours north of Quebec City. All the boys were staying at the same hotel and there was a bar on the bottom floor. In the bar, there were Robinson, (Lord Alfred) Hayes, Sailor White, a journeyman called Michel Morin and some other wrestlers. Everybody was drinking, but at some point, White started paying for drinks to Robinson. It was mainly beers, but a few shots too. Hayes was drinking some of the shots sent to Robinson. Then, White told Robinson he wanted to talk to him outside the bar. As soon as they got out, White sucker punched Robinson behind the head. As he was on the ground, White kicked him in the face and ribs several times. Before he went back inside the bar, he urinated on Robinson.

"The next morning, you should have seen Robinson's face," said Brito. "His face had so much swelling. I had never seen that before in my life. We were heading to Quebec City and Robinson asked me to change the card and book him against White. I told him that in his condition, that wasn't a wise thing to do, that he could get busted open after any kind of punch to the face. He asked me again, this time more firmly, and I finally agreed. But White didn't show up in Quebec City. He got lucky. If Robinson would have not been drunk the night before, never would White have beaten him that way."

"I don't think it's fair for those Montreal wrestlers to praise Sailor White on this one, and how he pissed all over Robinson and all," said Saito.

Jack Brisco, in his autobiography, talked about his own confrontation with Robinson, in 1969, in Australia, where they first met. The two, who became good friends, noted as they traveled together in Australia, Robinson would talk about how his wrestling style learned in Wigan, England ,was superior to the style Brisco wrestled in winning the 1965 NCAA championship at Oklahoma State.

Brisco, in his first few years as a pro wrestler, had encountered so-called submission experts, and had trained with them, and eaten them alive. Eddie Graham, who promoted Brisco's rise to the top, would tell people in wrestling that based on what he'd seen Brisco do to high caliber wrestlers in the gym, he'd brag that nobody could beat Brisco in a real fight.

"Hooking took a lot of skill in being able to maneuver an opponent to get him into position to apply one of the submission holds," Brisco wrote about his mentality at the time. "I had yet to meet anyone who could set up to get me in position to apply their hold and make me submit."

One night, after both had been drinking and it was past 2 a.m., they ended up in Brisco's hotel room. It actually started with each being friendly and demonstrating techniques and set-ups to each other. But at one point, it turned dangerously real.

"Man, he was tough," said Brisco. "A lot of wrestlers I met throughout the years fancied themselves as shooters. They were adept at demonstrating holds. `Let me show you this,' or `Let me show you that,' but the real test was if they could get these devastating moves or submission holds on in an actual match. Most of these guys suffered from delusions of grandeur. They couldn't hit those moves if their lives depended on it. Billy was the exception, by far. He not only could demonstrate the move, he could hit them from anywhere."

Brisco said he broke a few of Robinson's fingers, and Robinson nearly broke his foot, and sprained his ankle badly. The next morning, their faces, hands and ankles were swollen badly.

Robinson, when asked about the confrontation, simply said, "He went to the hospital. I didn't."

Robinson trained MMA fighters, but didn't like the rules. He said that the submission wrestlers of his day, in mixed rules matches, would clean up against anyone, but the current rules, with the unnatural stand-ups, favor the strikers. But he also noted another change was evolution. When he did mixed style matches in Europe, it was like the early UFC, facing people who were experts at an aspect of fighting, but not familiar with defending the takedowns and blocking the submissions. It was the pure submission wrestlers, the pure Jiu Jitsu guys, the pure kickboxers, pure judo guys and pure boxers. Now, with everyone cross-trained, the advantage of the pure submission wrestler isn't there because the guy he's facing will also have extensive submission wrestling training and sprawling training.

Robinson was a very proud man. A few years after knee problems had led to his retirement, he was talked into doing one last match in Japan, a ten minute exhibition against Bockwinkel, on a UWFI show. Robinson was living in Las Vegas at the time. At a gathering some time later, when someone had a tape of the match, Robinson refused to let them play it. He didn't like the idea of his friends seeing him wrestle at any less than what he was once capable of. On occasion, when talking about his exploits in his heyday, he would use the term, "When I was still Billy Robinson." But he reveled in talking about wrestling, wrestlers, telling stories and giving his thoughts on the business, particularly to those who had a clear understanding of the era of who he really was when he was still Billy Robinson.

"Billy was a bit of a grumpy old man," said Barnett. "All of us are when we get older. But he was a very passionate person. He really cared about those he looked after. He felt very strongly about wrestling, and what he's teaching. He wanted the people he worked with to make the most of it, or it's just a waste of time. Some may see him as a hard nosed coach, but he wanted you to be the best you could be with it. He wanted you to spend the time, perfect it, make it right, and do the best you can and use it in the best way.

"Billy was a fantastic guy. He lived an incredible life. He could tell some of the most interesting stories, as old workers could, but he really cared about the people who cared about him. Imagine how tough it was to be a very physical person, a high-level athlete, and then be in the (wrestling)_business for years, and getting old and injured and losing all that. Jake Shannon helped Billy out and gave him a second stage in his wrestling life with his teaching. It's been amazing."

We will have a second story on Robinson over the next few weeks concentrating on his pro wrestling career.

Fat Cat · Post by **Fat Cat** » Thu Mar 06, 2014 11:58 pm

Thanks for the obit bruh

T200 · Post by **T200** » Fri Mar 07, 2014 5:10 pm

DDP sent out a release saying that he had accepted the offer to induct Jake Roberts into the Hall of Fame. I've already seen what will probably be similar speeches last year at the Cauliflower Alley Club where DDP gave the speech to induct Roberts. DDP is the right guy, for a number of reasons, since Roberts was a mentor to DDP as a performer and DDP was the guy whose inspiration turned Roberts' life around. Without DDP cleaning him up, I can't see WWE risking putting Roberts in their Hall of Fame. Last year's Cauliflower Alley Club banquet, where DDP inducted Roberts, now looks like it was the test run, and both were riveting.

TomFurman · Post by **TomFurman** » Fri Mar 07, 2014 6:46 pm

Is Dick Cardinal still alive?

IGX

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