Pro Wrestling Hall of Fame, The: The Heels

By Greg Oliver and Steven Johnson

From the critically acclaimed authors of The Pro Wrestling Hall of Fame: The Tag Teams comes the most comprehensive look ever at the colourful villains, heels, bad guys and rule breakers who give professional wrestling so much of its character. In The Pro Wrestling Hall of Fame: The Heels, Greg Oliver and Steven Johnson take readers on an informative and entertaining ride through mat mayhem. With their signature mix of original research, interviews, and anecdotes, they describe the rise and development of wrestling’s bad guys, from riots in small-town arenas in the 1920s to the mega-event pay-per-views of today. Intended for everyone from casual fans to wrestling historians, the book explains how a barrel-chested Milwaukee brewer became wrestling’s first Nazi, then served his country with distinction in World War II. You’ll find out how bleached blond bad guys like the legendary Ric Flair trace their lineage to Gorgeous George — and about the little-known Ohioan that George himself emulated. And of course, Oliver and Johnson’s list of the most influential heels in history is sure to spark debate.

Like its predecessors in this series, The Pro Wrestling Hall of Fame: The Heels features more than a hundred rarely or never-before-seen photos of wrestling’s most despised characters — it’s a must read for anyone interested in the unique world of sports entertainment.

• Language: English
• Publisher: ECW Press
• Release date: Jun 15, 2007
• ISBN: 9781554902842

Book preview

Destroyer.

Introduction

Back when we were all separated, if you went in the heel dressing room, you would have had a ball. The babyface dressing room — they couldn’t walk by the mirror without stopping to look. We used to say, You’re not really that popular. C’mon! — Davey O’Hannon

This is one heck of a way to make a living.

In 1980, following a match in Albany, New York, long after Larry Zbyszko turned on his mentor Bruno Sammartino, he had trouble getting out of the ring. As Zbyszko worked his way through the crowd, he felt a sharp pain, as though someone had kicked him in the rear end. In the security of the dressing room, he reached back and pulled out a broken metal blade that had lodged in his buttocks.

In May 1976, Ole Anderson was walking from the ring after a heated match in Greenville, South Carolina, when a seventy-nine-year-old man lunged at him and slashed his chest open like a fisherman gutting his catch. Woozy, reeling from the loss of blood, Anderson took more than one hundred stitches. He was back in the ring two days later.

In July 1965, another seventy-nine-year-old man — what is it about that age? — thrust a four-inch pocketknife blade into the stomach of Benji The Mummy Ramirez outside a ring in Pasadena, California. The attack sent The Mummy to the hospital in serious condition, but, as befits a mummy, he lived to tell about it.

For the last century, grown men, presumably sane, have been going out in public and doing things that make people yell at them, stone their cars, stab them, shoot at them, threaten their families, and generally make their lives a living hell. They have been called villains, bad guys, roughhousers, meanies, mischief-makers, evil-doers, rule breakers, and, in the most popular vernacular, the heels of pro wrestling. If you’re the hero — the good guy — it’s a good life, the seemingly ageless Jean Madrid, a.k.a. Gypsy Joe, sighed to the Charleston Daily Mail a generation ago. But, if you’re the heel, it’s a tough life.

The result of heat — angry fans (of all ages).

Professional wrestling owes a lot to heels — probably its very existence. Wrestling is based on heat, a broad and ill-defined term that basically means getting people mad at you, typically by gaining an upper hand on the good guy, or babyface. Without heat, most wrestlers feel there can be little, if any, emotional involvement from fans. Without fan involvement, tickets don’t move as quickly — and you wind up with a depressed and sputtering business. As Johnny Powers, a grappling star around the world for two decades, explained: You cannot have a good match without a good heel. You can have a great match with two heels. But you can only have a so-so match with two babyfaces because life is a morality play, good versus evil. If you don’t have that tension created by the heel, you don’t have an emotional release. If you don’t have a release, what have you got? You’ve got something that’s boring.

No wonder many wrestlers, including Powers, preferred to be heels, despite the accompanying perils. There were financial benefits to being a heel — grappler after grappler interviewed for this book recalled how they didn’t really rake in the loot until they switched to the dark side. But being a heel also enabled them to express their creativity in a way that they couldn’t do as upstanding, law-abiding citizens. Robert Fuller, part of the legendary Fuller-Welch wrestling dynasty in the South, is one of many who preferred working as a bad guy because it allowed him more freedom in the ring: As a babyface, you’re sort of limited. There’s only so much you can do being a nice guy. There’s only so much good performance you can do being a good babyface. But a heel, it seems to be unlimited. As much bullshit as you’ve got in you, you can let every bit go when you’re out there trying to get people mad at you. From the managerial perspective, Sir Oliver Humperdink, a heinous sort for most of his career, said the release of pent-up emotions might even have been healthy for mind and soul. As heels, we were able to be as annoying and politically ‘incorrect’ as possible. We were able to say and do what everyone probably wanted to say and do, but, for one reason or another, could never, ever get away with. And, by being able to do so, I generally found that my fellow heels were much more ‘easygoing’ than our babyface counterparts who had to ‘toe the line.’

Not everyone is fit to be a heel, of course, and fewer still are fit to be successful heels. Many in the industry believe in the concept of a natural heel, a villain who is so convincing because he relies on something within himself to rattle fans, rather than on a wholly conceived, separate wrestling character. In essence, a natural heel’s ring identity is an extension of his real-life identity, with the volume cranked up. Stan Lane, who worked as a hero and as a villain during a successful tag team career, believes individual personalities play a key role in determining who will succeed as a bad guy. I think some people are more predisposed to be nice and humble, and other people, such as myself, are predisposed to be more cocky in nature. It just fits better being a heel; it’s a lot easier to make somebody dislike you than it is to make them like you. You can anger somebody a whole lot faster than you can win them over. That’s a general rule, not applicable to every wrestler, but Dr. Tom Prichard, a star in various promotions and a top wrestling teacher, believes, based on his own circumstances, that it has merit. He was toiling away at the beginning of his career as a cheery, undersized chap, but after some sour experiences in real life, he found that role didn’t fit him. I was working in Louisiana and I hated being a babyface, and I hated going out there, and I hated working with the guys I had to work with. When I walked out of the dressing room, I didn’t feel like a babyface, didn’t feel like being a good guy, and having people cheer for me. [Promoter] Bill Watts said, ‘Hey, have you ever thought about being a heel?’ I said, ‘Every day.’ I felt more comfortable, it was more natural. I didn’t smile — it was just a natural thing to not smile for me. It was easier to be an ass-hole than to try to be a nice guy. As Watts, famous for his work as head of the Mid-South territory, put it: You can’t be what you’re not. In other words, you can’t be a great heel if you don’t have some heel quality.

A HEEL’S JOB

Larry DeGaris, a sports marketing professor at the University of Indianapolis who moonlights as wrestler Larry Brisco, relates a conversation that he had with a friend who wanted to work as a heel on a local independent show. His pal was anxious to get in the ring so he could kick and stomp the good guy into oblivion. To DeGaris, that fervor represented a fundamental misunderstanding of the heel’s true calling — to make his opponent look good. The number one job is to get the babyface over, he said. Good heels understand that. Your challenge is to make this other guy look like Bruno Sammartino, not the local ex-gym owner. A lot of heels don’t understand that because they want to beat someone up to make themselves look good, as opposed to being a coward. When you’re a heel, when you’re on top, you’re brave. But then the tide turns against you a little bit and you become a chicken.

The line between heels and babyfaces has become blurred during the last twenty years, but DeGaris’ insight still rings true — the heel is charged with the responsibility of winning sympathy for his opponent. Tully Blanchard, one of the best workers of his time, said he understood that was the way to make money. When it’s time for the comeback, I am all over the stinking building and they’re talking about me. By making him look good, I’m making me look good.

What many fans of pre-1990s wrestling do not realize is that the heel was the one calling for his own blood. Before the introduction of tightly scripted, step-by-step matches, most bouts were laid out in the ring, in progress, with little more than a predetermined finale. The heel led the match like a dog trainer would an excited but unschooled puppy. The heel is the guy that was truly the ring general, in most all cases. He was the one that ran and set the stage, set the match, and ran the flow of the match, Watts said. So if I was working in the ring, and the guy was a quality heel, I would let him call my match, even if I owned the territory, as long as he was calling the match in a manner that I thought fit the direction that we were going. You let the heel call the match because he’s the one that had to execute it. In fact, in what wrestlers fondly refer to as the old days, it was common for a wrestler to break into the business as a good guy, then work for several years with more experienced villains who could teach him the subtle ins and outs. I remember, as a heel, I loved it because you’re the guy that controls the way the match is going, good guy-turned-superego Rick Martel once said. You’re calling the match. One of the things that I enjoyed the most about being a heel is that finally I was able to do that.

There’s a secondary job for heels, and it’s closely related to the first. They have to keep the business in the black by inducing fans to come back week after week to see justice in action — a sort of psychological ploy that for years served as wrestling’s underpinning. It’s the logical conclusion to what French social critic Roland Barthes explained in a famous 1957 essay The World of Wrestling: But what wrestling is above all meant to portray is a purely moral concept: that of justice. The idea of ‘paying’ is essential to wrestling, and the crowd’s ‘Give it to him’ means above all else ‘Make him pay.’ In other words, heels serve an important function as a source of ire, both in their matches and in the grand scheme of wrestling. Frankie Cain, who wrestled both as an Inferno and as The Great Mephisto, took a trip inside the mind of a typical male fan so he could figure out how to get him to keep buying tickets. The guy’s got a job, Cain explained. He’s mad at his wife. His kids are driving him nuts, and you make him madder than when he came into the arena. He’s saying, ‘There’s no justice in the world!’

HEEL PSYCHOLOGY

Les Thatcher, one of the sport’s top trainers, begins seminars by asking would-be wrestlers a question he picked up from Ricky The Dragon Steamboat — why is a heel a heel? One kid will say because he’s ugly, Thatcher related. Another kid will say because he’s wearing black, or he punches and kicks. None of the above. He’s a heel because the other guy out-wrestles him. Out of frustration, out of lack of skill, he has to take shortcuts to stay on top or to get on top. That’s why he’s a heel.

That’s a fundamental point that wrestlers feel has been lost as the sport has changed content and character in recent years. Heels come in all shapes, sizes, and colors. But if there is a single denominator common to all successful heels, it’s this: they have to cheat to win because nobody likes a lousy sportsman. The true heel is not a mean guy. He’s a cheater. He’s not a very brave individual. He may be tough as nails, but he’s not willing to put his body on the line to take the fall from the guy, said veteran Randal Brown, one of the premier builders of wrestling rings in the country. The true heel is a disgusting person. He’s a guy who shakes hands with you and takes your ring and your watch, so you want to see his butt get beat.

Heels have an almost infinite number of ways to draw heat, from their getups, their interviews, and their facial expressions, to their underhanded tricks in the ring. The profiles in this book describe many of these methods in detail. In virtually all cases, though, successful heels draw a careful line between cheap heat and real heat. Cheap heat is based on actions that elicit a quick, superficial jeer from the crowd. Parading through an arena in Boston wearing a New York Yankees jersey — that’s cheap heat. Standing on the second rope and telling a section of the crowd that it sucks — that’s cheap heat. Flipping the bird to a fan — that’s cheap heat, and veteran wrestlers turn their noses up at it as though a skunk just passed through their midst. There’s nothing cheaper than hollering or yak-yak at the people in the front row, Blanchard said. That pumping the crowd stuff; that’s not going to sell out Madison Square Garden. That’s cheap heat. That’s because you can’t think of anything else.

Real heat — the kind that once had overwrought fans standing on their seats, flipping open their switchblades — is something else entirely. The best real heat, many wrestlers agree, comes during the course of a match, through normal give and take. They’ve gone out and wrestled a little bit and every time they do, the good guy comes out on top, Lane said. So the heel has a decision to make. ‘Obviously, this guy is a better wrestler than I am; eventually he’s going to pin me. Do I want that to happen or am I willing to cross that line and cheat?’ So you start cheating and that’s what makes the people mad. Cain, who has studied heel psychology as much as anyone, believes that the best heat can be accomplished by slithering in and out of holds and counterholds, without pandering to the audience. Once you’ve got your heat, you don’t have to tell them every ten minutes, ‘I’m a heel.’ You do your wrestling. That’s the way that they drew money in the old days without television. Even when I was traveling around the country, heeling was a lost art, and it’s a shame.

Sometimes a heel doesn’t have to do anything. Just the bare hint that a heel might consider bending the rules is more than enough — a minimalist approach to heat that ensures the audience will react in a major way when the heel finally snaps. Sometimes, I’d sneak my hand up the guy’s back two or three times when he had me in a headlock, said Ken Wayne, a long-time star in Tennessee, now a trainer there. I wouldn’t pull his hair; I ’d just wrestle. I’d save myself, so then when I did do something, it meant something. If the heel, after begging for mercy, comes out a victor because of a dirty trick, managerial interference, or some inventive finish, so much the better — as long as fans believe in their hearts that the heel otherwise was headed for ignominious defeat. You have to show vulnerability, Johnny Valiant said. You have to show that you can be beat. So when you win by some method of cheating, people get even hotter because they know you’re not deserving.

Essential to heel psychology is the role of the referee. In recent years, referees have become almost irrelevant to the mat game, but during the heel heyday they were an important component because they established the rules that were to be broken. To be a good heel, you’ve got to use the referee, Jake The Snake Roberts stated. When I say ‘use’ the referee, respect the referee. It makes no sense if a guy doesn’t listen to the referee because then the heat goes on the referee; it doesn’t go on the heel . . . Sort of like if you’ve got a sniper in the bell tower shooting kids in a playground, and you’ve got a policeman next to him. Who has the heat? The policeman; he’s not doing his job. So, to me, honoring the authority in the ring, breaking down and apologizing, begging off to the referee, these things are what makes a heel. You’ve got to respect the authority.

Referee Jochen Herman administers a count to Jason The Terrible (Karl Moffat) as he destroys Bruce Hart.

In this book, we’ve placed heels in different categories depending on their dominant characteristics. A cautionary note — our categories are not mutually exclusive; heels can belong to two or more. Dick Murdoch is thought of as a big, brawling Texas cowboy; less remembered is the fact that he was one of the best technical workers in wrestling. But it’s easier to compare and contrast different heel styles by trying to categorize them. Our groups include:

• Madmen — Wrestlers who threw the rule book out the window while applying foreign objects to the foreheads and torsos of their opponents.

• Foreigners — Perhaps the most common villain in the postwar world, wrestlers adopted Japanese, Russian, and German guises to disgust and incense patriotic fans, even though most of these wrestlers were true Americans or Canadians.

• Technicians — Wrestlers who employed a variety of holds and technical wrestling skills when they weren’t cheating behind the ref’s back. Within the profession, these grapplers often referred to as smooth wrestlers or wrestling heels.

• Egotists — The most well recognized category of wrestling villain is probably the bleached blond, narcissistic, pretty boy, who has headlined cards from the time of Gorgeous George to today’s Ric Flair.

• Tough Guys — Wrestlers who were best known for hard-hitting, brawling, slugging, realistic-looking action. For tough guys, fisticuffs came as naturally as a Stetson to a cowboy, which is an archetype many tough guys portrayed.

• Monsters — Wrestling can be larger than life, and monster heels often were larger than wrestling. Three hundred-pound behemoths have been a draw for years, in part, because of their seeming invincibility

• Connivers — Some wrestlers have a knack for understanding how and when to manipulate a crowd, even though it might just be through a raised eyebrow or a turn of the head. While every heel is a conniver or a sneak to some degree, some performers stand out for their ability to master audiences.

We’ve added a category called Pioneer Heels that includes some wrestlers whose careers started in the 1920s and 1930s. That shorthand is our way of singling out wrestlers who charted a course for their rule breaking heirs.

THE HISTORY OF HEELS

Clarence Whistler was the Abdullah The Butcher of the 1880s — he ate glass. Whistler, known as the Kansas Demon, celebrated his achievements by downing a goodly measure of champagne, then snacking on the flute. He also was among the first wrestlers to be accused of stratagems any budding heel would envy. In a legendary 1881 marathon with William Muldoon, Whistler allegedly wet his hair with ammonia to burn his opponent’s eyes and used his long fingernails to scratch Muldoon’s body. His deceits remained unproven, and he later wrestled several exhibitions with Muldoon. But the mere possibility that someone bent the rules 125 years ago shows that heel tactics as are old as pro wrestling itself. (Whistler died in 1885, reportedly from ingested jagged crystal, though some writers suggested excess booze was the true culprit.)

In the early years of the twentieth century, what later generations would call villains or heels were identified as roughhousers, or rough-and-tumble wrestlers. One of the first was Leo Pardello, billed as an Italian heavyweight, who earned some infamy for his brawling methods. In 1908, he touched off a minor riot in Chicago after losing a fall to Charles Olsen. Pardello jumped Olsen, and in an instant the two men were in the center of the ring pummeling each other in approved prize ring style, according to the Fort Wayne Daily News. An assistant police chief and several detectives protected Pardello from enraged fans.

Pardello’s was the dominant bad-guy style until the development of slam-bang wrestling — around 1919 — popularized the use of storylines and emphasized wrestling characters. The brainchild, in part, of Joseph Toots Mondt, slam-bang wrestling combined boxing, traditional mat wrestling, and lumberjack-style fights into revolutionary, emotion-filled athletic contests. World champion Ed Strangler Lewis, who was to wrestling what Jack Dempsey was to boxing in the 1920s, was the early-day equivalent of a killer heel — his headlock allegedly rendered opponents unconscious and caused lasting neck damage. The new style of wrestling took off like a rocket, so much so that historian J Michael Kenyon observed there was scarcely enough supply to meet the demand. The mat trust(s) became instant goldmines, with every city, town and country holler eager to stage weekly shows. Nearly three-score, full-fledged wrestling ‘circuits’ sprang up throughout North America in the early ’30s, and, of course, it was an impossibility to provide them all with the legendary, headline wrestlers.

Who then to fill the bill? One of the answers rested with a group of mayhem-loving charlatans who packed audiences from coast to coast with wild antics — the freshman class of character heels. Wrestlers like Chief Chewacki, Ted King Kong Cox, and Buddy O’Brien hit the mat scene in the early 1930s, creating a sudden and unprecedented run on goods at the neighborhood illegal foreign object store. In many cases, the character heels were failed prizefighters. O’Brien and George Koverly were two of many who turned to wrestling after exiting boxing. In any event, they were a smash hit with Great Depression audiences starved for diversions. College men have helped to revive wrestling, William Draucher, sports editor at the Newspaper Enterprise Association, noted in 1931. The decline of boxing interest also has been a factor. But there is another cause perhaps as great as either of these. It is called showmanship. A great deal of the quality that Barnum worshiped is in the cast of characters of the act itself which provides that one man must be a conniving, unscrupulous villain. . . .

If fans soaked up the new and outrageous acts, high-minded athletic commissions and lawmakers were less impressed. In 1933, John V. Clinnin, chairman of the Illinois Athletic Commission, said he’d impose fines and suspensions on grapplers who engaged in organized monkey business. It is no longer a sport. They bite each other, trade blows, and go through other horseplay for no other purpose than to work on the passion of the spectators, he declared. A Michigan legislator introduced a bill to abolish commercial wrestling in 1935, on the grounds that it had become a public nuisance. When business is slack all a promoter has to do is obtain the services of Gentleman Jack Washburn, either of the better Duseks, Chief Chewacki, or any one of a dozen or more stirrer-uppers, Representative Stanley J. Romanski fumed. They will fill his hall — with police, if no one else. They come — first-class riot guaranteed, or no pay.

It’s unclear when the term heel started to become commonplace. Wrestling historian Don Luce said old-timer Lou Newman recognized it when he asked him about it. In 2001 on WrestlingClassics.com the great Lou Thesz wrote that the press might have invented the term. When I came into the world of Ray [Steele] and George Tragos, the terms were ‘clean’ and ‘rough.’ I don’t know when the ‘heel’ term began because I never really thought about it. Regardless, suspensions and fines aside, heels thrived in the 1930s and 1940s, passing themselves off in just about every guise imaginable. The villains are invariable hairy specimens who might pass as walking testimony to the Darwinian theory except that they must be able to register the whole gamut of emotion on their not-classic countenances and to put more soul into their grunts than the brutish anthropoid, Maine sportswriter Richard G. Kendall wrote in 1937. Added to these accomplishments the villain matman preferably comes from some outlandish spot on the globe. It is alright, however, if he lives in New York City as long as he looks like he might have originated in, say, Ukrania, or almost any portion of Poland or Russia.

The biggest change facing heels during the first half-century of pro wrestling though came with the invention of the television. TV in its infancy and professional wrestling kind of grew up together. TV found the perfect vehicle in this constant, flying-around action. It was perfect for the small screen and wrestling changed to accommodate it, said wrestler-author Ted Lewin. People no longer laid in holds for twenty minutes. There had to be a lot of moving around and a lot of flying and aerobatics to keep people’s interests. I think they kind of grew up together. By bringing the action from arenas into living rooms, TV placed a premium on showmanship and visual attractions, and launched the career of Gorgeous George. The gorgeous one was a star of the early television days, and, while historians still debate his impact on box offices around the country, there’s no question about the impression he left on millions of viewers. Entertainment Weekly put his November 11, 1947, television appearance as the forty-fifth greatest moment in the history of the boob tube. Who knew a bottle of peroxide and a trunk full of attitude would change pro wrestling — and TV — history? the magazine mused. By the late ’40s, wrestling (one of the few spectator sports unsophisticated cameras could successfully capture) was often a nightly TV event, and flamboyant George was like programming manna from heaven. New York promoter Bill Johnston told the Associated Press that television helped wrestling in the East by at least fifty percent.

Even after national TV abandoned wrestling in the mid-1950s, the basic heel formula remained the same for about thirty years. Russians, Germans, and Japanese had nothing less on their minds than the hostile takeover of America. Bleached blonds preferred that their locks remain undisturbed. Masked men concealed their identities, adding a whiff of mystery to their ways. Satanic arch-enemies are necessary in our melodramas so that even the dimmest of us can see some clear contrast with the crusading knight. The characters we love to hate — the Professor Moriartys, the Fu Manchus — are played by experts. It is the same in wrestling, Joe Jares wrote in his good-natured 1974 romp, Whatever Happened to Gorgeous George?

In 1984, the world of wrestling changed forever when WWF owner Vince McMahon seized the industry, recast it as sports entertainment, and marched it to the forefront of pop culture. McMahon’s drive, determination, and marketing genius made a lot of money for many people, most of all himself, but it also had a profound effect on the way fans perceived heels. In a world of B-list, celebrity-stuffed WrestleManias, toy action figures, cable specials, and Saturday morning cartoons — Hulk Hogan’s Rock ‘N’ Wrestling ran for two seasons on CBS — there was no room for the killer heel who warded off fans with a malevolent leer or a threatening fist. George The Animal Steele, became soft, more or less cuddly. Nikolai Volkoff and the Iron Sheik showed up in a Cyndi Lauper music video. As McMahon bought and consolidated territories, pro wrestling became nationalized, and World Championship Wrestling, the Atlanta-based company that offered a slightly more traditional heel product, was the only competitor until 2001, when it toppled. When Vince made a cartoon out of it, that changed everything, said WWF veteran Davey O’Hannon. Then there wasn’t delineation between a heel and a baby-face anymore.

WHITHER HEELS

In 1989, McMahon made one of his periodic forays into the mainstream by tapping Tom Tiny Lister, a relatively unknown actor, to portray a monster heel named Zeus as Hulk Hogan’s antagonist in the forgettable No Holds Barred movie. Their rivalry extended into the ring. Zeus fought Hogan in tag team matches at SummerSlam and Survivor Series that year. In December, Hogan vanquished him once and for all, but the episode probably sounded a death knell for traditional heels. When Vince took Zeus, an actor who had never been in the ring, and never had a match, and drew money by putting him with Hulk Hogan in a pay-per-view, that told me that you did not have to start out and learn the trade, Hall of Fame manager Bobby Heenan said. You simply had to have someone give you a push. Just think of that.

Pundits have filled up notebooks and computer screens to explain why heels have fallen by the wayside. The foreign heel, a staple of ’60s and ’70s wrestling, has dried up in the face of geopolitical developments. Instead of hurling invectives at German and Japanese wrestlers, fans drive German- and Japanese-made cars to the arena. And how much could they hate the Iran-sympathizing Iron Sheik if he was a goofy regular on a Saturday morning cartoon show? Paul A. Cantor, a professor at the University of Virginia, observed that the end of the Cold War put promoters and heels in a pickle. Suddenly, audiences could not be counted on to treat a given wrestler automatically as a villain simply because he was identified as a Russian, he wrote in a 1999 essay Wrestling and the End of History.

Changes in the business also have contributed to relegate the red-hot heel to the dustbin. Pro wrestling has become a might makes right enterprise, discarding the old moral struggle between good and evil. Huge monster heels that caused fans in a bygone day to cringe in horror now win praise when they demonstrate their power and might. You take a guy like Abyss or some of these other guys, they just go out there and manhandle people and mutilate them, Brown noted. And people identify with them and start rooting for them because they see them as big tough guys who are not going to take anything off anybody. DeGaris, writing about wrestling from an insiders’ perspective, noted the same phenomenon: Today’s pro wrestling audience, skewing heavily younger and male, cheer the strong and boo the weak. In the absence of a framework of ‘sportsmanship’ that predominated wrestling for so long, it is no longer moral weakness or moral turpitude that is vilified; it is simply physical weakness. Mid-Atlantic wrestler and trainer George South believes disrespect for authority now is a badge of honor. People have the wrong concept of what a heel is. . . Just because a guy comes out cussing and shooting the middle finger, they think that’s being a heel, and they think it’s cool. Everyone knew Vince McMahon was ‘Stone Cold’ Steve Austin’s boss, and every time Austin stuck his middle finger in McMahon’s face, people cheered that. How can you be a heel if that’s being a babyface?

Today’s fans go to be a part of the spectacle.

These factors have contributed to the demise of heels, but it’s just as clear that heels don’t have a chance to flourish in today’s business climate. World Wrestling Entertainment is the Microsoft of elbow drops; it committed the old wrestling territories to the dirt so young wrestlers don’t have a chance to learn their trade by working five or six nights a week. So many of these kids are self-trained, Thatcher said. Some are remarkably easy to educate. Others just look at you with this blank stare like, ‘What’s he talking about?’ because they’ve never seen it, and they don’t have anywhere to go to get the experience they need. There are some things you can only learn by being in the ring night after night.

Even if Thatcher, Wayne, Prichard, or other trainers cranked out great heel after great heel, it might not be enough. Greg Gagne, son of former world champion Verne Gagne, worked for a while as a trainer with the WWE in 2006. Stephanie McMahon, Vince’s daughter, released him, explaining that he wasn’t working out, though the Ohio Valley Wrestling territory he was assigned to was doing well, and several wrestlers credited him with helping them improve their skills. Regardless, Gagne got a peek at the WWE mentality, and his findings are worth quoting at length because they explain how the heel he knew during his career has fallen out of favor: The kids watching today don’t have a feel for what it really was. When I was up with McMahon, I told him, ‘That’s what you’re missing. The kids aren’t learning to be themselves.’ Stephanie McMahon said, ‘Now, when you go and train the kids, I want you to develop some characters.’ I said, ‘Stephanie, we don’t develop the characters. You can’t take a kid and do that.’ Guys like myself who grew up in the business, maybe after three or four years, we’d start to find the character. Guys that were in the business five years, six years, seven years — heck, some never find it. But until you find that and can project that to the people, you’re not going to succeed, and that becomes a character. Take Paul Burchill. They made him a frigging pirate. The writers wanted a pirate, so they made him a pirate. I worked with the kid down in Louisville. That’s not his personality. So when it didn’t get over, the writers said, ‘Oh, this kid’s no good. Get rid of him.’ It wasn’t the kid’s fault. It was them trying to make him something that he wasn’t. I was going nuts with them.

Manager Sir Oliver Humperdink makes a point.

Can wrestling return to its past? Can the wrestler we loved to hate suddenly reappear from behind the curtains, without pyrotechnics and video boards, and whip crowds into an angry frenzy? Skandor Akbar, one of the most despised managers in history (he wasn’t beloved as a wrestler either), has his doubts. These days, Akbar is in Texas, doing a little training and helping local groups run shows. People will come to me and they’ll say, ‘We liked it back when you guys were in. It was real. We loved it.’ Sometimes I’ll book shows around here and the first thing they say is they want a family show, they don’t want that stuff we see on TV, naked women and stuff. I’m sure they’re good people up in [the WWE] — I’ve always had a good rapport with them. But that’s their house and they do what they want to do. It’s hard to say if it will ever go back to being like we were used to.

Perhaps, then, it’s worth a final trip into the past to appreciate the raw hatred that a good, old-fashioned heel could engender. Herman Hickman, a College Football Hall of Fame lineman, dabbled in wrestling for a few years, and penned his remembrances for the Saturday Evening Post in 1954: I know that there have been few legitimate professional matches since Milo of Croton was six times champion of Greece, and Theseus laid down the wrestling rules in 900 B.C. I even have my doubts about whether that historic match between Ulysses and Ajax was a shoot. I do know that I met a lot of good guys who were the straightest shooters I’ve ever known, and that I got to see a lot of ‘faraway places.’ I still don’t think you can get a better night’s entertainment than you will by seeing your favorite ‘hero’ tangle with a ‘villain.’ This plot has had the longest run in show business, so it must have something.

ABOUT THE WRESTLERS IN THIS BOOK

We know the question is coming: Why isn’t so-and-so in the book? (How do we know it is coming? Because it happened with both previous books.)

The Pro Wrestling Hall of Fame: The Heels is by no means meant to be a comprehensive list of bad guys during the last century. Chances are someone you booed with all your heart in your childhood isn’t here. Our aim is to offer a decent representation of wrestlers who had particular importance, a lasting impact on the sport, or interesting stories to tell. By doing this, we hope readers will have a better understanding of why heels are such an important and fascinating part of this business. And maybe some young wrestler will find something in this compendium that he can refine and use to entertain us for years to come.

For ease of reading, we’ve tried to group heels into certain categories that we think cover some of their defining characteristics — whether they were monsters, foreigners, madmen, and so on. It’s an imperfect system, but we hope this makes for interesting comparisons between heels, and helps to explain how different heel styles evolved.

There are very few wrestlers who were either a good guy or a bad guy their whole careers. We’ve tried to classify them based on their longevity or heel impact, but there are always going to be disagreements; in some territories, a wrestler may be seen as the spawn of Satan, and in another, fighting on the side of angels. Those good guys, or babyfaces, will be dealt with in the next volume in this series, The Pro Wrestling Hall of Fame: The Heroes. Others are a curious shade of grey, particularly a lot of the grapplers during the last fifteen years, or those that we have decided to label anti-heroes, like Bruiser Brody or Stone Cold Steve Austin. Some of these wrestlers will make the next book as well.

Finally, listing the top twenty heels of all time is an admittedly subjective endeavor. To come up with our ranking, many different sources — historians, wrestlers, fans, promoters — were consulted, and heels were rated on a set of a dozen standards. Some of these standards are quantifiable, such as longevity as a heel, the size of the box offices they drew, and the number and quality of territories where they worked as a main-event heel. Some of them are more subjective, such as their ability to work different styles of matches, or the reasons for their success. In every case, we’ve tried to emphasize a couple of factors we think are most important — their responsibility for significant historical innovations, and their in flu ence on later generations of wrestlers. With a few exceptions, we’ve kept a lot of the early pioneers from our rankings simply because we don’t have the luxury of evaluating their work on video.

Bulldog Don Kent argues with a fan.

We don’t claim this is the final word on heels — in fact, we hope we’re just getting the debate started and the memories flowing. So, on to the stories. And remember, you’re free to hiss at will.

The Top 20

1. NATURE BOY BUDDY ROGERS

You still see him everywhere.

You see him every time Vince McMahon swaggers down the runway to the ring on TV. You see him every time someone clamps on a figure-four leglock. You see him every time someone screams out, NA-ture Boy! You see him everywhere because wrestlers, promoters, and fans all agree that he was the most imitated, most talented, most . . . everything heel in history.

Buddy Rogers in all his arrogance.

The ironic thing is that there wasn’t much original about Buddy Rogers. His name was lifted from Charles Buddy Rogers, an actor and jazz musician who starred in Wings, the first winner of an Academy Award for best picture. Nature Boy was a number one hit on the Billboard charts in 1948. The sneer, the strut, the pretty boy looks . . . those were parts of wrestling almost from the start. It’s just that all-time greats like Don Leo Jonathan agree Rogers packaged them like no wrestler before. He really wasn’t that good of a hand, but he was a hell of a showman. He could draw houses where other guys couldn’t. He just had that thing. He had a way of making those people want to kill him, and he could do it just with a look, a posture, Jonathan said.

Billy Darnell, Rogers’ friend and greatest rival, tells of an incident in the early 1950s that puts it all in perspective. In those days, in Hollywood, you could go in small clubs and see the best entertainment in the world, and never spend a dime for a cover charge or anything. At the Brown Derby, Nat King Cole was there and he had his trio. So I walk in, and I’m sitting down, and there’s Nat up there playing something. And Buddy Rogers walked in the door. It was an amazing thing. The spotlight went over to Buddy Rogers, and Nat looked over and saw him and nodded, and he transposed the song he was playing right into ‘Nature Boy.’

Rogers was the sport’s top gate attraction for the better part of two decades, until he lost the World Wide Wrestling Federation world title to Bruno Sammartino in May 1963, and essentially ended his active career. In his most famous match, he drew a record 38,600 to Chicago’s Comiskey Park in June 1961, when he beat Pat O’Connor for the National Wrestling Alliance championship. While he served some duty as a fan favorite, especially early in his career under his real name of Herman Dutch Rohde, he was meant to be a heel. Buddy Rogers loves being hated. He loves being hated almost as much as he loves being Buddy Rogers, observed famed Chicago sportswriter Dave Condon. As Rogers himself once explained, It’s bread and butter, and cake, too, for me. The more the fans hate me, the more money they pay in hopes of seeing me whipped. This I enjoy.

To say the least, Rogers was not everybody’s cup of tea. Many of his contemporaries, while acknowledging his skills, viewed him as a schemer and conniver who knew his position in wrestling, and went to great lengths to protect it. He was strictly a con man from A to Z. Everything he did was bullshit to keep you down and keep himself up, but he was always laughing and joking along like he was normal, said Bob Orton Sr., Rogers’ tag team partner in the early 1960s in the Northeast. What he was doing was thinking, ‘How can I screw this guy?’ I could read him like a book and remember every word. Opponent Jackie Fargo called him Bud-ro, and felt the same as Orton, based on encounters and matches with Rogers. He was the most no-good son of a bitch that ever put on a pair of wrestling boots. He was a fabulous, fabulous, fabulous worker. He was a natural, and you can’t take that away from him. But as far as a person — listen, he would try to hurt you or cripple you any way he could. Before one bout in New Jersey, Fargo recalled saying to Rogers, Let me tell you something, pally — if you screw with me any way, shape, or form, don’t try to leave the ring, ’cause you’ve got a fight on your hands. Lou Thesz carried a long grudge against Rogers for belittling Ed Strangler Lewis, Thesz’s mentor, during a ride to Louisville, Kentucky. The knowledge of his contempt for Ed and true wrestlers was more than I could tolerate, Thesz wrote in his autobiography Hooker. Despite years and years of main event matches, Thesz never let him win, just on principle.

Regardless of what people felt, Rogers was guaranteed money in the bank, with a perfect sense of what to do and not do in the ring. When in 1960 and 1961 a newspaper exposed Tito Carreon, one of Rogers’ opponents in the Northeast, as Mexican and not Puerto Rican, Carreon found himself being booed one night in New Jersey. Rogers pounded Carreon into oblivion, and then whispered, Flag me, a tip-off for his opponent to seize the offensive. Carreon reported his comeback was so intense that excited Puerto Rican fans started throwing chairs in the ring. We had good matches all the time because [Rogers] knew how to get the crowd going. He had something special about him. There are a lot of jealousies in the business. Everywhere he wrestled he was drawing people. Everywhere. Babyfaces, they loved working with him, Carreon said. Don Arnold battled Rogers for a version of the world title in Ohio in 1952 and 1953, and thought he had a terrific head for business. He made money for you, Arnold said. The place was sold out weeks ahead. He was a big attraction and big name. He was the first to do what he did.

The son of German immigrants, Rogers was born in Camden, New Jersey, in 1921, worked the carnival circuit for a couple of years as a teenager, and turned pro thereafter. He said in interviews that he officially turned to the mat to support himself after the death of his father, who was nearly fifty when Buddy was born. For years, he maintained a loose affiliation with the Camden police department. After a brief stint in the Navy in 1939 and 1940, he started to attract attention on the East Coast for his good looks, Adonis-like physique, and cocksure ways. By 1944, The Washington Post labeled him the District’s most popular mat star. The following spring, Rohde headed to Texas under the guise of Buddy Rogers, a name older stepbrother John used during a brief wrestling career. In May 1946, Rogers won the Texas heavyweight title, including an apparent swap with Thesz, though Thesz claimed the title change took place in an office, not the ring. In September 1946, Rogers hooked up with Jack Pfefer, a promoter who was alternately brilliant and reviled, but who helped push Rogers to the hilt for about five years.

Adding Nature Boy to his persona, Rogers made a splash in California in 1948, when Pfefer arranged a grand coming-out party designed to make the public forget about Gorgeous George. In a letter to promoter Hugh Nichols, who ran the Hollywood venue, Pfefer sought an accordion player and a couple of Amazonian models to accompany Rogers to the ring and tend to his splendid capes. After the big circus which the gorgeous guy put on in your clubs, we will have to beat this silly stuff with something more unusual, but at the same time something serious and beautiful, Pfefer wrote. Rogers won that night, and didn’t lose a match until he fought Darnell that October. It worked out for Rogers — he wrote Pfefer that he raked in $26,349 in 1948: So Jack we had a great year together again and I’m sure glad to hear we have a good new year coming up. Pfefer’s cut was $7,118.

Rogers hosts his short-lived WWWF segment, here with Pat Patterson.

Rogers, a natural for the early days of TV wrestling, officially changed his name from Rohde around 1950. His appeal only increased as he toured the country and won a variety of regional championships with a cold, calculated hostility toward audiences. As a youngster, former Chicago columnist Bob Greene was taken with Rogers and eventually got to know his anti-hero. Well, the blond hair, the sneer, the gaze of absolute confidence — Nature Boy Rogers was to wrestling what Elvis Presley was to music: electric, jolting, incandescent, Greene wrote. He was a unique personality, added Darnell, who wore a collar for a year after Rogers accidentally crushed discs in his neck with a botched piledriver. He was one of those guys who wanted to appear like a hardball, but if you needed something he was there for you. He was like Sinatra. He wanted to rule the roost, but if you needed something, he was there for you. And Rogers was oddly honest with interviewers about his portrayal of a wrestling villain. Out of character, Buddy Rogers is a pleasant, soft-spoken, handsome gentleman who readily admits the long blond hair, the exaggerated strut, and the scornful stare are all part of an act, Art Abrams admiringly informed readers in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette in 1962.

Rogers held the NWA title until January 1963, but his reign was marked by controversy about his unwillingness to wrestle outside a handful of major cities. To be sure, his draws were as big as ever. In 1961, he helped to pull $151,000 in four shows in Pittsburgh against Johnny Valentine and Crusher Lisowski; Steel City wrestling had been dead for years. He was closely aligned with promoter Vincent J. McMahon in New York, and McMahon made Rogers his first WWWF champion in 1963 after Rogers lost the NWA belt to Thesz in Toronto. In my opinion, Buddy Rogers was one of the best ever, said Pete Sanchez, a frequent opponent from 1960 to 1963. He was a very intelligent worker. He could go in the ring with a broomstick and make the broomstick look good, because if the broomstick looked good, and Buddy beat it, he would look that much better himself.

Rogers was WWWF kingpin until May 1963, when Bruno Sammartino dispatched him in forty-eight seconds. The circumstances of Rogers’ title loss have been examined almost as carefully as the Zapruder film. For years, backstage whispers, spread in part by a New York sportswriter, held that Rogers suffered a heart attack, and was dragged out of a hospital to wrestle Sammartino. That wasn’t the case, according to several people familiar with the event. Rogers backed out of three matches in a row in mid-April 1963, and a physician checked him out after at least one of them. To some colleagues, he explained that a long-standing heart murmur troubled him, though many of his contemporaries remain convinced that he was fashioning an alibi for his