Game Over 
Six Brothers
And now there is only one. To live through the horrific cycle of suicide and tragedy that wiped out the other f ive, Kevin Von Erich has relied on the strange code of the professional wrestling world his family once ruled: What’s real is never certain, and what’s fake is never, ever talked about.
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“I remember Kamala [the Ugandan Giant] going for the big splash off that third turnbuckle one night onto me. I’m lying there with guys stretching out my arms and legs, and when he landed, I felt like a tube of toothpaste. If wrestling were fake, I wish someone had told me.”
But the reality of wrestling, as Kevin learned it from Fritz, was that no one ever discussed whether it was real. For all the weird pretense— the unnatural bodies, the ring histrionics, the shady dealings that historically made up the business—there was an unwritten code that ruled in that world: kayfabe. It was like the Mafia’s law of omerta, akin to a vow of silence, and it was born, like American wrestling itself, on the old carny trails. When carnival performers were traveling, they’d phone home collect from “Kay Fabian.” Whoever answered would refuse the charges but know that Dad or Mom had made the next town. In the twenties, when wrestling left the highways to set up regional offices to run the sport—independent businesses called territories or promotions—the modified term “kayfabe” went with it. It was the rule that kept fans from learning what was really going on. If two wrestlers were talking and a third person walked up, one wrestler might quietly mention kayfabe; the other then knew that the newcomer was not smartened up to the game. Think of kayfabe as wrestling’s curtain, and remember that nothing was as important as keeping it closed. Or, as one longtime wrestling writer described it, think of kayfabe as quasi—pig latin for “fake.”
When I asked Kevin to explain kayfabe, he said it means simply “Shut up.” It wasn’t immediately clear if he intended a definition or an instruction. But while he wouldn’t discuss kayfabe as a concept, he did give an example. “Way back in my dad’s day, they were fighting in Canada, where this cop was a local celebrity. So the cop was going to be put in a match. Some bad guys were going to beat up the good guy, and the cop would step in. But he got nervous waiting for his spot. When the bad guys came down, he panicked and started hitting them with a blackjack and knocking them out. Guys were hitting the ground like flies. That’s kayfabe.”
That may be kayfabe, but it’s also very much Kevin, and when he describes the theatrics, you catch yourself wondering what part of the story is real. He took me one day to meet his mother, Doris, a small, 72-year-old woman with a bright smile who lives near downtown Dallas. They talked a lot about Fritz, about his strong Christian faith and early career. They went on at length about a match he’d fought in New York. Heavyweight boxing champ Rocky Marciano was serving as celebrity referee, and before the match started, he attacked Fritz. Though the crowd likely assumed it was part of the act, Kevin and Doris said it was without warning or reason.
“So Dad kicked his butt,” said Kevin.
“He did,” added Doris. “There’s no boxer who can beat a wrestler. Marciano thought he’d make a little name for himself.”
“After the match, Dad took care of him in the dressing room.”
“Well,” said Doris, “he took pretty good care of him in the ring too.”
Then there’s the subject of his brothers. When they come up, Kevin talks about the 32 gallons of milk delivered weekly to the house when they were kids and the 40 pork chops Doris would cook them for dinner. His stories end with bee stings, milk spills, and trips to the emergency room. But a lot of awful history has washed over Kevin, and reaching through the murk for Family Circus scenes has helped keep him afloat. In a strange way, though, it also pinpoints the tragedy. Everybody who knew the Von Erichs says they all were good boys. But there’s always an addendum: They did have their demons. And when it came time to address them, the Von Erichs concentrated on what the world saw outside the curtain.
WHEN DORIS JUANITA SMITH MARRIED JACK ADKISSON in 1950—he was a Southern Methodist University football player and not yet known as Fritz—the plan was to have just two kids. Jack Junior was born in Dallas, in 1952, and the Adkissons hoped to complete things with a sister named Jill. Doris and Jack would raise Jack and Jill, and the storybook life would be under way.
But they’d have to wait five years before any more children came, and the next was a second son, Kevin, followed fourteen months later by another one, David. By then Jack Senior had started to wrestle, and his persona, the vicious Nazi heel Fritz Von Erich, had been born as well. While Doris raised the boys in a trailer in Niagara Falls, Fritz toured the northeast United States and Canada. It was the sport’s black and white, postwar period, and, Gorgeous George aside, it was violence that filled arenas more than theatrics. Fritz fit the bill, six feet four and a thick 260 pounds, with unexpected quickness for a man his size. But the key was his unbeatable finishing hold, the dreaded Iron Claw. He’d clamp his blond right bear paw onto a good guy’s forehead and squeeze until blood poured down Fritz’s arm and onto the mat. He quickly became a top draw and practically lived on the road.
He was in Cleveland in the winter of 1959 when his family got its first taste of real-world fragility. Six-year-old Jackie was walking home from playing with friends when he started to run his hand along a neighbor’s trailer. A wire had shorted out underneath, and the outside wall was juiced. Jackie was knocked unconscious, and he fell facedown into a puddle of melting snow and drowned.
It was an event many marriages wouldn’t survive, and Fritz and Doris each blamed themselves. If I’d only been home…If I’d kept Jackie inside… In Fritz Von Erich: Master of the Iron Claw, an as-told-to biography written by Ron Mullinax that came out this year, Fritz explained where he put the guilt. “I just started blaming the entire wrestling business for the death of my oldest boy…I started to look forward to climbing back into that squared circle and going after one of the guys who I held personally responsible for all my bad luck. I got such a bad reputation for being overly aggressive in the ring that some wrestlers even turned down matches with me.”
Doris had to deal with it back at home. “After you lose the first one,” she said, “there is that nagging fear you’ll lose another. You not only believe it can happen to you, you know it’s going to almost. It’s a horrible thing to live with, and I became very protective of the boys.”
By 1962 the family was back in Dallas and Kerry had been born. Fritz had bought into the Dallas promotion, and by making himself the star and bringing in friends he’d fought up North, business took off. Fritz purchased real estate around Lake Dallas and, in 1964, just before Mike’s birth, moved the family to a 15-acre place near Corinth that Fritz would later grow into a 150-acre cattle ranch. It was a perfect place for the boys, with wide-open fields where they could play football and hunt. The lack of neighbor kids was never an issue. The boys were a self-contained unit, as Fritz had raised them to be. And when one of them got out of line, put a rock through a window or some other stunt, Fritz would line them up and demand a confession. When none came, he’d ask the innocents to hand over the culprit. When no one spoke up, Fritz would whip them all with a leather strap. He was proud to see them acting like men.
In 1967 Fritz “turned baby face” and became one of the good guys. He’d brought in a barely reformed Chicago hood, Playboy Gary Hart, to run the promotion’s booking, and a big part of the job was creating personas for the wrestlers. Hart also fought, as a carpetbagging heel detested by Dallas fans, and it made sense for the business to make Fritz the hometown hero. “Although it got me in a lot of trouble with Fritz,” says Hart now, in his small Arlington apartment, his accent sounding as if he just walked off Halstead Street, “I went on TV and told fans the truth. I said, ‘He’s not a German! His name is Jack Adkisson, he went to SMU, and his daddy was a thief!’”
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