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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It worked, not least because fans were also seeing Fritz the proud papa. Chris completed the family in 1969, and Sportatorium crowds got to watch the boys grow up. When each boy hit puberty, Fritz would send him into a weight room he’d created in a barn on the ranch. Their after-school workouts stretched for up to three and a half hours a day, even during football season, and they’d often do roadwork in the morning. Fritz devised the regimen. There was the torture rack, a row of dumbbells that ran from two and a half pounds to fifty, and the routine was to do a short set of curls with each weight, from lightest to heaviest and back again. They did push-ups with their feet elevated, steadily increasing the height of their feet until they were almost flush against a wall, their bodies perpendicular to the floor. For balance, they’d run across the top of a wood fence and catch football passes. According to an old friend of Kerry’s, to toughen them up, Fritz would tie them together by their feet, hang them from a beam, and have them fight upside down.
The legend is that Fritz did all this to prepare them for the ring, and wrestling has always been a father-son trade. But Kevin says their goal was simply to become athletes. They achieved it. The oldest boys were all over Dallas’ sports pages with all-district honors or better in football, basketball, and track. David, Kevin, and Kerry each got full athletic scholarships to Texas colleges. But during summer break, they wrestled for Fritz. The money was easy and the fans already loved them. One by one, they decided to make wrestling their career.
“A LOT OF PEOPLE DON’T WANT to ask me about my brothers,” says Kevin Von Erich now, stretching out sideways in an overstuffed chair in his den, the wall behind him covered with framed photos of the brothers as young men in the ring, kids on motorcycles, and best friends carrying shotguns to the duck blind. “They think it will make me sad. The truth is, people like me, and you can’t help but like someone who likes you.”
That last phrase is one he uses repeatedly. He still enjoys being a Von Erich, in no small part because it still matters to a large number of people. This summer he was flown to Israel to tape a role in a prime-time soap opera. He played himself. While there, he was featured on several news shows and had an hour-long visit with former prime minister Shimon Peres. They talked about the way sports could bring Israeli and Palestinian children together. The tragedies they discussed were related to war.
But mostly his existence is quiet. When I first met him this spring, we drove to see his small herd of Black Angus cattle and the rest of his place. He stopped by a bowed old post oak that he, David, and Kerry once chopped limbs off of with hatchets. Then he talked about another nearby tree where he said he and Kerry once impaled David on a low branch during a game of football. But he talked just as much about his own kids. He and his wife, Pam, have been married 27 years, and they have two daughters, Kristen and Jill, aged 21 and 19, and two boys, Ross and Marshall, aged 17 and 12. They all still live at home, along with Kristen’s husband and their 6-month-old daughter. They are a startlingly attractive group of people.
He sits squarely now at the center of that family. He’s admittedly overprotective, and he speaks in life lessons to all of his family. He answers potential crises with “Look, today can be a good day or a bad day. You make the choice now.” Or “You know what kind of person has accidents? The kind of person who has close calls.” Or, quoting his father, “Pay the price the other guy isn’t willing to pay.”
When Fritz died, in 1997, he left nothing for Kerry’s ex-wife or two daughters, instead giving everything to Kevin, to the tune of about $3.5 million after taxes in cash, stocks, real estate, and the World Class video archive. Kevin now spends his days working on deals for the properties and has had discussions with World Wrestling Entertainment head Vince McMahon about licensing the old World Class tapes to the WWE’s 24-hour wrestling classics channel. The Von Erichs would be a top draw. Kevin said they also discussed the possibility that Ross will wrestle someday for the WWE.
But for now Ross’s focus is football, as it once was for Kevin, who dreamed only of the NFL until knee problems turned him to wrestling. Ross is shy and polite, with his mom’s dark hair and eyes. At five eleven, he’s not as tall as his dad but has his dad’s chiseled physique and speed. He’s starting at defensive end this fall as a junior at Denton Ryan High School, and it’s on the subject of football that he and his dad bond. I rode with the two of them to Ross’ spring scrimmage, and if you ever went to lunch in high school on game day with football players, you know exactly what it was like. Kevin asked Ross to find him a piece of paper in the backseat.
“What do you need it for?” asked Ross.
“I’m bleeding.”
“Dad, why are you always bleeding?”
“I scratched my arm with my fingernail.”
“Why?”
“I don’t know, son. For fun?”
“Man, Dad, seriously. That’s what happens when you peel off a scab.”
“I didn’t peel it off for any mean reason. Come on. Nobody’s going to say, ‘You know, Ross, I would have liked you, but your dad’s a bleeder.’”
The talk eventually shifted to ground they could share.
“Keep your head up, son.”
“Keep my head up?”
“Yeah, don’t let it get down too low.”
“Oh, like literally.”
“Yeah.”
“Well, they’re putting a tight end over me now.”
“Good. Kick his butt. Give him the worst day of his life.”
“The tight ends are big, Dad. Bigger than me.”
“Well, Ross, use your strength to stand him up, and all he’ll be is in the way. Raise him up, go titty to titty, and it’ll give you time to look in the backfield and see which way they’re coming.”
“I know, Dad.”
“I know you do, buddy.”
FRITZ’S PROMOTION HAD ALWAYS MADE MONEY, but his empire was built by his boys. A Von Erich was a fact-and-fiction collage of loyalty to true family, steadfast regard for playing by the rules, and absolute certainty that right begat might. When they lost, it was the result of some underhanded trick, and when they won, they gave credit to their faith in Jesus Christ. Fans all over the state ate the act up, in big wrestling cities like Houston and San Antonio and in every little town they could get to on weekly tours around Texas.
And they happened to be the prototype for a new kind of wrestler. No more would the ring be the domain of lumbering ex-football players who locked onto each other for half an hour of grappling. The boys introduced the world to wrestlers built like Greek gods, to high-flying aerial moves and rock and roll ring entrances. Then, in 1980, they started the World Class show, an even bigger step forward. Wrestling shows had always been broadcast with just two static cameras, one long shot, one medium. But Mickey Grant had worked on boxing shows for Don King, and he brought that experience to the Sportatorium. He used up to six cameras, including handheld ones on the ring apron. He put mikes in the turnbuckles and under the mat. And he started taping short segments away from the action, vignettes that fleshed out wrestlers’ personas and gave backgrounds on the feuds. It was the birth of modern televised wrestling, and the old guard, Fritz included, did not like it. They worried it would give away too many secrets. But Grant and Bill Mercer persuaded Fritz to try. It was an immediate success.
After the Freebirds got to Dallas, in late 1982, all of the pieces were in place, and the promotion became the most successful in the country, grossing more than $11 million a year. The World Class show was the second-ranked syndicated program in America, behind only Soul Train, and it showed on eighty stations in the U.S. and in 23 countries. It aired in prime time on Saturday nights in Japan, where All Japan Wrestling didn’t come on until late at night. Back home, Dallas Cowboys players started begging out of autograph sessions at events where the Von Erichs would appear because the lines for the wrestlers outstretched their own. Legend has it that when Japanese tourists rode in Dallas taxis, the most requested destinations were Southfork and the Sportatorium, and there was said to be a lull in the fighting in Lebanon when the Von Erichs were on television.
The World Class success made an impression on an upstart Vince McMahon, who was preparing to take over the Connecticut-based Northeast territory from his ailing father. The wrestling world knew he intended big changes, that he would drop the kayfabe charade to escape the regulatory fees and drug policies that state athletic commissions imposed on real contests, like boxing. Then he’d hook his World Wrestling Federation—now known as World Wrestling Entertainment—up with a national cable network and stretch his territory across the country, creating a sort of major league for wrestling. But he’d need major-league talent, and Dallas was where that talent lay.
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