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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In the fall of 1984, McMahon met with Fritz. Details are sketchy—McMahon would not return calls for comment, and Fritz died in 1997—but the story goes that McMahon came to Dallas pitching a merger. Skeptics who knew the two say that the egos involved make such a scenario unthinkable. And, in fact, no merger took place. McMahon kept his WWF billions to himself. But the story from Fritz’s former employees is that Fritz turned McMahon down, that he was too loyal to the system to create a promotion that would put his friends out of business. And Fritz believed that his own promotion would outlast McMahon’s.
His confidence seemed well placed; his boys were wrestling’s first rock stars. But when they were out of the ring and in towns where Fritz couldn’t see them, they started acting like it. They had women clawing at their hotel room doors wherever they stayed. The boys advanced from trusty painkillers to far more glamorous drugs. They started enjoying a life that would have worn Aerosmith out. It wasn’t consistent with their white-knight image, but when they occasionally got caught, the image didn’t suffer. Instead, it bailed them out. In June 1983 Kerry was arrested at DFW airport on the way home from Mexico. In a supremely boneheaded move, he’d taken a picture of his new wife while they were going through customs, something frequent international travelers, as Kerry was, know better than to do. He was wearing a karate outfit. Newspaper reports said he was carrying hundreds of pills and a small bag of unidentified powder. But he was convicted of only a misdemeanor possession of marijuana. Friends concluded that Fritz had pulled some strings at the courthouse. Fans believed Kerry had been set up by the Freebirds.
Then, in February 1984, just a few months before he was scheduled to win the world championship belt, David died suddenly on a tour in Japan. Newspaper reports ran the family’s version of the death: An autopsy had found acute enteritis, and David’s intestines had burst while he was sleeping. But when the wrestlers who’d discovered the body got back to the States, word quickly spread that he’d been found with a bottle of Crown Royal in one hand and a bottle of the sleeping pill Placidyl in the other. Whether the truth lay in one version or the other, or somewhere in between, was never determined.
Nearly four thousand fans attended David’s funeral service in Denton, many of them listening on speakers set up outside the church. A who’s who of wrestlers was there, although the Von Erichs’ ring enemies paid their respects from afar. “We were told not to go by the front office,” said Gorgeous Jimmy Garvin, the unofficial fourth Freebird. “And given those circumstances, I don’t care if you’re my best friend. If you’re dead and you’re my opponent, I’m not going. That’s kayfabe.”
FINGERS POINT IN A LOT of directions when people try to understand the rest of the Von Erich story. The favorite explanation is that Fritz drove the boys too hard. Fritz himself blamed a “Von Erich curse.” Some friends talk about a suicide cycle, how when one family member takes his own life, it becomes a viable alternative for the family members who are left. Some want to blame wrestling itself. They hold up the rash of wrestlers who died young in the late eighties and early nineties. As part of that theory, some wonder about steroids, which Kerry and Chris were known to have used heavily. One family friend talked about pain-pill addiction, wrestling’s main dirty secret. The injuries that nagged wrestlers as they traveled from town to town made painkillers a necessity, or at least a very hot commodity. Doctors wrote them prescriptions as readily as wrestlers signed autographs. Kevin says pain pills are like fish hooks: “They look harmless, but they have little barbs, and it’s easy to get hooked.” They played a role in the deaths of each of the boys but Jackie.
Surely all these things contributed to who the Von Erichs were. But it was when that reality collided with the boys’ saintly image that dealing with the real world became too much to bear. They were billed as unbeatable, all-American, born-again kids. There wasn’t much room for being merely human.
A week after David’s funeral, Fritz and his sons taped an interview for a special memorial episode of World Class. Sitting quietly with his sons in a shady spot by the lake, Fritz announced that Kerry would take David’s place in the upcoming title match and win the championship in honor of Dave. And he said the duty of filling David’s boots would fall to Mike. “That was an ugly part,” says Kevin. “Kerry and I did not want to get in the ring. We were mourning David’s death. But it was a family business, and Dad was the business manager.”
Mike was the brother who’d never wanted to wrestle. He and Chris were so much younger that they had grown up as their own entity. Mike was a mama’s boy and fairly unnerved when, at age five, he was introduced to baby brother Chris. According to Doris, she cured that by ignoring the baby when she brought him home. She told Mike that no one wanted Chris, so Mike took it upon himself to become Chris’s protector. As the two entered their teens, they grew even closer, tied together in part by their failure to imitate their brothers’ athletic success. Mike took up guitar, and Chris played drums and drew Native American scenes. But they did enjoy the Von Erich fame. With Kerry as their role model, they both took advantage of the drugs and female attention that trickled their way.
But neither would ever think of letting the family down, and having beefed up to a respectable 190 pounds, Mike soon assumed the third spot on the Von Erich bill. But friends say he never looked comfortable in the ring, nor with the fact that he won nearly every match. And his body couldn’t take the punishment. His old shoulder problems returned, and in the summer of 1985 he had to have surgery in Dallas. The procedure seemed to go fine, but a couple days later he returned to the hospital with toxic shock syndrome. His temperature soared to 107, he suffered major organ failure, and in short time, he lost 40 pounds. Although doctors told the family to say their good-byes, somehow he survived.
He was back in the ring just nine months later, in July 1986, but was never the same. He was awkward and unbalanced, and Kevin says that just as Mike realized he could no longer wrestle, he was telling himself he could not give up. He slipped in and out of dark depressions and started drinking heavily and taking lots of pills. Barbiturates, Valium, Placidyl. One night he was arrested for DWI. Another, he flew into a rage, destroyed a man’s car with his hands, feet, and elbows, and was arrested again. In April 1987 he was picked up for driving under the influence once more, and he was carrying a bottle of pills. When he was released the next morning, he left a note in his apartment apologizing for embarrassing the family and drove out to a spot on Lake Dallas where he’d played as a kid. He climbed into a sleeping bag and took enough Placidyl to ensure he’d never wake up. But to the last minute he still looked out for Chris. In his note he insisted that Chris inherit his scuba gear, and in one of the swim fins, Mike had left a bag of Placidyl for Chris to take when he was ready to get out.
By then the promotion was starting to falter. Kerry had been out of commission for more than a year. In April 1986, wearing nothing but a pair of silk track shorts, he’d driven his motorcycle into the back of a police car, all but severing his right foot. When he tried to wrestle that Christmas, he reinjured it so badly it had to be removed, though the family hid the amputation from fans until he died.
The crowds weren’t showing in their earlier numbers. Now when the Von Erichs booked Reunion Arena, a 17,000-seat venue they’d sold out three times in 1983, they were lucky to fill 5,000 seats. Fans had soured on the negative press and on Fritz’s introduction of long-lost cousin Lance, an Arlington boy who fans knew wasn’t a real Von Erich. Adding more pressure, McMahon’s WWF was picking up steam, working the World Class blueprint to make guys like Hulk Hogan national stars.
In 1988 Fritz turned the promotion over to Kevin and Kerry, who was wrestling now on a prosthetic foot. But they developed reputations for no-showing matches. There were widespread rumors that they both had serious drug problems, although Kevin denies that that was true of himself. In 1989 Kerry took his still sizable drawing power and went to fight for McMahon, and the Dallas promotion was absorbed by the Memphis territory.
That left Kevin and Chris to carry the banner in Texas. Chris had always wanted to wrestle, and now the family needed it. But his chances were never realistic. He had built up his body with weight lifting and growth hormones, but he couldn’t grow taller, and his bones were brittle from his asthma medicine. He worked a few matches, but, according to Kevin, after Chris broke his elbow on a throwaway move, a doctor told him that his body would not hold up in the ring. Chris realized he would always be remembered as the Von Erich who couldn’t wrestle. In September 1991 he shot himself in the head.
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