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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By then Kerry was a mess. Wrestling on the fake foot caused him constant pain, and the combination of painkillers and partying had left him so strung out he often couldn’t talk. He would even show up at the weight room incoherent. He lost his house and left the WWF to enter the Betty Ford Center. He’d try rehab for his drug problem at least twice, but treatment never worked. And he could no longer charm his way off the hook.
In September 1992 he received ten years’ probation for a series of prescription forgeries. He was on his own—his wife had divorced him and taken custody of their daughters—and though he said he was clean, four months later he was picked up for possession of cocaine. On the morning of February 17, he was indicted, and he was certain that the next day, when he was to appear before the judge overseeing his probation, he’d be sent to prison. His attorney assured him that that wouldn’t happen, but Kerry was convinced it would. That afternoon, he went to his dad’s house and found the .44 Magnum he’d given Fritz for Christmas two years before. Then, after hugging his dad and telling him he had some thinking to do, he drove into the woods, sat against a tree, and put a single bullet through his heart.
Gary Hart, who worked on and off for Fritz for nearly twenty years, had as close a view of the saga as anyone not named Adkisson. Five times Fritz hired him, and four times he was fired. Their last conversation came as Hart was finally quitting. It was after Kerry’s foot had been amputated, when the promotion was foundering and the WWF was starting to supplant the old regional scheme.
“I asked the other guys to leave the room, because Fritz and I were getting pretty heated. And I told him, ‘Fritz, this isn’t the Houston promotion coming after us. This is Vince McMahon. And we’re more interested in protecting our image than protecting our business. We’ve got to come totally clean. The only credibility we have is to make Kerry an icon, someone who’s doing something that’s never been done before. Have him stand up and say, “Hey. I f—ed up. But I’ve paid the toll and I’m going to overcome it. I see little kids in wheelchairs and blind people that learn to travel with dogs, and I’m gonna do it too.” That will soften the hearts of the people who have backed away and make them give us one more chance.’
“But Fritz thought that would show weakness. I really believed that with all of the death and drugs and suicide, the rumors and untrue stories were going to become fact.”
THE DAY AFTER ROSS’ SCRIMMAGE, Kevin took me to see Doris. She lives in a Swiss Avenue mansion, whole worlds away from the apartments and trailers where she babied Jackie and Kevin while Fritz was on the road. She said that to make those places livable you had to scrape before you scrubbed. We sat comfortably in a sun-drenched sitting room. Between quotations of Scripture and drags on her Salems—Doris smokes cigarettes like kids pop M&M’s—she presented nothing of the shrinking violet you would have thought Fritz required.
She’d divorced him after Chris died. They were living on a ranch outside Tyler then, in a 10,000-square-foot house that she had designed. But they had rooms on different floors of their dream home. She said that in the kitchen there was a cartoon she had stuck on the fridge that showed a man with a cup of coffee sitting at a table and a woman staring at him. The caption read “I thought you were up; the birds had stopped singing.”
After their split and then Kerry’s death, they grew even further apart. In July 1997 Fritz suffered a stroke, and doctors discovered that cancer had filled most of his body. Doris saw him before he died, less than two months later, as did Kevin and a few old friends. But he spent most of his time with Mullinax, recounting the stories that constitute Master of the Iron Claw. In the book Fritz describes how each of his boys asked him to let him start wrestling and the pain that he felt when each of them died. But it’s also filled with details of near-death experiences in the ring, some his own and others the victims of his feared Iron Claw. To the end, he never broke kayfabe.
When Kevin and I sat down with Doris, she muted the volume on a financial news show and sounded like a broker herself while discussing her stocks. But when she and Kevin started reminiscing about the boys, her tone softened and her cadence slowed, and Kevin’s changed too.
“I remember one night,” she began, “it was freezing cold. Mike was leaving the Sportatorium after a match, and when he got outside, this man came up to him and said, ‘Do you see that woman over there? She was just beaten by her husband and has no place to go.’ When the man left, Mike approached her. He said, ‘You don’t know me, but I want you to have this.’ And he gave her all the money that he had. Then he said, ‘Call a taxi, get yourself a hotel room for tonight, and in the morning I want you to look in the directory and call one of those battered-woman shelters.’ And then he took his coat off and gave it to her.”
“You know, Mom, Kerry was like that too, and so was David,” added Kevin.
“And so were you. When Kevin saw somebody that needed money, he would pretend to drop it—”
“A lot of people won’t take money,” said Kevin.
“Yes, they’re too proud. So he would say, ‘Excuse me, is this yours?’”
“Ah, Mom.”
“Well, Kevin, I’m just telling the truth.”
“I’ll take my reward in heaven,” said Kevin. “I wish I’d done it more.”
I WAS BACK AT KEVIN’S house a couple months later, on a day in July that Kevin said would have been David’s forty-seventh birthday. It was the end of the day, and while Pam was trying to figure out what to feed the family for dinner, Kevin and I finally talked directly about what happened to his brothers.
“Mike should have never been a wrestler. He should have been off somewhere playing his guitar.
“I loved Chris, but I wasn’t around him that much. When I was, every word out of his mouth was a put-down, of other people and himself. So I spent a lot of time correcting him, trying to motivate him, and he made me out to look like Ward Cleaver. But somebody had to say ‘ten hup.’
“Kerry wasn’t addicted to any one drug. He liked drugs. It wasn’t that he liked coke or ice or meth. He just liked that life of parties and drugs.”
Then we got around to Jackie and David. “I don’t remember being told anything when Jackie died, just that he was in heaven. It’s almost like God protects children from grief. I’m sure I did plenty of playing that day, even though my brother was gone. It’s not like losing brothers when you get older. With David, it was like a really low kick, terrible. To this day I’m not over that. Every death after it was just ‘Oh, this again.’ Losing David—that one kind of burned down the mission, you know?”
It’s the kind of history that’s hard even to hear. But Kevin discussed it as if it was just part of life.
He said he had been the one who’d discovered Chris’s body. Fritz and Doris had found a suicide note in Chris’s room and, doubting he meant it, sent Kevin to talk to him. He found Chris lying on top of the highest hill on the East Texas ranch, near a place where Chris kept arrowheads he’d found.
“I thought, ‘Oh, man, he’s taken a bunch of pills or something.’ So I put my hand behind him to lift him up and said, ‘Come on, Chris. Stand up, walk around.’ My thumb went into his head. You could’ve put a coffee cup in that hole. There was no doubt—”
Just then, Kevin’s daughter Jill spoke. She’d been standing in the hallway, and neither Kevin nor I had seen her.
“Wow,” she said. “I’ve never heard that story.”
“Well, baby,” said Kevin, “it’s not one you tell at the dinner table.”
Jill walked off. Kevin continued.
“That’s where I got the joke I tell that the last thing that crossed Chris’s mind before he died was my thumb. I know that sounds horrible. I’m sure I sound like a nutty guy right now. But I guarantee you that at one time, there were five more just like me. That’s the way we deal with grief. It keeps you from being a victim.
“I wouldn’t want anyone to feel sorry for me. What am I doing today? I watch Ross play football; my kids call and tell me they love me; my investments do well. I have a good life, and I’m planning on having a lot more. When people say, ‘How do you do it?’ the answer is pretty simple, really. If you don’t have any choice, then it’s easy to deal with. What else are you going to do? Just drop dead and sink into the ground like rain?”
That night, Kevin had one shot of Crown Royal in honor of Dave, as he does every February 10 and July 22. Then he went to bed.
The next day he got up and went about his business and life, like that’s just what you do.
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