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.
IN THE SUMMER OF 1983, the center of the pro wrestling universe, in terms of time and space, was indisputably Friday night, Dallas, Texas, in a white, corrugated-tin coliseum called the Sportatorium. Grandfathered out of city building codes thanks to the political connections of Fritz Von Erich, the imperious don who ran Texas wrestling, it stood defiantly—exposed wiring, iffy plumbing, no AC—in an increasingly sketchy area near where Industrial Boulevard runs under Interstate 35. At one time it had housed the Big D Jamboree radio broadcasts, and Elvis Presley played there in 1955. But even then the stage was a converted ring. The Sportatorium was a wrestling arena, and the frenzy that greeted the King seemed sleepy compared with the bedlam wrought in the eighties when Fritz’s three golden-boy sons, Kevin, David, and Kerry, would stride into battle.
The matches were taped every other week for the Von Erichs’ internationally syndicated show, World Class Championship Wrestling, and on TV days, producer Mickey Grant and his team would be the first in. They’d park their $450,000 network-caliber production truck outside the old barn, while inside crew ran cables, set up cameras, and miked the ring. In the Sportatorium lobby, concession stand workers stocked a state fair menu—cotton candy, popcorn, corn dogs, Jack’s Famous French Fries, and sodas—and then undertook the all-important count of the beer: Three thousand cans of Bud, Schlitz, and Coors, something for everybody, that would later be poured into plastic cups so they’d do less damage when hurled to the ring.
Fritz would show up in the late afternoon. In his mid-fifties, he was still built like that piece of lumber that Buford Pusser clubbed hillbilly mob bosses with in Walking Tall: long, blond, solid, and unforgiving, with jug ears and a foghorn voice. He jumped into the ring on occasion, sometimes in the aid of his boys and sometimes to fight his own matches, but most Friday nights he’d just work a little color commentary with announcer Bill Mercer, the former Dallas Cowboys broadcaster who was the voice of World Class.
The card started at eight o’clock, and the doors opened at seven, but fans got in line as early as five. It was not a traditional wrestling crowd. Beat-up pickup trucks shared the parking lot with Mercedes, Lincolns, and Cadillacs, and scalpers walked between them selling $12 tickets for upwards of $50. As the crowd grew, Grant would seek fans who made good TV, smartly dressed professionals or smiling females, to fill the front rows.
There were all manner of females. Junior high girls who wrote about the Von Erichs in their diaries, high school girls with photos taped up in their lockers, young moms wanting out of the house, recently reborn divorcées, even grandmothers. Of the 3,700 people who’d fill a sold-out Sportatorium, fully 70 percent were female.
It was Von Erich beefcake that they came to see. Kevin was 26, the barefooted acrobat with a comic book superhero’s body, who did things in the ring no one had ever seen. He could fly off a turnbuckle, land with his legs in a scissors hold around an opponent’s waist, and hold himself there, his body parallel to the ground. He was like a buck knife thrown and sticking in a tree. David, 25, was a tall, redheaded cowboy and the trio’s true leader. His mind worked like his dad’s, and he was the best technical wrestler and talker on the mike. But Kerry, 23, was by far the fans’ favorite. With long blond hair, green eyes, and a body cut like a stone pyramid stood on its tip, he looked like Conan the Barbarian, but bigger. (So much bigger, in fact, that Arnold Schwarzenegger, who played Conan on-screen, once refused to be photographed shirtless with Kerry.) And he had a brilliant streak of dumb-jock charm. One night, he was spotted in a dressing room putting black shoe polish on his feet before a televised match. His dad had forbidden him to use Kevin’s barefoot gimmick, and Kerry hoped that by painting his feet black, Fritz wouldn’t notice.
After spending the afternoon playing video games, they’d sneak in a Sportatorium back door around seven to dress in their dad’s cavernous office upstairs. They’d do short warm-ups around Fritz’s desk, muscle-against-muscle stuff, with one brother trying to do curls while another pressed down on his hands. Their two younger brothers would always pop in. Mike was nineteen and a dead ringer for David but fresh out of Lake Dallas High School, where shoulder injuries had kept him from playing sports after the tenth grade. Thirteen-year-old Chris was the baby, the brother who didn’t look like a Von Erich. Treatment for chronic asthma had left him stunted and round. He stood a puffy five feet five. The five of them were one another’s best friends, the three overgrown kids who were hooked on the fans’ adulation and the two younger brothers who looked on with envy.
The boys would head downstairs to the main dressing room a little before showtime. The scene was surreal: a good-sized room with wood panels, some benches, and eighteen or so huge men in Speedos, some playing cards, others oiling their bodies, doing push-ups, or receiving injections of painkillers into aching joints. All of them were slipping into personas that matched their ring names: Bruiser Brody, Abdullah the Butcher, the Great Kabuki, King Kong Bundy, Gorgeous Jimmy Garvin, and the Von Erichs’ mortal enemies, the Fabulous Freebirds—Southern-fried muscleheads Michael Hayes, Terry Gordy, and Buddy Roberts.
There was a TV in the dressing room to monitor the ring, but the wrestlers didn’t need it to sense the crowd building; motorists on the highway could hear the noise in their cars. About an hour into the taping, the house lights would go down, and the darkness would be dotted by the cherry tips of hundreds of lit cigarettes.
There were two doors into the arena from the dressing room, so that opponents appeared to enter the ring from different rooms. When Lynyrd Skynyrd started blaring, the Freebirds came first, strutting through a shower of beer cups, spare change, small batteries, and boos.
Then the razor-sharp guitar of Ted Nugent’s “Stranglehold” would blast overhead, and the room would erupt. When drums threw the song into gear half a minute later, a Von Erich kicked open the good guys’ door and began the procession to the ring. Fans poured from the stands as if someone had yelled “Fire!” Circled by bodyguards, the boys still needed five solid minutes to negotiate the fifteen yards to the ring. Little kids screamed for their autographs, grown men slapped their backs, and women would hand them flowers and kiss them on the mouth, pat their rears and grasp at their fronts.
When they’d reach the ring, Kevin would grab the top rope and throw himself over, then run to a corner, jump flat-footed to the top turnbuckle, and balance there, soaking in the crowd. Kerry would climb through the ropes and stand in the middle of the ring, staring down the Freebirds and waiting for direction from David, who, at six seven, stepped over the ropes, barking instructions. As loud as Nugent was playing, by the time the lights were back up, you couldn’t hear the music over the shrieking girls. The Von Erichs looked as if they owned not just Dallas but the world.
But of course, if you know anything of the Von Erichs, you know they owned nothing for long. The next February, David died suddenly in a hotel room in Japan. Then, in April 1987, Mike killed himself with sleeping pills. Four and a half years later, Chris followed suit with a pistol shot to the head. And a year and a half after that, Kerry shot himself through the heart.
KEVIN IS THE ONLY ONE OF FRITZ’S SONS who is alive today. He’s 48 and living on 137 acres near Lake Dallas, not far from the spread where he grew up with his brothers. He goes by Adkisson now, the family’s real name. But though he retired ten years ago, he’s still a Von Erich.
He made his living in a sport that most people realize is staged, but his body shows very real wear and tear. His toes no longer face the same direction, the effect of twenty years of fighting barefoot against two- and three-hundred-pound men. Still typically shoeless, he points to a scar on his right foot, a trophy from a dropkick to the mouth of Freebird Buddy Roberts. “That U shape is the dental chart of Buddy’s top row of teeth. I opened up my foot all the way to the bone.” He lost two back teeth of his own, dislocated every finger, and had the back of his head opened in a match at the Cotton Bowl, when Gentleman Chris Adams misjudged a full swing with a folding metal chair. There were three knee surgeries, so many concussions that he hears a constant, high-pitched ringing in his ears, and enough damage to his lower back that he sits in a hot tub for half an hour most mornings to loosen it up. When you see him walk today, you sense that he’s been through the wringer. He still keeps on the balls of his feet—he’ll always be an athlete—but rather than looking ready to pounce, he moves like someone who’s been pounced on.
FACEBOOK
RSS
TUMBLR
TM
Read Later