Less than a month after his brother Mike killed himself because he felt he couldn’t live up to the family name, Kevin Von Erich was working the main event in Fort Worth when something rare happened: a moment of spontaneous, unmediated terror. Pringle wrote in his resignation letter to Fritz Von Erich, “When I read the Penthouse article I knew the dream was over.” Later, Percy Pringle, the circuit’s lead heel manager, left World Class to become a new character in New York: Paul Bearer, manager of The Undertaker. Someone once said it’s a bad sign when you lie with full knowledge that you’re going to get caught. Soon one of the wrestlers discovered otherwise when he picked up the October 1988 issue of Penthouse from a convenience store rack on a road trip, and it was promptly passed around the back seat of the car between spot shows throughout northern and eastern Texas. The boys were told not to worry, that the family’s vast influence had succeeded in getting the story killed. On the bright side, I got the chance to chat in the green room with another guest that night, the distinguished movie director Paul Mazursky.Ī pre-publication story about the article in the Dallas Times Herald naturally led the wrestlers in World Class Championship Wrestling to ask their bosses, Fritz Von Erich and Ken Mantell, about it. The clueless host, Ross Shafer (a game-show emcee who was hired to pick up the pieces of the Late Show after Joan Rivers was fired), read similar verbiage off a cue card while introducing me. The producer’s preparation consisted of urging me to “blow the lid off wrestling,” unencumbered, in all likelihood, by the reading of my article. The publication of the piece was something of a departure for mainstream journalism – even if, as Fritz Von Erich complained in a preemptive and more positive profile in D magazine, my investigation did appear in “a damn pornographic magazine!” Among other things, I was invited to appear on the Late Show, a short-lived competitor to Johnny Carson on the then-fledgling Fox network. The following is adapted from a story that would be selected for the anthology Best Magazine Articles: 1988. Ī Cute Concept Decays into a Macabre Body Count Inquiries for details on ordering autographed copies can be sent to. Those of you interested in Wrestling Babylon can still find it at Amazon. (I think I earlier misstated that it was Chapter 1.) In so doing, I at least get it out there in its authoritative version, including the precede and postscript of its publication as Chapter 2 of my 2007 ECW Press book Wrestling Babylon: Piledriving Tales of Drugs, Sex, Death, and Scandal. With the release of the movie The Iron Claw (which I discussed here and here, and on the Pollock & Thurston podcast last week here, beginning at the 32-minute mark), the floodgates have opened more than ever on online pirate versions of my 1988 Penthouse article about the Von Erich wrestling family, “Born-Again Bashing.”
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |