Bobo Brazil's Wrestling Legacy

Bobo Brazil

Houston Harris was born on July 19, 1924 in Little Rock, Arkansas. He grew up to become Bobo Brazil--the Jackie Robinson of sports-entertainment (professional wrestling). Bobo wasn't the first Black wrestler, but when he signed with the World Wrestling Federation (WWF), Brazil went mainstream to become the sport's first African American megastar.

The six foot, six inch, 270 pounder was playing baseball in the Negro League for The House of David when he was spotted by professional wrestler Joe Savoldi. In 1951, Savoldi suggested Harris give pro-wrestling a try where he could make some real money. At twenty-seven years old, with a wife and a passel of kids to provide for, Harris traveled to Canada from Benton Harbor, Michigan to learn the secrets of the squared circle. Once he knew the fundamentals, Harris began wrestling in small, Canadian and Midwestern venues as Bobo Brazil. 

Before long, he signed with Jack Britton and Bert Ruby of Detroit's Big Time Wrestling. Edward George Farhat, also known in the ring as The (Original) Sheik, bought the organization in 1964. The Sheik and Bobo fought and bled their way through Michigan, Ohio, and Ontario in the longest running feud in professional wrestling. The Sheik was the most hated player in the game. He and Bobo grappled many times over the years trading the United States Heavyweight Champion belt back and forth. In the process, Bobo became a hero to many Black and White wrestling fans who despised The Sheik. His crowd-pleasing, finishing move was the Coco Butt (head butt).

Bobo Brazil was inducted into the WWF class of 1994 by his personal friend Ernie "The Cat" Ladd. Houston "Bobo Brazil" Harris died January 20, 1998 at Lakeland Medical Center in St. Joseph, Michigan after suffering a series of strokes. He was the father of six children.

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Born Wayde Douglas Bowles on August 24, 1944 in Amherst, Nova Scotia, Canada, Bowles changed his name to Rocky Johnson when he signed with the National Wrestling Alliance (NWA) in Atlanta, Georgia. His ring name was a tribute to his two favorite boxing greats--Rocky Marciano and Jack Johnson. At six foot/two, 262 pounds, Rocky Johnson cut an imposing figure, but like all Black professional wrestlers before him, Johnson endured racial slurs and battled racism early in his career.

                           

Rocky Johnson with announcer "Mean" Gene Okerlund

"There is a lot of racism in professional wrestling then and now. Only now, it is more covered up," Johnson said in a cable TV interview. "I kept myself in shape, (but) the stuff going on in the South, I wouldn't go for it. They (the promoters) wanted to whip me on TV like a slave, but I said 'No! I came in as an athlete, and I'll leave as an athlete.' They respected me for that."

On December 6, 1974, Rocky Johnson became the first Black Heavyweight World Champion in the state of Georgia. When he teamed up with Tony Atlas, they were known as the Soul Patrol. They were the first Black, tag team champions in the World Wrestling Federation when they defeated the Wild Samoans on December 10, 1983. 

Tony Atlas and Rocky Johnson--The Soul Patrol

Rocky Johnson retired from pro wrestling in 1991 and was inducted in the WWF Hall of Fame in 2008, but before retiring, Rocky Johnson passed the torch to his son Dwayne Johnson when Rocky and his father in law, Peter Maivia, trained Dwayne in 1995 for a career in the family business. After battling a bad cold, Rocky Johnson succumbed to deep vein thrombosis on January15, 2020 at the age of seventy-five.

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Dwayne Douglas Johnson was the son of Rocky "Soulman" Johnson. As a boy, he grew up with the dream of playing in the National Football League (NFL). Dwayne entered The University of Miami on a football scholarship and played on their National Championship team during his freshman year 1991. Along the way, Dwayne earned a bachelor's degree in Criminology and Physiology.

Dwayne's childhood dream of going pro was dashed when he went undrafted in the 1995 NFL Draft. Undeterred, he tried out for the Calgary Stampede of the Canadian Football League. Only two months into his first season, he was cut due to injuries. It was then that Dwayne asked his father to train him for a career in professional wrestling. His grandfather Peter Maivia was a NWA wrestler and his father was a WWF wrestler. At six foot/five, 260 pounds, he had the physique for success in the ring but did he have the heart?

Rocky tried to discourage his son at first. He knew first-hand about the difficulties of being on the road away from family. Dwayne had a college education, something no other male in the family had, but he was determined to wrestle. Rocky told his son he would train him on one condition, "I'm going to train you 150% because that's what it takes to be a champion." Rocky was hard on Dwayne, but he never gave up or complained.

Proud son Dwayne Johnson looks on as his father Rocky Johnson is inducted into the WWF/WWE Hall of Fame in 2008.

The following year, Dwayne Johnson signed his first WWF contract and slowly developed his charismatic, brash charm and boastful, trash-talking personality. As a tribute to his father, Dwayne took on the ring persona of The Rock. Within two years of entering Vince McMahon's WWF, The Rock won his first world championship belt, the first of seventeen titles he would hold in the next nine years. The Rock is considered by many as one of the greatest and most popular professional wrestlers of all time.

In 2004, The Rock resumed his Dwayne Johnson identity to pursue an acting career and establish his own film production company becoming one of the world's highest paid actors. Johnson's first starring role was in The Scorpion King along with other hits to follow like the Fast & Furious franchise and two Jumanji movies to name only a few.

As of 2021, forty-nine-year-old Dwayne Johnson's net worth is estimated to be 320 million dollars. His movies have grossed 10.5 billion dollars worldwide. Johnson has twice made Time magazine's 100 Most Influential People in the World list in 2016 and 2019.

In 2006, Johnson founded the Dwayne Johnson Rock Foundation, a charity that works with children who have illnesses, disorders, and disabilities to improve their self-esteem and help empower their lives. As for Dwayne's boyhood football dreams, they get played out yearly watching the Super Bowl like the rest of us.

Allen Park Wrestler Lou Klein and Protege Heather Feather

Lou Klein

Allen Park, Michigan resident Lou Klein began his pro-wrestling career in 1941 after dominating the Michigan amateur ranks and earning four national titles. In the beginning of his pro-career, Klein donned a mask and wrestled as the Green Hornet so he could earn a living while protecting his amateur standing. For a time, he wrestled with Red Bastien in a tag team, but most of his career he worked as a single performer known to be a "scientific" wrestler. Early on, Klein's tag line was "The Atomic Blond from Detroit" and later in his career "The Man of a Thousand Holds." His signature finish moves were the Boston Crab and the Atomic Drop.

After thirty-six years of competing in the squared circle, Klein retired on July 9, 1977. Later in his career, Klein was known as a developer and promoter of new talent which he would manage into the professional ranks. In addition to teaching wrestling holds, and counter holds, he prepared new-comers for the professional ranks and pro-wrestling's code of Kayfabe--the representation of a staged event as genuine and authentic.

Kayfabe required wrestlers to stay in character in the ring and in public and not give away trade secrets. Kayfabe can be considered a verbal non-disclosure agreement. This three-syllable word is a Pig Latin carny term for "Be Fake" spelled backwards. If anyone came backstage who wasn't in the business for example, security or someone else would shout out "Kayfabe!" and the alert would travel through the ranks. Then, the wrestlers would put on their game faces for the press or whomever the interloper was.

In addition to his gym and wrestling school, Klein owned the local Tastee Freeze on Allen Road. Occasionally in the summer, Klein would set up a ring outside next to his gym or ice cream shop and let the kids play on it. Klein and some of his wrestling cohorts would teach the guys some grappling moves. My Allen Park High School friends Mick Osman and Earl Rennie made pocket money helping set up the ring for local promotions. Jack Ulrich remembers setting up and breaking down rings for Klein in Kingston, Ontario, Canada.

Heather Feather

One of Lou Klein's proteges was Allen Park resident Peggy Jones. He first met Peggy when she was working the counter at the Thunderbowl bowling alley. At 5' 10" and weighing over 300#, Peggy always stood out from the crowd at North Junior High and suffered more than her share of verbal abuse and body shaming. Klein approached her about coming to the gym and begin training for a possible new career.

She did and four months later, Klein--acting as Peggy's manager--introduced her to Big Time Wrestling promoter Eddie (The Sheik) Farhat. What Peggy lacked in speed and wrestling prowess, she made up in bulk and strength. But there were two things Peggy needed to go pro--a gimmick and a stage name.

For a gimmick, Farhat had Peggy primarily wrestle men as a parody of feminism and the growing woman's equal rights movement of the 1970s. For a stage name, Farhat came up with Heather Feather. She wrestled throughout the Midwest, but Detroit was her home base. Feather would hang ringside during a bout and taunt the male wrestlers trying to shame them into a match. Then in an unscheduled ringside interview with the announcer, she would amplify her challenge making the men look weak and cowardly. The crowd loved it. Heather Feather was the first woman to wrestle and pin a man and soon became a fan favorite.

The Fabulous Moola and her crew.

Her debut match was an eight-woman Battle Royale in Detroit at Cobo Hall. Several of the lady wrestlers with great effort threw the newcomer into the front row seats. Heather Feather was the first woman eliminated that night. Peggy was black and blue for her pains, but she was $200 richer. Her tenure lasted five years from 1973 until 1978. 

Toward the end of her career, Feather wrestled an eight-foot-tall bear in an interspecies match. Victor, the bear, was found as an orphan cub and rescued. Pro-wrestler Tuffy Truesdell purchased the bear and trained him to wrestle humans. Victor wore a muzzle and was declawed. Truesdell and Victor toured the wrestling circuit as a novelty act. The bear was undefeated by over 100 men but could only get a draw against Feather. Once again, she bested the men but left the bear's undefeated record intact.

Heather Feather was one of the featured wrestlers in a wrestling mockumentary called I Like to Hurt People. In a rare break from the Kayfabe code of silence, the film's host Dr. Sonia Freidman asked Feather, "What's a nice twenty-three-year-old-girl doing in this racket?"

Out of character, Peggy answered, "It's really kinda hard to say. There are lots of reasons why I'm in it. Mainly it's a way of proving myself. A way of making me something in life. Have you ever met a girl built like Rosie Grier (famous 1960s football player)? I've been this tall and this weight since I was twelve. I won't lie, it was tough growing up."

When Dr. Freidman asked Feather how long she thought she would last in her chosen profession, she answered truthfully, "A girl can only last as long as she looks young. As soon as she starts looking old, she's done for. A man can do this until he drops dead in the ring." It wasn't long after this candid interview that Heather Feather was released from her wrestling contract. Kayfabe had been violated.

 

After her pro-wrestling career, Peggy Jones (Heather) became a mother and raised her daughter in Taylor, Michigan. She died of cancer in 2014.

https://fornology.blogspot.com/2018/05/detroits-wrestling-titans.html

Detroit's Wrestling Titans

If you grew up in Detroit in the 1950s through the 1970s, chances are you remember Big Time Wrestling (BTW) on WXYZ--Channel 7 which aired on Saturdays at 3:30 pm until 4:30 pm with announcer Fred Wolfe. BTW captured the rough and tumble world of Detroit's blue collar angst. Detroit wrestling fans had a strong work ethic, respect for fair play, and a hatred for dirty tactics and cheating. They particularly loved grudge matches, loser leaves town matches, and wars of attrition which could last twenty minutes or more. BTW wrestlers were not pretty boys from the West Coast or elite snobs from the East Coast--they were blue collar heroes who had to work for a living. 

Dick, the Bruiser

Early wrestling story lines involved coastal invaders coming into our town bragging how tough they were. They would abuse and destroy our mid-level wrestlers trying to climb the ranks and then turn and insult the crowd proclaiming Motor City wrestlers weren't that tough. They would leave town, then a month or so later, these sore winners would return to wrestle our top guys and get their clocks cleaned. A notable exception to this rule was the most hated wrestler in the business--Dick, the Bruiser. He beat the hell out of everyone. In and out of the ring.

Leaping Larry Chene (not Shane)

Some of Detroit's fan favorites were Lou Klein--the Man of a Thousand Holds, Dick "Mr. Michigan" Garza, Haystack Calhoun, Bobo Brazil, Ernie Ladd, Killer Kowalski, George "The Animal" Steele, the Junkyard Dog, and my favorite, Leaping Larry Chene.

Chene (Arthur Lawrence Beauchene) was tragically killed at the age of thirty-five in an early morning car accident on October 2, 1964 while returning home to Michigan from a match in Davenport, Iowa the previous night. Leaping Larry Chene was a credit to his profession and sorely missed by his fans.

That same year, Edward Farhat and his father-in-law bought the BTW television rights and secured exclusive rights to promote wrestling events at Cobo Arena for a mere $50,000. Edward Farhat, better known as The Sheik, was the most hated wrestler in Detroit. Farhat's character usually came out dressed in a robe and an Arab headress. He wore wrestling shoes with exaggerated pointed toes and had a camel printed on his wrestling shorts. The Sheik was the focus of Detroit's frustration with the Middle Eastern oil crisis, and The Sheik did everything he could but set a Ford Pinto on fire in the middle of the squared circle to incite the crowd against him.

Rocky Johnson is Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson's father.

The Sheik's signature move was the Camel Clutch, but he was also known for "blinding" his opponents with his patented magic fire ball effect. Once his opponent was disoriented, The Sheik would attack him mercilessly and stretch him out for a win. Usually, medics stood by to roll the loser out of the arena on a gurney while the crowd gave the man a howling ovation. As a kid, I was mesmerized by the fireball. A few years later, I discovered that magician's flash paper could be purchased at any magic or novelty shop in town.

The Sheik with his manager Dave Burzynski.

 

Under Farhat's leadership, BTW matches suddenly became edgier and bloodier with ethnic overtones. In the 1970s and 1980s, Detroit faced the oil crisis and stiff competition from foreign competitors. Farhat imported Japanese wrestlers like Kenuke Honda and Toyota Matahashi to exploit this economic reality. 

The Japanese tag team worked their way up the ranks until they won the BTW title belt by throwing Sumo salt into the eyes of their opponents--shades of The Sheik's fire ball move. Then, in front of rabid Detroit fans, the Japanese wrestlers destroyed the officially sanctioned title belt and replaced it with one made in Japan. They bragged their belt was better quality and less expensive. Those were fighting words in Detroit and the new champions were led out of the arena under police protection and left the country with the belt--as the narrative went. In professional wrestling, the line between reality and fantasy gets blurred, and if you can get the crowd fired up, that's money in the bank.

The Camel Clutch

When the national economy went belly up in 1980, BTW could no longer draw big crowds to fill Cobo Arena or other big venues in the Midwest. The advent of cable TV and two national wrestling federations--one out of Stamford, Connecticut and the other out of Atlanta, Georgia--helped spell the death knell for regional promotions. Professional wrestling went dark in Detroit.

Alex Karris meets Dick, the Bruiser at Lindell's AC sports bar: https://fornology.blogspot.com/2017/02/alex-karras-and-dick-bruisers-detroit.html