Lost in the Funhouse_ The Life and Mind of Andy Kaufman - Bill Zehme [26]
Before this and throughout their youthful companionship, there was always TV wrestling—of course, the wrestling! the fights! the matches! oh!—Saturday night grappling cards broadcast from Sunnyside Gardens and beyond, thunderfleshed hulks snarling and bellowing, slamming sweat-slicked torsos against ropes and onto canvas, hair-pulling face-biting blood-spurting throat-stomping eye-gouging jeer-spewing thespianic guys with remarkable coifs and dumb names. And it was—had to be, couldn’t be anything else—a big lie, a phony deal, fabulous fakery probably kind of all-made-up. They were only fooling—in fun—probably. Anyway, this was stuff very very extremely thrilling to behold—loud, bellicose, prancing, giant assholes in heaving combat! It was the only sport that remotely held any appeal for him, so he clung to it proudly and defiantly: “Wrestling is the finest and oldest sport known to man,” he declared many years later. “It’s been around since the caveman, before the ball and the wheel were invented!” Stanley, on son: “He went bananas for wrestling as a kid.” As kid grew, he remained bananas for such. Jimmy Krieger: “We loved to watch Killer Kowalski and Haystack Calhoun—they were the two biggies for a while. Kowalski was just vicious; he once ripped a guy’s ear off, according to legend. [Truth! He stepped on it and off it tore. Kowalski demurred, ‘It was so cauliflowered, it would have fallen off by itself if it had a chance to.’] Haystack Calhoun was the only guy who could beat him, because he was so big and fat that he would just fall on The Killer.” (Haystack, weighing in at six hundred pounds, would happily exult from every ring he trod, “There are going to be a lot of human pancakes around here before I get finished!”) “The meaner they were, the more Andy liked ’em,” said Krieger.
He needed to see them up close, so Stanley or Grandma Pearl would take Andy and Michael (another fan) out to Commack Arena or Suffolk Forum on Long Island, when pro matches came through the territory. “We saw Wild Red Berry and The Kangaroos, ‘Brute’ Barney Bernard [with his sixty-three-inch chest], Cowboy Bob Ellis, Skull Murphy, and Johnny Valentine,” Michael recalled. “Andy’s favorite was Buddy ‘Nature Boy’ Rogers—the blond pretty boy bad guy. He knew how to piss you off. I hated him. But Andy saw past that. He saw how fantastic it was to have everybody hate him—what theater it was.”
The villainous Nature Boy merely became his newest deity. (“Oh—he was, in my opinion, the greatest wrestler of all time! He was to wrestling what Muhammad Ali was to boxing, what Elvis Presley was to rock-and-roll music, in my opinion.”) In 1962, only his second year on the big circuit, Rogers was voted by fans the most unpopular wrestler alive—ahead of the despicable Killer Kowalski and the ruthless Crusher Lisowski. He was also nearly unbeatable, which he flamboyantly made known to all as he preened and posed and strutted (“He invented the strut!”) and demeaned and boasted (“He invented the term ‘I am the greatest!’ He invented ‘I got the brains!’”) and obliterated all sacred rules of sportsmanship. (“I once saw Buddy Rogers beat a guy unconscious so they had to carry him off on a stretcher. Then Buddy kicked the stretcher over. Buddy Rogers knew ways of manipulating a crowd like no one in the world.”) Andy’s fierce devotion to the blond champion was boundless; he told everyone who would listen, “Any friend of Buddy’s is a friend of mine. Any enemy of his is mine, too.” He saw Nature