THE FOUR HORSEMEN - OLE ANDERSON ARN ANDERSON RIC FLAIR TULLY BLANCHARD
Posted on 10/24/2005 1:12:17 PM PDT by Rakkasan1
Reggie "The Crusher" Lisowski, a professional wrestler considered a man of the people because of his blue-collar Milwaukee roots, died Saturday night. He was 79.
Lisowski never fully recovered from surgeries to remove a tumor at the base of his brain stem, his son David Lisowski told the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel on Sunday.
"He worked out on his last day. That's how he wanted to go," said David Lisowski of Delafield, Wis. "He did concentration curls and triceps work. He just had to work out every day. ... In his mind, he never thought he was old."
Two surgeries had affected Lisowski's ability to swallow and left him partially paralyzed, his son said.
Promoter Frank DeFalco said Lisowski was a constant in the world of wrestling in a career that went from the 1950s to the 1970s.
"The Crusher was a mainstay in professional wrestling for so long," DeFalco said. "He sold out the Milwaukee Auditorium and Arena on a number of occasions."
Lisowski learned to wrestle while in the Army in Germany during World War II and returned from the war and played semi-professional football, his son said.
(Excerpt) Read more at startribune.com ...
THE FOUR HORSEMEN - OLE ANDERSON ARN ANDERSON RIC FLAIR TULLY BLANCHARD
I want all of you fat overweight, beer drinking rednecks to sit down and shut up...while I take my robe off and show the ladies what a real man looks like. LOL. Rick Rude died of a heart attack at 40. Me thinks steroids or cocaine. Sad.
Talk about flash from the past....I remember him and Verne Ganya among others....We used to watch wrasslin on Sundays in Minnesota way back when we only had one clear and one fuzzy channel on the black and white TV
Who gets to determine who becomes the next champion and who gets to be the good guy and the bad guy ?
It used to be the "booker" the guy who ran the card, now it is usually a team of writers, who script the show much like any other television show. Unfortunately in recent years the writers have no wrestling background, so we get idiotic story lines instead of good matches.
He was a great interview. Always chomping on a cigar, sometimes holding a beer keg on his shoulder, occasionally grunting out a polka. I loved how he talked about "fishin' in Lake Minnitinky."
Bruno Samartino?
Anybody got a pic of Argentino Apollo? Dick the Bulldog Brower? Johnny Weaver? George Weaver? 2 Ton Harris???
Oops, George Becker.
Read Ric Flair's book
Crusher stands for: Colorful Rough Unsurpassed Self-confidence Habitually Exciting Rasslin'
Sammartino has grown so bitter in his old age, I am sorry to say it has taken some shine off his legacy.
He compromised himself in the early WWF epansion to get his son a push, but his son had no charisma. If his son had come along a decade before, wrestling was so different that he probably could have made a living off it.
After that failure, Sammartino grew more alienated from the direction the biz was going. Unlcear if wrestling was 'more real' or 'less fake' his his era, he consistently came across as bitter with each passing year.
I prefer oldschool pro wrestling, don't get me wrong. Sammartino seems unable to cope with the game changing, and also unable to cope with it passing him by.
Wrestling was really cool back then, even though it was before my time. I started my lifelong love affair with the mat wars back in 1975 at the age of 7, back when the WWWF had to be seen at midnight on the spanish speaking channels in the nyc metro area.
The best!!!!!
The original incarnation of the 4 Horsemen, and the second incarnation (dumping Ole for Lex Luger), are my personal faves.
Ole isn't wearing my fave t-shirt in your pic, though. "Evil, Mean & Nasty!"
Wait a minute. Pro rasslin' is fake?
Pro Wrestling, remember, is whatever is promoted under the banner of pro wrestling. Within that context, there is wide latitude as to how it works.
The promoter and the 'booker' (often the promoter) decides who the champions will be, when they win and when they lose. Whether a wrestler is a good guy (a 'face' in lingo), or a bad guy (a 'heel') is also decided by the promoter/booker. This is based on the wrestlers personality, interview ability, skill, charisma, and fan response. Often the fans impact who will be promoted as a face or a heel.
Heavens no!
rasslin' is pro fake! ; )
Who was his tag team partner and who were the two wrestlers he used to call the Dolly Sisters?
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