Pro Wrestling Hall Of Fame: The Heels (eBook)

1. 'NATURE BOY' BUDDY ROGERS You still see him everywhere. You see him every time VinceMcMahon swaggers down the runway to the ring on TV. You seehim every time someone clamps on a figure-four leglock. You see him every time someone screams out, 'NA-ture Boy!' You see him everywhere because wrestlers, promoters, and fans all agree that he was the most imitated, most talented, most... everything heel in history. The ironic thing is that there wasn't much original about Buddy Rogers. His name was lifted from Charles 'Buddy' Rogers, an actor and jazz musician who starred in Wings, the first winner of an Academy Award for best picture. 'Nature Boy' was a number one hit on the Billboard charts in 1948. The sneer, the strut, the pretty boy looks... those were parts of wrestling almost from the start. It's just that all-time greats like Don Leo Jonathan agree Rogers packaged them like no wrestler before. 'He really wasn't that good of a hand, but he was a hell of a showman. He could draw houses where other guys couldn't. He just had that thing. He had a way of making those people want to kill him, and he could do it just with a look, a posture,' Jonathan said. Billy Darnell, Rogers' friend and greatest rival, tells of an incident in the early 1950s that puts it all in perspective. 'In those days, in Hollywood, you could go in small clubs and see the best entertainment in the world, and never spend a dime for a cover charge or anything. At the Brown Derby, Nat King Cole was there and he had his trio. So I walk in, and I'm sitting down, and there's Nat up there playing something. And Buddy Rogers walked in the door. It was an amazing thing. The spotlight went over to Buddy Rogers, and Nat looked over and saw him and nodded, and he transposed the song he was playing right into 'Nature Boy.'' Rogers was the sport's top gate attraction for the better part of two decades, until he lost the World Wide Wrestling Federation world title to Bruno Sammartino in May 1963, and essentially ended his active career. In his most famous match, he drew a record 38,600 to Chicago's Comiskey Park in June 1961, when he beat Pat O'Connor for the National Wrestling Alliance championship. While he served some duty as a fan favorite, especially early in his career under his real name of Herman 'Dutch' Rohde, he was meant to be a heel. 'Buddy Rogers loves being hated. He loves being hated almost as much as he loves being Buddy Rogers,' observed famed Chicago sportswriter Dave Condon. As Rogers himself once explained, 'It's bread and butter, and cake, too, for me. The more the fans hate me, the more money they pay in hopes of seeing me whipped. This I enjoy.' To say the least, Rogers was not everybody's cup of tea. Many of his contemporaries, while acknowledging his skills, viewed him as a schemer and conniver who knew his position in wrestling, and went to great lengths to protect it. 'He was strictly a con man from A to Z. Everything he did was bullshit to keep you down and keep himself up, but he was always laughing and joking along like he was normal,' said Bob Orton Sr., Rogers' tag team partner in the early 1960s in the Northeast. 'What he was doing was thinking, 'How can I screw this guy?' I could read him like a book and remember every word.' Opponent Jackie Fargo called him 'Bud-ro,' and felt the same as Orton,...