02.03.2007, 01:34
Of all the brothers, only Chris truly loved wrestling -- and yet he was the one who would never make a career in the family business. Chris was too small too wrestle -- a mere 5-foot-5 and 175 pounds -- too frail from asthma and the medication that stunted his growth and made his bones fragile.
To the rest of the brothers, all of whom had athletic aspirations outside the ring -- wrestling was just a business, a way to kill time during off seasons. They were forced into the ring only after circumstances went against them. But Chris wanted to wrestle -- if only he could , Kevin says, he could not.
"He had so much pressure, but not from us," Kevin says. "He had pressure on himself and maybe from the fans, too. Sometimes fans can be cruel. They don't know what they're doing, but they can say things like, 'Hey, are you going to be a wrestler when you grow up?' and things like that. They would just kill Chris, because he never got tall and healthy."
Kevin recalls one night in Little Rock, during one of Chris' rare appearances in the ring, how he taught his younger brother to perform a drop kick-- a Von Erich specialty. The brothers would leap into the air, get parallel with the mat, wrap their legs around an opponent's neck and send them crashing to the canvas. Somehow, in the middle of violence real or imagined, the Von Erichs always seemed to fall with grace.
During a match in Texas shortly after that lesson, Chris and Kevin were a tag team, and Chris was in the ring. Kevin recalls how Chris hit his chest, then raised his arm to block the man's retaliatory shot. When the guy hit him, Chris' arm snapped -- it was broken, the bone so brittle that the prednisone he was taking for his asthma.
"I heard a pop, and I said, 'Chris, tag me,' and he goes, 'No, wait, I'm got to do my drop kick,'" Kevin recalls. "I said, 'No, Chris, no!' Well, a drop kick would have been perfect, but he couldn't do it. I could tell his leg was broken. But he threw his drop kick anyway, and he fell and broke his shin bone, too -- the radius and the ulna. Broke 'em both. It was too bad that it just wasn't to be for Chris. He had heart, though."
Chris became too weak and too injured to wrestle. In September 1991, after being up on cocaine and Valium, the 21-year-old took his own life with a 9mm pistol. He killed himself on the family's farm, a mere 300 feet from the home Jack had built for his wife. Kevin found his brother lying near a trove of old Indian relics that Chris and Mike had once collected.
There was also a suicide note, which read: "It's nobody's fault. I'll be with my brothers."
In 1993, his mother told The Dallas Morning News that Chris' death was, in all likelihood, almost an accident. She believed he was "toying with the weapon when the gun went off," and she didn't believe "what he said in the note he left was with conviction."
Kevin also never thought Chris meant to kill himself. To believe that a beloved brother had died by his own hand was just too difficult for him to.
By the early 1990s, Kevin Von Erich was almost wiped out by wrestling. The business had changed dramatically since the birth of Jack's WCCW. Now he had the mighty WWF and WCW to contend with, each with their cushy cable-TV deals and marketing gimmicks. The regional promoters were dying in the main, losing their audiences and their wrestlers--to the Vince McMahons and Ted Turners of the wrestling world.
Jack had enough of wrestling after Mike's death. He no longer wanted to book his sons, and his business sense began to fail him. Fed up, he turned the promotion over to Kevin and Kerry--who then teamed up with a Tennessee based promoter named Jerry Jarrett. The brothers ended up suing Jarrett, claiming he had swindled money from the WCCW and cut the brothers out of bookings in the very organization they had helped build. Jarrett said that he had rescued the WCCW, that the brothers weren't showing up for bookings, and that when they did, "they were not in a physical or mental shape to wrestle."
The suit was eventually dropped, but Jarrett likely had a point. Kerry was then in the WWF, and Kevin had exhausted himself trying to keep up the promotion in his brothers' absence. Sometimes he would wrestle three times a night in three different small towns; he became the franchise, the sole heir. Either Kevin fulfilled the obligations, or the family went broke. He found himself shooting up more and more with painkiller. He limped during the day and faked his way to victory in the ring. He took matches he shouldn't have, risking more concussions and injuries.
"Money was the only thing I got out of it," Kevin says. "But money was good, because it was money for the family. The family was hurtin'. With my brothers going down, the family needed me. So you just dig down and get it up, pull it out."
A bad concussion caused Kevin to be banned from wrestling in Texas, so he decided he'd just fight in Japan instead. "Over there, there are all those shooters," recalls Kevin, "and they like to kick you in the ribs and in the head. Well, the first night, the first match, my back was to the mat...and I got kicked right in the ear, and it was a terrible. And so I had headaches, I was throwing up all the time, so the Jatpanese matches are what made me get out of it."
Kerry was also in no shape to wrestle, much less walk. The motorcycle accident he suffered in 1986 had cost him his foot--and, in the process, turned him into a drug addict. By 1991, his wife of a decade, Cathy, left him and took their two daughters. She demanded he pay $2,500 a month in child support--which was nowhere near what he was spending on cocaine.
He was arrested in 1992 in Richardson for forging prescriptions for Vicodin and Valium. After a stint in the Betty Ford Clinic, he received a 10-year suspended prison sentence. Four months later, on January 13, 1993, the cops pulled him over and found cocaine and a syringe in his car.
February 18, 33-year-old Kerry went out to his father's house, secretly took a pistol he had given to Jack as a Christmas present, borrowed his, and drove out into the mesquite. He put a single .44-caliber bullet in his heart.
Kerry had warned Kevin he was going to kill himself--though Kevin couldn't bring himself to warn his father. Why upset the old man if Kerry was just kidding? But it wasn't as though Kerry hid his suicidal longings: He gave hints, left notes, and whispered to those around him that he was thinking of ending his life. But no one believed someone as strong as Kerry, who was the closest of all the sons to Jack, would actually become the thirdboy to kill himself. Such things just don't--can't--happen. Only they did.
The last time Kevin wrestled in Dallas was shortly after Kerry's death. The management at the Sportatorium scheduled a Kerry Von Erich memorial match and asked Kevin to attend, though he wanted no part of it. He was sick of, sick to death of it. His family had disappeared in just a few short years--no way in hell he was going near the Sportatorium, a place invested with memories that were beginning to rot.
"I sure hated that, but I did come back and wrestle," Kevin says. "It was hard to get into that ring. I can't explain it. It was hard to do it...It brought up those memories of the brothers and all that." t
After his career ended, Kevin spent much of his time with his family and his father, watching the legend fade into shadow. Doris and Jack were divorced in July 1992, a year before Kerry's death, and Kevin could never figure out how Jack had withstood losing his family. Although Jack had lost so much, he had still held onto his home in Denton County and a net worth estimated at more than $600,000.
On July 25 of this year, Jack suffered a stroke and was diagnosed with brain cancer. He knew he didn't have long to live, and he welcomed death, said he was anxious for the chance to see his sons again.
As always, Kevin was there for his father, even though Jack, though never in much pain, was "hard to be around," fluctuating between being moody and happy. Jack and Kevin rarely spoke about the many tragedies they had both experienced -they didn't have to.
On September 8, Kevin and Jack were at Jack's house watching Monday Night RAW when, during the fourth quarter, Jack began suffering enough for him to call the nurse to administer morphine. Jack slept throughout the rest of the day, then died quietly and quickly on Wednesday.
"He got out with no pain at all, and you have to think that's a good thing," Kevin says. "I've visited people that were suffering so bad it would take me days to get over it. But see, like, I'm telling you all this sad stuff. I am sure you've got sad stuff too."
Now Kevin begins the task of collecting that sad stuff and showing it to the world. He and Mike's ex-wife are now assembling the family history and putting it on the Website, which is located, appropriately enough, at.http://www.vonerich.com. There, Kevin will provide pictures and bios of his brothers and father, celebrating their place in pro-wrestling history--not the tragedies, he hopes, but as heroes. He will sell old videotapes of the brothers and Fritz; Jack had left behind hundreds of black-and-white reels and old wrestling films, which Kevin one day hopes to market on the Website.
"Someone asked me if I wanted to do the Website as a way to keep my brothers," Kevin says. "I said, `No, not necessarily.' I just think it was a hell of a wrestling show, and I'd like people to see it."
Kevin often says that when people first meet him these days, they treat him as though he is "a ghost." There are those who wonder why he is not dead or how he kept from becoming another dead Von Erich. That is why he is willing, though not necessarily happy, to rehash the past one more time. If nothing else, he, maybe someone can learn something from his tragic story. Meanwhile, he is still trying to figure it out for himself.
"I'm from the country, and last winter, there were persimmons growing on the trees," Kevin recalls. "Well, persimmons drop off during the winter. They fall to the ground and rot. The wind was blowing hard on this one persimmon, and it hadn't fallen off--and it was the dead of winter. I was thinking,`I'm like that persimmon. I'm not going to let go of the vine. The wind's, it's killing me, but I'm not going to let go.'
"I didn't have a choice. What was I supposed to do? Lay down and die? I'm a married man. I have kids. There were times when I thought, `I can't stand any more of this.' But I think God strengthened me, and I can take it. It's different now. I have everything a man could want. I have children, I have a wife who takes care of my kids so I'm free to do the dad-like play catch and things like that. I think things couldn't be better for me."
Minutes later, as if on cue, the cellular phone next to him rings. It's his son. He has been sick in bed all day with a cold. He wants his dad to come.
To the rest of the brothers, all of whom had athletic aspirations outside the ring -- wrestling was just a business, a way to kill time during off seasons. They were forced into the ring only after circumstances went against them. But Chris wanted to wrestle -- if only he could , Kevin says, he could not.
"He had so much pressure, but not from us," Kevin says. "He had pressure on himself and maybe from the fans, too. Sometimes fans can be cruel. They don't know what they're doing, but they can say things like, 'Hey, are you going to be a wrestler when you grow up?' and things like that. They would just kill Chris, because he never got tall and healthy."
Kevin recalls one night in Little Rock, during one of Chris' rare appearances in the ring, how he taught his younger brother to perform a drop kick-- a Von Erich specialty. The brothers would leap into the air, get parallel with the mat, wrap their legs around an opponent's neck and send them crashing to the canvas. Somehow, in the middle of violence real or imagined, the Von Erichs always seemed to fall with grace.
During a match in Texas shortly after that lesson, Chris and Kevin were a tag team, and Chris was in the ring. Kevin recalls how Chris hit his chest, then raised his arm to block the man's retaliatory shot. When the guy hit him, Chris' arm snapped -- it was broken, the bone so brittle that the prednisone he was taking for his asthma.
"I heard a pop, and I said, 'Chris, tag me,' and he goes, 'No, wait, I'm got to do my drop kick,'" Kevin recalls. "I said, 'No, Chris, no!' Well, a drop kick would have been perfect, but he couldn't do it. I could tell his leg was broken. But he threw his drop kick anyway, and he fell and broke his shin bone, too -- the radius and the ulna. Broke 'em both. It was too bad that it just wasn't to be for Chris. He had heart, though."
Chris became too weak and too injured to wrestle. In September 1991, after being up on cocaine and Valium, the 21-year-old took his own life with a 9mm pistol. He killed himself on the family's farm, a mere 300 feet from the home Jack had built for his wife. Kevin found his brother lying near a trove of old Indian relics that Chris and Mike had once collected.
There was also a suicide note, which read: "It's nobody's fault. I'll be with my brothers."
In 1993, his mother told The Dallas Morning News that Chris' death was, in all likelihood, almost an accident. She believed he was "toying with the weapon when the gun went off," and she didn't believe "what he said in the note he left was with conviction."
Kevin also never thought Chris meant to kill himself. To believe that a beloved brother had died by his own hand was just too difficult for him to.
By the early 1990s, Kevin Von Erich was almost wiped out by wrestling. The business had changed dramatically since the birth of Jack's WCCW. Now he had the mighty WWF and WCW to contend with, each with their cushy cable-TV deals and marketing gimmicks. The regional promoters were dying in the main, losing their audiences and their wrestlers--to the Vince McMahons and Ted Turners of the wrestling world.
Jack had enough of wrestling after Mike's death. He no longer wanted to book his sons, and his business sense began to fail him. Fed up, he turned the promotion over to Kevin and Kerry--who then teamed up with a Tennessee based promoter named Jerry Jarrett. The brothers ended up suing Jarrett, claiming he had swindled money from the WCCW and cut the brothers out of bookings in the very organization they had helped build. Jarrett said that he had rescued the WCCW, that the brothers weren't showing up for bookings, and that when they did, "they were not in a physical or mental shape to wrestle."
The suit was eventually dropped, but Jarrett likely had a point. Kerry was then in the WWF, and Kevin had exhausted himself trying to keep up the promotion in his brothers' absence. Sometimes he would wrestle three times a night in three different small towns; he became the franchise, the sole heir. Either Kevin fulfilled the obligations, or the family went broke. He found himself shooting up more and more with painkiller. He limped during the day and faked his way to victory in the ring. He took matches he shouldn't have, risking more concussions and injuries.
"Money was the only thing I got out of it," Kevin says. "But money was good, because it was money for the family. The family was hurtin'. With my brothers going down, the family needed me. So you just dig down and get it up, pull it out."
A bad concussion caused Kevin to be banned from wrestling in Texas, so he decided he'd just fight in Japan instead. "Over there, there are all those shooters," recalls Kevin, "and they like to kick you in the ribs and in the head. Well, the first night, the first match, my back was to the mat...and I got kicked right in the ear, and it was a terrible. And so I had headaches, I was throwing up all the time, so the Jatpanese matches are what made me get out of it."
Kerry was also in no shape to wrestle, much less walk. The motorcycle accident he suffered in 1986 had cost him his foot--and, in the process, turned him into a drug addict. By 1991, his wife of a decade, Cathy, left him and took their two daughters. She demanded he pay $2,500 a month in child support--which was nowhere near what he was spending on cocaine.
He was arrested in 1992 in Richardson for forging prescriptions for Vicodin and Valium. After a stint in the Betty Ford Clinic, he received a 10-year suspended prison sentence. Four months later, on January 13, 1993, the cops pulled him over and found cocaine and a syringe in his car.
February 18, 33-year-old Kerry went out to his father's house, secretly took a pistol he had given to Jack as a Christmas present, borrowed his, and drove out into the mesquite. He put a single .44-caliber bullet in his heart.
Kerry had warned Kevin he was going to kill himself--though Kevin couldn't bring himself to warn his father. Why upset the old man if Kerry was just kidding? But it wasn't as though Kerry hid his suicidal longings: He gave hints, left notes, and whispered to those around him that he was thinking of ending his life. But no one believed someone as strong as Kerry, who was the closest of all the sons to Jack, would actually become the thirdboy to kill himself. Such things just don't--can't--happen. Only they did.
The last time Kevin wrestled in Dallas was shortly after Kerry's death. The management at the Sportatorium scheduled a Kerry Von Erich memorial match and asked Kevin to attend, though he wanted no part of it. He was sick of, sick to death of it. His family had disappeared in just a few short years--no way in hell he was going near the Sportatorium, a place invested with memories that were beginning to rot.
"I sure hated that, but I did come back and wrestle," Kevin says. "It was hard to get into that ring. I can't explain it. It was hard to do it...It brought up those memories of the brothers and all that." t
After his career ended, Kevin spent much of his time with his family and his father, watching the legend fade into shadow. Doris and Jack were divorced in July 1992, a year before Kerry's death, and Kevin could never figure out how Jack had withstood losing his family. Although Jack had lost so much, he had still held onto his home in Denton County and a net worth estimated at more than $600,000.
On July 25 of this year, Jack suffered a stroke and was diagnosed with brain cancer. He knew he didn't have long to live, and he welcomed death, said he was anxious for the chance to see his sons again.
As always, Kevin was there for his father, even though Jack, though never in much pain, was "hard to be around," fluctuating between being moody and happy. Jack and Kevin rarely spoke about the many tragedies they had both experienced -they didn't have to.
On September 8, Kevin and Jack were at Jack's house watching Monday Night RAW when, during the fourth quarter, Jack began suffering enough for him to call the nurse to administer morphine. Jack slept throughout the rest of the day, then died quietly and quickly on Wednesday.
"He got out with no pain at all, and you have to think that's a good thing," Kevin says. "I've visited people that were suffering so bad it would take me days to get over it. But see, like, I'm telling you all this sad stuff. I am sure you've got sad stuff too."
Now Kevin begins the task of collecting that sad stuff and showing it to the world. He and Mike's ex-wife are now assembling the family history and putting it on the Website, which is located, appropriately enough, at.http://www.vonerich.com. There, Kevin will provide pictures and bios of his brothers and father, celebrating their place in pro-wrestling history--not the tragedies, he hopes, but as heroes. He will sell old videotapes of the brothers and Fritz; Jack had left behind hundreds of black-and-white reels and old wrestling films, which Kevin one day hopes to market on the Website.
"Someone asked me if I wanted to do the Website as a way to keep my brothers," Kevin says. "I said, `No, not necessarily.' I just think it was a hell of a wrestling show, and I'd like people to see it."
Kevin often says that when people first meet him these days, they treat him as though he is "a ghost." There are those who wonder why he is not dead or how he kept from becoming another dead Von Erich. That is why he is willing, though not necessarily happy, to rehash the past one more time. If nothing else, he, maybe someone can learn something from his tragic story. Meanwhile, he is still trying to figure it out for himself.
"I'm from the country, and last winter, there were persimmons growing on the trees," Kevin recalls. "Well, persimmons drop off during the winter. They fall to the ground and rot. The wind was blowing hard on this one persimmon, and it hadn't fallen off--and it was the dead of winter. I was thinking,`I'm like that persimmon. I'm not going to let go of the vine. The wind's, it's killing me, but I'm not going to let go.'
"I didn't have a choice. What was I supposed to do? Lay down and die? I'm a married man. I have kids. There were times when I thought, `I can't stand any more of this.' But I think God strengthened me, and I can take it. It's different now. I have everything a man could want. I have children, I have a wife who takes care of my kids so I'm free to do the dad-like play catch and things like that. I think things couldn't be better for me."
Minutes later, as if on cue, the cellular phone next to him rings. It's his son. He has been sick in bed all day with a cold. He wants his dad to come.