Get In the Ring: How Minnesota Wrestling Crushed the World

Inside this old banquet hall in Bloomington, the air conditioning roars. The room is half full, mostly middle-aged dudes in jeans and T-shirts emblazoned with ’80s-era wrestlers like Ric Flair and “Macho Man” Randy Savage. Half these guys have kids in tow; they’re also wearing T-shirts emblazoned with ’80s-era wrestlers. In the ring at the center of the room, men in neon tights fling each other against the ropes. They seem to be in constant danger of launching themselves right through the drop ceiling.

I’m sitting at the announcer’s table, a special guest of tonight’s broadcast team: play-by-play man “Slick” Mick Karch and color man Ken Resnick. Karch was the last play-by-play announcer for the old American Wrestling Association: the locally based league owned by Verne Gagne that gave us All-Star Wrestling, which aired Saturday mornings on Channel 11. That’s where we all used to watch Nick Bockwinkel and Jesse The Body, Mad Dog Vachon and Baron von Raschke. Even Hulk Hogan became Hulk Hogan in the AWA.

Since 1998, Karch has been working for a Lakeville-based promotion called Steel Domain Wrestling. We’re a quarter of the way through the eight-match card, and so far he has breathlessly called a couple of humdingers: one where a good guy switched into a baddie—a classic “heel turn”—in the middle of a match. The other starred a masked luchador-style wrestler named Airwolf, who used his acrobatic moves to upset a much larger rival.

Tonight marks my first time attending a live professional wrestling match. The lights look dimmer than they do on TV, and the performers appear both younger and older than the brutes who star in today’s nearly billion-dollar major-league wrestling promotion, the WWE. It feels like we’ve fallen 50 years into pro wrestling’s past, back to a time just before Verne Gagne and his AWA reinvented the national wrestling landscape. Back when the best wrestling talent in the world was developed here in Minnesota. Back before a sharpie from New York named Vince McMahon swept in and stole the show. Way back before we elected one of these ginormous carny-era relics—I’m speaking about Jesse “The Body” Ventura, of course—for our governor.

During a break in the action, Karch winks at me. “Hey, I’ll put you over,” he says, using the old carny barker term for provoking the crowd to take a side. In the middle of calling the next match, then, he describes what an honor it is having the illustrious journalist Steve Marsh as a very special guest in the booth tonight.

“Steve has been a wrestling fan since he was 7 years old,” he says, “and it’s an honor to have him with us for his first live match tonight.”

Karch’s broadcast partner, Resnick, immediately chimes in with a rhetorical question: “Oh, 34 years of being a pro wrestling fan and do you think he could pay for a ticket?” He answers it before Karch can butt in. “No,” Resnick says, his voice dripping with derision. “He used his press credential!” 

Next up, a far more popular figure than a media jackal: New Prague’s own Mitch Paradise, the last of the local professionals to be trained by a real pro wrestling Yoda, Eddie Sharkey. 

We know what TV wrestling looks like today: postmodern good versus evil, performed in the key of cynicism. Surgically enhanced men and women who start as body-building tragedies and become drug tragedies by career’s end. The AWA also gave birth to all of that. Minnesota created the first national wrestling stars—at one time, we were putting on the finest working-class opera in the country. We created our own American mythology, with heroes we could actually believe in. The AWA’s great helmsman Verne Gagne, for better or for worse, made important contributions to this fever dream. Is it his fault that what used to feel like an escape now feels like a trap?

And now Mitch Paradise is rising from the mat, somehow miraculously recovering from an unholy beating at the hands of the monstrous Heavy Metal Lore. Paradise looks poised to win when, from the back of the room, an interloper—the heel from earlier in the show—slides into the ring and begins to beat Paradise with a golf club. The crowd howls in horror, the bell rings over and over again—to no relief.

Oh my god, what will happen next?!

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I'm Crushing Your Head

How does an All-American college wrestler turn into a monstrous German Baron? Put out your hand... 

When Baron von Raschke contorted his catcher’s mitt of a right hand into the ghastly claw and thrust it toward the rafters, 10,000 wrestling fans would gasp in horror. The match was over, and some poor palooka was about to get his face torn off. 

But back before Raschke ever developed this evil Teutonic twin, he was Jim Raschke, a middle school English teacher, standing in the back of a wrestling exhibition at the Calhoun Beach Club, setting up the mats and the ropes. And Raschke’s story—how he transformed himself into the Baron with the Iron Claw—reveals something about the DNA of the AWA.

Things were not happening for Jim Raschke in 1966. He’d excelled as a college wrestler, even making the 1964 Olympic team (though he missed Tokyo with a hyperextended elbow).  

Raschke moved to Minnesota to train under Verne Gagne, at one of Gagne’s famously brutal training camps. Raschke made a fine babyface in his nifty USA wrestling jacket. But he couldn’t give an interview, no matter what angle the AWA’s ringside correspondent Marty O’Neill would try. 

“I was real meek and mild,” Raschke recalls from his living room in Hastings. “The ‘aw shucks’ kind of stuff.” 

One Saturday, setting up for a match at the Calhoun Beach Club, “this backlit shape appeared in the doorway,” he says. “And it looked at me, and I looked at it, and he said,” and here Raschke bellows like a monster with a Frenchy accent, “YA’D MAKE A GOOD GERMAN!!!!” 

The shape, it turns out, was French-Canadian legend Maurice “Mad Dog” Vachon. He convinced the new kid to shave his head, change his name to the much more sinister (in the mid-’60s) Baron Fritz von Raschke, and move to Montreal to train as a full-time heel.

Raschke’s heel turn paid immediate dividends. But it wasn’t until a trip to St. Louis that the Baron found his signature move. He was wrestling Pat O’Connor, a respected veteran from New Zealand. “We’re rolling around and we’re having an excellent wrestling match,” he says. Toward the end of the match, entangled in a leg hold, O’Connor got close enough to whisper in Raschke’s ear, “Put the claw on me.” Raschke couldn’t understand. “The claw,” O’Connor rasped. “Put your hand on my head.” 

Raschke did as he was told, and O’Connor started flailing as if he were being electrocuted. As Raschke rose to his feet—his hand gripping O’Connor’s head—the crowd went bonkers. “Got over sensational,” Raschke says. 

He promptly forgot about that moment. Two years later, in Indianapolis, Raschke again matched up with O’Connor, who called for another application of the Claw. “This time it got an even greater effect,” Raschke says. “Mostly Pat’s doing.” 

It finally occurred to Raschke that the Claw could become a signature finishing move. First he had to get the blessing of an established claw-wielder, Fritz Von Erich (real name: Jack Barton Adkisson), the owner of the Texas pro wrestling territory. 

Von Erich signed off, but the Baron points out that he gave the move his own distinctive spin. “Von Erich’s claw—and his entire family went on to use it—it was like a guided missile.” Here he shoots out his huge paw as if it were possessed by a charging pit bull.

“When I was a kid, there was a scary movie out with Peter Lorre, about a hand in a box,” he says, referring to the German Expressionist classic, M. “I think that had something to do with it.” 

 “Whereas mine went like this”—here he slowly moves his hand toward you, with the buh-dum, buh-dum rhythm of Jaws. And for just a second, you forget that you’re parked in the sitting room of a polite retired English teacher. 

Will your cheekbones collapse in the Baron’s awful grasp? Where’s the referee?! 

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The Match of His Life

With the AWA, Verne Gagne invented modern pro wrestling. But someone else got rich off it.

Verne Gagne was always small for a behemoth. When Gagne debuted as a heavyweight contender in 1949, the bill listed him at 5-foot-11-inches and 210 pounds. Yet his All-American skill made him a star on the DuMont television network’s first nationally broadcast wrestling show.

Over the course of his glorious 40-year career, Gagne would win thousands of matches and help invent the template for modern American pro wrestling—before losing it all to a more ruthless competitor, whose steroid-pumped physique barely hid the fact that he couldn’t wrestle himself. 

But I’m getting ahead of myself.

Gagne arrived on the scene with a perfect babyface backstory: He grew up on a farm in Corcoran, Minnesota, and walked to school at Robbinsdale High. At the University of Minnesota, he played football for the Gophers, while becoming a national collegiate wrestling champion. He even earned a slot as an alternate on the 1948 U.S. Olympic wrestling team.

Despite Gagne’s skill, and perpetual number-one contender status, he never could force National Wrestling Alliance world champ Lou Thesz into a lights-out sleeper hold. So in 1960, he parlayed his individual TV success into real power by buying out the reigning promoter in the Midwest, the Stecher family. With his new partner, Wally Karbo, Gagne crowned his new regional operation the American Wrestling Association.

The first order of business? Measuring himself for his very own championship belt.

Over the following decades—confronting the bad guy in every mid-sized arena from Winnipeg to Omaha—Gagne rarely lost control of that belt. A few months ago, when I met Verne’s son Greg in an Eden Prairie strip mall, and asked about his dad’s strengths as a wrestler, he responded, “He didn’t have a weakness. Nobody would fuck with him.”

In Gagne’s universe, wrestling should appear to be as realistic and demanding as possible. And although his promotion developed great characters—Jesse Ventura, “The Crusher”—Gagne believed the crowd would find its real catharsis in displays of physical virtuosity. That aesthetic focus may have blinded him to the AWA’s greatest threat: Vince McMahon, Jr.

In 1982, McMahon and his wife Linda began to assemble wrestling’s first true national promotion, swallowing up the regional players one by one. McMahon added a layer of corporate rock ’n’ roll shtick to fit the age. And the McMahons struck a deal with sports super-executive Dick Ebersol to overhaul wrestling’s production values, on shows like NBC’s Saturday Night’s Main Event.

Even more damaging to the AWA and Gagne, the McMahons also modernized the prevailing code of handshake deals between wrestlers and promoters. That is to say, they stole the talent. In one of their first big moves, they poached the AWA’s new star, Hulk Hogan, over the holidays in 1982. Soon after, they hired AWA’s star announcer, “Mean” Gene Okerlund.

Speaking over the phone from Florida, Okerlund told me that he gave Verne a chance to make a counteroffer. But in his recollection, Greg Gagne looked at him in the AWA’s offices and replied, “If it’s so good, take it.”

In the end, the McMahons bought up everybody: Jesse Ventura, Adrian Adonis, even Greg Gagne’s tag-team partner in The High Flyers, “Jumpin’” Jim Brunzell.

What wrestling fans probably never knew is that McMahon offered the Gagnes a buyout, too. Okerlund remembers the terms, because McMahon made the call from Okerlund’s Minneapolis office.

“He would have $10 million initially, and then $5 million over the next five,” Okerlund said. 

Verne’s response: “What the hell you think you’re gonna do? Run me out of my own town?”

The AWA rumbled on for a few more years. But by 1990, the WWF had become the leering global face of wrestling. 

The dissolution of Verne Gagne’s empire hurt the man. He lost his estate on Lake Minnetonka through eminent domain. Toward the end, he was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease. In a Bloomington senior facility, a disturbed Gagne body-slammed a 97-year-old fellow resident, killing him. 

Eventually, Vince McMahon bought the AWA archives. And in 2006, McMahon inducted a wizened Gagne into the WWE Hall of Fame.

Gagne’s son acknowledges the gesture. “But I think it was more for Vince than it was for Verne,” he said.

Professional wrestling never has been, and never will be, a sport for losing gracefully.

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Fight Card

They wore singlets. They coined weird nicknames. They bashed their opponents with chairs. Introducing—or reintroducing—the stars of Minnesota’s legendary wrestling league, the AWA.

Verne Gagne 

After buying out the Stecher family’s Midwestern wrestling promotion, Minnesota’s greatest wrassler founded the AWA and immediately declared himself its heavyweight champion.

Wally Karbo 

Co-founder of the AWA, this Nordeast Minneapolis operator became Gagne’s token suit. According to wrestler Larry “The Axe” Hennig, “He would rather climb a tree and tell a lie than stand on the ground and tell the truth.”

Eddie Sharkey 

A former wrestler, Sharkey became the second most successful wrestling trainer in state history (behind Gagne himself). He trained Bob Backlund, Jesse Ventura, Hawk and Animal of the Road Warriors, “Ravishing” Rick Rude, and Rick Steiner.

The Road Warriors Hawk and Animal 

Bouncers at the rowdy Gramma B’s bar in Northeast, the pair begged Sharkey to train them. After becoming stars, they insisted Gagne give a refereeing contract to their old trainer.

Larry “The Axe” Hennig 

Another Robbinsdale High graduate (like Gagne), Hennig teamed with fellow heel Harley Race to form one of the AWA’s greatest tag teams. Also sired Curt “Mr. Perfect” Hennig.

The Crusher 

Wrestling has seen many “Crushers” over the years, but Milwaukee’s own Reginald Lisowski crushed them all.A bona fide working-class hero, Lisowski took a disturbing amount of punishment every match—before usually emerging victorious.

Kenny “Sodbuster” Jay 

The quintessential jabroni—or jobber—Jay started on the carnival circuit, wrestling farmers, apes, and bears. He would later make every AWA star look good every Saturday for decades. (The moniker? Jay ran a lawn service.) 

Hulk Hogan 

The Gagne family first recognized that the Hulkster shouldn’t play the heel. Instead, his destiny was to become the biggest, blondest, most cartoonishly pumped-up babyface of all time.

Bobby “The Brain” Heenan 

The most brilliant manager in wrestling history (if he could say so, himself), Heenan led Nick Bockwinkel to the AWA title in 1975, ending Gagne’s seven-year reign as champ.

The High Flyers Greg Gagne and“Jump in’” Jim Brunzell 

The men met as walk-on football players—QB and receiver—at the University of Minnesota. They trained in Verne Gagne’s famous class of 1972, eventually becoming tag-team champions in the AWA.

Baron “The Claw” von Raschke 

Raschke started out as a shy loner who couldn’t give an interview to save his life. That is, until Maurice “Mad Dog” Vachon spotted him during a taping of All-Star Wrestling. “YOU’D MAKE A GOOD GERMAN,” Vachon bellowed. And he did.

Jesse “The Body” Ventura 

An awkward athlete in the ring, Ventura possessed an astonishing gift at the mic, delivering some of the greatest promo interviews of all time. The former Navy vet moved on to checkered achievements in a sprinkling of media and government jobs.

“Mean” Gene Okerlund 

An ad man (for clients like Maaco) before he was an AWA announcer, “Mean” Gene got his nickname from Ventura. Okerlund mistook rocker Tom Petty (a personal pal, Ventura bragged) for the race car driver Richard Petty. Ventura’s response? “You’re mean, Gene.”

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True Tales from the Mat

Everyone knew that wrestling wasn’t real. Everyone, that is, except the wrestlers themselves. In the days of the AWA, wrestlers were expected to “maintain kayfabe”: that is, the stance that while the matches may have been choreographed, they weren’t fake. Verne Gagne was a nearly religious adherent to kayfabe: He believed the integrity of the business depended on it.

All that changed in the Vince McMahon revolution of the 1980s. McMahon’s World Wrestling Federation (WWF; later, WWE) reclassified professional wrestling as “entertainment,” in order to remove it from the scrutiny of state athletic commissions (and gate taxes that could run up to 5 percent).

The stars of the AWA may not have broken kayfabe, but they damaged a lot of other things: knees, marriages, sobriety, and, yes, feelings, too. In the AWA, the pain was always real.

Muhammad Ali was real (and so was the captive bear)!

Kenny “Sodbuster” Jay, now 81, got his start earning $3 a match wrestling farmers (or the occasional bear) at the carnival before settling into the classic “jabroni” role: a professional whom the boss, Verne Gagne, could trust to deliver 10 minutes of entertainment, no matter the opponent.

I met the Sodbuster in his garage in Bloomington, and he told me about the time he wrestled Muhammad Ali on a day’s notice. For Ali, it was a tune-up for a closed-circuit main event against Japanese wrestler Antonio Inoki in 1976. For Jay it was just another payday. 

KENNY JAY: Verne Gagne called me on Friday morning. He said, “Kenny, you got a ticket at the airport.” I said, “Why?” He said, “You’re going to Chicago and taking on Muhammad Ali.” I said, “What?!” Well, then the best part was I didn’t have that much time to worry.

MPLS.ST.PAUL: Why you?

JAY: Well, I was capable. And, you know, I was cheap.

MSP: Verne Gagne was the special referee that night. Did you have a legitimate chance to win?

JAY: I got [Ali] down and I got on top of him, but then he’d go to the goddamn ropes, and Verne would say, “Break it!”

MSP: So you think you could have beat him?

JAY: Well, no, I doubt it. He gave me that punch.

MSP: Oh, he could punch you?

JAY: Because he had gloves on.

MSP: Dude.

JAY: But he did take me up and slam me.

MSP: Oh my god.

JAY: He got me on the rope, and finally he got me like, boom. And down I went.

MSP:  Did he knock you out?

JAY: Yup, knocked me out. 

Verne Gagne’s training camp was real!

Verne Gagne trained 144 wrestlers over the years: everyone from Baron von Raschke to Ricky “The Dragon” Steamboat. The class of ’72 was perhaps his most talented ever. According to Gagne’s son Greg, a class of 100 quickly shrunk to just six: Greg and his eventual tag-team partner in The High Flyers, “Jumpin’” Jim Brunzell; Rick Fliehr (Ric Flair); Khosrow Vaziri (“The Iron Sheik”); U.S. Olympic powerlifter Ken Patera; and former NFL linebacker Bob Bruggers. The men were put through their paces in six-hour sessions, six days a week.

Their routine would look something like this: 

9 am 1,000 free squats. Starting with sets of 25. “It was un-fucking-godly,” remembers Greg Gagne. “Guys would throw up.”

10 am Headstands with feet on turnbuckles. Shoulder presses. Human bridges. 

11 am Locking up with Verne and British wrestler Billy Robinson.

1 pm Hitting the ropes. “I tore new skin down my entire sides,” Gagne says. “We were black and blue for the first three weeks.”

2 pm Safe landings.

3 pm Holds and counter holds.

Greg Gagne got a career out of the training—and a few useful life tricks, too. “I can break your arm so fucking quick you wouldn’t know what happened.”

The sleeper hold was real!

In 1960, on the local television show Sports Hot Seat, Verne Gagne agreed to demonstrate that his sleeper hold was not a choke hold. With a panel of sportswriters scrutinizing his arm positioning, Gagne demonstrated the grasp on local promoter Eddie Williams. Lights out!

Injuries are real!

Larry “The Axe” Hennig blew out his knee in a tag-team match with Verne Gagne and Johnny Powers in Winnipeg. His tag-team partner, Harley Race, drove him the seven hours home to Minneapolis in the backseat of his car.

The next day, Gagne and Wally Karbo, his deputy, came to pay their respects at the hospital.

“‘Got a lot of pain?’” Hennig recalls them asking. “I say, ‘No, it feels great.’ Dumb questions. Why would you bring me to the hospital, $19,000 a day, and ask me if rocks float?

“‘So we gotta ask a favor,’” Gagne continues. “‘We got Chicago running the next night, and we don’t want you to wrestle. But we want you to put your stuff on, get to the ring somehow, and make an appearance.’”

Hennig considered the ask. He’d made $1,000 for his previous Chicago show. And he’d be laid up, and out of work for a while, with the knee. Gagne promised he’d show Hennig some more money.

“I get on an airplane and I made an appearance, and then I got out of there.” The next night, back in Minneapolis, he went into surgery.

Gagne, in his own fashion, lived up to his word.

Hennig laughs as he remembers the outcome: “They paid me $50 more.” 

Bullets are real!

Verne Gagne used to have a policy on bar fights: “Go ahead, boys, get in all the fights you want,” he said. “But if you lose, you’re fired.” Violence beyond the ring was just part of the wrestling business, explains Eddie Sharkey, former AWA wrestler and the trainer behind The Road Warriors, “Ravishing” Rick Rude and Jesse Ventura.

For instance, Sharkey recalled what happened when Gagne refused to accept his retirement from life on the road. Sharkey had recently married a “girl wrestler” named “Princess Little Cloud,” and wanted to stay home and start a family.

“Verne Gagne asked her to go out on a date with him and she said no,” Sharkey says. “And so he never booked her.”

Sharkey adds, “He was not a nice guy. And then I shot up his office and that didn’t endear him to me either.”

Wait a minute. What?

“Yeah, 9mm high-power pistol,” Sharkey says. “Thirteen shots, 12 in the clip, one in the chamber.” Nobody was in the offices. “But you gotta understand the times,” Sharkey says. “They weren’t like now. Now, hell, I’d be in prison forever.” 

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Did Professional Wrestling Help Create Donald J. Trump?

In June, President Donald J. Trump thrusted his endless campaign into Duluth’s Amsoil Arena. He took the podium to Lee Greenwood’s “God Bless the USA,” and the crowd chanted, “USA! USA!” 

After warming up—fulminating over this and that—Trump began to taunt a protester from Minneapolis named Sam Spadino, who was wearing his long hair in a man bun. 

“Was that a man or a woman?” Trump bellowed at Spadino. “Because he needs a haircut more than I do!” The crowd jeered and hissed at the man-bunned heel. “I couldn’t tell!” Trump added. “He needs a haircut!”

It’s not a stretch to imagine that Trump learned his carny barker crowd psychology from the world of pro wrestling, where he has worked for years. This is not an exaggeration or a metaphor: Trump belongs to the WWE Hall of Fame (look it up!). 

The connection started in 1988–89, when Trump hosted WrestleMania IV and V at his Convention Hall in Atlantic City. In 2007, Trump nearly received his own haircut, when he squared off against Vince McMahon, CEO of WWE, in the “Battle of the Billionaires” at WrestleMania 23 in Detroit. Trump won the match, with the timely assistance of “Stone Cold” Steve Austin, and proceeded to shave McMahon’s head in the ring. Later on, perhaps to make nice, President Trump hired McMahon’s wife, a failed Connecticut senate candidate, as administrator of the Small Business Administration. 

Trump’s disturbing golden mane recalls some of wrestling’s finest kayfabe (that is, ostentatiously fake) locks. This lineage originated with the OG bottle-blond heel, Gorgeous George, and included Minnesota’s fringe candidate Jesse “The Body” Ventura. 

The Body brought a postmodern maneuver from the wrestling ring to the governor’s mansion: the heel coming clean. Back when he worked as a color man on old WWF broadcasts, he could be relied on to disparage the babyface, and make spectacular word salad in defense of the heel—winking at the audience the entire time. During his call of WrestleMania III’s main event, for example, between Hulk Hogan and Andre the Giant, The Body accused the unimpeachable Hulkster of “horrible sportsmanship.” 

The effect? Jesse dispensed with the tired narrative of good versus evil, replacing it with something more cynical: If everyone’s a mark, you should trust the most accomplished con man. 

Jesse employed the same trick on talk radio, and then turned to it again in 1998, while running for governor against Skip Humphrey and Norm Coleman. At a debate in Hibbing, he turned toward his opponents, who were quibbling, and said, “Listen to them, is this what you really want?” When his turn came, he fielded a question about the Iron Range Resources and Rehabilitation Board (IRRRB). “I don’t know what the IRRRB is, but if it’s a government agency, then its budget should be cut.” The line won the loudest applause of the night.  

You can hear Trump employ a similar tactic when he points out how the government lets moguls (like himself) get away without paying taxes. And then, for good measure, he reinforces that claim by refusing to release his tax returns. 

That’s not the only trick Trump has borrowed from pro wrestling. Every chance he gets, he pantomimes the wrassler’s swaggering display of dominance. Remember how Trump—a heavyweight at 6-foot-3-inches and 239 pounds—loomed over Hillary Clinton during the presidential debate? Or when he literally shoved aside Montenegro’s prime minister during the NATO Summit? And what are Trump’s death-grip/judo handshakes if not an executive-level submission hold?  

Outside the ring, Trump does his own match hype, borrowing from wrestling’s Cold War–era jingoism and xenophobia. When he demonizes Mexican “rapists” and the “animals” in gangs, you can almost picture the Central American version of the AWA’s cartoonish bad guys, like Boris Breznikoff or The Iron Sheik.

My great-grandma used to watch the AWA on Saturday afternoons, rooting for Verne Gagne to tear the bad guy’s head off. After the match ended, everybody would switch off the TV, take a deep breath, and ease back into reality. That was then. In Trump’s America—his arena—the show never ends.