The Von Erich Curse

How the fall of a Texas family tells the story of American cultural change

In the 1950s, professional wrestler Jack Adkisson achieved success playing an unrepentant Nazi named Fritz Von Erich. As one can imagine, this character did a good job of working up crowds composed of veterans who had fought in Europe at a time when memories of the Second World War were still fresh. According to wrestling legend, one night he was sitting in a dressing room in Chicago after a show when,¹

A small man appeared at Fritz’s door and asked him about his service in the war. Fritz gruffly told the guy to go away. When the man persisted, Fritz told him it was an act — a gimmick — and the man wondered aloud if Fritz knew that gimmick was a Yiddish word. Fritz and the man went back and forth a few more times, with Fritz getting increasingly frustrated with the man’s quiet insistence that Fritz realize the gravity of his offensiveness. Finally, Fritz threatened the man a last time, and the man rolled up his sleeve to expose the tattoo that proved him to be a survivor of the Holocaust. He told Fritz that he’d lost all seven of his sons in the death camps, and — here’s where it gets good — he said ominously that he sincerely hoped that nothing like that would ever happen to Fritz. Adkisson went pale and tossed the man out of the locker room, running him into the door frame, cutting his arm, and tearing his coat, from which fell a scrap of cloth with a six-pointed star imprinted and a few drops of the man’s fresh blood. By the time Fritz looked up, the man had vanished. A locker room attendant watched the scene from the shadows and recovered the patch from the trash can after Fritz left.

In 1959, Fritz’ first son, six-year-old Jack Jr., was electrocuted on a piece of exposed wire in the trailer park the family was living in and then drowned in a puddle of snow. By the early 1980s, however, Jack had built up a successful promotion called World Class Championship Wrestling in Texas that centered around his next three sons Kevin, David, and Kerry, who, by the luck of the genetic draw, all turned out to have the right body and look to succeed in the profession. Then came Mike, who has born in 1964, and finally Chris in 1969. The last two brothers were nowhere near as lucky as the other three who survived to adulthood. Mike had the build to be a lower card wrestler, while Chris was asthmatic, had brittle bones due to the medication he took, only grew to 5’5 as an adult, and by all accounts should never have been anywhere near a wrestling ring.

Things started to go downhill when in 1984, David Von Erich died while on tour in Japan. The Consular Report of the US embassy says it was a ruptured intestine, which would have been a freak medical event, while others suspect drugs had a role to play. In true wrestling fashion, they worked this into an angle, where Kerry ended up beating Ric Flair for the NWA championship and winning the title that was supposed to have gone to his brother.²

Michael, Kevin, David, and Kerry in 1983, during the good days.

Upon David’s death, Mike’s position in the company was upgraded, although he was nowhere near as impressive as his three older brothers. In 1985, Mike injured his shoulder in Israel, and while being operated on suffered toxic shock syndrome as a result of a bacterial infection. This caused a near death experience and left him with brain damage, which was apparent when he came back into the ring and would occasionally forget his lines or stop in the middle of a move. Mike got pulled over with pain killers in his car in April 1987, and a few days later committed suicide by overdosing on sleeping pills.

Now there were only three brothers left, and you must be thinking that we’re pretty much at the end of the story. Not even close. Remember Chris, the youngest brother, who was 5’5 and had asthma? He wanted to be a wrestler more than any of the others, and his end was completely predictable. Chris broke his arm, realized that despite the Von Erich name he would never make it in the industry, and shot himself at the age of 21. Kevin found his brother, picked up his head thinking that he had overdosed on drugs, and felt a finger go through the bullet hole.

In 1986, Kerry crashed his motorcycle into a parked police car and eventually his right foot had to be amputated. Incredibly, the family decided to hide this from the world because Fritz thought it would “show weakness,” and Kerry kept wrestling, putting his boot over a prosthetic and performing as if nothing happened, which was painful and contributed to his drug abuse. In the late 1980s, WCCW and other promotions were being surpassed and usually put out of business by the WWF. Kerry had a brief stint under Vince McMahon, where he won the intercontinental title, but struggled the whole time with drugs and run-ins with the law. In February 1993, facing a potential prison sentence after being arrested while on probation, Kerry shot himself in the chest at his father’s ranch.

Fritz died of some combination of brain and lung cancer in 1997. Kevin is now the last Von Erich brother still alive. He tells people “I used to have 5 brothers, now I’m not even a brother.” When the family was inducted as a group into the WWE Hall of Fame in 2009, Kevin accepted on behalf of all of them. He now lives in Hawaii, has two adult sons who also went into wrestling and two daughters, and seems to be doing as well as can be expected given all that he has gone through.

Some broader context here. Wrestlers in previous decades died at massively high rates. Despite the fact that the matches and storylines are fixed, the punishment that their bodies take is real, which often leads to drug abuse. Steroids have long been part of the industry, as quick recovery times and big, freakish muscles are often necessary to achieve stardom. The nature of the business may also attract unstable individuals, and repeated blows to the head tend not to be conducive to alleviating mental problems. All of this leads to ghastly mortality statistics for professional wrestlers.

So something like the Von Erich Curse was more likely to happen in wrestling than most other professions.

The Von Erichs were massive Texas celebrities in the 1980s. I only started watching wrestling after Vince McMahon’s conquering of the old territorial system was complete. But WCCW could draw tens of thousands to an arena, as many as the major professional sports, its matches were shown on ESPN, and at one point its show was the second highest rated syndicated program in the country behind Soul Train. David Von Erich’s funeral drew thousands, though as the tragedies piled up the fans seemed to get demoralized and lose interest. WCCW was likely on its way out anyway, as most wrestling promotions that had to compete with the WWF were facing tough times. But for a brief window, the Von Erichs were major cultural figures.

All kinds of families have problems and tragedies. The Von Erich story in particular continues to fascinate to this day, as seen in the recent release of The Iron Claw. This is because the most disturbing curses are inflicted on those who were once blessed. And one look at the Von Erich family in its prime is enough to realize the rarity of what Fritz and his sons had before it was taken away. The great tragedies in the Western canon usually involve the downfalls of individuals. A beautiful family being destroyed is not something we are used to handling, even in fiction. The real Von Erich story is so sad that the producers of The Iron Claw decided to leave Chris completely out of it, in part because the filmmaker believed that the movie just couldn’t take another death. When Hollywood has to tone things down, you know that a family has truly suffered.

Having a large number of children can be seen as making a pact with the universe in which the laws of probability all but guarantee that an individual will leave a mark on future generations. Luckily, despite everything that happened, Fritz diversified the family portfolio to the extent that he could lose five young sons and still have a birth rate above replacement going into the third generation. In addition to Kevin’s four children, he has 13 grandchildren, and Kerry’s two kids are still around, which makes me glad that the physical legacy of the family lives on. Lacey Von Erich, Kerry’s daughter, wrestled for a while, retired early, and has three children. Having watched what happened to earlier generations, wrestlers are now more conscious of some of the pitfalls of the profession and more likely to avoid them. Perhaps just as importantly, in the era of social media and rampant safetyism it’s difficult to imagine that the old system of free flowing steroids and pain killers regularly contributing to early deaths would be allowed to exist today.

As wrestlers, the Von Erichs were notable for not really having gimmicks. Other than the fact that their surname wasn’t actually “Von Erich,” they otherwise played themselves. Their most important rivalry in the 1980s was with the Fabulous Free Birds, who represented Georgia in matches having an atmosphere that has been likened to what one finds in a college football rivalry, and represented more negative stereotypes of Southern culture. While the Von Erichs were clean cut all-American heroes, Michael Hayes, with his bedazzled confederate robes, was a smooth talking showoff whose act had homosexual undertones, and Terry Gordon a kind of backwoods ogre.

The fact that the Von Erichs did not have to adopt fancy gimmicks serves as a microcosm of how life works outside of wrestling too. If you are tall, blond, and beautiful, just being yourself is enough. In the 1980s, young people who couldn’t meet such standards were willing to live vicariously through those who could. Today, they’re more likely to find a weird niche subculture or develop a politics of resentment in response to seeing, or even knowing about the existence of, people like the Von Erich family. Their story, like professional wrestling at the time, reflected a now long gone monoculture with an accepted status hierarchy, lacking the kind of self-consciousness that comes from even knowing that such ideals might be under threat or subject to renegotiation. Finding out that the Von Erichs in real life were in many cases heavy drug users with serious mental problems perfectly captures the general disillusionment with the older culture and what we now tell ourselves about its shortcomings. Fritz lost the sympathy of many of the fans when he introduced “Lance Von Erich” as a cousin to the boys, an act that did not go over well and was soon abandoned. Even at the time, fans understood that professional wrestling was fixed, but lying about the Von Erich bloodline was seen as attempting to cheapen an aspect of reality that the audience had come to identify with.

If the myth of the Von Erichs reflects the heroic ideals of an earlier era, the behind-the-scenes drug use and story of Lance show how it was often more dishonest and kept problems beneath the surface, sometimes with disastrous effects. The suicides of Mike and Kerry appear to have been motivated in part by the embarrassment of being arrested, and Chris killed himself because his size and health status meant he could not live up to the family name. Too much awareness of mental health can cause its own problems, but the suffering of the Von Erich boys appears to have been exacerbated by a sense of family honor and a belief that they were to keep wrestling and suffering no matter what.

There’s a lesson here about social contagion too. Mike’s suicide note left his scuba gear to Chris. In one of the swim fins was a bag of Placidyl, the drug Mike had used to kill himself, in a not too subtle message that his younger brother should go next. Before his own suicide, Kerry was telling people that he felt his brothers were calling him from beyond the grave. Kevin recounts that when Fritz was dying of brain cancer, he pointed a gun at his last surviving son and told him if he had the guts he’d kill himself too.³ This is not something I’d say to my son if I had 5 others who died, 3 by suicide, but one may excuse this as a reaction to illness and all that had happened before. Fritz told a reporter in 1988 that “The hell of it, is that now people watch us to see what tragedy will happen next. I wish I could explain it, but I can’t….We’re better known now because we die.” At some point, they came to see themselves as cursed, and this became a self-fulfilling prophecy.

The story of the Von Erichs is in a sense timeless, but can only truly be appreciated with a deep knowledge of the social reality of 1980s America. We once had a unified culture, the same heroes, and standard scripts of good and evil. Behind the facade, there was often despair, tragedy, and death, and, like the Texas fans who abandoned the Von Erichs in the late 1980s, we preferred to look away from those aspects of reality rather than indulge in them. The old culture had its flaws, but it was generally healthier for most people most of the time, if not for all groups. Among the hardest hit by its shortcomings were professional wrestlers, and no family suffered more from the mental and physical burdens of the sport than the Von Erichs. Remembering their story is a way to reflect on all that has been lost, and perhaps appreciate some of what we have gained as a consolation prize.

1. Quote is from David Shoemaker’s The Squared Circle, the chapter on the Von Erich family. For more on the family’s story, see this Vice documentary (available on Hulu), this WWE documentary on WCCW, this 2005 article from Texas Monthly, and this 1988 article from D Magazine.

2. The Von Erichs wrestled mainly in WCCW, their father’s promotion. At this time, each territorial promotion would have its own championship, but the National Wrestling Alliance (NWA) was the governing body of wrestling and had its own title that those from different territories could compete for. The NWA and the promotions that composed it were surpassed by the World Wrestling Federation (WWF) in the 1980s, which under the name World Wrestling Entertainment (WWE) remains the center of the wrestling world today.

3. This story is told by Kevin in the Vice documentary.