Pro Wrestler Terry Funk Is a True American Hero
Pro wrestler and living legend Terry Funk. Art by Tanzanian Wojak
News that Terry Funk is suffering from chronic pain is as surprising as news that it is chilly in Alaska. The Funker was being begged by doctors, family members and quite possibly the Lord himself to retire from professional wrestling in the 1999 documentary Beyond the Mat yet continued wrestling for the best part of two decades.
Wrestler Dustin “Goldust” Rhodes posted on Twitter:
Just got off the phone with Terry Funk. He is in a lot of pain and could use some prayers. One of the greatest #TrueLegends to ever be in the ting (sic). Appreciate y’all.
People assumed that Funk had a terrible illness or had been in a horrendous accident. Rhodes posted a clarification:
Just to clarify guys, Terry Funk is just in severe pain with his hip. He is a tough SOB.
Just his hip? That is very hard to believe. But Terry Funk is not a normal human being. Tributes like this are generally written after someone’s death, but that seems unnecessary, both because there is no reason why a celebration of life should be published posthumously and because it is hard to believe that Terry Funk will ever die.
“Meaner than a rattlesnake, tougher than shoe leather” is how the 76-year-old legend describes himself. He has to have been to have made it this far. Pro wrestlers have an average lifespan that rivals BASE jumpers’, a consequence of bodily damage, mental strain, and the alcohol and drugs that are consumed to soften their effects. I don’t think Funk has ever hit the bottle—in any form—to any serious extent but the bodily damage he has taken since the 70s has been immense.
This is a man who has endured not just the usual bone-clattering, joint-juddering, tendon-tingling effects of suplexes and spinebusters but the terrors of the deathmatch: chair shots, fire, barbed wire, explosives et cetera. It’s rare for such a mainstream wrestler to participate in such underground carnage. One match he wrestled against his friend and rival Mick “Cactus Jack” Foley was advertised as a “Barbed Wire Rope, Exploding Barbed Wire Boards, and Exploding Ring Time Bomb Deathmatch”. It was as bizarre and terrifying as you can imagine. Funk was 50 at the time.
Terry Funk is a great wrestler. But he is also a great American—perhaps one of the last truly great Americans. ““An American hero,” says Professor Harvey Rich, “is someone who has made a major impact on the country, with lasting cultural implications.” Well, the Funker made his mark on American culture. But more than that he embodies the American spirit—that transcendent quality one knows far better than one can define.
In The Myth of Sisyphus, Albert Camus wrote:
I leave Sisyphus at the foot of the mountain. One always finds one’s burden again. But Sisyphus teaches the higher fidelity that negates the gods and raises rocks. He too concludes that all is well. This universe henceforth without a master seems to him neither sterile nor futile. Each atom of that stone, each mineral flake of that night-filled mountain, in itself, forms a world. The struggle itself toward the heights is enough to fill a man’s heart. One must imagine Sisyphus happy.
The greatest Americans are Sisyphus, laughing. They have no utopian delusions but are intent on hurling themselves up the hill with two-fingers-to-fate gusto. Were the pioneers aware of what kind of home they would find? Of course not. No one promised stacks of gold and lakes of wine. Still, they threw their talents westward with absurd good cheer.
Terry Funk has the same spirit. He is a wanderer. Toughness is baked into his bones. As he recounts in his memoirs:
At the end of June 1944, my father’s ship was hit by a typhoon, which tossed around that little boat like a matchbox in a washing machine. They ended up near the coast of China! But what he didn’t know was that my mother was also in a dangerous situation at the same time. She was giving birth to a breach baby and started hemorrhaging. The only person in the area with the same blood type was her doctor, so he gave her his own blood.
And that was how I came into this world.
Funk started wrestling in Texas, with his father Dory and his brother Dory. (Dory is apparently short for Dorrance. No, I don’t know why they don’t call people Dorrance anymore.) They worked in the old school territories of the National Wrestling Alliance, but Texas could not contain them. Terry worked across Japan, where he was perhaps the most popular gaijin, or foreigner, in the country. Westerners were generally bad guys, “heels”, but the Japanese loved the rambling American outlaw.
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Funk worked in the two biggest American promotions, the WWF and WCW, where he had a timeless “I Quit” match"—in which one wrestler has to verbally submit—with the world champion Ric Flair. Even as the heel, Funk’s throaty emotion, maniacal stare and fierce dedication to whatever he was doing proved that the highest talent of a wrestler is to make people care about you—care about you kicking ass or getting your ass kicked.
Funk lost that bout, like the pro that he was, putting over the more mainstream and marketable star, but he would not let anyone fuck with him. When the WWF wanted to employ him, in 1993, in a small, humiliating role under a blue mask as part of another wrestler's entourage, he skipped town, leaving a note: “My horse is sick. I think he’s dying. I’ll see you later.”
There were missteps. A later 1997 run in WWF took place under the moniker “Chainsaw Charlie”, with a pair of stockings on his head, baffling crowds who simply wanted to watch Terry Funk. Funk also ended up working for the ill-fated promotion XPW, the brainchild of the sleazebag pornographer Rob Black, which was such trash it made a landfill look like a Five-Star hotel. Still, what is life without mistakes? Fantasy.
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Funk knew the world was constantly in motion. The business had to change so as not to grow stale. In the 1990s, he was a pioneer of the rough and violent “hardcore” style, winning the Extreme Championship Wrestling title in 1997 and taking part in a famously difficult-to-watch match with Terry “Sabu” Brunk in which the ring ropes were replaced with strands of barbed wire. But while hardcore wrestling could devolve into joyless brutality, Funk never lost his ramshackle charisma, his sense of humor, and his keen awareness that wrestling should be fun.
This is an age of superheroes: the Avengers, the X-Men, Batman, Spiderman. As a British outsider it is perhaps not my place to comment but I think these figures betray the American ideal with their stylishness, their glossiness. The American hero was the pioneer, the frontiersman, and the cowboy. Someone who spat. Someone who ate squirrels. Someone whose feet smelled. Of course, that vision had its flaws as well but it was more real. Terry Funk is that kind of hero: not the sort of bronzed Adonis Vince McMahon of the WWF fell off his chair for but someone who is recognizably human, with a level of toughness, experience, and wit one can aspire to emulate.
Of course, the man's absurd conviction and iron will is what has left him in such pain today. Few of us should or could aspire to do such harm to ourselves. But that was where Terry Funk’s talents led him: on a path which entertained and inspired thousands at every turn. Perhaps American ambition always sows the seeds of American destruction. Nathan Hale was hanged. Davy Crockett went to his death at the Alamo. Two of the Earp brothers went down in a storm of bullets. The destination might be painful. But the journey is a blast.
So, say a prayer for Terry Funk if you are so inclined. Send out a word of appreciation to someone who is not just a great wrestler and a good man but an American hero.
Read more of Ben Sixsmith’s writing on Substack and follow him on Twitter.
