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Verne Gagne, Wrestler Who Grappled Through Two Eras, Dies at 89

Posted: May 3rd 2015 By: Margalit Fox

Eighth Avenue traffic was disorganized, pedestrian traffic was jammed for blocks north and south, side doors at Madison Square Garden were torn from their hinges as the crowd stormed the entrances. It was the largest crowd at the Garden in 25 years ? larger than for championship fights, rodeos, tennis matches or the circus.

? New York Journal-American, 1957

They had come to see Verne Gagne.

Gagne, who died on Monday at 89, was one of the most celebrated pro wrestlers of his time, known for his quickness and finesse in the ring. ?A matador,? the newspapers called him; a ?matinee wrestling idol,? ?the millionaire wrestler.?

His effect on New York City that day was nothing out of the ordinary. Handsome, college educated and a former United States Marine, Gagne (pronounced GAHN-yeh) was among the first wrestlers of the postwar era to become a major national celebrity. He wrestled professionally from the late 1940s until the 1980s, when he was well into his 50s, drawing vast crowds around the country and appearing frequently on television.

His opponents ? men with names like Dick the Bruiser, Killer Kowalski and Hard Boiled Haggerty ? often left the ring in defeat. Sometimes they left on stretchers.

A native of Minnesota, a state perhaps second only to Iowa in its ardor for wrestling, Verne Gagne had been determined to be a wrestler from the time he was a boy. He left home at 14 to pursue the sport, defying his father and turning down a career in pro football for life in the ring.

In 2002, Wrestling Digest ranked him No. 5 on its list of the 50 greatest wrestlers of the previous half-century, ahead of titans like Andre the Giant, Gorgeous George and Stone Cold Steve Austin.

But the sport that gave Gagne wealth and renown also exacted a great price. Besides the toll on his body ? concussions, broken bones, cauliflower ears, hearing loss and a surgically fused ankle ? there was, quite possibly, a toll on his mind: Six years ago, in the grip of the Alzheimer?s disease with which he lived for the last dozen years of his life, Gagne was involved in an altercation that resulted in a man?s death.

Even at midcentury, Gagne was small for a heavyweight: about 6 feet and 225 pounds in his prime. He held 10 world professional titles, was a much-decorated college champion and served as an alternate on the 1948 United States Olympic team. As a pro, he was earning $100,000 a year by 1960, equivalent to almost $800,000 today.

?In Minnesota especially, he was one of the most recognizable and charismatic heroes that people had back in the ?50s and ?60s and into the ?70s,? George Schire, the author of the 2010 book ?Minnesota?s Golden Age of Wrestling: From Verne Gagne to the Road Warriors,? said by telephone on Wednesday. ?He rivaled people like Harmon Killebrew and Fran Tarkenton. When Hubert Humphrey was the vice president, there were several times when Verne and Humphrey would appear at the same function and they?d be in the news at the same time.?

Gagne was a transitional figure in pro wrestling history, a bridge between the early 20th century barnstormers who grappled in the dirt at carnivals and the steroidal sideshows of today. A pure technician, he relied on speed, skill and strategy rather than brutal bulk. He wore no costume but shoes, socks and shorts; his theatrics were minimal.

?Verne?s character was that he was the real deal,? Schire said. ?In wrestling it was always a soap opera. You had to have a good guy, you had to have a bad guy; that?s what draws the crowd. So Verne was always in the ring with the bad guy. Those guys would be cheating ? eye gouges, doing stuff behind the referee?s back, hitting someone with something ? all to further the story line for the crowds. Verne never did.?

In later years Gagne was a wrestling trainer and a promoter whose clients included Hulk Hogan and Jesse Ventura, the future governor of Minnesota. He produced wrestling shows for television and was the executive producer and a star of a 1974 feature film, ?The Wrestler,? which also starred Edward Asner and a spate of fellow wrestlers. (To persuade any remaining cynics that he was no actor in the ring, Gagne cheerfully commended to them his performance in the movie.)

But after he left wrestling in the 1990s, Gagne all but disowned the sport. From the manner in which his promoting career had run its course ? and as he himself made plain in interviews ? wrestling, in its late-20th-century histrionic incarnation, appeared to have passed him by.

A saloonkeeper?s son, LaVerne Clarence Gagne was born on Feb. 26, 1926, in Corcoran, Minn., near Minneapolis, and reared on a farm there. His mother died when he was 11; three years later, determined to wrestle despite his father?s insistence that he work in the saloon instead, he left home. Verne finished high school, where he wrestled and played football and baseball while living with an aunt and uncle.

At the University of Minnesota, he became a four-time heavyweight champion of the Big Nine, as the Big Ten Conference was then known, and an N.C.A.A. national champion. He also played football. Near the end of World War II he served stateside with the Marines, tapped by virtue of his wrestling skills to teach the men hand-to-hand combat.

In 1947 Gagne was a 16th-round draft pick by the Chicago Bears; he was later courted by the Green Bay Packers and the San Francisco 49ers. But there was little money in pro football then, and he chose to earn his keep on the canvas.

In his first professional match, in 1949 in Minneapolis, Gagne defeated Abe Kashey, known as King Kong, and in the decades that followed Gagne traversed the country. Crowds waited eagerly for him to dispatch his foes with his trademark sleeper hold, which entailed grabbing an opponent?s head and pressing on his carotid artery so that he passed out ? or at least gave a convincing impression of passing out.

In 1960, Gagne helped found the American Wrestling Association. Based in Minneapolis, the association promoted matches throughout the Midwest, Far West and Canada. Gagne, who later became the association?s sole owner, held the A.W.A. championship belt 10 times.

But in the 1980s, with the ascent of cable TV and its lucre, many of the nation?s star wrestlers, including Hogan and Ventura, were lured from their regional stables to the World Wrestling Federation, now a national behemoth known as World Wrestling Entertainment. The A.W.A. ceased operations in 1991; Gagne filed for personal bankruptcy in 1993.

A dozen years ago, after Gagne had trouble finding his way to his son?s home, a 10-minute drive from his own, doctors at the Mayo Clinic diagnosed Alzheimer?s disease.

Speaking by telephone on Tuesday, the son, Greg Gagne, also a former professional wrestler, said that while the exact cause of his father?s dementia could not be determined, it was more than possible that the many blows to the head he sustained during his career were a contributing factor. He ticked off a list of pro wrestlers, contemporaries of his father, who had also developed dementia.

In 2009, in an altercation of uncertain origin, Gagne, then 82, pushed Helmut Gutmann, a 97-year-old fellow resident in the memory-loss unit of a Bloomington, Minn., retirement home. Gutmann fell to the floor, breaking a hip. Neither man could recall the episode afterward.

Gutmann had surgery but died from complications less than three weeks later. Although the Hennepin County medical examiner?s office ruled the death a homicide, the county attorney declined to file charges, citing Gagne?s impaired mental capacity.

Gagne lived afterward in Chanhassen, Minn., at the home of one of his daughters; his death there, from complications of Alzheimer?s, was confirmed by his son.

Gagne?s wife, the former Mary Marxen, whom he married in 1949, died in 2002. Besides his son, his survivors include three daughters, Elizabeth Ahern, Kathleen Whistler and Donna Gagne; a brother, Jerry; nearly half a dozen younger half-siblings; and six grandchildren.

In an irony that was not entirely lost on him, Gagne was inducted into the W.W.E. Hall of Fame in 2006. Though he made a few jovial remarks at the induction ceremony, he had made his real views on the organization and its stars clear long before.

?They?ve got a cartoon going there,? Gagne said in The New York Times in 1989. ?I never heard of needing a dog bone or a safety pin through your cheek to wrestle.? He added: ?A lot of ?em don?t even know how to wrestle. Some are just body builders, and some puffed themselves up with steroids. Sure, there was entertainment when we wrestled, but most of us were real wrestlers.?