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Heels and Faces

Posted: Mar 5th 2007 By: CMBurnham

There was an Assassin in the office this week and I missed him.

Jody Hamilton, who wrestled for decades as one of the Masked Assassins (and for a few years as The Flame) came by to talk with The Daily Citizen's professional wrestling columnist Jamie Jones. Hamilton is owner of Deep South Wrestling, an Atlanta-area company which plans to promote matches in Dalton.

Due to a prior commitment, I didn't get to meet Hamilton, which is a shame because I have always wanted to get an up-close look at pure evil.

And make no mistake, the Assassins were evil of the purest sort, perpetrating the devil's business in the guise of a professional wrestling tag team.

I first saw the dastardly duo in the late 1960s. There was Assassin 1 (the late Tom Renesto) and Assassin 2 (Hamilton). Back then--when pro wrestlers went to great extremes to make the business look real--we had no idea what the Assassins' real names were. They were just the Assassins, two beefy, black and gold-clad grapplers willing to do absolutely anything to win their matches.

Of course there were a lot of heel (bad guy) wrestlers back then, but none came close to matching the Assassins for sheer cunning and villainy.

One time they introduced a protege, a masked cohort who wrestled as The Professional. He was a pretty darn good wrestler too, but it became obvious that he didn't have the stomach for some of the rule-breaking shenanigans his mentors often utilized. The Professional wanted to win without cheating and was willing to risk a loss to do so.

That attitude might win you a sportsman of the year award from the Fellowship of Christian Athletes, but when you were the tag team partner of the Assassins it earned you something else entirely: a televised beatdown.

After getting pounded into a puddle, the Professional vowed revenge and for months he enlisted a series of partners to help him gain his vengeance. It didn't happen. No matter how bravely the Professional and his various partners tried, the Assassins always came up with one more dirty trick to save them.

It drove me nuts!

In those days, most of the heel wrestlers came in obvious packages. You had your Evil Foreigners: Tojo Yammamoto (who pretended to be Japanese, but was actually Hawaiian), Baron Von Raschke (a Nebraskan who pretended to be a Nazi) and Skandar Akbar (an "Arab" bad guy with a mysterious Texas accent).

You also had a lot of guys playing off the old Gorgeous George gimmick: vain and pampered.

But not the Assassins. There wasn't anything girly about them at all. Where they did differ from a lot of other wrestlers of that era--both heels and faces (the good guys)--is that they were extremely intelligent. They gave articulate interviews where they calmly explained that they were going to kick their opponents' butts and why there was nothing their foes could do about it. No shouting. No jumping up and down. No bombastic threats.

Fans be damned. The Assassins were interested in the well being of exactly two people--and they both wore black and gold.

To heck with everyone else!

Wrestling has changed enormously since the heyday of the Assassins. There's a lot more money in the business now. It's on national television every night of the week and some wrestlers (The Rock, Jesse Ventura, Hulk Hogan) become huge celebrities outside the business.

Certainly the wrestlers are bigger and stronger now and much more skilled at the flamboyant "high impact"; moves that young audiences demand.

But you can't tell me it's a better show than the one I used to camp in front of the television set on Saturday afternoon to see, no matter what else was going on.

El Mongol. Bearcat Brown. Saul Weingeroff. Jackie Fargo. Bob Armstrong (the wrestling fireman). Mr Wrestling 1 and 2. Dory Funk Jr. Roberto Soto. Dr. Ken Ramey and the Interns. The Torres Brothers. Ray Gunkel. Big Bad John. Dick Steinborn. Len Rossi. Jerry Jarrett. Tony Atlas. Ray Candy. Rock Hunter. The Scuffling Hillbillies.

I loved 'em all.

Truth be known, even the Assassins.