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From Wrestling Legend to Double Amputee, Kamala Keeps Fighting

Posted: Nov 20th 2014 By: Jason King

The day after they cut off his leg, James Harris' screams echoed through the halls of Baptist Memorial Hospital.

Doctors upped the dosage on his anesthetics, and Harris' wife, Emmer, tried to calm him by clutching his hand. Nothing worked. Throughout the day and into the night, Harris wailed in agony as nurses stood at his bedside, pleading with him to stop.

"You can't keep yelling like that," one of them said. "There are other people in this hospital, too."

Harris' voice quivered.

"Those other people," he sobbed, "aren't hurting like me."

For anyone who followed his 30-year career as a professional wrestler, the sight of Harris so helpless and afraid would've been jarring.

Billed as a cannibalistic headhunter from the African jungles, Kamala "The Ugandan Giant" was one of the industry's most terrifying heels during the 1980s and '90s.

Children often scattered or hid behind their parents as the 6'7", 380-pound grappler?clutching a spear and wearing nothing but white face paint and a leopard-skin loincloth?sauntered barefoot down the aisles of legendary wrestling venues such as Madison Square Garden as tribal music boomed over the sound system.

Believed to be unable to speak English, Kamala (who was actually a truck driver from Mississippi) was usually flanked by a masked handler named "Kim Chee," with whom he communicated through yelps and grunts.

"He was the kind of guy you had nightmares about," longtime wrestling commentator Jim Ross says. "But out of the ring, you couldn't find a more beautiful person."
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Wrestling matches may be scripted, but much of the physicality is real. Still, the sting that followed a chair shot from Hulk Hogan or a head-butt from Andre the Giant was nothing compared to the pain Harris felt as he lay in that hospital bed back in the fall of 2011, when diabetes forced doctors to amputate his left leg.

Harris endured the trauma again the following spring, as the disease claimed his right leg, too.

"I'm never going to walk again," Harris says more than two years later. "It's just something I have to accept."

Crammed into an electric wheelchair outside of his home in Senatobia, Mississippi?not far from the fields where he grew up picking cotton?Harris gets emotional as he relives the hell of losing his limbs.

The physical discomfort may be gone, but his new life is a continuous struggle.

Whether it was dealing with the murder of his sister and the loss of his son to AIDS, or fending for himself in a corporate world with a ninth-grade education, Harris has always been defined by his ability to persevere in the face of adversity.

But never has he encountered a challenge as daunting as this.

While former main event opponents such as Hogan and The Undertaker enjoy their lives as millionaires, Harris rifles through the mail each day for his monthly disability check.

The air conditioner is out in his $39,000 home, and Harris can't afford to get it fixed. The same goes for the transmission in his truck, which means Harris' wife?who was recently laid off from the job she held for 28 years?can't drive him into town to attend church or eat dinner.

"When you're on fixed income, it's hard to save money for your vehicle," says Harris, who, until his recent hospitalization, hadn't left his house in more than two months.

Instead, the 64-year-old Harris spends his mornings and afternoons in his garage, waving at the people who drive by and honk. He builds wooden chairs by hand, branding each with his "Kamala" signature before selling them online for $150.

Harris was giddy when someone ordered four of them this fall, but after he spent two weeks constructing the chairs, the man decided he didn't want them anymore.

"Now," Harris says, "I demand half the cash up front."

Around 6 p.m. each night, usually after dinner, Harris wheels into his bedroom, lifts his shirt and hooks up to a dialysis machine. For the next eight hours, excess fluid and waste flows through a tube that snakes from a hole in Harris' stomach, across the room and into a commode.

It's a lonely existence, especially after a traveling carnival of a career that took him everywhere from Africa to London to Puerto Rico to Dubai?not to mention nearly all 50 states. Still, Harris is determined to not let it get the best of him.

Harris smiles.

"Life," he says, "is worth living."