Violent People

1973: Before Terry Funk Was Terry Funk

Dan Rice
Latest posts by Dan Rice (see all)

When Tanner began putting together FUNKIN’ FALL, by which I mean declaring we should do it and then not mentioning it again for months, he divided Terry’s career into pre-1975 and everything after.

This makes sense.

There is considerably more Terry Funk footage available after 1975. December 10, 1975, is also the date Terry beat Jack Brisco for the NWA World Heavyweight Championship, which is a pretty clean dividing line. Before that, Terry Funk was a successful wrestler from a famous wrestling family. After it, he’s a World Champion.

I understand why Tanner did it. He’s also wrong.

For me, the line separating the first Terry Funk from the Terry Funk who follows isn’t December 10, 1975.

It’s June 3, 1973.

That’s the day Terry Funk’s father died.

I’ve written about death more than I ever intended to. I’ve written about losing my mother, losing my father, and the strange ways professional wrestling has helped me process both. At this point I’ve become the self-appointed Violent People Obit Guy, a distinction that doesn’t come with much in the way of perks.

There’s an old idea that a boy doesn’t truly become a man until his father dies. I think that’s largely macho bullshit, but I understand the sentiment. Losing a parent changes the architecture of your life. Someone who has always been there suddenly isn’t, and whatever relationship you had with them becomes something that exists entirely in the past.

I know from experience that losing a parent doesn’t come with one predetermined response. When my mother died, I spiraled. I lost control. For a long time I felt like a ship without a compass, still moving but with no real idea where I was going. Her death didn’t make me grow up. If anything, for a while it made me considerably worse at being an adult.

My father’s death was different. By then my life was fairly “together” in ways it hadn’t been when I lost my mother. Instead of knocking me off course, his death made me more conscious of the course I was already on. I became more present. I started taking positive actions instead of putting things off. This doesn’t mean that grief somehow improved my life, or that losing my father was easy. It wasn’t.

That’s probably part of why I’m hesitant to make grand declarations about what Dory Funk Sr.’s death did to Terry. I don’t know. Nobody really does. But I do know the death of a parent can change the direction of your life.

For Terry Funk, that loss wasn’t just personal. His father was also his teacher, his promoter, and the man responsible for building the wrestling world Terry inhabited. When Dory Funk Sr. died, Terry didn’t just lose his father. He lost the man who had been at the center of practically everything he’d ever known about professional wrestling.

I don’t think it is possible to understand early Terry Funk without understanding just how much of his world already belonged to Dory Funk Sr.

Dory Funk Sr. arrived in Amarillo in 1949. He wrestled there. Then he became a promoter there. He had a weekly television show. He worked as superintendent and football coach at Boys Ranch. The man ran cattle. He raised a family on the Flying Mare Ranch outside Amarillo.

The Panhandle Sports Hall of Fame describes the territory Dory built as stretching from Amarillo through El Paso, San Angelo and Colorado Springs. His sons learned wrestling from him and from the assortment of wrestlers constantly passing through their lives. 

There wasn’t really a line between the family business and the family. Wrestlers weren’t mysterious people who appeared on television. They were Dad’s coworkers. Wrestling wasn’t something happening somewhere else. It paid the bills.

By the time Terry finally wrestled professionally in December 1965, he wasn’t entering some foreign world. He was going to work, just like his old man.

One of the things I love about looking at the beginning of famous careers is how stupid hindsight makes everything look. We know Terry Funk.

We know the crazy eyes, the staggered punching, the moonsault that a man of his age absolutely did not need to be doing. Theres the branding iron, FMW, and ECW. We know the endless retirements. We even know Chainsaw Charlie.

None of that exists yet.

In 1965, Terry Funk is the third Funk.

Nick Bockwinkel once explained the problem with coming into Amarillo as a babyface:

“First of all, there’s the number one babyface, Dory Funk Sr., then the number two babyface is Dory Funk Jr., and the number three babyface is Terry Funk. Then you’ve got your fourth son, Ricky Romero. But now you’re going to bring in, from Hollywood, this blond, nice-looking, All-American boy by the name of Nick Bockwinkel into Amarillo. And you expect me to get over?”

That tells us exactly where Terry stood.

That’s not to suggest Terry was some unsuccessful nobody riding his father’s coattails. Being the third most popular wrestler in a territory your family runs is a pretty good position to find yourself in. There are worse places to start a career.

But it also meant Terry was growing up professionally in a world where the two men closest to him had already established what success looked like.

This became even more pronounced in 1969 when Dory Jr. won the NWA World Heavyweight Championship.

For more than four years, Terry Funk’s older brother was not merely a successful wrestler. He is THE wrestler. The traveling NWA champion. He’s the guy every territory puts on top when he comes through town. The Funk whose name sits next to the most important championship in professional wrestling.

It’s hard to imagine Terry Funk living in anybody’s shadow because history has turned Terry into this enormous figure, but he did, for years.

The spring of 1973 was brutal for the Funk family.

On May 24, Dory Jr.’s four-plus-year reign as NWA World Heavyweight Champion ended when Harley Race defeated him.

Ten days later, their father was dead. Dory Funk Sr. was only 54.

The details of his final night, whether true or not, are so perfectly pro wrestling I choose to believe them.

According to accounts from wrestlers who were there, a group had gathered at the Flying Mare Ranch. Drinks were involved. Eventually, because apparently nobody in the business knows how to sit in a chair and talk like a normal human being, wrestling broke out.

Les Thornton remembered Dory Sr. putting him in a full nelson. Thornton picked him up and rammed him into a refrigerator, sending its contents everywhere. Dory patched up his head and laughed.

Later that night, Dory suffered a heart attack. He died at St. Anthony’s Hospital in Amarillo.

There are probably worse ways for an old wrestler to spend his final hours. There are definitely safer ones.

Dory Funk Sr. was only 54 years old. Terry was 28.

His father wasn’t some elderly man whose death had been looming over the family for years. He was still wrestling. Still promoting. He was actively running a ranch. Still occupying the same enormous space in his sons’ lives that he had occupied since they were born.

And then he wasn’t.

There is a wrestling result from May 24, 1973 that I can’t get out of my head.

Dory Funk Sr. and Terry Funk defeated King Curtis and Cyclone Negro in Amarillo.

Ten days later Dory was dead.

Then the cards just continue.

June 12. Dory Jr. and Terry against Cyclone Negro and Killer Karl Krupp.

June 14. Terry beats Les Thornton.

June 19. Terry defeats Tommy Tsuruta.

June 25. Terry goes to a draw with Harley Race. 

That’s professional wrestling. Your father dies. There’s another town to make.

I don’t know what Terry Funk was feeling when he stepped into the ring after his father’s death.

Maybe wrestling was a distraction. It could have just been an obligation. Maybe it was the only thing that made sense in a world that suddenly didn’t.

I don’t know.

I don’t want to psychoanalyze a dead man I’ve never met. Wrestling history already has enough people confidently explaining what wrestlers were secretly thinking in hotel rooms fifty years ago.

I have no idea if Terry woke up on June 4, 1973, feeling fundamentally different.

Probably not. Grief rarely works that efficiently.

There are still things that need done. Bills that need paid. People who need you. Responsibilities that were there yesterday and will still be there tomorrow.

In Terry’s case, there were wrestling shows.

I’ve written before about the way wrestling helped me deal with losing my own mother. I can’t pretend my experience was anything like Terry’s, and I certainly don’t want to suggest that I understand how he grieved.

But I do understand how strange it is to continue participating in something that was part of your relationship with a person after that person is gone.

Something that was once connected to them now belongs to you in a different way.

Maybe that’s why I keep coming back to those June 1973 results.

Before June 1973, Terry Funk could always be described in relation to somebody else.

Dory Funk’s son.

Dory Funk Jr.’s younger brother.

One of the Funk brothers.

A wrestler in the Funk territory.

Afterward, those descriptions still existed, but they didn’t explain enough anymore.

His father was gone.

His brother was no longer World Champion.

And the family business now belonged to the sons.

There wasn’t anybody left above them.

Six months after his father’s death, Terry wrestled Jack Brisco for the NWA World Heavyweight Championship in Amarillo.

They went sixty minutes.

Two years later, Terry would beat Brisco for the belt. 

1975 matters. Of course it matters.

Winning the NWA World Heavyweight Championship inherently changed how Terry Funk was perceived. The title gave him something Dory had already possessed. It put both brothers into a category no other brother combination had ever occupied.

I don’t think the title created Terry Funk. I think by the time he won it, the more important transition has already happened.

There’s a tendency when discussing Terry Funk to work backward from the hardcore legend.

We look at ECW Terry and search old footage for evidence that he was always there hiding in plain sight.

Look! He took a crazy bump in 1968. There’s Terry.

He bled in 1971. There’s Terry.

He screamed bloody murder. Terry!

I don’t think that’s correct. The Terry Funk we know wasn’t trapped inside a 28-year-old waiting to escape.

The young wrestler didn’t know he’d someday fight Atsushi Onita in an exploding ring. Onita was still a kid. He didn’t know there would be an ECW. Terry certainly didn’t know there would be a Chainsaw Charlie.

Terry’s great gift wasn’t that he somehow predicted professional wrestling’s future. It was that he kept arriving in the future and finding a way to belong there.

Maybe growing up in Amarillo explains some of that.

He watched his father wrestle, promote, book and manage relationships.

He watched his brother carry the NWA championship around the world.

He worked Texas.

He traveled the NWA.

He went to Japan.

He became a promoter.

Dory Funk Sr.’s obituary described Terry and Dory Jr. simply as two sons who had “followed in his footsteps as wrestlers.” 

That’s true.

It also became hilariously inadequate.

Terry Funk spent the next fifty years following those footsteps into places Dory Sr. could never have imagined.

December 1975 is when Terry Funk became NWA World Heavyweight Champion. June 1973 is when the world that had made Terry Funk stopped existing.

Until that point, Terry had spent his entire life in a world his father built, with Dory Sr. there to show him what being a Funk was supposed to mean.

Terry would spend the rest of his life answering that question, and because he was Terry Funk, he changed the answer about every five years.

dan-r


Co-host of Talking Tourneys and Violent People Radio, all around violent person.

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