Terry Funk

[WolfofWords]

I have already talked at length about Bray Wyatt (real name Windham Rotunda) and his death hit me hard this past week but there was also another death in wrestling. The death of Terry Funk was not as much of a surprise but it was no less impactful.



I only became a fan of pro wrestling somewhere in late 1995 or early 1996 and I was only watching the WWF. So, I did not really have an appreciation of the man who went by Terry Funk. I would later learn that he had already been in the business for thirty years at that point. He was working for the International Wrestling Association and for Extreme Championship Wrestling during those days. He was between stints in the big two of the WWF and WCW. I first got to know Terry Funk a little later but under a different name. Yes, I am talking about his stint as Chainsaw Charlie.



Terry Funk had had a long friendship with one of his many proteges, Mick Foley, for a long time. Foley idolized Terry as a legend and one of the progenitors of the hardcore style of pro wrestling. Foley had made a name for himself literally bleeding for the fans just as Funk had done. The WWF brought in Funk to be Foley’s tag partner in a feud with the New Age Outlaws (one of my favorite tag teams at the time). Foley was working under his Cactus Jack persona, a wild-eyed danger enthusiast. When Terry Funk came in, he insisted that he could not just be Terry Funk even though that name brought a lot of prestige and fame with it. In a move that still leaves people confused, he picked the name Chainsaw Charlie, put a stocking over his head, and wielded a chainsaw. It was silly but also a little bit scary when I was a preteen. Foley and Funk put their bodies through hell against the Outlaws and I was thoroughly entertained.



The next time that I saw Terry Funk was a very silly moment but one that would resonate with me after reading Foley’s first autobiography. Mick Foley had one of his most famous matches against The Undertaker in Hell in a Cell. During that match, he legitimately got knocked out and struggled to regain his faculties (something that wouldn’t happen today). Instead of sitting around and waiting for Foley to brush the cobwebs aside, they decided on some stalling tactics. One of those tactics was that officials and backstage personnel rushed to the ring to check on Foley including his mentor Terry Funk. Undertaker grabbed Funk and chokeslammed him out of his shoes. In retrospect, this was Terry offering up his body to help his friend get back into the spotlight at a time when Foley’s career was stalling a bit.



I would later go on to learn a lot more about the Funker. He was a second-generation wrestler and got his start working for his dad, Dory Funk. He and Dory Funk, Jr. were a much-celebrated tag team for years. He worked heavily in the old territories and also traveled often to Japan where foreign (gaijin) wrestlers were often very revered. He won the National Wrestling Alliance Heavyweight Championship one time which at one point was the pinnacle of working in professional wrestling.



He worked one of the most amazing and dangerous events in all of professional wrestling. It was called the King of the Death Match Tournament. IWA Japan was a newer organization at the time and was making a name for itself as a hyper-violent organization. Of course, I learned all about this from Foley’s book and later regretted watching any footage of it. Funk was brought in as the main star of a tournament of increasingly dangerous matches. Matches had thumbtacks, real barbed wire, bins full of broken glass, and spike nails. Suffice to say, there was a lot of bleeding. This was before professional wrestling realized that it could create fake barbed wire and prop weapons to lessen injury. The tournament came down to Foley going up against Funk. The finals of the tournament would be a Barbed Wire Rope, Exploding Barbed Wire Boards and Exploding Ring Time Bomb Deathmatch. Just looking at those words makes me want to piss myself. Somehow, Funk had talked Foley into using actual C-4 in the match, a move that left both competitors with some intense burns. Absolutely insane. That wasn’t the only time the two of them set each other on fire either.



That’s the lens through which I watched Terry Funk for the rest of my experience with him. Funk was hardcore before there even was a hardcore. He worked for several companies including World Championship Wrestling until its demise. Actually, Funk is very famous for his various “retirements”. Terry was constantly suffering from nagging injuries but he somehow kept going. Eventually, he was convinced to hang it up but it never stuck. His first retirement match was about forty years ago but he was still working up until 2017. If you do the math, that’s a lo of years of off-and-on retirements. Most famously, he was featured in the 1999 documentary Beyond the Mat where he was planning a retirement show at his ranch in Texas because of chronic knee problems. He continued working for another eighteen years.