riverplate
01 Sep 2008, 10:19 AM
An all-time great has left us. He was from the era when wrestling was wrestling and not the outrageous freak show that exists today.
RIP Killer, and all the others from the golden days back at Madison Square Garden who are no longer with us. You were great fun and entertainment. Way back when, I used to go to the Garden every month for the wrestling shows with my late friend Paul and we always had a blast.
http://www.post-gazette.com/images/19981112hokillerM.jpg
Killer Kowalski, Wrestler, Dies at 81 (http://www.nytimes.com/2008/09/01/sports/01kowalski.html?ref=obituaries) - N.Y. Times
Walter (Killer) Kowalski, one of professional wrestling’s biggest stars and most hated villains when wrestlers offered a nightly menu of mayhem in the early years of television, died Saturday in Everett, Mass. He was 81.
Kowalski’s death was announced by his wife, Theresa, who said he had been hospitalized since a heart attack in early August.
At 6 feet 7 inches and 275 pounds or so, Kowalski was a formidable figure who delighted in applying his claw hold, a thumb squeeze to an opponent’s solar plexus, when he was not leaping from the top strand of the ropes and descending on his foe’s chest.
Emerging as a featured performer in the early 1950s, he became a TV celebrity with wrestlers like Antonino Rocca, Lou Thesz, Gorgeous George, Haystacks Calhoun and Nature Boy Buddy Rogers.
RIP Killer, and all the others from the golden days back at Madison Square Garden who are no longer with us. You were great fun and entertainment. Way back when, I used to go to the Garden every month for the wrestling shows with my late friend Paul and we always had a blast.
http://www.post-gazette.com/images/19981112hokillerM.jpg
Killer Kowalski, Wrestler, Dies at 81 (http://www.nytimes.com/2008/09/01/sports/01kowalski.html?ref=obituaries) - N.Y. Times
Walter (Killer) Kowalski, one of professional wrestling’s biggest stars and most hated villains when wrestlers offered a nightly menu of mayhem in the early years of television, died Saturday in Everett, Mass. He was 81.
Kowalski’s death was announced by his wife, Theresa, who said he had been hospitalized since a heart attack in early August.
At 6 feet 7 inches and 275 pounds or so, Kowalski was a formidable figure who delighted in applying his claw hold, a thumb squeeze to an opponent’s solar plexus, when he was not leaping from the top strand of the ropes and descending on his foe’s chest.
Emerging as a featured performer in the early 1950s, he became a TV celebrity with wrestlers like Antonino Rocca, Lou Thesz, Gorgeous George, Haystacks Calhoun and Nature Boy Buddy Rogers.