Pain and Passion by Heath McCoy

Author:Heath McCoy
Language: eng
Format: mobi, pdf
Published: 2012-01-27T08:08:22+00:00

Let the Good Times Roll

165

Schneider, the oily janitor with the pencil-thin moustache on tv sitcom One Day at a Time – while wrestling in Florida. In Calgary, Wayne started slick-ing back his hair and wearing costume jewellery to the ring. He even wore an Elvis Presley jumpsuit a Florida fan had given him. Gradually, his character morphed into that of a sleazy Elvis impersonator. That transformation was complete in the late 1980s, when Vince McMahon recruited Wayne into the wwf as hated Elvis-wannabe Honky Tonk Man.

Wayne’s physical skills in the ring were average at best, but on the microphone he was one of the greats, selling himself as an arrogant, fast-talking hillbilly with moonshine in his veins, a motor in his mouth, and a cheating heart. By the time he got to the wwf, he had the shtick down pat and, for a time, it made him a star.

“Dr. D” David Shults, the D standing for death, came to Stampede Wrestling in 1980 as another of Foley’s minions. Hailing from Memphis, the six-foot-four, 270-pound grappler, a former solider in the U.S. Army, quickly distinguished himself as a fierce brawler and the most charismatic heel in the territory at the time.

Shults, who had a goatee and a shock of tightly curled blond hair, was also a master on the microphone, towering over Ed Whalen and making boastful proclamations in a style that was equal parts Wolfman Jack and Muhammad Ali.

“Sheriff Shults has come to town, baby!” he’d rave. “The rich girl’s lover and the poor girl’s dream! Dr. D! King David! The Messiah of the Mat!” The fans loved to hate him and later, when he joined the good guys, they cheered him wildly.

David Shults was one of the all-time great Stampede Wrestling characters. But behind the scenes, many claim, Shults was not all that different from his Dr. D character. Laurie Mills, a member of the Calgary Boxing and Wrestling Commission, was leery of the Southern wrestler: “You never knew what he was going to do. He had his own ideas, and he could be hard to handle.… I never knew how much of [his persona] was made up, because he was a showman. But he was very nasty.”

Certainly, Shults was a prickly individual who liked to intimidate people, his fellow wrestlers included. Some wrestlers were even scared to step in the ring with him because if they did something he didn’t like, even accidentally, he’d deal with them harshly. As Ross says, “he was a bomb waiting to explode.” “He had a temper and he could back it up, too,” says Shults’s friend Leo Burke, who considers his fights and tag matches with Dr. D among the best work of his career. “He was the kind of guy that [if he came after you,]

you’d have to kill him to make him stop.”

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.