Shooters by Jonathan Snowden

Author:Jonathan Snowden
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: ECW Press
Published: 2012-10-15T16:00:00+00:00

But even a historic bronze medal didn’t pay the bills. “I was always broke,” he said. “I came home from the Olympics with 60 cents in my pocket. [As a pro wrestler] I was getting paid. So I was happy.”

The fighter took to wrestling even quicker than he took to judo, earning him a spot with New Japan Pro-Wrestling. “Training for wrestling was a breeze compared to my judo training. Wrestling was very easy for me. New Japan Pro-Wrestling took care of me and booked me at various venues. I listened to advice given to me from the veterans. Most young guys out there have had six matches and think they know it all: you never stop learning and asking questions if you want to be good at what you do.”

While Coage was famous in wrestling circles for his judo accolades, his real claim to fame was a confrontation with Andre the Giant on a tour bus in New Japan. Andre had been making racist jokes and Coage, an African American, demanded they stop the bus. He got out and challenged the Giant to come and settle things man to man. “The Giant looked out the window and never made a move,” Bret Hart wrote in his autobiography Hitman: My Real Life in the Cartoon World of Wrestling. The next day at the hotel, Coage renewed his challenge. Finally, the Giant backed down and apologized.

Hart’s family would become all too familiar with “Bad News” Allen Coage in the years to come. He was the lead heel in Bret’s father Stu Hart’s Stampede promotion for years. His propensity for in-ring savagery was legendary. Even Tom Billington, the reckless “Dynamite Kid” who helped popularize the ladder match and took enormous risks in the ring, often thought his matches with Coage were out of control:

It was as if he didn’t know you. I’ve had a lot of hard matches in my career, most of them in Japan because that’s how they like their wrestling, but the matches I had with Bad News were something else.

Violence was a main feature of all our matches, and I could guarantee we’d both end up hurt. If Bad News picked up something to hit you with, a plank of wood, a chair, a bottle, you had to move fast because he would hit you. He didn’t care.

Announcer Ed Whalen was so put off by Bad News’s violent matches and interviews that he briefly quit the promotion. The athletic commission in Calgary also suspended Coage. Fake or not, the matches were brutal. Coage hit Billington with fire extinguishers and chairs, and once even took a swing at him with a real axe.

To Coage, this didn’t seem extreme. “That’s the way Tommy and I approached it. He’d lay in with the chops and the punches and I would do the same. When the audience saw it, they thought, ‘This is the real thing.’”

By the time Bad News hit the big time, in Vince McMahon’s WWF, it was 1988 and the Olympian was 45 years old.

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