Ken Patera was someone who was born to be an athlete. The brother of an NFL head coach, Ken received a scholarship for the shot put to Brigham Young University and won a gold medal in the Pan-American Games. He placed 1st in his weight class four consecutive years in the US Weightlifting Championships and competed in the Munich Olympic Games. All that shot put experience came in handy when Patera was denied serviced at a McDonald's in April 1984. Patera and fellow wrestler Masa Saito were hungry after a wrestling event in Wisconsin. Unfortunately, the McDonald's in question was closed and refused to serve the hungry wrestlers after hours. Most rational human beings would leave and find another spot at this point but Ken Patera wasn't a rational human being that night. Patera, being the superhuman power lifter, picked up a fairly large boulder and tossed it through the front window of the offending establishment. The wrestlers then actually had a good idea for the first time all night: Get the hell out of there before the cops showed up. Unfortunately for our heroes, the police tracked them back to their hotel and that's when things went from bad to worse. Patera and Saito decided they weren't going to be taken without a fight and they proceeded to assault the officers sent to arrest them. Patera beat a female police officer so badly that she was unable to return to police work and necessitated a gun being pulled on him. Patera was arrested and charged with two counts of assault on a police officer and one count of destruction of property for destroying the McDonald's window. He was sentenced to two years in jail for his night on the town and served almost all of it. When he returned to the WWF in the spring of 1987, Vince McMahon actually tried to portray him as a babyface. Unsurprisingly, the crowd didn't exactly take to Patera.
