10 Wrestling Road Stories You Won't Believe
4. Dr. Jerry Graham Kidnaps His Dead Mother...
Jerry Graham, a well-known lunatic within wrestling circles, was always a handful. In fact, so legendary were his antics that Terry Funk even dedicated a whole chapter of his autobiography to them.
Stories of The Good Doctors insane shenanigans are legendary. In one tale, Graham was in El Paso, Texas and decided to dye his suit black (while he was wearing it, actually). Graham only owned one suit, so whilst he was waiting for it to dry, he went down to the nearest restaurant in just his underwear. He was also carrying an umbrella, which he used as an imaginary gun to shoot at planes flying overhead (as you would).
When Jerry's travelling partners Terry Funk and Harley Race returned to the hotel room, they found that Jerry had not only dyed the suit, but he had also completely splattered the room with black dye covering everything in sight. They had no idea what he could have been doing in there to create such an incredible mess!
...So yeah, The Good Doctor was nucking futs, as we've hopefully just established.
As far as unbelievable road stories go, this one is pretty crazy, but a number of wrestlers, including Terry Funk and Superstar Billy Graham (who's real-life brother was one of the arresting officers), swear that it actually happened.
The incident occurred in 1969. Jerry's mother, Mary, had been admitted to hospital. Graham, who suffered from a virulent combination of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (he was a WW2 veteran) and alcoholism, made a threatening phone call to her doctor in an attempt to persuade him to keep her alive.
After she passed on, a grief-stricken Graham decided to make good on his threats, and armed himself with a sawn-off shotgun and a hunting knife. Accompanied by his 12-year-old son, Graham shoved all hospital personnel aside before picking up his mother's dead body from a gurney and attempting to take her home with him. Amazingly, he was able to fight the hospital's security personnel one-handed and emerge from the building with the body, before heading to his car and exhaustedly dropping it onto the hood.
Police arrived at the scene, so Graham took them on as well. Despite being physically and emotionally exhausted from the ordeal, Jerry was still able to take on several cops, until one of them damn near split his head open with a nightstick.