13 Things We Learned From Dark Side Of The Ring: Ludvig Borga

Then there's this insanity.

Mikko noted that he once found an odd newspaper story about “two karate guys” beating up everybody in a local bar. It was Tony and Christer ‘in character’. Halme was fascinated by movies, and he wanted to create a larger than life persona for himself. Before becoming a night time karate fighter (?!) he’d refer to himself as “The Viking” and get into street fights.

Christer’s reaction is one of knowing embarrassment, but also a strange shrug about that sort of behaviour. It's painfully obvious that both he and Tony were bad influences on each other - they had a strong need for power, which manifested itself as physical violence. Going further, the double act developed fantastical characters for themselves even though they were fighting for real.

This, naturally, was all a power fantasy, but it was very, very dangerous to others around them. Both Tony and Christer are surely lucky things didn't get even further out of hand. Somebody could've been killed when Halme was strutting around as "The Viking". He was a big, burly dude who could do some serious damage, and it seems like Christer was exactly the same. They didn't shy away from violence as a general way of life.

The "karate guys" thing is wild though. Keep in mind that this was long before Tony was ever interested in becoming a pro wrestler. He fell into the industry by happenstance, not because he'd grown up loving the biz. However, wrestling fan or not, he was crafting his own quasi-weird rip-off gimmicks away from the ring anyway.