41 Most Disgusting Promotional Tactics In Wrestling History RANKED

25. 1986 - Comparing Chris Adams’ Blindness Angle To The Death Of Gino Hernandez

Things were getting bleak in World Class Championship Wrestling.

David Von Erich had passed away in ‘84. His younger brother Mike was tasked with replacing him. It was a sad ploy; Mike wasn’t great, certainly not the future NWA World champion and national star his older brother was. He carried himself like he knew it, and suffered brain damage in ‘85.

Business was far from abysmal, but, amid Vince McMahon’s expansion, was doomed. With everything in a state of flux, Fritz Von Erich grew desperate and, to put it mildly, tacky. On February 4, 1986, handsome, obnoxious heel Gino Hernandez passed away under disputed circumstances (the cause of death was officially ruled as a cocaine overdose, but conspiratorial whispers persist that he was murdered).

Before he passed, he had blinded Chris Adams with hair cream in a heavy heat angle. This, obviously, was meant to result in a match. It could never happen. When WCCW ran video packages paying tribute to Hernandez, the footage was spliced with the blinding angle and, incredibly, the reality and the fiction was conflated. It was threatened that Adams would never wrestle again, and how insensitive. You know who else would never wrestle again…?

WCCW persevered with the blindness angle, but had no business comparing the two incidents. One was a phony pro wrestling angle. Fritz Von Erich knew what he was doing in this lamentable attempt to add gravity to the fiction.

By this point, Fritz knew what sold, what the public would buy into. He was the victim of unimaginable tragedy - but his insidious and deeply cynical promotion of it was abhorrent.