41 Most Disgusting Promotional Tactics In Wrestling History RANKED

4. 1987 - Exploiting The Death Of Mike Von Erich

Mike Von Erich didn’t have it in him, physically, to star in the wrestling business. He wasn’t a great athlete; he was a more sensitive and creative soul with an interest in music.

He was put back in a ring, in July 1986, even though he hadn’t recovered. Depressed at his fate, and his inability to reverse business, he was arrested multiple times before, on April 12, 1987, taking his own life via intentional drug overdose. He was just 23 years old.

Fritz’s carny impulses drove him to get ahead of the real story, in a bid to garner sympathy and preserve the idea that the Von Erichs were good old, clean-living all-American boys. Before Mike’s suicide was reported accurately by the media, astonishingly, Fritz had conceived the idea to pretend that Mike had been kidnapped, shrouding the cause of death in mystery.

The annual Parade of Champions Memorial show, initially promoted to lucrative success as a means of paying tribute to David, was already rotten. Surely, one was enough. The 4th (!) edition was expanded to include Mike. The idea of the show was gross enough; the tone of it was utterly bleak. You’d have expected some stripped-back pure wrestling. It was not the time for gimmicks. Promoting gimmick matches on such a card would suggest that Fritz was chiefly interested in shifting some tickets.

On Mike’s memorial show, Fritz booked a lumberjack and scaffold match, and, worse still, a six-woman Mud Pit match designed to titillate a grieving audience. Utterly disgusting.

Moreover, with business plummeting, Fritz charged extra for VIP tickets.