41 Most Disgusting Promotional Tactics In Wrestling History RANKED
3. 1988 - Fritz Von Erich’s Fake Heart Attack
When you write a long list like this, based on the same topic, you eventually run out of synonyms that adequately capture the gravity of wrestling’s awfulness. Ghastly. Exploitative. Abhorrent. Evil. Despicable. Loathesome.
What word best conveys how awful it was, when Fritz Von Erich faked a heart attack?
By 1988, a Von Erich family tragedy - a real one, the serious illness or death of a young man - essentially became WCCW’s big annual show. Fritz had lost his creative fastball, but, since it was so feasible and there was such real-world precedent, he could always depend on disaster.
The problem is that the curse had spared him for a while. What was he to do? Nobody had died for real. Better use the sympathy generated by his grief to con the public.
These were his own sons, and he used the “not again…” trauma felt when they had passed in order to book a believable wrestling angle. This happened on Christmas Day, 1987, when, following a steel cage match, he was beaten down by the retooled Fabulous Freebirds before collapsing. An angle featuring the same stipulation and the original stable had sparked the World Class boom back in 1982. This amplified the bleak quality of the tactic; this was Fritz Von Erich playing the hits - and one of them was tragedy.
In a bid to quell the backlash, Kevin Von Erich revealed on the next show that his father had not actually suffered a heart attack, an explanation he has maintained since, but the fans in Dallas sensed the implication.
Worse still, depending on whether the weekly Friday show had drawn a decent crowd, Fritz’s condition would worsen. If it was a bad gate, he’d suddenly feel worse.