What Really Happened To…Bruiser Brody

This perceived inability to do anything beyond being Brody just added to it. He often worked by not working, or not cooperating. He was singular in his identity: Brody was a true original, a man not to be f*cked with. That was his deeply credible appeal, one he carefully reinforced with his bullsh*t.

Those brawls remain captivating decades later. His tandem with Stan Hansen yielded matches richer than the Brody norm, but the Brody norm was best illustrated through his legacy rivalry with Abdullah The Butcher. Their matches together weren’t bound to the ring for long; both men rampaged through many an arena, frequently and literally collapsing in the stands as they strangled and smeared blood over one another’s faces, lying prone on the concrete.

Brody didn’t play to anybody, much less the crowd. They gravitated towards him; to his benefit and the detriment of so many others, he was at the centre of everything. In a business as despicable as pro wrestling, in which promoters literally paid potatoes and to this day refuse to classify their performers as anything beyond meat for the maw, this must be considered a victory.

Unlike Lesnar, Brody was legitimately unstable. Ornery is a euphemism. Or was that simply the calculated work, in turn casting him as one of the greatest? Several of his peers - Hansen, Jim Duggan, Bret Hart, Scott Hall, The Berzerker - have all stated on record their immense gratitude for Brody’s avuncular ways. An enemy of the promoters, he was naturally one of “the boys”. To some of them, anyway. Because he was a myth, there was never one accurate portrait of the man.

Again, like Lesnar does to this day with Vince McMahon and Dana White, Brody used his immense Japanese fame to extort North American promoters into booking him to the potential detriment of their regulars. He was an aberration: a myth.

A mythical man met a mythical end.

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