Sleeper, Cold

(Props to Greg)

Vern Gagne, a champion in the ring and Vince McMahon’s bitch outside it, has died at the age of 89. Gagne had been a standout at the University of Minnesota in wrestling and football and was drafted by the Chicago Bears in 1947, but opted for the more lucrative world of professional wrestling instead. He became one of the most well-known stars of wrestling’s Golden Age, hailed for his technical skill rather than histrionics. He was also one of its most well-paid, raking in more than $100,000 a year during the 1950s so that by 1960, he was able to break off and start the American Wrestling Association. Though he cut back on his wrestling to build the organization, he was its biggest star and soon one of its first champions. He was intermittently a champion 9 different times, and held the belt well into his 50s. Gagne was old school, and championed wrestlers with technical skill, while the (then-)WWF preferred steroid-gobbling, oiled-up personalities. Among them Hulk Hogan, who had been fired by the WWF, became a star with the AWA (though Gagne hated him as a showboat rather than a wrestler), and then headed back to the WWF. But not before Gagne offered the Iron Sheik a bribe to injure Hogan. When the WWF decided to nationalize what had been a “sport” of regional organizations, Gagne tried to match the effort, even securing a contract with ESPN. But ESPN treated the AWA like a second-class citizen, pre-empting their timeslots for live events and tractor pull previews. Like it now does with baseball. With a steady flow of its stars heading to the WWF, the AWA was bankrupt by 1991. All told, Gagne was a 16-time World Heavyweight Champion, holds the record for the longest combined reign as a world champion and is one of six men inducted into each of the WWE, WCW, Professional Wrestling and Wrestling Observer Newsletter halls of fame. His legacy endured for decades through the wrestlers Gagne trained, including Ric Flair, Ricky Steamboat, Bob Backlund, and Ken Patera.