Athens author releases biography of famed wrestler Fritz von Erich
April 15, 2005
Martin Winchester
Special to The Monitor
Martin Winchester is a book critic for The Monitor. He is an English teacher at the IDEA Academy in Donna. Send comments to winchestermartin.aol.com
If wrestling had a golden era, many in Texas would argue it was in the days of "World Class Championship Wrestling." Its biggest stars were the legendary wrestling family, the Von Erichs. Their patriarch, Fritz Von Erich (real name Jack Adkisson), who died in 1997, has a new, authorized biography, Fritz Von Erich: Master of the Iron Claw (Hats Off Books, $43.95 Hardback, $18.95 Paperback), written by Ron Mullinax.
Mullinax, a Texas native and ex-Marine, met Adkisson and they became fast friends as Mullinax took care of Adkisson during the last months of his life.
"What I remember most about Fritz in his final days was his urgency in having his life story told to the public before he passed away," said Mullinax in an e-mail interview from his home in Athens, Texas. "It became an obsession for him to make sure that on a daily basis that I was taking notes just as he was telling me the stories."
Von Erich dictated his life story to Mullinax each night. "Fritz would break out a bottle of scotch and start telling me story after story, making sure I was not too drunk to write down what he was saying," recalls Mullinax.
Those stories included the patriarch’s own wrestling career as the much-reviled Nazi heel "Fritz Von Erich" and his eventual success as a leading promoter of his sons, as well as the tragedies that surrounded the deaths of five out of six of those sons.
During the time of their friendship, Mullinax came to know the man and his innermost thoughts. "The Jack Adkisson that I knew personally for only a few short years was a very smart and kind man. The burdens he carried around with him in the form of the terrible tragedies bestowed on his family showed up in every day life," said Mullinax.
Those tragedies did not make Adkisson bitter, according to Mullinax.
"The last thing that Fritz said to me before he passed away was, if he could do one thing in life over again, it would be to raise his six sons just one more time."
Mullinax believes he’s stayed true to Adkisson’s word and tried to retell his life as it was told to him. "I would hope that Fritz would be very happy with the way in which I wrote his life story," said Mullinax. "The book is straight-forward and to-the-point, so much so that Kevin Adkisson (Von Erich’s only surviving son) and I are no longer friends because of some of the things I said in the book. But Fritz made me promise that I would tell the truth and not leave anything out, and that’s the way I wrote his story."
Mullinax is currently working on a screenplay based on his book. "My goal is to have a Von Erich movie that is filmed in Texas capturing the magic that "World Class Championship Wrestling" was so famous for."
That era of wrestling seems much more pure compared to today’s billion-dollar entertainment industry that wrestling has become. Mullinax believes wrestlers today have to be good actors and adept at politics to succeed. Still, he firmly believes the Von Erichs would have succeeded had they lived to see the changes in wrestling. "As far as Fritz is concerned, in his prime, I’m not sure the pro-wrestlers of today are tough enough for the legendary Fritz Von Erich," said Mullinax.
Mullinax hopes his book will "compel fans and non-fans alike with its uniquely personal account of pro-wrestling history, as well as its heart-wrenching, true tale of human drama."
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