Forever - Remembering Terry Funk
On August 23rd 2023, the greatest wrestler of all time passed away. He was 79 years old. His name was Terry Funk.
I have written in the past about disliking the urge to quantify “the best ever”, “the greatest of all time”, or “the Mount Rushmore of wrestling”, because it is invariably a fool’s errand - to preserve one wrestler, or one match, in amber as The Greatest is to risk overlooking that wrestling at its best is an ensemble piece and a variety show, and that the singular greats would be nothing without an exceptional supporting cast. Not only that, but it’s an exercise in bias - the internet is littered with the lists of wrestling’s commentariat and tastemakers’ ideas of the “all-time greats”, most of which would have you believe that wrestling started in the 1980s and was only ever a minority interest outside of North America, so infrequently do foreign wrestlers get more than a token look-in, like a jazz record on a Pitchfork Top 100. There’s also a danger in pointing to one match, one wrestler, or one style as the unequivocal, unargued Best That There Is, in that it encourages subsequent generations of wrestlers to aim to replicate something that worked due to its historical and geographical context, at the expense of innovation and of the myriad regional variations that make wrestling special.
With all that in mind, I am happy to say without reservation that Terry Funk was The Greatest Wrestler Of All Time.
It’s not a distinction based on drawing power or five star matches - though he can more than hold his own in both of those conversations - but on every principle that, to me, truly matters in professional wrestling. Terry Funk was believable, in a way that so few wrestlers are. When he wanted to scare you, he was as convincingly unhinged and psychopathic as any heel, but when he wanted your sympathy, his selling as a babyface was second-to-none. If he wanted to make you laugh, he was a master of physical comedy, if he wanted to make you cry, he could tug at your heartstrings like few others. He could be a main event superstar or a midcard supporting act with equal expertise. He was endlessly creative, able to adapt to wrestling’s changing tides, and had almost unmatched longevity as a marquee star throughout a career that ran for more than fifty years.
My own discovery of Terry Funk came, as I assume was the case for many others, through reading Mick Foley’s first book. The wrestling I first watched was the WWF of the mid-90s, all clowns and wrestling binmen, and that couldn’t have been further removed from the hardcore and deathmatch scenes that Foley described so vividly, and upon rediscovering wrestling in mid-2000 and wanting to consume every bit of information about it I could, that book opened my eyes to a world of wrestling that expanded far beyond my understanding - a world of rinky-dink independents, and Japanese stadium shows full of barbed wire, fire and explosions and, at the centre of it, a crazy old man named Terry Funk.
The way Foley wrote about Funk was instantly engaging, and made me a fan of the idea of Terry Funk before I’d ever seen him work. It was a study in hero worship, and in those rare and wonderful moments where the men we idolise actually end up not only living up to, but exceeding your expectations. It’s a sad indictment of many wrestling fans that, when faced with a story of a man who gave everything to entertain his audience, who sacrificed and strove to leave the wrestling business better than he found it, who never stopped giving back, and when faced with the journey of meeting and working with a man like that, and what we could learn from him, the message most took away from it was “lol, Terry Funk retires a lot”. It is a profound shame that such a great was reduced in the eyes of so many to such a lazy punchline.
In the months and years after reading that book, I tried to cast my net wider - a difficult task when living on a small island, not yet understanding how tape trading actually worked, and with the punishingly slow dial-up internet of the early ‘00s. Whenever I find myself watching a live stream of a Japanese wrestling show as it happens, I count my blessings, remembering back to the days of waiting half an hour or more to download a RealPlayer file to see a few grainy seconds of a Hayabusa high spot, or of Terry Funk and Cactus Jack flinging each other into barbed wire. I bought every wrestling magazine, every wrestling video game, no matter how abysmal, every book and, most of all, every video. My local branch of HMV was tiny back then, but hidden away in the “special interest” video section was always a small range of wrestling videos. It was a banner day whenever they had an ECW video on display, and memory fails me on how I managed to buy those 18-rated gems as a scrawny, nervous lad in my early teens, but somehow I did. I experienced ECW with complete detachment from its chronology - a video from 2000 one night, 1995 the next, and then 1998, all while in reality their stars were quickly migrating to the WWF; Justin Credible, Spike Dudley, Rhyno, even Paul Heyman himself making the jump. While my occasional forays into the years of WWF shows I’d missed, via videos borrowed from friends, were alongside watching the current weekly shows unfold, ECW was something that existed out of time.
It was through those ECW videos that I got the first real glimpse of wrestlers I’d grow to love - in those days, Sabu, Jerry Lynn, Tajiri, Super Crazy, Masato Tanaka, Rob Van Dam; a litany of men performing moves that my WWF-only diet could never have prepared me for, and Raven, because I was a teenage goth, of course it was Raven - but it was Terry Funk who stuck with me more and more. This crazy old man with two bad knees, what was he doing in a barbed wire match against Sabu? Used to matches ending after a steady escalation of finishers, to see a main event come to an end on a pinfall that occurred only because the two were so tangled together in barbed wire after a blood-soaked, brutal affair, stuck with me for a long time. This was wrestling as a war of attrition.
He popped up time and time again, in triple threat matches, in emotional heartstring-tugging promos, and in the unhinged heel turn of ECW November To Remember 1998, hijacking the show and berating Tommy Dreamer for choosing Jake Roberts over him - a story that, sadly, was cut short when Funk became ill, wrestling only infrequently for most of the following year. Looking at it through more experienced eyes, the angle in its execution is pure Memphis, but back then it was like nothing I had ever seen.
And then, one day, while visiting family in East Yorkshire, I made my much-anticipated visit to Virgin Megastore - far larger than any equivalent store in Jersey, I would pore over their dedicated heavy metal section, and over the range of CDs by artists of all genres that I was growing to love, amazed that somebody like Tom Waits would be allotted two whole rows, rather than the paltry couple of copies of Rain Dogs I could expect from HMV St. Helier. Ordinarily, I’d be so focused on that task that I’d barely trouble the video section (by then shrinking with the advent of DVD), but this time I did, and in it I found the holy grail. A video named simply “THE JAPANESE TOURNAMENT”, adorned with photos of Terry Funk and Cactus Jack soaked in blood, with barbed wire everywhere.
Deathmatches are an acquired taste, but Japanese deathmatches of the ‘90s were, at their best, as good as wrestling has ever been. This wasn’t torture porn, or pure gratuitous weapon spam, this was high drama, tension derived from the inevitability of horrendous violence. Too many deathmatches today give you everything all at once, with no sense of escalation; a lighttube shot two minutes into a match meaning no more or less than one twenty minutes in. Too many deathmatches today rely on wrestlers spending half the match rearranging furniture. But in this tournament, and in the best FMW matches I would come to watch soon after, of which Terry Funk was so often a part, they told you up front what to expect - this was a No Ropes Barbed Wire Exploding Barbed Wire Boards & Exploding Ring Time Bomb Death Match, and it did exactly what it said on the tin - and the story of the match came not from the violence, but from the expectation. Years later, Atsushi Onita explained to an interviewer the appeal of a deathmatch - to paraphrase; a beautiful, technically perfect match would be forgotten within a few hours, but the gruesome visuals of a deathmatch linger on your mind, and the way the likes of Funk, Foley and Onita structured their matches was to encourage the viewer to imagine the outcome, and then delayed gratification until just the right moment. At its best, as in the legendary exploding ring death match between Funk and Onita, it was pure cinema, and as good as wrestling ever gets.
Over time, I grew to enter the wrestling business myself, and learn about the nuts and bolts of how a match was put together. I never had the opportunity to meet Terry, or to see him wrestle live, but he remained a constant, and my respect for him only grew. Things that I would never have noticed before now became the highlight of every match of his I watched. The differences in how he worked as a face or a heel, the ways he gave so much to his opponent without ever appearing weak. The more I read and heard about him, the more I became convinced that there was never anyone better. Confident in his abilities, and in what he had to offer wrestling as a whole, he never felt threatened by younger talent or emergent styles - he recognised the drawing potential of Lucha Libre in the United States when most of his contemporaries thumbed their noses at it, he saw through the “it’s just for girls” put-downs of AJW and told Dave Meltzer that he saw that the likes of the Crush Gals and Akira Hokuto were wrestling at a level far above their male counterparts. He never allowed himself to stagnate, to become the old man shaking his fist at a young generation, and worked with emergent trends rather than against them. That’s what makes him the greatest of all time. You could try - as many have - to psychoanalyse his reasons for wrestling far longer than one practically should, or to ascribe it to sheer stubbornness, the need to hear the roar of the crowd, or that he simply didn’t know how to do anything else, but if you ask me, the answer is simple. He never stopped, because he loved what he did, and because he knew he always had more to give back. When Dirty South, the founder of Channel Islands World Wrestling, nicknamed me “the Terry Funk of Refereeing”, it was because of my stubborn insistence of working through a knee injury that I probably should have had looked at, but later it became a joke about my inability to stay “retired”. I wasn’t complaining - that anyone would put the two of us in the same sentence was, and is, an honour far beyond anything I have ever deserved.
I’m writing this with a sore throat and hoarse voice, two days removed from AEW’s All In at Wembley Stadium. That show was main evented by a match between two best friends and, to an audience schooled in wrestling tropes, the question on everyone’s lips was who was going to turn on who. That the match ultimately became a story, not of betrayal, but of the endurance of friendship, seemed wholly unique in professional wrestling. But, in a weird way, that’s also the story of Terry Funk and Atsushi Onita, and of Terry Funk and Cactus Jack. They bled and brawled and tried to kill each other, but always came back to each other’s side, tied together by the closest of bonds, by a shared experience that almost nobody else on the planet could possibly relate to. Earlier this year, Sami Zayn briefly became the most talked about wrestler in the world, and a bonafide World Championship contender, not through overt displays of parodic macho posturing like so many before him, but through his vulnerability and ultimately human failings. Eddie Kingston, too, has become one of the most beloved men in wrestling not in spite of his flaws, but because of them - we look at Eddie, and we see ourselves, magnified. We see in him the things we wished we’d had the courage to say and do, and we see the things we wished we’d had the hindsight not to say and do, and we love him for them both. Terry Funk was Sami Zayn too, just as Terry Funk was Eddie Kingston.
Because while Terry Funk was like a Forrest Gump of wrestling, appearing opposite every major star in every territory, competing against Jumbo Tsuruta in AJPW, finding a spot opposite Hogan in the ‘80s, wrestling at Wrestlemania at the height of the Attitude Era, giving ECW the credibility boost it needed, all the way through to wrestling CM Punk in ROH, and everywhere in-between, he never felt superhuman like so many of his contemporaries, nor did he feel, even at his silliest - and he could be very silly indeed - like a cartoon character. Terry Funk was always human. Deeply, painfully, human. From the pained hobble that came from two utterly ruined knees, to the cracked voice that always sounded on the verge of tears, he was a figure of vulnerability - that vulnerability might make him sympathetic, as it did in his run at the ECW World Championship in 1997, evoking the memory of his dead father, or it might make him lash out, as it did against Tommy Dreamer in 1998, or against Ric Flair in 1989, but above all it made him human.
There are a thousand ways to pay tribute to Terry Funk’s memory, and to look at how he left his mark on wrestling. WWE lent his name to a “Hardcore Tag Team Match” on a show where, painfully, they were also paying tribute to the late Bray Wyatt, just 36 years old. CM Punk used the biggest stage in wrestling history, at Wembley stadium in front of more than 80,000 fans, to mimic one of Terry’s signature slapstick sells, caught between the top and middle rope, and to utilise the Funk family’s signature Spinning Toe Hold.
But perhaps the greatest legacy Terry Funk has left on wrestling today is that the heroes we look for and root for aren’t roided up supermen, or unbeatable Gods and human action figures. They’re Eddie Kingston and his Rolodex of grudges, they’re Hangman Page and his battles with his own anxieties, they’re Sami Zayn just fighting to belong, they’re a 64 year old Sting battling against Father Time by flinging himself through tables, and they’re MJF learning what it means to have a friend. They are humans, with flaws, with weaknesses, with hearts. Anyone can tie themselves up in barbed wire, anyone can throw themselves through tables, but it takes heart to make the audience care about the person doing it, not just about the stunt. Nobody could make you care like Terry Funk. He once said that he thought that he would have no legacy, that he would be forgotten. I refuse to believe that - but even if that were to be so, one look at wrestling today will show you that Terry Funk’s legacy is everywhere, once you know how to look for it.
And how long will that legacy last for?
I think you know this one.
Forever.
Forever.
Forever.
Forever.
