30 Years After Death, Bruiser Brody Still a Huge Influence in Pro Wrestling

30 years ago last week, Bruiser Brody was stabbed to death in an arena shower before a match. The killer was Jose Gonzalez, who often wrestled as Invader 1, a masked superstar from Puerto Rico. It was in the babyface locker room with witnesses to both the moments directly preceding and after the attack. Gonzalez called Brody into the shower, there were yells almost immediately, and then there was Brody, bleeding to death.

Look up Bruiser Brody and you’ll see a lot about the circumstances of his death. About how it went down, how the Bayamón police were slow to come and the ambulance even slower, leaving the giant wildman wrestler to his fate. And you’ll see terrible things about the aftermath, about how the subpoenas for witnesses like Dutch Mantel only arrived after the trial was over and Gonzalez was acquitted.

It’s a death which looms large in a pro wrestling world filled with deaths. A significant part of that is because of just what a big deal Bruiser Brody was, something which recedes into the haze of the territory days and the slowly faltering memories of 70 year old men. But make absolutely no mistake: Brody was huge, physically and reputationally, and the pro wrestling world lost something special when he died.

The deal is that Brody liked money and he liked to brawl. That combination led him to a globetrotting career which was exhausting even by the standards of the always traveling 70s and 80s wrestler. He’d go from territory to territory on a loop, never staying anywhere too long, and he’d work his gimmick to bloody perfection.

That gimmick was simple in retrospect, but proved to be revolutionary. He was a brawler, a wild six and a half feet tall mammoth with gigantic hair and a big black beard. His eyes would cross and he’d hold his hand out, yelling the non-word “huss” over and over. If he wasn’t doing that in an interview, he’d yell clear truths about his opponents with an articulateness which belied the fearsome image. It was all terrifying if you gave yourself over to even the smallest collapse of the barrier between reality and fantasy.

There were plenty of brawlers in those days (and now), but few did it with quite the same amount of violence and precision as Brody. His standard match was to go out into the audience and beat the hell out of whoever he was feuding with. They’d wander around the stands, do a blade job or two, then return to the ring, bloodied and exhausted, whereupon a crescendo would be reached and Brody would win.

Brody always won. That was part of his mystique. He wouldn’t work for a promoter without settling on what level of invincibility he was going to possess, then he held that promoter to his word. Famously, he would sometimes just decide that he wouldn’t play ball in the ring, spontaneously and without much warning. He didn’t sell for Invader 1 one time in the WWWF, a fact which may have come into play on that bloody night. Most famously, he stopped selling for a young Lex Luger during a cage match in Florida.

It wasn’t the only time Brody decided not to sell for someone, but it is the most famous, largely because the cameras were actually rolling and for just how egregious the stop to the action was. One minute Luger is punching Brody and the giant is selling, the next Brody is just standing there doing nothing. Luger decided he’d had enough, might get his ass kicked in a very real way if Brody went from apathetic to angry, and left the ring.

In a compelling discussion on the 30th anniversary of Brody’s death, Chris Jericho and Dave Meltzer talked about the man on the Talk Is Jericho podcast. The story of the Luger match is told. Luger was on his way out to Jim Crockett Promotions for a big payday and larger spotlight. Over lunch, he told Brody about how big his payday was going to be and how he needed to stay strong for his dream job. Hiro Matsuda, who was in charge of CWF, the Florida territory Luger was based in and Brody was visiting, told Brody to teach the kid some respect.

In other words, Luger was planning on pulling a Brody. Meltzer puts Brody’s stubborn refusal to lose or sometimes even sell into the context of his travel. Brody was biggest in Japan, much bigger than in the US; Japanese magazines would follow him on his journeys and run photos from his stateside matches. A loss for Brody in a small town house show wouldn’t mean much here, but over there it meant a huge dent to his income. Everything was done with an eye toward Japan and his truly legendary status there as the greatest gaijin wrestler of the age, alongside Stan Hansen. Brody was frustrating, but he was advocating for himself as a worker who had a family to feed in the only way a wrestler knew how.

It’s here where we return to Puerto Rico and his death. All sorts of theories have been floated and debunked, but Meltzer cautiously floats that Japan was the issue, that some dispute over a match or push was complicated by Brody’s stature in Japan. It turned violent and that was it. Ghoulishly, Gonzalez wrestled later that night; he continued to wrestle, mostly as a babyface, until he was 60.

What might have been? The consensus is that Brody would’ve finally gone to the WWF, where he would also finally lose a high profile, globally televised match to Hulk Hogan. It would’ve been the ultimate payday for the money-obsessed Brody, and a way to slow down or get out of the business entirely as he proceeded though his 40s.

But nobody ever leaves wrestling, not really. It’s easy to see him making cameos in ECW at its peak. After all, Terry Funk was already there, working crowd-pleasing, hyper-violent brawls to roaring Philadelphia crowds. Or a brief return to the WWF in the late 90s, a decade after the hypothetical Hogan match, to put over Steve Austin or The Rock.

We won’t know, but we have his influence, which is felt far and wide. Back in the gimmick days of the 90s, his former tag team partner, John Nord, adopted his gimmick as The Berzerker. Jimmy Jacobs lampooned the Bruiser Brody gimmick in his early career. Luke Harper deliberately looks a lot like Brody. Chris Jericho admitted to purposely channeling Brody’s style during his current New Japan run in the podcast. And every time there’s a bloody brawl in a crowd, there’s a faint echo of Brody’s iconic matches with Abdullah the Butcher.

Bruiser Brody was a big deal, because he made the violence of pro wrestling feel extremely real. That’s an art and it’s a somewhat different one from the balletic pro wrestling of 2018, where we know it’s an artistic simulation of violence. He was a difficult, stubborn, fascinating wrestler of the old school. 30 years after his stabbing, echoes of his life and style still linger.