Stan Hansen, Wrestling's Violent Rambling Man, Has A Home In The Hall Of Fame

Stan Hansen, WWE's most recently announced Hall of Fame inductee, never stuck around one place for long. At least, that's my memory of him as a kid who was getting into pro wrestling in the 1980s. Hansen would just appear like a tornado, beat hell out of your favorite babyface, and then disappear a few months or a year later to do his violent business someplace else.

This made him seem like a barrel-chested force of nature, the type of wrestler who was grappling with his own wild restlessness as much as with other men. Hansen looked the part, too—a pasty, ginger-haired Texan carrying 300 pounds of flesh and another 10 of bull rope. One of his tells was that he'd put a plug of chaw in his mouth and scream at everyone around him, mouth hanging open in such a fashion that his face was quickly a mess of tobacco and brown spittle. He was, in a word, scary in a way a lot of wrestlers weren't, and this was made doubly so by his restlessness. His unfamiliarity meant that he was always fresh when he kicked in the door of whatever territory you were stuck watching, whether that was WWF, NWA, or AWA.

Hansen also hit hard, maybe harder than anyone in pro wrestling history. His main move was his lariat, a clothesline with his left arm which wasn't so much meant to catch people in the upper chest or neck as it was to club people. He'd raise his arm after running at his opponent and, at the split second before impact, launch all his muscle into making it connect with enough force to knock someone out. Seldom has a move so matched the wrestler; for a character who was violence personified, only a finishing move that made you legitimately recoil would do.

It was all an act, of course. The difference between Stan Hansen the psychopathic cowboy and Stan Hansen the soft-spoken Texas gentleman is remarkable. Or it's all an act except for the stuff that can't be faked. Those hard hits were both very real and the result of his terrible eyesight. The story goes that Hansen had to work stiff because if he didn't, he'd whiff on a punch or slam and everyone would catch on to the act. Given the choice between going soft but betraying the business and going hard but injuring people, Hansen went with the latter. The only caveat was that everyone knew, so they went just as hard right back. Classic Stan Hansen matches aren't real in the sense that boxing or MMA are, but they're also not not real in the way most pro wrestling is.

That's not just talk. Hansen famously broke Bruno Sammartino's neck during a run in WWF early in his career while feuding for the championship. Even more famously, he worked one of the stiffest matches of all time with Big Van Vader, another scary big man who is incongruously mellow in real life; the match is infamous for the fact that Hansen popped Vader's right eye out of its socket (This is both a remarkable brawl between two 300 pound men legit beating each other and also very graphic despite the pixelated quality, so be warned.) They finished the match.

The Vader match—the most famous among many between the two—happened in the Tokyo Dome for the All Japan Pro Wrestling championship. If it seems odd that a hyperviolent caricature of the cowboy, that most American of folkloric characters, caught on so well in Japan that Hansen spent most of his career there, it's not quite as odd as the fact that Hansen was clearly at his most comfortable over there. While he zipped through American wrestling feds like he was spinning a rolodex, Hansen would travel to Japan whenever he could, and stuck around in AJPW for the bulk of his career. Here in the United States he was another big redneck wrestler—almost certainly the best of all time in that genre of gimmick, but of a piece with Black Bart, the Funks, Sam Houston, Dick Murdoch, and a host of others active in the same period. In Japan, he was something bigger than that.

Hansen became, over time, something like a demigod in Japan. You didn't even have to follow Japanese wrestling to figure it out. You'd hear whispers from friends of friends about Stan Hansen (the cowboy?) and how he probably killed a man with his lariat in Tokyo. He'd get mobbed in the streets, or so we heard. It was pro wrestling, after all. It didn't matter what was real and what was legend.

Hansen was a true pioneer of the now familiar USA-to-Japan pro wrestling career arc. He blazed a trail alongside or immediately ahead of his good friends Bruiser Brody, "Dr. Death" Steve Williams, and Terry Gordy. All were from the American South and West, all gigantic white guys who worked a stiff style that sent Japanese fans absolutely wild, and all were thrust into the main event scene overseas. They were conspicuous in Japan in a way they weren't here, and they made lifelong careers of it. That may feel odd, given that the archetypal gaijin in those days were men in the cultural mold of Hansen, but that comes with implied assumptions which we're all familiar with—that a big Southern white guy just has to be bigoted and uncultured, with no way to navigate a new culture halfway across the world, much less one with the fraught love/hate relationship that postwar Japan has with the United States.

But these men didn't just navigate that contradiction, they thrived on it. Everyone who hit Japan after, from Bob Sapp to AJ Styles, can look to Hansen and his coterie of fellow big Yankees for the way to cut out a thriving career while splitting time between Japan and America. Gaijin had done it before Hansen, but nobody had done it quite as well.

It was always Japan, too. Hansen came back to American wrestling, of course, winning the United States championship from Lex Luger in WCW before closing out by skipping town just as a bizarre, awkward angle involving other cowboy wrestlers looking for him in the Old West reached a crescendo. The rumor, possibly apocryphal, is that Hansen wanted no part of American wrestling's early 1990s schlock. And so it was back to Japan, where he kept going throughout the '90s, never flagging and further cementing his legend as the greatest foreign wrestler in Japanese history.

But that was in Japan, and the WWE Hall of Fame offers well-deserved validation for a career that the everyday fan might have missed. This is, for good and bad, the closest thing to a universal pro wrestling hall of fame we've got, and Hansen's career being honored in Dallas this year is exactly the televised homecoming, after all those violent years on the road, that he deserves.