When I was a kid - grade school and junior high - I used to watch AWA All-Star Wrestling on WCCO (the local CBS affiliate) on Sunday mornings. First they’d run an old comedy show - Little Rascals or Three Stooges or Abbott and Costello or Ma and Pa Kettle - and then Mean Gene would come on and we’d watch an hour of hot sweaty guys throw each other around the ring. Badly.
This was pre-WWF or -WCW or whatever they’re showing on cable these days…the FX were bad. As were the storylines, but I was 12-ish at the time and really didn’t know what was going on.
The AWA was where Bobby “The Brain” Heenan got his start, as well as Nick Bockwinkle, the Gagnes (who, for some reason, I still think are related to a former MN Twins shortstop), Hulk Hogan, Eric Bischoff, the Nature Boy, Diamond Dallas Paige, Randy Savage, Sgt. Slaughter, and our esteemed [sub]cough[/sub] governor.
A lot of these guys have gone on to bigger and better things in the current market, and a lot of them weren’t big even in the AWA days. But The Claw, Baron von Raschke, was the one that always stuck in my mind…mostly because of his preposterous signature move. He’d take his hand, place it over the face of his terrified victim, press his pinky and thumb into the poor guy’s temples, and turn the loser into a twitching bunch of spastic nerves.
I’ve been searching on and off for The Claw for a couple of years now and I don’t even find a reference to him, let alone a link to what he’s doing these days. Anyone else know his story?