BOBBY HEENAN: THE BRAIN, OR THE WEASEL, WHO WAS PROFESSIONAL WRESTLING

9/24/17

As most of my loyal readers know, pro wrestling was one of my guilty pleasures from early childhood nearly into middle age, when the sport transformed from entertaining into just downright silly and soap operatic under the Vince McMahon monopoly.   The sport died years ago but the man who made the sport passed only last week.

One can talk about all the greats of grappling:  Dick the Bruiser, Bruno Sammartino, Ric Flair, Hulk Hogan, Andre the Giant, Rowdy Roddy Piper, Johnny Valentine, Bobo Brazil, the Crusher, Gorilla Monsoon, Big John Studd, Moose Cholak, Jesse “The Body” Ventura, the Iron Sheik, The Road Warriors, Big Cat Ernie Ladd, Bob Backlund, Verne Gagne, Nick Bockwinkel…the list goes on and on and doubtless would have to include some of the heavily muscled leading men who have emerged in the last 30 or so years after yours truly lost all interest.   None of these gentlemen, however, would have achieved his greatness without Bobby Heenan; Bobby Heenan was professional wrestling.

Every hero needs a heel…and just about every heel needs a manager.   There were managers before Bobby Heenan, but he perfected the art of managing and every manager who followed him…Captain Lou Albano, Jimmy “Mouth of the South” Hart, Classy Freddie Blassie, et. al., patterned himself after Mr. Heenan.  

Yours truly first witnessed the Heenan script at the age of 8 or 9 when Mr. Heenan managed the original Assassins.   Throughout the considerable span of my wrestling fandom, Mr. Heenan was the only constant and the story was always the same; only the actors, with the exception of Mr. Heenan, changed.  Mr. Heenan would come out with a new member (or usually members because he preferred working with tag teams) of his stable, which he referred to as the “Heenan family,” and gin up a conflict with a hero or tag team of heroes.   Heenan’s boys, despite being beaten to a pulp, would win the first match, or maybe the first two matches, with the intercession of some foul tactic on Heenan’s part involving distracting the referee and introducing a “foreign object,” usually a folding chair, a championship belt, or a pair of brass knuckles, into the ring.  Mr. Heenan unfailingly escaped the retribution he had garnered from the barely scratched, yet technically vanquished, heroes by effecting a quick and cowardly exit from the arena.   Ultimately, though, the heroes would demand and get a match in a cage or some other device that would keep Mr. Heenan in the ring, preventing him from weaseling out of the beating that he was certainly due.  (This amazing ability to escape unscathed led to Dick the Bruiser’s assigning Mr. Heenan the alternative title Bobby “The Weasel” Heenan, a moniker that stuck.)   Under those conditions, not only were the heels beaten to within an inch of their lives, but fans’ bloodlust was finally satisfied when, his charges disgraced and unconscious, Mr. Heenan was left alone in the ring with, say, Dick the Bruiser, who delivered a punch that, judging from Mr. Heenan’s reaction, must have been delivered with the power of an atomic bomb; Mr. Heenan would fly through the air backwards for what looked like five or six feet, land and flail about as if his entire nervous system had been destroyed and Mr. Heenan was thus experiencing his last bout of frenetic neural activity.  Mr. Heenan, his bleached blonde hair now crimson with blood, would stumble to his feet, futilely begging for mercy, only to experience yet another closed fisted blow from the other hero tag team partner, say, the Crusher.   Nobody, but nobody, took a punch like Bobby Heenan.  The fans went wild.

Then the process would start all over again.   Mr. Heenan would find another heel, or pair of heels, and gin up a conflict with another, or perhaps the same, set of heroes.   The key was Mr. Heenan’s considerable interview skills; with the possible exception of the Crusher, Mr. Heenan was the best interview in the history of pro wrestling, insulting the heroes, the interviewers, the fans, various ethnic groups, the United States of America, and anything that was considered good, holy, consanguineous with the fan base, or all of the above.

Perhaps the greatest rendition of the Heenan script involved his management of Nick Bockwinkel and Ray Stevens against Dick the Bruiser and the Crusher, largely because Mr. Heenan was still a young man at the time, the scenario was still being developed, and all five people involved were legends of the mat.  Further, in Nick Bockwinkel, Mr. Heenan found a match for his heeldom; the fans hated Mr. Bockwinkel as much as they hated Mr. Heenan.   Both were portrayed as elitists completely out of touch with the average wrestling fan who clearly identified with the blue-collar Bruiser and Crusher.   It was fine white wine and the opera vs. beers at the “saloons on Halsted Street” when “Halsted Street” meant “south Halsted Street,” a completely different place from the trendy Halsted Street north of North Avenue that we know today.

Later in his career, Mr. Heenan expanded the scope of his insults to even those he managed.   What wrestling fan can forget his introduction of one of his latest charges as a man of “limited size, limited strength, limited ability, limited intelligence” who would nonetheless become a star because of the wise tutelage of the, in Mr. Heenan’s own words, “great Bobby the Brain”?   Funny, though, that I cannot remember the actual wrestler to whom Mr. Heenan was referring, which, one supposes, was the point.

Like Mr. Bockwinkel, as Mr. Heenan aged, he maintained the role of heel, but that role evolved from despised heel to respected, nearly beloved, heel.   The insults continued, but they were far from the scripted racist, homophobic, misogynistic insults that got Mr. Heenan literally shot at on at least one occasion in the ‘70s.   His late career “observations” were more (Remember that most things are relative.) subtle than his early shotgun blast of generally gratuitous insults and thus were more biting than the all-out assaults of his earlier years.   He, like Mr. Bockwinkel and Jesse Ventura, became somehow even more entertaining as an elder statesman color commentator, and foil to Gorilla Monsoon, with the WWF than he was as the young ultimate heel of the ‘60s and ‘70s.

Bobby the Brain Heenan is doubtless playing the heel, perhaps managing the likes of Mr. Bockwinkel and Macho Man Randy Savage (Why not?   One of Mr. Heenan’s early charges was Mr. Savage’s father, Angelo Poffo.) in that great Squared Circle in the Sky and begging for mercy not from the Almighty, Who has already taken care of that, but from Dick the Bruiser and the Crusher.   And the fans are loving it.

God bless you, Brain…all wrestlers, and wrestling fans, owe you a huge debt of gratitude.