I am not saying anything new when I tell you that Terry Funk is the Greatest Wrestler of All Time. In these early days since his passing, hundreds of people have said as much, shared stories to that effect, written obituaries and histories for a man who lived more lives in any given decade of his career in professional wrestling than most of us could dream. If he is not your favorite wrestler, he is probably your favorite wrestler’s favorite wrestler. If he is not your favorite wrestler’s favorite wrestler, he is probably your favorite wrestler’s favorite wrestler’s favorite wrestler. If this is not true somewhere in your favorite wrestler’s lineage of inspiration and influence, I humbly suggest that you find yourself a new favorite wrestler. Why, Terry Funk is right there, existing, impossibly, in the sport as it was, is, and always will be. Terry Funk is eternal. Terry Funk is forever.
Where do you start with a figure like Terry Funk? Where do you end? If you’re new to his legend, and I suspect many are, there is much to chew on. His feuds, his promos, his matches, the way he seemed to be in every promotion just when it really mattered, his philosophy towards the business – if you trace through Funk’s career at any depth, you can come away with a fairly complete understanding of what wrestlers do and why they do it. In him there is a master of all of the small details that really matter to effective match structure and character work, as well as an ambitious stylist who never stopped expanding his own wrestling consciousness, both for the good of himself and wrestling in general. He was never afraid of taking big swings. More often than not, they connected.
The stories Funk could tell with his body and voice could make any other narrative storyteller die of jealousy, or sit at his feet to learn. Against his brother, Dory Jr., he had bouts that began as friendly matches between older and younger siblings that became more heated as it proved that each man wanted to beat the other, Terry perhaps even more than Dory due to his youth and his older brother’s stature. With Dory and pitted against monsters as various as Abdullah the Butcher, The Sheik, Stan Hansen, Bruiser Brody, and Terry Gordy, you had two men with hearts as large as the state from which they hailed attempting to forestall death itself.
Against wrestlers like Atsushi Onita and Cactus Jack, Funk charged headlong into death, wrestling at the risk of exploding rings and cages and shredding himself on barbwire. With proteges like Tommy Dreamer, he could be tender like a proud father. Against men like Ric Flair or Hayabusa, he could be the veteran enraged at a perceived disrespect. He could invade a territory like Memphis. He could defend the NWA with honor. He wasn’t just a wrestler you loved or hated, he was an artist capable of illustrating the depths of both emotions, illustrating the human soul in strokes of sweat and blood and fire.
Terry Funk advanced professional wrestling the way poets advance language. His wild, improvisational leaps, the way he’d sell getting belted or pour motor oil on himself in the shower while cutting a promo or throw his arms up to the heavens as if to ask God why the ring didn’t blow up, all of it existed simultaneously as something antithetical to the unwritten rules of the business as it had been done to that point, something that justified itself in the moment by drawing money, and something that would inform the future. Call him a soothsayer or a prophet if you like – God knows he was right about the general direction of the industry to justify it – but I think that, more than being ahead of time, Terry Funk is time itself.
All of this, even the phrase “Greatest Wrestler of All Time,” is inadequate to the task of summing up Terry Funk’s career. Professional wrestling is big on the word “legendary” to describe both the figures of its past and the burgeoning stories of its current stars. Funk’s life qualifies in a way that’s much closer to the mythological sense of the term. In ECW, his theme song was the Eagles’ “Desperado,” which, at least in this context, was about a stubborn, aging cowboy whose thrillseeking days were coming to an end much sooner than he’d maybe like to admit. It’s the music that scores a pretty touching video package about his last shot at a World Championship at 1997’s Barely Legal, the precursor to a miracle run meant to serve as a thank you for all he’d done.
I don’t need to tell you that he kept going. That that is the legend. Terry Funk’s in-ring career spanned 52 years, only six of which passed without him wrestling at least once. His first retirement was in 1983. From that point forward, he basically a character from a Sergio Leone western, a hero or a villain who’d ride from one town to the next as he was called or compelled to, often gone as quickly and chaotically as he arrived, always doing something that served to burnish his legend, even when his vision wasn’t executed perfectly or his instincts were off.
Even his lowest ebbs or most reactionary ideas, like his run as Chainsaw Charlie in 1998, are integral to his legend. Without that run, how do you get his match against Mick Foley on Raw? Who else could have created as indelible an image as he did in Hell in a Cell, getting chokeslammed out of his shoes while his protégé was coming to after one of the most horrifying bumps in wrestling history? In August 1998, he wrestled Mick Foley in Toronto’s Skydome. In September 1998, he wrestled Manny Fernandez in a high school gym in Hagerstown, Maryland. He did not think about the business in a straight-line fashion, did not suffer the notion of enduring bad creative or settling for a desk job. In Japan they called him the Texas Bronco. It’s one of the most apt nicknames in wrestling history – Terry Funk was a bucking horse, and there wasn’t anybody in wrestling capable of taming him.
Despite the nickname, the creature Funk most commonly compared himself to was the rattlesnake, a poisonous scavenger whose brethren have crawled and slithered across countless metaphorical deserts striking the heels of the unwitting for as long as we have had story. It makes a certain amount of sense, too. Consider the serpent in the story of creation and its capacity for honied words, how Funk’s mellifluous warble was as sweet as any voice our culture is fortunate enough to have preserved.
If the serpent hailed from the Double Cross Ranch it’d be too on the nose, but in Funk’s case, it was perfect for the kind of character he was, someone who’d kick an interviewer’s ass on the front porch for barging in on him while he was in his long underwear as soon as he’d invite the Insane Clown Posse in for a bowl of chili.
In both of those instances and in every instance of Terry Funk’s professional life, what one gets in return for listening to the self-styled rattlesnake is the same thing the serpent offered Eve: knowledge. Like the serpent, Terry Funk went back on his word when he said “Forever!” in 1983, but to lie as a professional wrestler is to create, and few in the world of professional wrestling have created as much beauty, let alone as much that will endure beyond the lifetime of anybody reading this, as he did.
