Danvers Massachusetts's OnionTown Sports on February 23, 1999. Part 1 of 5 videos. Walter (Killer) Kowalski was one of professional wrestling's biggest stars and most hated villains when wrestlers offered a nightly menu of mayhem in the early years of television. At 6 feet 7 inches and 275 pounds or so, Kowalski was a formidable figure who delighted in applying his claw hold, a thumb squeeze to an opponent's solar plexus, when he was not leaping from the top strand of the ropes and descending on his foe's chest. Emerging as a featured performer in the early 1950s, he became a TV celebrity with wrestlers like Antonino Rocca, Lou Thesz, Gorgeous George, Haystacks Calhoun and Nature Boy Buddy Rogers. Kowalski wrestled on the pro circuits for some 30 years and appeared in more than 6000 matches, by his count. Early in his career, he called himself Tarzan Kowalski. But, as he often related it, one particular match, at Montreal in the early 1950s, literally made his name. "I was leaping off the rope, and Yukon Eric, who had a cauliflower ear, moved at the last second," Kowalski told The Chicago Tribune in 1989. "I thought I missed, but all of a sudden, something went rolling across the ring. It was his ear." Yukon Eric was taken to a hospital, and the promoter asked Kowalski to visit him and apologize for severing his ear. Reporters were listening to their chat from a corridor. "There was this 6-foot-5, 280-pound guy, his head wrapped like a mummy, dwarfing his bed," Kowalski ...

• published: 02 Sep 2011
• views: 383
• author: Referee Richard Lannon