Sonny Myers, 83, Wrestling loses a legend and a character
wazzzy
With the death of Sonny Myers on Monday at age 83, the world is short
one less genuine character. Whether it was making a headlining
wrestling career out of a 200-pound frame and then becoming perhaps
the world's slowest referee, working as sheriff in Buchanan County,
Mo., or the Sonny Myers Carnival, Myers went to his own beat.
His 60 years in pro wrestling are intrinsically tied to St. Joseph,
Missouri. One of St. Joe's latter-day wrestling graduates, Ed Wiskoski
(Colonel DeBeers, Mega Mararishi), can rhyme off tale after tale.
Sonny Myers? "There was a bandito from the word go. I've got a
thousand, million stories on him," claimed Wiskoski, who grew up
knowing of the legend, and then got to spend time around Myers. "You
talk to the old guys that were in the business with him, and he was
just a con artist. He'd go into a restaurant, and he'd sit down with a
guy that was sitting there all by himself. He'd order his dinner and
start bullshitting with him. Then he'd get up. He would say to the guy
sitting at the table, he'd say, 'that gal up there taking the money,
she fancies you.' 'What do you mean?' 'Well, I drop in here quite
often. She likes you.' Myers would go up with his ticket and he'd lay
it down. He'd say, this guy at the table I'm at, he's got my ticket.
Of course, the gal would wave back at him and point at the ticket that
he's going to pick up. Myers is out the door and gone. But that's just
one of the things the guy used to do."
Stan Holek, who worked as Stan Nielsen and Stan Lisowski, got to know
Myers on a trip to Japan in 1960. "He was a character," said Holek, a
real fun guy to have along on a trip. "They'd take us to these hot
houses, hot baths and things. Sonny, he said, 'I've never seen so many
that don't got chests -- they look like ironing boards!' I just had to
laugh. He was a character. He could make you laugh."
Mad Dog Vachon said that he was often asked if he knew Sonny Myers,
but he didn't meet him until Sonny was old and refereeing in Kansas
City. Vachon later saw tapes of Myers and knew why they asked; "He was
so handsome. That's why so many women asked me, 'Where's Sonny Myers?'
They loved him, he was such a nice looking man." Wrestling Revue once
plugged Myers as "college-bred, smooth and handsome as porcelain."
Dick Brown, the son of another Midwest great, Orville Brown and a
wrestler himself, started to laugh just hearing the name Sonny Myers.
"I can't think of anybody who did more with less of a body than Sonny
Myers. They used to call him Bag Of Bones. He got over very well in
St. Joe, and he did in other places too. He really was a junior
heavyweight, and should have been a junior heavyweight probably. He
had some very good matches."
So while on the one side, Myers was a true original, marching to his
own drummer, in the ring, he had few peers.
"He was fantastic," simply stated Wiskoski. "He was a really good
worker." Former referee Tommy Fooshee echoed the comment: "He was
fantastic. I saw him in his prime."
"In my opinion, Sonny was probably the best pure all around worker
I've ever seen," Jody Hamilton (The Assassin), told the Georgia
Wrestling History web site.
"Sonny was probably the best of the best when it came to the clean
side of wrestling," Harley Race said in the St. Joseph News-Press
following Myers' death.
Born in 1924, Harold C. "Sonny" Myers grew up on a Savannah, Mo.,
farm. While employed on the killing floor of Swift's packinghouse,
Myers met St. Joseph wrestling promoter Gust Karras in 1943 at the
local YMCA. The 6-foot-2 Myers had been playing basketball.
"One night I was up there, and I just happened to walk in room where
the boys were working out, and I didn't even know they were working
out. I walked in there and said, 'Jesus Christ, let me out of here!'"
he told this writer in April 2006. "Gust Karras looked at me, and he
laughed. He used to smoke a pipe all the time, and, boy, he started
puffing on that pipe, and I said, 'My God, how does anybody get a
breath in here?' He said, 'They do. Pretty soon, you'll never know it.
Once you get in a building where you've got three, four, five thousand
people, everybody's smoking, you don't pay any attention to it. And he
was right."
Having gotten his parents' permission to train, Myers was soon on the
way to a professional career. But wrestling was hardly the only sport
that he excelled at. Myers spent two years at the University of
Missouri, where he wrestled and played baseball. During the summers,
Myers was a semi-pro baseball player as well. "I loved all sports, all
sports I loved, and I did good at all of them. It's just because I
liked it. You've got to like something if you're going to do something
good," he said.
"The Missouri Meteor" carved out an incredible in-ring career. He was
a 14-time Central States champion, the NWA Missouri champ, a five-time
champ in Texas, and held tag belts with Dizzy Davis, Pat O'Connor, Leo
Garibaldi, Larry Chene and Bobby Graham. In the 1960s, Myers teamed
with Johnny Weaver in the Ohio-Indiana territory as the Weaver
Brothers, feuding with the Nielsens and Angelo Poffo & Bronko Lubich.
"I wrestled and had so many belts so much that you forget," Myers
admitted.
Forgotten by history and circumstance -- and devious promoting,
perhaps -- was Myers' brief run as a recognized world champion. He
defeated Orville Brown in November 1947 for the version of the belt.
However, in early 1948, the National Wrestling Alliance was formed,
and recognized Brown as its first champion, leaving Myers' reign
confined to the history books.
His legacy lived on through a lawsuit, however. Myers sued P. L.
(Pinkie) George, Des Moines promoter, and the National Wrestling
Alliance for $600,000 in an anti-trust action in the 1960s. Myers'
contention was that the alliance and George had a monopoly on
wrestling and caused him financial damage. The feud with George dated
back to 1953.
The lawsuit was successful. "He collected ninety thousand dollars from
them and they had to sign an agreement that they wouldn't continue the
monopoly. He nailed them," Lou Thesz said in an interview in Whatever
Happened To ... in 1999. "Pinky George did a stupid thing. He said,
'I'll see that you never wrestle anywhere again.' That's it -- bingo!
After that, they all had to sign a consent decree that they would not
be involved in any restraint of trade."
"One of the handsomest physiques ever carried over the coaxial cable.
Anyone who has seen him in action can testify to his superb cat-like
agility as he maneuvers to apply his favorite holds: the Atomic Drop
and the Japanese Sleeper," promoted Wrestling Revue.
His favorite place to wrestle? "I'll tell you the truth, the best
wrestling I ever had and made money was, I was booked out of Houston,
Texas. That was Morris Sigel and the guy that booked the territory for
him was [Doc Sarpolis]." It was also in Texas where he was stabbed,
and wound required 248 stitches to his belly.
Wrestling took Sonny and his wife, Elaine -- whom he met at the
matches, and married in 1947 -- all over the world: England, France,
Germany, Mexico, Canada, Alaska, Australia, Japan seven times. But he
couldn't shake his St. Joe roots. "I used to love to come home," he
said. He and Elaine raised two sons, Steve and Michael.
Aside from wrestling, the Sonny Myers Carnival ran for 22 years,
meshing a show that his brother-in-law had with his own. "We took our
two shows, and put them together and made a big one. We just did
oodles of money," Myers said. "Back in those days, it was 25, 30, 35
cents for a ride. You put them people on them rides, and give them a
nice ride, they'll come back and keep riding. A lot of people will put
them in there, and put them on a 25 or 30 cent ride, and put them on
the ride and when they start out, you can count the circles that the
damn ride makes before they stop it. That's no good, you can't do
that." When Myers was on the road, his sons and his wife ran the
carnival.
He also owned three local farms that used to provide beans and corn,
but that had recently been converted to tree farms. "Shit, we've made
more money out of them than anything else," Myers said, explaining
that he had more than 6,000 trees on about 150 acres. In later years,
Myers also worked at a car dealership, and at a Wal-Mart as a
greeter.
Myers also served two terms as Buchanan County sheriff in the 1970s.
His years as a self-promoter served him well, said Wiskoski. "He knew
how to work the press."
Like his wrestling career, Myers' years as a public servant bring out
stories as well. The one told the most, perhaps, is his bust of a long-
tolerated illegal cock fighting game in southern Buchanan County. "I
went there one time. You couldn't even see the building until you were
right up next to it. It had black tar paper around it. But inside it,
it was all bright lights and everything else," said Wiskoski.
Myers decided to go after the illegal cock fighting and get some
publicity; he and his deputies busted it, and arrested 35 people. "The
magistrate court was overflowing Monday morning," Bob Slater, former
St. Joseph News-Press managing editor said in the obituary. "Sonny was
not one of the good ole boys."
The dead roosters went into storage. "By the time it was all said and
done, and about a year's worth of trial, all the county ended up
getting out of it was a big bill for the cold storage of the dead
cocks," laughed Wiskoski. "He ended up with egg on his face there."
As a wrestler, Myers competed off and on up until about 1980, at which
time he helped out here and there as a referee in the Central States
territory based out of Kansas City, and would be brought into other
territories as a special NWA troubleshooting referee. (Having had both
knees replaced, Myers was not exactly known for flying across the ring
as a ref.)
He also trained wrestlers -- using the gym at Lord Littlebrook's St.
Joe home -- and promoted the occasional show. Myers figured he had
15-20 people come through his door asking to be trained. Myers shared
a tale of his own: "When I put the squeeze on them, they say, 'Hell,
what are you trying to do, kill us?' 'No, I'm not trying to kill you.
I'm trying to make things so that you can win.' He said, 'I ain't
never heard anything like that.' 'Well, then you ain't very smart
then.'"
Myers died on Monday, May 7, 2007, following a two-month illness.
Funeral arrangements are not known at this time.
By GREG OLIVER - Producer, SLAM! Wrestling