Message-ID: 

rspw{at}HackMan.com (Hack-Man) wrote:
| Mark van Pelt  wrote:
| | OHMYGOD! rspw{at}HackMan.com has a raccoon in his\her pants but still found the
| | time to write:
| | >
| | >stolenfromthenet{at}yahoo.com (Evad Seltzer) wrote:
| | >| Born Fred Blassman in 1918 in St. Louis, he was a boxer early in his
| | >| career
| | >
| | >Blassie is still working the media even in death.  He never boxed a
| | >day in his life.
| | 
| | In last week's WON, Meltzer wrote that Blassie's last name really
| | is Blassie and not Blassman.  He wrote that Blassie tried to get
| | this cleared up a couple of times but it still persists.
| 
| Actually, Meltzer wrote that Blassie wrote to Georgie Makropolous
| telling her this.  I'm 90% sure Blassie was trying to work her (and
| her readers).  And I'm not convinced by his claims (without showing
| them to anyone) that his birth certificate and Navy  records list
| his name as "Blassie" either.

And here is an article from tomorrow's New York Observer written by
Keith Elliot Greenberg with more on the name debate:


So Long, You Pencil-Neck Geek

When "Classy" Freddie Blassie, the 85-year-old pro-wrestling legend,
visited his friend Jerome Raguso on Arthur Avenue in the Bronx, the
Italian pastry-shop owner would occasionally show the self-professed
"King of Men" the things that people wrote about him on the
Internet.

All the lore accumulated during the villainous showman's life inside
the ring and out was compiled there: the way he provoked
spectators-on 21 separate occasions-into stabbing him, and on other
occasions burning him with acid; the elderly TV viewers in Japan
dropping dead in their seats from shock as they watched him gouge
their national wrestling heroes with his famously filed teeth; the
time a spectator hurled a hard-boiled egg at him, obliterating the
vision in his right eye; his peculiar friendship with comedian Andy
Kaufman, who mimicked the aging gladiator's heelish mannerisms both
onstage and in real life.

But one glaring inaccuracy always pissed Mr. Blassie off. Somewhere
in the course of an eight-decade career, a rumor had started that
his birth name was Blassman.

"I don't know where the hell those pencil-neck geeks came up with
that," Mr. Blassie would rant, noting that his cousin, "Colonel"
Nick Blassie, was a labor leader of some repute in St. Louis and
that, through the miracle of DNA, another relative, First Lt.
Michael Blassie, was found to be the Vietnam War victim buried in
the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier.

"Everybody in my family is Blassie," he said. "My father was a son
of a bitch, but he was Blassie."

Otherwise, Mr. Blassie was pretty much at peace when he died from
heart and kidney failure on June 2. Fans were rediscovering him
through Listen, You Pencil Neck Geeks, the autobiography he and I
had recently written together. And exactly three weeks before his
death, he'd participated in a storyline on the TNN cable station's
World Wrestling Entertainment WWE Raw program-culminating with
salt-and-pepper "half-brothers" Bubba and D-von Dudley splintering a
table using a Blassie antagonist as a hammer.

Relatives of the World War II veteran from South St. Louis said that
Mr. Blassie's violence and bombast was nothing compared to what his
Austrian-born mother and grandmother could summon; the latter once
threatened to yank out a nun's arms after she refused to allow young
Freddie-then called "Fritzie"-to resharpen his pencil during a
grammar-school exam.

Despite family pressure to go into the meat-cutting business, Mr.
Blassie made his wrestling debut in 1935 at age 17, and was soon
working the wrestling tent at Midwestern carnivals. The brown-haired
teenager was blind to the fact that the finishes were rigged,
but-since he wasn't yet gifted enough to win anyway-old-timers
amused themselves by placing him in a variety of torture holds.

When he wasn't tussling between the ropes, though, life on the
midway formed the foundation of Mr. Blassie's wrestling education.
He was exposed to "carny"- the form of pig-Latin wrestlers still use
to keep outsiders in the dark-and witnessed a geek show, featuring a
skeletal-looking man sticking pins and nails in himself, and biting
off the heads of chickens and snakes. Inspired, Mr. Blassie coined
the term "pencil-neck geek" to badger opponents and fans during
interviews.

By the early 1960's, Mr. Blassie was one of the most notorious
villains in the industry, his hair bleached blond, like fading
headliner Gorgeous George. At the time, promoters divided the
continent into regional territories, and Mr. Blassie rotated from
place to place, goring adversaries and spitting out their blood, and
filing his teeth for television crowds. In the segregated South, he
modified his routine to disparage fans as "pencil-neck grit eaters,"
infuriating rednecks by pointing at the balcony and dedicating
matches "to my fans-my Negro fans."

At a certain point, some observers realized that Mr. Blassie was a
pretty entertaining guy, and stopped jeering him. He then became
something of a cult figure, recording a novelty tune, "Pencil-Neck
Geek," and an album, I Bite the Songs, for the Dr. Demento crowd; he
also appeared, with Andy Kaufman, in My Breakfast With Blassie, a
parody of the 1981 art-house hit, My Dinner With Andre.

All the while, Mr. Blassie remained unaware of his growing kitsch
value, believing that all his fame had resulted from his antics in
the ring.

I last saw Freddie in the hospital on June 1. He could no longer
speak, and his blue eyes were bulging. With tubes protruding from
various body parts, he apparently decided to vacate his death bed,
and began to rise. A doctor attempted to restrain him, then another,
before two nurses arrived on the scene. Blassie fought them all, as
if he were back in the ring with Bruno Sammartino or Bobo Brazil.

The next day Mr. Blassie finally submitted, after Jerome Raguso
promised to look after the roughneck's doting third wife, Miyako,
59.

Everyone was happy, and convinced that Mr. Blassie would rest
easily-until they opened up The New York Times two days later and
noticed one inflammatory word in the paper of record's obituary:

Blassman.

-Keith Elliot Greenberg

This column ran on page 2 in the 6/16/2003 edition of The New York
Observer

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