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'King of ring' still reigns

After 47 years of pro wrestling (and 17 operations), hall-of-famer Harley Race teaches a new generation

These are the more humbling years.

But he doesn't mind the pain. Are you kidding? This is the man who gets his teeth filled without anesthesia; the man whose eyeball was nearly ripped out during a chain-wrestling match; the man who once broke his fibula while wrestling, finished the match, then said "the hell with it" to surgery because he didn't have the money.

No, pain doesn't bother Race. Few things bother him in his quiet home on the Lake of the Ozarks.

"I've lived a helluva life," Race says, sitting in the un-air-conditioned Eldon, Mo., office of the Harley Race Wrestling Academy and World League Wrestling, the minor-league wrestling circuit he founded.

And when he gets inducted into Newton's pro wrestling hall of fame, it'll be another memento of toughness and grit he can put alongside his world championship belt.

"He's really a piece of American pie, a piece of Americana," said Terry Funk, who wrestled against Race hundreds of times. "Life was never easy for Harley. He came up through the school of hard knocks. . . . He's the persona of what wrestling was and should still be."

From small town to big time

The headquarters of World League Wrestling and the Harley Race Wrestling Academy is a storefront on the main drag in Eldon, Mo., a central Missouri town of almost 5,000 people.

Eldon's main strip, Maple Street, seems stuck in time. There are consignment stores and a Bible bookstore, antique shops, Eldon Drug and Midway Barber Shop.

The World League Wrestling headquarters, with muscle-bound men waddling into the door, seems out of place.

But it's an appropriate place for this small-town farmboy to spend the quiet years of his anything-but-quiet life.

Harley Leland Race grew up in Quitman, Mo., near the Missouri-Iowa border.

He was always tough - as a kid he needled his own tattoos in his arms. His father farmed and drove the school bus until money became too thin. The family moved north to Clarinda for jobs at a mental hospital.

It was about that time when Race, in 10th grade at Quitman High School, was horsing around in gym class, wrestling his best friend.

The principal walked in, saw the brawl and tried to break it up. Race jumped up and knocked the principal to the floor. He was expelled from school and, after working the farm and studying to become a minister, found himself following his wrestling dream at age 15.

He started by traveling on the carnival circuit. His first professional match - during the Eisenhower administration - was in Waterloo, and he was soon driving 150,000 miles a year, crossing the Midwest with a 700-pound wrestler named Happy Humphrey.

And he got tougher and tougher.

He wouldn't use painkillers, preferring to drink a case of beer after a match.

"He was the world's champion in many things," said Funk, still a close friend. "He used to proclaim himself the world's fastest car driver. I've driven with him and I'll tell you, he is. He'd tell you he is the world's greatest beer drinker, and I'll vouch for that."

He was one of the most hated "heels" - the wrestler who plays the bad guy - in the business.

"All of the sudden we had something going," said Larry Hennig, Race's tag-team partner in the 1960s. "We were unbeatable. One of those unique things that comes around once in a lifetime where all the parts fit. He was a good athlete, good looking, the whole package. Some rednecks don't like that. They don't like to see you talking and mouthing off. But he could back it up."

In 1973 he captured the National Wrestling Alliance world championship belt, which he would hold seven more times. He was the first wrestler to body slam the wrestling behemoth Andre the Giant. All the while he learned the business side of wrestling, at one point running the five-state Midwest wrestling territory - Iowa, Missouri, Nebraska, Kansas, Illinois - with matches on 13 TV stations.

At the time of his last match, President Clinton had just taken office.

Gospel of the ring

It's 8 p.m., past closing time at the academy, and the champ is holding court.

A group of wrestlers, mostly in their 20s, encircle Race as he preaches the gospel of the ring. They range from fast-food and factory workers to engineering graduate students.

"You go in the ring and you're the band director," Race says. "You're not part of the audience or part of the band. What you create in your mind is what makes people get behind you or go against you."

The wrestlers nod. Race is the wrestler emeritus here, the man who no longer gets in the ring but whose experience speaks louder than any body slam.

The champ's locks are still curly, only slightly balding atop and dyed blonde. He's hardly ever without a Marlboro Light squeezed between his thick fingers, and a bottle of Diet Pepsi is never far away.

"The longer your body is on the mat, the longer you are in the business," Race said. "When you're in the air, you gotta land somewhere. If you got the background in basic mat wrestling, you can wrestle anybody."

Some wrestlers do crunches as they listen.

"If I told you once, I told you a million times," Race says, and the group completes his sentence: "Imagination is the key in this business."

There's a motto here: "Shut up and wrestle." It's not the motto you see on the glamorous stage of World Wrestling Entertainment.

"There are other schools I could go to, but Harley does it old-school, traditional wrestling," said Neal Isaak, 27. "Here it's based more on the sport of it and less on the show. You know how to do it right. You learn how to feel out the crowd."

His school is so old school that, Race swears, "There's not one steroid in this gym."

The Miller County sheriff confirmed that. A recent undercover steroid sting in the region showed the wrestlers' gym to be the cleanest gym in the county.

Race tried steroids once, near the end of his career when he should have been pondering retirement. In that six-week steroid cycle, his bench press shot up from 300 pounds to 450 pounds.

"(But) once I was on it long enough to physically feel what it was doing to me, I couldn't get off it quick enough," Race said. "All it did to me was make every part of my body hurt."

Training is brutal
For the newcomers, training is brutal. They do a 30-bump drill, during which one wrestler pulls a move on the other 30 times in a row. They laugh at those who say wrestling is fake. Do one of these drills and try and get out of bed the next day, they say.

To toughen up, wrestlers chop each other - deliver a thumping slap to the chest - over and over. One pair did it for 45 minutes until one guy's chest began bleeding.

In the weight room, a sign reads, "Work hard or get punched in the face."

"This place is one of the best schools in the country," said Dan Palmer, 19. "It's more or less a trade school here. Our trade just happens to be wrestling."

'Most fortunate on earth'

Race lifts one leg to the mat, pauses and hoists himself into the ring.

"I used to be able to do one-arm pushups with each arm, headstand pushups," he says, grunting. "Nothing works any more. The problem now is doing anything once I get in here," he says.

It wasn't long ago that Race was still grappling with his students.

"Everyone for a while used to like to test Harley," says Trevor Rhodes, who just signed with WWE. "They underestimated - oh, how can I put this tactfully . . ."

"The old man," Race finishes with a grunt and a laugh. "They underestimated the old man."

Now he gets in the ring just to pose for pictures. The only way he hurts his boys these days is to sneak up to them with his stun gun.

He doesn't need the money from the wrestling academy or the shows he promotes. Race was making upward of $400,000 a year at the height of his career, and he does this just for fun.

He climbs slowly back out of the ring and hobbles back to his office. He takes a drag on his Marlboro and exhales. Two of his wrestling students are letting out moans and groans that sound like they're getting tortured. They're selling the bump - persuading the imaginary crowd that their fall hurt many times more than it actually did.

Race smiles, knowing these kids are learning the business he reigned over for so many years.

"I've been the most fortunate person on earth," he said. "Wrestling is the only job I've had since I was 15 years old. Yep. I've lived a helluva life."