The Iron Sheik, a Hall of Fame wrestler who became a villainous star in the 1980s, taking on Hulk Hogan and teaming with a wrestler claiming to represent the Soviet Union, died in his sleep early Wednesday morning at his home in Fayetteville. Go. He was 81 (according to his passport) or 80 (according to him).
The death was confirmed by his managers, Page and Jian Magen, who said they did not know the cause.
Foreign-style heels are a time-honored tradition in professional wrestling, and the Iron Sheik, whose legal name was Khosrow Vaziri, became one of the most recognizable of them all.
The sheikh loosely drew on his Iranian heritage to create a caricature of a Middle Eastern villain. He wore a thick moustache, curled-toed boots and kaffiyeh, Middle Eastern headscarves – not generally worn in Iran.
At the height of the sheikh’s disgrace, and in the aftermath of the 1979 Iran hostage crisis, he often stomped into the ring waving an Iranian flag emblazoned with the face of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, then Iran’s Supreme Leader , to take on stereotypical American wrestlers. .
The sheikh’s signature move was the camel clutch, in which he sat on an opponent’s back, tucked his fingers under the other wrestler’s chin and pulled up. His hapless opponent’s spine seemed to bend like a drawn bow.
In 1983, the Sheik defeated Bob Backlund to win the World Wrestling Federation Championship. But his time with the title was short.
About a month later, on January 23, 1984, the Sheik defended his title against Hulk Hoganthen a relatively new face in the World Wrestling Federation (now known as WWE), to a sold-out crowd at Madison Square Garden.
The match seemed to go in the direction of the sheikh and he trapped Hogan in a camel clutch. But Hogan got up with the sheikh on his back and slammed him into a corner pylon.
The sheikh plopped down on the mat. Hogan launched off the ropes, jumped into a leg drop on the sheikh, then pinned him down. It was the first of Hogan’s six WWE Championships and the beginning of Hulkamania.
The defeat stung even decades later, the sheikh said, very characteristically WWE in an interview in 2014.
“Hulk Hogan, all he had was luck,” he said. “I had a bad night, I lost my belt.”
Sergeant Slaughter was a regular opponent of the sheikh, who later lost a big game to him in Madison Square Garden in 1984.
The following year, the Sheikh teamed up with Nikolai Volkoff, a heel who supposedly wrestled for the Soviet Union (he was actually from Croatia), and went on to win the World Tag Team Championship at the inaugural Wrestlemania.
The sheikh also used his character’s anti-American rhetoric. He would often snatch an announcer’s microphone and yell, “Iran No. 1! Russia No. 1!”
Then he glared at the audience and shouted “VS!” and spit on the floor.
The public reaction could be so vicious that the sheikh, despite his brutality in the ring, sometimes feared for his safety.
Keith Elliot Greenberg, a struggling historian and writer, said in a phone interview that he felt fans sometimes believed the sheikh’s character too much.
“The reality was that he was actually a very loyal American and was grateful to the United States for the opportunities it gave him,” Mr Greenberg said.
Hossein Khosrow Ali Vaziri was born in Damghan, a city about 320 kilometers east of Tehran. His date of birth was 15 March 1942 on his passport, but he was not sure if it was correct and celebrated his birthday on 9 September. His parents, Ghassem and Maryam Vaziri, owned a farm growing pistachios, grapes and other crops.
When he was a boy, his family moved to Tehran and opened a wrestling school where some of Iran’s leading wrestlers trained. He grew up immersed in sports.
Vaziri became a talented wrestler and his fame helped him get a job as a bodyguard for the family of the Shah of Iran. But after Olympic gold medal-winning wrestler Gholamreza Takhti died under mysterious circumstances in 1968, perhaps because he displeased the Shah, Vaziri left Iran for the United States and settled in Minneapolis.
He wrestled with an amateur club in Minnesota, won an Amateur Athletic Union Greco-Roman wrestling tournament in 1971, and served as an assistant coach for the U.S. Olympic team in 1972 and 1976 before transitioning to full-time professional wrestling.
Vaziri trained under the direction of American Wrestling Association promoter Verne Gagne. The idea for the Iron Sheik came from Mary Gagne, Verne’s wife, Mr. Greenberg said, though Vaziri experimented with other versions of the character over the years.
In 1975 he married Caryl Peterson, who survives him. He is also survived by their daughters, Nicole and Tanya; a sister; and five grandchildren.
In the 1980s, the sheikh began taking drugs and drinking heavily. In 1987, he and Hacksaw Jim Duggan – a babyface, as good-guy wrestlers are called – were arrested on the New Jersey Turnpike after police officers found cocaine and marijuana in their car.
The Sheik appeared in a match as an ally of Sgt. Slaughter’s in 1991, and in 1997 he managed another wrestler, the Sultan. But his professional career largely dried up as his drug use accelerated in the 1990s. He struggled with substance abuse for a long time, but according to an article Mr Greenberg wrote for Bleacher report in 2013, he had more recently been able to stay off drugs other than the occasional beer.
In 2003, his daughter Marissa, 27, was murdered by her boyfriend, Charles Reynolds. Vaziri said he considered attacking Mr Reynolds with a razor blade in court, Mr Greenberg wrote, but that his family stopped him from doing it. Mr Reynolds was sentenced to life in prison. He died in 2016.
In 2005, the Iron Sheik was inducted into the WWE Hall of Fame.
Beginning in the early 2000s, the Sheik brought a less inhibited version of his character onto Howard Stern’s radio show to rant about various wrestlers. He threatened to sodomize rivals like Hogan and used homophobic slurs to describe the Ultimate Warrior.
In more recent years, the sheikh’s rants have appeared on social media. His managers often posted blasphemous messages in capital letters on a Twitter account with nearly 650,000 followers. A recent one just said “HOGAN” preceded by an expletive.
But, the sheikh admitted in 2014, things were more civilized when he met Hogan outside the ring.
“Nobody talks bad about the past,” he said. “I get along with him.”
Alain Delaquériere has contributed research.
