When Heroes Fade

I may end up showing my age here, but I remember when I was a boy, sitting in the living room on Saturday afternoons, watching wrestling on TV. In those days, they didn't have all the glamor, the showmanship and the highly overacted scripts and special effects that are found in WWE.

Those days the wrestlers were fewer and it was clearer on who was a good guy and who was a bad guy. Some of the famous wrestlers from that time included Sergeant Slaughter, the Iron Sheik, Mike "Scrapiron" Kadaski, and of course, Da Crusher and his brudder, Dick Da Bruiser.

Also wrestling at that time was Vern Gagne. He was always one of the good guys and was usually more athletic than the others, even as he got older.

It was kind of sad when I heard this story this morning on the radio, in which he attacked a 97 year old in the same nursing home, and may have caused the older man's death:

Minnesota wrestling legend Verne Gagne, who climbed to fame as a likeable giant of the ring, is under police investigation in the death of a fellow resident at a Bloomington care facility, a local television station is reporting.

Gagne, 82, threw his roommate, Helmut R. Gutmann, 97, to the floor on Jan. 26, breaking his hip and injuring his head, according to Gutmann's family and KMSP-TV. Gutmann, an accomplished cancer researcher and violinist who fled Nazi Germany in 1936, was treated for his injuries, but was later rehospitalized.

He died Saturday.

Gutmann's daughter, Ruth Hennig, told the Pioneer Press that the two men had been in a public lobby of the Friendship Village memory loss unit, by the nurse's station, when Gagne grabbed her father.

"I don't know what precipitated the attack, if anything," Hennig said. "All I know is that Verne Gagne lifted my father off the floor and then threw him down to the ground, and that caused him to crack his hip."

Gagne suffered from Alzheimer's and Gutmann, who could recognize his wife and children but not his grandchildren, suffered from dementia and short-term memory loss, said Hennig, the executive director of a charitable trust in Boston.

Alzheimer's has got to be one of the worst disease's out there, and I hope like hell I never have to go through that particular hell.

I extend my sympathies to both of the gentlemen's families.