A new book paints a picture of 40 years of wrestling history — as seen through the eyes of one of its most successful and beloved stars, Gorilla Monsoon, who went from wrestler to commentator to the fictional president of wrestling’s largest franchise. WSHU’s Davis Dunavin sat down with the author, wrestling historian Brian Solomon.
WSHU: So you're not only a wrestling historian and a former writer for WWF magazine, right? You're also just a lifelong wrestling fan. So I wanted to start by asking, what is your first memory of this wrestler named Gorilla Monsoon?
BS: I think my first memory of Gorilla Monsoon would be similar to a lot of people who, like me, started watching the WWF in the '80s, during that whole era of Hulk Hogan and Wrestlemania. At that time, he was the commentator. He was the lead play-by-play announcer. And so we would hear him every week on TV. … So for people who grew up then, he's kind of like a voice of your childhood.
WSHU: He doesn't look like a Gorilla Monsoon. He starts out as a guy named Robert Morella, right? Tell me about Robert Morella. What led him into the world of pro wrestling?
BS: So, Robert Morella was from Rochester, New York, and he was born in the 1930s, and he came from an Italian American family, which wasn't really known during his wrestling career because he used the name Gorilla Monsoon. He was a very large man. He was six feet six and anywhere between 325 and 400 pounds, depending on the year.
WSHU: He is what we call a face, right? A good guy, when he begins as Gino Morella
BS: Yes, face, which is short for babyface.
WSHU: But Gorilla Monsoon, this character is very different from who he actually is in a lot of ways.
BS: In his early years, he had been pretty much himself. In fact, they were trying to capitalize on his Italian heritage. … He would actually sing Italian folk songs and opera before his matches. Now, by the time he got to the Worldwide Wrestling Federation in 1963, they really weren't looking for someone like that. They had plenty of Italian American wrestlers. What they were looking for was a monster. … And that's kind of how Gorilla Monsoon was born. They created this character, which … could be considered problematic today, because you have a wrestler who is playing a persona of a character of a different race. They called him The Manchurian Giant. … And he would actually never speak … there was such a sense of the other back in those days, with the villains of wrestling, they had to be these foreign menaces. So he was built up as this savage beast that his manager had found, that I think they had said that they found him bathing nude in a stream. And he would, you know, he was living this wild, savage lifestyle, and so he would never speak at all. He would have a mouthpiece, a manager who spoke for him.
WSHU: The irony here is that he would become so well-known for his speaking as a commentator, and that he was actually a really smart guy.
BS: And what you see happen is that the people in power started discovering exactly what you're saying. We're kind of wasting this guy in this way. He has a good head on his shoulders. He's college educated … very well spoken. Good head for business, well-liked, well-respected. So, about 1969, they started to transition him, where he got more of an ownership stake in the company. He's allowed to buy up shares up to 25%. And on top of that, they turn him back to babyface, and he pretty much drops the whole Manchurian persona. (But he keeps the name.) He keeps the name. There's money in the name. And he starts speaking perfect English. He was actually very erudite, very well spoken and well read, and, of course, typical of pro wrestling, there was absolutely no explanation for why this happened.
WSHU: I have to ask about this incident with Muhammad Ali. What happens there?
BS: So, in 1976, there was a boxer versus wrestler match, and it turned into an actual legitimate contest. It was between Muhammad Ali, who, at the time, was the undisputed heavyweight champion of the world, and a wrestler in Japan named Antonio Inoki. … And at the time, there was a lot of money at stake here, and it was very strongly believed that if you had a boxer face a wrestler, the boxer would win easily, the wrestler wouldn't be prepared to get punched in the face. And especially Muhammad Ali at the time, you know, was unbeatable. So there was a fear that, well, fans are not going to believe that there's any chance that Muhammad Ali will lose this. So it's going to be a bust. So what they decided was, we have to put him in there with a wrestler leading up to this, that's going to make him look bad, that's going to embarrass him and manhandle him. And Gorilla Monsoon was chosen for that role.
WSHU: And it's sort of amid the WWF heyday when he's teamed as a commentator in this kind of back-and-forth relationship that ends up setting kind of the standard … for how wrestling commentators work with this other guy named Bobby The Brain Heenan.
BS: To put it plainly, they became a comedy team, and you know, that's been replicated a lot since that time in wrestling. … Bobby Heenan had been a wrestling manager, a very colorful character, a very funny guy. I knew him personally, and he was genuinely funny, even away from the cameras. And when they put them together, it was just magic. They really were like an Abbott and Costello … They had a lot of chemistry, and they also became the greatest of friends. And that came through. Even though they were playing these adversarial roles on TV, you could tell that they had a fondness for each other, and it really worked.
WSHU: And you in the book talk about, I thought a very moving encounter with Bobby The Brain Heenan about Gorilla Monsoon. Could you share that?
BS: I went to WrestleMania when it was in Houston in 2001 … I was a young writer, I had been a wrestling fan, but I didn't know the behind-the-scenes stuff, and I didn't know how close they were. And at that time, Gorilla had only been dead for about a year and a half. … And I brought him up, and immediately the whole tenor of the conversation changed, and Bobby became very introspective, very emotional. I didn't think of him that way. He started to tear up, and he really was most decidedly out of character. … And I started to get an inkling in my head, 'Oh, my God, these guys really loved each other,' you know?
WSHU: Gorilla Monsoon in the 90s, he experiences some personal tragedy, right? He lost his son in 1994. And Gorilla Monsoon himself dies in -- is it 1999?
BS: Yeah, he died in October 1999. So he lived for five years after the death of his son.
WSHU: What were his last years like? Because they're also marked by the time in which he's the on-screen president of the company.
BS: It was definitely a lot sadder. And if I could pull back the curtain a little bit, playing that on-air role as the president was far less demanding because he was not the actual president. So all he would have to do would kind of come out every now and then, issue some proclamation, and then go backstage again. So it wasn't like the weekly grind of announcing all these shows.
WSHU: Sounds a lot like, almost like an emeritus. It's a position of honor where he didn't have to do much, but the company could, in some way, show its respect for him.
BS: I think you hit the nail on the head there. It was someone they knew the fans would respect. It was someone they knew that they would expect to be in a position like that by that point, and it was a way to keep him on television, to keep him relevant, to keep him a part of the show, but take it easy on him, let him take some of those responsibilities off of him, give him a little more space. So it very much was that a sign of gratitude, a sign of respect for sure
WSHU: Your previous book was about another classic wrestler, the Sheik. And I was wondering, what is it about Gorilla Monsoon that drew you to him?
BS: One of the reasons was that it had never been done. And WWE, that company was partly founded by him and established by him, and during his lifetime, he was so cherished, and yet they've done very little with him. And I thought something really needs to be done to preserve the legacy of this person, who was a cornerstone of what is now the most successful wrestling company of all time. So I thought that had to be preserved. The other reason why this is more than just a life story. There's a reason I call it the life and times, because it also tells the whole story of the first 40 years of what is now WWE, and the establishment of that company, especially in those early years, and how it was growing all around him, and the connections that he had to it.
