No. 187: VERNE GAGNE, BARON VON RASCHKE & HELMUT GUTMANN / A bone-breaking work of short-circuited synapses.
The facts were as fantastic as fiction and straight journalism couldn't do it justice. Why I backed off a story that was tragic, terrifying and too familiar.
In late 2010, ESPN The Magazine published a fiction issue edited by Dave Eggers who had interned for the biweekly back in the day before his breakout memoir, A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, a Pulitzer-nominated, No. 1 best-seller and a book that has aged well and influenced a generation of aspiring writers and knock-off artists.
We folks who wrote about the perspiring arts for the mag were told that we were free to take our swings and submit our attempts at freestyle fiction on a spec basis. It would be Dave Eggers’s call and, be warned, he was recruiting his fast friends from McSweeney’s, which he founded, and from the New Yorker, Esquire and other high-literary outfits. If you submitted, your work would get read, but odds are it will land in a slush pile. We were Division III talents and the contributors commissioned were Hall of Famers all.
I had never published fiction before, but I had fooled around with it.
In 2001, I received a small advance for a YA novel about a junior-hockey player based on a 20,000-word sample, but it got lost in the mix. (I recently looked around for the draft of the manuscript, which was about 100,000 words and in need of an edit. The entire backlog at the email address I was using had been wiped out.) The protagonist in the novel suffered a massive concussion and with it a crisis of confidence. Kind of ahead of its time, but already dated—no MRIs for instance. I didn’t think I could rework the material for the ESPN initiative, didn’t even bother opening it to take a peek.
I had also fooled around with a satire about the Toronto Maple Leafs, the stuff that would later become Every Spring a Parade down Bay Street, which Penguin Canada published as an e-book in 2012 and Audible slapped together an edition in 2022. Again, I didn’t think it was stuff that would tweak Dave Eggers’s fancy.
I had always been fascinated by a former basketball player named John Brisker. Some would say the point of obsession. Others would say that the present continuous would be the correct tense in the sentence above. I had wanted to write a straight magazine story about Brisker, a tough guy who played for the University of Toledo, the Pittsburgh Condors in the ABA and the Seattle Supersonics when they were coached by Bill Russell. One major stumbling block: Brisker had gone missing back in the 70s and had been declared dead (although many, including those investigating him in the FBI and CIA and even former teammates and a coach had their doubts). I did a lot of reporting on it, but couldn’t work it into a manageable story—an editor at Esquire had told me that if I ran him (or his remains) down, it could make it into the mag. I even had developed contacts in Liberia and Uganda, his last whereabouts, to dig up clues but no go. Dead end.
So I repurposed my research and wrote a piece of fiction about John Brisker—or more precisely about looking for John Brisker—and that landed on Dave Eggers’s desk. I had zero expectations, but he signed off on it. “John Brisker’s Greatest Game” was the only story in the ESPN The Magazine fiction issue written by a staffer or a sportswriter of any sort. I’ll write about that short story in a SubStack down the line—I was absolutely floored when I got the news that my fiction had survived the first cut and delirious when I was told it received the green light. Your first fiction is supposed to land in some obscure quarterly read by dozens—mine landed in a U.S. national magazine with a circulation of two-million.
Okay, Paul Harvey time, here’s the rest of the story. How to Succeed in Sportswriting (without Really Trying) really does lean on the rests of stories. This rest of this story is that fact that I wrote two short stories for the mag’s fiction issue but submitted only one, the aforementioned “John Brisker’s Greatest Game.” The other, “Friendship Village,” is kinda finished, but could use a tune-up. It’s today’s offering.
Like the Brisker short story, “Friendship Village” featured real-life folks and background that I reported at first with the idea of writing a straight piece of sports journalism, longform as they say (though I never do because it sounds hopelessly pretentious). Like the Brisker short story, I ran into a crushing issue: The two principals weren’t available for comment, one being non compos mentis and the other dead. And like the Brisker short story, “Friendship Village” is framed around a search in vain for answers.
“Friendship Village” spun out of coverage of the death of one Helmut Guttman, a scientist of no small renown. We don’t pick how we get to go, generally anyway, and often we don’t know in advance how or when we’ll exit the stage. I’m sure Dr Guttman didn’t have his cause of death on his bingo card.
The above clip is from Newsday in February of 2009. A month later this note below landed in the same daily, befitting an afterthought fully buried at the bottom of a page.
A couple of years before I sat down to write “Friendship Village” my father was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s. The diagnosis just confirmed what I had presumed a couple of years before that—mixed-up names, constant retelling of the same stories and other telltale signs that no one could discount or ignore. And by the time my father was admitted to what they labelled “the memory wing” of the retirement home, well, I figured I had a pretty good idea of what the day-to-day was like for Mr Gagne and Dr Gutmann.
I started poking around—yes, Friendship Village was in fact the name of the facility where Mr Gagne and Dr Gutmann resided. And “pushed” might not have fully covered exactly what the wrestling legend. While no one can be certain exactly how it went down and no one eyewitnessed the awful events, investigators surmised that Dr Gutmann was body-slammed by Gagne, who was still physically hale even if he couldn’t string together a cogent thought. I did a fair bit of research on it, including interviews with the deceased's family. Calls to the police investigating were a little less productive.
“Friendship Village” is fiction along the lines of Jim Shepard, maybe my favourite short-story writer. Shephard’s work frequently imagines the rich interiors of real-life events and real-life people. The New York Times labelled him “the master of the historical short story” and lavishly praised his “taut, high-concept, research-dependent fiction covers a bracing, career-long range of hobbyhorses and obsessions,” nothing that readers Nazis, horror movies, aircraft and explorers abound.” From a NYT review of You Think That’s Bad, a 2011 collection:
I love that Shepard has written short stories around the life and times of John Ashcroft, a loathsome Bush-era pol, and John Entwistle, the Who’s morbid bassist and legendary instrument thief. Given that he has written for Dave Eggers at McSweeney’s I’m surprised that Shepard didn’t contribute a piece for the ESPN dive into fiction—surprised and very much relieved because he surely would have bumped me out of the issue.
I didn’t submit “Friendship Village” for three good reasons:
1. The theme of the Gagne-Gutmann piece was dark and the prose experimental with its stream of fractured consciousness.
2. The subject material might prove hurtful to the Gutmanns—just a couple of years removed from the real-life event, it was too soon no matter how well-intentioned my telling of the story might have been.
No. 3. It was just too close to home.
If I ever tried to put together a collection of short fiction, sports-themed or otherwise, I’d fine-tune this one. That collection would include “John Brisker’s Greatest Game” and another short story that was published a few years later, “Hands.” A story about Curt Flood and his time as the commissioner of the Senior Professional Baseball League, “Hands” was published in Spitball, the St Louis-based self-styled “baseball literary quarterly” but the editors there never issued me a copy even though they cashed my money order. I repurposed “Hands” as a story for Black History Month a few years back on Sportsnet’s website. Here’s a link to “Hands” on the Sportsnet.ca which features my collection of baseball cards from the short-lived SPBL, something that in a better world would have survived and thrived.
One last note: Baron Van Raschke has a supporting role in the twist at the end. It won’t hurt and might amuse you to view this video of The Baron, a heel in Verne’s stable figures in the story (the purely fictional/imagined component).
I had arranged to meet the Baron (square name, Jim Raschke) on a work trip to Minnesota but sadly it fell through on the day of.
On with the show.
Verne in his prime.
FRIENDSHIP VILLAGE
DETECTIVE Hanson closed his notebook. It was an uncomplicated case at a couple of levels. Who did it? No doubt. Verne Gagne, good-guy upstanding-citizen wrestler, world champion and hero to all Minnesotans, not the least of them the boy who became the detective closing his notebook. How did it end? With Helmut Guttman in a hospital, where he lingered for a couple of weeks, then died the way 97-year-olds tend to do when they go there for something like a broken hip. All that was known, not in dispute. Everything else was unknown. How? No one saw it. Why? Even Gagne couldn’t tell you if he wanted to. Unknowable. All of it at the end of synapses disconnected like phones with bills past due.
*
VERNE
“The winner and still champion” … “from Minnesota” … Listen to that crowd … Stand up straight when they put the medal around your neck … Look at across the ring and give Jim the nod … Look at the crowd and do the math and know your take is in the bank … They fall asleep in my hands, hundreds of them have, thousands of times, all the cheering can’t keep them awake … The sleeper: Of course there’s a reason they sleep but I’m not gonna start that now … Jim draws the heat for sure, he’s a good man and he shoots a great angle, a heel’s heel … I think they like Jim more than me, even with his shaved head and the fake accent, such a good/bad heel he comes out the other side as a baby-face … “champion” … the farm, got farm strong there, always farms strong, a gift from the farm, from my father … the day he died and going back to class, grade school, everyone knowing … “champion” … a thousand of them have stood where Jim does … in the arenas, in training them, taught more guys than any schoolteacher, giving them the knowledge to go out with their trade and make their way … I hate no man, just not my way … I’m not what you think, a college man … “champion” … can’t drift, can’t wander, can’t succumb, can’t be tempted, can’t be of that whole world, and hear those cheers and “champion” … You haven’t fallen out of bed as many times as I’ve been body-slammed and body-slammed back … Killer Kowalski had that, like Jim, heel-to-babyface without changing a thing, you couldn’t do it if you tried, just the reward for shooting a great angle
*
HELMUT:
Mozart … Many things I love to listen to, love to play, even if I could not achieve mastery before my fingers started to go, leaving the string section for the piano bench and ultimately the audience … Listen to the complexity, the integrity … organic genius, a lesson for all of us on the potential for the human to create majesty … the mind of the man who made that music which endures centuries later and forever more … This is the human condition, that in us is the potential for such greatness as Mozart and yet so often, too often, through history there are perversions of such magnitude that we defile our creation … Cancer, of course, is an awful thing and I’ll be forever grateful that I never suffered it though too many I know succumbed and did so often painfully … This is the human condition too, suffering … At the end of my life I know more than I can say, I know more now than I did ever before, and yet I am denied the opportunity to articulate it, to share it, even to my wife who is down the hall … My wisdom accumulated in a life, mine alone unfortunately … That makes me sad sometimes and yet I will put it into perspective when I see the others of us here, also at the end of lives mostly well-lived I presume … They were and are like me for no one knows that point in life when you stop accumulating and begin losing and don’t deny me that because there must be that point … and then what is left
*
THERE was a kid, developmentally challenged they said, who worked at Sam’s and all he ever wanted was to meet with Verne. Somehow wrestling reached him in a way that all other things didn’t. Maybe because it was coloring inside the lines: not just that there was good and bad but that what was good was unremittingly fair and decent and what was bad was so painfully evil that it had to register even with those who cannot process the slightest subtlety. So when the kid, who was mostly a kid in mentality but a man by his birth certificate, asked to meet Verne for his birthday a couple of years before, it had to happen. It would have violated the kid’s whole sense of the world. That good guys didn’t go around doing good things: That couldn’t be. It had to happen for Verne because a hero must constantly build on his heroism. He could have just played football for the Gophers and it would have been enough. He could have just won the NCAAs in his weight class and that would have been more than enough. Enough for a good life but something less than heroism. And so he went stepped into the ring in hundreds of arena and could always be counted on to do the right thing, however colorless he might have been. He was a man without an angle other than decency. And so a decade after he last stepped in the ring and a year or two after he sold off the promotion end, Verne went to Sam’s where the kid had showed up expecting to work a shift on his birthday. Verne didn’t just shake his hand. He took him fishing.
Verne couldn’t remember the kid’s name that day.
The next he couldn’t remember fishing.
He was 70.
*
THE detective remembered going with his father to the arena to see Verne Gagne wrestle Nick Bockwinkel. Gagne was no special favorite of his. He didn’t need Gagne to win, just Bockwinkel to lose. The detective was 12. He was reading The Hardy Boys at the time, books his father had thumbed through and thought good and decent enough for his son’s edification. At some level the boy understood that there was something more delicious about Bockwinkel than Gagne. Preening. Bleached hair. Baiting the crowd. Bockwinkel was a showman and Gagne just a guy who pinned you to the mat with no salad, no sides and no dessert. Bockwinkel could take a spectacular fall. Gagne threw him into the turnbuckle but somehow Bockwinkel stumbled and ended up with his head rubbing the bottom rope and ass against the top one. He took punches like they were gunshots and he hit canvas with legs quivering. If it had been Gagne vs Gagne, cod liver oil. If it had been Bockwinkel vs Bockwinkel, Mars bars for breakfast.
He remembered going to the back exit and waiting for the wrestlers to come out to get autographs. Larry “the Ax” Hennig was giving Mad Dog Vachon a lift to airport. Vachon told him that people in Minnesota didn’t know how to drive in the snow. He saw Baron Von Raschke out of the military boots and without the helmet, just in street clothes like the guy who lived next door. Then Verne Gagne and Nick Bockwinkel came out of the dressing room. Bockwinkel mugged, flipping the bad guy on and off like it was a toggle switch. Gagne signed every autograph with all the passion of a factory worker punching the clock.
When his father was in the palliative care unit, after giving up all hope with chemo and the rest, he asked to put wrestling on the television that hung over his bed.
*
THE Effect of 2-Acetylaminolurene on Growth and Composition of the Liver of the Rat. Hard to see how the induced enlargement of a rat’s liver amounts to a hill of beans but Helmut Guttman always saw it like pennies in the bank. Incrementalism. This paper and 119 more, his contribution to better lives for all. Interaction of aromatic amines wth rat-liver proteins in vivo: On the mechanism of binding of the carcinogens, N-2-fluorenylacetamide and N-hydroxy-2-fluorenylacetamide to soluble proteins. The names of other researchers at the University of Minnesota and elsewhere, they’d often, maybe usually take the lead credit on papers published. No one person is more important than another. A collective effort was going to be necessary to neutralize cancer. From the first paper he authored to the last that he contributed to, he took satisfaction from the pennies he dropped into the bank of knowledge. Everybody has something to add.
Others hadn’t thought the same. JUDEN. He saw the signs in the Berlin ghetto as a young man interested in science, accomplished in music, aspiring to goodness if not greatness. JUDEN. Exclusion. Constantly reminded when he’d see the signs in the street. It was all wrong. He couldn’t understand how anyone’s contributions could be denied because of something so personal as worship. It didn’t make any difference in the lab—there was simply science, good science or bad science, but not Aryan science and Jewish science. It didn’t make any difference on the concert stage—Mozart was not easy but it was either perfect to the note or somewhat corrupted, and it didn’t matter if it were gentile or Jew who played it. He didn’t understand the thinking—he could not call it reason. He was in the wrong place at the wrong time. That’s how he came to Minneapolis, a place that he had never much considered. In this cold but open place Helmut Guttman found refuge from the Holocaust.
*
THE mortality rate for wrestlers is no secret. Many don’t make it out of their forties. Sudden, shocking deaths, bodies ravaged by thousands of fights, by drugs and various abuses. When one died Verne made sure there were moments of silence before the next show with the ring bell tolling ten times. Verne outlived almost all his old rivals. There’s no home for wrestlers in their sunset years. There’s no place where they could wander around in their crowns and masks and robes that cover their failing bodies and where the attendants would always treat them in character. There’s no place like that and, anyway, Verne Gagne didn’t wear a crown or a mask or even a character. He had no trademark. He was as unlike a wrestler as a wrestler could possibly be. He was generic, just a balding guy, could have been your mechanic or plumber, could have been an unmissed ex-husband. When Verne was unable to care for himself and when those around him struggled to attend to his care, he moved into the promisingly named Friendship Village in Bloomington. He was not among his kind but among his neighbors. He was one of the younger ones in the facility. He was in the Alzheimer’s wing.
Old age was kinder to Helmut Guttman. Moderation has its rewards. Neither a drinker nor a smoker—there was no scientific argument that he could make for doing either. He was still driving deep into his eighties, still sharp, still playing the piano, still calling up and dropping by the bio-chem department, still the hit of all the family sedirs. Guttman didn’t check into Friendship Village’s Alzheimer’s wing until he was into his nineties. His wife predeceased him. A fact that eluded him sometimes at the start, all the time at the end. Colleagues: While he was still reading, or still processing what he was reading, he would see their names, funeral notices. It struck him as remarkable that so many of his mentors lived into their deep 80s and even 90s. And he wondered if science sustained them. Or if the end came when they could no longer do science. “The science,” he had always said. Same with others he performed with. The symbiosis: They lived for the music and the music enabled them to live. To keep the neurons firing. He thought about this in his last days of cogency.
*
DETECTIVE Hanson had enough years in to feel like he had his fill of depravity. The only thing that surprised him, oh so rarely, was compassion. He asked the staff at Friendship Village questions and took notes. It wasn’t the first time. Acted out, he wrote.
PUSHED PUNCHED
all caps and underlined as his usual for emphasis. He talked to the doctors over the phone. He boiled it down. Not his right mind, bottom line. Was going to get messy. When the Guttman family were going to push for charging Vern Gagne as the families always do.
But then the Guttman family didn’t.
Detective Hanson arranged to meet Guttman’s daughter in the dining room of Friendship Village. They had coffees from the kitchen. Thin and tasteless.
She wasn’t a scientist or anything. Business school, a banking executive in Boston. But she knew about Gagne from the visits to Friendship Village. She knew about Alzheimer’s. She said if the shoe were on the other foot. She said that she had to ask what her father would have wanted, what he would have wanted. He would have thought first about the science, not useless emotions. There was a quest for knowledge not revenge.
“It wouldn’t be humane to charge him,” she told Detective Hanson. “There’s no knowing what happened. They didn’t know. It would be cruel to make anything of it … just so long …” Her voice tailed off.
Detective Hanson filled in the blank. “It won’t happen again,” he told her. He told her that there would be an inquest. He told her that there’d have to be special measures.
She wept. She looked at a bulletin board beside the table between them. The staff posted snapshots of those in residence. She saw a picture of her father and a former student who had come to visit him. At the bottom of the bulletin board she saw a picture of Vern Gagne, oblivious to a man with a shaven head, bald as a baby’s, mugging, grimacing. In felt pen below it: “Verne and Jim, good old days!” She recognized the bald man. She had seen him at Friendship Village when she had visited her father before. She had heard him laugh and trying to cheer up Vern Gagne. Detective Hanson closed his notebook and Guttman’s daughter thanked him. He felt like he should have been thanking her. He saw her looking at the picture with Gagne. “Jim Raschke … Baron Von Raschke,” he said helpfully. “’Nother old wrestler. I had to take a statement from him. About Gagne’s state of mind. He visited him that morning of the accident.”
It was in Detective Hanson’s notebook.
J RASCHKE
Said to him “It’s me, Jim. The Baron.”
“We shot some angles didn’t we, Verne?”
Didn’t register
Knew it was bad day … visit him every week
Growled—thought it was upsetting him
Anger
Don’t know if he recognized
Nothing registered least I could tell
Said nothing, just sounds, slapped his arms about the bicep
Stayed for a while—went to sleep
And on it went. Taking the notes he had struggled to stay detached, professional. He couldn’t get past seeing the Baron who would take a head shot and then get knocked into some sort of past life, goosestepping in his jackboots. And then his left hand grabbing his right wrist as he prepared to apply The Claw, that crushing grip of an opponent’s face that rendered him lights out. The detective wanted to laugh as he listened to him but kept it under control.
The detective and the Guttman daughter stood up. He extended his hand and she shook it and it was done. Resignation. Some things the law can’t reconstruct and some things science can’t deconstruct.
The Guttman daughter went to the front desk. She had an appointment, stuff with Friendship Village’s business office. Sign forms, clear accounts. Form to donate clothes. Keepsakes in a box. She was showed into the office.
A minute later, Jim Raschke walked in the front door. At the desk they apologized and told him that Verne Gagne wasn’t allowed any visitors now. Not for a while or maybe even ever. “Can’t help thinking that if I had been there this wouldn’ta happened,” he said.