Bruiser Brody—real name Frank Goodish—was a college football player at Iowa and later at West Texas State, the latter of which churned out wrestlers in those days the way that botched space adventures produced comic book superheroes: Tully Blanchard, Ted DiBiase, Manny Fernandez, Dory and Terry Funk, Stan Hansen, Dusty Rhodes, Tito Santana, and Barry Windham were all alums. (Maurice Cheeks and Georgia O’Keefe went there too, for the record.) Goodish had a cup of coffee with the Redskins and another brief tour in the CFL before he was discovered by Texas wrestling mogul Fritz Von Erich. He had successful runs though a few of the regional territories until Vince McMahon Sr. brought him in and renamed him Bruiser Brody. It was a simple and apt moniker—not too alien, since, despite his size and viciousness, Goodish wasn’t a monster like Abdullah—but nonetheless epic, timeless: Bruiser Brody was a legend from the moment he came into existence. Before long he was in high demand across the country. He was huge; he was powerful. In the ring he seemed near feral, but in interviews he was shockingly coherent, his growl often bordering on eloquent. Which made him the diametric opposite of Abdullah, and in his way, even more frightening—like, wow, this guy has made a logical and empirically sound decision to dismember somebody.
