In the early years, Kevin Adkisson had what he describes as an “idyllic” childhood. He and his four younger brothers – David, Kerry, Mike and Chris – grew up on a farm in rural Texas. They spent their days drinking chocolate milk and eating blackberries from the fields, running around with their dogs and riding horses. When they became wrestling stars – known in the ring as the Von Erichs – their excursions got fancier. They would fly out to Hawaii between matches and spend a few days diving and fishing. “We always had fun,” he says. They were as close as brothers could be, often competing side by side in the ring.
But, one night in 1984, that life shattered. Adkisson was at home when he got a call from his sister-in-law Patricia. David, the second eldest brother, had been found dead in his hotel room while on a wrestling tour in Japan. Aged 25, David had been poised to win the National Wrestling Alliance (NWA) Worlds Heavyweight Championship. Reeling from shock, Adkisson hung up and ran out of his house. “I went to the woods and laid face down. I could smell the trees and the dirt. I felt so low … I don’t think I’ve ever completely got up from that.”
Adkisson, 66, is speaking today over Zoom from his home in Boerne, Texas. It was acute enteritis that killed his brother – rupturing his intestines, filling his body with blood and causing a fatal heart attack. “It thoroughly shook my world,” he says. He became consumed with questions about the afterlife. “All these things that I’d been curious about, like heaven, now I had to know: will I see him again?”
But there was no time to grieve. Adkisson’s own wrestling career was taking off. Known as the Barefoot Boy, because he liked to compete with no shoes on, Adkisson became a regular on the World Class Championship Wrestling show, run by his father, Jack, which was televised each week in the 80s. His heart wasn’t in it. “It was hard to make yourself think about beating that guy when everything in your mind is about heaven … you know?”
David’s sudden death would be just one part of an unimaginable series of tragedies to befall the family, to the point that, by 1993, Adkisson would be the only surviving Von Erich brother. Now, the tragedy and triumph of wrestling’s most famous dynasty has been turned into a film, The Iron Claw, with a beefed-up Zac Efron playing Adkisson and The Bear’s Jeremy Allen White as his younger brother Kerry. The film, which was made without the family’s involvement, unfolds as a cautionary tale about the dangers of toxic masculinity. Jack – a former wrestling champion known in the ring as Fritz – is portrayed by Holt McCallany as a strict, overbearing patriarch pushing his sons to the brink because of his desire for them to win a world title.
But while Jack, who adopted a Nazi persona in the ring, was tough on them, Adkisson says the boys needed that. “My father was the most honourable man I’ve ever known,” he says. “He loved us so much. My dad was born in 1929, in the Depression. Like most fathers back then, he had to raise his sons rough because life is rough. Boys have to be hard.” Jack liked to jokingly rank each of his sons in order of who was his favourite. If they ever got caught getting up to mischief, they would get a “leather strap across our back. That’s just how it was.” Their mother, Doris, disapproved. “She was going to leave my dad because she thought that he was too rough on me, Dave and Kerry. She didn’t want Mike and Chris to be raised that way.” But “we always felt like we could take on anything”, Adkisson says. “So I think he did right.”
The beginning of what would be whispered about as the “Von Erich curse” began in 1959. Adkisson’s older brother, Jack Jr, was electrocuted while playing in the trailer park where the family were living in Niagara Falls. He touched a live wire, was knocked unconscious and drowned when he landed in a puddle of melted snow. He was six; it is said that his mother never got over it.
Jack Sr was a 20-time NWA US Heavyweight Champion – and he encouraged his sons to be wrestlers. David was tipped to be the biggest star – he was a natural showman. Kerry was charismatic and handsome, and Kevin was a powerhouse in the ring. The brothers’ wholesome, all-American good looks made them wildly popular. But any pressure to succeed came from his brothers, Adkisson says, not his father. “We held each other to a high standard.”
Football was Adkisson’s first love, but a knee injury quashed his plans of playing professionally. Wrestling also took its toll on his body, “but in the ring, you just feel like you’re flying. I guess I had a showoff in me and wrestling brought it out,” he says. By the early 80s, he, David and Kerry were like rock stars in Texas – mobbed everywhere they went. Fans lapped up the dramatic feud between the brothers, fighting as the Von Erichs, and their rivals the Fabulous Freebirds, with matches between the two tag teams selling out and watched by fans across the world – World Class Championship Wrestling was syndicated to 63 countries. But Adkisson says he wasn’t interested in fame and partying – he married his high school sweetheart, Pam, in 1980. They are still together today.
In 1985, his 21-year-old brother Mike – the second youngest Von Erich and an aspiring musician – was seriously injured during a wrestling tour in Israel. “His shoulder looked like an axe chopped it,” says Adkisson. “I was so worried.” After Mike was discharged from hospital, he developed toxic shock syndrome and nearly died. He was back in the ring a year later but struggled physically – and over time became more withdrawn.
The next year, Kerry, the middle brother and a former Olympic hopeful in discus, tried to jump over a police car on his motorbike. He was under the influence of drugs, says Adkisson. “He wasn’t himself. He was wearing no helmet, no shoes.” Eventually, doctors were forced to amputate part of his foot. “It was so painful for him to put weight on it because people that are amputated have ghost pains where they still feel their digits,” he says.
Not long after, Mike suffered minor head injuries when he lost control of his car and it overturned. Then the boys’ grandmother died from a heart attack.
This whole period of Adkisson’s life, he admits, was a “blur”. He was grieving, and still “having to wrestle three times a day”. Then, one night, in 1987, he was talking on his car phone as he pulled into his garage in Roanoke, Texas. When the phone lost reception, he backed out again, but hadn’t realised that two of his daughters – Jill, two, and Kristen, six, had run out to greet him. His car had backed into Jill.
“I thought she was going to die,” he says, and starts to cry. Jill spent several weeks in intensive care with liver injuries. By the time she was discharged, Adkisson had lost more than 13kg (30lb) in weight. “I couldn’t eat. I couldn’t sleep,” he says.
Then Mike disappeared. His family had found a suicide note, but had been unable to find him for days. Adkisson only discovered he was dead while watching the news on TV. He had overdosed.
Coming a few weeks after Jill’s accident, Adkisson shut down. “It was so much. It was like: ‘Oh God, not this again.’ Because I never thought Mike would do such a thing.” There was speculation that Mike had taken his life because he felt under pressure to fill David’s shoes as the star of the family, but Adkisson denies this. He says his health problems were too much for him. “He wasn’t healing, he was just wasting away.”
Did he believe in what people said was a family curse? “Well, I believe in God,” he says. “I believe he’s a fair and loving God that has our best interests at heart. And things that we overcome make us stronger. So no, I don’t believe in a curse. I do believe it was a lot.”
Unlike his older brothers, Chris, the youngest, had struggled to establish himself as a wrestler. He had asthma and, at 5ft 5in, was hampered by his height. He idolised his siblings and was desperate to join them. “It was just an uphill fight for him and I think he got overwhelmed,” says Adkisson. After Mike’s death, Chris became depressed and started using cocaine.
In September 1991, Adkisson was at his parents’ ranch in Denton County, Texas, when Chris appeared. It was after midnight. Adkisson could see he was upset and followed him into the woods on his motorbike. “I said: ‘Chris, what’s the matter? You’re so sad.’” Chris reassured him that he was OK and told Adkisson to go back to the house to read a note he had written for them. “I wish I hadn’t left,” he says. When he returned to the ranch, his parents told him the letter was a suicide note.
When they found him, “he was laying on the ground choking. I hooked my arm under his to lift him up. My thumb went in this hot blood.” Chris had shot himself. They called an ambulance; he died a few hours later. “He was so dejected. Just couldn’t see over the hill. If he’d just held on for a little bit longer, he’d have seen a bright day was on the way.” Chris was 21.
As Adkisson struggled to come to terms with yet another death, his remaining brother, Kerry, was spiralling. His foot amputation had been kept secret, and he continued to wrestle while wearing a prosthetic. “It was terrible for Kerry,” says Adkisson. “He saw himself as a freak … He had a lot of guilt, a lot of shame.” Kerry began using painkillers to get through the fights, and his performance in the ring suffered. He divorced his wife, Catherine, with whom he had two daughters.
By 1991, he was addicted to painkillers, and was arrested for forging prescriptions. Two years later, he was arrested again for cocaine possession. Two weeks after his 33rd birthday in 1993, scared that he would have to go to jail, Kerry called Adkisson while heading to their parents’ ranch, desperate. At the time, Adkisson was living in Jefferson, Texas, 200 miles away, so he called his father, who told him he was busy pouring concrete and couldn’t talk. “To this day I’m mad about that,” Adkisson says, his voice breaking. Kerry shot himself in the fields on the ranch, too. “I was crushed,” says Adkisson.
The family only found out about the making of The Iron Claw from the press. Chris has been cut entirely, but Adkisson says he understands why. “With my story, there was so much death that it was just too much.” But he hopes that people take away not just the tragedy, but the remarkable strength it took for him to go on. “I’m a man that had every reason to quit but didn’t,” he says.
By 1993, all five of Adkisson’s brothers were dead – four of them within the space of nine years. “I was terrified at first about my kids,” he says. “Like something was gonna happen to them. But that’s where prayer came in … I just know that I’ve seen enough blood, I won’t see any more.”
Adkisson retired from wrestling in 1995. In 2007, he moved to Kauai, Hawaii, with his wife, two daughters and two sons as “a reaction to my pain”. For the first six months, he mostly slept. “Then I surfed and spent a lot of time in the ocean … You just lay on your back, kick your feet, look at the moon and the waves break over your face. It’s just you and God.”
The family moved back to Texas last year. Kristen works in investment, Jill is a teacher and his sons, Ross and Marshall, have become professional wrestlers. “I didn’t want my sons to do it, but they wanted to be like me,” he says. He often joins them at their matches and he has a one-man show, Stories from the Top Rope, which he tours around the US, talking about his life and career.
He is also busy with 13 grandchildren and several more foster grandchildren. “A lot of people have hurt worse than me,” he says. “A man can be down and get kicked and kicked. You think to yourself: ‘I quit, it’s not fair.’ But I have this huge family that I love so much. I laugh every day. I look forward to waking up.”
And when he thinks about his brothers, he feels grateful for the time that he had with them. “When I look at all of that, I call it a good day. Everybody’s gonna die.” He repeats a question he has probably been asked many times over the years. “‘Aren’t you afraid you’ll be next?’ Damn right, I’ll be next!” he laughs. “That doesn’t bother me a bit.”
He commemorates his brothers every February. “We have a boat in our pond. We put the Christmas tree on it, shove it out and light it up.”
He remembers a time when he used to think life was too long, the years, with everything he had to carry, stretching out ahead of him. “Now, I think life is too short. That’s what I’ve learned: just to love every minute.”
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