McMahon had jobber Horowitz use Jewishness as wrestling angle
Dirty Barry
23.02.2023
Barry Horowitz shines again in the ring - the legendary Jewish fighter from the 80s with the Star of David on his shorts. They still hit him with chairs, but this time he wins.
In his 30 year wrestling career, he's been hit with a stool at least a hundred times. About 20 trash cans were split on Barry Horowitz's back, and muscular male bodies weighing well over 100 kilograms landed countless times on him - in wrestling this technique is called "air attack": one wrestler jumps on another from the ropes. He was beaten by people with the names of Chief Mighty Oak or Macho Man. At the same time, for a long time they did not even know who they were beating - the Jew Horowitz acted under neutral pseudonyms like Jack Hart, the Red Knight or, for example, Mister Techie.
But in 1987 everything changed. “I was called in by the boss of the World Wrestling Federation - WWF, or Titan Sports, now WWE - and said:“ Your real name is Horowitz? This is a great feature! We need to “pump” your Jewish theme, because it will “turn the heat on” for the audience,” Horowitz recalled many years later. "Turn up the heat" is another wrestling term for backlash from the crowd. “And so it all appeared: the star of David on my tights and the “Hava Nagila”, under which I entered the ring. And commentators to all voices convinced the audience that on Thanksgiving Day I don’t eat turkey, like all decent Americans, but gefilte fish.
In fact, Horowitz didn't like gefilte fish. He always preferred steaks to fish, and instead of "Hava Nagila" he liked to listen to stoner rock. He could pass for a 100% Southern American, if not for one “but”: his parents were descendants of Jewish tailors, Yiddish was spoken at home, and every Hanukkah in the family they lit a menorah for eight days.
Horowitz was not the first Jew in the world of wrestling - this is the name of a staged fight with a predetermined result. But he was the first to make Jewishness part of his stage image, while other wrestlers - like Scott Levy, known as Raven - believed that their origin should be hidden in order not to ruin their careers. “Perhaps this general belief was due to the idea that Jews are not strong in sports,” sports journalist Dave Meltzer once suggested.
Barry Horowitz spent most of his youth in St. Petersburg, Florida. He said that he fell ill with wrestling in the early 70s, when he himself was about 14 years old. Horowitz remembers this moment well: he turned on the TV, and there, on one of the channels, the Florida Championship was broadcast. “Thug Patterson got into a fight with Mr. Clean. Well, that’s all: I disappeared for life, ”he recalled. Barry signed up for the local wrestling section, began to swing, later tried to study sports administration at the University of Florida for a year - but, as he himself says, "jumped off to go on a journey for a dream." In other words, become a professional wrestler.
The Tabletmag, which sent a journalist to interview Horowitz for a long time, describes the world of Florida wrestling in the 70s like this: "The Wild West, where a bunch of promoters cut up pieces of territory and called them their own." Horowitz made his debut in 1979. And for the next eight years, he turned around in various minor leagues, letting himself be beaten. “He was the bad guy or the jobber—that is, a person who uses dirty tricks, but in the end allows himself to be defeated by the good guys,” recalls Dave Meltzer.
In the Soviet Union at the time, wrestling was portrayed as an example of the decline of Western morals. Having begun at the end of the 19th century as a quite serious fight in circus arenas, wrestling in the USA mutated into a strange show after half a century. Colorful big men in the ring insulted and beat each other - but at the same time, the conduct and outcome of the fight, with the exception of rare cases, were directed in advance. The audience knew everything and was still delighted. And the promoters of wrestling organizations until the mid-90s made a "poker face" and claimed that the athletes "wrestle for real."
“I think wrestling took a turn from real wrestling to show back in the mid-20s,” recalled wrestler Lou Thez. - Well, because otherwise it was a complete failure. In boxing, Jack Dempsey knocked people out in five rounds. Baseball has broken records for home runs. And in the fight, two men fiddled on the carpet for five or six hours, and nothing interesting happened. And then someone guessed: you just need to lose - preferably quickly. This decision injected new blood into our business.”
In the mid-80s, wrestling was experiencing a "golden age" thanks to the development of cable television and the arrival of new colorful heroes in the fight. Among them were, for example, Hulk Hogan, Ric Flair and Andre the Giant - "the eighth wonder of the world", as he was called: 220 centimeters tall and 236 kg weight. Andre became famous, among other things, for his drunkenness: he once drank 156 bottles of beer in one sitting. On the periphery of these colorful heroes, the star of Barry Horowitz also rose.
In 1987, he was taken to the WWF, the then largest wrestling federation in the United States. Then he was asked to give up pseudonyms and perform under his real "Jewish" name. But the role of the "bad guy" was left the same. “Barry's mission was to carry 'superstars' on his back. Just as Batman needs the Joker, so he, playing the “bad boy”, lost to people who later ended up in the WWF Hall of Fame,” said Jacques Rougeau, ex-champion of the federation. But at the same time, Horowitz was an artist: according to Rougeau, he made the audience believe that he really could outsmart everyone. Sometimes he really won - in 1988 alone he had 15 victories. But there were so many defeats that when Barry defeated wrestler Criso Candido in 1995, the commentator shouted: “We have witnessed a miracle! Horowitz won his first match!" “He was really loved.
“The problem was that I was smaller than most of the guys. To become a superstar in the 80s and 90s, I didn’t have enough dimensions. The wrestlers rocked like hell, steroids were used - there was an opinion that the champion should have a maximum of hypertrophied muscles, ”Horowitz himself admitted. Unlike others, he did not touch doping. And today, allowing himself a maximum of a couple of bottles of beer on weekends, he believes that his own Jewishness saved him from experiments. “I think the environment that reigned in our house shaped my character. I had rules: live honestly, don't do drugs, don't drink too much,” he says. What happens to wrestlers if they don't have these rules is well illustrated in the 2008 movie The Wrestler with Mickey Rourke: joint problems, back and heart problems, poverty, oblivion - and, as a result, a quick death.
Horowitz retired from wrestling in 2013. He began working as a fitness instructor and dietary consultant. He claimed that he was “tired” and “wants to spend more time with his family.” However, the world of wrestling is no stranger to nostalgia - including for the man who turned on the crowd, appearing to the tune of "Hava Nagila" with the Star of David on sports shorts. Horowitz's image turned out to be too bright to simply be abandoned and stop missing him - and so the 63-year-old wrestler returned to the big clip.
Since March 2022, Barry Horowitz has been fighting in the ring again. In the first match upon his return, another ladder was broken about him, and then a toaster. He spent his last duel at the moment just the other day, on February 16 of this year. But unlike the fights in the 80s, the "bad guy" - or "legendary Jewish wrestler" as he is now - won. To the delight of many.