Terry Funk and Leatherface: Two Sons of Texas

I’m going to preface this by telling you that, despite its inherent charms, the 11/17/94 cage match between Terry Funk and Leatherface is just okay. There’s nothing wrong with the match — it is, in fact, a fun time! — it’s just that part of engaging with wrestling’s more mythological figures or ideas requires one to accept that sometimes a given match is just another day at the job. This isn’t what I’m usually looking for in wrestling, particularly when I’m sitting down to do an essay about it, but every all-time great wrestler has dozens, maybe hundreds of matches like this one, where everything goes right but there’s nothing much to write home about. 

You can make a career out of matches like that. A lot of fans like to go even further, making hall of fame cases for wrestlers like The Miz based on things like “consistency” and “longevity,” both terms eliding how much of that consistency and longevity looks like beige paint. Average days may make up a lot of an athlete’s resume, but the sheer number of them isn’t evidence of all-time greatness: there is, after all, a difference between “average for The Miz” and “average for Terry Funk.” So there’s not much to write about here, but just the same, there’s Terry Funk, once more a nomad in 1994 in the wake of what is, to me, the last great WarGames cage match, the guttersniping villain of one of the greatest family sagas ever committed to American wrestling television.

This is the last match of Terry Funk’s 1994, the end of his busiest year since 1989. It’s also his first tour with IWA Japan, a huge coup for the W*ING successor promotion, who would cement their place in wrestling history on August 20, 1995 with the Kawasaki Dream King of the Deathmatch tournament. I’m trying to lean away from mythology here, so allow me to note that Terry Funk looks like he’s ready for a month off on the Double Cross Ranch, entering the steel cage already battered and bruised, huge bandages covering fresh cuts from earlier on the tour. He’s not quite at the point in his career where his every move is warped by decades of aches and pains, but even if that point wasn’t in his immediate future, he’s still a couple of retirements deep at this point. 

He is also in the ring against an imposter Leatherface. 

Okay, maybe "imposter" is unkind. Rick Patterson, who took over the gimmick in late 1993 when Victor Quinones needed someone to fill in for the original while he served a stint for assaulting a fan, has as much of a claim to the gimmick as anyone working an Unlicensed Film Monster gimmick, but given how this match is booked around the meeting of those particular minds, I’ll go ahead and state my preference for the one who shows up in the stands, the original Leatherface, Michael “Corporal Kirchner” Penzel. A former paratrooper in the 82nd Airborne, Kirchner was discovered by Hulk Hogan, trained by Verne Gagne, was drummed out of the World Wrestling Federation for being too stiff, and bounced around for a while until, finally, he was drawn to the saw. Both guys wrestled as Leatherface for the rest of their careers, the first two of what has to be dozens at this point, but if you were to compare how they worked the gimmick, which you can right here in this match, you’d conclude, naturally, that while Patterson worked the gimmick, Kirchner felt it. Sprinting around with his saw in the air, jerking his body to the bloody symphony his instrument is playing just for him, he is, frankly, second only to Gunnar Hansen in the role, a cinematic monster let loose upon the real world.

The Kirchner Leatherface will eventually team with Terry Funk in FMW as one of the Funk Masters of Wrestling, so we’ll have to make due. Everything that I said earlier about Terry Funk being old and at the end of one of the longest tours he’d have in the twilight of his career? That’s relevant, but he’s still Terry Funk. Sliding into the cage through its tiny trap door, he greets the roar of Leatherface’s saw by bouncing on the bottom rope, trying to peer out over the top of the cage to see the madman coming. He chooses the wrong side of the ring, but this is a relatively unhurried Leatherface so his plan — to sneak out of the cage and secret a chair into the ring to counter Leatherface’s chainsaw — still works. That opening chairshot to the back of Leatherface’s head? Brutal, mean, unprotected magic, a shot with the fury of a blow from the original Texas Chain Saw Massacre. Pure Terry Funk. 

What plays out from there is a house show cage match. Funk throws a lumbering Leatherface into the cage a few times, both of them playing to the house. Funk hits his punch combo, locks in the spinning toe hold, and does everything you want him to do. But the thrill of a Terry Funk match is in what you’d never think to ask for — his loopy, spaghetti-legged selling, his way of talking through matches, trying to get the goat of a cannibalistic serial killer while cranking on his leg. It doesn’t take many punches from Leatherface for the cut on Terry’s forehead to open up, soaking his bandage for the benefit of the ringside photographers. Then, around five minutes in, you get the big, psychotic thing you’d only get from Terry Funk, as climbs the ropes and sells a Leatherface punch by spilling himself over the top of the cage, catching himself just before going all the way over. When he gets back in the ring, he loses his balance on the top rope and catches his nuts on it, tumbling to the mat in a heap.

Let’s consider the conclusion of The Texas Chain Saw Massacre. With Sally Hardesty speeding away in the bed of a pickup truck, soaked in blood and scarred for life, Leatherface stands in the middle of a two-lane road, swinging his chainsaw under the rising Texas sun like he’s dancing with it, horrible and beautiful to behold. This is the nature of the Terry Funk bump, a surreal gesture that at once seems to mock and reify everything about professional wrestling, an unreal act that makes what he’s doing seem painfully, inescapably real. 

If Patterson’s Leatherface had any menace, Terry Funk would really be in trouble, but he’s essentially working himself in there until it’s time for OG Leatherface to crash the show. Patterson is noticeably gassed, which isn’t the sort of thing I care about except that there’s no snap to anything he does. His sidewalk slams and powerbombs are lifeless, his decapitation kneedrop has the misfortune of being shown to miss entirely in the edit, and there is no sense of urgency or malice on his part. That’s all driven by Funk, who sells his own missed moonsault like he’s being charged by a defibrillator. I don’t know what he’s going for when he puts Leatherface on his shoulders in the corner, but it’s a nasty spill, something that probably should have ended the match. It doesn’t, but a small package seconds later does. Seeing the second Leatherface at ringside, Funk slips out of the cage and takes cover underneath the ringside seats while the two Leatherfaces speak to each other in saw.

It is, again, an average match. If it wasn’t for the aura of Funk, 90s Japanese deathmatch wrestling promotions, or (to a lesser extent) the W*ING monsters, there’d be nothing to recommend this match on, and even with those things in mind, we’re talking about 15 seconds of unexpected magic, a maniac from Texas dancing under the lights of some arena in Yokohama. Is that enough to recommend a match on? No. But when you’re browsing YouTube late at night looking for something to throw on and see the words “Cage Match - Leatherface vs. Terry Funk” scroll past, you watch it not because you’re hoping to see a classic match, but because you’re hoping to rubberneck at the kind of perverse spectacle that’s only possible in this great sport. It’s only 15 seconds. Most wrestling matches offer less than that.

Rating: ** & 3/4