Original subtitles

Let me tell the Sheik something.

I've been stabbed in the middle of that ring. I've been burned.

Sheik, that's one for you.

One Sheik, Bruce and Brody zero.

The original innovator of hardcore wrestling, the Sheik, broke all the rule

and out of the ring.

The Sheik was ultra -violent at a time when pro wrestling was still presented

a sport.

The Sheik was the first one to use a fireball, the first one to bring a snake

into the ring.

I mean, he was banned from New York City for starting riots.

Wild and crazy gimmicks far beyond what you believe could happen in a wrestling

match.

My uncle broke the rules, got away with it. Sheik has gone completely mad, as he

always does.

A legendary figure.

The fireman of pro wrestling heads to the Detroit Cobo Arena. The Sheik lived

life of violence, mystery, and a strict devotion to the secrets of wrestling.

He created a shroud of secrecy around his personal life so that he could be

fully immersed as the Sheik of Araby, the wild man from Syria.

Even his grandkids called him Sheik.

And if you called him anything else, he wouldn't answer to it.

But as a promoter and a star, the Sheik made sure he always came out on top,

even as that star began to fade.

The Sheik is a cautionary tale for what happens when you got a dragon nobody

ever slayed.

So far, it's been the Sheik all the way.

He just didn't accept the fact that he was getting old and that he was no

the top of the wrestling heap.

And it almost cost him his life.

A lot of pain.

He kept it real, you know what I mean?

And he couldn't walk away.

He had so much love for the business.

I have no doubt he would have liked to die in the ring.

29 pounds of Arabia, the Sheik.

I've been a lifelong fan of the Sheik because the first time I saw him, I was

struck by the aura, the presence, the magnitude of the original Sheik himself.

I'm Jim Cornette. Before my 40 -year career in pro wrestling, I was a fan of

original Sheik.

When the Sheik would come into the arena, the mood would change. The fans

sense that something was different. He had an aura. He had a presence. You

feel it.

The greatest example was in 1988 at the Cobo Arena in Detroit.

All the fans in the arena, you could tell they were tensing up. They were

waiting for something.

All of a sudden, in comes a stretched limousine. It was amazing.

He pulled all the way onto the floor of the arena where everybody in the

building could see. And the driver gets out and opens the door and out steps the

Sheik in the headdress and a three -piece suit and dozens of gold chains

his neck. And the place erupted. Oh, my God, it's him.

There's a match going on. People are getting dropkicked and thrown around.

They don't care about that. They want to see the Sheik.

And he walks right into the locker room with a bunch of people carrying his

bags. That set the tone for the evening. The Sheik is in the building.

He was the greatest in almost every category.

Not because he's my uncle. He proved it. He was.

I am Savu. I'm the nephew of the Sheik.

He made people believe.

Even though they thought they knew Rustin was bullshit, they knew he

Sheik laid down the foundation for what would be called the hardcore wrestling.

My name is Rob Van Dam. I was trained by the original Sheik to be a pro

wrestler. He's still influencing the business now. There's so many characters

that have been influenced by something that he did.

Modern wrestling fans are used to chaos. They're used to simulated violence.

They're used to furniture breaking and people being run over with cars.

That didn't happen in the wrestling of the 50s, 60s, and 70s because

was foremost.

Believability. This is best two out of three falls.

When The Sheik debuted full -fledged, he would still wrestle.

They're pummeling each other.

The Sheik could wrestle.

Here's a leg torture hold.

You know, he didn't become the Sheik in one night. It took a while. In need of a

character to make himself memorable, Ed Farhat draws on his ethnic background to

turn himself into a villain that will shock Middle America.

People actually were frightened of this Arab madman.

Because Arabs in those days, there were something very, very strange and very

foreign. You always had...

foreigners in wrestling. They were dark and mysterious from other lands.

And that's what the Sheik built on throughout the entire decade of the

1950s.

This image as a rich but insane Middle Eastern Sheik.

Early on, he had a slave girl that he brought to the ring.

It was his wife, Joyce.

But her name was Princess Salima.

He makes this woman kiss his boots.

And he would berate her and abuse her.

He's slapping her, Bill. And then he would take his time to kneel down and do

his prayers, where he would pray to Allah for the strength to overcome his

opponent. He would only do his prayers when the audience was respectful and

quiet. And so if he thought anybody was making any noise, he would stop and then

start over.

But as the gimmick got wilder and crazier, much of the wrestling left the

matches and instead it was all chaos.

What's he got in his hand?

He would pull out a stick or a pencil out of his tights and he would stab the

opponent in the head with it. Looks like a hammer or something.

He'd be throwing chairs into the ring and tearing up ringside.

Not a crowd pleaser exactly.

It was chaotic as it could be. There was fight on the floor.

fight with the chair.

It was everything but a wrestling match.

My name is Dory Funk Jr., and I used to wrestle with the Sheik.

Sheik always and forever stood for blood and gore.

Every time that I hit him with the fork, blood was shooting from his arm or from

his head.

This is brutal, fans.

This is Abdul of the Butcher. I have wrestled the Sheik.

We knew for a fact that the fans were scared of us.

We did a lot of shit.

And then when finally when the Sheik got stabbed with his own pencil and he

started bleeding, the people would go out of their minds. Yes, yes.

You're going to pay Sheik. You go ahead, burn me, burn them all. One of the

things that caused the most commotion was when the Sheik would throw fire.

The Sheik has got that fire.

He's burning them badly. That was explained by the promoters and the

that the Sheik knew some way to magically produce fire from his

What it was was magician's flash paper with a little incendiary thing that you

could hide on your finger.

He always kept it in his trunk. Then when he hit it... And in the arena, the

match might be crazy enough and people would be screaming, but when the fire

came out...

A gasp would erupt from the people.

He's throwing fire.

They still got a mark. Come on. I'm serious.

Yeah, look at that. You see it? If I wouldn't have turned my head, I would

been blind today.

It was like the ancient gladiator days, like the Roman Colosseum.

A lot of people say that the Sheik was the originator of hardcore wrestling.

Bull Curry was doing the same kind of thing in the 40s, but the Sheik

popularized it. He made it more mainstream. He made it more profitable.

And the crowd loved to hate him, right? I think he fed off that.

There was a lot of animosity back in the day, you know, being that he was a

first -generation Lebanese -American.

We were wondering a moment ago if the Sheik understood English.

My grandmother's grandfather was born in Lebanon.

So when they came into this country, they came to Detroit.

Detroit, Atlanta, was a pretty big hub for Arabs at the time.

He was known in the neighborhood as a tough kid that you didn't want to cross.

That's just who he was.

As a young kid, he wasn't even old enough to enlist in the Army, but he

his application.

And once he was in the Army, he did some boxing and some wrestling there.

After he was in the military and came back, he went into the trades a little

bit, and he taught himself how to do electrical work.

Then he met Bert Ruby, who was a promoter.

And in training with him, they developed the thought, because of his Arab

descent, it would make a lot of sense for him to take on this sheik persona.

242 pounds, the sheik!

In an era where most wrestlers maintained their characters outside of

the Sheik takes his dedication to a whole new level.

Kayfabe in wrestling was the aura of believability.

And the Kayfabe mindset meant that you were, to everyone in public, always to

present the personality that you claim to be on television and at the wrestling

matches. From the time that the Sheik first found this gimmick, he started

removing proof of who he was really.

The Sheik took it to the extreme, probably to the most extreme it's ever

taken. He has put himself in some hypnotic state.

He was committed to not expose the Sheik because that was just

anti -Cafade.

He never used his real name.

If you called the Sheik's house and you asked for Ed, he would hang up on you.

You had to ask, is Sheik there?

Sheik. That's all you heard was the Sheik.

Yeah, when we'd have dinner, he had the wrestlers over, and one table in the

other room was the heels, and the baby faces in the other room. I was thinking,

why are all the bad guys sitting together, and why are all the good guys

together?

But then I figured it out. He was kayfabing.

He would always kayfabe, even when it wasn't necessary.

When the sheik was out in public, I mean, he didn't speak to people he

know at a restaurant or something.

You know, he was a man of few words.

And any time a waiter or waitress would come by and be within earshot, he'd

switch it right back to Arabic.

He became a character.

And in his mind, that's kind of being a con.

And he milked it for all it was worth.

I think the Sheik had realized that he had hit on a gimmick that was once in a

lifetime. Truly the wild man of professional wrestling.

If he protected it, if he worked it, if he always embodied that character.

There it goes again, right into the throat.

That he would always be the top heel in wrestling.

He would always make a ridiculous amount of money.

But Ed Farr has an unwavering commitment to living his life as the Sheik.

Often leads to dangerous encounters with fans who believe the madness is real.

A lot of fans were violent towards him.

He would leave shows and have fans try to attack him outside the shows.

He had people stab him.

One fan broke into the dressing room and my uncle had his weight on him.

I was there, and the guy who came to my uncle started saying shit, and my uncle

just zipped him like a, give him a C, and he cut him to the bone.

Almost an insight came out.

And in the newspaper, the explanation they gave for the fan's injuries was

he had been knocked through a plate glass window in the process of being

apprehended.

Because the Sheik had just ripped him from one end to the other.

There was a night in Amarillo, Texas.

where the Sheik got so much heat that a guy pulled a gun on him at point -blank

range.

The fans were stirred into a frenzy by the Sheik.

Kill him! Kill him!

A lot of times when the Sheik was on the car, the local promoter might beef up

the police, the security.

There was one night in Amarillo, a guy pulled a gun on him.

and tried to fire, and the gun jammed, and the cops tackled the guy. And when

they took the guy in and arrested him, the policeman, trying to see why the gun

had jammed, fired the bullet.

If the guy had pulled the trigger one more time, he would have got the Sheik.

A lot of top wrestlers that were heels had that much heat, but the Sheik caused

riots everywhere he went, and Sheik wasn't scared of anything.

With the Sheik drawing crowds in arenas all over North America, Ed Farhat looks

to elevate his career as a promoter. That's where you made the money in pro

wrestling, owning the thing. You got first count.

In 1964, the Sheik buys Detroit's Big Time Wrestling, packing the famed Cobo

Arena with fans.

But in business, like in the ring, he never breaks character.

When Sheik took over, nobody knew that he owned the promotion.

He made his father -in -law, Francis Fleischer, the figurehead promoter, and

Sheik called the shots in the ring.

And there's a camel clutch.

Sheik's wife, Joyce, handled the paperwork and ran the office.

Yeah, Grandma was definitely the matriarch of our family, and she was the

They were always a team, even behind the scenes. You know, she was lockstep with

him in the business.

In the mid -1960s, the city of Detroit, Michigan, had money, and they knew and

liked wrestling.

The Kobo was a 12 ,000 -seat building, and they were coming close to her

it up on most occasions.

The Sheik before 12 ,500 fans in the Detroit Kobo Arena.

The Sheik was a thinking businessman.

He was the very first promoter in the country who bought a mobile TV truck.

And he's going to film his own matches at arenas where he's already at. So now

you don't have to pay the TV studios anymore.

The Cobo Arena in Detroit was the hottest building for pro wrestling in

country. He outdrew the Detroit Pistons who played there.

Any concert that played there. Here's a man who set more attendance records

around the country than any other wrestler alive.

Every major name that worked for the NWA would come to Detroit to wrestle for

the Sheik.

It was like the WWE of the time. It was a place where everybody wanted to work,

and the guys made the most money there, and it was the most popular.

He had power. He had pull.

So it was just an onslaught of top stars from every part of the country on the

cards. And when you own the promotion, you can double sell tickets, you can put

stuff in your pocket, unless there's a state athletic commission inspector

there. Nobody knows how much money you took in. And it's all in cash, $4 and $5

and $6 at a time.

Thousands of people. In 1973, the Sheik reported income of $400 ,000

on his income tax.

That's the equivalent of over $2 million in today's money.

That's what he reported.

No wrestler in the world made as much money as the Sheik. The Sheik was

everything back then.

He's a first -generation Lebanese -American.

He built his empire and his career from the ground up, you know, and I think

that is the American dream, right?

The sheik spares no expense, draping himself in luxury to sell the image of a

man who is powerful, untouchable, and rich.

He had one house, and then he had another house built, a giant house.

And it was like four floors, indoor pool, gym, five or ten acres of woods

creek and stuff. It was beautiful.

Sauna in the home.

I think it had 35 rooms in it. It was a big place.

And I go to myself, holy shit.

He worked hard for a living, and I think he did like to play hard. He liked

cars, suits, jewelry, traveling.

He definitely enjoyed being successful.

He had a Lincoln, and that was kind of his signature vehicle.

He had about a thousand suits. He wore a different suit every day. No matter if

it was hot, cold, he wore it every day. It was his style.

The man was not afraid of color, and you could always find him when he wasn't

wrestling with tons of jewelry on, tons of rings, lots of necklaces.

You're an entertainer, right?

You have to look the part.

You understand?

He was a sheik. He acted like he was royalty.

He was reckless.

He would go buy anything he thought he wanted. I mean, because he had no idea

any limitations about him at all.

He was a fabulous businessman.

But I'm going to tell the honest truth.

He had one weakness.

Gambling all the money that he had.

Las Vegas would wipe him out.

I mean, just like any other gambler, you know, you always think you can win.

You may win here or there, but it's always the house win.

He lived big, and he had to keep up the gimmick.

Insisting he remained the top draw, the Sheik books himself to headline nearly

every show.

The United States heavyweight champion has held that title longer than any

U .S. heavyweight champion in the history of the belt.

There is...

A lot of truth to the idea that the main event star in wrestling should lose

only rarely. So that when you do it, then that gets you over as the guy.

But the Sheik took it to extremes.

And the Sheik felt that if anyone was to conclusively defeat him, that it would

take his heat away and it would diminish his aura.

The Sheik has got a million tricks, so don't count him out.

If you're able to decide who's going to be on the card and who's not going to be

on the card, why would you not assume that he would be the main event?

The United States heavyweight champion, The Sheik. He would sell for wrestlers.

He would bleed for them. He would do all those things, but you couldn't beat

him. The Sheik never did a job.

And that was what made it even more shocking on the rare occasion that he

One of the few times The Sheik agrees to lose a match.

comes at a volatile moment in Detroit's history.

1967,

the city of Detroit had riots.

Four days of rioting, looting, and arson rocked the city of Detroit.

It was over a situation where the police had raided a certain bar in an African

-American area, and the riots lasted for several days.

The Sheik's number one baby face, his star attraction as a hero, was a guy

Bobo Brazil.

Sheik saw an opportunity there because at the Kobo, the crowds were black and

white. Like a lot of places in the United States in the 60s, the only place

you would go and see a really integrated audience was at the wrestling matches.

In the late 1950s, early 60s, down in the South, the whites and the blacks

separated.

and the blacks were usually separated to the upper tiers of the arena, and they

had chicken wire or something like that put up in front of them. And at one

point, the Sheik was on one of those shows, and he crawled up that chicken

and tore it down and invited the black folks to come down into the arena floor.

He was that kind of guy.

Being that he was a Lebanese -American, he experienced racism himself growing

up. You know, he felt it.

And I think that once he reached a position where he was able to help other

people, he took advantage of it.

Once the riot started, the sheik thinking, what can I do to calm things

to help? So in that arena that night, you know, there was at least 10 ,000

people, and there was not only whites and blacks and every kind of ethnicity.

In that arena that night, they were all one.

hoping that Bobo Brazil could beat the Sheik. You're watching a championship

bout. Bobo Brazil and the Wild Man from Syria, the Sheik. And when Bobo finally

beat the Sheik, the place exploded

like I've never seen before.

Doing that, the Sheik helped heal the city of Detroit.

It settled down the tension in the town.

And then, of course, Sheik beat him two weeks later and won it back.

Once responsible for the promotion's greatest success, eventually the Sheik

becomes a liability for big -time wrestling.

If you have a hot heel that can't be stopped, everybody wants somebody to

him. But then if it goes on for so long that the people become convinced that

nobody can stop him, They'll stop coming to see somebody try.

The winner with a camel clutch, the Sheep!

Past 1975, the auto industry was, you know, starting to have problems.

The economy, you know, started to take effect. That's why big -time wrestling

started to fail, because people really didn't have that extra money to spend to

see wrestling.

It was just a domino effect of the economy and the promotion, not drawing

The Sheik always lived big. The custom -made suits, the jewelry, the stretch

limousines, the handlers, the helpers.

Suddenly, with business going down, he didn't have the money coming in to cover

the money going out.

How do you maintain that lifestyle?

Unfortunately, he couldn't keep it up.

By the mid -1970s, the Sheik's Detroit promotion big -time wrestling is

struggling financially, and its woes take a toll on locker room morale.

A lot of guys got pissed because either they were promised things that they

weren't getting, or they could just see the business going down, and they

started no -showing the cards.

I remember a time when Bruno Sammartino came to Cobo Arena.

If you're an East Coast guy, you're a Bruno fan.

You know, Bruno was everything.

And after the show, Bruno says, hey, you want to go out to dinner with me? So

I'll never forget, we went to this Chinese restaurant, and I go, I hear

going to be back here in two weeks, you know, in a return match against the

Sheik. He says, I'm going to tell you something, but don't say anything to

anybody else. I'm not coming.

The Sheik promised me $2 ,000 to come tonight, and he gave me a check for

So I'm not showing up.

Money wasn't coming in, and he couldn't afford to pay the wrestlers what they

thought they were worth.

Big Time Wrestling had lost TV in some of their other markets. Finally, they

lost TV in Detroit.

It was somewhere around late 1980.

That was the last event that Big Time Wrestling ran in the Cobo Arena, the

that Sheik built. One of the most...

Popular places to see wrestling in the United States for the previous 15, 20

years couldn't run it anymore.

That was pretty much the end of big -time wrestling.

Unfortunately, if he wasn't making that money, he was still spending it.

And so the only thing that saved him was the Japanese tours because Giant Baba

and All Japan Pro Wrestling brought the Sheik to Japan.

Japan was the biggest moneymaker in professional wrestling for a long time.

The Sheik had been in all these pictures, the fire and the snakes and

and the eyes, but they'd only seen him at magazines and newspapers.

They went absolutely out of their minds for the Sheik. He became an icon in a

very short period of time.

A great city of Tokyo, when the Sheik walks down the street, they actually

traffic. They were bloodthirsty.

Look at the blood, everything.

They could do that in Japan and they could get away with it.

But then after a few years, again, Japanese wrestling was very highly

The Sheik couldn't keep up. Baba stopped bringing him to Japan.

He was not able to be booked almost anywhere else in the United States

of his age and the bridges that he had burned.

And as the money dried up, pretty soon he was just...

wandering around the house, a 60 -something -year -old man in a

mansion that had seen its better days.

I mean, he'd spent all his millions.

And so he and Joyce were living in the kitchen.

I can't go into it all the way because it's embarrassing, but he was losing his

money. Like, we had to sell the big house.

And so he was not penniless, but he was going broke.

After they left the mansion, it was... Still them, still two against the world,

so to speak. I mean, they were a tight pair.

And to me, as their grandchild, I never saw anything but my loving grandparents.

All the money and all the glory and all the fame and the lifestyle, it was just

not there anymore.

I mean, you've been the greatest heel in the sport of professional wrestling for

how many years? But now you're that older athlete who can't. perform at that

level anymore.

You know, what's the guy to do?

Now past his prime, the Sheik takes any booking he can get just to keep food on

the table.

He'd go to Warren, Ohio to a high school gym and do the same thing with Bobo

Brazil that they had done 20 years earlier in the Cobo Arena. Instead of in

front of 12 ,000 people, it might be in front of 1 ,200.

He was born in the 20s.

And he was just trying to make a couple hundred dollars here and there just to,

you know, keep food in his little kitchen.

His gimmick had gotten tired.

And he couldn't keep it up.

He was chasing a career down a rat hole.

All that obviously had to play a part in a late life crisis.

And he was trying to recapture some former glory and try to do something to

himself going at the same time.

I'm not a psychiatrist, but one would think that that had to be uppermost in

mind is how can I keep doing this for very much longer?

How can I keep up the gimmick?

With injury and age driving him from the ring. Anything you want.

The Sheik shifts to training the next generation, starting with his nephew.

My mom and my uncle were the two youngest.

So my uncle always took care of my mother. Walked her to school every day

beat up anybody who got in her way and all that stuff.

And my uncle used to beat up my dad.

They got a divorce when I was three years old. But I'd see him around when I

five or six.

And he'd hit my mom.

And mom would call my uncle. Uncle would come over and beat him up.

And then one day...

He comes to meet him up. My dad was hiding under his bed.

And I said, that's what I'm going to do. I'm going to be the Sheik and have

people hide under the bed from me.

I said, well, I got my uncle. He's more of a dad.

All up until I was 19, I was telling him, I'm going to be a wrestler, I'm

to be a wrestler. But I never did nothing other than amateur wrestling.

I was 19 at a party, and these guys were shooting.

One guy shot my one friend in the stomach and took off running.

I ran after him and grabbed him and threw him down.

He pushed the gun against my face, and he hit my teeth, and it shattered.

So it went in my nasal cavity and in the back of my throat. It knocked out seven

of my teeth.

So when I got shot, I go, now's the time I got to do it.

So after a couple days, I got out of the hospital.

My mom called my uncle and said, I want to be a wrestler, a pro wrestler.

The next day, he came to my house. He goes, come on, we're going to camp. Pack

your bag.

So I got in his car.

A limousine, by the way. And he took me to his house and he goes, this is the

cap. Now you're not going to go home for another year. You're going to be stuck

here for a year.

And don't bitch when it hurts.

So the first seven months, he had me doing chores and chopping wood.

And I'd set the ring up in the morning and tear the ring down at night and

get in it.

I never had a free minute. Anytime he goes, what are you doing? I go, nothing.

He goes, okay, go chop some wood.

He always had me wash his car, clean the house for no reason when it wasn't

dirty.

And I never questioned him.

For the first year I was training, he had two bad hips, could hardly move.

I'm sure he took pain pills, but he never told me about them.

He was just a tough old motherfucker.

He was just a tough guy.

Sabu doesn't just follow in the sheik's footprints.

He carries his legacy into a new era, adapting his style for a new generation.

Sabu did adopt a lot of the sheik's mannerisms, from the headdress to the

looking up and pointing in the sky and the not speaking English.

But Sabu, of course, was more acrobatic and more of a death -defying daredevil.

I don't think the Sheik ever climbed to the top rope in 50 years.

But the family connection was still there, and that enabled the Sheik to, in

some cases, go along with Sabu and lend his historic reputation to help get Sabu

over.

I never copied him, but he influenced me.

What I do is my way. It resembles something he would do maybe, you know,

the tournament and stuff.

He paved the way for me, but he didn't give it to me. No, he made me earn it,

and if I didn't have it, he wouldn't have backed me up.

As Sabu's star rises, he brings in a new recruit eager to learn the ways of the

Sheik.

The fans love RVD!

It was just the tail end of 89, before my 19th birthday, when we met.

The Sheik had me get in the ring, and he just like, boom, both hands on my

throat, and he just pushed me back to the corner, and he's choking me, you

like pushing and pulling me, making me move in the corner a lot, and then those

big eyes were looking at me, and his tongue's out.

He was, like, so committed, and he bit my nose.

And, man, I about peed my pants.

You know what I mean? Like, it was a scary experience.

We would wrestle for hours.

Then we would jump in a swimming pool. His wife would make dinner.

It was a very personal experience that made me not a student but part

of the family.

Sabu and I did a lot of training by ourselves during that time.

But Sabu was saying, you know, that Sheik wasn't doing well or whatever.

And Sheik would sometimes come out and sit in a chair and watch us for a little

bit.

I'm sure there was always a part of him that wanted to get back in the ring.

That's just who he was. So he kind of had a renaissance in the late 80s and

early 90s.

After years on the sidelines and two hip surgeries, the Sheik makes a final grab

for the spotlight back in Japan with death match promotion FMW.

He was approached to do a fire match, and it was in a baseball stadium, I want

to say that held like 65 ,000 people or something like that.

The idea of the match was that my grandpa, I wrestled with Sabu, my

tag team against a Japanese tag team.

Instead of rope, it was barbed wire, and they wrapped that barbed wire with

kerosene -soaked linen.

They didn't tell me I was having a fire match until a couple days before.

The ring didn't all go on fire, just the parts where they wanted, but the fire

was too big, like sucked up the air in the middle, and even the logo in the

middle was melting on her hand.

And it was only in there probably five or six minutes.

And it was too hot.

They must have not anticipated the fire would get as big.

But they got stuck in the ring.

And tragically, the whole thing went up in flames.

The flames were taking up all of the oxygen.

So it was not only blisteringly hot, but they couldn't breathe and they couldn't

see. And suddenly it just engulfed everything.

They're in the center of the ring because that's where they could get the

oxygen. And Anita said to Sheik, Sheik, this is bad.

He didn't know Anita could even speak English.

That's when Sheik was like, okay, something's wrong.

In Japan, the Sheik and Sabu find themselves trapped in a ring of fire.

Battling for survival as a hardcore match spirals out of control.

They had done a practice run that afternoon, and everything was fine. But

because it was a baseball stadium and it was outdoors, wins are a factor.

And so when the actual match took place, things were going as rehearsed.

The winds shifted, flames started going horizontally across the ring, and it

started melting the ring.

Sabu and one of the Japanese wrestlers were able to get out of the ring

My grandpa was locked up at that point with Onida.

They were in there for maybe 15 or 20 more seconds, and that was a mistake.

They really struggled to get out of the ring.

It is really hard to watch, because you can see he's still trying to do his job.

He crawls out of the ring. I run around the other side. I throw water at him.

He goes, what are you doing? I said, I'm trying to put you out. You're smoking.

And he goes, no, I got to throw fire still. I was getting his hand wet.

The skin is dropping off his body, and he's still trying to do chic stuff.

You know, but they'd gone too far.

My grandpa ended up with third -degree burns over 20 % of his body.

How's that, Grandma?

Three or four in the morning a call came in because the time difference with

Japan. And Grandpa didn't really let on that he was that hurt, but Grandma could

hear it in his voice.

When the Sheik got on the plane, people in first class were disgusted because

his skin was still burning and they could smell it.

You know, it was quite the journey to get him back from Japan, you know, the

-hour flight back home with third -degree burns all over your body.

I don't think most people would have honestly survived that trip.

I just remember he was in a wheelchair, and he was wrapped like a mummy.

He didn't let on at all that he was hurting.

Grandma did a lot of his care at home, unbandage him and put the cream on it

bandage him up.

I'm sure he was in horrible pain.

That was not the end for him. He was like, oh, I'm burned?

That's fine. I'll just recover from this, and I'll get back in the ring.

With age and injury catching up, the Sheik fights to extend his wrestling

alongside Sabu.

In 1995, World Championship Wrestling, one of the two major companies in the

United States, has Sabu booked on a pay -per -view event, and as a special

attraction, he brings his uncle, the Sheik, to be at ringside with him. I did

flip out of the ring, and I hit my opponent, and his leg got stuck under

broke his leg.

And there's the Sheik, 69 years old, out there with a broken leg, and he still

threw the fireball.

That's part of, I think, him wanting to make sure that the business moved ahead.

It didn't matter how badly he was hurt. You have to get back up and finish the

match. There you see the Sheik right at ringside.

It wasn't until we got back behind the curtain, we had to get a wheelchair for

him. He never complained about it. Tony, the manager threw a ball of fire in the

man's face.

At that point, I think he knew his body. It was time to call it quits.

I felt at ease that he was going to stop because I was always worried he wants

one more, he's going to have a heart attack or his leg's going to break

You know, I was always worried about that. But it was awesome because he

says, I'm going to stop.

You know, he had reached the pinnacle of his career and it was done at that

point and kind of just moved into the family life.

He still was the Sheik in public.

It may have just been like out of habit because he had been doing it for like

literally 30 years.

After devoting so much of his life to the wrestling business.

Ed Farhat now focuses on family.

He came to Grandparents Day in second grade.

I think that's when I realized, okay, something's up.

Because all the other grandparents were, like, peeking in our classroom and

asking for autographs. And we're just a bunch of eight -year -olds. I just

happened to have the grandpa with a shirt opened, camel necklace on his

yelling Allah to the ceiling in the classroom.

I never, ever questioned whether he thought we were the center of the

He showed us that every day.

We all have a decent amount of time to know and love him.

You know, it's never enough.

By the early 2000s, years of a lifetime in the ring take their toll on the

Sheik's body.

He had some organ failures, and he had suffered from multiple myeloma to the

cancer.

One thing about our family is that we rally.

And so that was the time for all of us to rally around him.

And we did. I would say the last few years of my grandfather's life, we were

the hospital.

Every other day, my grandmother never wanted him to be alone.

At that time, I lived on my own in Lansing. I was 19, and Grandma had

called, and I said, he's gone, isn't he?

Not a glamorous death, but...

He was surrounded with love, and that's what matters.

I was 27 when he died. I had a long time with him.

I feel grateful that I had as much time with him as I did.

He was a pillar of our family, so there was a major loss for us.

I went to Japan, and he died when I was in the air. I didn't know it.

All the boys were saying, I'm sorry about your uncle. I thought, because he

sick. And finally Goldberg goes, sorry to hear about your uncle. I said, wait a

minute, you know, I barely know you. Why do you care about my uncle? He goes,

well, he passed away last night. I said, what?

When he told me that, they said, Sebu, you got to go get set up for the

entrance. So it was a 20 -minute ride around the Tokyo Dome.

I'm talking to my aunt. She goes, yeah, he passed away last night, but you got

to do your job like he'd want you to. I said, but, you know, he was more than my

father, more than anything.

And she goes,

you know he'd want you to do your job.

You can't have a heartbreak affect your professionalism. So I stayed and did my

match, and then when I got home, I missed the funeral. But to me, funerals

just to show people who are still alive that you cared. A person that died knows

you cared.

At his funeral ceremony, even the priest referred to him as Sheik.

And I took one of the roses off the top of his casket that I still have to this

day.

My friend was gone.

Years after the Sheik's passing, his legacy is solidified into wrestling

as he's inducted into the WWE Hall of Fame.

To be inducting the Sheik, of course, you know, what could be better? I was

proud always to represent him.

They wanted Sabu, of course, to induct him. But Sabu's not big on vocabulary.

The original Sheik was hardcore before any of us heard of hardcore.

So, you know, he asked if I would go with him and do most of the talking. Of

course, of course, you know, let's do this.

It was a nice moment to see that appreciation.

be given to him by a new generation.

I mean, he started at the dawn of television, and his last appearance was

-per -view. Nobody had that kind of drawing power, and nobody was in as many

different places doing as many different things for as long as the Sheik was.

Yeah, one of my favorite objects is the little doll of the bloody Sheik. This

came out, you know, way after he had passed away.

He was a good man.

He taught a lot of people how to work.

You know, I've always been proud that I'm a nonconformist, and I have no doubt

that that is me taking after the original Sheik who brought me into this

Uh -oh, here comes the chair.

Both men outside the ring, but it's not over.

He put ass in seat.

People wanted to go and see the wild, crazy Sheik.

Most wrestlers, I don't think.

Last that long.

The Sheik had a very tragic aspect, and that was that he lived an illusion of

who he was.

And in some ways, it was absolutely charming because he did such a marvelous

of it. The Sheik looks like he's been through World War III. You know, anytime

you see a wrestler using a metal chair to smack someone or do something

slightly nefarious during a match, you know, whether that... wrestler knows it

or not he's paying homage to my grandpa and we take a little bit of pride in

that