UK’s Telegraph posted an obituary on Killer Kowalski, which is pasted here. You can view it on their site at http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/obituaries/2677448/Obituary-Walter-Killer-Kowalski.html.
Walter “Killer” Kowalski
Walter “Killer” Kowalski, who died on Saturday aged 81, was a self-proclaimed bad boy of professional wrestling, enjoying a notoriety as synthetic as the grimaces, grunts and groans that riveted television audiences across America in the 1950s.
In the sweaty, heaving toils of the wrestling ring, Kowalski – at 6ft 7in and 19½ stone – loomed extremely large as one of its most hated stars, having made his name in 1952 during a bout in Montreal.
After accidentally tearing off the cauliflower ear of his opponent, known as Yukon Eric, Kowalski made a carefully-publicised visit to the vanquished fighter’s hospital bed, where Kowalski took one look at his bandaged head and burst out laughing. “I swear, the first thing I thought of was Humpty Dumpty,” Kowalski recalled. “Yukon Eric looked at me, shook his head and smiled. I started laughing and he laughed too.”
When the papers reported that he had laughed at his victim rather than with him, Kowalski cemented his image as one of wrestling’s most ruthless and hated villains. Climbing into the ring that night, he heard the crowd calling him an “animal” and a “killer”. The label “killer” stuck.
Wladek (Walter) Kowalski was born Edward Walter Spulnik on October 13 1926 at Windsor, Ontario, the son of Polish migrants who had settled in Canada.
By the time he was 14, and a skinny 6ft 4in, he began body-building at his local YMCA.
Having no sporting ambitions, he read Electrical Engineering at college, working part-time at the Ford plant in Detroit to help pay his way.
Realising he could make more money in the wrestling ring, and now possessing the required physique, he attended wrestling school and began his professional career as Tarzan Kowalski, later mutating variously to Hercules, Killer and Wladek Kowalski, the name he took legally in 1963 because it sounded more menacing.
During a bout in Boston, refereed by the former boxer Jack Dempsey, Kowalski accidentally kicked Dempsey in the diaphragm, landing him in hospital.
In 1967, during a television interview, Kowalski attacked his interrogator with his claw hold, a vice-like grip to the stomach known as his “killer clutch”.
Appearing in some 6,000 matches in a 30-year career, Kowalski took on many famous names in wrestling and eventually joined Big John Studd in a tag team called the Executioners. When he retired in 1977 he founded Killer Kowalski’s School of Professional Wrestling in Massachusetts.
Away from the ring, Kowalski was a vegetarian, and took on charity work for children with special needs. His photographs of fellow wrestlers were exhibited in galleries.
“I used to be a villain,” he recalled, “but now I’m a good guy. I kiss old women and pat babies. I’ve gone from Killer Kowalski to a pussycat.”
Walter Kowalski married, in 2006, Theresa Ferrioli, who survives him.
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