The Sheik (wrestler)
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00:00Let 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, Bruiser Brody Zero.
00:15The original innovator of hardcore wrestling, the Sheik, broke all the rules in and out of the ring.
00:23The Sheik has something in his hand. The Sheik was ultra violent at a time when pro wrestling was still presented as a sport.
00:3030 minute time limit. The Sheik was the first one to use a fireball, the first one to bring a snake into the ring.
00:39I mean, he was banned from New York City for starting riots.
00:43Wild and crazy gimmicks, far beyond what you believe could happen in a wrestling match.
00:49My uncle broke the rules, got away with it.
00:53Sheik has gone completely mad, as he always does.
00:56A legendary figure.
00:58The fireman of pro wrestling heads to the Detroit Cobo Arena.
01:01The Sheik lived a life of violence, mystery, and a strict devotion to the secrets of wrestling.
01:08He 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.
01:17Even his grandkids called him Sheik. And if you called him anything else, he wouldn't answer to it.
01:21But as a promoter and a star, the Sheik made sure he always came out on top, even as that star began to fade.
01:29The Sheik is a cautionary tale for what happens when you got a dragon and nobody ever slays.
01:36So far, it's been the Sheik all the way.
01:38He just didn't accept the fact that he was getting old and that he was no longer the top of the wrestling heap.
01:46And it almost cost him his life.
01:48A lot of pain. He kept it real. You know what I mean?
01:52And he couldn't walk away.
01:55He has so much love for the business.
02:00I have no doubt he would have liked to die in the ring.
02:04At 229 pounds of Arabia, the Sheik.
02:23I'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.
02:33I'm Jim Cornette. Before my 40-year career in pro wrestling, I was a fan of the original Sheik.
02:40When the Sheik would come into the arena, the mood would change.
02:43The fans would sense that something was different. He had an aura. He had a presence. You could feel it.
02:50The greatest example was in 1988 at the Kobo Arena in Detroit.
02:56All the fans in the arena, you could tell they were tensing up. They were waiting for something.
03:01All of a sudden, in comes a stretched limousine. It was amazing.
03:06He pulled all the way onto the floor of the arena where everybody in the building could see.
03:11And 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 around his neck.
03:21And the place erupted. Oh my God, it's him! There's a match going on. People are getting drop-kicked and thrown around. They don't care about that. They want to see the Sheik.
03:34And he walks right into the locker room with a bunch of people carrying his bags.
03:38That set the tone for the evening. The Sheik is in the building.
03:44He was the greatest in almost every category.
03:47Not because he's my uncle. He proved that he was.
03:50I am Savu. I'm the nephew of the Sheik.
03:53He made people believe.
03:55Even though they thought they knew wrestling was bullshit, they knew he wasn't.
04:00Sheik laid down the foundation for what would be called the hardcore wrestling.
04:06My name is Rob Van Damme. I was trained by the original Sheik to be a pro wrestler.
04:14He's still influencing the business now. There's so many characters that have been influenced by something that he did.
04:23Right into the throat.
04:25He has an almost inhuman expression.
04:30Modern wrestling fans are used to chaos. They're used to simulated violence.
04:34They're used to furniture breaking and people being run over with cars.
04:39That didn't happen in the wrestling of the 50s, 60s, and 70s because credibility was foremost.
04:46Believability.
04:47This is best two out of three falls.
04:50When the Sheik debuted full-fledged, he would still wrestle.
04:54They're pummeling each other.
04:55The Sheik could wrestle.
04:57Here's a leg torture hold.
04:59You know, he didn't become the Sheik in one night. It took a while.
05:01In 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.
05:12People actually were frightened of this Arab madman.
05:17Because Arabs in those days, they were something very, very strange and very foreign.
05:24The Sheik.
05:26You always had foreigners in wrestling. They were dark and mysterious from other lands.
05:32The Great Togo.
05:33And that's what the Sheik built on throughout the entire decade of the 1950s.
05:41This image as a rich but insane Middle Eastern Sheik.
05:47The Sheik from Arabia.
05:49Can you imagine the arrogance of the Sheik?
05:52Early on, he had a slave girl that he brought to the ring.
05:54It was his wife, Joyce, but her name was Princess Salima.
05:59He makes this woman kiss his boot.
06:02And he would berate her and abuse her.
06:05He's slapping her, Bill.
06:07And then he would take his time to kneel down and do his prayers.
06:12Where he would pray to Allah for the strength to overcome his opponent.
06:16He would only do his prayers when the audience was respectful and quiet.
06:21And so if he felt anybody was making any noise, he would stop and then start over.
06:26But as the gimmick got wilder and crazier, much of the wrestling left the matches and instead it was all chaos.
06:35What's he got in his hand?
06:37He would pull out a stick or a pencil out of his tights and he would stab the opponent in the head with it.
06:43Looks like a panda or something.
06:44He'd be throwing chairs into the ring and tearing up ringside.
06:49Not a crowd pleaser, exactly.
06:51It was chaotic as it could be.
06:54It was fight on the floor, fight with a chair.
06:58It was everything but a wrestling match.
07:01My name is Dory Funk Jr. and I used to wrestle with the Sheik.
07:06The Sheik always and forever stood for blood and gore.
07:10Every time that I hit him with the fork, blood was shootin' from his arm.
07:16Or from his head.
07:19This is brutal fans.
07:21This is Abdullah the Butcher.
07:23I have wrestled the Sheik.
07:25We knew for a fact that the fans were scared of us.
07:29We did a lot of shit.
07:31We did a lot of shit.
07:32And then when finally when the Sheik got stabbed with his own pencil and he started bleedin'.
07:38The people would go out of their minds.
07:42Yes, yes!
07:43You're gonna pay Sheik!
07:44You go ahead, burn me!
07:46Burn them all!
07:47One of the things that caused the most commotion was when the Sheik would throw fire.
07:52The Sheik has got that fire!
07:54How?
07:55He's burned them badly.
07:56That was explained by the promoters and the announcers that the Sheik knew some way to magically produce fire from his fingertips.
08:04What it was was magician's flash paper with a little incendiary thing that you could hide on your finger.
08:10He always kept it and it shrunk.
08:12Then when he hit it...
08:15And in the arena, the match might be crazy enough and people would be screaming.
08:20But when the fire came out...
08:25A gasp would erupt from the people.
08:28And he throws fire!
08:31He's throwing fire.
08:32I still got a mark.
08:33Come on.
08:34I'm serious.
08:35Yeah, look at that.
08:36You see it?
08:37If I wouldn't have turned my head I would have been blind today.
08:40It was like the ancient gladiator days, like the Roman Coliseum.
08:45It hurt so badly that now they bring the stretcher...
08:47A lot of people say that the Sheik was the originator of hardcore wrestling.
08:52Bull Curry was doing the same kind of thing in the 40s, but the Sheik popularized it.
08:58He made it more mainstream.
08:59He made it more profitable.
09:01An ugly situation.
09:04And the crowd loved to hate him, right?
09:05I think he fed off that.
09:07Oh, what a terrific action in here now!
09:10There was a lot of animosity back in the day.
09:12You know, being a...
09:13He was a first-generation Lebanese American.
09:15We were wondering a moment ago if the Sheik understood English.
09:19My grandmother and grandfather was born in Lebanon.
09:22So when they came into the country, they came to Detroit.
09:26Detroit and Lansing was a pretty big hub for Arabs at the time.
09:29He was known in the neighborhood as a tough kid that you didn't want to cross.
09:33That's just who he was.
09:34As a young kid, he wasn't even old enough to enlist in the Army, but he lied on his application.
09:42And once he was in the Army, he did some boxing and some wrestling there.
09:47After 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.
09:54Then he met Burt Ruby, who was a promoter.
09:58And in training with him, they developed the thought because of his Arab descent.
10:03It would make a lot of sense for him to take on this Sheik persona.
10:06242 pounds, the Sheik.
10:10In an era where most wrestlers maintained their characters outside of the ring, the Sheik takes his dedication to a whole new level.
10:19Kayfabe in wrestling was the aura of believability.
10:25And the Kayfabe mindset meant that you were, to everyone in public, always to present the personality that you claimed to be on television and at the wrestling matches.
10:35From the time that the Sheik first found this gimmick, he started removing proof of who he was really.
10:43The Sheik took it to the extreme, probably to the most extreme it's ever been taken.
10:48He has put himself in some hypnotic state.
10:52He was committed to not expose the Sheik because that was just anti-Kayfabe.
11:02He never used his real name.
11:03If you called the Sheik's house and you asked for Ed, he would hang up on you.
11:08You had to ask, is Sheik there?
11:10Sheik, that's all you heard was the Sheik.
11:13Yeah, when we'd have dinner, he had the wrestlers over.
11:16And one table in the other room was the heels and the baby faces in the other room.
11:20I was thinking, why are all the bad guys sitting together?
11:22And why are all the good guys sitting together, you know?
11:25But then I figured it out, he was Kayfabe-ing.
11:27He would always Kayfabe, even when it wasn't necessary.
11:30When the Sheik was out in public, I mean, he didn't speak to people he didn't know.
11:38At a restaurant or something, you know, he was a man of few words.
11:41And any time a waiter or waitress would come by and be within air shot, he'd switch it right back to Arabic.
11:50He became a character.
11:52And in his mind, that's kind of being a con.
11:56And he milked it for all it was worth.
11:58I think the Sheik had realized that he had hit on a gimmick that was once in a lifetime.
12:05Truly the wild man of professional wrestling.
12:08If he protected it, if he worked it, if he always embodied that character.
12:15There it goes again, right into the throat.
12:18That he would always be the top heel in wrestling.
12:21He would always make a ridiculous amount of money.
12:25But Ed Farr had some wavering commitment to living his life as the Sheik.
12:32Often leads to dangerous encounters with fans who believe the madness is real.
12:38A lot of fans were violent towards him.
12:43He would leave shows and have fans try to attack him outside the shows.
12:46He had people stab him.
12:47One fan broke in the dressing room and my uncle had his blade on him.
12:53And I was there and the guy who came to my uncle started saying shit.
12:57And my uncle just sift him like a Z.
12:59And he cut him to the bone.
13:02Almost the insides came out.
13:04And in the newspaper, the explanation they gave for the fans injuries was that he had been knocked through a plate glass window
13:12in the process of being apprehended.
13:15Because the Sheik had just ripped him from one end to the other.
13:21There was a night in Amarillo, Texas, where the Sheik got so much heat that a guy pulled a gun on him.
13:27At point blank range.
13:29The fans were stirred into a frenzy by the Sheik.
13:32Kill him, kill him.
13:33A lot of times when the Sheik was on the car, the local promoter might beef up the police, the security.
13:48There was one night in Amarillo.
13:50The guy pulled a gun on him and tried to fire.
13:55And the gun jammed.
13:57And the cops tackled the guy.
13:59And when they took the guy in and arrest him, the policeman, trying to see why the gun had jammed, fired the bullet.
14:07If the guy had pulled the trigger one more time, he would have got the Sheik.
14:11A lot of top wrestlers that were heels had that much heat.
14:14But the Sheik caused riots everywhere he went and Sheik wasn't scared of anything.
14:21With the Sheik drawing crowds in arenas all over North America, Ed Farhat looks to elevate his career as a promoter.
14:29That's where you made the money in pro wrestling, owning the thing. You got first count.
14:34In 1964, the Sheik buys Detroit's big time wrestling, packing the famed Kobo Arena with fans.
14:41But in business, like in the ring, he never breaks character.
14:47When Sheik took over, nobody knew that he owned the promotion.
14:51He made his father-in-law, Francis Fleischer, the figurehead promoter.
14:55And the Sheik called the shots in the ring.
14:58And there's the camel clutch.
15:00Sheik's wife, Joyce, handled the paperwork and ran the office.
15:04Yeah, Grandma was definitely the matriarch of our family, and she was the boss.
15:11They were always a team, even behind the scenes. You know, she was locked up with him in the business.
15:17In the mid-1960s, the city of Detroit, Michigan had money, and they knew and liked wrestling.
15:23The Kobo was a 12,000-seat building, and they were coming close to or filling it up on most occasions.
15:28The Sheik before 12,500 fans in the Detroit Kobo Arena.
15:34The Sheik was a thinking businessman.
15:37He was the very first promoter in the country who bought a mobile TV truck.
15:43And he's gonna film his own matches at arenas where he's already at.
15:47So now you don't have to pay the TV studios anymore.
15:50The Kobo Arena in Detroit was the hottest building for pro wrestling in the country.
15:57He outdrew the Detroit Pistons who played there.
16:00Any concert that played there.
16:02Here's a man who set more attendance records around the country than any other wrestler alive.
16:07Every major name that worked for the NWA would come to Detroit to wrestle for the Sheik.
16:13It was like the WWE of the time.
16:15It was a place where everybody wanted to work, and the guys made the most money there, and it was the most popular.
16:20He had power. He had pull.
16:22So it was just an onslaught of top stars from every part of the country on the cards.
16:27And when you own the promotion, you can double-sell tickets, you can put stuff in your pocket.
16:33Unless there's a State Athletic Commission inspector there, nobody knows how much money you took in.
16:37And it's all in cash. Four and five and six dollars at a time. Thousands of people.
16:44In 1973, the Sheik reported income of $400,000 on his income tax.
16:52That's the equivalent of over $2 million in today's money. That's what he reported.
16:57No wrestler in the world made as much money as the Sheik. The Sheik was everything back then.
17:03He was a first-generation Lebanese American. He built his empire and his career from the ground up.
17:10And I think that is the American dream, right?
17:12The Sheik spares no expense, draping himself in luxury to sell the image of a man who is powerful, untouchable, and rich.
17:21He 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 and creek and stuff. It was beautiful.
17:34Sauna in the house.
17:35I think it had 35 rooms in it. It was a big place. And I go to myself, holy shit.
17:41He 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.
17:51He had a Lincoln, and that was kind of his signature vehicle.
17:55He 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.
18:02The 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.
18:11You're an entertainer, right? You have to look the part of him. You understand?
18:15He was a fake. He acted like he was royalty.
18:18He was reckless. He would go buy anything he thought he wanted. I mean, because he had no idea of any limitations about him at all.
18:27He was a fabulous businessman. But I'm going to tell the honest truth. He had one weakness.
18:35Gambling all the money that he had. Las Vegas would wipe it out.
18:41I mean, just like any other gambler, you know, you always think you can win.
18:47You may win here or there, but it's always the house wins.
18:51He lived big, and he had to keep up the gimmick.
18:56Insisting he remain the top draw, the Sheik books himself to headline nearly every show.
19:03The United States heavyweight champion has held that title longer than any other U.S. heavyweight champion in the history of the belt.
19:09There 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.
19:21But 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.
19:31The Sheik has got a million tricks, so don't count him out.
19:36If 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?
19:43The United States heavyweight champion, the Sheik.
19:45The Sheik.
19:46He would sell for wrestlers. He would bleed for them. He would do all those things, but you couldn't beat him.
19:53The Sheik never did a job, and that was what made it even more shocking on the rare occasion that he would.
20:01One of the few times the Sheik agrees to lose a match comes at a volatile moment in Detroit's history.
20:091967, the city of Detroit had riots.
20:13Four days of rioting, looting and arson rocked the city of Detroit.
20:17It was over a situation where the police had raided a certain bar in an African American area, and the riots lasted for several days.
20:27The Sheik's number one baby face, his star attraction as a hero, was a guy named Bobo Brazil.
20:35Sheik saw an opportunity there, because at the Kobo, the crowds were black and white.
20:40Like a lot of places in the United States in the 60s, the only place that you would go and see a really integrated audience was at the wrestling matches.
20:49In the late 1950s, early 60s, down in the South, the whites and the blacks were separated.
20:56And 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.
21:05And at one point, the Sheik was on one of those shows, and he crawled up that chicken wire and tore it down.
21:14And invited the black folks to come down into the arena floor.
21:18He was that kind of guy.
21:20Being that he was a Lebanese American, he experienced racism himself growing up.
21:24You know, he felt it.
21:26And I think that once he reached a position where he was able to help other people, he took advantage of it.
21:30Once the riots started, the Sheik thinking, what can I do to calm things down, to help?
21:40So 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.
21:49In that arena that night, they were all one, hoping that Bobo Brazil could beat the Sheik.
21:55You're watching a championship bout. Bobo Brazil and the wild man from Syria, the Sheik.
22:01And when Bobo finally beat the Sheik,
22:08the place exploded like I've never seen before.
22:12Doing that, the Sheik helped heal the city of Detroit.
22:15It settled down the tensions in the town.
22:19And then, of course, Sheik beat him two weeks later and won it back.
22:24The match will stay the end of the Sheik.
22:26Once responsible for the promotion's greatest success, eventually the Sheik becomes a liability for big time wrestling.
22:35If you have a hot heel that can't be stopped, everybody wants somebody to stop him.
22:40But 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.
22:50It's the winner with a camel clutch! The Sheik!
22:55Past 1975, the auto industry was, you know, starting to have problems.
23:02The economy, you know, started to take effect.
23:04That's why big time wrestling started to fail because people really didn't have that extra money to spend to see wrestling.
23:13It was just a domino effect of the economy and the promotion, not drawing fans.
23:20The Sheik always lived big.
23:23The custom-made suits, the jewelry, the stretch limousines, the handlers, the helpers.
23:26Suddenly, with business going down, he didn't have the money coming in to cover the money going out.
23:35How do you maintain that lifestyle?
23:38Unfortunately, he couldn't keep it up.
23:40By the mid-1970s, The Sheik's Detroit promotion big time wrestling is struggling financially and its woes take a toll on locker room morale.
24:01A 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.
24:12I remember a time when Bruno Sammartino came to Kobo Arena.
24:18If you're an East Coast guy, you're a Bruno fan.
24:21You know, Bruno was everything.
24:23And after the show, Bruno says, hey, you want to go out to dinner with me?
24:27So, I'll never forget, we went to this Chinese restaurant and I go, I hear you're going to be back here in two weeks, you know, in a return match against The Sheik.
24:36He says, I'm going to tell you something, but don't say anything to anybody else.
24:40I'm not coming.
24:42The Sheik promised me $2,000 to come tonight and he gave me a check for $800.
24:47So, I'm not showing up.
24:49Money wasn't coming in and he couldn't afford to pay the wrestlers what they thought they were worth.
24:54Big Time Wrestling had lost TV in some of their other markets.
24:58Finally, they lost TV in Detroit.
25:00It was somewhere around late 1980.
25:03That was the last event that Big Time Wrestling ran in the Kobo Arena, the house that Sheik built.
25:08One of the most popular places to see wrestling in the United States for the previous 15, 20 years.
25:14Couldn't run it anymore.
25:16That was pretty much the end of Big Time Wrestling.
25:18Unfortunately, he wasn't making that money, he was still spending it.
25:23And so, the only thing that saved him was the Japanese tours.
25:27Because Giant Baba and All Japan Pro Wrestling brought The Sheik to Japan.
25:33Japan was the biggest money maker in professional wrestling.
25:37For a long time.
25:38The Sheik had been in all these pictures, the fire and the snakes and the blood and the eyes.
25:46But they'd only seen him in magazines and newspapers.
25:49They went absolutely out of their minds for The Sheik.
25:54He became an icon in a very short period of time.
25:56The great city of Tokyo, when The Sheik walks down the street, they actually stopped track.
26:02They were bloodthirsts.
26:06Buckets of blood everywhere.
26:08They could do that in Japan and they could get away with it.
26:11But then, after a few years, again, Japanese wrestling was very highly athletic.
26:16The Sheik couldn't keep up.
26:18Baba stopped bringing him to Japan.
26:20He was not able to be booked almost anywhere else in the United States.
26:23Because of his age and the bridges that he had burned.
26:27And as the money dried up, pretty soon, he was just wandering around the house.
26:35A 60-something-year-old man in a dilapidated mansion that had seen its better days.
26:40I mean, he'd spent all his millions.
26:43And so he and Joyce were living in the kitchen.
26:46I can't go into it all the way because it's embarrassing, but he was losing his money.
26:51Like, we had to sell the big house.
26:54And so he was not penniless, but he was going broke.
26:57After they left the mansion, it was still them.
27:01Still two against the world, so to speak.
27:03I mean, they were a tight pair.
27:05And to me, as their grandchild, I never saw anything but my loving grandparents.
27:09All the money and all the glory and all the fame and the lifestyle, it was just not there anymore.
27:17I mean, you've been the greatest heel in the sport of professional wrestling for how many years?
27:24But now you're that older athlete who can't perform at that level anymore.
27:30You know, what's a guy to do?
27:31Now past his prime, the Sheik takes any booking he can get just to keep food on the table.
27:38He'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 Kobo Arena.
27:48Instead of in front of 12,000 people, it might be in front of 1,200.
27:50And 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.
28:00His gimmick had gotten tired and he couldn't keep it up.
28:04He was chasing a career down a rat hole.
28:09All that obviously had to play a part in a late life crisis.
28:13And he was trying to recapture some former glory and try to do something to keep himself going at the same time.
28:23I'm not a psychiatrist, but one would think that that had to be uppermost in his mind is how can I keep doing this for very much longer?
28:33How can I keep up the gimmick?
28:43With injury and age driving him from the ring.
28:51Anything you want.
28:53The Sheik shifts to training the next generation, starting with his nephew.
28:59My mom and my uncle were the two youngest.
29:02So my uncle always took care of my mother, walked her to school every day and beat up anybody who got in their way and all that stuff.
29:07And my uncle used to beat up my dad.
29:08They got a divorce when I was three years old, but I'd see him around when I was five or six.
29:13And he'd hit my bow.
29:15My mom would call my uncle.
29:16My uncle would come over and beat him up.
29:19And then one day, he'd come up to beat him up.
29:21My dad was hiding under the bed.
29:23And I said, that's what I'm going to do.
29:24I'm going to be the Sheik and have people hide under the bed from me.
29:28I said, well, I got my uncle.
29:30He's more of a dad.
29:32All up until I was 19, I was telling him, I'm going to be a wrestler, I'm going to be a wrestler.
29:34But I never did nothing towards it other than amateur wrestling.
29:38I was 19 at a party and these guys started shooting.
29:43One guy shot my one friend in the stomach.
29:46He took off running.
29:47I ran after him and grabbed him and threw him down.
29:52He pushed the gun against my face and he hit my teeth and it shattered.
29:56So it went in my nasal cavity and in the back of my throat and knocked out seven of my teeth.
30:00So when I got shot, I go, now's the time I got to do it.
30:04So after a couple of days I got out of the hospital, my mom called my uncle and said, I want to be a wrestler, a pro wrestler.
30:10The next day he came to my house and he goes, come on, we're going to camp, pack your bag.
30:13So I got in his car, a limousine by the way, and he took me to his house and he goes, this is the camp.
30:17Now you're not going to go home for another year.
30:19You're going to be stuck here for a year and don't bitch when it hurts.
30:22So 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 never get in it.
30:33I never had a free minute.
30:34Anytime he goes, what are you doing?
30:35I go, nothing.
30:36He goes, okay, go chop some wood.
30:37He's always had me wash his car, clean the house for no reason when it wasn't dirty.
30:41And I never questioned him.
30:43For the first year I was training, he had two bad hips, could hardly move.
30:46I'm sure he took pain pills, but he never told me about them.
30:49He was just a tough old mother .
30:51He was just a tough guy.
30:53Sabu doesn't just follow in the sheik's footprints.
30:56He carries his legacy into a new era, adapting his style for a new generation.
31:03Sabu 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.
31:12But Sabu, of course, was more acrobatic and more of a death-defying daredevil.
31:17I don't think the sheik ever climbed to the top rope in 50 years.
31:22But 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.
31:36I never copied him, but he influenced me.
31:40What I do is my way.
31:41It resembles something he would do maybe, you know, with the turban and stuff.
31:45But he paved the way for me, but he didn't give it to me.
31:48No, he made me earn it, and if I didn't have it, he wouldn't have backed me up.
31:51As Sabu's star rises, he brings in a new recruit eager to learn the ways of the sheik.
32:00The fans love RBD!
32:03It was just the tail end of 89.
32:05Before my 19th birthday, when we met, the sheik had me get in the ring, and he just like, boom, both hands on my throat.
32:13And he just pushed me back to the corner, and he's choking me, you know, like pushing and pulling me, making me move in the corner a lot.
32:24And then those big eyes were looking at me, and his tongue's out.
32:30He was like so committed, and he bit my nose, and man, I about peed my pants, you know what I mean?
32:36Like, it was a scary experience.
32:41We would wrestle for hours, then we would jump in a swimming pool, his wife would make dinner.
32:47It was a very personal experience that made me not a student, but part of the family.
32:55Sabu and I did a lot of training by ourselves during that time.
33:00But Sabu was saying, you know, that sheik wasn't doing well or whatever.
33:04And sheik would sometimes come out and sit in a chair and watch us for a little bit.
33:10I'm sure there was always a part of him that wanted to get back in the ring.
33:13That's just who he was.
33:14And so he kind of had a renaissance in the late 80s and early 90s.
33:19After years on the sidelines and two hip surgeries, the sheik makes a final grab for the spotlight back in Japan with deathmatch promotion FMW.
33:34He was approached to do a fire match, and it was in a baseball stadium.
33:40I want to say that held like 65,000 people or something like that.
33:43The idea of the match was that my grandpa wrestled with Sabu, my cousin, as a tag team against a Japanese tag team.
33:51Instead of ropes, it was barbed wire.
33:54And they wrapped that barbed wire with kerosene, soaked linen.
33:57They didn't tell me I was having a fire match until a couple days before.
34:01The ring didn't all go on fire, just the parts where they wanted, but the fire was too big.
34:05Like sucked up the air in the middle, and even the logo in the middle was melting on their hands.
34:09And it was only in there probably five or six minutes, and it was too hot.
34:12They must have not anticipated the fire would get as big, but they got stuck in the ring.
34:21And tragically, the whole thing went up in flames.
34:24The 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.
34:34And suddenly it just engulfed everything.
34:36They're in the center of the ring because that's when they could get the most oxygen.
34:39And Anita said to Sheik, Sheik, this is bad.
34:44He didn't know Anita could even speak English.
34:48That's when the Sheik was like, okay, something's wrong.
34:57In Japan, the Sheik and Sabu find themselves trapped in a ring of fire battling for survival as a hardcore match spirals out of control.
35:06They had done a practice run that afternoon, and everything was fine.
35:11But because it was a baseball stadium and it was outdoors, winds are a factor.
35:16And so when the actual match took place, things were going as rehearsed.
35:21The winds shifted, flames started going horizontally across the ring, and it started melting the ring.
35:28Sabu and one of the Japanese wrestlers were able to get out of the ring quickly.
35:31My grandpa was locked up at that point with Anita.
35:36They were in there for maybe 15 or 20 more seconds, and that was a mistake.
35:40They really struggled to get out of the ring.
35:42It is really hard to watch because you can see he's still trying to do his job.
35:48He crawls out of the ring. I run around the other side. I throw water on him.
35:52He goes, what are you doing? I said, I'm trying to put you out. You're smoking.
35:55And you go, no, I got to throw fire still. I was getting his hand wet.
36:00The skin is dropping off his body, and he's still trying to do chic stuff.
36:06You know, but they'd gone too far.
36:10My grandpa ended up with third-degree burns over 20% of his body.
36:14I was at grandma's. Three or four in the morning a call came in because of the time difference with Japan.
36:22And grandpa didn't really let on that he was that hurt, but grandma could hear it in his voice.
36:27When the chic got on the plane, people in first class were disgusted because his skin was still burning, and they can smell it.
36:36You know, it was quite the journey to get him back from Japan, you know, a 14-hour flight back home with third-degree burns all over your body.
36:46I don't think most people would have honestly survived that trip.
36:51I just remember he was in a wheelchair, and he was wrapped like a mummy.
36:55He didn't let on at all that he was hurting.
36:58Grandma did a lot of his care at home, unbandaged him and put the cream on it and bandaged him up.
37:03I'm sure he was in horrible pain.
37:07That was not the end for him. He was like, oh, I burned? That's fine. I'll just recover from this and I'll get back in the ring.
37:14With age and injury catching up, the chic fights to extend his wrestling career alongside Sabu.
37:22In 1995 World Championship Wrestling, one of the two major companies in the United States, has Sabu booked on a pay-per-view event
37:31and as a special attraction, he brings his uncle, the chic, to be at ringside with him.
37:37I did a flip out of the ring and I hit my opponent and his leg got stuck under me and it broke his leg.
37:48And there's the chic, 69 years old, out there with a broken leg, and he still threw the fireball.
37:53That was part of, I think, him wanting to make sure that the business moved ahead.
37:57It didn't matter how badly he was hurt, you have to get back up and finish the match.
38:02There you see the chic right at ringside.
38:04It wasn't until we got back behind the curtain that we had to get a wheelchair for him.
38:07He never complained about it.
38:09Tony, the man just threw a ball of fire in the man's face.
38:12At that point, I think he knew his body. It was time to call it quits.
38:15I 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 again.
38:23You know, I was always worried about that.
38:25But it was awesome because he finally says, I'm going to stop.
38:29You 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.
38:35He still was the chic in public.
38:37It may have just been like out of habit because he had been doing it for like literally 30 years.
38:41After devoting so much of his life to the wrestling business, Ed Farhat now focuses on family.
38:50He 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.
39:05And we're just a bunch of eight year olds and I just happened to have the grandpa with a shirt opened, camel necklace on his chest, yelling Allah to the ceiling in the classroom.
39:18I never ever questioned whether he thought we were the center of the universe.
39:24He showed us that every day.
39:26We all had a decent amount of time to know and love him.
39:28You know, it's never enough.
39:38By the early 2000s, years of a lifetime in the ring take their toll on the chic's body.
39:44He had some organ failures and he had suffered from multiple myeloma to the cancer.
39:53Um, one thing about our family is that we rally.
39:57And so that was the time for all of us to rally around.
40:01And, and we did.
40:02I would say the last two years of my grandfather's life, we were in the hospital.
40:07Every other day, my grandmother never wanted him to be alone.
40:11At that time I lived on my own in Lansing.
40:14I was 19 and, um, grandma had called and I said, he's gone, isn't he?
40:24Not a glamorous death, but he was surrounded with love and that's what matters.
40:29I was 27 when he died.
40:33I had a long time with him.
40:34I feel grateful that I had as much time with him as I did.
40:37He was a pillar of our family, so there was a major loss for us.
40:41I went to Japan and he died when I was in the air.
40:44I didn't know it.
40:45All the boys were saying, I'm sorry about your uncle.
40:46I thought, because he was sick.
40:48And finally, Goldberg goes, sorry to hear about your uncle.
40:50I said, wait a minute, you know, I barely know you.
40:51Why do you care about my uncle?
40:52He goes, well, he passed away last night.
40:53I said, what?
40:54When he told me that, they said,
40:55Sabu, you gotta go get set up for the entrance.
40:57So it was a 20 minute ride around the Tokyo Dome.
41:01I'm talking to my aunt.
41:02She goes, yeah, he passed away last night,
41:03but you gotta do your job like he'd want you to.
41:05I said, but , you know, he was more than my father.
41:10More than anything.
41:12And she goes, you know he'd want you to do your job.
41:16You can't have a heartbreak, you know, affect your professionalism.
41:19So I stayed and did my match.
41:21And then when I got home, I missed the funeral.
41:23But to me, funerals are just to show people who are still alive that you cared.
41:27The person that dies knows you cared.
41:30At his funeral ceremony, even the priest referred to him as Sheik.
41:36And I took one of the roses off the top of his casket that I still have.
41:40To this day, my friend was gone.
41:51Years after the Sheik's passing, his legacy is solidified into wrestling history as he's inducted into the WWE Hall of Fame.
42:01To be inducting the Sheik, of course, you know, what could be better?
42:06I was proud always to represent him.
42:09They wanted Sabu, of course, to induct him.
42:12But Sabu's not big on vocabulary.
42:15The original Sheik was hardcore before any of us heard of hardcore.
42:19So, you know, he asked if I would go with him and do most of the talking.
42:23Of course, of course, you know, let's do this.
42:26It was a nice moment to see that appreciation be given to him by a new generation.
42:32I mean, he started at the dawn of television, and his last appearance was on pay-per-view.
42:38Nobody had that kind of drawing power, and nobody was in as many different places,
42:43doing as many different things for as long as the Sheik was.
42:48Yeah, one of my favorite objects is the little doll of the bloody Sheik.
42:53This came out, you know, way after he had passed away.
42:57He was a good man. He taught a lot of people how to work.
43:01You know, I've always been proud that I'm a non-conformist,
43:05and I have no doubt that that is me taking after the original Sheik, who brought me into this life.
43:13Uh-oh, here comes the chair.
43:16Both men outside the ring, but it's not over.
43:18He put ass in seats. People wanted to go and see the wild, crazy Sheik. Most wrestlers, I don't think, last that long.
43:27The Sheik had a very tragic aspect, and that was that he lived an illusion of who he was.
43:35And in some ways, it was absolutely charming, because he did such a marvelous job of it.
43:40The Sheik looks like he's been through World War III.
43:43You know, anytime you see a wrestler using a metal chair to smack someone,
43:49or do something slightly nefarious during a match, you know, whether that wrestler knows it or not,
43:54he's paying homage to my grandpa, and we take a little bit of pride in that.
43:57I just got a little bit of pride in that.
43:59I'm gonna be like, this is what I'm gonna do.
44:03I just want to put a little bit of pride in that.
44:05I just want to make a little bit of pride in that.