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Alumnus makes good: The Destroyer
Destroyer is ready to cheer on Syracuse
Saturday, October 25, 2003
By Milan Simonich, Post-Gazette Staff Writer
Dick Beyer, a clean-cut assistant football coach at Syracuse University, disappeared more than 40 years ago, never to be heard from again. A masked scoundrel known as The Destroyer shoved Beyer aside, then stole his identity.
Beyer says it was the best break he ever got.
During football off-seasons, he had padded his income as a professional wrestler. Beyer wrestled under his own name for almost eight years, from October 1954 to March 1962, piling up pins as a crowd favorite.
From 1962 until 1993, Dick Beyer prowled wrestling rings as The Destroyer and Dr. X.
Then Jules Strongbow, a silver-tongued giant who promoted matches in the Los Angeles area, asked Beyer to put on a mask and become a villain. His ring name would be The Destroyer, and he would break all the rules.
Beyer hated Strongbow's gimmickry and the crude wool mask the promoter supplied. It stretched from Beyer's head to his crotch. He could scarcely see or breathe.
His first match under that itchy hood occurred on an April night in San Diego. Feeling awkward, Beyer wanted to give up on The Destroyer right then and there.
Strongbow intervened, sweet-talking him to stay under the mask for a month, after which he could go back to being Dick Beyer, vanilla good guy, if he liked.
Beyer agreed. But he discarded the wool hood and created a more comfortable disguise by fashioning a woman's girdle into his mask.
"You want to draw a crowd? Go into the lingerie shop and start sticking 'em on your head," says Beyer, now 73.
The girdle worked fine as headgear, and The Destroyer was on his way to fame and fortune.
Fans hated his cockiness -- he insisted on being introduced as "the sensational, intelligent Destroyer" -- so they paid to see wrestling's paragons of virtue try to unmask him.
A photo composite of Professional wrestler Dick Beyer, who wrestled under the identities Doctor X and The Intelligent Sensational Destroyer.
In his first four weeks under the mask, Beyer's income doubled. By 1963 he was making $25,000 a year, twice as much as most pro football players of that time.
With The Destroyer's success, Dick Beyer was finished in the ring, and in football, too.
Beyer told Ben Schwartzwalder, Syracuse's head coach, he wouldn't be returning to the Orangemen. He would be a full-time wrestler, and a masked man at that. It ranked as the strangest career move Schwartzwalder saw in 25 seasons as Syracuse's coach.
But on days like today, with Syracuse playing at Pitt, Beyer still bleeds orange. He follows his old school with the same fervor he had when he coached.
"Part of my job was to scout Pitt every year. I still remember I had one warning for our players -- never, ever turn your back on Mike Ditka," Beyer says, laughing.
"But after I became The Destroyer, it wasn't financially feasible for me to stay in coaching."
He had more than 5,000 matches under the mask and saw the world in the process.
Early on, Strongbow and other promoters decided to make The Destroyer a "world" champion to exploit his box-office success. He pinned Classy Freddie Blassie for the old World Wide Alliance belt -- the first of The Destroyer's many championships -- on July 27, 1962.
Wrestling had almost 50 regional territories in those days, and at least three different world champions were recognized by the various promotions. The Destroyer wasn't the undisputed king of the ring, but he sold tickets everywhere he went. Promoters booked him five or six times a week, all year long.
In one of his most memorable bouts, The Destroyer put up his mask against Gorgeous George's hair. George, by then a pudgy 47-year-old, lost that match and his bleached-blond locks.
The Destroyer, who stood 5-feet-10 and weighed 230 pounds, bragged that not even wrestling's biggest men could whip him. He tangled with Haystack Calhoun, who claimed to weigh 601 pounds, and Lenny Montana, who later became famous for his role as hitman Luca Brasi in "The Godfather."
In 1967, The Destroyer ventured to Chicago, where he wrestled to a one-hour draw with Verne Gagne, who was both champion and promoter of the American Wrestling Association, a circuit that stretched from Canada to the Midwest. Gagne wanted the masked man to be a fixture in his territory. But he didn't care for the name Destroyer, claiming many wrestling fans realized that Beyer was under the mask.
"I don't think anybody knew," Beyer says now. "Anyway, Verne wanted me to come in under another mask, and he was willing to pay me to do it."
So, in a flash, The Destroyer transformed himself into a different mystery man, this one called Dr. X.
Dr. X's most bitter rival was a fan favorite named Billy Red Lyons. Both were masters of the figure-four leg lock. Each promised to maim the other.
In truth, Lyons and Beyer were brothers-in-law who got along famously.
"We had a heated feud," Lyons says now. "Nobody outside the business knew that Dick was married to my wife's sister. We'll be friends for life."
The wrestler's vagabond existence, though, could be a grind. It broke up Beyer's first marriage. "We had 18 moves in our 18 years of marriage. It took a toll on my wife," he said.
Still, Beyer delighted in his role as wrestling's rule-breaking mystery man.
"Dick worked just as hard in a little town as he did in a big city," says Red Bastien, who had dozens of matches against The Destroyer and Dr. X. "He gave it all he had every night, and that's not easy.
"Everyone says it's fake, but let me tell you that those bumps -- when you get thrown down or you fall to the mat -- are not fake."
Beyer did more than gouge, kick and bite the opposition. A gifted talker who modeled his interviews after those of the late, great Nature Boy Buddy Rogers, he insulted celebrities in the cities where he appeared. This tactic proved effective in building up the gate, especially when he picked on pro football players.
"I used to talk bad about Floyd Little, and he was from Syracuse," Beyer says.
Beyer lettered three years, 1950-52, as a right guard for the Orangemen. He played on the same line with Jim Ringo, who went on to a hall of fame career with the Green Bay Packers and Philadelphia Eagles.
Beyer co-captained Syracuse's 1952 team, which, at 7-2, was good enough to get to the Orange Bowl and bad enough to lose to Alabama 61-6.
Beyer also wrestled at Syracuse after an injury sidelined the school's heavyweight, who happened to be his fraternity brother. A tryout for a replacement was staged at the Phi Gamma Delta house, and Beyer appeared to be the most promising of the frat boys.
"I got to the point where I was halfway decent at it," he said of amateur wrestling.
Syracuse's sports information department said Beyer's record was 6-0-1 as a junior, and 5-1-1 as a senior.
He had enough moves to attract the attention of Ed Don George, a wrestling promoter in Buffalo. With George's backing, Beyer turned pro after graduating from Syracuse.
In the beginning, wrestling was just a sidelight. He worked as a high school teacher, leaving him only summers to travel the wrestling circuit.
Syracuse records show that Beyer became a full-time assistant to Schwartzwalder in 1959. But in those laid-back times, when college football was not a year-round business for coaches, he could still wrestle part of the year.
After Beyer committed himself to the ring, he stayed under the mask as The Destroyer or Dr. X for a shade more than 30 years. He fought his last match on July 29, 1993, when he was 63 years old. That bout occurred in Tokyo, where The Destroyer remains an icon.
"Even my best friends there have never seen me without my mask," he says.
America is a different story.
When he reached his middle 50s, Beyer cut back on his wrestling schedule and took a job as an elementary school physical education teacher in Akron, N.Y. He retired in 1995, after 11 years, but he remains the high school swimming coach in Akron.
"He's a heck of a gentleman, and he knows how to relate to young people," says Ron DeCarli, the school superintendent. "He's not like a young coach who thinks it's all about the wins and losses."
Beyer also stays busy as an alumni representative for Syracuse, visiting college fairs to talk up his alma mater. Prospective students have no clue that their kindly recruiter used to be a heel who packed wrestling arenas to the rafters.
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