Blackjack Mulligan: The Meanest Outlaw In The Ring (2024)

I think I was eleven, lying on my stomach watching the TV. Black and white, by the way. Saturday morning wrestling. WWOR: channel 9. Local New York television from Seacaucus, New Jersey. That’s when I first saw Blackjack.

Blackjack Mulligan.

Yep. Long handlebar mustache. Oily black hair. Thick mutton chop sideburns. A 6-foot-9, 345-pound Texas badass with a branding iron on the back of his black tights. Did he always dress in black? From his cowboy hat to his leather glove.

Yes. Always dressed in black. The meanest outlaw you could ever imagine. He used the leather glove to do his signature iron claw hold — his finishing move. Matter of fact, that’s what affected me. The iron claw hold.

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I was watching Blackjack’s debut in the WWE –known as the WWF back then. He was fighting this “jobber” –a wrestler who’s there to get beat up on and lose matches all the time. Blackjack was whooping him good. This guy had no chance. But when he was through with him, Blackjack put the iron claw on his head. Seconds later, black blood was streaming from this loser’s head. It was gross.

They slapped this big red X across his face. That, and the word CENSORED, flashing on and off. It covered most of the screen, but I could still tell this guy was bleeding. You’d have to cover the whole screen to hide that fact. I didn’t know what censored meant then, but I could tell it was bad.

I kept thinking about it the whole day. Why did this guy — I want to say his name was Barry Hart, but I’m not exactly sure– sign up for this match? Didn’t he know about the claw? Did he really think he could beat Blackjack? This was a lot for an eleven-year-old to process.

Keep in mind, I’d only been watching pro-wrestling for a little over a year when I saw that match. It was the first time I’d ever seen blood in a wrestling match, let alone the word CENSORED flashing on and off and a big red X blocking someone’s face. That’s what bothered me the most, I think.

Not the claw, exactly. Not the blood. But the fact that they were covering it up. Shielding me from the horror of what I was seeing. That they were even telling me this is not for your eyes. You shouldn’t be watching this. I don’t know who thought of putting the big red X on the screen, a WWOR station manager, or Vince MacMahon himself, but it was effective. Impressive, really.

I never forgot it. From there on in, I was in awe of Blackjack Mulligan. I mean, what a way to make a debut on New York City TV. My God! You’ve got to be a badass when they cover your bloodied opponent with an X. I watched every Saturday after that looking for Blackjack’s matches. He was the only wrestler I was ever really dying to see.

Every human being. Stop everything you’re doin’. Get momma from the kitchen. Get the kids and listen to what I have to say. Andre the Giant? I’m the only giant. I’m quicker, faster, and have more wrestling skills than you’ll ever have. You hear me boy? I will beat the everlivin’…

But he rarely ever wrestled on Saturdays. Mostly promos of Blackjack talking about what he’d do to Andre the Giant, but no action, no more big red X’s.

So Blackjack and Andre were feuding. It was only natural of course. These were the two biggest men in the WWF at the time. They had to be matched up. You’d be crazy not to want to see those two collide. And I wanted to see it so bad, too. We didn’t have a lot of money at the time so I didn’t want to ask my father to take me.

Some of their worst battles were in the Brendan Byrne Arena–part of the Meadowlands Sports Complex in East Rutherford, New Jersey. Sounded far to me, so I never asked.

One day, the WWF shows this short snippet of the fight between Andre and Blackjack at the Brendan Byrne Arena, where Andre’s going around outside the ring hurling chairs into the ring, so they’d hit Blackjack, I guess. Andre had gone berserk. He’d really lost it.

So when he finally gets back into the ring, Blackjack makes his escape through the ropes. Andre had lost his mind and it was time to get out of Dodge. When a 7 foot five 500 pound behemoth comes after you like that, you get to steppin’.

Andre was generally seen as this gentle giant. Certainly not someone to be trifled with, but hardly a savage in any sense of the word. He was always like the sensitive noble giant he played in “The Princess Bride”.

So, yes. I was impressed. A few weeks later I saw a photo of Andre in a wrestling magazine. It was snapped minutes after the first Blackjack encounter. Andre’s sitting on a toilet. You can barely see the toilet. Bloodied and miserable, Andre gives the photographer the finger. It was a remarkably candid photo that solidified, in my mind, Blackjack’s menacing mystique. See, I really think that finger was meant for Blackjack.

Now I’m no expert on villains, but I think we all kind of know the best villains are the ones that bring out the darker sides of our heroes. So as Blackjack and Andre feuded the entire summer of 1983, I finally broke down and begged my father to take me to one of their bouts. But not just any bout. It would be the culmination of the summer-long feud, set to be held in Madison Square Garden.

The main event: a six-man tag team featuring Andre and the Strongbow brothers-Jules and Jay-versus Blackjack and Mr. Fuji and Mr. Saito, the fiendish former tag-team champs from Japan. The Strongbows and Fuji and Saito had scores of their own to settle, so it would be an all-around barnburner for most wrestling fans. For me, it was a chance to see Blackjack and Andre in person. A chance to see some bloodletting without a big red X hiding it all.

I didn’t just want to see blood for blood’s sake. It wouldn’t have meant anything if the wrestlers were bleeding from something extraneous. It had to come from Blackjack. It had to come from that ominous fingerless black glove he used to slap on the claw.

My father brought me to Madison Square Garden–to my first live wrestling match. The match was in August, two weeks before the start of school. And while most of that night’s ring action is a blur to me, all these years later, I still remember most of the tension of the match was derived from Blackjack avoiding a tag from Fuji or Saito that might land him in the ring alone with Andre. Andre, of course, was gunning for Blackjack, champing at the bit to be in the squared circle, mano a mano.

But, you know, Blackjack was as slippery as his oily black hair. He was quick to tag in and out if the Strongbows were even within an inch of tagging in Andre. And I saw, what I imagined to be blood because we were sitting in the nosebleed section, my dad and I, and I didn’t have the benefit of a pair of binoculars.

Straining my eyes to get a glimpse of anything that might look like gore of any kind, I thought I saw blood or something like it, on Blackjack’s face. So, if turnabout is fair play, you can imagine what Andre did to Blackjack when they were finally alone in the ring.

Managed to unglove that dark desperado. Then, with that same black fingerless glove, Andre slapped his enormous sixteen-inch hand over Blackjack’s face and mashed and mashed until Blackjack couldn’t take it anymore and quit and the ring bell sounded. And sounded. And sounded.

Because Andre wasn’t going to stop mashing anytime soon. The puny ref in the ring wasn’t going to stop him either. Andre had gotten his revenge. Blackjack was beaten.

One of the greatest things I ever witnessed. The blood, I’m not sure I really saw, but I saw a scary tough hombre get run out of town. He didn’t stick around the WWF (as it was known then) too long after that. I mean, the man-made his debut like a scourge.

He came back in 1984, but the menace was missing. Vince McMahon softened him up and old Blackjack got kitschy folksy with an interview segment called “BLACKJACK’S BARBECUE”. Talk about getting DE-CLAWED.

When you’re eleven, you know, not so easy to tell the difference. Especially if the TV graphics hide the TV graphics and everything else a young impressionable mind shouldn’t see. Anyway, Robert Windham — Blackjack’s real name — died in 2016. Turns out he was a born-again Christian. Nice guy, of course. Saw him do one of those interviews – their called ‘shoots’- where wrestlers tell fans the inside skinny of the wrasslin’ business.

He was very like: “If you ain’t with Our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ, I feel sorry for you, brother.” Other than that, just plain old vanilla folksy. Nothing like the dark desperado I could not wait to see Saturday mornings.

Hi everyone. My name is Ariel Gonzalez, originally from Brooklyn, now living in the Garden State and I have a new podcast called “Wrestling With Heels On.”

On the podcast, I get to reminisce about my favorite wrestling bad guys from yesteryear. Light on stats and heavy on nostalgia, this little trip down villainy lane gives me a chance to visit the dark corridors of my wrestling soul, and it’s also fun to have a podcast.

• Music For Episode – https://www.purple-planet.com/