I was saddened to read about the death of Lou Albano recently. Lou was most famous for his appearances in a Cyndi Lauper music video but made his living in the world of professional wrestling. Back in the '70's pro wrestling wasn't the huge juggernaut of the current WWE but was still very much a fringe entertainment. It was even hard to find on television back then since the "sport' was often relegated to UHF channels that were hard to tune into as opposed to the regular over-the-air stations that had the monopoly of programming before the age of cable. As my friend Roger said to me recently, before the WWE, wrestlers weren't all the steroid-built hulks of today but in large part were just a bunch of fat guys from New Jersey. Enter Lou Albano. Like Freddie Blassie and The Grand Wizard of Wrestling Lou's role was a manager of various villain wrestlers such as Ivan Koloff, the Valiant Brothers and the Wild Samoans. Lou's modus operandi was being totally off the wall during matches and interviews. I think what appealed to us about wrestling when we were kids - and of course we knew it was fake - was the sheer wackiness of it all and it was kind of cool to follow something that was out of the mainstream. Being a manager of a bunch of "bad guys" is not a role to aspire to, but the self proclaimed Captain sure made me laugh a lot.
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