When all-time tough guys are discussed in professional wrestling, names like Terry Funk, Haku and Mick Foley often come up. The sport’s historians might mention older names like Dick the Bruiser or Johnny Valentine. If you ask folks around the South, though, one of the names which comes up again and again is the legendary Gypsy Joe, the original king of hardcore wrestling who started his career in the 1950s and had his final match at the age of 76 in 2011.

The beginnings of Joe’s career are shrouded in legend, with some sources saying he was trained in Puerto Rico by Carlos Colon and Pedro Morales, and others saying he began wrestling when he moved to the U.S. after failing a baseball tryout for the New York Yankees. Either way, he started his U.S. career wrestling under the moniker Pepe Figueroa as an undercard wrestler in the WWWE before traveling the country and working under multiple names — Aztec Joe in Detroit, Chief Tuna in Alaska, and one half of the masked Blue Infernos in Kentucky and Tennessee, a team that held a version of the World Tag Titles which Jerry Lawler called his first favorite wrestlers. In the late ’60s Joe worked as Gene Madrid, who along with his “brother” Jan Madrid were the top stars of the West Virginia television territory. (Decades later, Joe would work some of his final matches as Gene Madrid in NWA Mountain State in 2009.)

Advertisement

While Joe had those top runs all over the country, he really came into his own in the Nick Gulas territory in Tennessee where he worked as part of top heel tag-team with Tojo Yamamoto.

“They came up with the No Pain Train gimmick,” recalls Reverend Dan Wilson, a wrestling manager and the great nephew of Joe. “Tojo would perform these feats with Joe, to show how tough he was — like taking a wooden shoe and just bashing him over the head with it.”

One of their big feuds as a team was with Nick Gulas and a young future legend, Bobby Eaton.

“There was a thing that him and Bobby Eaton would do,” Wilson says. “It’s like a personal bet where they would just have these matches in Chattanooga where they’d see how many backdrops they could do to each other, and they would bet each other to see if they could fly high enough to hit the lighting rig.”

Advertisement

Joe soon went over to Japan, where he became one of the first hardcore legends in the country, having wild, bloody brawls with wrestlers like Mad Dog Vachon and Mighty Inoue, and engaging in a legendary series of cage matches in the IWE promotion with Rusher Kimura, where Joe was credited as the first wrestler to dive off the top of a cage, years before Jimmy Snuka made the spot famous.

After his time as a territorial headliner, Joe had an entire second career as older legend haunting the independent wrestling scene in Japan and the Southern U.S., engaging in frenzied brawls, blood and mayhem years after most wrestlers hung up their boots. Gypsy Joe stories became the equivalent of tall tales, wrestling folklore.

“He had this leathery skin and he just couldn’t blade normally anymore” says WWE and AEW veteran Chris Hero. “So before the match he would cut himself, wipe off the blood, and when he got punched in the wound, it would bleed. I wasn’t there for this, but I heard stories of people walking into the locker room and seeing Joe stabbing himself in the head with a giant butcher knife just to get color.”

“I got Gypsy Joe’d once,” remembers indie death match legend Tank. “I had been in the business a little over a year, and this guy hit me up to come to McMinnville, Tennessee to wrestle Gypsy Joe — and I was like, ‘Gypsy Joe is still wrestling?! I remember him from when I was a kid.’ People were going crazy for this frail old man — and he commences to beat the s*** out of me for 10 to 12 minutes, and I am like, ‘S***, I didn’t sign up for this!’

“We go outside of the ring and he grabs a baseball bat, and I bend over and he hits me in the back of the head — it was an aluminum bat and he was like hitting a softball on my big gourd head. I ended up getting eight staples, and here I am punching this old man in the face as hard as I can, and he is just saying, ‘Harder, motherf***er!’ By the end I swelled his left eye halfway shut. He just about ran me out of the business [with that match]. A few years later I heard that I he loved me and thought I was tough as hell — could have told me different that night.”

Advertisement

Joe eventually returned to Japan in the ’90s as the eminence gris of W*ING, one of the first death match promotions in Japan. By then, a match with Gypsy Joe would be often treated as a rite of passage for young wrestlers on their first Japanese tour.

“I met him the day before [our match] at the airport. I didn’t know he was a wrestler, he looked really in bad shape — I thought he was a retired wrestler or a coach,” recalls former ECW and WWE champion Taz. “I get to Kouraken Hall and the board says my name against Gypsy Joe, so I go up to [veteran wrestler] Kevin Sullivan and I ask, ‘Who is Gypsy Joe guy?’ And he points to the old guy I met at the airport and he says, ‘You’ve got be careful with him Taz, he is really old and really brittle. Just don’t hurt him.

“We go out there and I am expecting this brittle, old, beat-up guy — and good lord, right from the jump of the match I realize I am in a real fight here. He hit like a ton of bricks, and when I hit him anywhere on his body, he felt like an old piece of granite. He is hitting me with chairs. I am hitting him with chairs as hard as can and it isn’t even fazing him. I clearly got ribbed by the old guys, and they are all laughing behind the curtain. I came in the back expecting to get in a real fight and he just hugged me and thanked me for the match.”

That toughness infamously extended to outside the ring as well. “Joe was watching baseball when his neighbor came over and begged him to go fishing,” remembers Wilson. “They pull off at a the local bar. His neighbor says, ‘Hang on, we’re going to go get some lunch to take fishing with us.’ They go into the bar and this waitress comes over and immediately recognizes Joe, starts talking about how she’s grew up on Gulas wrestling. She loved Jackie Fargo and Tojo Yamamoto and Gypsy Joe. All of this was a ploy by the neighbor — he had no plans of taking Joe fishing, he wanted to [date] the waitress.

Advertisement

“So he thought bringing Gypsy Joe over — because she was a huge fan — was going to enchant her and make her think this guy was so cool that she would sleep with him. Well, of course, she’s a giant fan, so she’s just talking to Joe and asking him questions and talking about his career. And so the guy tries make his move on the girl, saying, ‘OK, divert the attention back to me,’ and she just keeps chatting up Joe. And the guy gets furious and storms out of the bar. He comes back into the bar a few minutes later with his f***ing gun and shoots Joe in the stomach. And this is why this is my favorite Gypsy Joe story, because even [when I was] a child, this told me that this man was so inhumanly tough. After suffering a gunshot, he f***ing takes the gun away from the guy, beats the s*** out of the guy and holds him until the cops get there. Like he was like a damn action hero.

“And then, of course, he was asked later, ‘Well, what was the deal with the girl? Like, why did this happen?’ And he was like, ‘I didn’t want to [date] the girl. … I just wanted to go home and watch baseball.”

Joe, who passed away in 2016 at the age of 82, is probably most widely known today for a viral match in 2003 with notorious hardcore legend New Jack, which broke down into a legitimate fight and saw New Jack swing a barbed wire baseball bat full force at his then 69-year-old opponent’s head.

But Joe’s career was much more notable then being a bit part in New Jack’s tale. He was the original king of hardcore wrestling, an untamed brawler who bumped and bled his way through the South, Puerto Rico and Japan for more than 60 years. Even into his late 70s, he continued to wrestle, serving as a whetstone to sharpen the blades of younger wrestlers.

If you could survive this wild old man, you proved you belonged.