Superstar Billy Graham obit

WWE Hall of Famer has died

 

 He was not on the list.

Professional wrestling is scripted, but there is no doubt that one of the best to ever do it, “Superstar” Billy Graham, was a real fighter.

Because, man did Graham, whose real name was Eldridge Wayne Coleman, ever put up a fight to live and to be here with his wife, Valerie.

Graham died Wednesday, according to multiple reports, after a long bout with illness and infection.

He was 79.

Really, the wrestler had a long history of health issues that could have taken him down for the count. He had a liver transplant in 2002. In 2010, dealing with liver problems again, he announced he probably had a year to live. In 2013, he was hospitalized with pneumonia and possible heart failure. In 2016, he was hospitalized due to internal bleeding following a surgery. He had toes amputated late last year.

And like all great grapplers, he just kept kicking out.

Even on the slide to his eventual death, Graham battled to be here.

He reportedly coded in a hospital in January before doctors revived him. He stayed between hospitals and rehabilitations facilities for the rest of his time, battling the infection and other issues — his wife kept fans updated regularly via his official Facebook page — until the end.

And Valerie didn’t want to give up either. When doctors requested to remove him from life support Sunday, she said she refused.

“He’s a fighter and his will is strong even if his body isn’t,” she said. “God is our hope.”

Nobody lives forever — although Graham is a WWE Hall of Famer who will be remembered forever — though and doctors had long been preparing her for this day.

“The doctors are continuing to try to prepare me for the worst,” she wrote in a recent post. “And I continue to explain to them that Wayne and I are people of faith and that our God has the final say. I am not in denial about what’s happening to him or blind to what the medical reports say… I just know that the God I serve is greater than any infection and more powerful than any organ failure.”

She updated fans again last week letting them know that Graham needed to have a risky surgery to try to remove the infection from his body.

“Still in ICU fighting the infection and organ failure,” she said in that post. “They did a nuclear test today that showed infection in the left hip and they said if we want to try and save his life they will have to go in and remove all of the old hardware and clean out the bone and surrounding tissue. It’s very extensive and you can imagine the risk involved.”

Again, he fought until the very end.

During his prime, Graham was known for his big personality and was an inspiration for many big-name wrestlers — guys like Hulk Hogan and Ric Flair — who followed in his footsteps.

He was a three-time heavyweight champion in major wrestling organizations, and was a 2004 inductee into the WWE Hall of Fame.

Flair acknowledged Graham’s death in a tweet.

“The Superstar Billy Graham just left us,” he wrote. “THANK YOU FOR ALL YOUR INFLUENCE on my career!”

His death was also acknowledged, with condolences to his family, during Wednesday’s live AEW Dynamite program on TBS.

Some of his wrestling protégés include Hulk Hogan, Jesse Ventura, Scott Steiner, and Ric Flair.

Coleman was born into a working-class family in Phoenix, Arizona, on June 7, 1943. His father was from Mississippi, and his mother, who claimed Cherokee ancestry, was from Arkansas. Coleman was attracted to weight lifting in the fifth grade. As a teenager he was an avid reader of bodybuilding magazines, his idols being Steve Reeves and John Grimek. As a teenager, he became a devout Christian and traveled to religious revivals where he incorporated feats of strength into his sermons.

Coleman was a shot put champion in high school. He also dabbled in amateur and professional boxing, participating in the 1959 Golden Gloves. At age 26, he tried out for the Canadian Football League's Calgary Stampeders but was traded to the Montreal Alouettes. He played in only a couple of games. In between football engagements, he worked as a bouncer in various nightclubs in Phoenix, New York and Los Angeles.

n 1961 Coleman was the winner of the West Coast division of the Mr. Teenage America bodybuilding contest (Frank Zane winning in the East Coast division), and his photo appeared soon after in Bob Hoffman's Strength and Fitness magazine. Coleman began to train intensively in 1968 at Gold's Gym in Santa Monica, where he worked out with Dave Draper, Franco Columbu and Arnold Schwarzenegger. At this time he was able to bench press 605 lbs (the world record, held by his friend Pat Casey, was 616 lbs). One of Coleman's photo shoots with Schwarzenegger was featured that year in Joe Weider's Muscle Fitness magazine.

n 1969, Coleman was encouraged by professional wrestler Bob Lueck to train with Stu Hart for the latter's Stampede Wrestling promotion. He trained under Hart in Calgary before debuting on January 16, 1970 in a match with Dan Kroffat. After wrestling briefly under his real name, Coleman traveled back to the United States in May, wrestling for a few months with Dr. Jerry Graham, Brick Darrow, Rick Cahill and Ron Pritchard in Arizona before he and Jerry Graham joined the National Wrestling Alliance's Los Angeles promotion (run by Mike LeBell) as a tag team the following August. He changed his ring name to Billy Graham, as a tribute to the famous evangelist of the same name. Later, while wrestling in Championship Wrestling from Florida, the name would serve both as his ring name and to make him the (kayfabe) youngest brother of Jerry and the other Graham Brothers (Eddie and Luke).

Graham returned to the WWWF in April 1977 after an agreement with promoter Vincent J. McMahon. Graham defeated Bruno Sammartino for the WWWF Heavyweight Championship on April 30, 1977, in Baltimore, Maryland. Graham held the title for nine and a half months.

During his reign, he wrestled across America and in Japan (February 1978), facing challengers such as former champion Bruno Sammartino, Jack Brisco, Dusty Rhodes, Pedro Morales, Don Muraco, Mil Mascaras, Strong Kobayashi, Carlos Rocha and Riki Choshu.