EmpireWF
Giants in the Super Bowl
From the big bio write-up in a recent WON...a couple stories about King Curtis Iaukea who recently passed away.
From his younger days when he played football....
And some ribs played on him and others when he was a young wrestler...
From his younger days when he played football....
The 6-3, 225-pounder was such a major recruit after high school that it got Bay Area headlines, “Giant Hawaiian Tackle Chooses Cal” in 1955. He started both ways, as an offensive and defensive tackle in 1956 and 1957, remembered as being a very talented player, an NFL quality athlete because of how agile he was for his size based on the standards of that era. But he had a difficult time controlling his emotions on the field. During the summer between his sophomore and junior years of college, he started wrestling in the Bay Area for promoter Joe Malciewicz and in Hawaii for promoter Al Karasick.
He was introduced on television in Hawaii as the protege of {Lord} Blears, as the great young athlete who had become the surfing buddy of the promotion’s then-top babyface, the former British nobleman who had been in a few years because of his love of the islands, been accepted by the public as one of them. It was well known in Honolulu to be true because people knew both of them and so many had seen them together at the beach. But in their first match as a team, Iaukea turned on Blears and became an instant top heel. During the 60s, Blears handled most of the booking for the promotion and made Iaukea his “go to” guy on top, constantly battling over and winning championships, and competing long programs with the top faces leading to various gimmick matches.
While studying economics, and learning about mind altering drugs, he dropped out of school and signed with the Montreal Alouettes of the Canadian Football League. But ended up traded to the British Columbia Lions, where he played in 1958 and 1959, while wrestling in the off-season in British Columbia, Hawaii and California before getting his big break in early 1960 in Japan.
His football career ended in the summer of 1961. He was in camp trying to make the Oakland Raiders, practicing in the brutal Sacramento area sun. As the story has it, the temperature that day was 120 degrees, he just got fed up. Late in the practice, on the field, in the middle of scrimmaging, he just took off his helmet, and then took off his pads. The line coach screamed at him to get his helmet back on.
“Fuck you,” he said, as he continued to strip. After more screaming by the coach, he said, “Fuck you” again until he was wearing nothing but his underwear. While this was going on, Don Manoukian, who was a genuine star, a college standout at Stanford who was a second-team all-AFL offensive guard the previous season as a rookie, then took off his helmet as a symbolic gesture of support. The coach turned his attention from Iaukea to Manoukian, and screamed at Manoukian to get that helmet back on. Manoukian, mimicking Iaukea, said, “Fuck you.” Manoukian had become good friends with Iaukea on the pro wrestling circuit in both Hawaii and California, where they had been a heel college football star tag team. Manoukian wound up taking everything off, and like Iaukea, was standing on the field in his shorts and told the coach he was done with football, saying, “I can make more money wearing nothing but my shorts.”
And some ribs played on him and others when he was a young wrestler...
While in Southern California for the first time, he crossed paths with Vic Christy, a legend among wrestlers for his propensity with ribs.
“He came to the territory and moved into a hotel in Hollywood,” remembered Dick “The Destroyer” Beyer. “Someone in the office told him Vic Christy would call him and take him to his first show, which was in Santa Monica, about 25 minutes away. He’s never been to Southern California so he has no idea where anything is. So Vic Christy called him up that night and said we’ve got a long drive tomorrow so I have to pick you up at 10 a.m. Vic picked him up, put down the top of the car and drove south to San Diego. Then he drove east to Yuma, Arizona. Then he came back through Nevada, through a town in the desert, then to San Bernardino and finally arrived in Santa Monica just in time for the show. Curtis got a terrible sunburn from the long drive and that night he went against a guy who threw chops, maybe it was Mr. Moto, and he chopped Curtis hard on that sunburned chest. Christy then told Curtis he had a date that night so the midgets, who were on the card, would take him back to the hotel. Curtis left with the midgets, thinking he was going to be in the car all night. Then 25 minutes later, they dropped him off at his hotel.”
Mossman said Iaukea loved to tell another Christy rib that actually worked out well for him. The wrestling office found out that one of the movie studios was looking for someone to play a sumo wrestler, and Iaukea, one of the biggest and thickest men in the business at the time, up to around 300 pounds, and with his Hawaiian ancestry, fit the bill. So they had Christy take Iaukea for auditions.
The place was filled with fat guys, so Christy told Iaukea that when he was introduced to the producers, he should jump on the table and then pull down his pants.
“But I’m not wearing any drawers,” Iaukea told Christy.
“That’s even better,” Christy said.
So, not knowing any better, he jumped on the table, pulled down his pants. As it turned out, the people doing the casting were gay, and what he did made him stand out among all the crowd, and he got the small part in the 1963 movie “The Three Stooges Go Around the World in a Daze.” He was the punch line for a joke when Moe Howard looked at him and said, “That’s not a man, that’s a committee.” He actually signed a multiple-film deal, but nothing ever materialized after the first one.
But he did make new friends, as Rocky Iaukea remembered as a child in 1964 when the Stooges came to Hawaii, they all spent time together.
But his out of control personality caused all kinds of problems for his father. Iaukea got into hard drugs while in college, and was best known in wrestling for his LSD-laced cookies. He’d give them to wrestlers to carry, and some, not knowing what they were, would get hungry and eat one, and then go on scary trips.
Once, on an airplane, Harold Sakata, the 1948 Olympic silver medalist in weightlifting who played “Oddjob” in the famous movie “Goldfinger,” was traveling with Iaukea to the mainland and ate one of Iaukea’s infamous cookies and went crazy on the plane.
The two were sitting together and Iaukea sat there while Sakata was going wild, and when asked, claimed he had no idea who the guy sitting next to him was. The irony is that Sakata going completely crazy and out of control was something he ended up being well known for, getting a national television ad for “Hai Karate,” a men’s cologne, that ended up as one of the most famous commercials of the late 60s.
