When Kevin Von Erich moved again to Texas remaining yr, the very first thing that struck him was once the elements. “It was three months in a row of hot spell,” he says from his new house within the Hill Country. His 2d realization was once that he’d been hauling round his choice of memorabilia from his well-known circle of relatives’s pro-wrestling dynasty in an eighteen-wheeler garage container for just about twenty years—from Texas to his longtime house in Hawaii after which again to Texas and to his present house, in Boerne. “I just thought it’s being wasted, sitting here with me,” he says.
Over the years, pastime within the Von Erich saga grew. The circle of relatives was once jointly inducted into the WWE Hall of Fame in 2009. Kevin’s sons started wrestling in Total Nonstop Action and All Elite Wrestling, and he started making occasional appearances along them at wrestling occasions. The documentary collection Dark Side of the Ring informed the circle of relatives’s tragic tale—all 5 of Von Erich’s brothers died younger, 3 of them via suicide—in a 2019 episode, whilst the 2023 movie The Iron Claw dramatized the occasions. “That dang movie came out, and I started doing these shows, and then all these [wrestling] experts who were little kids watching me on TV when they were growing up, they know everything about me, and I wanted to do something for them,” Von Erich says. “So we’ve got all this junk—ring jackets with maybe some Kabuki spit on ’em or something that won’t come out—that, for some reason, I never discarded. I’ve got a lot of stuff here, and we decided to go through it and get rid of a lot of it.”
Von Erich and considered one of his daughters looked after throughout the pieces and taken lots of the items to Dallas-based Heritage Auctions to get them into the palms of creditors. “It’s pretty much everything I could find,” Von Erich says. In addition to the ring-worn pieces belonging to him and to his brothers—trunks, jackets, capes, and so on—there also are circle of relatives footage, newspaper clippings from Japan, and the plaques given to Von Erich for every member of his circle of relatives to commemorate their front into the WWE Hall of Fame.
Von Erich’s courting with WWE and its former CEO, Vince McMahon, stays difficult. The public sale incorporates the Hall of Fame plaques however no longer the rings Von Erich accredited for himself and on behalf of his brothers and father, as a result of he felt he needed to stay a promise he made when he won the rings. “I told Vince I wouldn’t do that,” he says. Still, he’s reflective when speaking in regards to the adjustments that experience come to professional wrestling since his circle of relatives’s time on the most sensible of North Texas’s regional wrestling circuit. “I didn’t really like McMahon’s approach to wrestling. I realize how successful it was, but—you know, we always watched how we talked in the ring. We would say ‘yes, sir’ and ‘no, sir’ to our announcers, because kids were listening, and we were trying to be good examples.”
There’s an old-school Texanness to Von Erich—a courteousness coming from a person whose ring peak was once six two and who weighed in at 235 kilos that tells you he was once raised to be well mannered and respectful. That high quality comes throughout when he talks about, smartly, just about anything else. (“In Texas, we don’t honk our horn when the light changes, because we’re not scaring an old lady,” he insists.) But it’s particularly noticeable when he displays at the courting between a performer and their enthusiasts.
Von Erich discovered that there can be pastime in his outdated wrestling “junk” when he was once contacted via an autograph collector and realized that there was once a marketplace for his signature as a result of he’d spent such a lot of years dwelling clear of the highlight in Hawaii. “I used to sign autographs for anybody, anywhere,” he says. He remembers a charity tournament on the outdated Texas Stadium within the eighties with some Dallas Cowboys avid gamers. “These kids asked for autographs, and [the football players] were charging money!” Von Erich says. “They said that we were making them look bad. I said, ‘No, you guys are doing that yourselves.’ These kids, this is something they’ll never forget.” But after his twenty years in Hawaii, his autographs become scarce. “What makes an autograph valuable is when you don’t sign it,” he says. “And when I moved, the only people I signed autographs for were in Hawaii.”
I requested Von Erich what his favourite items within the public sale are, and he pointed to a few footage, together with a sequence of photographs from a wrestling tournament at Texas Stadium that, taped in combination, provide a breathtaking view of the gang that night time. But then he pauses, remembering a gold-and-white velvet cape he wore in his early days. “I wore that in Reunion Arena,” he remembers. “I love velvet. When you go through the fans, they always grab at you, and I wanted them to feel velvet when they grabbed at me.”
He takes me via his reminiscence of the day, and, like the most efficient professional wrestling tales, it’s considered one of victory snatched from the jaws of defeat—or possibly vice versa. “I was doing this new thing where I’d climb up the side [when entering the ring] and put my hand on the top rope, go into a handstand, and bring my feet over and flip, coming down on my feet. It looked like Superman coming in,” he says. “But with that cape on, I stepped on it midway and my feet caught it, and I came down right on my face in front of thousands. So I grabbed it and wadded it up and threw it down, and made a little joke out of it, so it wasn’t quite so bad.”
