He was a jerk, but above all he was a weasel, a guy willing to talk big but unwilling to compete, and that made him truly detestable. He was in some ways the same streetwise bully he portrayed in his earlier wrestling days, challenging his rivals' manhood and hurling decidedly un-PC epithets at the gathered crowds. He became Sammartino's principle foil, despite the fact that he hardly set foot in the ring Albano sent fearsome heels at Sammartino like an ornery god lobbing thunderbolts at antiquity's heroes.Įven as a heel - some would say especially as a heel - Albano was a ragtag supernova of charisma: long, frazzled mane Hawaiian shirts unbuttoned to the navel rubber bands tying off his unkempt goatee and dangling from his ears. It was a convenient storyline for pro wrestling's territorial era: Sammartino was a In his new role, Albano bridged the gap. He dubbed himself "Captain Lou" - a direct (albeit imprecise) reference to Albano's pre-wrestling military career. On the advice of the iconic Bruno Sammartino, Albano made the first significant shift of his career, ending his days as a grappler and refashioning himself into a diabolical manager, determined to dethrone Sammartino and end his years-long championship reign. Never the most talented ring technician to begin with, Albano was nonetheless indisputably good at provoking the fans. The Sicilians had a good run - they even briefly held the United States tag titles in Vince McMahon Sr.'s World Wide Wrestling Federation (the progenitor of the WWE) - but by 1969 they had dissolved their union. This basic equation would repeat itself throughout Albano's career. And it's instructive that Albano so straightforwardly and eagerly became someone else for mainstream exposure. I won't claim to have seen the show, but it's interesting nonetheless that Gleason, in bringing the wrestling world in all its oddity to mainstream culture, chose a young Lou Albano as his shepherd. There is a scenario that video games and home consoles ended up as just a fad in the US, like the hula hoop or doo wop.Albano and Altomare also appeared on a 1963 episode of Jackie Gleason and His American Scene Magazine (aka The Jackie Gleason Show), as professional wrestler Sandpaper Sam Staccato and referee Harry Hornet respectively. Due to overstocks, every single retailer refused to carry video games (they had bad memories of clearances where they sold $50 Atari games for $4). Remember: the NES, despite how amazing and arcade-accurate it was, was nowhere near a surefire bet. Imagine that the entire history and future of video games came down to one game of wei chi. It’s got a positive message about learning and adapting to another culture, tons of eighties nostalgia, an underdog battle, would introduce people to a great new board game, and actually happened. One story about video game history that actually would make an incredibly good movie: video games were saved in the United States from total oblivion because the Japanese president of Nintendo was a fanatical wei chi player (圍棋, aka Chinese chess, called Go in Japan) and the Yankee head of Nintendo of America learned the game in order to beat his boss. Once he did that and got his respect, he asked the president of Nintendo to release the NES in America.įun fact: because the president of Nintendo was such a nut for Go, one of the earliest games for the NES, tragically, not released in the US, was computerized Go:Ī story like that would have everything.
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