Blood and Fire: The Story of Wrestling's Original Sheik
Brian Solomon's New Biography Attempts the Impossible
The first time I saw the legendary Sheik in 1992, old Ed Farhat was decades past his wrestling prime, on the last legs of an extended retirement tour throughout Japan with FMW. He’d spent years there earlier in a Hall-of-Fame career, yet another country that loved to hate him.
FMW superstar Atsushi Onita had been a “young boy” for Giant Baba during the height of the Sheik’s fame and could never get the raving American completely out of his head. While Onita’s time in America in Tennessee and Florida is often credited as the inspiration for his own wild and wooly promotion, watching the Sheik up-close-and-personal at Baba’s side was equally informative. When he had the opportunity, he rescued Sheik from an economic collapse of his own making, offering the icon $10,000 a shot to come out and make the fans feel young again.
Even at 65, Sheik was a presence, somehow exuding foreboding from his very pores as he hobbled to the ring, barely able to climb between the ropes, let alone do much once he was there. Critics would say that wasn’t especially different from how he’d wrestled as a younger man either, the gimmick doing the work an arm-wringer could never accomplish. His was an act so primal that it made him one of the most important and successful wrestlers in the world for more than a decade.
The match, seemingly perfect for a man with the Sheik’s blood-and-guts reputation, was a flaming barbed wire bout featuring the old-man and his nephew Sabu taking on Onita and the equally grizzled Tarzan Goto. The promotion had been dabbling in explosives and was hoping to create a match with the same visual impact without the same bite into their bank account, simply lighting the barbed wire surrounding the ring on fire and hoping for the best.
The idea worked like a charm—until it didn’t. Wind blew the flames and caught some Kerosene that had dripped to the mat ablaze. Soon the entire ring was on fire and the younger, spryer wrestlers were forced to flee for their lives. Sheik, barely able to get himself into the ring, struggled to escape, eventually crawling through a small break in the conflagration created by ringside staff and wrestlers with buckets of water. Despite a fire that would burn the ring to the ground, Sheik threw a fireball of his own at Onita as they brawled to the back.
The Sheik ended up in the hospital, surviving the experience with nothing worse than third-degree burns and smoke inhalation. Considering it looked like he was about to be burned to a crisp, it was an outcome I’m sure he could live with.
It was, I would soon learn, quintessential Sheik. Later I’d go back and discover his memorable brawls in All Japan Pro Wrestling in the 70s and 80s, some of his Detroit matches from his hey day (in dubious quality on low-priced DVD) and, of course, the cult classic I Like to Hurt People. Even a cursory review of pro wrestling history would bring him to your attention—like so many of his contemporaries, his name had faded from memory. But to those who had seen him, like Onita, his was a specter they would never quite shake.
While the Sheik I grew up with was the WWF knockoff version (sorry Bubba), I learned to appreciate the original, a gimmick so powerful even Ed Farhat himself seemed lost in its orbit. A Christian born to a successful Syrian immigrant family from Lansing, Michigan, Farhat played a raving Muslim lunatic with nary a wink, a deadly serious threat to everyone he encountered, whether it was in a ring or out in the parking lot.
The Sheik, famously, never broke character. Even, occasionally, within the confines of his own home, he played the role that had made him rich and famous. That’s partly what made me so interested in Brian Solomon’s new biography Blood and Fire: The Unbelievable Real-Life Story of Wrestling’s Original Sheik. Solomon, who worked for years creating content for WWE and now writes for Pro Wrestling Illustrated, had taken on a seemingly impossible task.
How, I wondered, would he penetrate the impenetrable veil that Farhat hid behind throughout his adult life? Solomon had no participation from the Sheik or his family and many of those closest to him in life were not cooperative or forthcoming (or deceased).
The Sheik, unlike almost all his peers, never did a shoot interview or did anything to encourage an exploration of his personal or professional lives. To the day he died, he maintained a strict adherence to kayfabe, refusing to break character in front of anyone who wasn’t part of the wrestling business, a living embodiment of the cry heard around the wrestling world:
“It’s still real to me dammit.”
Which leaves me to wonder—if a man’s life is in large part devoted to remaining a mystery, can his story ever truly be told? The Sheik was a public figure, hated and feared around the globe. Ed Farhat? Only a select few every really knew him, even within the business he’d made his life.
Solomon, a good writer and even better historian, uses the Sheik as a jumping off point to tell the story of pro wrestling as it existed in the 1950s right through the 1990s. He tracks Farhat’s journey around the globe and shares facts and anecdotes about everyone he meets along the way. It’s a masterful way to tell Sheik’s story, surrounding him with context so it’s clear to the reader who this man was and what he meant to the business.
The Sheik lived through seismic shifts in professional wrestling, appearing nationally on the old Dumont Network in the 1950s, joining the NWA’s wrestling mafia in the 1960s as the owner of Big Time Wrestling and seeing his place in a changing industry disappear entirely as the 80s dawned and dreams of national expansion in New York and Atlanta made him an enticing target.
Solomon’s book ably tracks all of this. It’s interesting reading and you’ll put it down knowing a lot about the Sheik and his career and, no matter your level of obsession, a lot more about the history of professional wrestling. You’ll understand how he came to hold Detroit in the palm of his hand—and how he let it all slip away in a cloud of promotional missteps and greed.
But even as we get to know the Sheik, Ed Farhat often remains hidden, missing in some ways from his own book.
He probably would have wanted it that way.