Harley Race Was Outside Your Jurisdiction

By Coach B

There are tough wrestlers, and then there was Harley Race, who appears to have regarded the human body as a set of recommendations.

Doctors would examine him, identify the injury, explain the medical reality of the situation, and Harley would respond by doing whatever the hell he had already planned to do.

This began early.

Race contracted polio as a child, recovered, and then started fighting grown men in carnival bouts as a teenager. That should have been the first indication that conventional medical advice was not going to play much of a role in his life.

The pattern became official in 1961.

Race was involved in a head-on collision with a tractor-trailer. His pregnant wife was killed. Race was badly injured and initially believed to be dead. At the hospital, doctors prepared to amputate his leg before promoter Gust Karras intervened and stopped the surgery.

Race was then told he would never walk again.

Doctors were merely the first group to discover that Harley Race did not recognize outside authority.

Eventually, the list would include promoters, athletic commissions, law enforcement, basic physics, and anyone attempting to explain why drinking a fifth of Smirnoff should impair his ability to drive through a snowstorm.

Modern Medicine Steps Aside

Rather than easing back into some limited ceremonial capacity, Race returned to full-time territorial wrestling, a system where the champion worked nightly in new cities under the standing assumption that you showed up unless an entire limb had detached.

Race went on to capture eight NWA World Heavyweight Championships.

His career became a decades-long disagreement between one man and every licensed physician unfortunate enough to examine him.

He had a foot and a half of intestine removed during emergency surgery and returned to work. He underwent repeated operations on his neck, hips, knees, and back. Five vertebrae were eventually fused together.

None of this stopped him from spending years diving headfirst off the top rope.

The diving headbutt is an unusual move because even when it goes correctly, the basic premise is still:

“What if my skull were the projectile?”

Race used it inside the ring. He used it on the floor. He used it during a period when wrestlers worked hundreds of dates a year and recovery often consisted of whiskey, tape, and somebody checking whether your pupils were the same size.

He also took the kind of floor bumps that make modern wrestling fans wince even after watching them from three camera angles.

This was not courage in the usual sense. Courage requires recognizing danger and proceeding despite it.

Harley Race often seemed unwilling to grant danger enough legitimacy to begin the discussion.

He was not overcoming fear.

He was declining to participate.

The Laws of Physics File an Objection

The same refusal applied to basic physical reality.

There are countless stories about Race that do not end with him winning a confrontation so much as rejecting the other person’s understanding of how force works.

Vince McMahon once reportedly tried to tackle him from behind after a business dinner. Race did not fall, stumble, or noticeably react.

McMahon hit him like a man running into an oak tree.

That is the perfect Harley Race story because there is almost no action.

Vince does something.

Harley remains Harley.

Story over.

His handshake developed a similar reputation. Wrestlers learned to offer him their fingertips because a full grip meant allowing Race temporary custody of the bones in their hand.

Mick Foley attributed one of the great statements on force production to him:

“If I punch a man with my left hand and he doesn’t fall down, I’m going to go look behind him to see what’s holding him up.”

Race allows for no possibility that the punch failed. Something external must have interfered.

A wall. A support beam. An act of God.

Further investigation would be required.

The Andre the Giant stories operated under the same rules.

Race claimed he once lifted Andre overhead and brought him down in one motion. That is difficult to verify, although verification feels almost beside the point. Harley Race said he did it.

Anyone who disagreed was free to approach him and discuss the matter personally.

Bobby Heenan later said there were only two men Andre feared: Meng and Harley Race.

That is a short list.

Meng allegedly bit a man’s nose off.

Harley had a blond perm.

Normal Authority Discovers It Has No Standing

The best Harley Race stories are rarely about sanctioned matches.

They are about moments when normal authority entered the room and discovered it had no jurisdiction.

There is a story from Baltimore involving an injured wrestler and the state athletic commission. The injury had happened outside the ring, which meant insurance would not cover it.

A doctor pointed this out.

Race looked at him and said the injury happened from a headbutt inside the ring.

The doctor repeated that it had not.

Race repeated that it had.

“It was a headbutt. Inside the ring.”

Eventually, the medical record was corrected.

This was not an argument. Race simply remained in place until reality submitted the proper paperwork.

Years later, WCW paired Race with Vader, which may have been professional wrestling’s closest attempt at checks and balances.

Leon White had a reputation for bullying people and working too stiff.

So they gave him Harley Race.

There is also a rumor that Leon once got mouthy with Harley, and Harley punched him in the face.

Would any of us call bullshit?

Right. That’s what I thought.

Leon said it never happened. Maybe it didn’t.

Or maybe Leon was being an asshole, Harley did Harley things, and even Vader understood jurisdiction.

I know what I believe.

The famous Hulk Hogan confrontation may be the purest example of Race’s worldview.

During the WWF’s national expansion, territorial promoters believed Vince McMahon was destroying the business they had spent their lives building.

Race entered Hogan’s locker room, knocked him down, reportedly pulled a handgun, and then extended his hand.

Hogan shook it.

They later became friends.*

*Depending, of course, on which Hogan interview you heard, the decade it was recorded, and whether the incident took place during one of the Hulkster’s famous 400-day calendar years.

The Law Reviews Its Options

The strangest part of the Harley Race stories may not be that he survived all of this.

It may be how rarely anyone appears to have tried stopping him.

This was a man who fought strangers in restaurants, carried guns, pulled at least one on Hulk Hogan, altered an athletic commission’s understanding of where an injury occurred, and reserved high-voltage electrical equipment for people he considered friends.

The stun gun was not for an enemy.

That was Owen Hart.

Harley liked Owen.

Owen once sabotaged Race’s chili with hot sauce during a barbecue. Harley waited until the following night, found Owen naked backstage, and stuck a 250,000-volt stun gun up his ass.

This was a rib between friends.

Owen Hart was one of wrestling’s great practical jokers. Most victims laughed, got angry, or plotted a rib in return.

Harley Race brought electrical equipment.

In 1965, Race saw several men roughing up a woman at a Minneapolis restaurant and intervened. He knocked one of them unconscious and was stabbed by another.

According to the most Harley Race version of the story, he went back and finished his meal before seeking medical attention.

He had been stabbed in the back, but apparently there was still food on the table.

Priorities.

Considering the number of stories that begin with Harley Race entering a room armed and end with someone else reconsidering his position, the legal consequences appear remarkably limited.

It is almost as though the United States legal system looked at him from a safe distance, reviewed the available options, and selected the path of least resistance.

No need to make this complicated. Best to steer clear until he’s done.

Doctors told him what his body could withstand.

He disagreed.

Promoters told him what business he was allowed to conduct.

He disagreed.

And yes, according to Dark Side of the Ring, he was once arrested for public intoxication after a boating incident and resisted arrest.

Which tracks.

You spend your entire life pulling guns, ending fights, correcting doctors, and ignoring the structural limitations of the human body, then suddenly some cop in a raft climbs onto your boat and starts explaining rules to you?

No shit he fought back. He’s Harley Race.

*Also, Dark Side of the Ring is anywhere from 20 to 42 percent accurate in any given episode, so Harley may have been arrested, may have owned a boat, or may have simply been standing near a large puddle.