Welcome back to a new appointment with the Piper’s Pit! Today we will talk about a mysterious event in the history of wrestling: the death of Gino Hernandez.
Many of you probably don’t even know him by name, as his untimely passing put an end to what seemed destined to be a bright career. Charles Eugene Wolfe Jr. was born in Highland Park, near Dallas, on August 8, 1957 and at a young age decided to dedicate himself to wrestling, being trained by José Lothario. He made his debut as Gino Hernandez in 1975 in Big Time Wrestling as a babyface, as his statuesque physique and baby face attracted the female audience, so much so that he immediately became a sex symbol, also wrestling briefly in the then WWWF.
Between the end of the ’70s and the beginning of the ’80s he made his name mainly in World Class Championship Wrestling, where he had feuds with the Von Erich family and teamed first with a rookie Jake “The Snake” Roberts and later with Chris Adams, with whom he created the gimmick of hairdressers who cut the hair of defeated opponents, a gimmick that would later be made immortal in the WWF by Brutus Beefcake.
Hernandez’s career seemed destined to reach planetary heights, but unfortunately his private life was very messy. Considered a “party boy” in the locker room, his addiction to alcohol and drugs, particularly cocaine, was well known to everyone, so much so that WCCW manager and booker Gary Hart had tried several times to convince him to detox.
Because Wolfe had failed to show up at a couple of the company’s house shows, on February 4, 1986, two executives, accompanied by some local policemen, entered his home in Highland Park, where they found his body, presumably having died two days earlier at the age twenty-eight years old. Although the police almost immediately dismissed his death as due to a cocaine overdose, the family immediately showed suspicions that in reality it could have been a murder linked to drug dealing circles. Michael Hayes also agrees with this, who claims that Gino Hernandez was someone who talked too much and who most likely had contracted drug debts, and Jake Roberts who claims that Hernandez hung out with people from too big a circle to which he evidently did not belong.
Adding further mystery is the fact that traces of cocaine three times greater than enough for a lethal overdose were found in the body and that the funeral had been paid for by a well-known local drug dealer known as “John Royal”, who however neither the mother nor did his ex-wife claim to have ever seen him. A voice out of the chorus, however, is that of Brutus Beefcake who states that Hernandez could only end up dead due to his unbridled drug use.
But let’s conclude with the most bizarre version, the one that can never be missing when we talk about the mysterious demise of a public figure: Gino Hernandez would not have died, but would have faked his own death to escape creditors and start a new existence elsewhere! In fact, the autopsy reported errors regarding his physical and ethnic appearance and, furthermore, the family never saw the body, as it was in a state of decomposition and the funeral was celebrated with a closed coffin. Naturally, beyond the most varied suppositions and human tragedy, there remains the regret of not having been able to see how far the career of the man who was considered a future superstar would reach.
“I have wined and dined with kings and queens and I’ve slept in alleys and dined on pork and beans”.
SUBSCRIBE TO OUR OFFICIAL WHATSAPP CHANNEL: https://whatsapp.com/channel/0029VaE6VKfLI8YfGSitF01t
SUBSCRIBE TO OUR OFFICIAL TELEGRAM CHANNEL: https://t.me/tuttowrestling
