Gorilla Monsoon was a professional wrestler in the sixties and seventies. He was a massively huge man, burly and mean. In those days, professional wrestlers were rarely on television. Mostly, they played house shows and most people believed wrestling was real. And Gorilla was a classic heel. A bad guy. Except that people didn't look at Gorilla and say "wow -- that guy plays a mean bad guy." They looked at him and said "that man's sick -- someone needs to stop him!" That was the game in those days, and no one did it better than the Gorilla.

The feuds people mention to me these days are Gorilla against Bruno Sammartino, called "The Living Legend" and a figure in wrestling on a par with the Brown Bomber Joe Louis in boxing. Gorilla Monsoon was one of the few figures in wrestling who could live up to Sammartino's legend. From all accounts, they put on a Hell of a show.

Gorilla was also famous for two odd bits of trivia: He's the only man to ever wrestle Mohammed Ali, and the only man to ever box Andre the Giant (a phrase I stole from one of his contemporaries, Lord Alfred Hayes). Ali jumped in the ring in (I believe) 1969, fast and dangerous, and apparently a "shoot" (he really was going to try and attack Monsoon.) Gorilla picked him up, put him on his shoulder and spun him around in an airplane spin, before throwing him to the ground and out into the stands. Ali didn't push the issue.

I suspect that while the legend said it was a shoot, in reality it was probably a "work" (the fake side of wrestling -- pretending it's real when it's not). Either way, it made for a fantastic image, back in the days when Wrestling was treated like a low brow sport, not a freak show or "Sports Entertainment."

I have no image of Gorilla Monsoon, the wrestler. I accept his background, but it means little to me. But Gorilla himself is bound inexorably into the enjoyment I have for Professional Wrestling, and his death saddens me. You see, in the eighties and nineties, Gorilla Monsoon was the primary Play by Play announcer for the World Wrestling Federation, and in several years of on-again, off-again wrestling watching I've done, he's by far been the best one I've ever seen.

It's hard to be a decent Play by Play man in Wrestling. It's all fake, of course. And Wrestling matches have a rhythm. A flow to them, and they're not constant. In the 'old days' of wrestling, matches when 30-60 minutes much of the time, and it's simply too hard a rate of working to have constant leaps off the top rope and spinning kicks. You sometimes need to throw a 'rest hold' on your opponent. A rest hold is when a wrestler puts a "submission hold" on his opponent to "wear him down." This might be a mat hold like a toe-lock or chin-lock, or it might be the always popular "abdomenal stretch," when one wrestler would put himself under the arm of the other and 'stretch' him to one side.

Rest holds look stupid. It doesn't matter if it's Hulk "I can't wrestle to save my life" Hogan or Ric "I'll give my life to save wrestling" Flair throwing it on his opponent. They're dull and drab, being held in place to let both men recover for the interesting bits coming up. The only way they can work is by having a really good play by play man on the stick. That announcer has to be one part Baseball Style Announcer (meaningless trivia, promotional work) and one part Boxing announcer (rapid-fire radio-style descriptions of what's happening). A good Play by Play man paces the match like he were telling a story, letting it develop, keeping the viewer's interest during the boring parts, making the match seem real by applying a measure to it. Further, he acts as the voice of the viewer -- our internal monologue. When the Heel pulls a roll of quarters out of his tights and punches Our Hero in the head, it's the disgust and moral outrage of the Play by Play man that translates into our perception of the match. It gives us the ability to engage Willing Suspension of Disbelief, which in Wrestling Terms is called being a "Mark." His job is made easier by the Color Commentator, usually a bad guy, who acts like a color man in other sports but really is there to give us the opposing viewpoint, and give the Play by Play man someone to talk to.

Gorilla was a phenomenally good Play by Play man. He was entertaining to listen to -- he knew his moves and knew how to pace better than anyone I've heard since. He loved inventing body parts, too. When wrestlers were thrown on the back of their head, he would always refer to it as the "rear occipital protruberance." In those days when Low Blows were booed instead of cheered, whenever it happened Gorilla would announce a blow to the "lower abdominal region," a region which apparently included the ribs and the thighs. And every word out of Gorilla's mouth moved the story along -- the story of the match, the angle between the wrestlers, all of it.

Most often, he was paired up with (now governer) Jesse "The Body" Ventura, who was a perfect Heel Color Commentator to Gorilla's Face (Babyface -- or "good guy") Play-by-Play. Ventura acknowledged good moves, pointed out good and bad strategy, and gleefully advocated cheating and nastyness. The two fit like gloves -- Gorilla getting outraged as Randy Savage went off the top rope onto Ricky Steamboat, slaming the ring bell into our hero's body, Jesse cheering on his philosophy of "win if you can, lose if you must, but always cheat." The synergy could take the dullest moments of the dullest matches and make them watchable. When paired up for a good match, the two caught utter fire and made the experience great.

The art of announcing is dead. It was dead before this -- Gorilla retired, Jesse went on (God help us) to Politics, and Tony Schiovone was hired. Today, announcers either chortle and make jokes or unrelentingly promote -- promote the Main Event, promote the Pay Per View, whatever. Watching WCW Monday Nitro, I'm always stunned at how bad the announcing is. Tony, our Play by Play man, misses things like people hitting their opponents with chairs, much less subtle plot points. Bobby "The Brain" Heenan is hysterical to listen to, but his comments are non-sequitors. Jokes saying more about Heenan than the match. Neither one of them is capable of identifying a wrestling move -- and neither am I, but the point of commentary is to give us that flow, that visceral connection to the match.

And the WWF? Besides the fact that WWF is reprehensible as a product, these days, Jim Ross and Jerry Lawlor are terrible. Jim Ross has always been this cloyingly horrid announcer. Jerry Lawlor is a miserable color man.

Jim Ross, by the by, is regarded by some commentators as the best announcer of all time. These commentators are patently wrong. Jim Ross is an annoyance given voice. I'll admit that makes him better than Tony Schiovone.

None of them are one tenth what the Gorilla was. And none of them were the simple gentlemen he was, either. My friend Frank knew Gorilla a tiny bit -- when he was a kid, going to shows at the Spectrum, Gorilla would work the front table. They'd talk. "Hey kid," Gorilla'd say. "You didn't like what the Shiek did to Bruno? You watch today, kid. I'll bet you go home happy." Listening to him on television, you always got the sense that no matter how reprehensible the situation he was announcing, Gorilla loved the sport and loved everything about it.

Now he's dead, of a heart attack. Frank e-mailed me the news, pretty depressed. I'd already heard, though. The WWF gives him a blurb. WCW doesn't acknowledge his death at all. Not one tenth of the attention given to Owen Hart's death, nor the death of Brian Hildebrand (a referee who died of cancer this year, and a true hero and gentleman) has been given to the man who wrestling Mohammad Ali, boxed Andre the Giant, and announced the rise to national prominence of Professional Wrestling.

And that's very sad, in this year of sad wrestling tragedies and pathetic wrestling lawsuits. One of Gorilla's favorite phrases, at the end of a match, was "Stick a fork in him -- he's done."

Well, maybe we can say that about wrestling now. But not about Gorilla. He'll live on as an example, and a gentleman. And someone who did the right thing.

Godspeed, Gino.