Posted on by bdamage1
Brian Damage
This is the 538th installment of the ‘Wrestling with Sin‘ series. A group of stories that delves into the darker, underbelly of pro wrestling. Many of the stories involve such subjects as sex, drugs, greed and in some cases even murder! As with every single story in the Sin series, I do not condone or condemn the alleged participants. We simply retell their stories by researching interviews, newspapers, magazines and various other sources of media.
Tricky Ricky
Ricky Steamboat portrayed a babyface his entire wrestling career. He was one of Ric Flair’s greatest in ring rivals. Outside the ring, Steamboat was very similar in some ways to Flair…mainly in the amount of times he has been married. Steamboat has been married a total of 5 times and according to his most known ex wife Bonnie…Ricky wasn’t always the babyface in his marriages.
Bonnie claimed that Ricky cheated on his first wife Maureen with a woman named Debra. He eventually left Maureen to marry the other woman. During his marriage to Debra, she left him after she cheated on him with a close friend to Ricky. After they divorced, Steamboat met and started dating Bonnie. While they were dating, Debra attempted to try and reconcile with Ricky, but he refused and chose Bonnie. The two married and had a son Ritchie. Ricky and Bonnie divorced with rumors of him being unfaithful to her towards the end of their marriage.
Steamboat ended up with a woman named Claudia. Bonnie admitted that she and Ricky were sneaking around while he was with his new woman, but eventually Steamboat chose Claudia over reconciling with Bonnie. Claudia and Ricky would end up divorced and he has remarried for a fifth time to a woman named Sandi to which they are still together as of this writing.
Boston, Booze and Blood
During a house show at the Boston Gardens in December of 1984, a random match between Ken Patera and David Sammartino went off the rails. Manager Captain Lou Albano was at ringside seconding Patera in the match. At some point, Albano, who was reportedly completely drunk decided to cut himself using an xacto knife.
Sammartino and Patera stopped their match to try and get Albano under control and during the melee, Sammartino suffered lacerations to his arm. David reportedly needed 45 stitches to close the wound on his arm. Albano was subsequently fired from the WWF by Vince McMahon, but eventually brought back not long after.
Bonnar’s Back
MMA legend turned professional wrestler Stephan Bonnar grew up in a small Indiana town a huge pro wrestling fan. Bonnar says that as a kid he idolized wrestlers Hulk Hogan and the Ultimate Warrior. Bonnar admitted that he wanted to become a pro wrestler himself, but claimed there were no wrestling schools around where he lived. He ended up becoming an amateur wrestler starting at age 10 and wrestled all throughout his school years.
Bonnar eventually stumbled upon mixed martial arts and fell in love with the combat sport. After a very successful career in the octagon, Bonnar still had the itch to try pro wrestling and began training with D-Lo Brown at the age of 39. He cited Diamond Dallas Page as an inspiration to start his pro career so late in his life. Bonnar wrestled for TNA wrestling as various indie groups. During a match where he was wrestling against Nick Aldis, Bonnar suffered a broken vertebrae in his lower back and then developed a staph infection. Bonnar ended up hospitalized for 10 weeks.
The back injury led to an addiction to pain pills and on December 22, 2022…Bonnar was found dead at his job in Las Vegas, Nevada. Initially it was reported that he passed due to some heart complications, however, an autopsy determined that his death was due to an accidental fentanyl overdose. To be precise, it was a ‘Fentanyl, Parafluorofentanyl and Mitragynine intoxication’. Stephan Bonnar was just 45 years old at the time of his death.
The Vanishing Giant
Yukari Kawamura aka Yukari Lynch was a Japanese female wrestler who stood over 6 feet tall and was dubbed ‘The Female Giant Baba’ because of her size. Not only was she very marketable because of her height, she was also biracial being half Japanese and half white who spoke English. Yukari made her pro debut for All Japan Women in 1975 at the young age of 14 years old. Lynch was mainly used as a heel during her brief career due to her looks.
In 1985, Yukari Lynch was arrested for drug possession. An offense that the Japanese take very seriously and usually comes with a very strict punishment. Yukari Lynch was basically erased from the AJW record books and permanently banned from wrestling in the country.