MEN’S WRESTLING HONOREE DEAN HIGUCHI:

A QUICK LEARNER AND PATIENT TEACHER
By Jeff Sharkey
Photos Courtesy of Chris Swisher, www.csclassicwrphotos.com
Brian Bukantis, www.wrestleprints.com,
www.onlineworldofwrestling.com

Dean Higuchi has answered the phone, having just completed the task of walking his dog.  Well, that’s one way to look at it.  “It was a bout two-and-a-half, maybe three miles,” Higuchi said.  “Sometimes you walk the dog…and other times he walks you.”

With the first warm weather of the season, and a mile or two under this writer’s belt himself, Higuchi ironically had left a message to call him back with the caveat, “Remember: keep walking; it’s good exercise!”  When told of the curious timing of this advice, Higuchi offered, “However long it takes, it’s important to just do the walk, get it in so you burn some calories and the unwanted sugars in your system.”

It is difficult to take up a contrary position to this sage wisdom.  In summarizing his career during the course of the conversation, there was this additional Higuchi mantra: “Enjoy your life.  Make the most of your time.  Help others in any way you can.  Be good; bring enjoyment.”   The tale of Dean Higuchi is a chapter best written between his late 1950s upbringing in pro wrestling in Hawaii and his curtain call in the mid 1980s near Vancouver.

Dispensing good advice on physical fitness is not a new hobby for Dean Higuchi.  On the heels of winning the bodybuilding title of “Mr. Hawaiian Islands” in 1956, and a sixth place finish in the Mr. America competition, Higuchi opened Dean’s Gym in 1957.  In short order, it became a haven for bodybuilders and professional wrestlers alike.  One such wrestler was Dick Beyer, who at this point, had yet to morph into the Intelligent, Sensational Destroyer.  Beyer puts the timeline around 1962, and remembers his time at Dean’s Gym with a certain reverence.

“That gym was on Kalakaua Avenue in Honolulu, which was the main street as you head into Waikiki.  It was more toward the downtown.  I worked out there, and was working in judo with Wally Tsutsumi, a wrestler/referee who was a fifth or sixth grade judo expert.  I became a black belt through Wally.  Some other wrestlers who wanted a workout would come down as well,”  Beyer said.  “When I went there, Higuchi expressed a desire to learn how to work.  So for about four months, I trained a group of four guys.  There was Sammy Steamboat, who was a beach boy, maybe a senior in high school.  At the time he was entering an AAU tournament.   Then there was Pat Matson, who was a local fireman.  He had wrestling talent, but I encouraged him not to to wrestle; he wasn’t big, and he had a good job already, which had benefits.”

The Destroyer continues his list of young proteges.  “There was Mister Fuji…who was a bouncer at this place called The Barefoot Bar, right on the beach.  He was bigger and uglier than the rest, and I think he’d had some training by maybe Curtis Iaukea.  And then there was Dean Higuchi. He had the best body of all of them.   There was a ring set up at the Civic Auditorium, and the promoters, Ed Francis and Lord Blears, wanted me to train these young wrestlers.  I asked them, ‘How much do you want me to smarten ‘em up?’  I never gave them that one hundred percent.  If I thought they were going to become something, I’d give them a little more information,”  Beyer said.

Higuchi recalls those training days with Beyer fondly as well.   “I was allowed into the dressing room of the auditorium, and Dick sat me down to talk about professional wrestling.  Nobody was allowed to step in there back then… so I had so much respect for Dick to do that.  But I knew I needed to keep my mouth shut, eyes and ears…OPEN!”  Higuchi said.  “And I was not to repeat what I was taught; Dick is one helluva guy.”

The training was basic, yet sound fundamental holds done in repetition. This was key for two reasons.  “I gave these guys all wrestling holds, never anything with punching or kicking,”  Beyer said.  “If a guy could wrestle without that stuff, they could pick things up pretty fast.  All of them did.  I gave them high spots that were all with some wrestling base; the kind of thing you can see in the amateurs.”  But this crew also afforded Beyer the opportunity to hone his own repertoire.  “This was around the time Buddy Rogers was sort of retiring… and I asked Blears how to put on a figure four leglock.  In my training, I was working on ways to get the figure-four applied off any move, from a backdrop, a drop toehold… I looked for ways to apply it,” Beyer said.

Those training sessions in the Civic Auditorium stuck with Higuchi, as he vividly recalled some of the drills.  “Dick Beyer was a guy who had a lot of patience.  He taught me just how a match is built.  He would give us maybe four spots beforehand, and sometimes they would come up, sometimes not.  You tried to remember them all, and hoped the other guy could remember what you didn’t,” Higuchi said.  And then… there was the conditioning level, that other wrestlers encouraged.

“Adnan Kaissey, or Billy White Wolf, wasn’t blessed with training ability so much as he instilled physical conditioning in us,” Higuchi said.  “In the Auditorium, there were ten aisles in the seating area.  We’d run fifty steps up the end aisle to the top, then run across to the next aisle, then run fifty steps down and across to the next aisle, back up again and so on… all the way around the Auditorium twice.  And four times around the ground level.  By the end, my tongue was dragging… MORE than that, actually,” Higuchi laughed.
 

Still in 1962, this Hawaiian paradise sparked the dawn of the rookie Higuchi’s career, and forever changed the course of two veterans’ lives.  “Freddie Blassie had come through Hawaii as the WWA World’s Champion,” Beyer said.  “When he got back to the states, he told Jules Strongbow in L.A. that he needed to bring me to town, because I was a great babyface.  I had been having matches with Maurice Vachon, who was a great heel.  Well, by the time Blassie came back, the roles were reversed.  This time Maurice was the babyface, and I was the heel!   So Blassie gets hold of Strongbow again and says, ‘Forget about Beyer as a babyface… he’s even better as a heel!  So from there, I came to Los Angeles, where they put the mask on me and I started as The Destroyer.  Maurice Vachon then went to Portland for Don Owen, and it was there he became known as “Mad Dog” Vachon,”  Beyer said.

Meanwhile, as the polished talents of Vachon and Beyer were off for greener pastures,  it wasn’t easy being green in Higuchi’s case. “I remember my first match.  It was a tag team; me and Herbie Freeman against King Curtis and Haru Sasaki.  They were good tutors,” Higuchi said.  “They had good heel moves, very sly.  But me?  I had three left feet!  It was so much different than what I had gone through in training.  Once you get out there, all that you were taught goes right out the window.  I panicked!”

Higuchi kept at his craft, though, and despite some rough patches, eventually there was some improvement in his game.  At the time Higuchi might have been hard to convince of that.  “I can remember being matched with Nick Kozak; I think Ed Francis and Lord Blears did it as a joke!  You know, put two greenies out there,” Higuchi said.  “We were two stiff guys, just bending arms… you could have filled two trucks full of concrete dust with our work… but it got over.”

Getting over was a relatively easy task for Higuchi, if not for some of his contemporaries.  “Some of the first Asian wrestlers, there are some things you carry with you… the persecution of Pearl Harbor.  Guys like Mr. Moto and Tosh Togo, their own faces made them natural heels.  The same for Kenji Shibuya; just natural heat there.  And look at Mister Fuji… he had to be a heel with a look like that,” Higuchi said.

On both sides of the wrestling fence, Higuchi remembers a dilemma for some of the boys, but it made for another opportunity for him to appreciate his later successes.  “I can recall myself and Mr. Moto traveling to shows together…BY BUS,” Higuchi said.  “We’re on the streetcorner with our suitcases, ready to catch the Greyhound to wherever we had our matches.  When we got to the town, we would get a cab and split the fare.  Not a lot of the boys had cars for us to get around a territory in those days.  It could be difficult at times.  But it was an experience I enjoyed.  I had no other plan to fall back on, once I left Hawaii… I had to make it!”

Higuchi’s career spanned close to 25 years and took him to a variety of territories.  Moving to the WWWF in the early 1970s, he used the name of Dean Ho, winning the tag team straps with Tony Garea.  Higuchi/Ho’s time on the east coast is remembered fondly.  “A great crew, a bunch of guys with no animosity… we accepted all of our positions and the money we were making was okay.  I was living in Bedford, New Jersey, which was close to Cherry Hill, where Gorilla Monsoon lived,” Higuchi said.  “I can remember going over to his house to talk many times.  Gorilla gave my oldest son an uncirculated silver dollar; I thought that was so nice of him.  We still have that silver dollar in its original case today.  We had such a good relationship.”

A move to Georgia in the mid 70s afforded Higuchi, now using the Dean Ho name regularly, an opportunity to begin repaying the favors of his youth.  Now the veteran, it was his turn to spread the pearls of wisdom.  “Ricky Steamboat was in Georgia at the time.  I felt that he had great charisma and a good look… and if he was put with somebody who could be of help to him, he’d be great,” Higuchi said.  “He stayed in an apartment near us, close enough that my wife could yell out the window and call him over to have dinner with us.  I remember his girlfriend, who eventually became his wife.  We attended their wedding, which was fabulous.  They had one of those champagne fountains where you could fill your glass just by dipping it into the fountain.”

Higuchi continued to nurture Steamboat’s career under his watch, until it was time for him to move to Charlotte, where Steamboat’s first major break occured.  “One Sunday, months afterward, I heard a knock on the door, but I didn’t see anyone outside or recognize anyone’s car.  So I opened the door and right then, Ricky popped out of hiding!  I hugged him, and then saw that he was doing really well… he had bought a new vehicle, a Pontiac Grand Prix,”  Higuchi said.  I asked him if he had any polish… and we waxed his car!  He told me, ‘I didn’t come here just for you to wax my car!’  But I told him, ‘We’re friends!’   Yet another example of Higuchi’s charm, in seeing life for the good things in the course of the day, like a surprise visit from a friend and protege.

Higuchi took the Dean Ho moniker to San Francisco in the latter part of the 1970s.  Well aware of others who viewed their stay as less than stellar, Higuchi again remembers the best elements of his run there.   “I made the best payoffs in my career working for Roy Shire,” Higuchi said.  “I know a lot of guys didn’t like him…Beauregarde for example.  Roy told him to wear one of his expensive shirts that he did promos with out, and they were going to start a program with someone when he would get his shirt torn off.   But Beauregarde didn’t get any extra to replace his good shirt!   Like some promoters, they would know which guys they could push… and not a push like in an angle; they knew how to push them to their limits.  But I never had that problem with Roy,” Higuchi said.

“One day Shire asked me if I had a ukelele, and I told him I did… so he told me to bring it to TV.  Well, I was supposed to face Alexis Smirnoff, and you can figure out the end of this story.  Smirnoff jumped on it when I left it on the apron.  I thought, ‘Oh great… there goes my fifty bucks!  But you know, when I got to the back, Shire gave me 75 bucks to buy another ukelele…so I got an even better one,” Higuchi said.

While in San Francisco, watching Dean Ho matches was a regular routine for young Ed Moretti.  “I knew Dean from all the magazines and cable TV,” Moretti said.  “His stuff in Georgia, Texas, his early Northwest stuff and Hawaii.  Now here I was, a young guy barely in the business… and Dean did me a big favor.”

Perhaps remembering his arduous bus trips, and how Beyer and other veterans had schooled him years before, Higuchi extended the olive branch to yet another up-and-comer.  “Along with Steve Pardee, Dean would let us ride with him to all the towns.  It was a way of making us feel like we were one of the boys,” Moretti recalls.  “He was patient enough with us, since he knew we were going to these towns anyway.  We were very respectful of him for that, and he charged us trans, just like the pros.  We rode with some greats, and got to learn that way.  I found out later that he had done the same with others like Jimmy Snuka, Ricky Steamboat and Don Muraco.”

Higuchi’s move to the role of mentor is not lost on Moretti.  These car rides prepared him for his own ring debut in June 1978.  And just as Higuchi has detailed memories of his first match, a tag bout, so does Moretti for his arrival into the wrestling business.  “I had my first match in Modesto, Caliornia.  Red Bastien was the promoter for Roy Shire in this town, as well as Roy’s booker at the time.  The match was myself and Reno Tuufuli against Takashi Ishikawa and Dean Ho,” Moretti said.   Around this time, the San Francisco territory had started to decline.  But Moretti has a nostalgic feeling about this time period.  “I saw Dean and Don Muraco here when it was dying, but they were able to turn it back around working with each other for maybe six months, with Shire appearing in Dean’s corner,” Moretti said.

More than simple random acts of kindness, Higuchi was taking decided interest in the formation of a young man’s career.  Ring advice and rides around the circuit were just the beginning.  “In October of 1978, Dean sent a leter to Al Tomko and Gene Kiniski who headed up the Vancouver office,” Moretti said.  “He got me booked up there based on his recommendations.  I was able to go up there and start on the undercards.  Dean was very instrumental in my career.”

As the 1980s got underway, Higuchi returned to British Columbia, where he had gained early fame with title shots against NWA World Champion Gene Kiniski in 1968, and winning tag team gold with Earl Maynard the following year.  Now appearing as Dean Ho, the close of Higuchi’s career still saw him garner singles gold in the region, but was also evidenced by a series of tag team matches with rising talent.  One of those talents who tagged up with Ho?   Ed Moretti, now with the Moondog label attached.  Together they grabbed the tag championships in the Tomko promotion.

“I was the edgy one on the team.  I was always fighting, while Dean would stay scientific when he was in there,” Moretti said.  “I really enjoyed myself; we tagged for close to a year.  He always had reasons for what he’d do.  It was always logical, simplified and nothing ever confusing to the people.  His stuff made sense.”

Another aspiring grappler that worked with Higuchi as an opponent was young Verne Siebert.  A number of Vancouver area televised bouts can be seen online, with Siebert partnering with a number of wrestlers in an unsuccessful quest to wrest the belts from Ho and Moretti.  “I worked with Dean quite a lot,” Siebert said.  “He was a master of timing, and taught me how to work, and work snug.  He showed me how a wrestler should work with a referee.  Seeing how he did things helped when I began to referee myself.  Dean was so popular in the ring; I learned a lot and have great respect for him.”

Having interviewed Moretti and Siebert months before, Higuchi would be encouraged that elements of logic and timing stuck with his young charges as they developed into seasoned veterans themselves.  “It was important to know how to control a match and when to do certain things,” Higuchi said.  “Nowadays I see some matches where someone will throw a dropkick, when it has no point in the storyline.  It’s no rhyme, no reason.” 

Moretti is pleased to see Dean Higuchi’s name on the list of 2010 Cauliflower Alley Club honorees.  “Dean was and is a pleasure to be around,”  Moretti said.  “I had such a nice experience being around him.  His wife, Rose, is a very classy lady, and she always welcomed you.  Dean really helped my career; I can’t say thank you enough or tell him how much I appreciate what he did.  He’ll be getting a very well-deserved award.”

The receiving line of Higuchi’s well-wishers is made up of masked men as well as Moondogs.  “I haven’t seen Dean Higuchi since I trained him in 1962!  He was always in different parts of Canada where I never appeared, or he’d be on the road somewhere and our paths would never cross,” the Destroyer said.  When old friends from the start and the tail end of your career can come together, you have created quite a stir.

With this being a rare public appearance for Higuchi since his retirement, he briefly laments those in his life who will not be present, just as he celebrates those who will.  “My wife and I went to one of Dean Silverstone’s reunions last year.  I hadn’t seen Buddy Rose since San Francisco…and shortly after that he died.  It was like I had been stabbed; he was such an easy-going guy.  Good on the mic, and when they let him do his thing, everybody made money, a good heel,” Higuchi said.  “Another guy who hit me hard was Jack Evans who was from Spanish Harlem, near where Manuel and Roberto Soto were from.  All he ever wanted to do was work.  When I heard of his tragic demise, it hurt me.  Jack was always so happy and humble… he’d ask me for a ride sometimes.  It would be me and Tony Garea and Spiros Arion with Jack, and we’d drive all the way to Bangor, Maine from New Haven.  Such strong and healthy men they were.”

The road of life has been a long drive for Dean Higuchi.  Again his credo bears repeating.  “Enjoy your life.  Make the most of your time.  Help others in any way you can.  Be good; bring enjoyment.”   From his rookie days on a bus, to waxing a friend’s car, to driving the next generation of stars to the town.  Dean Higuchi knew that the destination is not what you remember, but rather the journey, and the passengers that ride with you.