With the No Way Out pay per view in the books, it is now officially WrestleMania XXV season. For the next seven weeks before the WWE’s premier event all the company’s energy will be focused on the big event and everything that surrounds it.
In addition to building the event’s match card, all of other hoopla and pageantry add to WrestleMania season. And one of the major parts of WrestleMania season is the annual Hall of Fame ceremony. The Hall of Fame is always presented on the Saturday night before the WrestleMania pay per view as a way to celebrate the stars who came before today’s current entertainers.
With this year’s WrestleMania in Houston, Texas, this year’s inductees will be very Texas themed. A month ago it was announced that Stone Cold Steve Austin would be the first inductee in the 2009 class, and the class’ star inductee.
Last night on Monday Night RAW it was revealed that brothers Terry and Dory Funk, Jr. would be the next inductees into the 2009 Hall of Fame class.
Terry and Dory, Jr., sons of Amarillo wrestler and promoter Dory Funk, grew up in the wrestling business in the 1960s under their father’s watchful eye. Both were natural athletes and took to the business quickly. By 1968, Dory won the National Wrestling Alliance World Heavyweight Championship and kept it for an outstanding four-and-a-half year uninterrupted run. Terry followed him into the business and by 1975 he too had also picked up the prestigious NWA World Championship and held for fourteen months. To this day they are the only brother combination to both win the same World Heavyweight Championship.
Both brothers went to on to have outstanding careers, both as a team and as individuals all across the world. In 1985 they reunited as a tag team in the WWF although the pairing didn’t last more than a few months before Terry left the company.
Dory was known for his consummate scientific wrestling knowledge and clean-cut style. He was a definite throwback to the old-school days of wrestlers portraying the matches as legitimate sport. As the ‘90s dawned, Dory eased into a trainer role and successfully trained many of today’s top stars. Dory officially retired on March 1, 2008, after winning a tag team match in Japan.
Terry started out as a clean-cut scientific wrestler in his own right before turning into a wild man known for his crazy brawls and hardcore antics, well before “hardcore” was even a term in the wrestling lexicon. He tore through the entire country and Japan through the 1980s. By the early ‘90s, Funk helped put the original Extreme Wrestling Championship organization on the map as an “old-timer” willing to help the young stars catch a break. Although Terry has “retired” numerous times over the past twenty-something years he still attached to the business very closely.
They will be inducted into the Hall by Dusty Rhodes, a fellow native Texan who has battled the Funks all through the ‘70s
