Superfly: The Jimmy Snuka Story

—

I would like to dedicate this book to my beautiful angel, my wife, my everything

Contents

Foreword by Rowdy Roddy Piper

Introduction by Mick Foley

Preface

1. A Real-life Tarzan

2. Body of Work

3. Under the Bright Lights

4. Homeward Bound

5. Gaining My Independence

6. A New Lease on Life

Epilogue

Afterword by Carole Snuka

Appendix. The Jimmy Snuka Timeline

Appendix. The Snuka Family Tree

Appendix. The Snuk-tionary

Acknowledgments

Praise for Jimmy Superfly Snuka

The Jimmy Snuka legacy will always be not what he did in the ring but what he did above the ring. His body splash off the top of a steel cage is the most impressive move I’ve ever seen. It was his signature. Others tried it. Mick Foley. Shawn Michaels. Even Hulk Hogan tried to splash the Big Boss Man from the top of the cage. But nobody—and I mean nobody—could do it as gracefully and effectively as Jimmy ‘Superfly’ Snuka.

—Mean Gene Okerlund, WWE announcer and Hall of Famer

I can’t say Jimmy Snuka is the best of all time, but he was the best of his time. At that point, wrestling needed somebody like him, and what he brought to the table was blowing fans’ minds. He wasn’t a rushed wrestler. He took his time, but he knew when to do the high-flying spots. There has never been anybody like him. The Jeff Hardys and RVDs are awesome wrestlers, but there will never be another Jimmy Snuka. He’s one of a kind.

—Kurt Angle, Impact Wrestling and former WWE star and Olympic gold-medalist

I was senior editor and photo editor at a pro wrestling magazine when I first saw him. I hadn’t seen him in person, but when I saw a picture of him in midair, high above the ring in a match against ‘Alaskan’ Jay York, I was amazed. I had never seen anyone like this. We started running stories on him right away. When I did meet him in New York, he was always grateful we ran a story. He sold magazines whenever we put him on the cover.

—Bill Apter, wrestling journalist

Jimmy was the only guy in the business who could watch someone do something in the ring and then be able to go out there and do the same thing.

—Matt Borne, the original Doink the Clown

Everyone would talk about Jimmy’s great athletic ability, but workers within the industry always knew what a great wrestler he was. He was a great draw wherever he went, whether he was a babyface or a heel. I was fortunate to grow up in New York, and I paid a lot of money to see Jimmy Snuka on the card.

—Tommy Dreamer, former ECW, WWE, and TNA Wrestling star

Look where he’s from, and look where he ended up. He was one of the best workers in the business, and he did it the old-fashioned way: he earned it. Nothing was given to him. He made his own legacy.

—Paul Orndorff, WWE Hall of Famer

When Jimmy Snuka jumped off the cage, it made me do what I want to do. I was a daredevil. I didn’t do any cliff jumping, but in elementary school, I would always jump from the highest limb on the tree. Snuka started all of that, and I can’t thank him enough. He started something, and I’ve made my living off of it.

—Jeff Hardy, TNA and former WWE star

I remember seeing Jimmy Snuka in his prime. He was my favorite wrestler when I was a kid…. He’s the kind of guy who, if you saw him at a bar, you’d just be like, ‘Hey Jimmy!’ He’s got that vibe. There are not a lot of guys who were like that. He had this earthy quality to him that’s so rare, and certainly fans connected with that.

—Billy Corgan, Smashing Pumpkins founder/lead singer and RESISTANCE Pro Wrestling creative director

He had a mystery about him…well, it seemed that way when I was 10. We, of course, used to imitate him and his signature move from the top rope. I remember him being a ‘good guy’ but you almost never knew what he was gonna do.

—Constantine Maroulis, Tony-nominated Broadway star and American Idol finalist

My brother and I watched Jimmy Snuka wrestle on TV in North Carolina in the 1970s, and we were obsessed with him. When he would climb up to the top rope, we would howl, ‘From the top rope…’ And then when he launched himself into the air like a muscle-bound bat and crush some villainous opponent, we’d scream, ‘Superfly!’ Then we’d pull old mattresses into the backyard and have neighborhood smackdowns.

—Clark Gregg, co-star of Iron Man, Thor, and The Avengers

Foreword by Rowdy Roddy Piper

I met Jimmy Snuka back in Portland, but we only became close many years later. I was a rookie at the time, and he was about to leave. We would meet up again down the road and become brothers. Jimmy had gotten his big break in Portland, and they just loved him there. If that place could sing…holy cow! Jimmy learned how to wrestle and expanded on everything he was taught. The package was already put together by the time he debuted in Portland—the look and everything.

He wore the lei and seashells around his neck because he knew where he came from. This was a man who danced on fire and dove off cliffs. With his island look, he was like a real-life Tarzan. Leap-frogging off the top of the rope was nothing for him. It was like taking a step off the curb is for the rest of us.

Jimmy always studied everything and made it his own. Wrestling was the Wild West back then, not what it is today. Jimmy was going pretty hard, and when we were in Charlotte we would bang out seven or eight towns a week. It was a brutal territory. All the bruddas, as Jimmy would say, would do 90 interviews each Tuesday there. We’d be running in all these towns, and all of us would have to do these interviews for each market, and each one had to be different. So, here’s Jimmy with Dusty Rhodes, Ric Flair, Andre the Giant, the Briscos, and Jimmy Valiant, and those guys were pretty good on the mic. But even with his limited vocabulary, Jimmy was able to get over using his eyes and his emotions. It wasn’t what he said; the whole magic of Jimmy was his heart and his soul. That’s why cameramen needed to zoom in on his eyes during promos. For Jimmy, it was all in the eyes. His eyes are the window to his soul. And when he goes out there, Jimmy opens up his soul. When he was in the Carolinas, he and Ricky The Dragon Steamboat had so many classic matches. Jimmy had a lot of classic matches with a lot of guys—he just went so hard in that territory and really came into his own.

By the time Jimmy got to New York, he was on fire. He was primed and ready. He was rolling with the big dogs and drawing a lot of money. But they did a dirty thing to him: they made him a heel. They tried him as a bad guy, but the fans just loved him anyway. Jimmy was getting over so much that a guy who came into New York got angry when he couldn’t get over Jimmy.

When Hulk Hogan came in, Jimmy and Don Muraco had been carrying the entire New York territory. When they put Jimmy in a cage match against Muraco….holy cow! It was amazing when Jimmy climbed up where no one dared to go. What a moment that was. When he looked at Muraco and brought those hands up, the flashbulbs went off. Muraco was lying on his back, and Jimmy didn’t just dive off. He did a half-squat and swan- dove out there. He gave Muraco the charley horse of a lifetime. Muraco won the match, but that was done on purpose. There was no underhandedness on Muraco’s part at all. That was done to make room for someone new.

I was the one Jimmy feuded with next. As a heel, working with someone like Jimmy is a dream. The Piper’s Pit we made almost instantly brought wrestling into a new age. Everybody was just like, What just happened? After it aired, it was like a bomb went off. It was hard to get around. I thought people were going to stab me after I hit him with the coconut. I’d been stabbed before.

I love Jimmy, but the reason I brought in the coconuts, bananas, and pineapples was he only could say, like, three words. This was the second time I had him on the Pit, and he wouldn’t talk. The first time, he didn’t talk, and the second time, we just stared at each other. I was like, Oh man, I’ve got two minutes and 54 seconds and this guy is not going to say anything. What am I going to do? So, I just asked him to get me something from Fiji, and two hours later, we filmed it again. I was trying to figure out what to do. I don’t know how many guys would’ve stood for that.

I don’t think I’d ever had a coconut in my hand before that day. It just came up when a coconut dropped out of a paper bag. There were six or seven coconuts in there, and I’m trying to fill the three minutes we had but I had nothing to say. I was looking at Jimmy as if to say, Are you sure about this? He told me to hit him with it. He didn’t run over in slow motion and say, Yeah, let’s do that. It was an idea, and in my mind, he had given me permission. I wouldn’t have done it otherwise.

People have called it the greatest angle in the history of professional wrestling. There have been a lot of great angles, but this one is hard to beat. I do think it took something out of Jimmy. I don’t know. I was wrestling him every night to big crowds. There was tension there all the time because of what I did on TV. We got into it in Chicago in a hotel hallway one night, but I was not mad at him. It took me a while to realize it, but he sacrificed his whole career for me. What do I say about a man who did that? From there, we became brothers, and I started watching out for him.

I think Jimmy’s career was cut short in the WWF. I feel there were four or five years where he could have been on top. After he was in Hogan’s corner at the first WrestleMania, something snapped with Jimmy. He just left. It was a brutal, vicious business back then, and Jimmy was hurt by it. There was a lot of pressure on a guy who didn’t really know who to trust, and he was always dependent on somebody else because English isn’t his first language. He hooked up with some wicked white people. He was trained under territorial rules, and all of a sudden there was a new world order in New York, and there were no rules.

I’m proud any time someone mentions my name alongside Jimmy Superfly Snuka’s name. He’s perfect in every way. The best word to describe him is organic. Everything about Jimmy is so real; his words in this book are no different. It’s Jimmy—laying his soul on the line, for the fans, just like he always has.

—Rowdy Roddy Piper

Introduction by Mick Foley

During my senior year of high school, it was not uncommon for me to stay home to watch Jimmy Snuka wrestle. Sure, my social calendar wasn’t that full, but I remember being invited to parties and telling people no because I was watching Jimmy Snuka that night. He had that big an effect on me. I think I got to touch him in 1980 in Syracuse, and I thought my life had just peaked. You couldn’t go to an acting class and say here’s the Snuka look and perfect it. An Oscar winner couldn’t do it. To take 20,000 people and make them simultaneously feel something inside is a gift that not many people in entertainment have. Snuka was able to convey this. He kept people emotionally captivated in his matches.

A couple months before that infamous cage match in 1983, I attended my first live wrestling show at Madison Square Garden. I watched the first match in the Don Muraco/Jimmy Snuka trilogy. I just remember Jimmy’s great words: I’m not through with you yet, Don Muraco. I was glued. And that cage match with Muraco, which I write about in my own autobiography, was the moment I really felt like I wanted to make people feel the way Snuka had made me feel.

It was such an emotional moment. It was a moment in time. It took everything else Snuka had done to get him to the top of the cage. It was all those road trips in Japan, breaking in and doing time in the Carolinas and Portland. Everything led to that moment. It was so much more than just the athletic feat of reaching the top of the cage. It was the anticipation of it, his timing, and the spectacle of it all—his slinging his hair back, putting up the I love you sign, and launching into the air.

I’ve always been fascinated with moments in time that people are remembered for. Sometimes it’s the worst moments in their lives that are remembered, but in Jimmy’s case, everything he had done before and after was going to pale in comparison to that one moment in time.

In 1990, Jimmy and I had a lumberjack match in front of 300 or 400 fans in a 17,000-seat arena in Las Vegas, and it was far from a classic match. It was completely improvised, and we ended up doing a double count-out, and that never happens. I remember being given the task of telling Jimmy the outcome, which was not supposed to be in his favor. I guess he wasn’t happy with that so I came up with a double count-out. That’s not supposed to happen—you actually have lumberjacks there specifically so you don’t leave the ring area. It was ludicrous. I’m sure it wasn’t memorable for Jimmy, but for me, to wrestle the guy who had been my biggest inspiration, it was a big match. I was nervous, but at the same time I felt confident. I had some national TV exposure and was determined to make it a good match. After all, I was out there in the ring with my hero.

I believe Jimmy was taken away from WWF fans too soon. I went to the Garden to see him against Rowdy Roddy Piper, and didn’t see him again for a while. I know he resurfaced in the AWA and later in WWF again, but I feel kind of cheated in regard to the magic of the Snuka era. I still have the Superfly poster that hung over my bed during my senior year of high school and freshman year in college.

To make a baseball comparison, it was like when Ted Williams was taken away from the Red Sox during World War II—but at least there was a more logical reason for Ted’s absence. We missed out on what would’ve been the best run of Jimmy’s career. Everybody who meets Jimmy knows he has some human frailties, but that’s real life. Just because you can have 20,000 people in the palm of your hand doesn’t means you can control your life any better than the rest of us. All you can ask for is kindness and decency in your heroes. Jimmy has not disappointed me yet.

—Mick Foley

Preface

The word fear is not a part of my vocabulary. This brudda doesn’t know what that word means. I never have and I never will. It has no meaning to me. Growing up in the Fiji Islands, the Gilbert and Marshall Islands, and eventually Hawaii, I was never afraid of anything. Danger means nothing to the Superfly. I live my life to the max without giving much thought to how dangerous something can be or how impossible it might be. I make the impossible possible—I always have, long before I jumped off the top of the steel cage at Madison Square Garden.

Heights mean nothing to this brudda, either. I can’t tell you how many times I used to dive off cliffs as a kid. I loved birds. I’d always look up to the sky, and I was fascinated with them. I wanted to know how it felt to fly. I remember when my children were born, I thought about getting