King Curtis Iaukea

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Curtis Iaukea was a professional wrestler better known as King Curtis Iaukea. He competed in the WWF where he won the WWF Tag Team Championship. He was also later The Master of the Dungeon of Doom in WCW.

[edit] Profile

Hometown: Hawaii
Professional debut: 1962
Previous identities: The Wizard, Prince Curtis Iaukea, The Bull, The Master

Curtis Iakeau won championships in several of the major regional US promotions, both as a single and in various tag team combinations, during the 1960s.

In no other part of the world did television wrestling win such widespread mass appeal in the sixties as it did in Australia.In that country, King Curtis became a household name.As part of the face team known as the People's Army, King Curtis, together with Mark Lewin and Spiros Arion, played a large part in making television wrestling part of everyday conversation across Australia during the so-called "Golden Years" of the Jim Barnett promotion, roughly 1964 - 1975. Although television rating surveys were then in their infancy, the audience share at the time is generally guessed to have been comparable to Olympic Games type viewership, and this on a show that ran on a weekly basis.

King Curtis in his rip-roaring prime was a growling and belicose personae with a Van Dyke beard,a pony tailed mane, and a massive torso on dancer's legs (officially he was announced as "the fabulous King Curtis from Honolulu, Hawaii at twenty two stone...!") His first sojourns to Australia were in the 1964 - 1965 season, where he was a heel who bit and stabbed with foreign objects. He was teamed with Skull Murphy, before the latter's highly successful partnership with Brute Bernard in the second half of the sixties. Whether in tag or singles matches, Curtis was always top of the card, and with the other headliners ensured that Australia's then-largest stadiums were filled to capacity with fans. King Curtis initially wrestled as Curtis Iakeau in his first run in Australia. But the King Curtis tag was the one that stuck as he played a killer heel in the latter sixties in a long-running feud against Mark Lewin. His matches were what today's wrestling fraternity would call "hardcore", but they could also be hilarious. In a memorable match against Quasimodo-like Dick "The Bulldog" Brower, he allowed Brower to chase him in unavailing circles around the ring until Brower became dizzy and fell victim to Curtis's "Hawaiian Splash." Fans still talk about Curtis - Lewin matches that continued into the audience, up the aisles, and outside on the street where heads met with parked cars.

After turning face in time for the seventies, King Curtis thrilled Australian audiences with his feuds against visiting heels such as Tiger Singh and various Japanese "brothers." Invariably these exotic foreigners would arrive on Australian shores with much-hyped killer holds against the good guys Curtis, Lewin, Arion and Mario Milano, who met them in a range of stipulation matches (cages, strap matches, loser-leaves town contests) which bought television wrestling to a level of mainstream popularity possibly never achieved in any other country before or since.

King Curtis was the anchor for the good-guy team which every Australian television viewer knew as "The People's Army." In the 1971 - 1974 seasons, this team created riots in Australian capitals as a "wrestling war" broke out against the various bad-guy outfits managed by Big Bad John, an outrageous biker/ preacher character "from the hills of Kentucky." This highly profitable run made Curtis Iakeau a much-loved figure with fans as diverse as school kids and grandmothers. In the wrestling business, he was also popular and well-liked, giving his all to the Australian promotions, even when ratings waned after 1975. King Curtis's masterly crowd control, showmanship and bullish disregard for blading and risk-taking (his battle scarred forehead week after week was the stuff of barroom conversation) helped maintain some momentum for the promotion in the second half of the 1970s. He was still drawing the crowds when Australian television wrestling closed in 1978.

Curtis Iakeau is remembered by Australian audiences for his stadium pleasing charisma, and warm, likeable personae.

After retiring in the 1980s Curtis Iakeau re-appeared in the WWF promotion as a manager. In 2002, he made a rare public appearance on behalf of the Altzheimer's Foundation in Hawaii.