Kevin Sullivan

 

Kevin Sullivan had already been a twelve-year veteran in professional wrestling when he took advantage of the religious right's obsession with "Satanic Panic" to create the gimmick that he inhabited for the rest of his career—the Prince of Darkness, as first seen in Championship Wrestling from Florida in the early 1980s. Sullivan spoke of praying to a god named Abudadein while eating cosmic cookies and chewing the betel nut, in which he was then tied to the Tree of Woe to gain insight on how to destroy his foes without mercy. He assembled his Army of Darkness, an incredible visual spectacle of rogue wrestlers gone horribly wrong and scantily-clad slave girls who would drape Sullivan's body with boa constrictors. One can imagine how the Florida territory crowds responded to such provocative antics at that time!

Although I was unable to see Kevin Sullivan at his peak in Florida, reading about him in The Pictorial History of Wrestling was quite compelling stuff. He was embroiled in a blood feud with Dusty Rhodes, which at one point escalated to a different level when Sullivan attacked the American Dream's own sister and threw a bottle of ink in her face to blind her temporarily! Sullivan actually triumphed in his rivalry with Rhodes, declaring the American Dream dead by running him out of Florida. Black Jack Mulligan met a similar fate at the hands of Sullivan and his Army of Darkness, who repeatedly left the popular cowboy grappler a bloody mess on television and at arena events.

Satanic Panic was mostly a thing of the past by the time Kevin Sullivan came aboard with Jim Crockett Promotions (soon to be rechristened WCW) in the late '80s. He toned down his gimmick considerably, losing much of his faux-Satanic trappings to become the Taskmaster. Sullivan as the Taskmaster remained in WCW throughout the 1990s, with brief stops in Smoky Mountain Wrestling and ECW along the way before transitioning into a backstage role until WCW folded in 2001.