Johnny Valiant
Exuberant ‘villain’ on the 1970s professional wrestling circuit
JOHNNY VALIANT, who has died aged 71, was an American professional wrestler and one half of the flamboyant tag-team duo the Valiant Brothers.
Considered by many aficionados of the sport to be the best tag team of the 1970s, the bleached blond “brothers” were in fact unrelated to each other. “Handsome” Jimmy Valiant had been born James Fanning and had already made his name as a popular ring baddy or “heel” by the beginning of the decade.
Johnny, meanwhile, often known as “Luscious”, had begun his professional career as the “babyface” John L Sullivan – someone for the crowd to cheer as he lost to bigger, more brutish stars. However, his partnership with Jimmy saw him reinvented in fully villainous mode. In January 1974 the Valiant Brothers won the WWA tag team championship, defeating rivals Dick the Bruiser and Bruno Sammartino.
Over the next five years Johnny and Jimmy reigned supreme, establishing audience expectations – for outrageous costumes, renegade behaviour and over-dramatic storylines – that still hold true today. “I was arrogant, sadistic if you turned your back on me, and in the end I’d usually win – cheating, of course,” Johnny Valiant recalled. Incidents of eye-gouging and hair-pulling were all part of the show.
Together the “brothers” won a second world tag team championship before Jimmy was sidelined due to illness and a third stage brother, known as “Gentleman” Jerry (real name John Steele Hill) took his place.
Although Johnny and Jerry gained another world title in 1979, the physical effort involved had taken its toll. After 1980 Johnny stepped back from the ring to begin a second career as a manager. His clients included Hulk Hogan, then just on the brink of stardom, and the 1985 tag team champions Brutus Beefcake and Greg Valentine.
Johnny Valiant also flirted with stand-up comedy and television acting, appearing as a mob bodyguard on The Sopranos and in bit parts on shows such as Law and Order. After years of being pelted by fans and hit over the head with chairs – sometimes for as little as $100 a night – the poor pay and relative obscurity of the roles on offer did not faze him. “I’m not Shakespeare. I don’t do Macbeth,” he told a Newsday journalist in 1999. “But then, Shakespeare doesn’t do Johnny Valiant.”
He was born Thomas Michael Sullivan on November 25 1946 and grew up in Pittsburgh. As a teenager he got into trouble for dyeing his hair blond. His parents, Edward and Irene Sullivan, sent him to military school, but any plan to set him on the straight and narrow collapsed when young Thomas fell in with a fellow cadet, Vincent Mcmahon, whose passion for wrestling matched his own. The pair were ejected for skipping a training exercise and Thomas eventually graduated from Pittsburgh’s North Hills High School. Decades later, he and Mcmahon would be reunited in the ring, the latter working as an announcer for WWE (World Wrestling Entertainment).
Thomas’s father, also a wrestling fan, died when he was still a teenager, an event that only intensified his ambition. Aged 18 he knocked on the door of Bruno Sammartino and offered to do chores in exchange for help breaking into the sport.
He got a job setting up rings in Detroit, before making his competitive debut as John L Sullivan (named in tribute to the Victorian-era heavyweight boxer). In 1996, as Johnny Valiant, he was inducted into the WWE Hall of Fame.
For all his aggression in the ring and his swagger outside it, Johnny Valiant had a more serious side. In his youth he had served as an altar boy, and he continued to attend Mass every week.
He died after being hit by a truck as he crossed the road to catch a bus. He is survived by his wife Youmei, and by two sons from a previous marriage.