Ikfmdc i had to do some digging up on this so if you can please take the time to read this... what Lou said about the shoot between him and Karl
It's Karl you asked about, though, and I saved him for last, because that relationship was an especially disappointing one for Lou. It's true that there was genuine heat between them; it came out when we were writing the book and I noticed that Lou had cut Karl's name from the section in the first draft where he listed some of the competitive wrestlers who were around in the '50s and early '60s. I asked him why, and he said he'd called Karl to ask for some general biographical information. He said Karl declined, saying that he was writing a book of his own and wasn't inclined to help out. Lou then said that was typical of Karl and went off on what amounted (for Lou, anyway) to a rant: He said Karl was always full of himself and very difficult to deal with; he also said, for the first of what would be many times, that Karl blew his chance at being a major star in this country by refusing to listen to others (namely Lou) about how to best handle himself. Lou had enormous respect for Karl as a wrestler, but he didn't care for the individual; he said Karl was arrogant and stubborn and, ultimately, in the sense of understanding wrestling as a business, a poor businessman.
I knew absolutely nothing about the match where Lou suffered the broken ribs until long after we'd finished the book. I was visiting Lou in Norfolk, and he was talking about the happiest time of his career (it was during the earliest years, in St. Louis, when he had the training camp on the Merrimac River and the boys were hanging out there, wrestling competitively during the day and partying at night). I asked him, what then was the lowest point? He said, without hesitation, it was the time he spent recovering from the broken ribs he'd suffered in that match with Karl. I'd never heard the story, so I later wrote it down as best I could recall, figuring that we might yet do another rewrite and could use the story then. What Lou said, in part, was this: "I still had the resort in Tucson at the time, so I crawled back there and holed up in my room. I slept on a mattress on the floor and had food sent in from the kitchen; I saw nobody, because I didn't want to be around people, and I didn't want anyone to see me in that condition. Broken ribs are extremely painful, and I was a long time healing. Mike DiBiase came around a couple of times just to check on me, but that was it in terms of companionship."
Mostly, Lou said, he was pissed at himself for "going to sleep" (Lou's words) that night against Karl. He always was alert to the possibility of a doublecross, but he trusted Karl enough, once they'd started working, to lower his guard. When Karl blocked him, it hit Lou immediately that something was up, and he ended things immediately. "I made him howl," is how Lou put it.
So yes, Lou believed it was an attempted doublecross. And he was mad at himself for almost allowing it to happen. He once said to me, long after that initial conversation, that Karl was an excellent choice to do it, because he was a good wrestler and probably could have pulled it off if Lou hadn't been so quick to snatch him and end the match.
I've never met Karl, and never even tried, in large part because I was aware of the heat between the two men and figured he wouldn't welcome my inquiries. Lou became one of my closest friends, and I miss him terribly, but I'm not an apologist for him; I met too many people in the wrestling business who were happy to talk about the "other side" of Lou, and I've heard enough stories to be satisfied that some of those tales are true, so I'm sure Karl could say some illuminating and unkind things about Lou. In the final analysis, though, I believe that the friction between the two stems from personal pride in their wrestling abilities. Lou was a lot like Ed Lewis in that he was very grudging with praise for the guys who could really go, and Karl was definitely in that group.