Ivan Koloff: An Evil Russian '80s Pro Wrestling Heel

Meeting "The Russian Bear"

Ivan Koloff poses with his signature chain. I took this photo the night I interviewed him.

January 18, 1971

The blustery cold New York City winter evening has not stopped the area’s pro wrestling fanatics from filling up Madison Square Garden to capacity yet again.

There are just over 21,000 fans in the building tonight.

It’s another in a long line of sold-out crowds at one of the premier pro wrestling venues in the country.

The crowd as a collective whole has come here to see the beloved Bruno Sammartino defend his WWWF world heavyweight championship.

Pro wrestling fans adore Bruno Sammartino.

Except for the first five weeks of the world title’s existence, Sammartino has been the reigning champion. He defeated the inaugural champion Buddy Rogers in May 1963.

In the nearly eight years since, he has emerged as the most popular attraction in all of professional wrestling.

Bruno’s challenger tonight is 29-year-old, 300 lb. Ivan Koloff, nicknamed “The Russian Bear”.

WWWF has no video camera recording tonight’s event.

The sole record of the historical event that will unfold is a lone contraband camcorder snuck into the building by a fan, who records the world title match from their mid-tier elevation seat.

The camera footage captured is slightly shaky, as camcorders tended to be in the early ‘70s in general and particularly in the hands of most hobbyists.

After all, the primary function most people use the technology for at this time is to film their family at outings and vacations.

There’s no sound on this kind of recording, but for filming a wrestling match it nevertheless provides a lively memento as the wrestling action itself tells the story.

The footage shot here tonight by this anonymous wrestling fan will be available and widely circulated more than a half century later, and it will be of keen interest to wrestling fans for generations to come. It will be watched on technology a half century plus later that the fans at this match can’t begin to fathom will exist.

When the bell rings in the world title match, Sammartino and Koloff immediately lock up. Neither gains an advantage. They break the lock up and try again with the same result.

On the third go around, Koloff puts a headlock on Sammartino. The champion responds quickly by shoving Koloff off the ropes. On the rebound, Koloff delivers a shoulder tackle and then bounces off the ropes again only to be caught by Sammartino, who backdrops him.

The champion covers the challenger but only gets a one count.

What proceeds is a back-and-forth flow with it alternating equally who has offensive control.

Sammartino delivers a couple of arm drags. Koloff fights out and delivers a leg scissors. Sammartino leg sweeps Koloff only to be kicked in the stomach as he approaches the challenger. Sammartino then does an arm bar as his next major move, only to have it reserved.

Neither one gaining control for any substantial length of time will be the theme of the match.

Bruno Sammartino’s offensive repertoire is based around punches and body slams with a mix of mat holds focused on the arm and leg. Ivan Koloff’s style is very similar.

When Sammartino’s punches finally begin to stagger Koloff, the crowd perhaps senses the end is near for the challenger like it has been in these title defenses for the last eight years.

A winding punch from Sammartino sends Koloff down to the mat for a one count. Sammartino quickly goes for another cover and this time gets a two count.

Koloff rallies back to his feet and whips Sammartino into the opposite corner turnbuckle and charges in with a boot, followed by a hard body slam.

The challenger then climbs to the top rope and delivers a knee drop onto the prone Sammartino.

The ref slaps the mat 1, 2, 3.

It’s both an abduct and shocking ending.

In later weeks, years, and decades, the accounts from those that were there live that night are universally the same: all say that the huge crowd went silent in the moment after Sammartino was pinned.

21,000 people not making a noise.

It seems they were collectively stunned to see Sammartino so suddenly defeated.

In an era where riots were common at wrestling shows, it would later be purported that the promotion feared that the fans would riot if Ivan Koloff was announced as the winner and new world champion and the title belt was secured around his waist in the center of the ring.

So, the ring announcer just declares Koloff the winner but does not say he’s the new world champion. The title belt is not handed over to Koloff either as is customary on a title change. Koloff quickly exits the ring to get backstage.

The promotional pictures of the new champion will be taken in a back hallway of Madison Square Garden, far away from the eyes of fans.

After he stopped wrestling for the NWA in 1989, Ivan Koloff wrestled for a large number of independent promotions throughout the United States and abroad. (Photo from the author’s personal collection.)

21 days later…

Ivan Koloff is back in Madison Square Garden five weeks later for his first title defense.

The building is sold out again with wrestling fans eager and hoping to see Koloff lose the title to the popular Pedro Morales. The prior month Morales defeated Freddie Blassie in a tournament final to win the vacant WWWF United States Championship.

Unlike when Koloff won the title, this time the promotion has a camera recording the match.

With both wrestlers in the ring, the announcement of the match commences.

Koloff is introduced first and the crowd responds with a vibrant chorus of boos. The announcement of Morales brings an equally boisterous crowd response, but for him it’s all cheers.

The match starts with Koloff jawing to the ref about something. Morales steps forward and throws a few soft jabs to get his opponent’s attention. Koloff stops the jawing, steps back and clenches his fists.

Koloff and Morales proceed to circle each other like boxers at the beginning of a fight, testing each other out with feints.

When the two lock up, Morales quickly maneuvers out and puts a headlock on Koloff. It’s only momentary, as Koloff promptly shoves Morales off the ropes. On the rebound, Morales delivers a shoulder block. He bounces off the ropes again to set up another move but is caught by Koloff and backdropped.

Morales rallies back on offense and then bounces off the ropes yet again only to get caught this time with a shoulder block. Koloff moves in stomps on Morales several times before dropping down to the mat to clamp on a headlock. The champion shifts his body position as he cinches in the headlock, moving slightly away from the ref’s visual sightline and using his singlet strap to choke Morales.

The ref finally catches on and breaks up the hold.

Morales is angry and fired up. The crowd picks up on his energy and cheers him on, buzzing with excitement as he takes control with a hard uppercut that staggers Koloff.

It’s only a brief momentum shift, as Koloff quickly regains offensive control with several kicks, an eye rake, and punches. Morales breaks it up by shoving Koloff off the ring ropes and the two collide mid ring when Koloff momentum sends him in a rapid fashion crashing back into Morales.

Morales is on his feet first and picks up Koloff for body slam, but his legs give out and Koloff falls on top of him for a two count.

Koloff picks up Morales and slams him back onto the mat. Then he quickly moves to the top rope, in a repeat of how he defeated Sammartino a few weeks earlier.

This time though Koloff misses his opponent with the knee drop and crashes down onto the mat knee first.

The noise in the crowd visibly rises.

Koloff staggers to his feet and Morales delivers a crossbody that gets a two count.

The fans rise to their feet all around the ringside.

Koloff pops up and whips Morales into the opposite ring corner. Then he lifts Morales up from behind in what appears to be the set up for a back suplex. Morales resists and then propels his feet off the top turnbuckle. The momentum causes the two to fall back to the mat.

Just before the three count, Morales lifts his shoulder.

The crowd is jubilant as all around the camera frame fans pump their fists in the air.

Several New York city policemen appear in the ring from off-camera and create a barrier around the ring, positioning themselves on the apron, to prevent the crowd from rushing into the ring in their excitement to celebrate the crowing of a new world champion.

I took this photo of Ivan Koloff’s match at an independent show after interviewing him.

Summer, 1986

“Magnum T.A. your attack on me last week, hitting me over the head with your United States heavyweight title, only goes to show what I’ve been saying all along that you’re an ill-tempered, uncontrollable man. You are not the athlete to represent America as the United States champion. My nephew Nikita is.

We’re glad the NWA has ordered the best of seven series for the Great American Bash to decide who is the U.S, Champion because this way my nephew Nikita can torture and punish you and teach you more manners for four straight matches and defeat you for the U.S. championship.”

- Ivan Koloff, on an episode of NWA’s WCW Saturday Night, just prior to the July start of The Great American Bash 1986 tour.

I had just started watching pro wrestling the prior Fall from when this promo aired. I discovered pro wrestling because of a cartoon. I wrote the story about it in my first Substack post Hulkamania is Real

I only watched WWF during my first few months as a wrestling fan. Then I started reading newsstand pro wrestling magazines and discovered there were other promotions out there.

At the end of 1985, I began watching NWA. It was a much different wrestling product than WWF. The NWA was grittier feeling, less character gimmick-oriented than the WWF and a little more, well, violent. The programs were built around grudge-based feuds, bloodshed was common, and I was enthralled by what I saw on TV from the roster of talent that included The Four Horsemen (Ric Flair, Tully Blanchard, Arn Anderson and Ole Anderson), The Road Warriors, Dusty Rhodes and The Midnight Express, among others.

It was from watching NWA that I first discovered I preferred, for the most part, the heels over the faces.

You know, the “bad guys”.

Two of my favorite heels from the 80s were Ivan and Nikita Koloff from the NWA.

Now, as fans, we were supposed to boo them because they were Russian, but I liked these two guys a lot because they came across as tough, determined and focused athletes who wanted to “win”.

Ivan had the pedigree of being the third ever champion in the lineal history of the WWE title. I knew this from my heavy reading of pro wrestling magazines at the time. Nikita was a physical specimen, intimidating looking, and well portrayed as a rising star, with the added billing as the nephew of Ivan Koloff.

As I would learn in the coming years as I immersed myself in the behind the scenes of pro wrestling, Ivan and Nikita were neither related nor Russian.

Ivan was a French Canadian from Montreal, and Nikita was an American from Minnesota.

Ivan Koloff had a prominent role in the NWA in his capacity as the uncle/manager/mentor and frequent tag team partner of rising star Nikita. It seemed that Nikita was poised for the top of the card and a possible world championship run before the decade’s conclusion, so that played a part in the two getting lots of airtime on a regular basis on NWA TV shows.

The third member of their heel faction was Kruser Khruschev, the future Demolition Smash, and he was not a Russian either. He was an American. The three held the NWA World Six-Man Tag Team Championship and were a formidable trio. Khruschev missed a good portion of 1986 with a knee injury but returned that summer. However, at the end of that year he left for WWF.

Ivan and Nikita played the role of evil Russians very well, and this was during the height of the cold war between the USA and USSR in the mid-80s.

That alone would have been sufficient to propel them to a high spot on the card, but additionally both were extremely talented in the ring in their own ways and had a tremendous presence in front of a camera, especially when they were together.

Russians were the ultimate villains of the ’80s in both pro wrestling and movies.

Action moves reigned supreme in this era and in every movie the villain always seemed to be a Russian, one of the more prominent movie villains being Dolph Lundgren as Russian boxer Ivan Drago in Rocky IV.

After Nikita turned good to align with Dusty Rhodes in 1986, Ivan Koloff’s next significant pairing was being added to Paul Jones’ heel faction. In that role, he played an integral role as a ringside second to The Barbarian and The Warlord in their feud with The Road Warriors.

In his last angle with the promotion before leaving in early 1989, Ivan turned good to reunite with Nikita Koloff.

I took this photo of Ivan Koloff right before his wrestling match I described in an article I wrote about him for a wrestling magazine

Meeting “The Russian Bear”

In the early ‘90s the concept of a standalone independent wrestling show was largely new and especially the concept of an independent show with a former TV wrestling star on a card with a line-up of local wrestlers.

The territory system of regional, full-time operating promotions was only a few years removed from having disappeared, and independent promotions were largely struggling to draw fans and find their audience.

This would all change within a few years. By the mid-90s, the independent scene would be vibrant, and promotions would have carved an identity and fan base by running both regular shows and developing rosters of local wrestlers, as well as implementing light storylines and feuds as part of the shows.

Back in the early ’90s, the only chance it seemed for most independent shows to make a profit enough to survive was to load the cards with local wrestlers, most of them with not too much experience and varying degrees of skill, with the common thread being they were willing to work for free or close to it.

Then the promoter would spend most of the show budget on bringing in a name wrestler, a legend or someone fresh off WWF or WCW TV, in the main event with the idea that would sell the tickets.

It was these kind of shows in the early ‘90s that epitomized promoters trying to fill the gap left by the whole disappearance of territory promotions with full-time rosters, week-to-week cohesive story lines and a locally broadcast television show.

The independent promotions of the early ’90s though weren’t really promotions at all in the traditional sense of the word.

Rather, they would often just be one-off shows. Many of these “promotions”, if you could call them that, only ran one or two shows and no more, and then somebody else would come in and run one or two shows after that in the same area and then never promote again too.

It was on one of those types of show that I heard Ivan Koloff was booked.

At the time I was writing for several different pro wrestling magazines and always looking to do interviews with former WWF or WCW stars so I could write profile articles about them.

I reached out to the promoter and requested permission to take photos ringsides and asked him to arrange an interview with Koloff, with the understanding I would mention the name of the independent promotion when describing Koloff’s match as part of the wrestling magazine story I would write.

I can still remember well the setting well where I interviewed Ivan Koloff.

It was a dilapidated back room, with a ripped couch and several rusty folding chairs, in a very rundown tiny community activities hall.

I remember thinking that this kind of small-town event was a long way from the stadium shows that Ivan performed in at the height of his NWA tenure and the sold out shows when he headlined at Madison Square Garden for the WWWF in the 70's.

Insights from Ivan

At the time of our interview, Ivan Koloff was a nearly 30-year pro wrestling veteran.

He told me that he started wrestling steadily in 1965 and debuted first in Asia, then came to wrestle in Montreal and that his great uncle, Dan Koloff, was a famous wrestler during the ’30s and ‘40s.

I was unclear at the time if Ivan was actually related to “Dan Koloff” in real life since back when I interviewed him the wrestlers always remained in character for magazine interviews. It would have been inappropriate for me, and against wrestling “journalism” protocol, to question him and be like, “Oh, was that your actual Uncle Dan or are you making this up for the magazine story?”

I was curious recently, so I searched the name “Dan Koloff” after all these years.

Turns out there was a pro wrestler from Bulgaria named Don Kolov in the first half of the 1900s.

He was well-known for that time and a top attraction from the late teens through the late ’30s and died in 1940. There was a movie made about his life in the late ’90s and he was inducted in the Wrestling Observer Newsletter Hall of Fame in 2020, so he was not an obscure name.

The timeline of when Ivan said “Dan Koloff” wrestled leads me to believe he was referencing Dan Kolov in his recount to me and perhaps the idea for the name Koloff came from Kolov, since they sound practically the same. Many wrestlers in times gone by adopted wrestler’s last names from earlier eras and make slight adjustments to the spelling.

Research a few years after I interviewed Koloff also would reveal he debuted under the name Red McNulty and was billed from Ireland, although he never referenced this in our interview when I asked him how he got started in professional wrestling. This would be expected since it was an in-character interview and the details of his actual early days in wrestling would detract from the story of Ivan Koloff.

Because of his reign as a WWF champion, Koloff told me he considered the WWF to be his favorite promotion for which he worked.

He said that his preference now was to wrestle on the developing independent circuit (which did then, and still does mean, working almost exclusively weekends).

I asked him if he was looking to return full-time to the WCW (NWA had been rebranded by this time) in the near future or had an interest in wrestling for WWF.

He said that he did not and added he was not interested in doing full-time pro wrestling work anymore with a touring wrestling national promotion, that those days had passed.

“The best thing about working on the independent scene is that I have control over my time,” explained Koloff. “Nowadays I pick and choose my schedule, so it is convenient for me. As opposed to wrestling seven days a week, I can wrestle where and when I want. Right now, I am wrestling twice a week. After so many years on the road I keep my work schedule down.”

Despite the reduced schedule, Koloff told me that he was keeping quite active around the country. His matches with independent organizations had taken him all over the United States, including Texas, Ohio, Tennessee, West Virginia and Maryland.

He said he has been making frequent appearances overseas too, including tours in Kuwait and Bermuda.

One of the things Koloff said he enjoyed most about wrestling on independent shows was the chance to face younger talent that might develop to the point they would get a shot with either WCW or WWF.

Here’s my short description of Ivan Koloff’s match that night that I included in the magazine article I wrote about him.

Ivan Koloff was booked to face rising star, The Golden Phoenix.

The bout between Koloff and The Phoenix proved to be a very interesting one. It was a match of a wily veteran against an upstart. Ivan, with his nearly thirty years of wrestling experience and knowledge, was matched against a burly rising star hungry for fame.

Koloff came to the ring accompanied by The Russian Assassin.

(It seemed whenever an independent promoter back then needed someone to wrestle in a mask, usually a wrestler who had already appeared on the show, he was called The Assassin with any of an assortment of generic names inserted before it. The practice still occurs today.)

While The Russian Assassin distracted the referee, Ivan used his chain to work over The Golden Phoenix. The Phoenix refused to back down from anything the veteran Koloff dished out. Koloff, in turn, matched the much younger wrestler in all encounters.

The match finally came to an end when The Russian Assassin entered the ring and caused Koloff to be disqualified. The Russian Assassin and Koloff then delivered a brutal beating to The Golden Phoenix.

Ivan was out to prove that he was still tough as nails and a man not to be messed with.

That same week, Koloff met another upstart young wrestler, Tony Stetson, in Philadelphia for the debut show of the Eastern Wrestling Federation.

Once again Koloff brutally beat his opponent with his infamous chain after the match.

Koloff may have been mistaken on the name of the promotion when he told me where he had just wrestled, as he was most likely referring to Eastern Championship Wrestling, which a few years later morphed into ECW/Extreme Championship Wrestling.

Pro wrestling schools were still a newer concept in the early ‘90s and not very prevalent as they would be in the decades to follow. Koloff mentioned during our interview that he had spent a considerable amount of time since leaving WCW training wrestlers and had been running his own wrestling school in North Carolina. He said he had approximately forty students and former WCW wrestlers David Isley and Rick Nelson assisted him with the training.

“Anybody interested in pursuing a career in wrestling, man or woman, I believe I can help you,” said Koloff, when I asked him to tell magazine readers about his training program. “Whether you are interested in becoming a wrestler, referee, or manager, my program can help you. I have an in-depth course for wrestlers that covers basic holds, counters, ring psychology and interviews. When you become a student of mine, I am your coach and will help you develop a career.”

Koloff said that besides his own school, he was also training wrestlers twice a week at the South Atlantic Pro Wrestling School for the local promotor and that Chris Chavis had been in one of the recent classes there before getting signed by WWF and re-named Tatanka.

What advice did Koloff have for perspective wrestlers?

He asked that I quote his response word for word in the magazine article I was writing.

“Stay away from steroids,” said the former world champion. “I am strictly against young athletes taking steroids. More and more side effects are being discovered each year. There are a couple of friends of mine who used steroids in the past and are regretting it now. For a person to be only 40 or 50 years old and crippled because of steroids after a successful career is a real shame.”

Steroids had been legal, with a doctor’s prescription, a couple of years before our interview took place and were a hot topic in the news and wrestling business itself when I spoke to Ivan Koloff.

He added that people should avoid all drugs and alcohol too.

“The computer can’t function right if different chemicals are in it,” said Koloff.

I thanked him for his time, took a few pictures of him holding his infamous chain, and promised to send him a copy of the magazine when the story about him was published.

Koloff shook my hand and thanked me in return for having an interest in writing about him, which struck me as incredibly humble coming from someone who reached the upper levels of professional wrestling for two different major organizations.

Ivan Koloff initially retired from active wrestling in 1994 but came back in 2004 and wrestled sporadically until 2013 for assorted independent promotions around the country.

He died in 2017.

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