The Iron Sheik is not doing well

By Mike Foss – June 25, 2013 at 12:53pm EDT

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The life of 73-year-old Hossein Khosrow Ali Vaziri, better known as pro wrestling villain “The Iron Sheik” has been hard, and very tragic.
In a sweeping essay, Kevin Iole of Yahoo! paints the picture of a man trapped within the limitations of his body, wrestling the one opponent that he has never been able to pin.
Himself.

The Iron Sheik has horrific, crippling injuries

(WWF)

Iole writes:

His left knee is particularly painful, and gruesome looking. A bone protrudes out. The bones, Caryl Vaziri said, are out of alignment and “don’t come together.” It makes it torture to walk.

Caryl Vaziri, the Sheik’s wife, also recalled the daily struggles facing her husband.

“He told me, ‘Caryl, I hurt from the top of my head to the bottom of my toes.’ It breaks my heart.”

The murder of his daughter in 2003 still haunts him

(Getty)

Caryl remembered the death of the couple’s 27-year-old daughter, Marissa, who was murdered by her boyfriend in 2003.
“It was devastating. No parent expects to bury their child. It tore us apart.”

The Iron Sheik was addicted to crack cocaine

(Getty)

Josip Peruzovic, better known as the Sheik’s WWF tag-team partner Nikolai Volkoff, saw the Sheik fall into drug use and alcoholism during his meteoric rise up the professional wrestling ranks.

“My God, I think at one time, more than 90 percent of the wrestlers were taking one drug or another,” Peruzovic said. “I was fortunate that I never got mixed up in that. I don’t drink, and I don’t smoke and I never was fooling around with drugs. I thank God for that. But I know that the Sheik had a lot of problems with it.

It wasn’t until a mild heart attacka few years ago that the Sheik was able to come relatively clean.
“He’ll buzz a beer here or there, but he’s been clean for the most part since that time,” according to Caryl.

The Iron Sheik has been stabbed by fans during performances

Vaziri recalled the difficulties of playing the bad guy. He has been stabbed by fans “several times”during performances (though Iole points out the stabbings were only in the upper arm). His family was also threatened, had their car’s windshield smashed and sugar dumped into the tank. --------------------- FORTHEWIN