The Iron Sheik was an icon of opportunity and reinvention
Who Hossein Kozrow Ali Vaziri was largely depends on when you were born. If you’re an Iranian born in the 1940s or someone heavily into the Greco-Roman wrestling scene in the 1960s and early 1970s, you may recognize him as a standout on the mat for his home country or coach for the U.S.
The majority of those who recognize him, however, know him as the Iron Sheik. For those who grew up in the 80s, that meant he was the exaggerated, comic book antagonist to Hulk Hogan, leaning into his roots as an expatriate and providing an avatar for a hated enemy. For kids who grew up two decades later, he was Sheiky Baby, prolific internet garbage poster who lived every breath in ALL CAPS, beloved despite unfiltered and occasionally problematic posts that ventured into mysogyny, racism and homophobia.
Vaziri — “Khosrow,” as friends called him — was each of those men to varying degrees. Their braid through his life came to an end June 7 after 81 years, as he died recently, his Twitter account announced Wednesday.
RESPECT THE LEGEND FOREVER pic.twitter.com/Cr6CC9pXSO
— The Iron Sheik (@the_ironsheik) June 7, 2023
Vaziri, Sheik, whatever you’d like to call him, lived a life defined by his willingness to lean in and rise above his surroundings. His childhood home, as he tells it, had no running water. He managed to emerge as a world-class wrestler regardless. When mentor and training partner Gholamreza Takhti died suspiciously after criticizing Iran’s ruling class, he left his home country for a place in the relative safety of Minnesota and an assistant coaching job with the U.S. Olympic squad.
This all led to legendary midwestern pro wrestling promoter Verne Gagne and a decades-long affair with the squared circle that threatened to build and destroy a legend in equal parts. Vaziri was built like a whiskey cask with arms, capable of pulling off genuinely astonishing feats of strength.
But he wasn’t just brute force. He was a trusted worker in the ring. More importantly, he had the charisma to not only overcome the hurdle of speaking English as a second language in a business ruled by talkers, but also to make it a distinct advantage. The Iron Sheik wasn’t just an invader fit into a wrestling stereotype; he became the mold for everyone that followed for years. For better or (mostly) worse, he was the standard by which so many other horrible gimmicks would be measured.
None of this would have been possible if he wasn’t willing to jump at an opportunity, no matter how slim the outcome of success might be. Within a decade he was headlining shows at Madison Square Garden. He was the ninth-ever WWE Champion. He was the launching pad that allowed Hulkamania to take off.
He also leaned into the excess behind the scenes in professional wrestling. He was arrested in 1987 after New Jersey State Police pulled a car driven by quintessential America-loving good guy “Hacksaw” Jim Duggan over and cited each with drug violations. Sheik was subsequently fired from the then-WWF — not because he’d been caught with cocaine, but because traveling with the wrestler who was supposed to be his mortal enemy threatened to expose the business.
Sheik never truly recovered from that incident and, in his 40s, settled into the vagabond lifestyle that traps so many pro wrestlers. He appeared in various promotions to play the hits to dwindling effect. Afterward, he’d nurse a body ravaged by the bumps he took in the ring, the lifestyle of being on the road and, perhaps most notably, the drug addiction that threatened to take everything.
By the 2000s, he was selling autographed photos, unsolicited, in the lobby of an Atlanta airport-adjacent hotel to purchase crack. Things worsened after the murder of his daughter in 2003. His spiral was real and threatened to make him another entry in an encyclopedia of tragic endings in the pro wrestling industry.
But an ultimatum from his wife — whom he married in 1975 — pushed him into recovery in 2007. Around the same time, he connected with the children of old family friends, who offered to take over his social media presence. Soon enough, he was Sheiky Baby, doling out all-caps insults on Twitter and dropping F-bombs with seemingly indiscrimate aim (except for Hulk Hogan, who deservedly got the bulk of his hatred).
This reinvention, like the ones before, traded on the problematic. Sheik’s posts and interviews were sometimes violent, homophobic or racist. But when they weren’t, he blended the gimmick he lived with a lifetime of observations, delivered in quickly digested all-caps tweets. Once again he was a sensation, racking up more than half a million followers even if his account was being carefully managed by a pair of brothers 50 years younger than him.
Sometimes he’d emerge as an unlikely ally for the downtrodden. Other times, well, there’s nothing saying poetry has to be a certain length.
That’s one of Vaziri’s final tweets, and while it may not have been written by him, it’s something we’ve heard so many times it’s impossible not to hear it in his gruff, barking voice. Long after his ring career was over he was still playing a heel. This time, a culture versed in anti-heroes was ready to cheer for him.
The Iron Sheik, one of the greatest villains in professional wrestling history, found a way to die a babyface, even while leaning into his gimmick. None of this would have happened if he weren’t willing to grab a silver of opportunity and tear it into a tunnel with his massive hands and barrel chest. He embraced everything that came his way — a route out of suspected danger in Iran, a window to try professional wrestling, the chance to get clean and even the stereotypical heel work that turned him into a caricature and left him fearing for his own safety every night he left the arena.
For more than 80 years, those opportunities were his escape. Now he’s left for good. The memories each reinvention created aren’t just ether in the minds of professional wrestling fans. They’re a map to an icon who never stayed in one place for long.