![]() Albano, who was a babyface at that point, would come into the audience during breaks and crack us up with his off-color humor and bad jokes. For those too young to remember, TNT was wrestling's version of "The Tonight Show," and it took place in a small TV studio in Owings Mills, Md., before a live audience. I never really had an opportunity to interact with Albano except for a very brief conversation at the WWF Hall of Fame induction ceremony in Philadelphia in 1995 (Albano was inducted in 1996).ĭuring the '80s, I attended several tapings for the WWF's Tuesday Night Titans show when Albano was a guest. Albano also has said in interviews that he and Vince McMahon Jr. fired him on a number of occasions but always quickly changed his mind and brought him back. He had the reputation of being a hard drinker and wrote in his autobiography that Vince McMahon Sr. The word on Albano was that he could be as much of a loose cannon off camera as he was on. In the late '80s and early '90s, he played one of the Mario Brothers on "The Super Mario Bros. In typical campy fashion, it was revealed that Albano's bad behavior all those years was because he had "a calcium deposit on the medulla of his oblongata." Once doctors performed "surgery," Albano underwent a transformation and began using his wrestling acumen for good instead of evil, managing the likes of George "The Animal" Steele and The British Bulldogs.Īlbano parlayed his celebrity status from the '80s wrestling boom into an acting career, as he got a part in the 1986 movie "Wiseguys" along with Danny DeVito and Joe Piscopo, and also made appearances on a number of TV shows. Albano turned babyface, going from a sleazy, maniacal character to your fun-loving, crazy uncle. In the mid-80s, the unthinkable happened, and the man fans loved to hate became the man fans loved. ![]() That set up a series of heated matches between the two. ![]() Finally, during a TV match involving Strongbow, Albano bludgeoned him with the cast and revealed that it had all been a ruse. For months Albano wore a cast on his arm, claiming that Strongbow had attacked him and broken his arm. The first wrestling angle that I remember involved Albano and Strongbow. ![]() One frequent target of Albano's insults was Strongbow, who passed himself off as a Native American but in actuality was a guy named Joe Scarpa, an Italian just like Albano. ![]()
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