Mike Sharpe, Canadian professional wrestler, Died at 64

  Sports

Michael “Mike” Sharpe was born on October 28, 1951, and died on January 17, 2016.

He was a Canadian professional wrestler.

He was better known as “Iron” Mike Sharpe.

Mike comes from a family legacy of wrestling, as his father and uncle were a successful tag team in the 1950s, recognized as champions from San Francisco to Japan.

Mike grew up in California but moved with his father back to Canada as a teenager.

Whilst in high school, Sharpe dabbled in boxing and weightlifting before choosing to follow in his father’s footsteps.

The well know Dewey Robertson trained him for the ring at age 25 and shortly thereafter Sharpe made his mark wrestling for promotions around Canada such as Gene Kiniski’s NWA All Star Wrestling.

Sharpe became a two-time NWA Canadian Tag Team Champion, partnering first with Moose Morowski and later with Salvatore Bellomo, and also won the Pacific Coast Heavyweight title.

Mike’s career picked up steam after moving to Louisiana, where he became a fan favorite and won two different Mid-South Wrestling belts, the Louisiana champion (two times) and the Mississippi title (also two times) along with a Brass Knucks title in 1979.

Sharpe entered the World Wrestling Federation in January 1983, where he would spend the rest of his in-ring career until his retirement in 1995.

Mike Sharpe was a regular of WWF programming throughout the mid-1980s and early 1990s.

Sharpe was announced and self-proclaimed as “Canada’s Greatest Athlete” (a nickname taken from Kiniski) and was further distinguished by his near-constant yelling and grunting throughout a match, as well as a mysterious black brace on his right forearm, supposedly protecting an injury but more widely believed to contain a foreign object.

first in his WWF career, he was managed by Captain Lou Albano and received a sizeable push, regularly defeating jobbers after smashing them with said forearm.

This ended on April 30, 1983, with a match against world heavyweight champion Bob Backlund at the Philadelphia Spectrum, but Sharpe was defeated and would never reach such main event heights again.

In actuality, Sharpe never held a title for the promotions and was primarily used as a jobber to rising WWF stars in television tapings.

During his television appearances were always as the role of a jobber, and victories even at house shows were rare, he chalked up quite a few untelevised victories between 1984 and 1988.

Mr.Sharpe had a few more memorable moments over his WWF career.

Mike appeared on Piper’s Pit in 1984, provided the opposition in Ivan Putski’s 1987 comeback match at Madison Square Garden, and pinned Boris Zhukov to reach the second round of the 1988 King Of The Ring tournament.

Even though Sharpe wrestled as a heel in the WWF, he was also the tag team partner of none other than Hulk Hogan during a tour of Japan against stars of New Japan Pro Wrestling in early 1984 (Hogan was heel in Japan).

Mike’s last televised match was on June 6, 1995, in a losing tag-team effort against The Smoking Gunns.

Following Sharpe’s retirement Sharpe had made his living teaching aspiring wrestlers at ‘Mike Sharpe’s School of Pro-Wrestling’ located in Brick, New Jersey and later Asbury Park, New Jersey (the school has since closed down).

Amongst the better known of his protégés are Mike Bucci, Chris Ford and the Haas Brothers, Charlie and Russ.

Mike Sharpe passed away at 64 yrs old.