Career
Born in Watts, Alberta, he was living in nearby Hanna as a cattle grain farmer when he was encouraged by his uncle Ray Steele to pursue a career in professional wrestling during the mid-1940s. Making his debut in 1946, he appeared with many later Stampede Wrestling veterans while in Stu Hart's Klondike Wrestling during the late 1940s.
By 1951, he began wrestling full-time and eventually defeated Al "Mr. Murder" Mills for the vacant NWA Canadian Championship in Calgary, Alberta on November 13, 1959 (although other sources claim Ruhl won the title in 1955). Continuing to tour North America with the National Wrestling Alliance during the next ten years, including the Arizona and Texas territories as the masked wrestler The Hooded Wasp, he would later win the NWA Canadian Heavyweight Championship a record six times defeating Sweet Daddy Siki, The Beast, Stan Stasiak, Danny Lynch and Abdullah the Butcher respectively. He would be the last NWA Canadian Heavyweight Champion, holding the title until being forced to surrender the championship due to injury in 1972.
Facing Gene Kiniski in a match for the NWA World Heavyweight Championship in Calgary on July 12, 1967, Ruhl eventually began competing for Stu Hart's Stampede Wrestling promotion during the late 1960s winning the Stampede North American Championship twice between 1969 and 1970 defeating The Stomper and Abdullah the Butcher respectively. Touring Japan in 1969 and again in 1972, he briefly held the Stampede International Tag Team Championship with Tiger Joe Tomasso in May 1972 although they lost the titles back to Chin Lee & Sugi Sito later that month. Suffering a career ending injury in 1974 as a result of a head injury sustained in a fight with Carlos Colon, Ruhl retired to farm with his brother Henry and eventually died in Medicine Hat, Alberta on December 21, 1988.
Read more about this topic: Dave Ruhl
Famous quotes containing the word career:
“It is a great many years since at the outset of my career I had to think seriously what life had to offer that was worth having. I came to the conclusion that the chief good for me was freedom to learn, think, and say what I pleased, when I pleased. I have acted on that conviction... and though strongly, and perhaps wisely, warned that I should probably come to grief, I am entirely satisfied with the results of the line of action I have adopted.”
—Thomas Henry Huxley (1825–95)
“A black boxer’s career is the perfect metaphor for the career of a black male. Every day is like being in the gym, sparring with impersonal opponents as one faces the rudeness and hostility that a black male must confront in the United States, where he is the object of both fear and fascination.”
—Ishmael Reed (b. 1938)
“He was at a starting point which makes many a man’s career a fine subject for betting, if there were any gentlemen given to that amusement who could appreciate the complicated probabilities of an arduous purpose, with all the possible thwartings and furtherings of circumstance, all the niceties of inward balance, by which a man swings and makes his point or else is carried headlong.”
—George Eliot [Mary Ann (or Marian)