Thirty-eight years after Bruiser Brody was stabbed in a dressing room in Puerto Rico, the man who did it has given his reason on TV. Jose Huertas Gonzalez, who wrestled as Invader #1, says Brody showed up to the matches dressed wrong and that he was the one in charge of discipline.
Gonzalez spoke on the season premiere of Ahí Está La Verdad with Normando Valentín on WAPA-TV in Puerto Rico on October 29. The interview was in Spanish, and the quotes below are translated.
“In those days, a professional wrestler should not arrive in flip-flops and shorts,” Gonzalez said. He called Brody “quite arrogant” and said the two spoke on the phone before the show. According to Es Noticia PR, he claims Brody told him, “F you and F Puerto Rico.” No one else heard the call.
“When I wanted to talk to him, I was prepared for anything,” he said. He also called Brody “the most cowardly man in the world.” Asked about the stab wounds, he said, “I don’t even remember how it went, what happened. But I know that I was determined to defend myself.”
What the record says
The shorts may be real. In Brody: The Triumph and Tragedy of Wrestling’s Rebel, the 2007 book by Brody’s widow Barbara Goodish and Larry Matysik, Brody’s friend Victor Quiñones says the office pressured Gonzalez to control Brody and once told him to order Brody to stop coming to the matches in shorts. Brody wrestled in trunks; the shorts were what he wore to the building.
Much of the rest does not line up with what others have said. On July 16, 1988, at the baseball stadium in Bayamón, Tony Atlas says he looked up and saw Gonzalez with a towel over his hand. The Wrestling Observer reported in its August 1, 1988 issue that Gonzalez had a large towel around his right hand. Atlas told Dark Side of the Ring that Brody walked into the shower area holding his bag and a picture of his son, and “never saw the knife.”
Dutch Mantell has said Gonzalez walked around Brody on the floor, got his keys and left, then came back in a different shirt and wrestled his tag match. The Observer reported the same in 1988. Brody died early the next morning at age 42.
Gonzalez was charged with first-degree murder. By the time the case went to trial in January 1989, the charge had been reduced to voluntary manslaughter. According to the book, the prosecution’s only witnesses were the two doctors who treated Brody, and their testimony was thrown out as hearsay. Atlas never testified and says no one contacted him. Mantell told Dark Side of the Ring his subpoena arrived 10 days late. The jury found Gonzalez not guilty on self-defense. No one else was ever charged.
Brody went into the WWE Hall of Fame’s Legacy wing in 2019. Gonzalez kept wrestling in Puerto Rico into his 70s.
Analysis:
The shorts story may have really come up, and the office may have really told him to handle it. But he says he walked in prepared for anything, the man six feet away says Brody never saw the knife, and the jury that acquitted him never heard from Tony Atlas. Whether it was planned or something that got out of hand, a man brought a knife into that dressing room and Brody did not have one.
I go through all of it, including where the bad blood started in 1976, in the video below.
