The Rage of the Squat King

In the summer of 1990, I worked for a brief time for the World Wrestling Federation in Stamford, Connecticut. It’s hard to believe now, but there was a time when the general public recoiled from a culture where gigantic men in tights smashed wooden chairs over one another’s heads and sought to rip their limbs from their bodies.

There had always been outliers, freaks, who delighted in this sort of savagery—and it was my job as marketing and outreach director to expand that demographic.

It was a tough sell. What would make a sane, much less an educated, person want to watch such blood sport? I thought about it a lot, could come up with no answer, until I encountered the curious wisdom and phenomenon of the man who would become, briefly, my special project—Dr. Squat, aka Fred McCoy, who at the time I truly believed was a genius and not just a freak. Certainly he had all the attributes.