Bobby Heenan and Nick Bockwinkel Incident in Chicago

In 1975, a horrific incident occurred when an angry fan took action in the ring too seriously. It was one of the scariest moments ever to occur in wrestling, and Heenan, Bockwinkel, and Verne Gagne were lucky to leave with their lives!

Bobby Heenan, Nick Bockwinkel, and the Scary Chicago Incident of 1975

In times past, to preserve the illusion that professional wrestling competition was not staged, it was common practice for wrestlers to adhere to kayfabe and remain in character in public.

This was due in no small part to feuds between wrestlers, sometimes lasting for years, which could be utterly destroyed in seconds if they were shown associating as friends in public. Something like that would have potentially had a devastating effect on ticket revenue.

During one particular AWA show on a cold Chicago night on January 25th, 1975, one “fan” took the action in the ring too seriously and took matters into his own hands to help out the “good guys” in the ring.

In the WWE biopic entitled Bobby “The Brain” Heenan, former wrestler and owner/promoter of the Minneapolis-based American Wrestling Association, Verne Gagne, Bobby Heenan, and Nick Bockwinkel opened up about that night.

Verne Gagne:

"We were in the Amphitheater in Chicago, in front of a huge crowd. Nick and I were the main event for the night."

Bobby Heenan:

"It was a simple finish. Nick (Bockwinkel) slammed Verne, and the ref counted, ‘One! Two!’ and Verne put his foot over the rope.

I took his foot and threw it off the rope, and the ref counted three.

Verne jumps up and tells the ref his foot was on the rope, and the ref says to continue the match.

Meanwhile, I’m on the apron, hugging Nick. Verne dropkicks Nick in the back, Nick knocks me off the apron, falls to the mat, and Verne pins him.

As I got up off the floor, a fan in the crowd says, ‘Don’t worry, I’ll get him down!’ And he took out a piece, lifted his hand on the kid’s shoulder who was sitting in front of him, and fired down to the ring."

Verne Gagne:

"The next thing I hear is a noise going Pow! Pow!"

Nick Bockwinkel:

"After the finish, Verne was up, gone, and out of the ring. I thought that was strange because usually, he’s sucking up all the glory that he can after the match by getting his hand raised.

Bobby jumped up on the apron and looked around back and forth, and motioned for me to come over to him. When I do, he tells me, ‘Let’s get the f*** out of here! Those were shots!’"

Verne Gagne:

"He shot down to the ring several times and missed us."

Bobby Heenan:

"He shot a woman in the arm, another one in the chest, two in the neck, and one in the thumb. The shots never made it to the ring; it hit the ringside seats before that."

Nick Bockwinkel:

"I looked right past Bobby, and they were crawling over chairs to pick up a woman. I could see a bullet hole in her shoulder, and I could see another woman who got shot in the arm and is bleeding something fierce, and they were starting to carry her out as well.

So Bobby and I got out of the ring, and there were some cops there that escorted us up these narrow aisles and to the dressing room."

Verne Gagne:

"When I got back to the dressing room, the guys were telling me, ‘Did you hear those shots out there?!’"

Bobby Heenan:

"The article in the paper about the incident showed the kid saying that all he saw was orange. He had suffered some hearing loss as a result of the incident."

Breaking Down the Details of that Night

As a performer, Bobby Heenan had the ability to get under fans’ skin. It was a tactic Bobby masterfully used to help draw thousands of people to arenas to see the wrestlers he managed get beaten. On this night, however, it almost got him killed.

A January 27, 1975, Chicago Tribune story on this incident featured an interview with a 36-year-old truck driver fan who was at the International Amphitheater in Chicago that evening.

According to the fan, who went by the alias “Wayne Polski,” the shooter was described as sitting in the cheap seats and as being “all slicked up like one of those dude pimps.”

Polski reported that the shooter became irate during the main event when Heenan, who managed Bockwinkel, interfered in the match.

“He kept screaming to get Bobby Heenan out of there,” Polski explained to the Chicago Tribune. Thinking Bockwinkel would unfairly get the win, the man opened fire, according to Polski.

A Different Account: What Another Fan at the Show Recalls

Not everyone who was present that night in Chicago agrees with the version of events that became widely accepted over the years.

An eyewitness named Vic Shenberg, who attended the January 25, 1975, show at the International Amphitheater, reached out to Pro Wrestling Stories, recalling the sequence of events differently. According to his account, the shooter was not a Verne Gagne supporter reacting to Bobby Heenan’s interference on behalf of Nick Bockwinkel, but rather the opposite.

The witness places the shooter in the mezzanine level, cheering for Bockwinkel throughout the evening. In this version, the shots were fired after the match had been restarted and Gagne had won, meaning the fan pulled the trigger out of fury that Bockwinkel had been, in his view, robbed of the title.

This account received circulation on the Eddie Schwartz overnight program on WGN Radio, a Chicago institution that regularly featured professional wrestling guests and personalities. Callers to the program that night largely agreed that the shooter had been a Bockwinkel supporter seated in the mezzanine who opened fire after the restart went against his preferred outcome, not before it.

The distinction matters because the two versions paint entirely different portraits of the gunman’s motivation. One frames him as a Gagne loyalist defending the babyface; the other frames him as a Bockwinkel partisan enraged by a perceived injustice done to the heel. Neither version has been corroborated by a named, on-record primary source beyond the accounts already published.

When Nick Bockwinkel was later approached about these conflicting details by Vic, his response cut straight to the heart of professional wrestling’s relationship with its own mythology: “Never let the truth get in the way of a good story, my boy,” Bockwinkel reportedly said. “There was no money in a story about a fan trying to shoot Gagne.”

It is a line that reveals as much about the business as it does about the incident itself.

Aftermath

The crazy part of this whole story? The shooter was never arrested. He would continue to attend wrestling shows for years after this.

“The guy who did it actually would continue coming back to wrestling cards held there,” Bobby Heenan would share later in life.

“Nobody would say that they saw him do it! He even had police around him to make sure that he never did anything again.”

After this incident, Bobby Heenan was quick to argue with people who would say that the old days were better.

He would particularly note that he made more money in far less dangerous situations as life went on.

These stories may also interest you:

• BrainChild: Secret Life of Bobby Heenan’s Daughter
• Kayfabe in Wrestling: Stories Fans Shouldn’t Know
• Extreme Cases of Wrestlers Protecting Their Gimmicks

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