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Dale Torborg’s journey: From baseball to pro wrestling and back – Chicago Tribune
Dale Torborg waited three years for the bus.
The White Sox‘s roving strength and conditioning coordinator wasn’t quite sure what he was looking for that morning in 1997 when it chugged into the Sox spring training complex in Sarasota, Fla., stuffed with players from the Twins’ Class A Florida State League affiliate.
An apology, perhaps.
An explanation, maybe.
A fight, even.
But he knew who he was looking for — Tom Mott, the man who shattered Torborg’s left orbital bone and broke his professional baseball aspirations in 1994 when he threw a fateful pitch that hit Torborg in the face during a minor-league game in Tennessee.
“Dale walked up, gigantic, and was like, ‘Hey, where’s so-and-so? I’m looking for him.’ Everyone’s like, ‘What the heck?’ ” said A.J. Pierzynski, a then-young catcher who was on that bus.
“Dale’s like, ‘I just want to make sure it wasn’t on purpose.’ He was trying to make it right. The guy couldn’t have been more sorry about what happened.”
Mott just hadn’t bothered to tell Torborg, who was playing for a Mets Class A affiliate that day in 1994, 19 games into a career that ran in his family.
The son of former Sox manager Jeff Torborg was fresh off his senior season at Northwestern, during which he batted .321 with five home runs and 43 RBIs.
“I always had the dream that somehow I would take over first base when (Don) Mattingly was done,” Torborg said.
Instead, his baseball skills went kaput. Damaged depth perception had doomed his dream, it was discovered the next year, when Torborg was in the Yankees system. He couldn’t hit a changeup.
“I never heard from (Mott),” Torborg said. “I wanted some answers.”
He found them — and Mott and an apology — hiding in a bullpen, behind a chain-link fence, Pierzynski at his side.
By that time Torborg, described as “mild-mannered” by many who know him, was well into another career, one that required him to wear makeup.
He was a professional wrestler, in Sarasota that day near his home to work out at the Sox complex.
“He’s one of the big, quiet guys you’ve got to be careful of,” said Jeff Torborg, who was there the day his son was hit. “He’s one of these guys who won’t start something, but he’ll finish it.
Wrestling connection
Dale Torborg didn’t have to wait long for the airplane.
He collided with fate at 15,000 feet.
His name was Hulk Hogan.
Not long after his 59-game minor-league career ended, Torborg encountered the wrestler on a late December 1995 flight to Los Angeles. Torborg was on his way with some college buddies to watch Northwestern play in the Rose Bowl. Hogan was on his way to meet Randy “Macho Man” Savage in baggage claim at LAX.
Hogan regaled Torborg with tales of his pal George Steinbrenner, a man for whom Dale’s father had worked for 10 years as a coach. The conversation quickly shifted to wrestling and Savage, a former minor-league catcher who grew up Randy Poffo in Downers Grove.
Hogan introduced the two.
“He says, ‘Torborg? Is your dad Jeff?’ ” Dale said of Savage.
“I said, ‘Yeah.’
“He’s like, ‘Oh, my God. I’m a big fan,’ with that raspy voice.”
Hogan and Savage suggested that Torborg, who stood 6-foot-7 and weighed 275 pounds during his wrestling days, should give their business a try.
“It was a world that was so far away,” Torborg said.
But it wouldn’t be for long.
Torborg soon found himself training under the guidance of Jim “The Anvil” Neidhart and “The Warlord” in Land O’ Lakes, Fla. From there he went to India. Then to the American Wrestling Federation, where he was known as “MVP,” which stood for “Most Violent Player.” The baseball-bat-bearing character caught the attention of World Championship Wrestling, a major-league promotion.
Before Torborg knew it, his childhood love for music and wrestling were married in WCW in the form of “The Demon,” a character based on Torborg’s favorite band, KISS, and its lead singer, Gene Simmons, a man Torborg looked up to as a child.
His parents weren’t so sure about their son’s career choice. Dale’s mother, Suzie, hated KISS and hated wrestling. But she and Jeff supported Dale, even if it scared them half to death.
Such as the time Jeff went with Dale to Universal Studios to watch him train.
“I sat there for three or four hours and listened to the noise and them slamming each other around and I’m like, ‘Holy Christmas,’ ” Jeff said.
The two were leaving when Dale asked Dad what he thought. Dad’s answer: It’s dangerous.
“But if you really want this, I think you’ll be excellent at it,” Jeff said he said to his son that day.
Dale went to wrestle against superstars such as Sting and Booker T. He met some of his best friends while in the business. Not to mention his wife, Christie, who was his valet.
The two have a 10-year-old daughter, Sierra Raye.
Torborg retired from wrestling full-time in 2001, when World Wrestling Entertainment bought WCW. He was destined to be involved in major-league baseball after all. But his wrestling days weren’t over.
A new challenge
Baseball is a bond Dale Torborg shares with his father.
Dale’s baseball memories were born at old Municipal Stadium in Cleveland, where Jeff was a coach and manager. Dale spent his formative years, from 7-17, in New Jersey while Jeff was a coach with the Yankees.
Summer afternoons often bloomed into games of running bases in the bowels of old Yankee Stadium with a boy named Ken Griffey Jr. Many evenings were spent looking up to Mattingly and Dave Winfield and Don Baylor. Graig Nettles and Thurman Munson and Reggie Jackson. Catfish Hunter and Lou Piniella and Phil Niekro.
“My friends, they would be in awe when we’d go to Yankee Stadium,” Dale said. “My friends from grade school were playing with Ken Griffey Jr. Later they were like, ‘I got to play running bases with a Hall of Famer.’
“I couldn’t have asked for a better way to grow up.”
Jeff Torborg’s days as a baseball man are behind him in body but hardly in mind.
Six years ago, the man who caught Sandy Koufax’s perfect game against the Cubs in 1965, who caught the first of Nolan Ryan’s seven career no-hitters in 1973, was diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease. This on the heels of news he had prostate cancer.