Charles Wright has a wrestling career few can rival.
The veteran performer, now 63, has long put his in-ring days behind him but did so knowing he worked with a power and intensity that was hard to match.
If Wright isn’t familiar to you by his real name, then you’ll almost certainly know him by one of his many wrestling monikers.
Perhaps most famously, he was The Godfather, fun-loving over-the-top character of the Attitude Era who was seen weekly surrounded by actors portraying ‘stars’ of the gentlemen’s club local to wherever WWE happened to be performing that night.
WWE were careful with how the character was illustrated – instead focusing on him getting the better of the villain of the day with a pre-match verbal joust, before usually beating them once the bell rang, too.
Wright spent arguably his best years as The Godfather – the less said about its successor, The Goodfather, the better.
That character pair weren’t his only avenues for performing in WWE, however.
Not long before that, he was the fearsome Kama, a member of the Nation of Domination and, earlier, a fighter regularly unleashed by Million Dollar Man Ted DiBiase.
To fans of a certain vintage, however, Wright is most remembered as the ghoulish Papa Shango, the voodoo inspired creation of the early 1990s who battled the likes of Ultimate Warrior and The Undertaker – the latter once breaking character to smash him in the head.
Decked out in freakish face paint, the supernatural superstar carried a smoking skull with him to the ring for matches in a gimmick that, eventually, faded from screens not least because of a failure for it to connect with audiences.
It was while working under the Papa Shango guise that Wright landed his first WrestleMania match in 1993 at the much-maligned ‘Mania IX.
As with this weekend’s WrestleMania 41, that event emanated from Las Vegas, with a packed crowd watching on as Hulk Hogan controversially claimed the WWE Championship for a fifth time.
Long before the throng of roaring fans were cheering the main event, though, there was action in the ring while the seats were being filled, as the spooky Papa Shango met hero El Matador Tito Santana.
Few saw it, partially because the venue was filling at the time, but also because the show wasn’t even on the air, the bout acting as a ‘dark’ match, a non-televised contest put on to entertain and warm up the crowd in readiness for the bulkier action to follow.
The mystical bout has featured occasionally over the years. It was in one DVD version of the event released by WWE and was uploaded to the now defunct WWE Network, but didn’t feature in the Network version of the full event.
Netflix uploaded each of the 40 previous WrestleManias to its platform in time for WWE’s $5bn launch in January but, cruelly, the Shango-Santana match hasn’t made the cut there, either, meaning fans are having to make do with trawling the depths of the internet to find it.
The atmosphere may have been flat for Wright in Vegas that day, but it clearly did him no harm. Though he left WWE after the Shango experiment fell flat, he was back as Kama in 1995 and, from there, the rest was history.
He’s now a respected and loved WWE legend, The Godfather inducted into the company’s Hall of Fame in 2016 with future WrestleMania appearances under his belt in 1998, 2000 and 2001.
Curiously enough, though WWE saw fit to repeat the dark match from WrestleMania IX later that year. It once again acted as a warm-up match for SummerSlam at London’s Wembley Stadium where, in front of an 80,000 crowd, Shango came out on top and beat Santana.
Brutally for him, Netflix doesn’t show that match, either!
