Former WWF wrestler Jerry Sags reflects on his winding career

Lakewood Ranch's Jerome Saganowich, better known to wrestling fans as "Nasty Boy" Jerry Sags, is a believer in connections. 

For instance, Saganowich believes his son Jax Saganowich's football future was written in the stars. Jax Saganowich is currently an eighth grader at Saint Joseph Catholic School in Bradenton, but will attend Cardinal Mooney High next year.

He plays on the offensive and defensive lines. Mooney's offensive line coach, Dave Marino, is from New Jersey, where Jerome Saganowich has a lot of friends. Mooney's defensive coordinator, Jon Haskins, previously coached at the Stanford University and recruited Saganowich's son-in-law, Troy Nicklas, to play for the program. Nicklas ultimately played for the University of Notre Dame, where Mooney Head Coach Jared Clark is an alumnus. 

Those connections and coincidences mean something to Saganowich. They remind him of the connections he needed when he was trying to break into the wrestling business. He eventually made it to the top — the World Wresting Federation — but it took a long time, a lot of hard work, and a bit of luck. 

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As a young man, Saganowich had gone to Ferrum College, an NCAA Division III in Virginia, for football, but was kicked out of school for poor grades and moved back to his hometown of Allentown, Pennsylvania.

At the same time, an old sports friend of his, Brian Knobbs, was discharged from the Army and returned to Allentown. The pair reunited and, after spending a bit of time causing trouble around town, eventually decided to get their lives together on the advice of a friend — Matt Millen, who had just finished his first year as a linebacker with the Oakland Raiders. 

As wrestling was getting popular in the area, and Saganowich and Knobbs were both in good shape from training with Millen, they decided to pursue it.

How? By harassing one of the industry's biggest stars — George "The Animal" Steele — until he either beat them up or gave them advice. 

It was nearly the former.

Saganowich said Steele had planned for a group of wrestlers to jump the duo outside of a show to get them to stop bugging him, but the pair luckily did not show up on that particular night. Eventually, they caught Steele on a good day, and he helped them by sending them to a development camp run by famed trainer Brad Rheingans near Minneapolis, Minnesota. A call from Millen helped vouch for them at the camp, Saganowich said. 

That camp, Saganowich said, is the hardest thing he's ever had to do. 

"It was a murder camp," Saganowich said. "Every day, we ran 2 miles out on the road. Then we had to use a 180-pound log to do squats. Then 100 suplexes. Then 100 hip tosses. This was on Olympics mats, so it was about three inches of padding, then concrete. And they put you in all the submission holds known to man. We went for five to six hours a day, no stopping. You're puking, you're crying. It was all to take you to your limit and push past it. To this day, I don't know how I got through it." 

Saganowich said he was in the camp for nearly a year before getting opportunities to wrestle around Minnesota and the surrounding area, making connections along the way. He did whatever it took to make it, including being a driver for the American Wrestling Association, lugging the company's ring from town to town. 

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In 1988, he and Knobbs got their biggest break yet, a televised AWA match against the Rock 'n' Roll Express, Ricky Morton and Robert Gibson, in Minneapolis. During the match, Saganowich went for a slam on Morton in the corner, but Morton moved out of the way. Saganowich's face hit the steel part of the turnbuckle. 

"I got 20 stitches in my chin, 30 to 40 in my lip, and I knocked out a tooth through my top lip," Saganowich said.

He never got the tooth fixed. It fit the Nasty Boys look too perfectly, he said. 

The tag team's next big break came in 1990. They were asked to perform on a World Championship Wrestling pay-per-view show, Halloween Havoc, against Rick and Scott Steiner. The match had been prefaced by a Nasty Boys appearance at a WCW event in Chicago, where the pair got on the mic and trash talked the city. The reaction was so huge, fans started throwing objects at the ring, Saganowich said. That's when WCW knew they had something. The pay-per-view match was the team's chance to prove the company right.

"We were doing crazy stuff in the ring and out of the ring," Saganowich said. "They hit a 'Frankensteiner' (a throw done via a wrestler's legs instead of arms) on Knobbs and beat him, but then we attacked them afterwards. The place just came unglued. No match was topping it that night." 

After that, the team signed with the WWF, when the full Nasty Boys personas came on display. On the advice of Roddy Piper, Saganowich started spitting at people in the crowd as he walked to the ring. The team's signature move, the Pit Stop, had them shove opponents into each other's armpits. The nastier the Nasty Boys got, the more the crowds loved to hate them. Saganowich compared the skills of a good wrestler to those of a method actor. The more someone embraces their persona, he said, the more natural it will look and feel to audiences. 

For a while, the Nasty Boys were on top of the world. They won the WWF's Tag Team Championship in 1991 and had feuds with legends of the ring like the Hart family. But the success did come at a cost. Saganowich said he has no idea how many concussions he suffered over the course of his career. 

"How many times did I crack my head on concrete?" Saganowich said. "When we took chair shots, I never had my hands up to block it. It was hitting my head. If I was being rammed into a pole, my face was hitting that pole. That is just the way we rolled. It's a hell of a thing now. You don't notice it, but your family does. You don't remember something you did or said. You have different moods."

But would Saganowich change anything about his career?

"Absolutely not," he said. "I would do it the same exact way again."

Despite that insistence, Saganowich said he wants his son Jax to try football before he thinks about wrestling. He's got a strong set of coaches at Mooney, who Saganowich knows will treat him right. Once he gets to and through college, Saganowich said, it will be his decision what happens next. 

As Saganowich knows, life can go in unexpected directions, But the connections you make can take you where you're supposed to be, even if that means ramming your head into a pole.