Like Niagara Falls and the Mona Lisa, there was only one Mr. Irresistible
Updated: Jan 6
Jim Withers
News that wrestling legend Sweet Daddy Siki has died takes me back to when I was a kid and in the process of becoming a life-long sports fan.
It was a simpler time when sporting heroes seemed truly heroic, unlike today's multi-millionaire mercenaries, leveraging their sweaty talents for yet more millions from billionaire team owners. It was a time before doping scandals and legalized sports gambling tarnished the integrity of whatever transpired on the playing field. It was a time when, in addition to all the REAL sports on TV, I also watched wrestling.
Sure, I knew it was fake – those flying dropkicks clearly didn’t connect with their targets – but that didn’t stop my friends and I from trying to duplicate what we saw in our black-and-white, one-channel universe. Headlocks, hammerlocks, step-over toeholds – we did them all. We might have even attempted some of Sweet Daddy’s signature moves, like his “coco butt” (head-butt), “neck-breaker” and “airplane spin,” which was usually the coup de grâce. It’s a wonder we all made it into adulthood.
Well into my dotage, I’m still a sports enthusiast – albeit an increasingly jaded one – but pro wrestling didn’t survive my adolescence. As the Bible says, “When I was a child, I spake as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child: but when I became a man, I put away childish things.” (Well, maybe not ALL childish things.)
Before the pseudo sport went big-time with WWE head honcho Vince McMahon and pay-per-view extravaganzas like WrestleMania III, Sweet Daddy represented a less synthetic and over-hyped time when relatively small-time promoters reigned over a patchwork of regional wrestling fiefdoms. Each one seeming to claim its own world champion. Stars like Sweet Daddy Siki, Haystacks Calhoun, Yukon Eric, Killer Kowalski, The Sheik and Bulldog Brower would regularly square off in televised matches out of Toronto’s Maple Leaf Gardens (or Montreal or Calgary), but they’d also crisscross the country staging – and I mean STAGING – shows in small-town hockey arenas. Publicity for matches was pretty much limited to ads in local newspapers and posters put up around town. (Midgets and “lady wrestlers” were regularly part of the program.)
Not to take anything away from Muhammad Ali, but I doubt that the boxing great ever topped Sweet Daddy Siki when it came to flamboyance. For that, you’d probably have to go back to Gorgeous George (George Raymond Wagner), another vintage wrestling villain.
Sweet Daddy’s bravado seems quaint and benign compared with the malevolent ubiquitous narcissism of the 21st century.
Strutting into the ring with his bleached-blond hairdo and decked out in a sequined robe, oversized bow tie, tall white boots and candy-cane-striped trunks, Sweet Daddy would sport Jackie Kennedy-type sunglasses while preening like a peacock. Ignoring a chorus of boos from the crowd, “Mr. Irresistible,” as he called himself, would admire himself in the mirrors he brandished in each white-gloved hand. Then, putting his personal accoutrements aside, the bell would ring and the match would begin with Sweet Daddy moving around the ring displaying an amazing mix of agility, athleticism and dirty-trick creativity.
Every wrestling match, it seemed, pitted Good versus Evil, and Sweet Daddy somehow freed us to cheer for the bad guy. He received an endless flow of fan mail.
“There’s only one Niagara Falls and only one Mona Lisa, and there’s only one Mr. Irresistible,” he’d say during promotional interviews.
His real name was Elkin James, and he was born to sharecroppers in Texas during the Great Depression (1933). He grew up in Los Angeles and rose to the rank of corporal while serving in the U.S. Army. After helping keep the peace in the Korean Peninsula following the war there, he was discharged and turned to professional wrestling in the mid-1950s.
While it might not be totally accurate to describe him as the wrestling equivalent of baseball’s colour-bar-breaking Jackie Robinson, Sweet Daddy was a trailblazer. One of the first black competitors in pro wrestling, Sweet Daddy frequently had to deal with threats of being lynched by racists for having the audacity to lay his hands on a white opponent. The scariest time, possibly, was when he took part in the first integrated world wrestling championship in Greensboro, N.C. Members of the Ku Klux Klan not only surrounded the arena while picketing against the match, they also sat menacingly around the ring and strung at least one noose from the rafters. Somehow Sweet Daddy and “Nature Boy” Buddy Rogers, his white opponent, friend and mentor, got out of there alive.
Sweet Daddy’s ring career was taking off, with high-profile matches at New York’s Madison Square Garden, until promoters discovered that he was romantically involved with a white woman who happened to be from Canada. To be with her and to distance himself from the pervasive racism in the U.S., Sweet Daddy moved to Toronto in 1961, and never left.
Born in Estonia in 1940, Anne (Anu Liis Kõks) and her family escaped the occupying Russians and a Nazi concentration camp before ending up in Canada when she was five. A decade and a half later, while working as a diorama designer at Toronto’s Eaton’s department store, the attractive blue-eyed blonde somehow met the soft-spoken wrestler. They were match, got married in 1964 and had two sons (Reg and Justin).
Sweet Daddy’s star rose quickly north of border, especially after making his Maple Leaf Gardens debut in 1962. While continuing to also wrestle throughout the U.S., and even as far away as Japan, Sweet Daddy was a headliner in the Great White North for almost three decades. And in every one of those hundreds of bouts, he strutted into the ring wearing sequined outfits made by his wife, a skilled seamstress with an artistic flair.
Wrestlers in Sweet Daddy’s day were expected to stay in character when they stepped out of the ring. It was all part of something called kayfabe, pro wrestling’s code of secrecy, in which you’re not to reveal in any way that the whole thing is scripted and that ring rivalries are anything but real. I, however, have second-hand evidence that Sweet Daddy, a designated heel, ignored strictures against good guys and villains being seen fraternizing.
My late father, who owned a service station in the southern Georgian Bay area of Ontario – back before motorists pumped their own gas – loved to recount the time a quartet of famous wrestlers pulled up to the pumps in a convertible. There they were, Sweet Daddy Siki, Whipper Billy Watson and two others – good guys and villains – yukking it up like the best of friends. En route to a wrestling show in nearby Midland, within an hour or two they would be undoubtedly beating the daylights out of each other – or pretending to – before rabid fans at the town’s hockey arena.
Long before he tossed in his trunks on his wrestling career in 1988, Sweet Daddy followed another of his passions – singing country music. He and his band, The Irresistibles – what else? – released four albums in the ’70s. Later, he deejayed around Toronto and area, and hosted karaoke nights. He was part of the Toronto scene, driving around the city in his purple hearse.
He also trained, and inspired, a generation of famous wrestlers, including Edge (Adam Copeland), Christian Cage and Bret “The Hitman” Hart.
Sadly, his beloved wife, Anne, died of Parkinson’s in 2013.
Sweet Daddy died in Toronto on New Year’s Eve 2024 at age 91 after a lengthy struggle with dementia.
“He lived a long life, did what he wanted to do, and made a successful career out of entertainment,” son Reg wrote.
Indeed, he did. Sweet Daddy was a proud, tenacious, courageous, self-made man who embodied a time when sports heroes seemed truly heroic – even if they were supposedly bad guys.
Pro wrestling might be fake but Sweet Daddy was the real thing.
One thing about his costume that isn't contemporary - he doesn't have a huge bulge in his crotch.
Please don't ever wear those shorts to lunch. But you can drop kick John anytime. He'll like it.
Fantastic tribute, Jim. Growing up on the Prairies under the spell of Stu Hart's Stampede Wrestling, nasally hosted by fellow Saskatonian Wailin' Ed Whalen, my friends and I thrilled to Sweet Daddy's legendary set-tos with "pig farmer" Dave Ruhl. Like you, we copied all their holds, dirty tricks and derring do. But no one did it better or with more flair than he did. To borrow a term from Muhammad Ali, who in turn picked up much of his braggadocio shtick from Gorgeous George (and to which the incoming president of the United States was clearly paying attention), Mr. Irresistible was the greatest.