Remembering WWF referee Dick Woehrle, who has died
Word broke out on Monday that former WWF referee Dick Woehrle had died, including this announcement from the Wrestling Observer website.
I remember Woehrle vividly from all of those mornings I watched the WWF on WLVI-TV 56 in Boston, when Championship Wrestling aired. He was on almost every week alongside fellow refs Dick Kroll, Gilberto Roman, and Billy Caputo. We knew their names because ring announcer Joe McHugh would let us know the officials during his opening monologue each week.
Woehrle played a no-nonsense type of referee who used a booming voice during his counts, such as yelling at wrestlers to break an illegal hold. “One! Two! Three!” Woehrle would yell, usually resulting in the wrestler backing off.
There were at least a couple of times Woehrle was involved in angles in the 1980s, both of which I’ve written about:
- He disqualified King Kong Mosca one week (a rare event to see a star DQ’d during a squash match), which led to Mosca’s attack on Pat Patterson
- In another Patterson angle, Woehrle started to pull the hair of Sgt. Slaughter in an attempt to get Slaugher to release the the cobra clutch from a battered Patterson
I don’t remember ever seeing Woehrle ref any matches at the old Boston Garden, although I could be wrong. I believe he officiated at Madison Square Garden, but I honestly can’t recall any matches he oversaw there. Does anyone reading this remember Woehrle’s history at WWF and WWWF house shows?
I was recently reminded of Dick while watching WWE network. Dick was the favorite referee of my youth and I recall many memorable bouts he refereed at the Cap Centre in Landover, MD.
Dick worked at Sun Ship in Chester Pa in the late ’70’s. I always remember that Dick would be running out the gate first because he had a match to get to that night. He was a good guy.
Dick Woehrle worked mostly out of the Philadelphia market; incl. The Spectrum for main event matches aired on then-cable. It was Dick Kroll who did the main event matches at MSG and the TV tapings along with John Stanley and Gilberto Roman. At a NJ casino whose name escapes me in the mid-80’s, he even did a TV taping of a 6-man Freebirds match with the AWA. It was Mario Savaldi who did the main event Boston Garden matches in the mid-to late 70s, but I don’t recall for certainty if Woehrle ever worked in New England.
In Boston I tend to remember Danny Davis (before his heel run) and Fred Sparta as the refs at many of the house shows in ’80s.