New on Kayfabe Network: the strange, violent, almost forgotten story of Jos LeDuc — the Canadian lumberjack who cut his own arm open with an axe on live television, and wasn’t even really named Jos LeDuc.
Plenty of wrestlers got billed as dangerous. Abdullah the Butcher had the fork. The Sheik threw fireballs. Jos LeDuc was different. There were moments when you genuinely weren’t sure where the character ended.
That’s the story we dug into for this one. LeDuc walked onto Memphis television in August 1978, sat down with announcer Lance Russell, and explained an old lumberjack tradition — how lumberjacks used to mark themselves during an oath so they’d never forget it. Then he pulled out an axe, rolled up his sleeve, and cut himself. For real. No special effects. No plan beyond LeDuc telling everyone he knew what he was doing.
Two days later, Jerry Lawler actually had to get in the ring with him.
The video traces the whole arc: a Quebec judo student and provincial police officer named Michel Pigeon who invented a wrestling brother that never existed, built a decade-long war with Jerry Lawler in Memphis, held Florida’s Southern Heavyweight title against Dusty Rhodes, wrestled from Puerto Rico to Japan, got a strange one-off run in the WWF as “The Headbanger,” and ended up buried inside a Hulk Hogan movie under the credit “Big Headbanger.”
And then there’s the twist most fans never knew until after he died: the man wrestling beside him as his brother for decades wasn’t his brother at all.
This is the kind of story Kayfabe Network exists to tell — the moments where professional wrestling’s illusion got so complete that nobody watching could tell where the performance stopped. Jos LeDuc might be the best example of it there ever was.
Full video is up now. Watch it, and let us know in the comments whether you think LeDuc was playing a character or just barely holding one together.