Dorrance Earnest Funk (February 3, 1941 – August 4, 2026), known professionally as Dory Funk Jr., was an American professional wrestler, promoter, booker, and wrestling trainer. The son of Dory Funk (Dorrance Wilhelm Funk) and brother of Terry Funk, he was the promoter of the Amarillo, Texas-based Western States Sports promotion. He held the NWA World Heavyweight Championship for 1,563 days, from February 11, 1969, to May 24, 1973, the second-longest uninterrupted reign in the title's history behind Lou Thesz. Funk and his brother Terry are the only siblings to have each held the NWA World Heavyweight Championship. Wrestling journalist and historian Dave Meltzer described Funk as "the consensus pick as the best pro wrestler in the world in the early 1970s" and called him "probably the closest thing to a perfect world champion for his time".
Funk held the WWC Universal Heavyweight Championship once and the CWA World Heavyweight Championship once. He also worked as a booker, notably helping to shape Jim Crockett Promotions' 1983 schedule, including the inaugural Starrcade, and served for years as a foreign talent booker for All Japan Pro Wrestling, where he held the Pacific Wrestling Federation (PWF) chairmanship. He ran the Funking Conservatory, a professional wrestling school in Ocala, Florida, that trained a number of future WWE stars. He is a 2009 WWE Hall of Fame inductee, and is also enshrined in the Wrestling Observer Newsletter Hall of Fame (inaugural class, 1996), the St. Louis Wrestling Hall of Fame (2008), the Stampede Wrestling Hall of Fame (1995), the NWA Hall of Fame (2006), the International Pro Wrestling Hall of Fame (2022), and the George Tragos/Lou Thesz Professional Wrestling Hall of Fame (2011), and received the Cauliflower Alley Club's Lou Thesz Award in 2019.
Funk died on August 4, 2026, at his home in Ocala, Florida, while in hospice care, at the age of 85.
Early life Dorrance Earnest Funk Jr. was born on February 3, 1941, in Hammond, Indiana, the elder of two sons of Dory Funk Sr. and Dorothy Funk. Despite the family's close association with Amarillo, both Dory Jr. and Terry were born and raised in Indiana, where their father, the son of a police chief in Hammond, had served in the Navy before entering professional wrestling. The family relocated to Texas after Karl "Doc" Sarpolis bought the Amarillo promotion from Dory Detton and recruited Dory Sr. away from Indiana with the incentive of a minority stake in the territory. When Sarpolis died of a heart attack in 1967, Dory Sr. bought out the remaining shares and ran Amarillo as Western States Sports.
Funk attended Canyon High School, where he played football and basketball and was, in his own words and those of contemporaries, something of a "Mr. Personality" and student body leader despite being the son of the area's most prominent wrestler and promoter. He went on to West Texas State University (now West Texas A&M University), one of a long line of future wrestlers to attend the school, a list that would go on to include Terry Funk, Dusty Rhodes, Bobby Duncum, Tito Santana, Bruiser Brody, Tully Blanchard, Ted DiBiase and Stan Hansen. Playing offensive and defensive line, Funk was part of the 1962 team, under coach Joe Kerbel, that defeated Ohio University 15–14 in the Sun Bowl in El Paso, Texas. He was inducted into West Texas A&M's athletics Hall of Fame in 1990.
Professional wrestling career
Early career and the Amarillo territory (1963–1968) Just ten days after the Sun Bowl victory, Funk made his professional wrestling debut on January 10, 1963, at the Amarillo Sports Arena, defeating Jack Dalton (Don Kalt) in eleven minutes in a show billed as a major local event, with the West Texas State football team and a local high school wrestling squad in attendance to support him. He was immediately pushed into matches with established names such as Wahoo McDaniel, Killer Karl Kox, Iron Mike DiBiase and Moose Cholak, and within three months of his debut he won the Amarillo version of the world heavyweight title from Gene Kiniski. He went on to record notable matches and draws against Verne Gagne, Lou Thesz, Harley Race, Fritz Von Erich and Dick the Bruiser during his rookie year, before suffering his first loss, to The Sheik, in Amarillo that October. The rapid push led to accusations of nepotism given his father's ownership of the territory, criticism that would follow him for years.
In 1965, Funk wrestled his first matches in Australia, for Jim Barnett and Johnny Doyle's World Championship Wrestling promotion, and in St. Louis, a promotion whose approval from promoter Sam Muchnick was widely regarded as a rite of passage toward world title consideration. He later called the Australian territory "the most first-class territory I ever worked". That December, his younger brother Terry made his own wrestling debut, and the pair first teamed together the same month, beginning a partnership that would become one of the most enduring in the sport's history. The brothers wrestled each other in singles competition only three times over their careers.
NWA World Heavyweight Champion (1969–1973)
After Gene Kiniski, champion since 1966, told NWA promoters he wished to relinquish the title, three wrestlers were put forward as possible successors: Bill Watts, Hiro Matsuda, and Funk, who was nominated by his father. According to Meltzer, Muchnick championed Funk on the grounds that he was a credible, well-spoken athlete who would represent the title well, and whose relative youth against more experienced or bigger-named opponents gave fans a believable sense that a challenger could beat him on any given night. Not every promoter agreed; Houston promoter Paul Boesch reportedly saw the choice as nepotism and initially refused to book Funk as champion.
Funk defeated Kiniski for the NWA World Heavyweight Championship on February 11, 1969, at the Fort Homer Hesterly Armory in Tampa, Florida, in front of roughly 7,000 fans, using the spinning toe hold that his father had popularized in Texas. He held the title for 1,563 consecutive days, the second-longest uninterrupted reign in NWA history after Lou Thesz. Dory and Terry Funk remain the only brothers to each have held the NWA World Heavyweight Championship.
As champion, Funk took the title on an arduous year-round tour of NWA territories across North America and Japan, wrestling contenders including The Sheik, Johnny Valentine, Jack Brisco, Archie Gouldie, Ernie Ladd, Antonio Inoki and Giant Baba. He set a Texas attendance and gate record on June 24, 1972, defending the title against Fritz Von Erich in front of 26,339 fans at Texas Stadium, a mark that stood until 1984. He also teamed with brother Terry to hold both the United States and NWA tag team titles during a feud with Jack and Jerry Brisco.
Rivalry with Jack Brisco Funk's central rivalry as champion was with Jack Brisco, the 1965 NCAA champion at 191 pounds, whom he first faced on record on April 10, 1966, in Albuquerque, New Mexico. Their series of matches, many of which ended in draws, became one of professional wrestling's defining feuds of the era, most notably in St. Louis, where their January 1, 1971, encounter drew a sold-out 11,587 fans to the Kiel Auditorium with thousands more turned away. The two also met at the Toronto promotion and elsewhere through the 1970s and early 1980s, including a bout for the title on October 17, 1982, which Funk won by retaining the championship.
By 1973, plans called for Funk to lose the title to Brisco on March 2 in Houston, but Funk suffered a shoulder injury after falling from a vehicle on his ranch in Umbarger, Texas, just days beforehand, and the match was called off, with Fritz Von Erich substituted on the card. The circumstances of the injury became a point of long-running controversy in wrestling circles, with some suspecting the timing was used to avoid a loss to Brisco, though most later accounts, including Meltzer's, accept that the injury was genuine. Funk returned to the ring weeks later and dropped the championship not to Brisco but to Harley Race, in Kansas City, Missouri, on May 24, 1973; Race then lost the title to Brisco on July 20, 1973, in Houston, completing the transition. Funk and Brisco continued to wrestle one another regularly into the late 1970s, in venues including St. Louis, Florida, Georgia and the Carolinas, with their final one-on-one match believed to have taken place on March 20, 1983, in Asheville, North Carolina.
Just days after Funk lost the NWA title, his father, Dory Funk Sr., died of a heart attack at age 54 on June 3, 1973, after informally wrestling with Les Thornton at a family barbecue. The sudden death thrust Dory Jr. and Terry into control of the Amarillo territory, which they continued to run until selling it in 1978.
All Japan Pro Wrestling and the NWA International title (1969–1996)
Funk first toured Japan as NWA champion in late 1969, wrestling Giant Baba and Antonio Inoki to consecutive sixty-minute draws. Funk's December 2, 1969, match with Inoki in particular was regarded as one of the best matches in the country up to that point and helped establish both the NWA title and Inoki's reputation with Japanese audiences. Following the death of his father in 1973, Dory Jr. and Terry took over as foreign talent bookers for Baba's newly formed All Japan Pro Wrestling, a role that had opened up after Antonio Inoki was ousted from the JWA amid allegations, reported by John Pollock, that he had plotted to "shoot on" Funk during a planned NWA title match to seize the championship for himself. Baba subsequently left the JWA to found All Japan, while Inoki launched the rival New Japan Pro-Wrestling; the Funks' NWA ties gave Baba's promotion a significant advantage in accessing top American talent.
In All Japan, Funk feuded with Baba, The Destroyer, Jumbo Tsuruta, Abdullah the Butcher, The Sheik, Genichiro Tenryu and Harley Race, and he and Terry worked frequently as a tag team against Abdullah and The Sheik, and against Baba and Tsuruta. Together, Dory and Terry won the World's Strongest Tag Determination League, later known as the Real World Tag League, in 1977, 1979, and 1982. Amarillo also became a training ground for future All Japan stars sent by Baba, including Jumbo Tsuruta and Genichiro Tenryu; Funk later recalled Tsuruta as the fastest learner he ever trained. On December 11, 1980, the Funks won the Match of the Year Award from Tokyo Sports for their bout against Baba and Tsuruta.
Funk's biggest individual achievement in All Japan was winning the NWA International Heavyweight Championship three times between 1981 and 1982, first defeating Terry in a tournament final on April 30, 1981, before trading the title with Butch Reed and Bruiser Brody over the following year. He later feuded with Brody, Stan Hansen and Tiger Jeet Singh. When Abdullah the Butcher jumped to New Japan in May 1981, the Funks helped persuade Stan Hansen to leave New Japan for All Japan, reportedly for around $8,000 a week, roughly double his previous salary; Hansen made a surprise appearance at that year's Real World Tag League final. Funk returned to All Japan repeatedly over the following decades, including a run from 1990 to 1996 in which he teamed with Al Perez, Andre the Giant and Giant Baba among others, before further guest appearances in 2008, 2013–2017 and later tribute shows.
Booking career and Jim Crockett Promotions (1983)