If you grew up in Minnesota in the 1950s and '60s, you remember Verne Gagne as the king of old-school professional wrestlers -- burly guys in little shorts and big boots who tossed each other around in the ring and into the turnbuckles.
For decades beginning in the 1940s, Gagne's feats in football and pro wrestling made him seem larger than life.
But now, at 82, with his mind ravaged by Alzheimer's disease, he is the focus of inquiry into an altercation with a fellow resident of a Bloomington health care facility that led to the other man's death.
Gagne and Helmut Gutmann, 97, clashed Jan. 26 in the memory-loss section of Friendship Village, Gutmann's daughter, Ruth Hennig of Boston, said Thursday.
Gutmann, a scientist and musician who fled to the United States from Nazi Germany in 1936, suffered a broken right hip in the altercation and died about 2 1/2 weeks later.
"No one knows" what led to the clash, Hennig said. "I don't think anyone was present when it began ... or even if anything precipitated it."
She said that because of her father's dementia, he had "no memory at all" of his fight with Gagne and "didn't understand why his hip hurt."
Hennepin County medical examiner's office investigator Mike Opitz said a cause of death hasn't been officially certified.