Wrestling's crappest heels revisited - Kamala

After much pressure from Socko I have decided to go back to my crappiest heel gimmicks, this time I will be looking at "the Ugandan Giant" Kamala.

What can I say about this gentleman apart from the fact that he's about as African as an Inuit. Kamala AKA James Harris was born and raised in Mississippi.

Looking at his in ring gimmick, an African cannibal? Barefoot and loincloth clad he would show of some pretty impressive technical wrestling skills before finishing them off with a running splash. Many times this splash would be when they are face down and he would attempt to pin them in that state - at this point his manager would point out to him that he needs to turn them over, this would usually eat up about a minute of TV time - towards the end of his WWF run he would be assisted by the crowd.


An early match featuring the Ugandan Giant.

The mic skills of this guy weren't great, he had a string of managers to do his talking for him including Harvey Wippleman, Freddie Blassie and some gimpish explorer with a strange white face mask on.

Early in his career with WWF they would do promo's of him "eating" live chickens (they would create a situation with lots of feather and make out like it's dinner time).

His character was involved in quite an interesting feud with The Undertaker, this feud gave birth to Casket Matches. In order to hold Kamala's large stature in a coffin, The Undertaker needed to build an especially large one - this took a few weeks and was seemingly only worked on during promo's!

This classic promo features The Undertaker and the now legendary Paul Bearer letting Kamala know what's in store and that he should be a tad scared.


And so it came to pass, Kamala was sealed into the casket and his character became nervous and agitated. This was towards the end of his WWF career and he had brief a run as a babyface where the Reverend Slick would attempt to humanise him with hilarious consequences. On one occasion he was taught to use a bowl.

He had a trial for WCW and appeared once or twice but nothing really came of it.

He did also make a couple of comebacks in the WWE by taking part in the Gimmick battle royal which was won by The (legendary) Iron Sheik and made a couple of appearances on Raw.

Overall, he was shit.