His hands are those of his father -- enormous, fleshy, strong. They are calloused, almost faded, worn from years of wrapping them around men's faces and using them as weapons. These are the hands that wrestled a decade's worth of opponents, men with such names as Ric "Nature Boy" Flair and "Gorgeous" Gino Hernandez. He made a small fortune with his hands, as his father did before him, and as his brothers did during their shortened stays in the ring. His hands carried on the family business even after Dad retired and his brothers died. He inherited The Iron Claw, the grip that made the old man a legend and the family a wrestling dynasty.

Yet when he shakes hands standing in the atrium of a Lewisville Mexican restaurant, the man once and forever known as Kevin Von Erich is soft, gentle, almost consciously so. He looks slightly worn down, tired -- you can see that much in his sleepy eyes. His gut seems a little more ample, a touch softer than it did a decade ago, when he seemed to be made of granite.

Kevin Von Erich can still intimidate you simply by being, yet it's almost as though he is hiding the strength in his body and in those hands.

His is now the yielding handshake of a father who plays catch with his sons; who holds his four children and caresses his wife of 18 years; who moves boxes into the office he is setting up to deal with his father's estate. His is the handshake of a gentle man known to his family and closest friends only as Kevin Adkisson.

Kevin Von Erich doesn't really exist anymore. He disappeared two years ago, when Adkisson stepped into the wrestling ring for the final time. His body had been wrecked by injuries to his knees and to his head, having endured seven knee surgeries and at least five serious concussions. Even now, he walks with a slight shuffle, like a man who has been on a horse too long.

Kevin -- dressed this cool November afternoon in a plaid flannel shirt, faded jeans, and a pair of flip-flops -- says he is not in any pain, physical or emotional. He claims he has put behind him the injuries that wrecked his once-promising football career, the wounds suffered in the ring -- and the deaths that have made the Von Erich name synonymous with tragedy.

Just 15 years ago, the Adkisson family was enormous -- five brothers and a happy mother and father who were married when they were almost children. They lived, for a moment, a storybook life on 137 acres in Denton County, in a house Doris Adkisson designed and her husband, Jack, built. They owned, for a moment, the world of professional wrestling.

Then, in 1984, the brothers began dying, succumbing to accidents, illnesses, drugs, and self-inflicted gunshot wounds. The family had already lost one son -- 7-year-old Jackie, to an accident in 1959 -- then David fell. Then Mike, then Chris, then Kerry. The loving couple divorced. The empire collapsed -- ravaged first from the outside by cutthroat competition, then from the inside by death. By 1995, there were simply no more Von Erichs left to wrestle. Kevin was the last brother alive, and he wanted no more of it.

Long ago Kevin had his fill of professional wrestling that had become more spectacle than sport. "To tell the truth," Adkisson says now, "wrestling was just a job to me."

If he ever loved it at all, it was because wrestling gave him a chance to be with his brothers and father -- but they're all gone now, and they have left Kevin to take care of the estate, to keep the Von Erich name from becoming a footnote in wrestling's scant history books. Even now, he and his late brother Mike's ex-wife have begun putting the family history on a Website. It's a sort of "virtual museum," as Kevin calls it, a cybershrine to the glory days.

Kevin is 40 years old now, the lone survivor of the Von Erich legend. He has outlived his five brothers and just buried his father, who died of cancer two months ago. Kevin rarely goes public with his grief, acting as if his personal loss belongs to someone else. He speaks about his father and brothers almost as though they were out of town for a while, gone on a trip and due to return at any moment.

"I don't know what some kind of psychologist would say," he explains, emitting a quick grunt you might mistake for a chuckle. "I do just pretend it never happened, and it works fine for me."

But then why build a monument to your memories? Why attempt to preserve the very pain that has stalked you your entire life? His tragedy isn't virtual; it's remarkably real. Kevin claims the Website is all about making money, but get him talking about the past, chronicling his losses, and it becomes obvious: Kevin Von Erich is still wrestling -- only this time with his demons.

The Von Erichs were once this town's ubiquitous heroes, authentic good guys in a sport filled with cartoon evil. Even patriarch Jack Adkisson, better known as the goose-stepping, Nazi-sympathizing Fritz Von Erich, became a hero -- a good businessman who helped turn wrestling into a million-dollar enterprise, a good Christian who spoke in front of church groups, a good father who had no answers for why his boys died before he did.

"Fritz Von Erich" became the creation of a boy from a small Texas town who moved to Dallas when he was in his teens. Jack was a track star at Crozier Tech, then a football hero at SMU, where he shared the field with Kyle Rote -- until he married his wife, Doris, and lost his scholarship. He took all sorts of jobs after college -- working as a loan collector, a fireman, anything to make money. In 1952, when he heard there was going to be a pro football team in Dallas, the Texans of the old AFL, Jack signed up. He didn't last more than a couple of preseason games -- his knees were too bad for football.

At the suggestion of an acquaintance, Jack then hopped on the pro-wrestling circuit. And he was awful, losing every one of his early bouts during a time when wrestlers were coming out of college; it was, for a moment in the 1950s, still a sport. It was hard to imagine that Jack Adkisson, who was once a golden, handsome man, would wind up becoming Fritz Von Erich -- the German Bomber, the man whose Iron Claw grip could dead-stop any comer.

By the 1970s, Jack had become one of the pioneers in modern wrestling. He leased out the Sportatorium in downtown Dallas, formed World Class Championship Wrestling (WCCW), brought multiple cameras into the arena, and launched a televised wrestling revolution. During the early to mid-'80s on Saturday mornings, young boys and their fathers and grandfathers around Dallas would turn on Channel 39 to watch the Von Erich brothers tangle with the Freebirds or Ric Flair. Young women filled the Sportatorium, which even then was a decaying venue, and screamed in delight. They adored the boys' good looks, their athleticism, the way they destroyed the bad guys with such grace and charm.

And this was just in Dallas. Around the world, the Von Erichs were even bigger. By 1983, long before Vince McMahon took control of the World Wrestling Federation (WWF) and Hulk Hogan had become a household name, the Adkissons were millionaires, owning homes worth hundreds of thousands of dollars and parcels of land all over North and East Texas. They drew 40,000 to Texas Stadium for wrestling matches. They met presidents of foreign countries. They often couldn't go out in public without causing scenes.

Kerry, his hair feathered and flowing, was like a comic-book rock star; he was all locks and muscle. David, a walking grin, was the cowboy of the lot, as hard as the Texas ground upon which he and his brothers were raised. Kevin, his feet always bare, came off as the brother whose gimmick was that he didn't have one. In the world of pro wrestling, where ugly men passed themselves off as pretty boys in wigs and makeup and skin-tight leather, the Von Erich boys emerged as clean-cut warriors. They never fought dirty. They loved family, God, and their fans.

Jack Adkisson didn't necessarily want his boys to follow him into the ring -- and they, in turn, were determined not to become wrestlers -- if they could help it.

Kevin received a scholarship at North Texas State University, where he showed great promise at fullback and defensive end. While playing under legendary coach Hayden Fry, he injured his knee during a game. It took him four months to recuperate, but then he ruined the other knee while trying to catch a pass thrown too far behind him. Like his father, Kevin was relegated to the sidelines.

"It was so natural to me to watch my dad get in the ring and wrestle and want to do the same thing," Kevin says. "We all did. Of course, I never really wanted to wrestle. I kinda figured I'd enjoy it and would do it one day when I retired from football...But then I had two big knee surgeries... After that, I had to play football in these braces, and it took the fun out of it. Just firing out of my stance was a bitch. That was the beginning of the end."

David was a two-sport athlete at NTSU, where he too received a scholarship. He played basketball and football. According to Kirk Dooley, who in 1987 wrote The Von Erich Family Album: Tragedies and Triumphs of America's First Family of Wrestling, Kevin liked to give David a hard time about playing basketball, telling his younger brother it was "a sissy sport."

But it was Kerry, who was born 11 months after Jack and Doris Adkisson lost their first child, who seemed destined to make his mark in the athletic world. Like his father, who was a record-holder in the discus at Southern Methodist University, Kerry was one hell of a hurler. Jack, acting as his son's coach, made Kerry study films of Kerry's workouts and dragged his kid down to the ring they erected on the family property. While at the University of Houston, Kerry broke the junior world record -- and shattered a longstanding Southwest Conference record held by his father.

Kerry was primed to attend the 1980 Olympics in Moscow, but then Jimmy Carter got political and boycotted the games. There was nothing for Kerry to do except go into wrestling.

Contrary to myth, Jack didn't push his boys into wrestling. It merely became their best option. Like so many young men who try to escape their father's shadow, the Adkisson boys fell backward into the family business.

And Jack, especially in his later years -- after David died of an intestinal infection in Japan, after Mike overdosed on painkillers, after Chris and Kerry shot themselves -- often spoke as though he wished they hadn't gotten into the sport.

"Some people say I pushed those boys into wrestling, and wrestling killed them -- like I killed them," Jack said in 1993. "Killed them? I loved those boys. I didn't force them to be wrestlers. I wanted something good for them, and I'd rather they had gone into one of the professions, but when they wanted to be wrestlers, I helped them. But wrestling didn't kill them. Different things killed them."

Still, had David not been wrestling in Japan when he fell gravely ill in 1984, perhaps he would have lived.

Kevin also never thought Chris meant to kill himself. To believe that a second brother had died by his own hand was just too difficult for him to accept.

By the early 1990s, Kevin Von Erich was almost wiped out by wrestling. The business had changed dramatically since the birth of Jack's WCCW. Now he had the mighty WWF and WCW to contend with, each with their cushy cable-TV deals and marketing gimmicks. The regional promoters were dying in the hinterlands, losing their audiences and their wrestlers--to the Vince McMahons and Ted Turners of the wrestling world.

Jack had enough of wrestling after Mike's death. He no longer wanted to book his sons, and his business sense began to fail him. Fed up, he turned the Sportatorium over to Kevin and Kerry--who then teamed up with a Tennessee-based promoter named Jerry Jarrett. The brothers ended up suing Jarrett, claiming he had swindled money from the WCCW and cut the brothers out of bookings in the very organization they had helped build. Jarrett contended that he had rescued the WCCW, that the brothers weren't showing up for bookings, and that when they did, "they were not in a physical or mental condition to wrestle."

The suit was eventually dropped, but Jarrett likely had a point. Kerry was off in the WWF, and Kevin had exhausted himself trying to keep up the bookings in his brothers' absence. Sometimes he would wrestle three times a day in three different small towns; he became the franchise, the sole paycheck. Either Kevin fulfilled the obligations, or the family went broke.

Kevin found himself shooting up more and more with painkiller. He limped through the day and faked his way to victory in the ring. He took matches he shouldn't have, risking more concussions and injuries.

"Money was the only thing I got out of it," Kevin says. "But money was enough, because it was money for the family. The family was hurtin'. With the brothers going down, the family needed me. So you just dig down and get it, pull it out."

A bad concussion caused Kevin to be banned from wrestling in Texas, so he decided he'd just fight in Japan instead. "Over there, there are all those kickboxers," recalls Kevin, "and they like to kick you in the ribs and in the head. Well, the first night, the first match, my back was to the referee...and I got kicked right in the ear, and it was a terrible concussion. And so I had headaches, I was throwing up all the time, so the injuries are what made me get out of it."

Kerry was also in no shape to wrestle, much less walk. The motorcycle accident he suffered in 1986 had cost him his foot--and, in the process, turned him into a drug addict. By 1991, his wife of a decade, Cathy, left him and took their two daughters. She demanded he pay $2,500 a month in child support--which was nowhere near what he was spending on cocaine.

He was arrested in 1992 in Richardson for forging prescriptions for Vicodin and Valium. After a stint in the Betty Ford Clinic, he received a 10-year probated sentence. Four months later, on January 13, 1993, the cops pulled him over and found cocaine and a syringe in his car.

On February 18, 33-year-old Kerry went out to his father's house, secretly took a pistol he had given to Jack as a Christmas present, borrowed his Jeep, and drove out into the mesquite. He put a single .44-caliber bullet into his heart.

Kerry had warned Kevin he was going to kill himself--though Kevin couldn't bring himself to warn his father. Why upset the old man if Kerry was just bluffing? But it wasn't as though Kerry hid his suicidal longings: He dropped hints, left notes, and whispered to those around him that he was thinking of ending his life. But no one believed someone as strong as Kerry, who was the closest of all the sons to Jack, would actually become the third Adkisson boy to kill himself. Such things just don't--can't--happen. Only they did.

The last time Kevin wrestled in Dallas was shortly after Kerry's death. Promoters at the Sportatorium scheduled a Kerry Von Erich memorial match and asked Kevin to attend, though he wanted no part of it. He was sick of wrestling, sick to death of it. His family had disappeared in just a few short years--no way in hell he was going near the Sportatorium, a place packed with memories that were beginning to rot.

"I sure hated that, but I did come back and wrestle," Kevin says. "It was hard to get into that ring. I can't explain it. It was hard to do it...It just brought up those memories of the brothers and all that."

After his career ended, Kevin spent much of his time with his family and his father, watching the legend fade into shadow. Doris and Jack were divorced in July 1992, a year before Kerry's death, and Kevin could never figure out how Jack had withstood losing his family. Although Jack had lost so much, he had still held onto his home in Denton County and a net worth estimated at more than $600,000.

On July 25 of this year, Jack suffered a stroke and was diagnosed with brain cancer. He knew he didn't have long to live, and he welcomed death, said he was anxious for the chance to see his sons again.

As always, Kevin was there for his father, even though Jack, though never in any pain, was "hard to be around," fluctuating between being moody and distant. Jack and Kevin rarely spoke about the many tragedies they had both suffered--they didn't have to.

On September 8, Kevin and Jack were at Jack's house watching Monday Night Football when, during the fourth quarter, Jack began suffering enough for Kevin to call the nurse to administer morphine. Jack slept throughout the following day, then died quietly and quickly on Wednesday.

"He got out with no pain at all, and you have to think that's a good thing," Kevin says. "I've visited people that were suffering so bad it would take me weeks to get over it. But see, like, I'm telling you all this sad stuff. I guarantee you've got sad stuff too."

Now Kevin begins the task of collecting that sad stuff and showing it to the world. He and Mike's ex-wife are now assembling the family history and posting it on the Website, which is located, appropriately enough, at www.vonerich.com. There, Kevin will provide pictures and bios of his brothers and father, celebrating their place in pro-wrestling history--not as tragedies, he hopes, but as heroes. He will sell old videotapes of the brothers and Fritz; Jack had left behind hundreds of black-and-white reels of old wrestling films, which Kevin one day hopes to market on the Website.

"Someone asked me if I wanted to do the Website as a way to keep my brothers alive," Kevin says. "I said, `No, not necessarily.' I just think it was a hell of a wrestling show, and I'd like people to see it."

Kevin often says that when people first meet him these days, they treat him as though he is "a ghost." There are those who wonder why he is not dead or how he kept from becoming another dead Von Erich. That is why he is willing, not necessarily happy, to rehash the past one more time. If nothing else, he shrugs, maybe someone can learn something from his tragic story. Meanwhile, he is still trying to figure it out for himself.

"I'm from the country, and last winter, there were persimmons growing on the tree," Kevin recalls. "Well, persimmons drop off during the winter. They fall to the ground and rot. The wind was blowing hard on this one persimmon, and it hadn't fallen off--and it was the dead of winter. I was thinking, `I'm like that persimmon. I'm not going to let go of the vine. The wind's blowing, it's killing me, but I'm not going to let go.'

"I didn't have a choice. What was I supposed to do? Lay down and die? I'm a family man. I have kids. There were times when I thought, `I can't stand any more of this.' But I think God strengthened me, and I can take it. It's great now. I have everything a man could want. I have children, I have a beautiful wife who takes care of my kids so I'm free to do the dad things--like play catch and things like that. I think things couldn't be better for me."

Minutes later, as if on cue, the cellular phone next to him rings. It's his son. He has been sick in bed all day with a cold. He wants his dad to come home.