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"I'm changing my name again," he said the next morning on a telephone call to Bob Harmon."From now on I am The Grand Wizard of Wrestling."The Grand Wizard of Wrestling. Yes! Of course! This was his master stroke. He had found a way to become even more despicable.He was the sleazy little DC comics sort of behind-the-scenes villain who always directs the efforts of much larger men in the pursuit of evil, the manager of cutthroats and braggarts, foreign invaders and leg breakers on the loose.The Wiz poked, prodded, screamed, enraged. He did the job. He made the blood move.At the end of a night's matches his wrestlers would hurry to the locker room to escape the inevitable mob of hostile fans.But Ernie would simply remove the turban and sunglasses and just move out the door. Because nobody would know who he was."He had a flair for the show business side of this sport," promoter and Saturday morning television announcer Vince McMahon Jr. said. "Put a microphone in front of him and, oh, my goodness, you'd have a diatribe of unbelievable dimensions.""He was the master," Bob Harmon said. "You look at wrestling today and what you're seeing are a lot of things he thought out a long time ago."There always was a call for the services The Grand Wizard - and so Ernie Roth always was moving. Talk to him on the telephone and he'd be going with The Sheik to Detroit on one night, picking up Superstar Billy Graham in Baltimore on the next, going with Beautiful Bobby and Blackjack Mulligan to New England on the weekend. He was up and down the East Coast, the "New York circuit" in wrestling promotion.For 27 years, Ernie Roth was involved in all of this. He had started as a disc jockey in Canton, Ohio and as a road manager for singers Don Cornell and Johnny Ray. Wrestling was an extension of that life. He was one of those little guys with a carnival barker's heart. He was a lights-and-action character.His friends noticed a change, however, in the last few years for Ernie Roth. There had been a couple of bad auto accidents, one involving a broken back, and he also was troubled by arthritis. He always seemed to be in pain. He was depressed a lot. The fact that he died last month in Fort Lauderdale, Fla., at 57 was not a surprise and the fact that the death is under investigation as a possible drug overdose situation also was not a surprise. Ernie Roth somehow had been ready to die.The surprise was that The Grand Wizard of Wrestling went with him.adapted from "FAREWELL SALUTE TO THE MAN YOU LOVED TO HATE" by Leigh Montville. The Boston Globe December 2, 1983.