Truth is stranger than fiction.

Take the life of a guy we'll call Adnan Alkaissy. Would you believe a plot like this?

A guy born to a devoutly religious but poor family in Baghdad ends up in high school alongside Saddam Hussein. Then the guy, who's a pretty decent athlete but has never played American football in his life, lands a football scholarship to a college in Texas.

That doesn't work so well, so the guy transfers schools and gets on the wrestling team — classic wrestling, the real kind. He does pretty well, even wins some championships, but figures out that he can make more money at his side job — professional wrestling, the phony kind. So he quits school in his senior year and joins the World Wide Wrestling Federation circuit in the guise of an American Indian chief known for his "Indian death lock."

Still with me? It gets better.

After a few years of that — several of them spent in Hawai'i — Alkaissy manages to get his bachelor's and master's degrees in education, all the while tomahawk-chopping away. He squirrels away some dough and decides to go home to see his family, local boy made good. Only when he gets there, there's very bad news and very, very bad news. Both his parents have died, but his siblings were too soft-hearted to give him the news while he was so far away. And his old pal Saddam is now climbing the Baath Party ladder, one corpse at a time, and things are tense in Baghdad.

So he leaves, makes some more money, gets a new character as "The Sheikh of Baghdad" — legit, he says, because his dad's status entitled him to that honorific. But he's homesick, and a buck goes a long way in Iraq, so in 1969, he decides to go back.

Only this time, he's hailed as the conquering hero and launches into a seven-year wrestling career that makes him a household name. Saddam wants to get the people's attention off the body count, so he sets the guy up with a new house, car with driver and guard, and fat job with the Youth Ministry. Saddam even helps him set up a televised match with the guy's old pal Andre the Giant that is witnessed by 200,000 Iraqis (including most of the Republican Guard).

All is going swimmingly until a cousin high up in Saddam's government lets the guy know that he's gotten a little too big for his britches: Saddam wants him gone — and not on an airplane. At which point, it's back to America in the late 1970s for more wrestling.

But, wait! There's more!

His next starring role comes during the Gulf War, when he plays "Gen. Adnan," a sidekick of Saddam Hussein who brainwashes an American military hero to fight at his side — villains fans love to hate in stadiums all over America. He only gives that up after the threats on his life get too heavy. Anyway, by this time, the guy's in his 50s, and his knee is shot.

And that is the story of Adnan Alkaissy, aka Babyface, aka Chief Billy White Wolf, aka The Sheikh of Baghdad, aka Gen. Adnan, told in a new "as told to" biography, "The Sheikh of Baghdad: Tales of Celebrity and Terror from Pro Wrestling's General Adnan" (Triumph Books) by Alkaissy, with help from wrestling historian Ross Bernstein.

Alkaissy, now 66, lives part of the year in Minnetonka, Minn., with his wife and children (ranging in age from 16 to 8 — "Hey," he says, "I started late!") and part of the year in Honolulu. A parsimonious sort who shunned the high life and so managed to keep some of the cash he earned in his heyday, Alkaissy bought a condo here years ago, when he was packing the Civic Auditorium in the guise of Chief Billy White Wolf, the good guy eternally throwing the gauntlet (well, tomahawk) down before the villain Curtis "The Bull" Iaukea.

When we meet at a McCully coffee shop near his home, my first question goes right to the issue of fact and fiction. Alkaissy explains in the book that, in the old days of wrestling, there was "The Code," which dated back to carny days. The Code said you never admitted that the storylines were fiction and the characters were made up and the matches were choreographed. If you did, you were blackballed.

Years later, one rogue promoter would decide to break the code. And guess, what? Wrestling got even bigger.

So I asked him: "Chief, I mean Sheikh, I mean Mr. Alkaissy: Did it surprise you that when professional wrestling finally admitted it was fake, it didn't matter?"

He turned those impossibly immense eyes and the full light of his charismatic smile on me and prefaced his answer with a phrase that's a favorite of his.

"I'm gonna tell you the truth," he said, in his still-accented English. "People who is into wrestling deep, no matter what you tell them, they think you are lying."

One guy recently accosted him and asked if it is true that all his matches were faked. "Absolutely!" Alkaissy answered. "You are a liar!" the man retorted.

Alkaissy then launched into the story of the Bust-up in Baghdad, when Saddam Hussein called him over and showed him a solid-gold Webley revolver and warned him that if Andre the Giant dared to flatten him, Saddam would unload the gun into the unfortunate victor's brain. Alkaissy was beside himself: He needed to get the word to Andre that their plan of an Alkaissy win-lose-win wouldn't work. He didn't dare let himself lose for Andre's sake. "I'm thinking, 'God, I don't want to fall down and get hurt by him because, sometimes, accidents happen, you know."

The stories flow and flow. Familiar names pop up: Lord "Tallyho" Blears, Johnny Barend, the Missing Link, Odd Job, Haystack Calhoun.

Talking to him, and reading the book, you finally get the pro wrestling thing.

It's not just that the matches are planned. The whole thing is a drama, worked out in storyboard meetings in advance. In his Chief Billy White Wolf days, Alkaissy was supposed to beat Iaukea fair and square, then get beaten when Iaukea cheated, then beat him again ... but they held the belt back because of a technicality, then Iaukea challenges again, then ...

"We do so many scenarios until it's time to take the belt away from him because the people are getting sick and tired of it," Alkaissy recalled. Then you move on to another part of the country, or you get a new persona and costume, and you start all over again.

They worked for cash, without contracts or benefits. They traveled the country in car caravans, sleeping in cheap hotels and eating junk food. Unlike Alkaissy, who to this day makes time daily for the gym, most of them never worked out — just pitted their brawn against each other until their bodies gave out.

As I listened, I realized what co-author Bernstein meant when he said that all he did was sit down for one interview of Alkaissy for another book he's working on and suddenly, he realized he had to tell this man's story.

When the talk turned to Saddam, the Iraq war and the state of his country today, Alkaissy grew solemn and sad-eyed. He said he believes Saddam will be convicted, and he'd like to be there to see the hanging, or the death by firing squad. He wants to go home and use the proceeds from his book to help children injured or orphaned by the war. He wants to show his respect for his elders, recalling an Arab proverb: "They planted and we eat."

He wraps a small loop of well-rubbed pink prayer beads more firmly around one knobby, fight-cracked thumb and said, "My dad, my mom, they taught me, and I believe, if you put your faith in God and you go toward what you believe in, you are gonna get it. We all come from God, and to God we gonna return. We are all the same in the eyes of God, whether I got a big house, big car or I got nothing. Because I know this, whatever I done, nothing has changed me."

Reach Wanda A. Adams at wadams@honoluluadvertiser.com.