Dusty: Reflections of Wrestling's American Dream (23 page)

There were some hot angles I did with Flair, but most of the really hot stuff was with all of the Four Horsemen as a whole, like the famous video we shot of them breaking my arm in the Jim Crockett Promotions parking lot in Charlotte. That was pretty brutal for back then, completely fucking violent and about as hardcore as you could get.

But the one angle that everybody asks me about, even the guys on road, the wrestlers themselves—it ain’t my best matches with Flair, it ain’t the tag-team matches against Arn—the one thing everybody asks me about to this day is my feud with Tully Blanchard and the night Baby Doll, Nickla Roberts, brought out this envelope in the Greensboro Coliseum. Everybody asks, “What was in the envelope?”

I’ll get to the envelope in a bit. The deal with Tully was that when I was booking, he was always my “go-to” feud. We knew that if business was down, he and I could always do something to lift business back up a little. I think the thing that made that feud so great was that the fans really saw our real personalities out there. It was as real as you could get. We didn’t necessarily like each other—we didn’t hate each other, either—but we respected the hell out of each other and we did business.

“When I was a kid I’d watch TV and I thought Dusty Rhodes was a cool name. I appreciated a big guy who could work his ass off and go an hour Broadway [draw]. Dusty’s charisma was over the top. I remember a TV match with Dusty and Ronnie Garvin against Ric Flair and Arn Anderson with Baby Doll. It was a big influence. During the match Dusty reached over and kissed Baby Doll. I remember the way it lit up the crowd.”

—”S
TONE
C
OLD
” S
TEVE
A
USTIN

Okay, the envelope …

In our industry really it’s about a very simple angle that I had thought up and shot that really was just a thing that I put in to generate something for television. I couldn’t come up with anything else and it turned out to this day to be one of the most asked questions besides “Who was the Midnight Rider?” and of course they smile after asking that question. So what was in the envelope that Baby Doll handed me in the Greensboro Coliseum?

They say the dramatic look on my face even to this day was priceless because that was the only time somebody was able to get “The American Dream,” Dusty Rhodes to shut up. Right in the middle of my interview I clammed up tighter than John Kerry at a Swift Boat Vets reunion. It was probably one of the last true shoots in our industry where people believed what they saw was real, and they should believe it because it was the most heartless thing that anybody had ever done to me … it was unbelievable. It
was unplanned. Tully put her up to it, I believe, and it was an unmerciful cowardly act by them.

I remember it like it was yesterday, when she came out and handed the envelope to me on the interview, I thought it was like a rib but really couldn’t sell it like that, so I said to myself, “Okay, let me open up this and look inside. …” the picture that I saw was the most phenomenal thing. … Until this day even the boys ask me what was in that envelope. So knowing all that and what it means to everybody, I think to keep them on a good square level knowing what can really happen if the things are done right, I don’t think anybody will ever know what was in that envelope unless Baby Doll tells you … and I don’t see that happening.

“I still have the envelope … the angle was going to be over a couple of weeks. I was going to reveal pictures that would expose him. Now Dusty was married and was faithful, the whole nine yards and all that, but the premise of it was that I busted him in a hotel room with another woman. And every week I was going to show a little more and a little more, like the hotel and all that. They even thought of having a video of me walking through a hotel room with maybe hearing giggling and laughing in the background and then seeing Dusty’s legs intertwined with another woman’s legs. And then it was going to be a little more pictures, a little more pictures, but to add even more to it, it was supposed to be a black woman. Every week it was supposed to be a little more. Maybe clothes thrown on the floor, jeans up on the couch or something, and then I’d bust him and his wife would bust him and it would be quite a soap opera. It turned out they didn’t like it, because my husband at the time, Sam Houston, was working for the WWF and I was working for Turner and they felt it was too much of a conflict of interest, because on my days off I would fly out to be with him and they wanted me to be very exclusive. Dusty always wanted me portrayed as this Marilyn Monroe figure, very single, very available, and being married didn’t fit in with that. So what I ended up having in the envelope were some really goofy pictures of him. There’s a picture of him copping a feel in a hotel lobby on a Venus de Milo statue with this goofy look on his face, then there was a photo of Dusty and either a security guard or a policewoman where it looks like he’s giving her a bribe. Then there’s one of him with this rainbow clown wig on with Groucho Marx glasses and nose. They’re just these goofy pictures. It was my idea to deliver the envelope and I took it upon myself to do it because I always liked that little bit of mystery of was it a work or was it real.”

—N
ICKLA
R
OBERTS
, A
KA
“B
ABY
D
OLL
”

So when I got into the back and away from the camera, I laughed my ass off, because that’s exactly what it really was, a fucking rib that was played on me. But to this day it played like a shoot, because in my mind that’s how I had to play it. Back then you never broke
kayfabe
, ever, no matter what. You learned how to roll with the flow and that’s how we took a rib and made it into an angle that was talked about for more than 20 years. And I can guarantee you that some of the people who were there, some of the wrestlers who saw it, will read this and still think we are working them on this, because it really was that good.

“What was interesting about the whole thing with Baby Doll, is that originally it wasn’t supposed to be Nickla, it was supposed to be Sunshine, who worked with me out in Texas. She was supposed to be the perfect 10, but looking back that never would have worked as well. We were lucky we couldn’t find her and ended up with Nickla, because she was the only person who could have pulled all that off the way it was.”

—T
ULLY
B
LANCHARD

Speaking of working, the man we called the devil, Kevin Sullivan, is the type of person who after being in the wrestling business all these years thinks everything is a work. We drew more money in a time when the house you drew was the thing that drove our business. His mind in the world of pro wrestling was tremendous. We had our run-ins both in and out of the ring, but I really enjoy him now. Over the years he had some Sheik-type ideas and we fed off of each other. There was nothing more exciting than the ref being knocked out and the devil reaching into his box and pulling out the golden spike, driving it deep into my chest area, as I went down. The crowd in that white, cold, silent heat is a memory that still wakes me up screaming in a cold sweat and looking into the fucking darkness, and after a while I smile. I think, whoa! It’s show time. He might have been the best. He was a devil and I was “The American Dream.” He was the antichrist and I was the savior. It was good versus evil at its very core.

>

“When I came to Florida, Dusty had no intentions of working with me. I went out and cut an interview that there was no ‘American Dream.’ People were in gas lines, there were hostages in Iran and interest rates were high. I said there was no such thing as ‘The American Dream’ and that Dusty’s hoodwinking the people. I said you can’t afford the B.S. he’s giving you. I thought of that promo for two weeks. Dusty blew right by me and proceeded to give a rebuttal. He booked it. That Sunday we had a good house and it went from there.”

—K
EVIN
S
ULLIVAN

Kevin was a weird guy. He was not big in stature but he was a tough fucker and he always had a group of people with him, an entourage— snakes, and belly dancers, fire-eating dragons and shit—and Abudadein. He had all these fucking people around that I could kick their ass but I could never kick his ass, kind of like the super villain who would always get away at the end of the movie, even though all of the other bad guys had been caught or killed. And he had a cult following of these people who would follow him from town to town sometimes. When he would do an interview, Eddie would get close but not too close and would be concerned with what he said on that interview because he believed Kevin was the devil. But when he would say it I would tell Eddie it’s okay because I had a rebuttal and I would make them know that he’s just saying that … but maybe he is.

In Orlando, Sullivan had a group of ten to 15 people, mystics, who came down from Casadega, Florida, who would follow him—as they would follow Jim Jones who gave the people Kool-Aid to drink and they all fucking died— that’s the way these people followed Kevin. They had a van with his name on it and all the peace signs, crosses and other stuff, and they would drive to this place they parked on the Fairgrounds inside a big fence, and once you had it parked, you couldn’t get out. Now of course, the local cowboys and Indians, the blacks and the browns, the amigos were my people in Florida. I was the pickup truck guy who the cowboys thought was the second coming of John Wayne. They didn’t give a fuck, so the devil was the only guy that on Christmas night turned Santa Claus into a heel at the Bayfront Center in St. Petersburg. When I left the building that night, people were standing what looked like two, three thousand deep, screaming to hang Santa Claus! It was Christmas night and they had the kids with them who just got presents that morning, and they wanted to kill Santa Claus.

As part of the promotion, Eddie had five or six Santa Clauses during the night for the kids circulating through the building. Well the fans soon found out that one of the Santa Clauses was actually one of Kevin’s disciples. Jake Roberts had dressed in a Santa suit and, passing the security guards, he knocked me on my ass to help Kevin beat “The American Dream” on Christmas night; starting the biggest feud in the history of our business in Florida that’s still going on today. But on that night it was like a riot. It was a bad Saint Nick that people wanted … they wanted somebody to kick that shit out of old Saint Nick!

“When we did the loser leaves town match in Orlando and I beat Dusty on Christmas, he came back as the Midnight Rider and beat me … and then I came back under a mask as Lucifer and we did that for a while. Dusty understood good versus evil. Years later when the Sheik was 59 years old, we did a Starrcade in Detroit and we made a bet that we could do a double switch during the tag-team match between Dusty and the Sheik versus me and Dick Murdoch to where the Sheik would turn heel and Murdoch would turn babyface. We pulled it off.”

—K
EVIN
S
ULLIVAN

So Sullivan had a knack for doing stuff like that and he was also the only guy I beat in a bull rope match that didn’t go off his feet! It’s hard to pin that little bastard, that little stiff fucker, when he won’t come out of the corner. So you had to put yourself in a position to be creative. I had the referee count the turnbuckle! I crawled up in the corner and cross-bodied him like I would cover him on the mat and the referee went one, two, three.

“All this B.S. about Dusty being an egomaniac … he did a job in the middle of the ring for me. He knew when to do it. When it made sense.”

—K
EVIN
S
ULLIVAN

Anyway, that Santa Claus thing in St. Pete really ignited the feud, and so getting back to that group in Orlando, one night we had drawn a big house and I was showering and I heard fire trucks and there’s only a one-lane road getting out of there. There were people running, screaming and shit, about to fall over each other. These cowboys who came to Orlando knew every week where these guys from Casadega would park their van, and so they
torched it after the match, they lit it up! They burned it to the ground in the parking lot while these goofs stood around it in a semi-circle as if watching a cross burn. Burned it to the fucking ground, buddy. They believed it was real.

And this is all after Kevin, Molokai, and Demetrius had won. But where were these fucking people he named? They beat the fuck out of me, stretching me out and laying out Black Jack Mulligan, too. Molokai of course was Gene Lewis, but Kevin would change their names to go with his gimmick, to go with his character; that’s how Mark Lewin became the Purple Haze, how Bob Roop became Mayhar Singh, how Nancy Sullivan became the Fallen Angel, and how Angel Vachon became Luna.

This was a perfect example of something that I talked about earlier in the book where there were no shades of gray, because on that night for two and a half hours after the bell rung, it was all black and white for you to get excited about.