More Than Just Hardcore (22 page)

There were some great European workers, like Tony St. Clair and David “Fit” Finlay, over there. And there were also some real crowbars, too, some guys who I thought shouldn’t even be there.

I used to think the same thing about some of the guys my dad brought in to work Amarillo.

“Dad,” I used to say, “why do you keep that guy around? He can’t do a thing.”

“Son, it’s my company, and I like the guy. I want him to be able to make a living,” he said.

He kept guys just for that reason, which was a perk of being a promoter, and it was something Otto did, too, for the same reason. Even today, you can see examples of Vince McMahon doing the same thing. He takes care of people, just because he thinks they’re good people.

I loved going to Germany because I had relatives in the little town of Krauthausen. They treated me like my family had never left there. Two of them were teachers, and they had children who played the cello and piano, who were highly educated and refined. It made me wonder—what the hell happened when Adam Funk crossed the seas to get to America?

Germany was a great place for guys to work. It’s a real shame that the promotion isn’t there anymore. Otto would bring guys in, and we’d work the same building every night, the whole summer. They’d change the matches, but we were in the same building every night. It really taught guys how to be creative because you had to be in that situation. You had to change up your match every night.

Having to work that more scientific German style and always adapting helped give a guy a sharper wrestling mind, because you always had to adapt and change. Plus, you had to be real enough that they came back the next night.

One of my favorite people to work with was in San Antonio around that time—Dick Slater. I’ve heard from a lot of people over the years that I had a big influence on Slater’s wrestling style. Well, Slater wore trunks like me, but there wasn’t anything wrong with that.

As long as I knew Dick Slater, he worked like I did. He worked like me before he ever saw me. We just had a lot of the same ideas about what would get over. We became good friends, and I don’t think he changed his walk or anything for me. I think he walked like a goof, because he was half-goofy, and he did some pretty wild things.

Hulk Hogan once told me the first time he ever saw Dick Slater was on Clearwater Beach, Florida. Slater had a cat by the tail and was swinging it around over his head while running down the beach, according to Hogan, and the cat was on fire.

Slater was one of the toughest guys you’d ever want to meet—just hard-nosed. There was a promotional war in the Tennessee area, with a bunch of guys claiming on TV that the Fullers couldn’t wrestle, and neither could anyone on their roster. Well, Slater was booking for the Fullers when he went to the bar where the other company’s boys hung out, and he beat the hell out of Bob Roop. Now, Roop was no slouch–he was a national AAU amateur wrestling champion and represented the United States in Greco-Roman Wrestling, in the 1968 Olympics. You don’t get those distinctions unless you are tough and can handle yourself.

As I went through the territories, I also got to see a lot of young talent that was on the rise. One young wrestler was Paul Taylor. I wrestled him in Georgia and thought he has a lot of wrestling talent. Plus, he had good taste in his choice of favorite wrestler! I always thought he had a lot of sense, too, and it looks like he had a lot more sense than I did, because he got out of wrestling in the ring full time and went to work in the office end of things, working behind the scenes in WCW and the WWF. I think it’s a hard job, and Taylor is a guy with a good mind who added to whatever company he worked for.

Another couple of impressive talents were Don Kernodle and Sgt. Slaughter. Junior and I wrestled them once in the Mid-Atlantic territory, where Junior was booking in 1983. Junior brought me in for a shot so we could work a tag match with them.

Slaughter and Kernodle were both excellent. I really think a lot of Don Kernodle’s work, and he really doesn’t get his due. Slaughter was great, too, a really great-moving big man. Putting those two together was a great idea, and those two did a great job with it.

There was almost the sense that they were the new big hell team, taking over from Gene and Ole Anderson, who had been one of the top teams in the area in the 1970s. The Andersons were another good team, and they drew some money. As far as work and style were concerned, it seemed to me Gene was the bigger influence. The original Andersons team was Gene and Lars (Larry Heinimi). Ole became Lars’s replacement on the team, and Ole went from being Alan Rogowski to really being Ole Anderson in those years. I don’t know what he would have become if it wasn’t for Gene Anderson and the style Gene did.

One of Gene’s last runs as a wrestler was him being managed in the Carolinas by Sire Oliver Humperdink, who later had a lot of success in the 1980s in Florida. I loved Oliver, but he was one goofy bastard. He had a sign on the back of the old van that he drove, which said, “Onward through the fog.” I don’t know that any phrase could have fit someone any better than “Onward through the fog” fit Oliver Humperdink.

One night in Tampa, he went through the fog

and a stop sign, and a dead-end barricade, and the side of some family’s house. I think that was a very foggy night, and yet, the weather was clear.

I might have stayed in Mid-Atlantic, but Jimmy Crockett, who owned the territory, didn’t want too many Funks there. He was enjoying a lot of success and felt like his way was the right way of doing things. Junior and I actually brought Hansen and Brody in to work there, and they were one of the hottest teams in the world at the time, based on their work in Japan. Jimmy thought they would be too much too handle, and he might have been right.

I don’t know that me staying there would have helped their business, because their business was great at that time. Why did Jimmy need me, Hansen, or Brody down there?

Crockett did a good job of protecting his area. He ran the Carolinas and Virginia, and it was a very isolated area. If you thought about the places for big money in wrestling, you might think of Chicago, or Detroit—one of the major metropolitan areas. Yet, that Carolinas territory, with all those small towns, was kicking ass and taking names in 1983, making more money than anyone else in the country! They were doing much bigger business than the World Wrestling Federation that year, and the WWF territory back then included New York, Philadelphia, Boston, Washington, D.C.—some of the biggest cities in the world!

I didn’t just travel around to wrestle. I also traveled around for about six years trying my hand at rodeo.

My daughters got into rodeoing while they were in school, and I think between them, they won more than 50 saddles. My younger daughter Brandee was a natural, but she got burned out on it before she finished high school. My older daughter Stacy won a scholarship to West Texas State in rodeo.

Whenever I was out on the road, hopping around territories, and they had a rodeo event, I would always try to squeeze in a short trip home to see them. Vicki, God bless her, would pick me up at the airport and drive the pickup truck to the event while I slept in the bed of the truck. It was the greatest thing in the world to watch my kids compete and do well. Those girls were incredible, and that’s not just “Proud Papa” talking, either. They were both state champions in barrels and pole bending.

We also got the girls a good horse. His name was Lightning, and he was a little albino horse, about half the size of a regular horse, but he had a huge heart and would just win for them, time after time. And the kids knew exactly how to work with him, to get the most out of him.

Retirement Match

I announced my retirement in Japan in 1981, two years in advance of my planned 1983 retirement show. It was around the same time as the Abdullah angle with the fork to the arm and was born out of the same sense of necessity to compete with Inoki.

I wanted All Japan to have something that the fans could follow along with for a long period of time, and my idea was to announce my retirement that far in advance and then build to it slowly.

I discussed the idea with Baba and Junior, but it was my choice and my idea, and it was my idea to have it for two years. I thought we’d have something built up by then, and at that point, All Japan would have some other things with momentum to carry the company from that point.

Things kept on peaking, and the company was really rolling by the time we did my retirement match. The match was Junior and me versus Stan Hansen and Terry Gordy.

If I hadn’t done what I did when I did it, I truly believe Inoki would have eaten All Japan, and the company wouldn’t have existed much longer. New Japan was leaps and bounds ahead of us at the time, in 1981. My retirement was an enabler; it enabled All Japan to have some long-term programs to build to the future while it was going on. I’m not just patting myself on the back when I say that I unselfishly gave that company three years to get back on track and then willingly gave up my position as one of its top attractions. I would call that being a good soldier. Give me a medal, please?

The night of the show I had a tough time. It was very emotional for me, because I truly had no intention of ever going back to Japan. Baba certainly never said anything that night, or in any of the nights leading up to it, to make me think there was a plan to bring me back. I had gotten close to a lot of the wrestlers there, and even a lot of the guys in the press, and I was very much taken aback by the whole thing.

The point of the match was almost as much to show Gordy in a new light, with more of a main-event feel, as it was to spotlight my retirement. I think the match really did a lot for Gordy. He was a hell of a hard worker and had unbelievable natural talent.

After that retirement match I was done. That was it. I still got paid a meager amount as a booker, but I had no involvement with the company. And they had programs going so strong that things just kept on rolling for the next 15 months, and I just stayed retired that whole time.

Now, we must be clear—I said I was retiring in Japan. I never did say I would never wrestle again, and it was never my intention to stop wrestling everywhere. I didn’t lead Baba, the fans, or the press to think that was what I’d meant. I had worked a handful of matches by early 1985 in the United States, but I really did stay out of the ring for most of that first year after the retirement match.

And the retirement ceremony that night was very real to me. It was very, very emotional to me and, I think, for the whole audience. My kids were there and they were crying. It really wasn’t a work. I was really retiring, and I felt I could. I felt I had the knowledge and fortitude to survive in the real world of business.

In 1984 Baba asked me to come back and referee a match in February, in which Jumbo Tsuruta would win the AWA world title from Nick Bockwinkel. Several months later, Baba asked me to come back on a tour, and I did. Coming back in Japan after retiring hurt me somewhat in the fans’ eyes there, but it wasn’t like I could tell them that it wasn’t me who had asked to come back. And it hurt me personally, to know that my return hurt the fans, but there was a financial reward to returning that I could not ignore.

I must have been some kind of idiot. I had paid off the Double-Cross Ranch, and had a good chunk of money in the bank. I thought, “My gosh, we’re finally going to be all right, for life. I can probably make more money in the States than I was making in Japan, anyway.”

Only a fool would think something like that.

Somehow it never came out that Baba asked me to come back. It always seemed to the fans as though coming back out of retirement was all my idea, but it wasn’t. I knew when I agreed to come back that I wouldn’t be as hot as I’d been. But it must have worked to some extent, because otherwise you wouldn’t be seeing 101 Japanese wrestlers retire and then come out of retirement, over the past few years.

The company I came back to in late 1984 was somewhat different than the one I’d left.

All Japan scored what was considered a major coup in 1984 when Riki Choshu, one of Inoki’s top stars, and 12 other wrestlers from New Japan jumped to our side. Well, it was a coup, but after they got to All Japan, it became a chaotic coup. I really don’t think getting them was a smart thing to do, and never did.

We ended up with too much of a crew, more than even Baba could handle. What we got were more guys vying for main-event positions than we had main-event positions, not even counting the main-event guys we already had. There is strength in numbers, but Baba got the numbers a little out of balance there. I think the proof of that is that almost the whole group jumped back to New Japan a few years later.

They were a clique, and cliques can cause chaos because they start from a stronger position than a single individual. I was glad to have Choshu because of his stature, and Yoshiaki Yatsu (one of the wrestlers who jumped with Choshu) was a good guy who I liked, but Choshu wanted more control over the matches than Baba wanted to give him, so Choshu wasn’t going to be happy. And when Choshu wasn’t happy, none of those guys were happy.

Baba also had a tough choice to make—which of his two top stars, Tsuruta or Tenryu, would get the shot to work the feud with Choshu? It was a big slot— imagine what it would have been like if Vince McMahon could have gotten Goldberg from WCW in 1999. That’s what Baba getting Choshu was like, and the person getting to feud with Choshu was going to work a lot of main events.

Choshu and Tenryu had been friends from their days before All Japan, but I don’t think that played into Baba’s decision to give Tenryu the slot. Tenryu used the octopus, which was also Inoki’s hold, so it was a natural to put those two in together. I also think that since Tsuruta was Baba’s main boy there was a desire to keep him from Choshu for a while. I know he didn’t trust Choshu enough to take care of Tsuruta. Now, I’m not saying Tenryu was a sacrificial lamb, because he wasn’t. But it didn’t hurt Tenryu to be beaten by Choshu, whereas it would have hurt Tsuruta. And to have Choshu beat Tsuruta would have given Choshu too much power, which Baba wasn’t about to do. But whatever the reason, Choshu and Tenryu made for a very successful feud.