More Than Just Hardcore (26 page)

I went to parties and all that shit, but when I became NWA champion, there was no time for drugs. And when I got back with Vicki, there was no way that stuff was going to ruin my life. Even if I had wanted for it to, it wasn’t going to happen.

In the 1970s, not long after we got back together, I got back home from several dates I had been working. I had some pot in my bag, and I said, “Hey, Vicki, you want to smoke some pot?”

She said, “Terrence, you really have some pot, do you?”

“Yeah, I sure do.”

“Let me see it.”

So I handed her my little plastic bag with the marijuana in it. She opened the bag, sniffed it, then walked into the bathroom and dumped the bag’s contents into the commode.

As she flushed it away, she yelled, “Don’t you ever bring that stuff in my house again!”

And I damn sure didn’t.

Besides, once our family was back together, I truly realized life was the greatest trip of all. I think that’s one of the reasons that I’m still alive and a lot of the boys I worked with, including guys younger than me, are not.

There were several guys on steroids, but I guess I was lucky when it came to steroids. Actually, I was lucky in a lot of ways—I was born into the business, and my father knowing the other promoters gave me a two-or three-year head start.

My first experience with steroids was in college, although I didn’t know what they were. In 1964, we were playing for West Texas State and the doctor said, “We’ve got this stuff called dianabol. It’s supposed to make you stronger and gain weight. Do you want to try it?”

Now, no one knew then the harmful side effects of the steroids, so hell yes, I wanted to try it! So did most of the guys on the team. It wasn’t illegal, and there was nothing wrong with it, as far as we knew.

I took them for about five days, and I thought, “Geez, I’m not any stronger. This shit don’t work.”

I threw them away. Some of the guys who stayed on them got stronger and bigger, but that’s how unknown steroids were back then. Later, when I got into the business, hell, we were too busy shooting jackrabbits and drinking beer on the side of the road to think about steroids or anything else.

I’ll be honest, if I’d been 20 years old when steroids became better known and someone told me they were my ticket to getting into the business and having a good 15-to 20-year run, but it might cut some time off my life, I would have probably taken them. Fortunately, I was a little older, and pretty well established by the time all these other guys were taking them, and I just didn’t have any interest.

There was only one other time I took steroids. In 1989, I broke my sacrum in a match with Sting, and it was the most painful thing I’d ever felt in my entire life. One of the NWA wrestlers (who I won’t name), a good friend of mine, gave me some tablets and said, “Terry, I really think these things will promote heal-ing.

I ended up losing them a few days later, in a North Carolina airport, after airport security found them. The police asked me about them, and I told them the truth, without naming the guy who gave them to me. I just said I had been given the pills to heal my injured sacrum.

One officer looked at me and said, “You sure don’t look like you take them,” and they let me go, without the pills, of course.

But getting back to 1986, my time in the WWF was coming to an end. It just got to the point that I was working on a run of God-only-knows how many days without a break, without getting home even once, and there was no end in sight. The travel had gotten to me, and I’d finally had enough.

One night I was splitting a room with Jimmy Hart. He was in one bed, and I was in the other, and I set my alarm for 6 a.m., hoping Jimmy would go right back to sleep. I snuck in the bathroom, packed my bags, shut off the light in the bathroom and started heading out of the door with my bags.

Just then, Jimmy sat up and said, “Terry? Where are you going?”

“Jimmy,” I said, “you caught me. I can’t take it anymore. I’m going home, going back to my girls.”

After leaving the WWF in 1986, I spent a lot of time at the ranch, only leaving for brief stints of wrestling.

One of those turned out to be my last trip ever for the World Wrestling Council, and my last trip to Puerto Rico until 2002, when I went in for a shot for the IWA. I wrestled Barry Windham and Carlos Colon, and even in 1987, the fans where still crazy.

It ended up being my last WWC trip because of what happened to my old West Texas alum, Frank Goodish—Bruiser Brody. In 1988, Brody was stabbed to death in a locker room bathroom by WWC booker Jose Gonzales. Jose was eventually found not guilty by reason of self defense, which surprised me. I did not believe he would be acquitted.

The thing that still haunts me is, what brought Gonzales to the point of doing what he did to Bruiser Brody? Was it fear, or was it hatred? I’m not knowledgeable enough about the situation, even after talking to the wrestlers I knew who were in the locker room when it happened, to really have an answer to that. But it is beyond my conception that someone could take a life in anything except a completely self-defensive situation.

I had always enjoyed my trips there, and it was always a good place to make a buck, but what happened to Brody took the fun out of it.

I was never someone who made a point of saying publicly, “I’m never going down there again,” but I just didn’t want to.

A year before he died, Brody ended up back with Giant Baba, in All Japan, after a tumultuous split.

Brody had ended up burning his bridges in Japan, by jumping to Inoki’s side in 1985 and then wanting to jump back. When he returned, he went back for the same amount he had been getting when he left in 1985. He talked to me about it, after starting to work for Inoki, and he felt he had made a mistake by going there. He realized he would have been better off just staying where he was.

Junior and I both talked to Baba, trying to get him to take Brody back. Bruiser was talented, and I don’t think he felt that they were pushing him as well as they could have. I agreed with Brody—Inoki didn’t really have any plans to make Brody a top superstar. His main benefit from having Brody was just that he had taken him from Baba.

I truly believe that if Brody hadn’t been killed, he’d have made one hell of a run in the WWF, for Vince Jr. He certainly had shown no signs of wavering up to the end of his life.

Brody was coming back in just as I was making my last shots as one of Baba’s soldiers in 1987. After all that time, Baba felt it was time to de-emphasize me, and I knew it. I wasn’t going to allow them to take me back to absolutely nothing. I felt like I’d paid my dues, and it was just time to go. My relationship with Baba had really grown strained over the years, from when I was on “Wildside” at a period when he wanted 100 percent of my time. Also, since Stan Hansen had started there in 1981, he had pretty much become the leading American for Baba. Baba felt like he could do without me, and I felt that I could do just as well without him.

And I had been instrumental in bringing Hansen in, along with my brother, and when we did, there was no doubt in my mind that the route we were taking would be to make Hansen the superstar, and that was all right with me, so I never had any hard feelings for Stan, or for Baba, for that matter. But at the time, I didn’t feel I was ready to be put to pasture. Baba felt like I was just an old dog, and I felt like the old dog had a few tricks left.

Around the time all this was going on in All Japan, something happened in New Japan that changed the course of the business.

After a couple of years with Baba, Choshu (and most of the crew that went with him) had come back to New Japan. In a tag match, Akira Maeda kicked Riki Choshu full out, cracking his orbital bone. Maeda was fired, but ended up starting a group called UWF that worked a slower style that looked more like a shoot.

The UWF was actually a restart of a similar promotion that popped up a few years earlier. This time, though, Maeda had convinced people he was the real deal, and he and the UWF were box-office magic for a few years.

We’ll never know what went into that kick, but I’d guess Maeda decided that Choshu just needed to be kicked. And he damn sure kicked him!

What surprised me was that Choshu never went after him. That was the thing I never understood, because getting kicked full in the face would anger me. I think I would have had to have a second time around with that boy. When my bones mended, I think I would have gotten right out of bed and gone looking for that son of a bitch! And Choshu was a tough guy.

A couple of months before that happened, in August 1987, I found myself working one last WWF show. It was in Houston, for a show commemorating the retirement of Paul Boesch. A few months earlier, Boesch had switched from Watts’ Mid-South (which had become the Universal Wrestling Federation in 1986, not to be confused with Maeda’s UWF) to McMahon’s WWF. But now, he was calling it a career.

Halfway during the show, they had a ceremony in the ring for Paul, with a lot of his old friends. One of them was Verne Gagne—a bitter enemy of the WWF, standing in the WWF’s ring! It took a hell of a man to get him there.

Verne Gagne, Gene Kiniski, Lou Thesz, Danny McShain and the rest of them were there because they knew it was the end of something special, something they only had a chance to deal with on occasion in their careers—an honest man. And Paul was an honest man, to the penny, throughout his entire career, and he took care of people when he really didn’t have to.

After I finished up Road House in late 1988, I was working out every day, several hours a day. I’d been doing 1,000 crunches a day, every day for years. And I was ready to get back into the ring.

Here I was, 225 pounds, in the best shape of my life, and Dave Meltzer, in his Observer newsletter, said I was “too skinny!” Skinny, hell! I had well-defined muscles—hell, I had abs, for the first time!

I also started back into wrestling, first in Dusty Rhodes’s group in Florida. The old Championship Wrestling from Florida office closed down in late 1987 and a year later left Dusty the promotion on TBS that used the NWA name, although the old coalition of promoters using that name was no more. Dusty formed a new Florida office in 1989 and asked me to come in and work some shots with him and his son, Dustin, who was a rookie wrestler with a lot of promise.

We did some pretty creative stuff. On one spot, I was about to drag Dusty behind my pickup truck, but he somehow got himself untied and got away. I wish he hadn’t (just kidding, Dusty!).

Working with Dustin was an experience, because I’d known him since he was a child. He would turn out to be an excellent worker, and although he was a little green in 1989, his potential was obvious.

For Dustin, overcoming the shadow of the American Dream was always difficult. With me, I went out from Amarillo, where Dad tended to stay, so it was easier for me to overcome the image of my father. With Dustin, his pop had worked on top in all the areas where Dustin found himself now trying to get over. It was hard for Dustin to overcome his dad’s notoriety and force of personality. It wasn’t a matter of ability, because Dustin was damn good in the ring.

If Dustin had been able to come along when his father was at his peak in the late 1970s and early 1980s, I think he would have melded a lot easier. Sometimes it’s easier when you’re with the legend than it is to follow the legend. You get the rub from being with that legend, and there’s also not the same type of comparison. You’re not trying to live up to people’s gilded memories of what the legend was like. But when people saw Dusty for years, and then Dusty was gone, and then Dustin appeared, the comparison was inevitable.

Dustin bleached his hair like Dusty’s and had a lot of the same moves, but could not become a duplicate of his father, and the best thing he ever did in wrestling was to quit trying to be a duplicate of Dusty. In 1995, Dustin went to the WWF and became Goldust, a really flamboyant character that was totally different than anything he had portrayed previously. I truly believe Goldust was one of the greatest characters in wrestling, and I don’t think people realize that this guy was doing something quite special. I give Vince McMahon credit for creating the idea of Goldust, but it was Dustin who brought Goldust to life, and it worked because he was good enough to make it work. A lot of people think that was a stupid, absurd character, but I thought it was great. And he did a great job with it. I think that character could have gotten pushed to greater heights than it ever was, but Vince put limitations on Dustin’s push, because of what the character of Goldust was. If Goldust, as the exact same type of character, had debuted in late 1997, instead of late 1995, I think he would have been a huge deal from a box-office perspective. But in 1996, just as the character was taking off, Vince just didn’t want the kind of flak that character was getting, and he toned it down.

Not long after I finished up with Dusty, I got a call from Jim Herd, the TBS executive running WCW (still calling itself the NWA) after TBS bought it from Jim Crockett, to come in for a Clash of the Champions show on April 2, 1989, where they wanted to honor past NWA world champions. I also announced the main event of Ric Flair versus Ricky Steamboat, with Jim Ross.

Steamboat was a world-class pro wrestler and a hell of a guy. He was one of the few guys I know of who never turned, over the course of his career (Bruno Sammartino was another). I think he would have made a hell of a heel, because it is the guy who grows to learn babyface crowd psychology who can become a great heel by doing the opposite, or depriving the people of what they want to see. But he was a career babyface, and I think it was because he was such an asset as a babyface to whomever he worked for that it just never crossed their minds to turn him. That also says a lot about Steamboat’s ability to get over and stay over. A lot of guys have to be turned, or have to leave an area, so they can be fresh, either in the opposite role after turning, or in their new area. But Steamboat was able to stay over, to the extent that he spent years in the Carolinas in the 1970s and 1980s as a top babyface, and I think he was more over when he first retired in late 1983 than he was in 1977, when he got his first huge push.