More Than Just Hardcore (40 page)

The show was on June 22, eight days before my birthday, so they even brought in a cake for me. And there was no porno girl jumping out of the cake or anything like that.

It was great working with Sabu again, and great getting out to California and getting to see some old friends out there. I did think their show was a little crazy, but one thing that really impressed me was the camera work. The camera guy doing the promos was a better shooter than anyone I’d ever worked with before. I mean, this guy could shoot some incredible promos. He was in and out, had a different look to each one, and they were all fantastic.

I said to him, “My God, you do a great job of that. Where did you learn how to do that so well?”

He said, “Well, uh, I really don’t want to tell you, but I’ve been shooting pornos for eight years.”

But the guy was a great cameraman! Vince should look this guy up and hire him! He knew when to go in for a closeup and when to pull back. The guy’s timing was amazing, and those XPW promos looked unique and fantastic. I think he also wrestled that night.

In January 2001, I worked a show for All Japan, teaming with Atsushi Onita against Abdullah the Butcher and Giant Kimala II. They had called me and asked me to come in for the show.

I was expecting a sad scene since Baba had passed away two years earlier, in January 1999. But it really wasn’t. His wife, Motoko, was there. The company was still afloat and together. However, there was the definite feeling there that it was never again going to be what it once was that All Japan was on the descent, not the ascent. You didn’t have to be the sharpest knife in the drawer to see that in terms of ratings, attendance and even company discipline, All Japan was sliding. That show was kind of a last hurrah.

All Japan took a big hit when top stars Mitsuharu Misawa, Kenta Kobashi, Jun Akiyama, Akira Taue and others left in 2000 to form Pro Wrestling NOAH. Of the top stars from the 1990s, only Toshiaki Kawada stayed in All Japan. For American fans who don’t follow Japanese wrestling, that would be like if Triple H, Kurt Angle, Chris Benoit and Eddy Guerrero left WWE to form a new company, leaving only The Undertaker among the top main-eventers.

Even though Misawa had been Baba’s boy, he was perfectly within his rights to leave and strike out on his own. After all, Baba himself had split off of the Japanese Wrestling Association to start All Japan nearly 30 years earlier.

I had always tried to avoid that match, the return to All Japan after all those years, especially since that match ended up involving Abdullah. The reason for that was it had been 20 years since the angle with Abdullah stabbing my arm with a fork. Even though a lot of time had passed, that image was still impressed and enlarged in a lot of those fans’ minds, like a photographic negative. There was no way, even if Abby and I were still in our primes, that we could live up to the fans’ memories of that angle. No matter what we did, it would be secondary to the image in people’s minds of what that match was, because people still talk about it to this day. So why rattle it? Why risk destroying that memory?

I went because they asked, because it was to be my first chance to see and talk to Mrs. Baba in years, and because I wanted to give them my own “last hurrah,” of sorts. I saw it as one last chance to participate in a show for All Japan where I could help them at the box office.

We went out to eat after the matches. Gene Kiniski and Nick Bockwinkel were there, and when you have them both at the same table, your end of the conversation is going to be very limited, because they are going to do much of the talking.

Aside from that, it was very, very cordial and a lot of fun talking about all those old times.

Keiji Muto, my old partner in 1989 when he was The Great Muta, ended up buying the company, and he’s now in a very difficult situation. Wrestling in Japan has changed so much and so has the audience. There are certain things you just can’t follow, and following Baba’s footsteps has been all but impossible for them. Misawa might have actually been a genius, because he’s now running a completely different company. Muto is running All Japan, and that name will always mean “Baba’s company” to the people of Japan.

Just a few days after that All Japan match, I found out ECW was out of business. I wish I could say the news of ECWs death was a surprise, but I had been half-expecting that phone call ever since they started going national. I understand they had been under financial strain for a while. They were paying a lot of money to a lot of their TV stations, and they just weren’t taking in enough to match the costs. You don’t have to be a financial genius or a wrestling genius to know that a company that’s not going in the right direction, moneywise, is going to be gone sooner or later.

WCW going under in March of that same year wasn’t really much of a surprise, either. I was actually surprised that it lasted as long as it did. I hate to say it, but it was the boys who killed WCW. They killed the goose that laid the golden eggs. It had started with they guys making a gazillion dollars, guaranteed, not wanting to do this and griping about doing that, and after that, it was monkey-see, monkey-do. That was also the case with the contagious concussions. If you see a top star get away with a prolonged absence, the next guy’s going to try it, and the next guy.

I also wasn’t too surprised that McMahon was the one who bought the assets. It was a pretty smart move on his part, especially since part of the deal was that there would be no new wrestling show on the Turner networks for the next few years. Think about it—was he buying the assets (the tapes, some of the contracts, the “WCW” initials), or was he buying the no competition?

The end of the wrestling war was chronicled over the Internet. Starting in the early 1990s, people on the Internet had begun to discuss wrestling online, and sites had been popping up all over. The Internet and the fans who communicate on it certainly have a great influence on the business, sometimes positively and sometimes negatively. It has an effect on the decisions being made by the people in power. If I watched a match right now and then pulled up a discussion of it on the Internet, I bet a lot of the people there would have the same views on what was good and what was bad that I would have. But the thing is, I’m not always right, either. I think it can be a great tool for those in the business to see what some of the fans think, but I don’t think wrestling should live and die by the Internet.

It can also be a sort of crutch, because one thing’s for sure—if I’m in the WWE and Triple H, as a top guy who’s married to the boss’s daughter, has a stinkeroo of a match, it’s a heck of a lot easier for me to say, “Hey, the Internet is saying you had a stinkeroo,” than it is for me to tell him I think he had a stinkeroo.

And later in 2001, I did something I had once thought I would never do— on October 8, 2001, I wrestled a match for New Japan. You might think there would be a strange feeling for me, being in a New Japan dressing room, but I had fully made the separation from Baba a decade earlier, and Junior had ended up leaving there, too.

It was a special match to commemorate 50 years of wrestling in Japan, with Junior and me against Tatsumi Fujinami and Bob Backlund. It was also going to be one of Fujinami’s last matches. He was one of the original great junior heavyweights in that company, and was one of its best workers for years. He had always wanted to wrestle me, and it was really an honor for me to get into the ring with him and to work with Backlund. Actually, Fujinami’s wife played a big role in that, I think, because she had been a great Terry Funk fan growing up in Japan.

The whole time I was there for that show, I never talked to Inoki. However, a couple of years later, Inoki and I did an appearance together on a talk show that was going to air in Japan. I sat down and listened to him. Of course we never could have met like that years ago, because the promotional rivalry was so intense.

If you think about it, Inoki has been very much a visionary of wrestling, and someone who has been able to change with the times. Our discussion was very cordial, if a bit strained at first. We had been adversaries for so long, and to get to hear the history of the wrestling war in Japan from his perspective was a great experience for me.

I was a special guest at the WWE show in Amarillo on April 30, 2004, just a couple of months before I started working on this book.

I had fun, and it really made West Texas State, or West Texas A&M, as it’s now known, a good amount of money, which was the thing most important to me. Still, it was good to see a lot of the boys again, and good to be in front of the hometown crowd one more time.

For the record, I thought the university’s name change was a successful deal. At the time they changed the name, I wanted them to leave it alone, but as time has passed by, even I’ve started calling it West Texas A&M. It has turned out that the best thing that ever happened to the university, for state funding and for the buildings, was for it to become an affiliate of Texas A&M.

The show was also a good deal for WWE, because they had a nice crowd, and I had gotten them a good rate on the building. WWE made more money than they could have otherwise, and West Texas made more money than they ever could have by trying to run an independent show as a fundraiser.

I saw a lot that night, and I actually took a minute to reflect on more than 50 years that I had been either in or around the wrestling business. The thing that surprised me most was, the matches I was watching were still different from the matches of 30 years ago but were a lot closer than they were to the matches of six months ago.

I saw more selling, and I saw a great deal more storytelling. I also saw a lot more mat wrestling that night than I had a couple of years ago, when it looked like a bunch of half-assed acrobatics. And when I say half-assed, that still makes those guys pretty damned good acrobats. But they got to a point where they were reliant on those moves, which don’t give you a whole lot of longevity.

A lot of those acrobatics were the product of the competition between the WWF and WCW. Each wrestler wanted to be better than the guys on the other show, and that put the guys in a position of constantly having to outdo each other. Ultimately, that mentality has shortened careers because of all the neck injuries that have resulted. The return to wrestling is a good thing for the performers, because it should be slowing that down, especially now that there’s no serious competition. The office itself has, and should, put a stop to the extreme amounts of punishment the guys are taking.

Of course, sometimes you never know what is going to be a crippling move. In October 2001, Hayabusa, who impressed me so much in Japan, slipped on the ropes while performing a move called a quebrada, landed on his head and ended up in a wheelchair. That move is one Chris Jericho does every week on Raw. He calls it the lionsault, and it doesn’t immediately look like the kind of thing that could cripple a man. It just goes to show that any move can be a dangerous one.

I understand what drives someone to take those kinds of chances, especially with the way the business was in the late 1990s and even now. It’s a wonderful business to be in if you’re in the right place and being used properly. It’s a business where you can make enough money to retire at a young age, but you also need to make sure you’ll physically be able to enjoy those retirement years. It’s nice to be able to afford a gold-plated wheelchair I guess, but it’s not a place I would want to be.

The only thing that’s going to have longevity in this business is wrestling itself. I could go out and do hardcore stuff, and it will leave an impression I can draw from for a while, but it doesn’t have longevity, because then you’re off to the next thing, acrobatics, or whatever. After a period of time, the acrobatics are gone, the hardcore is gone, and so it goes. But wrestling will never be gone.

I think Hunter, or Triple H, as he’s known now, and the rest of the WWE guys saw what was happening, with all the injuries due to that style, and pulled it the other way. Maybe I’m blowing too much smoke up Hunter’s ass, but he’s got great psychology, and the McMahons added a real asset to their family when he married Stephanie.

A lot of the guys from my era don’t see things the way I do, and I don’t necessarily mean that as a bad thing against Bill Watts, Ole Anderson, or any of those guys.

Like them, I don’t watch it on TV every week, but I stay involved enough and keep my finger on certain things to where I can still feel some of these things that can be difficult for them to understand, because they don’t follow it at all.

And any of us “old-timers” can gripe about how “Vince did this,” or “Vince did that,” but I’ll say one thing—Vince’s daughter Stephanie married a guy who’s got some goddamned brains, and some respect for the way things should be done to keep the business strong. This guy Hunter loves wrestling.

And he catches a lot of heat for his position. People gripe, saying stuff like, “Well, he’s always got the belt!”

Well, hell, he’s not going to get all pissed and run crying out of the door like Shawn Michaels used to do, is he? He can’t! He can’t quit and go home, because the business, in the form of his wife, is waiting for him at home!

And get used to seeing him, because Vince is going to rely on him more and more. When he needs a truthful word, a decision from someone who knows the business itself, he’s going to go to Hunter.

And Hunter is a guy who strives for excellence inside that ring. He busts his ass to get all he can out of every match.

And Stephanie’s out there, too. She watches every match, to see reactions.

My wife used to do that, too. I used to hate to ask Vicki, “How was my match?”

She’d point out every single thing I did wrong, and the reason I hated it was she was always right.

What I saw made me optimistic for the future—the future of WWE, anyway. If you had told me 20 years ago that I’d be talking about that company as the industry leader in this country, I’d have laughed in your face. But they’re not just the industry leader in this country—they’re the industry itself!