The Road Warriors: Danger, Death, and the Rush of Wrestling (24 page)

When it was time for us to go on, my heart was beating like a jackhammer. There was so much that could go wrong, so little room for error. And yet I knew that once our music hit, it was going to be nonstop until the match was over, for better or worse, in life or death. No shit, man, it could have happened.

Boom!
Our music hit, and it was time for the Night of the Skywalkers. When we came through the curtains, Hawk and I nodded at one another and patted each other’s back. Then off we went. Crockett had sprung for these cool pyrotechnic cannons to go off as we went by, shooting off giant Roman-candle-style fireballs.
Bam, bam, bam!
The smell of smoke and the roar of the people are all I remember as I made my way to the scaffold.

In true Road Warriors style, Hawk and I knew exactly how to handle our entrance: storming to the top of the scaffold as we’d always stormed the ring. We launched up the small side ladders built into the structure and made it up there in a matter of seconds. Again, I had a sense of vertigo, but this time I was scanning the 20,000 people standing and screaming for us. We were exactly eye level with the fans in the upper tiers. The lighting rig was really hot, something I would never have noticed down in the ring.

The Midnight Express had come out before us, but they were really playing up their fear factor for the 25-foot scaffold. Cornette was hilarious as he shared Dennis’ and Bobby’s anxiety and was hugging both of them and yelling, “This is insane. This is ludicrous.”

Hawk and I stood on the catwalk, shouting for them to start their climb. I kept making chicken wing motions to show the fans what I thought about the Midnights.

After a few more minutes of comedic cowardly stalling, they finally made their way to the ladder rungs. As you can imagine, Dennis and Bobby took forever to climb to the top, which was probably due to a combination of shtick and real fear.

When they finally got to the top, we thought it’d be funny to shake the skinny little guard rails and scare the hell out of them. It worked like a charm. I remember being shocked and a little worried about how flimsy the rails were. They felt like they were held together with tape instead of screws.

In fact, when we started shaking them a second time, one of the rails on Hawk’s side broke and swung down toward the ground. He immediately looked at me. “Holy shit. Did you see that?”

Across the catwalk, Bobby was pointing over to the rail and saying something to Dennis, which I’d guess was something along the lines of “Oh God, we’re going to die.”

And with that, while the two of them were on their knees, Hawk and I made our way across the catwalk to start the match. I led the way as we walked carefully in little shuffle steps until we were about halfway across. I was praying the whole time and trying not to look down. As I got close to Dennis, I yelled out to him, “C’mon, Loverboy, let’s do this.”

He crawled toward me and then ducked between my legs.

I spanked Loverboy’s ass as he went through and made my way to Bobby by the rails, and
bam!
I started throwing punches and kicks at Bobby while Hawk was headbutting and kicking Dennis. As we stomped on the catwalk, it made the loudest, most shrill noise I’d ever heard, like hitting a tin roof with a frying pan.

For the first couple of minutes, the four of us carefully paced ourselves, trading shots slowly and deliberately. Then it was time for the Midnights to take control, which they did by pulling little bags of baby powder out of their trunks and throwing it into our faces. The big explosion of powder kayfabe blinded us and allowed Dennis and Bobby to take the upper hand of the match.

Hawk was doing an amazing job of dangling his legs off of the side of the scaffold, really looking like he could’ve spilled to the concrete floor below at any second. It also didn’t help that another one of the guard rails disconnected and swung to the side. The entire audience (and Dennis, who was right next to it) gasped. The Night of the Skywalkers was truly living up to the hype of being a life-or-death situation.

Hawk and I weathered the storm and let the Midnights have their way for a minute before turning the tide back in our favor. On the other side, I could see Hawk slamming Dennis’ head into the steel repeatedly until he drew blood. On my end, I followed suit and busted Bobby open, too, which put us in the position to take the match home.

Both Hawk and I, on opposite ends of the catwalk, eventually moved Bobby and Dennis onto their stomachs and off of the side of the scaffold. They were both holding on to the inside of the structure, facing the ring. The catwalk was underlined from end to end with two parallel sets of ladder rungs exactly like a set of monkey bars in a jungle gym.

Dennis was holding on to a rung and lost his footing so that he was only hanging by his arms. Hawk, too, was hanging from one of the catwalk rungs and started to barrage Dennis with swinging kicks. Dennis couldn’t hang on any longer and, just like that, he let go and fell like a ton of bricks into the canvas.
Boom!
At the same time, Bobby decided to monkey bar all the way out to the middle of the catwalk, 20 feet above the ring. I was right behind him and started to swing and kick his lower back with my right foot.
Boom, boom, boom!

Bobby swung wildly back and forth maybe five times before losing his grip and taking a full-out crash onto his ribs and hip in one of the nastiest bumps I’ve ever seen in the business. Both Dennis and Bobby looked like two dead bodies lying in the ring, battered and bleeding. We won the match and got our revenge on the Midnight Express.

But the action wasn’t over yet. Jimmy Cornette still had a date with the top of the scaffold. With Dennis and Bobby in a crumpled mess in the ring, Cornette thought he’d sneak attack Paul with his tennis racket. Just as he was about to swing, Paul turned around, blocked the shot, and chased Cornette into the ring and up one of the sides of the scaffold. He climbed all the way to the top and found himself all alone with me.

In a great performance, Cornette shuffled his way cautiously out to the middle of the catwalk, got down onto his stomach, and started to reach underneath the platform to the monkey bars. I crawled right down on top of him and assisted him over the edge. In a flash, Cornette swung off and was hanging completely vertical from the catwalk, yelling, “Bubba, Bubba, catch me.”

Well, either the lights were in Bubba’s eyes or he was terrible at playing catch, because when Jimmy let go, he plummeted straight down and landed flatfooted, blowing out one of his knees. He was lying in the ring, crying out, “Oh, Bubba, my knee. I hurt my knee.”

He wasn’t kidding, either. Cornette wound up being gone from the business for a few months until he could rehab the injury.

In the meantime, lucky us, we got to tour the entire country until early 1987 doing Skywalker rematches with Dennis and Bobby. That little stretch couldn’t have ended soon enough for all four of us. But I’ll tell you what, as exciting and climactic as Starrcade was, the biggest excitement of the year had yet to arrive.

Not even a week after climbing up the scaffold in Atlanta, I got the call on December 2 that Julie’s water had broken. Shit, I was going to be a father again, and here I was in the middle of a TV taping in Greenville, North Carolina. I didn’t even take my gear with me as I scrambled to make the first flight out of there to Charlotte and then to Minneapolis. I’m telling you, it was nothing like the convenience of today’s airline travel.

I finally got back at about 10:30 a.m. on December 3 and made it to the hospital about a half hour before Julie delivered. As I mentioned earlier, Julie and I decided to keep the baby’s gender a surprise, so when the big moment came, we had no idea what to expect. And what did we get? A baby boy, whom we named James.

We were both overwhelmed with joy at our new gift from God and, man, you should’ve see James’ size. He was huge. All of the nurses were betting each other on how much he weighed, which I said would be at least ten pounds. He came out at 10.4 pounds— and with a full head of black hair, which eventually turned blond.

There he was, my son, screaming and hungry. As I held him, I also looked at Julie, who’d put in the greatest effort for nine months carrying a kid this size. I said, “James, you’re going to be one amazing athlete someday, bud.” With the genes he’d inherited from Julie and me, our son was loaded with potential. We both knew great things were ahead for our baby James.

By late February of 1987, Hawk and I finally wrestled the last of our scaffold matches with the Midnight Express, although our long-term feud with them was far from over. The Road Warriors’ popularity had risen to such a height that Giant Baba gave us a call. He wanted Hawk and me to come to Japan and go over Jumbo and Tenryu for the NWA International Tag Team titles. It was a huge honor.

Usually guys from America who were privileged enough to be given those belts had been in the business for years and had legendary reputations. Sure, the whole wrestling business is a work and titles are given, not won, but when you’re on a short list of respected American workers with the likes of Abdullah the Butcher, Dory and Terry Funk, and even Dick the Bruiser and the Crusher, it was clear how much respect the Japanese truly had for us. With only three and a half years of experience, Hawk and Animal were among the very elite ranks.

Fortunately, by the time we arrived at the Tokyo Dome on March 12, 1987, Hawk and Jumbo had long since laid their problems to rest. When it came down to it, both teams respected the hell out of each other and wanted to do great business for Baba by putting on a phenomenal show. And, believe me, we definitely outdid ourselves.

I particularly enjoyed the opening of the match. I started off with Jumbo, and the crowd let out a mixture of chants for both of us. It was electric. After locking up and pushing off each other a couple times, we locked horns a third time and Jumbo snapped me over with a fast arm drag.
Whoom! Bam!
I hit hard and skidded sideways before jumping up like a startled lion.

I thought we needed to pick up the pace a bit, so I looked at the crowd, started screaming, and launched at Tsuruta with a big boot to the stomach.
Boom!
Then I whipped him into the ropes, bounced back, and smashed him with a flying shoulder block. As soon as I landed, I ran to Jumbo, picked him up off the mat, and then pressed the big man high over my head as the Japanese people stood in amazement. That was my official Animalized opening for our championship night.

The rest of the match was a smooth and successful demonstration of two seasoned teams working their craft. After two years of being in and out of the All Japan trenches with Jumbo and Tenryu, we had definitely reached an instinctual level of understanding and communication in the ring.

The way we won the match was interesting because it was by count-out due to giving Tenryu a piledriver on the concrete floor and running back into the ring at the last second. Now, in the United States, a title could never change hands by count-out. The only way a challenger could win a belt in the United States was by pinfall or submission, period. But in Japan, they didn’t have the same stipulations we did, so the finish allowed us to capture the NWA International Tag Team Championship and also allowed Jumbo and Tenryu to save face by not being clearly beaten in the middle of the ring. Nevertheless, Hawk and I did it.

We were given the ultimate recognition from Baba as highly respected entities in Japanese professional wrestling. You should’ve seen the giant four-foot-tall trophies we were given. I’d never seen anything like them.

In fact, championships were handled very differently in Japan. In America, the referee raised your hand and the announcer made the call and it was over with little fanfare. In Japan, it was a much different, more reverent scenario. The procession was serious, and we were as humble as possible for the duration. After all, we were still just oversized kids in another country following the leaders, excited and grateful to be there. We were also given the International title belts, which we actually gave back to Baba after the show was over.

About a month before we had left for Japan, Jimmy Crockett had been so proud of us going over to AJPW and winning the championships that he’d had brand-new American belts made for us, but we used Baba’s belts whenever we wrestled in Japan. Now we were the NWA Six-Man Tag Team champions (with Dusty) and the NWA International Tag Team champions.

As it would turn out, that night proved to be the very last time we would face Jumbo and Tenryu as a tag team. Not long after, they would split up. In a lot of ways, I guess winning the titles from those guys kind of ceremoniously ended the classic rivalry altogether. In fact, just a couple of years later, we’d invite Tenryu to be our six-man tag partner in WCW. But Hawk and I had some business to attend to first.

When we touched back down in the United States, we started getting ourselves prepared for the upcoming 2nd Annual Jim Crockett Sr. Memorial Cup in Baltimore in April. Although Hawk and I were the defending Crockett Cup winners and were on one hell of a team in the business, we were told by Dusty that he and Nikita were going to win the Cup. At that point, Dusty was still intent on getting Nikita as over as possible with the fans, who were still reeling from the loss of Magnum T.A. back in October.

It was also around this time that yet another set of Road Warriors clones were brought to my attention. A few months earlier in January, the WWF debuted a team by the name of Demolition, which was nothing more than a slightly different approach to our Road Warriors gimmick. Ax and Smash came to the ring wearing black spray-painted hockey masks along with black spider-strapped singlets studded with little spikes.

When the masks came off, Ax and Smash were both revealed to be completely made up in bizarre mixtures of silver, black, red, and yellow face paint. To be honest with you, I felt their look and posturing looked a little more like the rock band KISS than like us, but the overall tone was definitely based on us.

I wasn’t too upset about Demolition, though, because the guys behind the Ax and Smash gimmicks were our old friend Bill “Masked Superstar” Eadie and fellow partner in crime Barry Darsow. You see, Barry’s contract with Crockett had recently expired and he was looking for any and all new opportunities.