The Road Warriors: Danger, Death, and the Rush of Wrestling (25 page)

Meanwhile, Randy Colley, the original Smash, was removed from the role after starting it up. Apparently, Randy had been too recognizable as Moondog Rex, half of the former tag team the Moondogs, and needed to be replaced by an unknown. As fate would have it, that unknown had turned out to be Barry.

In all honesty, I feel Demolition originated directly out of Hawk’s and my meeting with Vince the year before. I think his wheels started turning the minute he realized we weren’t signing with the WWF, and he must have thought,
If I can’t have the Road Warriors, I’ll make my own.
Had Hawk and I agreed to terms with Vince, there’s no doubt in my mind Demolition never would’ve come to be.

The Demolition gimmick provided both Bill and Barry with a new life in the business, and God bless ’em, they took full advantage of it. Managed by Mr. Fuji, Demolition destroyed every team in the company (in true Road Warriors fashion) and became the unbeatable WWF Tag Team champions.

The wrestling magazines had a field day with the rivalry, constantly theorizing who would win in a dream match if both teams ever faced each other. Fans used to ask me on the street all the time. Shit, even I was starting to wonder who’d win. In time, everyone would get their answer.

When the Crockett Cup weekend rolled around on April 10 and 11 at the Baltimore Arena, honestly I was a little disinterested in the tournament. I guess I got a little too used to winning everything and was a little put off when we were told we wouldn’t take this year’s Cup. But I quickly got over it. I had to.

At the end of the day, as hard as it was, I always had to remind myself that the wrestling business was a work and I couldn’t feed into all the bullshit about wins and losses. The second a guy takes championship belts and himself too seriously, he becomes a mark. Sure, it’s easy to be swept up in the hype, but we had to maintain a separation between ourselves and our gimmick.

To keep grounded in this industry, all I had to do was remember that the most important word in the phrase “wrestling business” was “business.” Everything else was details. As cliché as it may sound, above and beyond everything was the commitment I felt to being a consummate professional and giving the fans what they paid for.

I never forgot what it was like toiling at my dead-end job: when it was time to get off work, it was time to unload and escape. And there were definitely times I looked forward for months for the AWA to come to town. Now I was on the flip side of the equation, and I took that perspective with me into every match. The fans who came to our shows had probably waited excitedly for months with their tickets tacked onto their corkboards for the big night when the NWA and the Road Warriors finally came to town. We owed those people what they wanted to see: something special and unforgettable.

In our first match of the tournament, we quickly flattened the team Paul Jones managed: Shaska Whatley (the former “Pistol” Pez Whatley) and a guy named Teijho Khan. In our second and last match of the event, we faced the Midnight Express, but it wasn’t the team of “Loverboy” Dennis and “Beautiful” Bobby. Dennis Condrey had abruptly left the company a month or two before and, needing an immediate replacement, Cornette and Bobby had hired Stan Lane, our old rival with the Fabulous Ones.

“Sweet” Stan Lane fit into the spot vacated by Dennis almost seamlessly and breathed new life into the Midnight Express. Since I’d seen him last, Stan now fancied himself a martial artist and was including side body kicks and 360-degree spin kicks in his arsenal. All the other boys, including us, thought those kicks were laughably bad. For most of the match, the Road Warriors dominated (except for Stan’s vicious kicks), leading to the controversial ending.

I was in the ring with Stan and came off the ropes with a flying shoulder block and, in classic fashion, knocked the referee right out of the ring. In the mayhem of not having an official to witness any interference, Jim Cornette quickly jumped into the ring. Immediately when I turned to face him, he lit and threw a handful of flash paper into my face.
Whoom!

All I remember was blistering heat and the smell of my singed eyebrows. I grabbed my face and rolled around as if it were melting off. In the meantime, Paul got a hold of Cornette’s tennis racket and took a good shot at Jimmy’s back. Then I recovered enough to grab the racket, and as I started whacking away on Stan and Bobby, the referee saw me and called for the bell. We lost by DQ. Rats.

In May we flew down to St. Petersburg, Florida, to wrestle at the Eddie Graham Memorial Show in honor of Eddie, a great guy and promoter who had shot and killed himself on January 21, 1985, after years of serious alcoholism. In front of a sold-out crowd at the Bayfront Center, Hawk and I wrestled NWA World Tag Team champions Manny Fernandez and some guy named Ravishing Rick Rude.

Yeah, tell me about it. It seemed like every time I turned my head, I was in a match with one of my old hometown buddies. Not only that, but between Hawk, Barry, Rude, and myself, we had held or were holding every major tag team championship from around the world. Eddie Sharkey had to have felt like a proud father.

By now, Rude had real swagger as the robe-wearing, narcissistic, egomaniacal heel who went to the ring to the tune of Sade’s “Smooth Operator.” I had to give it to him, after struggling for quite some time to come into his own, Rick had developed one smooth gimmick, and I couldn’t have been prouder. Now he was half of the NWA World Tag Team champs. Hell, that was a title Hawk and I had yet to win.

Manny Fernandez was an interesting guy, too. He’d spread the funny rumor that he was in fact the same Manny Fernandez who’d played for the Miami Dolphins in the 1970s. I knew he was full of shit and told him so, but he sure pulled that rib on everybody else. They just didn’t know their football like I did.

We had a great match that night with a double DQ finish when manager Paul Jones came into the ring and broke up the pin I was about to score after powerslamming Manny. Then “Precious” Paul ran in and started beating Jones down, and the ref called for the bell. That didn’t stop Hawk and me from getting one last lick in on Rude. We picked him up from the mat, threw him into the ropes, and double clotheslined his head off. What else are friends for?

Funny enough, also that month, the entire wrestling industry got a little black eye when Jim Duggan and the Iron Sheik got arrested together in New Jersey. On May 26, Duggan and Sheik got pulled over on the NJ Turnpike and were both found under the influence of drugs. But forget about all that, because the kicker is that those two were currently in a hot feud in the WWF. Talk about breaking kayfabe, brother!

There they were, hateful enemies on TV, caught being the best of buddies. As you can imagine, the WWF wasn’t very happy about Duggan and Sheik exposing part of the business and drawing negative publicity to the company. They were both released shortly after.

So, after finishing up in St. Petersburg with Rude and Manny, we had a few dates to hit in the Southwest, where we suffered a big hit to our gimmick—and our wallets. We were staying at a hotel in Weslaco, Texas, slightly above the Rio Grande River from Mexico and west of the Gulf of Mexico. I guess somebody had been watching us during our stay. All I know is that the next morning when Hawk and I went outside to our van, one of the side windows was smashed in. When we opened up the van and took a look inside, it was as I feared: they’d taken our spiked vests. I could’ve killed somebody.

Hawk was livid. “Fuck, man. That’s bullshit.”

I felt violated in the worst way and cursed the fact that we had spent $3000 each on them, including big, custom foam carrying cases.
Poof!
Gone. It makes me sick to think that today, somewhere out there, Hawk’s and my prized vests are probably sitting in a pawnshop collecting dust.

But you know what? Maybe it was all meant to be because the loss made me think even bigger. I decided to give a call to a buddy who worked at Riddell, makers of collegiate and professional grade football shoulder pads, and ran some ideas past him. He sent me a couple pairs of the pads, and I went to work on the vision I had for the Road Warriors’ newest piece of artillery.

I called an old coworker from my days at Honeywell and asked him if he could fabricate a few nickel-plated spikes in various sizes. He said it would be no problem and got to work right away. The next step was drilling holes in the tops of the pads and then spray-painting the entire sets with a flat black.

When the spikes were ready, I simply popped them in place like rivets into the holes. After clamping some chains between the breastplates, I tried them on. They were even better than I’d hoped. Like an excited little kid, I called up Hawk and told him to get his ass over and check out my newest creation.

“Holy shit, Animal, those are badass,” he said.

We both put our pads on and looked at each other in the mirror. It was love at first sight. The Road Warriors had been supersized.

Inspired by the new addition to our gimmick, I also started to experiment with a new Road Warrior Animal paint job. Sketching out some ideas, I began to draw a web with a spider in the middle. That was it! I drew the webbing onto my face in the same general shape as my standard devil horn look, only I didn’t fill it in with solid colors. I simply connected a series of lines into a point between my eyes and then painted a little black spider hanging right in the center.

It gave me chills looking at it. I thought,
Don’t get caught in the web.
Hell, yeah. Being stuck in Animal’s web meant certain doom for all unfortunate prey.

My Road Warriors inventiveness didn’t stop with the pads and the paint job. During another trip back to Japan in early June, after watching a match with the British Bulldogs, I was inspired to develop a new finisher to captivate audiences. Davey Boy Smith and Dynamite Kid were one of the most innovative and exciting teams I’d ever seen, and one spot Dynamite did in particular caught my attention.

The move was called the electric chair drop, which involved Dynamite bending over and scooping an opponent onto his shoulders in an upright seated position, as if to give him a piggyback ride. From there, Dynamite pushed backward as hard as he could, giving his opponent a back-bump from hell.
Boom!

I wondered what it would be like if I put somebody up for the electric chair and Hawk clotheslined them from the top rope. Hmmmm. Only one way to find out.

A few days later we were doing TV tapings for AJPW against a couple of jobbers, and I thought we’d take my new idea for a test run. When we got to the end of the match, I told Hawk to climb to the top. I walked up behind one of our dazed opponents, stuck my head between his legs, and raised him high up on my shoulders. When I’d adjusted to the additional weight, I pivoted around to face Hawk, who launched off and clotheslined the guy with a ton of force, knocking him for a full backflip.
Whoom!

The resulting carnage was incredible and perfectly Road Warrioresque. The move was like a decapitation and a graceful trapeze act all at the same time. Hawk and I knew we had a winner the second we watched it back on tape. No one was doing anything like what we had executed. The only thing we were missing was a name, which we quickly came up with: the Double Impact. But when we went back to the States, we eventually settled on a new, permanent name for our finisher: the Doomsday Device.

When we came back to the United States and used the Doomsday on our first TV taping, the guys in the back were less than thrilled. “Oh, great,” Arn Anderson said. “Now we get to do that? What’s next, a firing squad?”

12

THE GOLDEN AGE OF JIM CROCKETT PROMOTIONS AND THE NWA

We’d just revamped our Road Warrior gimmick with the addition of the shoulder pads and the Doomsday Device when the time came yet again for the Great American Bash, another monthlong tour in July of 1987. But this year the Bash itself would be a mere backdrop for the event Hawk and I felt was the defining moment of each of our careers—War Games: The Match Beyond.

War Games was another brilliant invention of Dusty Rhodes, who’d been thinking of a way to get all Four Horsemen in the ring with himself, Nikita, and us in a super match. I don’t know how he came up with it, but Dusty envisioned two rings, side by side, enclosed by one giant, ceilinged cage. The resulting concept would become the uncontested king of the gimmick matches.

I remember arriving with Hawk at the Omni for the match on the Fourth of July, the kickoff night of the Bash. We couldn’t wait to go out on the floor and see what this thing was all about.

I couldn’t believe what I saw. There in the empty arena, hanging ominously about 70 feet in the air above the two rings, was the giant War Games cage. It’s an image I’ll never forget.

Like little kids in awe, Hawk and I walked to the rings and checked them out. Right away I noticed there was about a five-foot gap between the ropes where the rings were side by side, and got big ideas. “I got it, man,” I said to Hawk. “We hit a set of double flying shoulder blocks.” With a new playground like this, the possibilities were endless.

The match was in two parts: the War Games and then the Match Beyond. The way it all worked was so simple that it was brilliant. War Games started off with two men, one from each team. After two minutes of no-rules combat, a coin toss decided which team got to send in another member for a two-on-one advantage. Then after two more minutes, the opposite team was able to even up the score with another entrant. This sequence went back and forth every two minutes until both teams were completely in the ring at the same time, at which point the War Games became the Match Beyond. The Match Beyond itself had an even simpler premise than the War Games: the first person to submit or surrender lost the match for his team.

I thought the whole idea was amazing and couldn’t wait to get painted and geared up. In a lot of ways, the War Games meant so much more than being a wrestling spectacle; it was a symbol of the heights the NWA and Jimmy Crockett had scaled in the industry. At that time, the company was in the midst of a golden era of popularity and profits, and it was because of our loaded roster of top guys.