The Road Warriors: Danger, Death, and the Rush of Wrestling (29 page)

On November 24, during a
World Championship Wrestling
taping at the WTBS studio in Atlanta, Hawk and I were recruited by Dusty himself to participate in a now infamous TV angle that would lead to his removal as booker and subsequent firing. It all started off when Hawk and I cut promos about our newfound antipathy toward Sting, Luger, and Rhodes. I personally put the exclamation on the interview to commentator David Crockett that ignited the fuse for the upcoming explosion.

“You know, David Crockett, I heard I’ve got a match December 7 against Dusty Rhodes, right? Dusty Rhodes, you seem to forget we ain’t new in this sport. Just like us, your credentials speak for themselves. You have a long history of wins against great opponents, but we made a name for ourselves beating legends. Legends just like you. You’re gonna find out what I’m made of December 7, and you ain’t gonna like it one bit.”

Just as Hawk and I left the interview, Dusty entered and challenged me to come out right then and there to take him on. He climbed into the ring, and I came right back out with Hawk and Paul to answer his challenge. I jumped through the ropes and pushed Dusty back into a corner to start dishing out some kicks to the gut.
Bam, bam, bam!
Then I whipped him across the ring into the opposite corner and charged with a clothesline only to miss when Dusty ducked out of the way. He turned and ran straight back at me with a big clothesline of his own and took me off my feet.
Whoom!

At that point, Hawk was already plowing into the ring to batter Rhodes into kingdom come while I recovered. While Hawk was taking care of business, I reached over for my shoulder pads, which Paul had set in the corner, and unscrewed one of the big seven-inch spikes.

As soon as the spike was free, I ran over with a double-over-handed thrust to Dusty’s forehead. Then the big drama came as I carefully made it look like I was trying to stab Dusty’s eye out of the socket.

Jim Ross, one of the commentators back at the podium, was going crazy. “He put it in his eye. He put the spike in his eye!”

While Dusty was rolling around bleeding like a stuck pig, Sting, Luger, Bam Bam Bigelow, and a bunch of other guys ran in for the save.

Oh, did I forget to mention that one of the most important new rules handed down from Turner was no bloodletting on TV? Oh yeah, it sure was. WTBS was flooded with hundreds of angry callers complaining about what they and their children had seen. Before Dusty even had time to wonder what management thought of his little stunt, he was swiftly relieved of his booking duties. But the worst for Dusty was still to come.

On December 7 in Chattanooga, I went over Dusty in a singles match by DQ after Rhodes bashed me with a chair as retribution for his heavily bandaged eye. Then, a few weeks later we met on December 26 at Starrcade ’88 (moved up a month from its traditional Thanksgiving night slot to avoid competing with WWF’s Survivor Series). Hawk and I lost to Dusty and Sting by DQ due to Paul’s interference.

Right after the match, Dusty Rhodes, the former World Heavyweight champion and creator of some of the greatest wrestling events in NWA history, was fired due to backlash from the spike incident. From beginning to end, 1988 was a turbulent year of big changes, some good and some bad.

The great moments, like my brothers making their debuts in the business and Hawk and I finally winning the NWA World Tag titles, were unfortunately counterbalanced by the bullshit of losing Tully and Arn, Jim Crockett going bankrupt, and, of course, Dusty’s firing. It was all part of the insanity that is professional wrestling.

Aside from all of the high drama at the workplace, though, the biggest news for me personally came before the 1989 New Year, when Julie told me little Joey and James were going to get another playmate. That’s right! My amazing wife was expecting our second child together and the third addition to the Laurinaitis clan.

To prepare for the newest little bundle, I decided it was time to build our own house, one with plenty of room. And that’s what I did. We bought a good-sized lot in a really nice neighborhood in Hamel, Minnesota, and had a contractor go to work on Casa de Laurinaitis. It would take the better part of nine months to finish and would be ready in time for Julie’s expected delivery. Good planning, right?

With Jim Crockett and Dusty removed from the picture of Turner’s WCW, there were some huge voids left to fill. Turner’s answer was to put a guy named Jim Herd in charge of the company. Herd was a former Pizza Hut executive from St. Louis who had once been the station manager of KPLR-TV, which aired the very popular NWA show
Wrestling at the Chase
. Everyone in the locker room was very skeptical of what the “pizza man” would deliver to WCW.

One of the first decisions Herd made at Turner (after firing Dusty) was to place Ric Flair in the role of booker. It was welcome news to us. Ric was one of Hawk’s and my most trusted friends in the company, and we were relieved to see someone of his credibility step up and be the man calling the creative shots.

Flair got right to work and immediately pushed for one of his greatest former rivals, Ricky Steamboat, to come to WCW. Back in the late ’70s and early ’80s, Flair and Steamboat had a legendary feud in Crockett’s old Mid-Atlantic territory that helped propel both of them into superstardom. When the WWF started luring top names from the NWA around ’83 to ’85, Steamboat was one of the guys who made the jump. Now, a few years later, Ricky “The Dragon” Steamboat left the WWF, giving Flair an opportunity he was happy to seize.

Steamboat debuted in January on
World Championship Wrestling
in a tag team match with Eddie Gilbert against Flair and Barry Windham. In a big moment on national TV, Flair the World champ was pinned by Steamboat, reigniting their old feud for the next four months.

During that time, Steamboat defeated Flair for the NWA World Heavyweight Championship at the Chi-Town Rumble in February, successfully defended the title against Flair at Clash of the Champions VI in April, then finally lost the belt back to the Nature Boy at Music City Showdown in May. That little run of Steamboat and Flair’s really brought a lot of excitement to WCW and was a much needed morale booster. It sure seemed like things with Herd and Flair were going to work out fine. Yeah,
seemed like
.

At the same time as Flair and Steamboat’s wars, Hawk and I remained the NWA World Tag Team and World Six-Man Tag Team champions by having a few battles of our own. Because Dusty had long been our six-man partner and was now gone, we needed a replacement. We asked Flair if we could bring in Tenryu from Japan, and he liked the idea. By this time, the experiment of turning us heel had pretty much disappeared without a trace. The fans just wouldn’t boo us.

At Clash of the Champions V in Cleveland on February 15, we defeated the entire Varsity Club (Steve Williams, Mike Rotunda, and Kevin Sullivan) by DQ after Sting, Michael Hayes, and Junkyard Dog ran in for a nine-man brawl. After the win, Tenryu went back to Japan to focus on winning the Triple Crown, the consolidation of the all-singles titles in AJPW. When Tenryu left, the company decided to shelf the World Six-Man Tag Team Championship permanently.

Five days later, on February 20, we successfully defended our World Tag Team titles at Chi-Town Rumble against Williams and Sullivan. After that, Ric came to us and said he wanted us to drop the titles to Williams and Rotunda at Clash of the Champions VI in New Orleans on April 2 (same day as WrestleMania V, which was once again offered as a free WCW alternative).

We said, “No problem, Ric.”

At the end of the match, Williams pinned Hawk, and referee Teddy Long gave a blatant fast count of only two but rang the bell and awarded the Varsity Club our titles. Easy come, easy go.

Just like anytime we dropped championship belts, it didn’t matter to us. We didn’t need them for credibility any more than Hulk Hogan or Flair himself needed their respective World titles. Once you reach a certain level of success and popularity, everything else is secondary. Championships are really meant to establish new guys and give them the rub as emerging main players. That’s the way it had happened for us six years earlier when Ole dropped the NWA National tag belts on our shoulders and said, “There you go! Now let’s see what you two can do from here.”

With all of the change and transition, Hawk and I were experiencing by that February in 1989, we still weren’t out of the woods yet. The WWF, in a successful bid to bypass the New Jersey State Athletic Control Board’s 10 percent surtax on all televised sporting events, released a statement admitting that professional wrestling was staged. Part of the document declared that wrestling was “an activity in which participants struggle hand-in-hand primarily for the purpose of providing entertainment to spectators rather than conducting a bona fide athletic contest.”

And there it was. A few keystrokes on a WWF typewriter and some Xerox copies later, the oldest and most important tradition of professional wrestling was wiped off the face of the earth.

From a business point of view, I easily understood why Vince did what he did, but his modernization of the wrestling industry as “sports entertainment” forced the deliberate exposure of kayfabe on all of us. Wrestlers who had been laboring over their kayfabe gimmicks, injuries, and rivalries at all costs for the sake of protecting themselves and the business were now left out in the wind. You can see why more than a few guys weren’t happy about the WWF’s revelation. Nobody was ever supposed to pull the mask off of the Lone Ranger.

The first few months of ’89 also saw a ton of new talent come into WCW. With the last of the other competitive promotions like the AWA and World Class Championship Wrestling fading away from the forefront, a lot of workers were running for the hills and found sanctuary in the NWA.

Along with guys like Sting and Rick and Scott Steiner, who were acquired during the Crockett Promotions’ dismantling of the UWF, the talent roster in WCW now boasted great prospects like Scott Hall, the Great Muta, “Flyin’” Brian Pillman, Tom “Z-Man” Zenk, the Samoan Swat Team, Sid Vicious, Cactus Jack (Mick Foley), and “Mean” Mark Callous. There were also two new tag teams on the scene in WCW that I’d helped along the way, The Terminators and the Dynamic Dudes.

The Terminators were the team of Al Greene and my brother Marc, while the Dynamic Dudes consisted of Shane Douglas and my brother John (Johnny Ace). Although The Terminators saw a lot of action in the ring, they didn’t see too many wins. Down the road a couple years, Marc and Al created a Road Warriors-inspired gimmick known as the Wrecking Crew and would become WCW World Tag Team champions.

The Dynamic Dudes, two bleach-blond skateboarders, came onto the scene in early ’89 and were managed by Jim Cornette. Although initially put into a successful feud with the Midnight Express, the Dudes were dumped by Cornette and eventually decided to part ways. Johnny had been successful over in Japan, where he was doing his big brother—and the fans—proud. Shortly afterward, John went to Japan, where he caught on and did damn well for himself.

By May, our suspicions about Jim Herd were proving to be true. After Flair was put in charge of booking, things went spiraling out of control like you wouldn’t believe. For starters, Herd didn’t know how to negotiate with the talent. After Ric went through hell to bring in Ricky Steamboat and wound up having a critically acclaimed series of matches, Herd failed to come to a contractual agreement with him and he walked. Just like that, Steamboat was gone and it ruined the planned program between him and Lex Luger, which had already started.

As big of a blunder as the Steamboat debacle was, it didn’t compare to the revolving cavalcade of horrible ideas Herd kept trying to introduce. The WWF had a heavily cartoonish roster of popular characters—Brutus “The Barber” Beefcake, the Honky Tonk Man, and the Big Bossman (Big Bubba repackaged as a corrections officer)—all with elaborate costuming and props. Herd thought he could mimic Vince McMahon’s product and get the same results. Boy, was he wrong.

This guy Herd actually introduced gimmicks like the Ding Dongs (a pair of masked wrestlers who rang bells during their matches), the Hunchbacks (a tag team that couldn’t be pinned due to their costume humps), and Big Josh (Matt Borne in a ridiculous lumberjack outfit with dancing bears). He even famously tried to convince Ric Flair to cut off his trademark blond hair and change his Nature Boy persona into a Spartacus gladiator gimmick.

God, I wish I could tell you I’m kidding, but I’m not. Herd was trying to erase the classic, very distinct line between the WWF’s product of over-the-top spectacle and showmanship and the NWA/WCW product of gritty, realistic professional wrestling.

Hawk summed it up eloquently one night during one of our on-air interviews in a jab at Herd. “Some of us should stick with what we’re good at. For some, that means wrestling. For others, it means making pizza.”

All the boys in the back popped huge for that one.

I’m pretty sure I can safely speak on behalf of my brothers Hawk and “Precious” Paul when I say that the second half of 1989 and into the spring of 1990 simply wasn’t fun at all. That’s the best way I can explain it. From the day we started back in ’83 in GCW up till around the time Crockett had to sell in late ’88, we were having a great time. But now, as the turmoil between Ric and Jim Herd started to escalate, I looked forward less and less to showing up for work.

Even now when I think back over my career, as great as our opponents were at that time—the SST, the Steiners, The Skyscrapers (Sid Vicious and “Dangerous” Danny Spivey), and Doom (Ron Simmons and Butch Reed), for example—I can barely remember a thing about our matches. It’s all a blur.

Things had gotten stale, and Hawk and I were getting bored. What more did we have left to do in WCW, anyway? Maybe we should pick up the phone and give Vince a call up at the WWF. We didn’t know.

It was decided that we’d stay as long as Flair was booker. We hoped he could turn things around.

In the meantime, since my interest in WCW was waning, I was able to put some long overdue focus on my family. In the summer of ’89, my little Joey was eight years old, James was climbing along at two and a half, and on August 8 I got the call that Julie was ready to burst. I got my ass to the hospital with Joey and James in tow.