My Life Outside the Ring (7 page)

Part of the reason was that music had shown me so clearly that there were other options in life.

Back when I quit the football team for good, around the same time I started going to the Christian Youth Ranch, I hooked up with the Jeannie Conroy Show. This lady, Jeannie Conroy, was like a local celebrity who had a summer replacement TV show on the air, and one of the ways she capitalized on her name recognition was to put together a fourteen-piece show band and play dinner clubs. They needed a bass player, and by that time I’d switched over to playing fretless bass more than guitar. The old ego I had in my first band slipped away, and I found that I actually liked being in the back instead of out front.

Her band had a horn section that played all this Tower of Power stuff. We also played themes from
Oklahoma!
and this fluffed-up music for the senior crowd. I just did it because it was good money. We got paid big bucks to play that stuff.

I also hooked up with a couple of other bands my junior and senior year—these bands with guys in their twenties who were playing the really hot clubs in the area and making some real dough. And it dawned on me: Here I was, in my teens, and I could make more money playing music two nights a week than my dad made working all week in the sun.

That was a huge wake-up call for me. My parents never had any new cars, and all of a sudden, my senior year of high school, I go out and buy a new Charger for like three grand. I was actually living in a hotel part of my senior year, for free. It was part of the deal with this band that played at the Islands Club, where I was playing all this new dance music and had to wear the platform shoes and the whole deal. It was the 1970s, man, and we had to look the part.

Playing music clearly meant that you could avoid working a real job and still live fine. But it also meant you could avoid the real world in general by staying out late and going to bed when everybody else gets up to go to work. I loved the escape. That’s part of the reason wrestling would eventually appeal to me—I just wanted to do anything to avoid that boring, routine 9-to-5, you know?

With music there was always that possibility that you’re gonna break through and become a national or even international act, and I had a real ear for it. I could jump in and play with almost any band, and I would do that: just drop in and fill in when some band at the Holiday Inn needed a bass player for the night. For a while I wound up playing with a guitarist who’d toured with Todd Rundgren—the guy who wrote that song “Hello, It’s Me”? Like a huge hit! He got tired of life on the road and moved down to the area, and we worked together. And I just loved the possibility of  “making it” someday.

It wasn’t that I was lazy. I was willing to work real hard. It just seemed to me that with most jobs there was already a period on the end of the sentence. Why would I even think about working a regular job that had a cap on top of it—a job in which you could only go so far, and that was it? But growing up in a place like Port Tampa, the draw to get one of those steady, secure jobs was always there, and I really struggled with that. For years.

When I graduated
from Robinson High School in 1971, I moved out to North Tampa and enrolled at Hillsborough Community College. I was the first Bollea to ever go to college, which was a big deal—even though it was only a two-year school. I picked up a liberal arts degree, which basically meant I avoided making any kind of a decision about what I was going to do with my life.

From there I went to the University of South Florida and majored in business with a minor in music while still playing gigs on the weekends. Business got to be too hard, so I switched to a major in mass communications, but that didn’t stick, either. I probably quit four or five times to travel around with these different rock ’n’ roll bands until I finally just didn’t go back. So I never received a real degree of any kind.

The rock ’n’ roll thing wasn’t a perfect fit, though. Even though I loved music, part of me was getting sick and tired of going down to the same clubs every weekend, and playing the same songs, and going through the same routines. I wanted to break into the big time, you know? After three years at the same club you might get a two-hundred-dollar raise—and that’s split between five guys! It just wasn’t enough for me.

Plus, the thing about working with those bands was it seemed like as soon as we’d get a break or a chance to start makin’ real big money, the guys would start bitching about having to work too much, or one guy would go off and get married and then wouldn’t want to travel. It was like banging my head against a wall sometimes. Like no one was willing to give it their all to get to that next level they all said they dreamed about gettin’ to, you know? I certainly couldn’t be a solo act. I couldn’t sing worth a damn, and I didn’t have that leading-man look.

So part of me was starting to wonder if my music career had a cap on top of it, too. Here I was in my early twenties and already starting to give up. In between bands, I wound up falling back on that old Port Tampa mindset and trying to land a regular job—the thing I swore I’d never do.

One of the first places I applied was Tampa Electric Company. The general feeling around town was, man, if you worked for the electric company? What a job to get. That was security for life! But I never heard back from them.

Another time I applied at Honeywell, an electronics company that was another big-deal employer in Tampa. I never heard back from them, either.

Finally I applied at Anheuser-Busch. They had a big plant between Tampa and St. Pete, and I thought if I could get in there and start unloading the beer off the trucks, I could work my way up. That’s what everyone always told me: “You could wind up driving one of those trucks, and then get promoted to supervisor, and then you can be a district manager,” and on and on, “and if you do that, if you put in your twenty-five, thirty years at Anheuser-Busch you’ll be set!” Guess what? I never heard back from them.

The one place I did find work was on the docks off the Twenty-second Street causeway. I was around 250 pounds in those days, and a lot more cut than I am today. You could actually see my stomach muscles back then instead of this one big ab I’ve got now. And the time I’d spent at Hector’s Gym made me strong enough to do some big lifting.

Anthony Barselo, one of the lead singers in one of the seven or eight bands I was in, helped me out. His dad was in the laborers’ union, and he got my name on the books. So every time I’d get sick of a band, when the guys were bitchin’ and complainin’, I’d go back and put my name on those books as a way to change gears and make money.

At first they sent me out on construction jobs or pouring concrete or helping electrical workers. Then one day they sent me out to the docks to help load and unload ships.

I took to that real quick. I was good at anything to do with math, and figuring out how to load these ships the right way was all about math and balance. It was important, too: If you had a big ship going to Singapore or Tokyo and that ship wasn’t loaded correctly, you could sink it. No joke.

They threw me down in the hole, and I worked real hard, to the point where they invited me to join the longshoremen’s union. I was the first white guy ever to get into the longshoremen’s union in Tampa, believe it or not. And the more I worked, the better I got at figuring out how to load these ships with these big containers of meat and fertilizer or whatever the product of the day was. I’d always do it just the right way.

So they kept me on these twelve- to fourteen-hour shifts for about six months until I was so good at it they invited me to join the stevedores’ union. That was a really big deal. Stevedores were the guys on the deck of the ship telling everybody where to put the load.

So there I was, the big man in charge, up on deck, roasting in the hot sun.

But I just kept picturing that Port Tampa Death. I didn’t want to live and die on those docks. I wanted something different for my life. I was still young. I couldn’t give in. Not yet. I knew I had to walk away.

Music wasn’t perfect, but at least I was having fun looking out on a crowd full of beautiful girls and not sweating it up on a container ship all day.

Had I landed one of those other jobs I applied for, who knows what would’ve happened?

If somebody had called me back and hired me at Tampa Electric, and all these friends started congratulating me on landing a great job, I’d probably still be working there today. I might even be retired by now. I’m sure I would’ve been a linesman with my own crew; a foreman, like my dad. I would’ve grown my goatee. I’m sure I would’ve lifted weights and taken steroids and been a legend in my own mind, standing on the side of the road all buff and tan with my hard hat on, posing as everybody drove by—being that guy that everybody wanted me to be.

I have friends who took those gigs, who turned a temp job unloading trucks into a twenty-year career. And I’m sure if I’d had the opportunity, making four, five, six hundred bucks a week, that big union money, I would have done it, too. I just thank God that it never panned out.

Honestly, at that point in my life, I was nothing more than a 250-pound piece of putty. I had no skill. I had no trade. I didn’t have a degree in accounting or business. I never even thought about becoming a doctor or a lawyer or a dentist, let alone a marine biologist or something really interesting like that. Coming out of Port Tampa, that mindset was just never there, you know? It wasn’t something you even dared to think about.

I was lost. I was just looking for someone to point me in the right direction.

The Revelation

By 1976, this pattern of moving between rock ’n’ roll and hard labor was gettin’ real old. But things started to click with this band called Ruckus.

Finally all the elements came together. We had all these good local musicians working in the same group, including Anthony Barselo, the heartthrob lead with feathered-back hair and a really great voice, and that kick-ass guitarist I mentioned before who had worked with Todd Rundgren. We had top-notch equipment. We were playing big gigs and sounding really good. We even had some original songs that the crowds seemed to love.

More and more people started coming to see us wherever we played. Word spread everywhere that Ruckus was the “next big thing.”

Even though I wasn’t the front guy, I developed a major knack for interacting with the audience at this point and became sort of the voice of the band. Whenever there was a break between songs, I’d be the one to step up to the mike and get everyone fired up. “How’s everyone doin’ tonight?! We’re Ruckus, and we’re gonna be rockin’ ya straight through to midnight!” I just had a rapport with the audience. I could kind of read their mood, and if we were having a lull I’d come up with something crazy. “Hey! It’s time for a beer chuggin’ contest!” Whatever it took to get everyone involved and having a great time. I had zero stage fright, and I actually enjoyed that part of the show as much as any of the music we played, if not more.

I’ll never forget this one night in late ’76, when I looked out from the stage and saw this towering blond guy walking through the crowd. It was Superstar Billy Graham! One of the top wrestlers from New York. This massive figure I’d been watching on TV for years.

I can remember the first time I saw him on TV, climbing up to the second turnbuckle and facing the crowd with his arms up, and those massive twenty-two-inch biceps. He looked inhuman. I remember thinking,
I want to be just like
that
guy some day!
He looked like this golden god, you know? And here he was in the club, listening to my band.

He had his manager with him, too, who I also recognized—this red-haired Humpty Dumpty–looking guy named Sir Oliver Humperdink.

Next thing I know, two nights later, four or five other wrestlers come in. Jack Brisco, the world heavyweight champion, comes in with his brother Jerry. Then Dusty Rhodes himself, my childhood hero, comes walking into the bar to hear
our
band.

Over the next few months, all these wrestlers started following Ruckus around, just like the rest of the crowd, to wherever our next gig was. Before I knew it, I found myself talking to these guys—these behemoths who had always seemed larger than life to me.

And guess what? After a while, it started to seem like they were just normal people. The more I talked to ’em, the more their mystique wore off. Once I wasn’t intimidated or awestruck, I told them all about this passion I had for watching wrestling when I was younger. I wasn’t afraid to talk about being a big fan.

The more I talked about it, the more pumped up it got me about the sport of professional wrestling. I started going to see live matches again. I started asking them all about their training and how they built muscles.