Hitman My Real Life in the Cartoon World (26 page)

Stu introduced me to the Crocketts, direct descendants of Davy Crockett, who ran the Carolinas, to Eddie Graham from Florida and Don Owens from Portland. Paul Boesch, who ran out of Houston, was also there.

The Nature Boy Ric Flair made a grand entrance into the hotel lobby, strolling by in a sharp light-blue suit and perfect shoulder-length white hair, escorted by a dozen girls, one of whom he was carrying.

He did a silly little jig and yelled out what was to become his trademark, “Wooooo,” sounding a lot like a siren revving up. Flair had recently dropped the NWA World belt back to Harley Race, but the star from the Carolinas was still considered by many to be the hottest American wrestler in the business at that time.

Harley stood talking quietly with Dory and Terry Funk; in another corner, seated in a wingback chair and sucking on a big cigar, Baba talked cordially with Inoki. A few feet away from them, Jim Barnett and Ole Anderson were in intense conversation. Kaiser, Jovica and Colón were there, too, all with big fat cigars. It was a bit awkward seeing Steve Ricard; I made a point of sitting down with him over a beer to explain why I left New Zealand and how much I truly appreciated what he would have done for me. “No worries,” he said, “sometimes a man’s gotta do what he’s gotta do.”

The formality of the meeting room, bedecked with long polished wood tables, plush carpeting and a podium, signaled the serious business that was about to unfold. Stu brought Bruce and me in with him as the doors were closing. Outsiders and hangers-on were definitely not welcome. Everyone had a kink in their tail because Verne Gagne, of the rival AWA, had been spotted in the lobby. I was half expecting them to round up a posse to go out and lynch him.

There were sixty of us in the room listening to a lot of boring speeches, which went a long way to explaining why my mom had stopped coming to these things. Everyone skirted around the real issue until Ole Anderson got up and got right to the point, talking about how the New York territory ran their TV in his Ohio markets. Ole stared hard at Vince Jr., but Vince remained impassive.

“If you want war, McMahon, I’ll give you war! I’ll run in your Pennsylvania towns.”

Everyone started arguing, and there were cries of order. Then Vince stood up in the midst of the commotion and simply walked out. In that moment, I was witness to the beginning of the end of promoters such as my dad and regional territories such as Stampede—though none of us recognized that at the time.

But Stu did tell Bruce and me that now there was going be a three-way pissing match between Vince, the Crocketts and Verne Gagne, and all three had enough money to piss for a long time. I asked him who’d win. After careful consideration, he said, “I’ll put my money on Vince. With that New York TV, he’ll have the deepest pockets.”

Stu was reminiscing about when he first met The Stomper, back in 1959. He told me that I would’ve still been crawling around in diapers when a young brute named Archie Gouldie drove up from a small town called Carbon, seventy-seven miles southeast of Calgary, to seek him out. A complete mark, he was brawny, strong and confident that he could beat Stu’s top guy, or anyone else on the card. He entered the pavilion and started to climb right into the ring. Stu grabbed him by the arm and somehow managed to persuade him to come up to the house and work out with him instead.

“I kicked the shit out of him,” Stu said. “Head between the knees, hip to head, the bastard kept trying to scoot on his ass until he had nowhere to go.” Stu gave him “all the ugly stuff after that.

Everything!”

He showed up at the house again the next day and was humble enough to say, “Sir, I want you to teach me how to wrestle.”

That’s how he became The Stomper, and he rescued Stampede Wrestling.

Now, some twenty-four years later, the past and present swirled together as I clamped Archie in a headlock while he angrily stamped his feet, trying to escape. My heart raced at the thrill of working with the man who had put fear in my heart when I was a kid. He was still intense, still believable, and he hadn’t lost a step. The crowd in Regina was standing as we brawled back and forth. When I kicked him, he shook from the pain of the blow. I spun him and slammed a lifter into his chest, and he hit the mat and rolled out, holding his jaw. He retreated to the dressing room and the ref counted him out. When I got there, I was surprised to see that Archie was in an angry sulk. It turned out that although I thought it had all gone perfectly, I’d chipped his tooth with the lifter. He was packing his gear and going back to Knoxville because he thought I’d potatoed him on purpose. I apologized. I told him how well I thought we worked together and how badly we needed him. I offered to get him a good dentist in Calgary and pay for it.

He showed a trace of a smile. “It was a helluva match, wasn’t it?”

I extended a hand, and we shook. “Yeah, Arch, it really was.”

The greatest thing about working with Archie The Stomper Gouldie was that he was everything he pretended to be.

Since News was still under suspension, we needed an angle that would carry us through to spring.

Soon Archie suggested that he team up with J.R. Foley to work against Stu and me. Everyone loved the idea, especially my sixty-eight-year-old father, so that’s what we did.

One of my greatest memories ever is teaming up with my dad. I’d have thought that having J.R. in there would have added a bit of humor to the mix, but when you throw two old shooters together, things are bound to get out of hand. Stu broke J.R.’s dentures in half, and somehow J.R., who was working in real cowboy boots, stomped my dad so hard that he broke a few ribs. Needless to say, every time he crossed my dad after that, J.R. had a malfunction at the junction.

As for me, Archie gave me back the confidence that I’d lost with Bad News.

The bus headed east in late October for another trip to Saskatoon. I sat next to Bruce, and across the aisle sat Karl Moffat. That bald-headed biker had passed his auditions down in the dungeon, having become good enough, quite good actually, that he was eagerly making his very first road trip. Also back was a newly reinstated Bad News, who was still on very thin ice with the commission. Moffat was still a mark, and gushed about Bad News, or should I say, “Mr. Allen,” just loud enough for News, seated near the back of the bus, to hear every word of it. News could barely keep a straight face, except when Karl turned to look back at him. Karl expected an appreciative nod and instead got only an icy cold stare, and he swallowed and turned away.

The wink went out. Bruce nonchalantly let slip that News’s four-year-old daughter had just been accepted into Juilliard as the youngest piano player ever in the history of New York. Karl hung on every word, but we acted like we didn’t notice. Bruce then suggested to me that it might be a good idea to congratulate News. As I purposely hesitated, Karl bolted out of his seat and headed down the aisle, all eyes on him. Karl approached News, cautiously smiling, “Well congratulations, Mr. Allen! I hear your daughter is quite the talented piano player!”

“You fucking asshole,” News yelled in a deep, angry voice. “My daughter lost both her hands in a boat accident! I oughta cut your heart out!” He stood up and pulled out his knife. “Get the fuck away from me before I change my mind!”

The Cuban and Davey attempted to calm Bad News down as Karl abruptly turned around, whiter than a ghost, shaking. When the big biker took his seat, he burst into tears, mumbling for the next three hundred miles that Bruce had sent him on a suicide mission. If Karl had only looked back, he might have seen all the boys bustin’ their guts laughing. Karl may have survived Stu’s dungeon, but he cracked on his first rib.

By the time we headed back to Calgary, we’d all grown sick of hearing Karl’s bawling about how he could have been killed. News couldn’t take it anymore so he confessed to Moffat that he didn’t even have a four-year-old daughter. Karl was so relieved he immediately embarked on an all-out drinking binge, which only made it worse for everybody because now he kept on laughing deliriously about how we really got him.

In the darkness of early morning, in that last hundred miles home, there was old J.R. snoring under another mound of shaving cream, while Little Wolfie tirelessly pounded on the bongos, singing; it did help Wayne stay awake at the wheel.

And then Moffat, so drunk he could barely stand, suddenly announced that he’d decided to “bust my cherry.” Nobody knew what the heck he was talking about, until he braved a visit to the godforsaken, foul-smelling toilet and emerged minutes later holding a blade in his hand with blood dripping down his forehead. “Look, Mr. Allen, I can do it!” The dumb ass accidentally dripped blood on News, who always wore nice duds. As we pulled into town, News was up and threatening to kill Moffat, for real this time, which started the endless bawling all over again.

Little Wolfie sat on the steps, blinking back tears as he stared up at Moffat. “It’s okay, Karl,” he said.

Wolfie was such an emotional fellow.

A couple of nights later, just outside the Calgary city limits, two guys in a black Camaro ran a red light, and Wayne narrowly avoided a nasty crash. As they flew by us, one of them hurled a beer bottle at the bus. The enraged wrestlers broke into cheers when a little farther up the road the Camaro was pulled over by a cop for speeding, and we stopped because some of the wrestlers wanted to tell the cops about how crazily the Camaro had been driving. But nobody could believe what happened next. Davey jumped off the bus, shoved the cop out of the way and grabbed the driver through his half-open window. The cop tried to restrain Davey by choking him with a flashlight. In the blink of an eye Davey hip-tossed him into the middle of the road!

The Camaro booted it, never to be seen again. We all sat in the bus in disbelief staring at Davey, now handcuffed in the back of the cop car. He was looking at a whole world of trouble; if he was convicted of assaulting a police officer he’d be kicked out of the country. I didn’t want to be the one to tell Diana.

I finally got some great news. Leo was off working for the Crocketts down in the Carolinas and had put in a good word for me. The Crocketts sent wrestlers up to the Tunneys in Toronto every second Sunday for a big show, and as a result I got a call from the booker, Johnny Weaver, asking me to start in Toronto on December 4. There was one small hitch. There was a guy calling himself Bret Hart who had done nothing but jobs on the Crocketts’ TV show, which aired all over the South—and also in Toronto. I wouldn’t be able to wrestle as Bret Hart. So Weaver gave me the moniker Buddy The Heartthrob Hart, a name I loathed. But still, this could well be the break I’d been praying for. Buddy The Heartthrob I would be.

Before I left the territory for Toronto in December, we planned to shoot the biggest angle since Abdullah fought The Stomper back in 1971: a six-man tag pitting Davey, Sonny Two Rivers and me against Bad News, The Stomper and a green kid from Tennessee named Jeff, who was pretending to be Archie’s son. The crowd sensed that something big was about to happen, knowing that Bad News and The Stomper had monster egos that were bound to collide.

Gord Grayston, the head of the Calgary Boxing and Wrestling Commission, was in the crowd looking for any excuse to make trouble. He had a serious dislike for Bad News. I heard Bruce warn News,

“Don’t use a fork or anything tonight.” News agreed.

The “Theme from Shaft” played as News made his way to the ring. A little old man whacked him as he went by and News jerked him out of his chair and held him up by his hair. Ed Whalen was livid.

Then, during the double-cross, in full view of a horrified Ed and a contemptuous Grayston, Bad News attacked The Stomper with his fork and then pile-drived The Stomper’s supposed kid into the cement. Bad News had to fight his way to the dressing room. He used to say, “The only thing I like to do more than fuck is fight, and not necessarily in that order.” This time, he’d done them both simultaneously.

Ed held the mic for Archie, who cut one of the most powerful promos I’ve ever watched, decrying what had happened in the ring. Fans and ushers milled about, sad and scared. This one seemed all too real. Even Ed marked out when he saw Archie, looking deathly pale, climbing into the ambulance as it took Jeff away. But when the smoke from this perfect work had cleared, there was nothing but real bad news: News was suspended, Stu had his Calgary license taken away and Ed Whalen quit the show, saying things had become too violent.

Incredibly, Bad News still didn’t understand what he’d done wrong. After the match in Edmonton the very next day, a fan tried to trip him, and News beat the man with a steel chair. In the rampage a pregnant woman was injured, and News lost his wrestler’s license in Edmonton too. Luckily, there were no lawsuits.

The angle should have been a big moneymaker, sweet relief for my mom and some long-awaited peace for my dad. Instead, the reckless actions of Bad News knocked the territory off course and, in my opinion, after that it never fully recovered.

Stu was forced to pack up his ring for the length of his suspension and move it to the Seven Chiefs Arena, on a Native reserve just outside the city limits. The Sarcee Indians (now known as the Tsuu T’ina Nation) were kind enough to help Stu out, but things looked bleak. The weather turned horrible, almost as bad as the press. We had no main event and, most noticeable of all, no Ed Whalen, who had been, in a lot of ways, the star of the show.

The whole family wore blank, empty stares, except for my mom, who was on a full-blown rampage, pleading with Stu to give up on the business.

14

WAR BREAKS OUT

As my flight took off for Toronto on December 3, 1983, I looked out the window half expecting to see a mushroom cloud hovering over Hart house. TV news crews had positioned themselves outside looking for a big story, ready to play up the violence of wrestling and accusing Stu of hiding from them instead of coming out to face them like a man. In fact, Stu was over at the Whalens’ house, trying to talk Ed into coming back.

I stepped out of the cab at the back door of Maple Leaf Gardens and explained to the security guards that I was Buddy the Heartthrob and I was here to wrestle. They took me straight to the promoters, Jack and Ed Tunney. Jack was large and jovial, and Ed was small and friendly. Johnny Weaver, their booker, was a floppy-eared old-timer. In the dressing room, Greg Valentine grunted and smiled my way. He was talking over his dog-collar match with a regular-looking guy in a kilt and a tight T-shirt called Rowdy Roddy Piper. What struck me about Roddy was his politeness as he shook my hand.