Hitman My Real Life in the Cartoon World (37 page)

Then I’d slither over the unconscious Dynamite and out through the open door. Victorious, The Hart Foundation would stumble past the fans, dripping blood. These matches made skeptics into believers.

I was finally expecting some big payoffs for all the blood and hard work. But I found out from Tom that since Junkyard Dog and Paul Orndorff were the main event each night, the big money went to them.

At the TV tapings in Buffalo on June 2, an angry Vince summoned all the wrestlers to a meeting to discuss the latest embarrassing incident.

Hacksaw Jim Duggan, a bearded goliath with the personality of a big, friendly St. Bernard, had made the simple mistake of giving his storyline archrival, The Iron Sheik, a ride to Asbury Park, New Jersey, where they’d be working against each other. The Sheik brought along a few cans of beer and lit up a joint, even though Duggan asked him not to smoke in the car. New Jersey state troopers pulled them over, and the odor of marijuana was all the probable cause they needed to search the car. They discovered coke in the Sheik’s shaving kit, so he and Duggan were both arrested.

It was hard to tell what made it a national news story—the rival wrestlers riding together in the midst of their huge America-versus-Iran feud or the fact that they’d allegedly been caught doing drugs together. Duggan’s hometown of Glens Falls, New York, a sleepy suburb of Albany, had been busily preparing for a WWF-sponsored Hacksaw Jim Duggan Day, with Jim’s father, the much respected local police chief, presiding. Needless to say, the moment was lost.

Vince had immediately fired them, and now he was giving us a long lecture on the absolute necessity to kayfabe. “The days of a six-pack and a blow job are over!” he shouted. All the wrestlers had this say-it-isn’t-so expression on their faces. And then he told everyone that he was instituting a mandatory drug test for cocaine and that anyone who failed would be suspended for six weeks without pay. The second time you’d get mandatory rehab, paid for out of your check. Third strike, you’re fired!

Anvil had just been acquitted of assaulting that stewardess and then got himself bankrolled by Vince to counter-sue U.S. Air. He had thought that the world was looking pretty rosy!

I was actually relieved that cocaine testing would soon be in effect, and hoped that it would force more wrestlers to clean up before someone else died.

So Hacksaw and The Iron Sheik were gone. Scanning the room as Vince talked, I realized that a lot of the old faces were now missing. One new arrival was Dingo Warrior, a six-foot-two ’roided-up bodybuilder named Jim Hellwig. Like Tom McGhee, he looked fantastic, but he didn’t know a headlock from a headlight!

In pro wrestling in the late 1980s, all you really needed was a good gimmick or the right look to be a big star; wrestling ability took a backseat. (Although McGhee was let go before the year was out, a hopeless case.) At that time, a number of great workers came into the WWF, plucked from the last remnants of the dying regional territories. One of them was George Gray, called One Man Gang, a four-hundred-pound wrestler with a black mohawk and a scruffy beard who wore small black sunglasses and a frayed blue jean vest emblazoned on the back with a skull and crossbones. On TV

One Man Gang was quite the angry character, but in real life George was a gentle guy who liked to read a lot.

Killer Khan was another monster heel lining up behind Kamala to cash in on Hulkamania. Then there was Scott Bam Bam Bigelow from New Jersey, who was possibly the best working big man in the business. Bam Bam could dive off the top rope with the agility of a cat. He had a sculpted red beard that emphasized a squared-off jaw, anchoring his big, round face and framing a missing front tooth.

His bald head was covered with tattoos of flames. He was still green and soon had a lot of heat from all the wrestlers for bragging about his big payoffs. One night, in the ring at Madison Square Garden, André got his hands on Bigelow and practically killed him—for real. That was all the attitude adjustment Bigelow needed, and he changed his ways.

Another new arrival was Ravishing Rick Rude, a guy around my age from Minneapolis, with a dry wit and an easygoing manner. He was tall and thin, with long, curly dark hair, a thick mustache, meaty forearms and washboard abs. He was considered a legit tough guy and serious pro arm wrestler.

As we all knew, Vince had grown up fantasizing about becoming a wrestler. As a boy he dreamed up a gimmick for himself, a filthy rich heel who would throw money out to the crowd and buy his way out of everything. When Ted Dibiase, a second-generation wrestler out of Amarillo, joined the WWF, he became The Million Dollar Man, the embodiment of Vince’s dream. Ted was brawny with chiseled features and was always immaculately groomed. He’d been taught by the Funks and was being positioned to become the next NWA world champion when Vince changed all that. Now Ted was going straight to the top as the WWF’s hottest heel. He had his own personal valet named Virgil, worked by Mike Jones, which was intended to be a dig at NWA booker Dusty Rhodes, whose real name was Virgil Runnels. (Vince never missed an opportunity to take a jab at anyone he believed had crossed him.) Ted also lived his gimmick outside the ring. The Million Dollar Man was driven everywhere by stretch limo, stayed in four-star hotels and flew first class, all paid for by Vince, which set the boys to grumbling because most of the larger wrestlers had to cram into coach seats.

Sitting across from me in the meeting were two new pretty boys from the nearly defunct AWA: Shawn Michaels and Marty Jannetty, a high-flying tag team known as The Midnight Rockers. It was their first day in the WWF, and I was scoping them out like a lion staring at two antelopes. The Hart Foundation desperately needed a new team to work with, having pretty much run our course with The Bulldogs, The Bees and The Rougeaus. Jim muttered to me that they were too small and skinny, but I knew that once The Hart Foundation got some serious heat on them, the young girls would get behind them and we could last a lot longer as champions. Back then, Michaels was a lean blond with nary a muscle on him. Marty Jannetty was shorter and more compact with shaggy brown hair.

Neither was as innocent as he looked: they came in with a notorious reputation for rocking after midnight, which might prove interesting for them considering Vince’s new hard line.

As it turned out, that night at the Hilton Playboy Club in Buffalo, the Rockers got rowdy, breaking bottles and glasses, and causing a drunken disturbance. Vince felt they had missed the whole point of his lecture and fired them. The Rockers lasted only one day in the WWF: So much for our hopes of a new tag team to work with.

Six weeks later, the dressing room at the Houston Summit was abuzz with the results of the WWF’s first ever drug tests for cocaine use, which had taken place on June 23 in Indianapolis. The first to go was Jake The Snake Roberts, who was hit with a six-week suspension. He’d gone straight to Vince to ask why Brian Blair hadn’t been caught too, so Vince suspended Blair. That sure didn’t help us, since Jim and I had been working with The Bees almost every other night.

The news from home kept getting weirder. One late night in mid-July, when Jim and I were driving around Glens Falls looking for somewhere to eat, he told me an incredible tale featuring his mother and Smith’s wife, Maria, who had been on the edge of a breakdown for years. When he was home last time, Jim’s mom, Katie, and my sister Alison volunteered to babysit their three kids so that Jim and Ellie could have a romantic couple of days in the mountains at Banff. As Katie and Alison crossed the driveway to Hart house with Jim and Ellie’s kids and Alison’s baby girl, they were startled to see Maria balancing on the railing of the second-floor balcony, just above them. She was naked but for a heavy winter parka that hung open in the summer heat. She seemed to be imagining herself to be an Indian scout on the lookout, one hand to her forehead: “I think rain come.”

Katie had a zesty, upbeat California attitude. She calmly waved, smiling, and said, “Yes dear, that’s great!” And then went up the stairs to lure Maria in off the railing.

Later, Maria came down to the kitchen where Katie, in an attempt at normalcy, offered her a Snickers bar. For no reason anyone else could understand, Maria grabbed it and hurled it, as hard as she could, at Alison, who had one-year-old Brooke in her arms. Maria then attacked Alison and started dragging her around the kitchen by the hair, with Katie valiantly trying to intervene. In the fierce struggle Alison focused on a finger and, fearing for not only her own safety but that of her baby girl, bit that finger as hard as she could! Maria never even flinched but continued to pull on Alison’s hair, so Alison just kept on biting that finger. Then she made eye contact with Katie, who had tears running down her cheeks. Katie said, “Sweetie, that’s my finger.”

Stu finally heard the commotion and came to the rescue. Jim’s poor mom ended up with six cracked ribs and a nearly severed finger. Alison had a bad case of whiplash. A few days later, Stu bought Maria a one-way ticket home to Puerto Rico. Smith had no choice but to let her go; he may have actually been relieved. When Maria was led out of the house, she turned to Alison with a glimmer of lucidity in her eyes and told her how sorry she was.

When Jim and I walked into the Glens Falls Ground Round that night, the hostess asked whether we were with the wrestling party in the back. We assumed it was a fan party, and decided to avoid it: I was just too tired. We sat ourselves down at the bar, ordered food and wet our whistles with a few frosty pitchers of beer. Every so often Jim would shake his head in disbelief about what happened to his mom.

For some reason a grumpy, old, bulldog-faced waitress instantly took a dislike to us. As the night drew to a close, she offered last call to everyone but us. We had words, and in our heated exchange I called her an old bitch. Her jaw dropped and she stomped off to the kitchen. This was normally Jim’s role when we were out in public, but on that night he sat on his stool, amused. He actually clapped and said, “Well done!”

With no more beer for us, I had a sudden change of heart and suggested to Jim that we crash that wrestling party. And we literally did: A partition was blocking off the back of the restaurant, and when we blindly gave it a push, we accidentally knocked some people down on the other side. Then we pried it open with our fingers and fell into the room.

This was no fan party! Vince was having a private office party with a long table full of brown-nosers, not to mention Hogan and the recently suspended Brian Blair. I was in no shape to be talking with Vince, who still intimidated me. Jim and I couldn’t get out of there fast enough. We backed up on rewind, but when I looked behind me I saw six policemen in riot gear, led by the grumpy old waitress, who was pointing right at me! I pushed Jim back into the room, saying, “You deal with Vince and I’ll deal with them!” As I tried to finagle myself out of it, Jim Troy, one of Vince’s top soldiers and closest friends, was suddenly at my side. He explained to the cops that I was with Vince’s party, and just like that they dropped the whole thing, and Jim Troy was leading me by the arm back to the party. I could only imagine how all of this might look to Vince, on his clean-up crusade, but when I nervously sat down it became apparent that Vince was totally bombed. A few minutes later he had to be helped out to his limo.

The following morning Jim and I, both hungover, drove up to Lake Placid for the second day of TVs.

Later that afternoon at the arena an equally hungover Vince called me over and said he needed to talk to me. He led me down a long corridor into a room and closed the door but became embarrassed when he couldn’t remember what the heck he’d wanted to tell me. He finally said,

“Don’t worry about it; it couldn’t have been very important if I can’t remember what it was.” After how quickly The Rockers had been fired, I was grateful for his forgetfulness.

In the dressing room in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, on September 7, I was approached by Jack Lanza, another one-time wrestler now turned agent for the WWF. Stooped like a black-mustached buzzard, with a personality to match, Lanza liked to make up the rules as he went along, but this time he was passing along a new rule straight from Vince: no more blading in the WWF. I thought it was typical that we’d find this out just as we were preparing for another gory cage match, this time with the virgin-headed Killer Bees. Banning blood would take a lot out of the big gimmick matches, but too many fans were now smart to the blade.

Though I’d bladed when I thought it would increase the artistry of the match, the practice was clearly stupid, and stopping it was a step in the right direction to protecting wrestlers. What bothered me was that Vince banned blading four months too late. My forehead had so many deep cuts in it from our recent run of cage matches that I could easily pull the slices apart with my fingers.

Pat Patterson later explained that the real concern was that AIDS could be spread by all that self-inflicted bleeding in the ring. I was relieved, and at the same time I felt bad for ever having done it.

By the end of September 1987, it finally felt like The Hart Foundation was picking up steam. Our first major angle since getting the belts was about to air on NBC’s SNME. In the dressing room before the taping, Pat laid it out: Jim and I would interfere in Honky Tonk’s match with Macho Man Randy Savage. Just as Macho was about to win, we’d charge in and put the boots to him, and while we held Macho down, Honky would threaten to break his guitar over Macho’s head. The lovely Miss Elizabeth, Randy’s real-life wife and attractive ring valet, would get in Honky’s way and plead with us all to stop. Honky would then shove her to the mat and unload his gimmicked guitar over Randy’s head, shattering it to pieces. To touch a girl on TV was unheard of, and all of us would get big-time heat as a result. It all went as planned, and the crowd was totally incensed as the three of us heels came back through the curtain.

Later that night I also learned that I’d be working a singles match with Macho on the next SNME.

Macho now was the hottest babyface in the territory, next to Hogan; it was a great opportunity to be able to showcase my talent with a top worker who respected me too. The show averaged sixty million viewers, much larger than any pay-per-view, even WrestleMania. When I called home that night I got the bigger news that Julie was pregnant again, due in May. Maybe if my career turned around our love would too.