Hitman My Real Life in the Cartoon World (55 page)

As I stood up to leave, I asked, “Did you take the belt from me because I didn’t do a good enough job?”

“Of course not! I’m just going in a different direction. It’s still onwards and upwards for you. Nothing is going to change too much for you.”

I was totally crushed

As I lay in bed that night, the more I thought about what Vince had in mind for Hogan, the more I felt that it would completely backfire on both of them. The hokey finish would stink, maybe not immediately, but in the weeks to come my fans, who were the biggest contingent in Vince’s paying audience at that time, would gag on it. There was something different about my fans. They really believed in me as a person.

By the time I got to the dressing room the following afternoon, word that I was losing the title had leaked out to the boys. Most of them were quiet and some were angry. The Nasty Boys, Shawn, Taker and several others expressed their utter disappointment. Knowing I was losing the belt didn’t stop me from planning on having a great match. I went over everything with Yoko and designed the match so that all the best moves were left for the final minute.

Hulk arrived with his entourage: his wife, manager, Beefcake and Jimmy Hart. Clearly he’d been in the know all along, probably from the first day he came back. Now he was suddenly acting like my long-lost old pal and wearing a big smile that rightfully belonged to me.

During our match, it was hot and dry in the desert heat, but a cool breeze made it impossible to work up a healthy sweat. An exhausted Yoko stampeded like a runaway elephant, short-changing me on my comeback and editing out all my best spots. I was furious that he would take it upon himself to go home on his own. That’s how I came to find myself crouched low, desperately hanging on to Yoko’s two massive calves in the sharpshooter, fighting with every ounce of strength not to let go.

Fuji was caught off guard by the sudden ending, and it took him forever to find, unwrap, and throw a packet of what was actually baby powder into my eyes, supposedly blinding me. I fell back as Yoko hooked my leg and Hebner counted one . . . two . . . three. Right on cue, Hogan hit the ring protesting the injustice that had been done to me, and Earl put on that classic expression of utter stupidity that all pro wrestling refs wear when convenient. As I feigned blindness Hogan helped me out of the ring.

Fuji stayed in the ring, absurdly challenging Hogan to a title match with Yoko right then and there.

Yoko was still teetering from exhaustion and looking for a second wind that wasn’t there. Hogan blinked in astonishment at his sudden good fortune. As scripted, with my face buried in the crook of my arm, I waved him to avenge my loss. “Go get ’em, Hulk!”

I was really thinking, Go ahead, Hogan, take from me what I worked so hard to get. We’ll see just how long you last! Hogan was champion again without even having a match—and before I’d even made it backstage. He simply ducked the powder Fuji threw in his face, clotheslined Fuji and dropped his big leg on Yoko. I could hear the one . . . two . . . three, the roar of the crowd and Hogan’s music thumping. I couldn’t help but stare at the TV monitor watching Hogan work the crowd with the same old posing routine, a hand behind the ear, shaking the World belt in the air as if to say it belonged to him all along.

A few minutes later, Hogan came up to me excited and happy and said, “Thank you, brother. I won’t forget it. I’ll be happy to return the favor.”

I looked my old friend in the eye and said, “I’m going to remember that, Terry.”

As for Yoko, I was always a little pissed off at him for going home on me and not letting me show Vince, Hogan and everyone else that we could tear the house down without their bullshit finish.

Even so, it was the best match that Yoko ever had.

29

“BROTHER, YOU DON’T KNOW THE WHOLE STORY!”

BARCELONA, APRIL 24, 1993. One man’s sunset is another man’s dawn.

The past ten days touring Europe had been a boost to my pained, empty heart. I sat on a small balcony outside my hotel window seven floors up, listening to my Walkman and looking out over rooftops, church spires and steeples as a huge red sun drifted below the horizon. I’d come to know the distinctive smells of many cities and as I inhaled deeply, I decided that Barcelona’s could be called Mediterranean melange. I’d been working hard with Bam Bam, and I was content knowing that our match that aired live across all of Spain that night had been excellent. The Barcelona twilight melted into night until the only glow in the sky was from a silver crescent moon and a few twinkling stars. My mind drifted to a hazy memory of Brussels, the first night of the tour, standing drunk on a corner with Bam Bam at four in the morning listening to some street musicians.

From Brussels we went to London, where I realized by the size of the crowd waiting for me at the airport that losing the belt hadn’t swayed my faithful fans one bit. I was more over than before. I laughed to myself as I remembered doing a morning talk show in London where I was supposed to promote a new WWF album featuring a sappy song I’d recorded months earlier. As horrible as it was, with a little production magic, it miraculously reached number four on the U.K. music charts.

Talk about a one-hit wonder.

A stuffy older man and woman hosted the talk show, and they had no clue who I was. They seemed skeptical when I told them that more than eighty thousand wrestling fans had filled Wembley Stadium to see us the previous summer. They droned on about whether or not wrestling was really a sport at all. I admit to being tired and cranky, and I was even less amused when some pear-shaped bloke in a red devil outfit joined us on the set and kept poking me in the stomach with a cheesy plastic pitchfork while I did my best to respond to their uninformed questions. During a short commercial break, I jerked his plastic pitchfork and told the startled devil that if he poked me one more time I’d shove the pitchfork up his ass!

The most interesting part of the tour had been Belfast, where the dreary streets looked tired and downtrodden, British soldiers with machine guns stationed on many corners. We’d stayed at the Europa, whose claim to fame is that it’s the most bombed hotel in the world. As I checked in I was approached by a timid taxi driver who mentioned that his two boys were my biggest fans; he offered to give me a free tour of the real Belfast. Soon we were driving past political murals. As he showed me various bombed-out sites, we talked some. His name was Sean, he was thirty-four, but he looked ten years older. We passed the cemetery where only a few months before, at an IRA funeral, mourners attacked and brutally killed some spying Ulster loyalists who were in the wrong place at the wrong time. Sean gave me an Irish Catholic history of Belfast and drove me to killer triangle streets, which, he explained, were intersections where kills could be made from three different angles and where people were randomly murdered all the time in the crossfire. It gave me pause when he said, “It’s not so bad. Nothing like America!”

When he was showing me the H-block, we got pulled over by an Ulster special police officer, and Sean broke into a sweat. He hurriedly filled me in that this officer, whom he’d seen many times before, was nicknamed Lurch by Catholics such as him, and had killed many of them. Lurch, who was about six-foot-five and dressed in an all-black uniform that reminded me of an SS storm trooper, approached the taxi suspiciously, machine gun in hand. It was a tense few minutes as Lurch questioned us. I handed over my passport while Sean explained. While Lurch ran a check on us, a terrified Sean confessed to me that he had a criminal record for gun-running and that he’d done two years in the H-block himself, where they’d worked him over pretty good. He was in at around the same time that Bobby Sands died while on a hunger strike. But after a very long ten minutes Lurch let us go.

Sean invited me for tea at his house. While we sipped from our cups, his wife told me that one of the hunger strikers lived two doors down, and she explained how the death of Bobby Sands eventually led the way for some positive change in the Catholic cause. IRA prisoners were now to be treated as POWs rather than common criminals. Meanwhile, Sean pulled his young boys out of the school across the street. They were shaking with excitement to meet me. They showed me their room, where magazine pictures of me were plastered all over the walls. They also told me not to worry because I was better than Hulk Hogan and I’d win back the title in no time!

That night at the show in Belfast, a mixed audience of Catholics and Protestants were content to let out their aggressions watching wrestling. Many hugged me and held tightly on to my hands as I walked around the ring after my match. Sean gave me a decorated and varnished hurling stick to take home with me to Canada. I thought it was nice of him to do something like that, since money didn’t come easy for him.

On the drive to Dublin I found the emerald Ireland I’d hoped for dotted with quaint moss-covered cottages and farms with sheep grazing in rolling pastures. At the show, I was amazed to find an even more adoring crowd, who wrapped me in Irish flags after my match with Bam Bam. They seemed to regard me almost as a son who’d come home.

Few people could imagine the life I lived. I’d come to feel like an explorer who’d traveled to far and distant lands and was loved by the people he encountered. I would never forget this breathtaking, spectacular, surreal time in my life.

WCW was beginning to give Vince a run for his money on the pay-per-view side of things, although their house show attendance was horrible. Vince fought back by scheduling a new annual pay-per-view to bridge the gap between WrestleMania and SummerSlam called King of the Ring. The inaugural event would be held at the brand-new Nutter Center in Dayton, Ohio, on June 13, 1993.

I stayed focused and carried myself with dignity, which was appreciated by the boys and, more importantly, by the fans. As soon as Hogan had taken the belt back, house show attendance nosedived. WWF wrestlers were paid a percentage of the gate, and it made me feel good when most of the boys told me they hoped I’d get the belt back. With paychecks shrinking and pink slips looming, the discontent in the dressing room was bad enough that many who feared they were about to be sacked took it as a mixed blessing. Tito, Darsow, The Beverley Brothers, Earthquake and even the pretty ring announcer, Mike McGuirk, suddenly vanished. Within a couple of weeks Duggan and The Nasty Boys were gone too.

WCW was waiting in the wings with huge guaranteed money contracts; they had made overtures to Hogan over the last year or so. I wondered whether Vince had put the belt back on Hogan with such a cheap win over Yoko just to lower his stock should he decide to go to WCW. Still, former WWF

names such as Rick Rude, Jake The Snake and Sycho Sid, to name only a few, all landed WCW

contracts at one time or another with lots of perks and time off. Davey was there now too, feuding with Vader.

Owen had come back to work because he couldn’t survive on what Vince paid him while he was hurt. Martha was pushing him hard to pack it in, and he’d applied for a job with the Calgary fire department. Meanwhile he taped his knee and carried on despite the torn ligament. He took pride in the actual wrestling, but he had the same love-hate relationship with the business that I did. You can’t stop talent, but, unfortunately, in Owen’s case, he’d been stopped by one thing or another every time he was on the verge of a break.

King of the Ring was a one-night tournament concept, and it was a good sign that my stock was rising again when Vince told me that I’d be crowned the winner. My guess was that Vince was starting to build me for what I already knew was coming, a SummerSlam showdown with Hogan—in many ways, a showdown between my fans and his. On May 24, I was summoned to a secret photo shoot in Halifax to do promotional shots for SummerSlam 1993. Hogan and I posed doing a mock tug-of-war with the World belt, standing chin to forehead, sneering and gritting our teeth. If I faced Hogan at SummerSlam, win or lose, I knew he’d be booed and I’d be the underdog. What didn’t occur to me was that Hogan knew it too.

On May 29, Vince called me at home to tell me the big news that I was getting the belt back. What I didn’t expect to hear was that he was getting ready to call Hogan and hated the thought of telling him that he was too old and tired for a company whose marketing strategy was now based around a

“new generation” concept. Vince wanted to make Hogan into the Babe Ruth of the WWF and use him as more of a special attraction. He asked me not to say anything until he had spoken to Hogan.

Ten days later, Vince called again. He warned me that he was about to tell me something that would make me really angry: Hogan was flat-out refusing to put me over, saying I wasn’t in his league.

Vince had decided that Yoko would be getting the belt instead. I couldn’t believe that Hogan would do this to me. I remembered him shaking my hand at WrestleMania IX, and telling me he’d be happy to return the favor. Vince said he’d have one more meeting with Hogan to try to sell him on it, but if he didn’t go for it, I’d work with Lawler at SummerSlam -instead.

Hogan didn’t go for it. I wanted to believe that Vince hadn’t told me the whole story, and I made up my mind to confront Hogan as soon as he’d dropped the belt to Yoko. I’d wait till then, because it didn’t seem right for me to change Yoko’s destiny.

I showed up in the dressing room for King of the Ring in a dark mood and promptly drew a blackboard cartoon of Beefcake with his face buried in Hogan’s ass cheeks with a caption that read,

“Be careful, Brutus, you don’t want to loosen the screws in your face . . . speaking of screws . . .” I was taking my frustration out on Beefcake, which wasn’t right, but I was too pissed off to know it at the time.

What Hogan had done was perfectly clear to the boys, and they enjoyed the humor of my cartoon.

Since Hogan rarely bothered to come into the dressing room, he didn’t see it, but Beefcake sure did and went slinking back to Hulk. But it didn’t matter to me: Hogan was no longer one of the boys, and he never would be again.

I was determined not only to have the three best matches on the pay-per-view, but three of the best matches of my career.