Hitman My Real Life in the Cartoon World (77 page)

Draped in a Canadian flag, with my music playing, I kissed the gold buckle of the belt, then dropped to my knees clutching the belt to my chest. I was aching all over, like one giant, throbbing bruise.

When I came through the curtain I apologized to Shawn, explaining that I couldn’t help the size of the gob and that it was an accident. He just thanked me for the match, and before either of us realized it we shook hands, for the first time in a long time.

I hunched over like someone had beaten me with a stick to untie my boots. I’d pulled my groin badly and I felt like I’d been impaled. Blade, in a long Hitman T-shirt, helped peel my pink wrist tape off and followed me everywhere with the WWF World Heavy-weight belt draped over his shoulder and his ball cap on backward. I loved those moments.

That night I crawled into my bed with a bag of ice on my knee, a heating pad under my back and Blade sprawled out sleeping beside me. The next day, he and I caught a lift to Raw in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, with Paul Jay in his production van. After all the angles that came out of SummerSlam

’97, The Hart Foundation stood in the ring together licking our respective wounds.

We should have been triumphant, but instead it seemed like everybody’s past was catching up with them. Michelle had just passed on the news that the nerves in Dynamite’s back were damaged beyond repair after years of him deadening the warning signs with pain pills so he could go out there and have another great match. He was now paralyzed from the waist down and would be stuck in a wheelchair for the rest of his life.

Vince had just phased out the costly drug testing he’d instituted at the start of the steroid scandal.

Of course the real danger was not steroids or coke but prescription painkillers. Every night deadly lines were crossed by too many of the boys, and at that time the most vulnerable was Pillman, trying to deaden his ankle pain just like Dynamite had deadened the pain from his back. Shawn, Davey and Hawk were all serious abusers too. We all knew it—the wrestlers openly popped pills in the dressing room—but the agents seemed powerless to do anything about prescription drug use.

Chief, once some kind of voice of reason in the dressing room, had been put out to pasture without anyone even seeming to notice, though Vince would never have gone anywhere if it hadn’t been for Chief and Pat Patterson. (After he retired Chief became a different kind of wrestling tragedy. He was left to babysit his young grandson one day and fell asleep. When he woke up, he found the child floating dead in his pool. I believed that Chief would never get over it, and my heart went out to him.)

As I started my fifth run as World Champion, Shawn was being friendly enough, but I was unhappy with a sexually explicit new storyline centered around him, Hunter, Chyna and Shawn’s newly arrived bodyguard, Ravishing Rick Rude, who was working as a manager while he was involved in an injury lawsuit. I was happy that Rude was back because he was a good friend, but Shawn was now on the booking committee with Brisco and Hunter. The simple truth was that there was no trust between us anymore. Looking back now, I can see that this wasn’t Shawn’s fault any more than it was mine. Vince was the one who planted and cultivated the seeds of that doubt. Vince was playing with me and Shawn like a kid with his wrestling dolls, bashing his old favorite and his new favorite together like he was God himself.

On September 7, I worked at In Your House in Louisville with Del Wilkes, whose gimmick was The Patriot. It was hard to do anything extraordinary because Wilkes had worked only in Japan and wasn’t over by any stretch of the imagination in the United States. What had been a red-hot American versus Canadian angle for the WWF lost its heat when the champion had to fight a cartoon—a hokey, masked marvel in red, white and blue that fans couldn’t relate to because, with a mask on, he couldn’t express pain or anything. When I asked Pat about the match up, he quipped,

“The whole business is a fucking cartoon.” I had nothing but respect for Del; we did all we could, but it was a tough haul.

Next came two days of TV and four hard matches, and then I flew up to Toronto for a charity dinner.

Dory Funk Jr. had asked me a couple of months earlier if I’d mind working with Terry for his retirement match in Amarillo on a big card billed as Fifty Years of Funk. Mind? I had said that I’d be honored. And Dory said that Terry, who like so many of the old-school boys had retired only to return again and again, actually meant it this time. So after Toronto, I connected through Dallas, where I caught a charter to Amarillo that was packed with the remnants of ECW. I looked at the heads of the young wrestlers, bandages hiding their gig marks, and they reminded me of my old Stampede days.

I had a bad flu but couldn’t miss such a significant night. I crawled out of bed and drove to the fairgrounds, where I met up with Stu and Bruce, and was saddened to hear from them that Fritz Von Erich had died of cancer.

In many ways the Funk show was like traveling back in a time machine. Dory and Terry were old-school pros who kindly conducted business the way it had always been done. Japanese reporters swarmed all over as Dory led me down back hallways to a room where he gave me and Terry our finish in great detail. I was happy to put the title up against Terry, but at his insistence, he wanted to put me over, even though it was his retirement match. The Amarillo fans were so fired up about my anti-American heel status that I feared for Stu, who was sitting at ringside. The special referee was Dennis Stamp, that big, lanky wrestler who’d given me one of my first matches back in Amarillo so long ago. When it was over I was so sick I had to crawl back to bed before Terry could even thank me.

On September 20, I arrived in Birmingham, England, for the One Night Only pay-per-view. I got there a day early and found the wrestlers, suits and road crew drinking merrily in the hotel lounge. Hunter had to help a trembling, pilled-up Shawn out of his chair and up to his room, in clear view of the fans.

On the bus ride to the National Exhibition Centre Arena the next day, Taker and I were disappointed to notice that we weren’t even pictured on the pay-per-view posters plas-tered all over town. Shawn and Davey were the main event in a European title match. We were baffled as to why the World title match was being ignored, especially when Taker and I had been the biggest draws in Europe for years.

But Taker and I knew how much this match meant to our U.K. fans, so we put our heads together and came up with one that was different from all the others we’d ever had. Actually, this one was for us as much as it was for the fans. I figured I’d finally find out whether the Brits and the boatloads of my German fans who were coming actually supported me in my war with the Yanks.

Before the show I talked with a little boy who’d been burned in a fire—his ears were gone. Then I found time to say hello to Davey’s family. Davey had made the huge mistake of promising in interviews with the British tabloids that he’d win his title match for his sister, Tracey, who was dying of cancer. He’d been told he was going over, but on the day of the show Vince and Shawn changed the outcome. Davey was devastated. Shawn had openly bragged about how he was not doing jobs for anyone, but nobody wanted to believe he had such nerve. This went against the code of all wrestlers. Usually Vince or Pat would give me my finishes, but now Shawn, Hunter and Brisco were there to oversee. Something was going very wrong.

I’ve always felt that Taker was one of the most unselfish and best workers in the business. We told a great story that night in Birmingham that ended in a DQ, living up to the expectations of our legions of fans. I had no way of knowing it at the time, but Vince in his live commentary was doing all he could to paint me as the bad guy here in Europe, which was contrary to his own plan, or at least to the plan he had described to me. I also had no way of knowing that this would turn out to be the last truly great match I’d ever have in the WWF.

Shawn worked the main event with Davey, using every gimmick and prop possible to ultimately end up injuring Davey’s knee and take the European belt. Vince, Brisco, Shawn and Hunter took great delight in intentionally designing a finish that made me and Owen look like total idiots. For the entire match, we were nowhere in sight as Hunter, Chyna and Rude worked Davey over while the British fans waited for The Hart Foundation to rescue him. After Shawn won, he took the house mic and said, “Hart Foundation, this is for you! Diana Smith, sweetheart, this is especially for you, baby!”

Diana was looking pretty—with stars in her eyes at being mentioned by Shawn even though he had just defeated her husband—seated beside Davey’s parents and sister. Surrounded by his clique, Shawn put the figure four on Davey, and Diana leaped from her front row seat and hit the ring!

Chyna grabbed Diana from behind as Owen and I finally charged down the ramp with everybody wondering where the hell we’d been all this time! As I pretended to help the wounded Davey back to the dressing room, we passed the burned little boy and Davey’s sister Tracey, who was terribly upset and crying. I thought, In wrestling, never make a promise you can’t deliver. I saw the light die in Davey’s eyes that day, darkness seeping into a heart that was giving out.

Two days later, on September 22 at Raw in Madison Square Garden, I was summoned to Vince’s office for a private chat. He rocked me with the news that he wasn’t just thinking of breaching the terms of my contract, but was actually going to do it: In the weeks ahead, he wasn’t going to pay me my full salary because of problems he attributed to Ted Turner. He told me that I was the Cal Ripken of the WWF and that he fully intended to pay me what he owed me on the back end of my twenty-year deal in-stead. “You’ll still get every penny,” he declared.

In a fatherly tone, he then confided, “I have no problem if you want to see if WCW will make you that same deal as before. I hear that Hogan is finishing up there soon. Your timing couldn’t be more perfect.” He went on to say that if I left, I would actually be doing him a favor because he was about to downsize into a northeastern U.S. promotion. Because of my fourteen years of loyal service, he said, he wanted to give me the opportunity to be able to approach WCW before everyone else did, since he’d be letting a lot of wrestlers go. He described me as the first guy in the lifeboat. “You don’t even have to drop the belt if you don’t want to. You hold all the cards.” He even said that he would secretly help me negotiate my deal, if I wanted. His final words to me were that he’d see whether he could find the money somewhere to pay me, but for now I shouldn’t breathe a word to anybody. If the news leaked out that Vince was in trouble, it would hurt my chances with Bischoff. Hurt my chances? I was so stunned by how many promises he broke in one short conversation that I didn’t know what to reply.

I worked Raw like a zombie. New York had always been my best American town, and my loyal following of fans couldn’t bring themselves to hate me like I was hated everywhere else. I feared having to sue Vince over my contract and also feared that WCW wouldn’t want to pay me so much since I’d turned them down the last time. My worries were only compounded by disgust as Hunter and Shawn told me that they wanted me to call them gay in my interview, like a true homophobe.

On the mic that night, Hunter referred to the business as a cheap whore with her legs spread wide apart, and he was right, but this was still supposed to be a kids’ show.

Pat Patterson, back from his break, had Steve Lombardi win a battle royal so Lombardi could face me for the title at the Garden on November 15. Steve was a veteran jobber, but Pat thought it would be different to let a real dark horse win and have a shot for once. I said, “It’s your most important market, and if that’s what you want to do, go ahead.”

Davey wasn’t working: he complained that he’d hurt his knee in the title match with Shawn, but I thought what was really hurt was his Bulldog pride. I had a dark match that night with Taker and Shawn. He was professional and pleasant, and I tried to relax and take all of this one step at a time.

On September 24, Owen and I drove up to Toledo together listening to the audio book of The Killer Angels, Michael Shaara’s wonderful account of the battle of Gettysburg. We reminisced about the time we were in Kearney, Missouri, touring the outlaw Jesse James’s house, where he was shot from behind by one of his own men. Two brothers who are in the same business all their lives live and learn a lot together. I confided to him everything Vince had said. “Owen, I’m going to end up getting screwed in the end, with bad feelings for the business and the people in it. Vince told me the business isn’t just about the money. What a hypocrite!”

“You’ll have to sue ’im,” he said.

That night during my match with Taker I did my usual job of taking a severe beating. So severe, in fact, that an overwrought mentally challenged kid hit the ring to protect me. When I came back through the curtain still wearing my belt, he broke away from the police, in tears, to hug me and tell me that he loved me. For some reason this scene was too hard for Davey to bear, and he told Lanza he was going home, for how long no one knew.

October 5, 1997. I took my time getting to the building in St. Louis that Sunday afternoon and arrived well rested for In Your House. When the agents realized that Brian Pillman hadn’t arrived with me, they started calling around looking for him. He was soon found dead of a suspected overdose in his room at the Budgetel in Bloomington, Minnesota. Brian was a good friend, a brother among brothers, and we shared a special bond. Just the night before, I remembered Brian leaning back in his chair in the dressing room in St. Paul, his arms crossed, beaming at me with a sparkle in his eye, even though we’d just been talking about how much he distrusted Shawn and the clique, and how he was worried about his future. I gave him a friendly pat on the chest, and told him, “Don’t worry, Bri.” And we both broke into big smiles. That’s how I’ll always remember Brian Pillman.

All too quickly after we heard the news, it was business as usual, with everyone hurriedly putting their matches together for the pay-per-view. Vader, who was only trying to make the best of it, said,