More Than Just Hardcore (16 page)

The match ended when I submitted to Harley’s Indian death lock. I had wanted it to be a submission finish, because I thought people wouldn’t be expecting it. I thought it would be healthy for the business to have a submission finish. I wasn’t really worried about losing the heat by submitting. I knew I could get myself over again. I could always work my way around it. Even if I didn’t like a finish, I’d do it.

I never cared about doing jobs, and that one, in particular, was about doing what was right for the business.

And that was the approach I’d taken in deciding how I wanted to drop it to Harley. When the time came to drop the title, I had wanted to see it go to Harley because I felt obligated to him. I was the one who wanted it to be that way. I didn’t give the NWA a lot of notice that I needed to lose the belt, and they hadn’t really prepared anyone else by that time.

The closest they had to another candidate besides Harley was Ric Flair, by now a top star in Crockett’s Mid-Atlantic territory, but I felt like Flair would have another time, and Harley deserved a good run with it. I knew Flair would be champion someday, but if it had gone to Flair, I’m not sure Harley would have gotten another chance at it. I’m not sure I could have said I was a good, fair man if I hadn’t helped the championship go to the man who came close to getting the votes when I ended up with it. I wanted to do something to see that things were done right by Harley. It was a pretty damn big deal for Harley, who started wrestling when he was 14, to be able to be the top dog in his business. I felt like it was important to Harley. I talked to Junior about it, and he felt the exact same way—that I needed to do right by Harley.

I never was approached about being NWA champion a second time, and if I had been, I never would have taken it in a million years. I was at a point, and it was a point I was lucky to stay at for pretty much the rest of my career, where I could pick my own dates instead of letting someone else set them for me. With my ability to build up an issue, I think I could have gone into any territory and been a good draw, even if I’d never even held the world title. Besides, I had gotten back a much better prize than any wrestling championship.

Fixing my relationship with Vicki was probably the most important thing I ever did. She had remarried since our divorce, and I didn’t figure that there was any chance of us getting back together, due to me. I was the one who’d been making things difficult. But she ended up leaving her second husband, and we did get back together. I guess after all our battles and fights over the isolation I created after my father died, we had just reached a point where we needed some distance for those issues to settle down.

And if I had to give up the NWA title to get her back, well, hell, that was the best trade I ever made.

After I came back to Amarillo regularly, the territory was running fine. Having two former world champions in the area was a huge plus for the territory.

In 1979,1 noticed something new—cable TV, in particular a wrestling show coming out of Atlanta. I knew there was a change coming in the professional wrestling business.

And once that change with national television hit, I knew that we would have fragmentation of this once-mighty alliance as everyone fought to be the national power. Sure enough, that’s what ended up happening, first with the WWF and then with Crockett, who ended up in 1985 on TBS, where I first saw Georgia Championship Wrestling.

Even in ‘79, I knew the day of the national wrestling promotion was coming. I also knew how much work it would be for Junior and me to keep Amarillo running. I didn’t want a repeat of what happened after my dad died, when I became obsessed with the business to the exclusion of all else, including my family. I knew that had been a mistake, and I would be damned if it was a mistake I was going to make again.

Junior and I talked and decided to sell the Amarillo territory to Bob Windham (Blackjack Mulligan) and Dick Murdoch. Before the deal was done, though, I told them both that I didn’t think the future was too bright.

“Gosh, guys, it’s going to be tough with the TV going the way it is,” I told them, and they knew it was a possibility, but they decided to take their chances. Junior and I decided to take the $10,000 apiece upfront from them for the territory and be on our way. They got five or six rings and the existing TV and arena deals we had. They were supposed to pay off the remainder to us over a period of time if they were successful. Unfortunately for all of us, times were changing and they weren’t successful.

The Amarillo territory had been a big part of my life for almost all my life, but it didn’t feel strange not to be in it, because I realized that with the way things were going, there was really no such thing as an area anymore. In this new era, it was the United States that was going to be the territory.

Junior and I did work some matches for Murdoch and Mulligan, but the bottom line at that time was that I wasn’t making a promoter’s money anymore, and there were areas where I could make a lot more money as a wrestler. I had just bought the ranch here, and I needed to pay for the thing, so I had to go where the best opportunities were.

Still, I sometimes think of all the talent that came through Amarillo. There are more names than you’d probably guess. Some of the names I came up with.

Not all of my names were successful. Some of them had no greater purpose than to entertain me. We had a guy come in to work one time, and his name was Joe Pelardy. Well, I told him, “No one’s going to pay money to see Joe Pelardy. Let me come up with a new name for you.”

He went to the ring and found out his new name, when they introduced the wrestling fans to Amarillo’s newest star … Joe Chit!

Sure enough, the fans soon started chanting, “We want shit! We want shit!”

The next night, he came to me and said, “I don’t like that name! I want my name changed!”

“OK,” I said. “I’m sorry you don’t like it. I’ll change it, and you won’t have to be Joe Shi—, I mean, Joe Chit anymore.”

The next week, he came to the ring and the announcer introduced him under his new name … Mike Chit!

And the chant continued, “We want shit! We want shit!”

Boy, he was mad. But it was just a rib!

I spent my time doing short stints in a number of territories, making sure to leave myself plenty of time for Japanese tours, and plenty of time at home.

It was kind of like the sentiment I saw another guy who I consider a great heel receiving. Earlier, I talked about Mr. Wrestling II. Well, there was a masked heel who was every bit as hated as II was loved—Don Jardine, a.k.a. The Spoiler. The Spoiler was actually very influential in the wrestling business. He was a big, tall man, but incredibly agile and able to put on a great match. He wasn’t just size, and no ability—he could move! He would go on to teach a kid named Mark Calaway the way to walk the top rope during a match. Mark used that knowledge in the 1990s, to help get him over as The Undertaker, working for Vince Jr. I watch the Undertaker today, and sometimes think I’m looking at Jardine himself.

Jardine was that rare big man who could do anything in the ring. Truthfully, though, and I think Don Jardine would agree with this, Don Leo Jonathan was the man among big men, and he always will be. As mentioned earlier, he was about six foot eight, and he wrestled as the Mormon Giant. He was also one of the most agile men I ever saw. He was so good and so spectacular that in some territories there was a problem with fans believing there was no one who could beat him.

Whether I was working with Dusty Rhodes or the Briscos, Florida crowds could be rowdy. Those people brought knives and everything else, but the worst fans might have been in Puerto Rico, home of the World Wrestling Council (WWC).

The Puerto Rican fans were nuts. They hated me with a passion, and they threw stuff. I don’t mean beer cups, like they threw in the States. I mean rocks, bricks—dangerous stuff. Every time we went there, Junior and I had to battle them, not fight, but battle them, all the way to and from the dressing room. When I got close to the dressing room, I knew they had rocks, so I’d arm myself. I’d take beer cans, about five or six of them, and pop a couple open. Then I’d throw them, and with the beer streaming out they looked like grenades flying across the arena, and the fans would scatter to get away from them. I saved my last couple of cans for when I was about to get to the dressing room, and I’d haul off and throw one of the full cans I had left right at one of the nuts’ heads, if there were any fans left blocking my path. A full can of beer right in the head would stop a man.

But a lot of the guys really enjoyed Puerto Rico. Pampero Firpo, a crazy-haired man who wrestled as “The Wild Bull of the Pampas,” used to love gambling at the casinos down there. He’d get going on the slot machines, and call out to me, “Terry! Terry! Come stand here!”

I would stand in front of the machine, and he’d take off running. He had to take a piss, and he did it as quick as he could. He was afraid someone was going to put in a quarter and win while he wasn’t there. There were times he spent his entire payoff in a casino. I mean he spent every nickel he earned in Puerto Rico, plus every cent he could borrow, or get his hands on in whatever fashion. He used to collect pop bottles and turn them in for the recycling deposits and then gamble with that!

The Puerto Ricans weren’t the only fans I whipped into a frenzy, though. I have two pocket knives on the wall of my office. Both of them came out of me after fans stuck me. One was from San Antonio, where a fan stuck a knife in my neck one night, and the other came from Florida. I never did miss a day. Hell, I wasn’t going to let a little puncture wound keep me from earning a buck!

In a strange way, I took being stabbed as a badge of honor, the same as when the cops had to take guns from the fans. Those people were really giving me an award, even though they didn’t realize it. They were telling me I had done my job, as a heel, and done it pretty well.

Aside from getting stabbed in the neck, I did like working in San Antonio for promoter Joe Blanchard.

One of Blanchard’s top guys, Manny Fernandez, also came from West Texas State.

Manny was a super worker and crazy as a March hare. Manny once got into it with a guy outside a bar in Amarillo, and ran over his legs with a car. Then he backed up and ran over the guy again. He was a wild man and another tough

guy-Manny made quite a name for himself in Florida in 1979, when Eddie Graham got crosswise with his top babyface, Dusty Rhodes. Eddie elevated Manny to that top level for a time, and Manny did well. I worked almost every night with him, and we drew a lot of money. Everybody thought the territory would go to hell without Dusty there, but I drew well with both Manny and Skip Young, who wrestled as Sweet Brown Sugar. The fans were willing to accept some other favorites. Skip, in particular, was a guy who never really made it anywhere else, because other promoters just didn’t see it in him, but Eddie Graham did. He saw him as a money player, and as a result Skip Young did a lot of business in Florida.

Vicki and I had come to Florida because we had just bought a ranch in Canyon for a couple hundred thousand, and we were having to pay 18 percent interest on it, so we had to go out to make money. We had a pickup truck that was so damn ugly that I didn’t want to be seen in it, because people would look and think, “Well, that guy doesn’t have shit.”

But I ended up making myself an eccentric, because I put a cow’s skull on the front, almost like a big hood ornament, when I drove it to the arenas.

I also wrestled quite a bit against Mike Graham, Eddie’s son. Mike was a unique case, as second-generation guys went. Eddie never pushed Mike to the moon, to make him a top superstar. You have to understand, it wasn’t that Eddie didn’t love Mike. Eddie loved his son,very much. In fact, I think it was that love that caused him to handle Mike the way he did, by making him slowly work his way up and only rarely putting him into the main-event picture. Eddie saw throughout his life what happened to the second-generation guys who hadn’t deserved their big pushes. He didn’t want that kind of resentment for Mike. He wanted Mike to be deserving of whatever push he got.

When Eddie passed away in 1985, Mike was not that old, and there’s still a chance Eddie would have eventually pushed Mike at that top level. But Mike, once he had control of the company after Eddie’s death, really didn’t push himself to the moon, either.

I also got to see a little of David Von Erich’s heel work in early 1980s Florida. He had been a lifelong babyface, but he was a great heel. He worked a lot with my brother, and I thought Junior did a great job of helping David attain a whole new dimension of his wrestling persona.

If David hadn’t died so young in 1984, I think he would have been a great choice as a long-term NWA champion. I know his name came up, at least in discussions of possible champions, and he would have been very successful. He was a good talker and had great ring psychology. In terms of being a pro wrestling performer, he had it all.

It would have been interesting to see what could have happened with the Von Erich boys if the drugs hadn’t been there. We might have a completely different wrestling business today; it might not be Vince McMahon running it. It might be the Von Erichs as the major power. That’s one of the many sad things about that situation—that tragic moment when David died could have been a major moment that changed the course of the business.

I had an NWA world title duplicate belt made by Reggie Parks (probably the best belt-maker around—I paid him $500 for it), and went on San Antonio TV to declare myself the real world’s champion.

I’m sure there was a little heat in the NWA office about that, but I could have cared less. I mean, the whole thing was ridiculous, but it worked! In fact, it worked so well that it not only got over with the fans, it got over with the boys and the office in San Antonio! They got so goofy about it, they decided it was a real world’s title, and held a tournament for it! I’d just created it as something to get me a little heat, a little controversy.