More Than Just Hardcore (2 page)

One summer, between my father’s freshman and sophomore years in high school, Dory Funk had what he thought was a great idea—he would slug a few slots in syndicate-owned stores in Calumet City, on the Illinois-Indiana state line, between Hammond and Chicago.

Their plan was that my father’s buddy would distract the store clerk, while my father would push slugs into the slot machines. He did well for about half an hour.

The only hitch to their scheme was a small window on the front of the slot machine that showed the last three coins played. When the clerk had finally taken more bullshit than he wanted to, he walked over to the machine. To try to keep him from seeing the slugs, Dory tried quickly to put in three nickels so they would be the only coins visible through the window, but he dropped his third nickel, and the clerk saw the slug in his machine.

Dory pushed him aside and ran out of the store, knowing the mob would be after him and knowing they wouldn’t care that he was only a kid, or who his old man was.

Dory felt he had to get out of town, so he hopped on a train and rode the rails for much of the summer. He actually made it as far as Florida, but decided to head back before school started. He got to Chicago and walked the remaining six miles back home.

As he walked up the alley to the house, he wondered what he was going to say, when six-year-old Herman spotted him. Herman ran back in the house, screaming, “Pa! Pa! There’s a bum in the alley … and I think it’s Dory!”

My father was filthy, and he smelled awful. Adam made him take off his foul clothes, and my aunt “Dot” burned them in the trash can.

Adam asked his son why he had run away. When Dory told him about getting caught slugging the slot machines, Adam took off his belt and gave him the beating of a lifetime.

The next morning, Adam and Dory took a father-son trip to Calumet City. They went to the store, where Adam made Dory apologize for what had happened weeks earlier. Dory also promised to repay every penny he had bilked from the store.

Then Adam told everyone in the store, “If you harm my boy in any way you’ll have hell to pay.”

After Dory’s brush with the mob, my father decided to buckle down at school. He became a good student, and an outstanding football player and wrestler. He won the state wrestling tournament three years in a row and became class president his senior year.

He took his wrestling to the next level after coach Billy Thom recruited Dory into the University of Indiana in Bloomington. Coach Thom, considered one of the best coaches in the country, was a strict disciplinarian and specialized in leg wrestling and hooks. His forte was the top body scissors and a variety of leglocks.

Coach Thom also taught how to cross a man’s face while applying these holds, making them tortuous, but still legal under amateur wrestling rules. Used properly, these holds can knock a man out. In short, Coach Thom taught his wrestlers how to hurt their opponents.

My dad wanted a good education, but he got the best of all possible worlds. He got his education, learned how to break arms and legs and got to be close to home, close to his family and to his true love.

My aunt was not the only “Dorothy” in my life, or my father’s. He ended up marrying his high school sweetheart, Dorothy Matlock, in 1940. They married secretly while my father was a freshman in college. She was a year older than him, and he often jokingly accused her of “robbing the cradle.” She never did seem to think that was very funny.

Even though in 1940 they were now married, my mother stayed with her parents while my father was at school, because my parents didn’t have much money. Bloomington was only about 200 miles from Hammond, so Dory would hitchhike home after his last class Friday, so they could spend weekends together.

The summer after my father’s freshman year, he got a part-time job driving a truck for Inland Steel, and my mother worked in her father’s drugstore. They had a few dollars in their pockets and were happy together, but that summer she found out she was pregnant, and they had a decision to make.

My father loved wrestling at the university, but he loved Mom even more. With a baby coming, he didn’t want to go back. Dad went to work for Pullman Standard, which had started making tanks (as opposed to train cars, their usual fare) as the war heated up in Europe. Dory Funk’s days as an amateur wrestler were over, but he played quarterback for Pullman Standard’s semi-pro football team.

Dory Ernest Funk Jr. came into the world February 3, 1941. Less than a year later, the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor, and the country was in a state of shock. My father thought seriously about enlisting, but held back because of his young family. Working for Pullman and making much-needed war materials kept him out of the draft.

All this time, my father missed wrestling. He liked the one-on-one competition. Beating someone on the mat gave him a rush that no other sport could supply. He went to local gyms and looked for opponents. He went through all of them, so he hit the bars and offered to take on all comers.

In the early 1940s, professional wrestling was very popular, and Chicago promoter Fred Kohler was one of the most influential in the country. Wrestling was treated as if it was pure competition, even though it was not competition, even at that time. Wrestling was even covered every week on the Chicago Tribune sports page.

My father wanted to get into this business, but didn’t know how to go about it. Pro wrestling was a strange brotherhood, and wanting in and getting in were two different things.

If you wanted in, you had to have certain qualifications. Toughness and the ability to keep your mouth shut were two of them. Smartasses were not tolerated. Those who wanted in usually ended up with the shit beaten out of them. It was a closed business, and Kohler didn’t want to let Dory into it initially.

Eventually, he proved himself in some shoots (legitimate contests), and they decided to take him under their wing and break him into the business.

Legitimate tough guys in wrestling were often called “shooters,” or policemen. They relished getting a hold of a mark (a derogatory term for a fan who believes in wrestling) or a “wannabe.” It was a feather in their caps if they made their victims scream with pain or piss their pants.

A.B. Scott, my father’s former high school wrestling coach, decided to cash in on wrestling’s popularity by opening a half-assed promotion in Hammond. He made a deal with Kohler to use two or three of Kohler’s boys (wrestlers) on each show and fill out the rest of the card with locals.

The coach also wanted to use my father, and his big idea was for Dory to take on all comers. Every weekend Dory would have a shoot (legitimate match) against the best and toughest in the area. He even beat Walter Palmer, one of Kohler’s top hands and a known shooter.

My father’s pay was a grand sum of $10 per match. After several weeks, the mob caught wind of this and sent the toughest son of a bitch they could find to “beat this Funk kid.” There was some betting involved, but these guys were mainly there to make the point that this mob muscle was tougher than any wrestler. I don’t know if the guy was a collector, or what he did, but all he collected that night from Dory Funk Sr. was an ass-kicking!

Lou Thesz happened to be one of the main-eventers sent by Kohler into Hammond the night the mob’s tough guy made his challenge. Years later he told me about it.

“One whole section was completely Mafia,” he said. “Your father was on the first match against their tough guy. The bell rang, and in no time, your old man had him down. He top bodyscissored him and then ripped him across the face several times with his forearm. This broke the guy’s nose. Blood was everywhere, and he quit. After the match, every one of those Mafia guys walked out, not saying a word. Their boy had lost. They could have cared less about the rest of the matches.”

He laughed and added, “Including mine.”

A reporter from the Hammond Times covered the match as if it were a major sporting event. The coverage made Dory something of a hometown celebrity. Fred Kohler, being the prototypical wrestling promoter, smelled a few bucks to be made. He brought my father into Chicago, where Dory worked occasionally in manipulated matches. The money wasn’t great, but it was something my father loved to do. He still had to maintain his Pullman job, but he was hooked on the wrestling business. Soon enough he would be out of both.

In summer 1943, my father enlisted in the navy. He knew he’d be drafted sooner or later and always said, “I figured the food would be better on a ship than in some goddamned foxhole!”

I think he made the right choice.

He went to basic training in Chicago, on Lake Michigan, where he was allowed to see Mom on the weekends. Then he was assigned to a Land Shore Medium craft, more commonly known as an L.S.M. It was No. 182 and assigned to the Philippine Islands. The ship was only a few hundred feet long and about 34 feet wide, carrying 50 sailors and four officers, plus whatever troops the boat took to the beach for landings.

It was a small fish in a big pond compared to the destroyers, tankers and aircraft carriers in the fleet. My father used to say, “What goddamned Jap in his right mind would want to waste his life and plane on our little boat?”

Now, I want to make something clear—I don’t condone the use of the term “Jap.” I would grow to love the Japanese people, and so would my father, but he was at war with them at that point, and he had hard feelings toward them that took a long time to heal.

Even though my father’s ship wasn’t much of a target, whenever a squadron of Zeroes flew over, the ship’s crew would man the 20-millimeter cannons along with the rest of the fleet, and they would claim any enemy aircraft that went down in the heat of battle. They didn’t give a damn if 10 other ships were also firing on the plane when it went down—they would paint a small picture of a plane to represent each one they had “downed.”

From the looks of their reconnaissance tower, you’d think that ship single-handedly wiped out the Japanese Air Force.

At the end of June 1944, my father’s ship was hit by a typhoon, which tossed around that little boat like a matchbox in a washing machine. They ended up near the coast of China! But what he didn’t know was that my mother was also in a dangerous situation at the same time. She was giving birth to a breach baby and started hemorrhaging. The only person in the area with the same blood type was her doctor, so he gave her his own blood.

And that was how I came into this world.

I was named after one of my mother’s favorite characters from the funnies, Terry from Terry and the Pirates. Dory Junior, or “Dunk,” as we used to call him (think about it), always said the first time he saw me, he thought I looked like a gangly little chicken. Later on, as we grew up, he would threaten to beat the hell out of me for one of the many reasons I gave him to do so. I ran like a chicken, but I never thought I looked like a chicken.

My mother spent the first three months of my life in the hospital, with peritonitis caused by a small piece of placenta remaining in the womb. My brother and I stayed with her family.

My father island-hopped until the war was over, and then came back to Chicago and to his family. He tried to get his job back with Pullman Standard, but they weren’t hiring—there were no more tanks to be built.

He knew he needed money to feed his family, so he decided to try wrestling full time. By now a new local promoter was running Hammond for Kohler, a man named Balk Estes. Balk was also a wrestler. In fact, he and his brothers (Toots and Kick) were all in the business, and were all full-blooded Indians out of Elk City, Oklahoma. That little state put out some of the toughest amateurs in the country, and it still does!

Balk was one of those tough amateurs, and when he first met my father, he said, “So, you’re the guy who’s supposed to be so tough.”

My father made no bones about it—he wasn’t afraid of anyone, and certainly not Balk Estes, so Dory took Balk up on his offer to go to the gym the next day to see who was toughest.

That was the way things were done in the profession at that time. Two tough guys would go to the gym, more than likely alone, with no onlookers. Who won and what happened was the wrestlers’ business, and sometimes never mentioned again.

Shortly before his death in July 2004, I tracked down Balk, by then 87, at his home in Oklahoma. I asked him what happened that day.

He said, “Dory took me down and hooked me in a top body scissors and facelock, but after several minutes, I got away. We wrestled about 10 more minutes with neither one getting the advantage, and then we both called it quits.”

In my heart, I believed my father hooked Estes and crossed his face. I don’t think Balk ever escaped, because with what I know about wrestling, I know that he would have had to have superhuman strength and the ability to withstand a hell of a lot of pain to get out of that hold.

Of course, I also thought if I were Balk Estes and Dory Funk were dead, I might tell a similar story, instead of one where I got my ass hooked.

As Ray Stevens, a legendary wrestler and a longtime friend, once told me, “If it’s worth tellin’, it’s worth colorin’ up a bit!”

And that, in a nutshell, is the wrestling business.

Whatever happened doesn’t matter, because that day at the gym was the start of a lifelong friendship for Balk and Dory.

Balk decided it would be best for Dory to go to another wrestling area to get some ring experience. He talked to Toledo promoter Cliff Moppen and told him he had a green boy named Funk who needed some experience.

Moppen said, “Funk? Goddamn! That sounds downright nasty! How the hell can he draw a buck with a name like Funk?”

Balk said he didn’t care what Moppen called him, and Moppen eventually agreed to use him and even let him use his name.

They borrowed a house trailer from my Aunt Dorothy and enough money for a used Oldsmobile. The Funk family was ready for the road.

I never really thought about us being nomads. It was just a way of life, traveling around and living in the trailer parks.