More Than Just Hardcore (27 page)

A month after the best-of-three-falls match, they wanted me back to “judge” the last Flair-Steamboat rematch on their “Wrestle War 89” pay per view, with the storyline being I would help determine a winner of the match if it was a time-limit draw. They also wanted me to do an angle with Flair, and they wanted me to serve as a member of the booking committee. That appealed to me, because I thought it would be a chance to use some creativity.

The booking committee was me, Ric Flair, Jim Ross, Kevin Sullivan, Jim Cornette and a few other guys. They didn’t exactly work together, though. There was a lot of division and conflict within that committee. I had no idea I was walking into a loaded situation, because the committee wasn’t in agreement with Herd. I walked into my first meeting, completely unaware of the problems. When Herd talked to me about coming in, he’d made it sound as if things were as smooth as glass. I ended up being the outside individual, almost alone, compared to everyone else in there. What was asked of me ended up being damn near nothing. It was a pretty shocking situation.

The conflict seemed to be a power struggle between the committee and Herd. The members of the committee, all of whom had put in years in the wrestling business, felt Herd was inept. Herd, a former St. Louis TV station manager and executive with Pizza Hut, was fighting to show he was boss. If everyone had been on the same page, I think we’d have had a much stronger product.

Jim Herd was as qualified to run that company as anybody whom Turner would have put in that position. Anybody put in that position was going to have problems. Especially a non-wrestling person is going to have to be led. Because of the shape the thing was in by the time I got there, I don’t know if they had tried to lead him in the right way and educate him into the business, or if they just tried to muscle him around, or if he had tried to muscle them around. To this day, I don’t know what happened between those people before I got there.

All I knew that on one side was Jim Herd, who had just signed me to one of the better deals I’ve had in my life, and on the other was people in the business I knew and respected.

Not long after I started, Kevin Sullivan approached me before a meeting and said, “I just need to know one thing, whose side are you on?”

I said, “What? I’m on the NWAs side!”

He said, “No, that’s not what I mean! Are you on our side, or Jim Herd’s?” “I’m on the NWAs side!”

I thought that was the most ridiculous question I’d ever heard, but my answer was not the politically correct answer. But I’m not a dummy. I saw that the best thing I could do, for myself, was to keep from falling into one side or the other.

And there were some very creative guys on that committee! Kevin Sullivan was one of the greatest idea men I’ve ever known. He had a gazillion creative ideas and could go one after the other, never running out! Here’s an idea you wrestling fans might not know was Kevin’s—Goldberg. The undefeated streak was Kevin’s idea, and it was the last thing in WCW that really got over like a million bucks. It was a very basic thing, but something that really worked. That idea made a ton of money for WCW before they found a way to screw it up, although that wasn’t Kevin’s fault.

The thing about Sullivan was, someone had to be there to separate the good ones from the bad. I’d recommend Sullivan for a booking committee anywhere, even today. He just needs to be regulated, is all.

There was such a mix of strong personalities on that committee that there was no one boss, no one steering the ship. Herd thought that booking committee was the way to go, because when he was an executive at Pizza Hut that was how they did things. For the wrestling business, a committee like that needs a strong leader, someone who can control and fire the other members of the committee and who could make the final decisions, instead of having eight people who wanted to go in eight directions. But you weren’t going to fire Ric Flair, the world’s champion (although Herd did just that in 1991). You weren’t going to fire me, not in the middle of such a hot program with Flair. That concept just doesn’t work in wrestling.

And again, you don’t need guys booking who are working in the ring.

Here’s an example of how little control over things I had. I brought in a talented young man to wrestle, and even though he put me over in his first match, I thought his talents were obvious, but they never brought him back. His name was Eddie Guerrero. Maybe you’ve heard of him.

I hadn’t brought Eddie in just to do a job for me. It wasn’t like I was sitting around one day and had the brilliant idea to bring in Eddie just so I could beat him up on TV. I knew he was a hell of a worker, because I had watched his early matches, and I told Herd and the rest of them, “This guy’s got it. He’s really good.”

I thought the world of his work, and I was shocked that he didn’t get an offer after our match. I did everything I could do to get him in there, which shows you how much influence I had as a member of the booking committee.

Eddie, of course, ended up making his own way, as part of a great tag team with Art Barr in Mexico, and then (after Art passed away) a great talent with ECW, WCW and WWE, where he finally rose to the top.

I also couldn’t do much to help my old friend Dick Murdoch. Dick was working for the NWA in 1989, but he didn’t last long after I got there.

We were having one of our meetings in the dressing room, with Herd trying to figure out what was wrong with the company, when Murdoch walked by. Herd had always liked Murdoch, so he called him in and said, “Dick, come in here and tell us what you think is wrong with the business.”

Murdoch said, “Well, Jim, it’s you. You don’t know a goddamned thing about this business.”

Well, hell, that was the truth! Jim Heid’s idea of a good concept for professional wrestling was the Ding Dongs, a tag team that wore little bells all over their costume!

But for Murdoch, that was also the wrong thing to say. About a month later, Dick was let go. I still loved Murdoch, and he was probably right, but I couldn’t blame Herd. Hell, that’s not what you want to hear from one of your workers.

After Murdoch left TBS, he went to work for the Coors distributorship in Amarillo. He was the Coors goodwill ambassador, which meant his job was to go from bar to bar, buying Coors for people everywhere he went. It was the perfect job for Murdoch—$90,000 a year, and all he had to do was go to bars and say, “Hey, how are you, pal? You’d better drink a Coors. Here—let me buy you a beer. Let’s have one together.”

That was his job!

Coors sponsored a rodeo in Amarillo, and Dick was there. So was this guy who was a bit of an asshole. He was in the stands, cussing at everyone and just being obnoxious. Right in front of 3,000 people in the stands, Dick just beat the shit out of the guy.

Vance Reed, who owned the distributorship, was there. He wasn’t thrilled, but Vance was a great guy, so he let that one pass. A short time later, Dick took his new pickup truck to the distributorship, where they had these huge delivery trucks. They also had a high-pressure wash system for the trucks, and Dick told one of the guys there to wash his truck.

The guy said, “We’re not supposed to wash people’s pickup trucks.”

“Goddammit, wash my truck! Get the thing in there and wash it!”

So the guy washed the truck, and the high-pressure system blasted all the paint off of it. Dick took the truck and had the body shop repaint it. Then, he sent the $2,800 bill to Coors!

Needless to say, Dick was not the Coors goodwill man for much longer.

It ended up that just about the only thing I could affect was the stuff I was doing in the ring, although that was the program with Flair, which I was pretty pleased with. The program itself, after the initial attack, was my direction. It started when I came in the ring after Flair regained the title from Steamboat and challenged the new champion. When he pointed out that I’d been in Hollywood and out of wrestling for a few years and needed to work my way into contention, I went berserk and attacked him, piledriving him onto a table. It ended with Flair being carried out while I screamed, “He said I wasn’t good enough!”

The story was, the attack would leave Flair injured for several weeks, and they would tease that the injury was serious enough that he might have to retire, before he came back and got his revenge on me. While he was out, I cut some really intense promos on Flair, including one where I brought out a skinny Ric Flair imposter with a yellow stripe painted down his back.

Flair was really bothered by this stuff, and I was told to tone it down a little bit. I didn’t see the problem, because I was the heel—the ending was going to be that Flair was going to kick my ass! I sure wasn’t going to say all these outrageous things, only to beat up Ric Flair and then go home and hang up my tights.

I don’t know if Flair was upset because he was insecure, or because he wasn’t there. You see, he was home, selling the injury angle, and all he knew about what I was doing was what he saw on TV. All he saw was me blasting him every week. With all the divisions in WCW at that time, I wouldn’t be surprised if he thought I was working on behalf of someone else there to make him look bad. He had been having his problems with Jim Herd even then, fighting over his contract, which Herd thought was too much money for him to make.

All that stuff was done to create a heated atmosphere for our match. If it hurt him, that certainly wasn’t my intent. I’m certainly not sitting here apologizing, because I didn’t see any real damage that was done to him. I did it as a kick in the ass for business. I had certainly done heavy heel promos like that and had never hurt a babyface before. I never did hear about Dusty Pvhodes being upset about the things I’d say about him, because he understood it was business to build up revenue at the box office. And while the Funk-Flair feud did very strong business, I think its box office was hurt by me having to tone down the heat.

I’d toned down promos a few times before when the heat got to be too much, particularly in Puerto Rico, but I had never before had to take it down a notch because someone’s feelings were hurt.

I wasn’t the only one Flair had a problem with that year. There was a lot of heat between Flair and Paul Heyman, known then in wrestling as “Paul E. Dangerously,” manager of the Samoan Swat Team. What was Paul E.’s heat with Flair over? Hell if I know, but one night, they were screaming at each other in the dressing room, and not long after, Paul E. was out of WCW It was a definite personality clash.

Paul E. was young guy who would play a big role in my professional life. I knew right away that he was nuts. The thing that really showed me that was when he rented a car on his credit card and let the Samoan Swat Team drive it on their own.

About $4,000 worth of damage later, the car was sitting in front of the rent-a-car place, and Paul E. realized he had made a mistake. Sometimes, Paul E. was not the genius many people think he is! But when it came to wrestling, the guy had a feel for it, a great mind and unlimited energy, as I would find out when I worked for him a few years later.

Regardless of how he felt personally about my promos, Flair was a pleasure to work with. I truly enjoyed every one of our matches. We had some very solid encounters. How could I not love a match when I was in there with one of the best performers in the world?

But I paid a price for those matches. One night I went over the top rope in a match with Sting and hit the rail outside, cracking my sacrum. It wasn’t anybody’s fault, just a bad landing. I ended up riding around on a plane every day going from town to town, and I couldn’t sit on the plane, except foi takeoff and landing. The only way I could stand it was to kneel on my seat, facing the person behind me.

I also had a nasty staph infection. I had torn my bursa, and my elbow swelled to the size of a baseball. 1 got myself some needles from a veterinarian in Amarillo and drained the damn thing myself, every night. I was thinking I was some kind of doctor, but I was almost Doctor Kevorkian, because I almost eliminated myself. While draining the fluid out, I was letting germs in, and the result was a staph infection. I just didn’t feel like I had the time to go to a real doctor about it, but Dr. Funk ended up putting me out of action for a couple of weeks. He wasn’t one of my better characters.

When I went into shock from it, Paul E. was the one who took me to the hospital. They operated on me, and it was quite a deal. But Paul E. was there for me, when everybody was gone, and he stayed with me. No one else did.

What heat was left after I toned down my interviews for the last couple of weeks built up to a main-event match at the July pay per view, the Great American Bash ‘89. And what I’d said must have done the trick, because the show was a sellout in Baltimore, and it drew the best gate for a live show the company ever had, until 1996.

I had announced a big surprise for Flair, which turned out to be Gary Hart as my manager. Again, I was given a mouthpiece, even though everyone in the company knew I could talk on my own. Why? Hell, I don’t know. Ask Jim Herd—or maybe the booking committee!

Gary was a good manager, though. Managers have all but disappeared today, but there used to be a role for a guy who couldn’t wrestle but who could talk for a wrestler with limited verbal skills. The best I ever saw was “Wild” Red Berry, who managed the Fabulous Kangaroos. They came through Amarillo when I was a kid, and I was fascinated by him. He threw around big words, half of which weren’t even real words! Where he got them from, nobody knows. He mixed in a lot of condescension and made himself a very hated man among wrestling fans.

Another one who was really good was J.C. Dykes, who managed the tag team of The Infernos. The Masked Infernos, in their blue outfits, were Frankie Cain and Rocky Smith. They were really talented guys, and that gimmick was really over for a long time in Florida, because they knew how to get heat, and so did J.C. He did all the talking, which created a kind of mystique about the Infernos.

In 1989, Gary Hart was also managing Keiji Muto, who wrestled as “The Great Muta.” He was a hell of a talent, but was kind of standoffish with me at first, since I’d been an All Japan man for years and years, and he was someone Inoki was grooming for stardom in New Japan. Maybe he had a sense of, “What is Funk going to do to me?”