More Than Just Hardcore (31 page)

The Headhunters were about the only guys who ever did. In another match in Japan involving Onita, I did my courageous moonsault off the top rope. Onita, Cactus and Mike Awesome somehow missed me. Nothing was there for me, except the floor.

I ended up with a hematoma on the side of my head the size of the Softball, and for the rest of the match, I wasn’t sure where I was or what I was doing. Onita tried to toss me back in the ring, and Victor Quinones, my manager, came running down to the ring to stop the thing because I was out on my feet, just knocked silly. After the show was over, I ended up taking another trip to the hospital. I am grateful to this day for Victor’s help.

I sure hope those guys never get the idea to try to play baseball, because they damn sure can’t catch!

But getting back to the Tokyo Dome match, Cactus and I came close to getting into some real trouble. During the match, Cactus was going to set fire to a board. We had talked about it earlier, and were both in agreement that we needed to do something special to call attention to our match, which was only the fifth match on the big card.

One of the Japanese officials apparently had seen some of the things we had done before, because he said to us, “No fire. You use fire, fire marshal close down whole Dome.”

But Cactus and I felt like we’d get some great publicity out of this and decided to light the board anyhow. We got to the spot in the match, and Cactus and I were the only ones in the ring. He squirted fluid all over the board and got out the lighter, while we were both lying on the mat. He kept flicking and flicking the lighter, but wasn’t having any luck, mainly because he was holding his hand upside down and was trying to light the board as it lay on the mat. He kept on burning his hand, and then he’d drop the lighter, pick it up and repeat the whole process.

If he’d thought to raise up the board and light it on its side, it would have gone up beautifully, and I guess we would have closed the show, because after his fourth failed attempt, the fire department guys saw what he was doing and started going nuts! The referee was trying to stop the thing, but all that kept it from happening was that Cactus kept burning his hand and dropping the lighter. If we’d closed that show down, we’d have been immortal in Japan, and that was what we had in mind. Of course, we never would have been asked back to Japan to work for anyone, but we weren’t looking that far ahead at the time. Between the wrestlers and the fans, we also might not have gotten out of the Dome alive!

With fire department officials hopping up on the ring apron, Cactus finally gave up and went on with the match.

When we got back to the dressing room, Asano was screaming, “No fire! No fire! You ruin me! You ruin me!”

Then he grabbed the referee and bitchslapped him! He was slapping the referee, I guess, because there was no way he had the balls to try to slap Cactus or me. He didn’t mind paintbrushing that poor referee about 20 times, though. I guess it was supposed to impress Cactus and me. That poor referee’s head was bobbing back and forth.

All told, though, we busted our asses on that match. After the referee-slapping concluded, Masa Fuchi came up to me and said Baba wanted to talk to me.

I went over to Baba, and we smiled at each other.

He looked at me for a second and said, “Very good. Very good.”

That was about the highest praise Baba ever gave someone.

It was the last time Baba and I ever spoke.

But being over there with Cactus was always fun, even if we did tend to come back with some new scars or burns.

Cactus was all about business. Like me, he was in Japan to make as much money as he could. Unlike me, this meant he was willing to sell any goddamned thing he could get his hands on.

One time, we were in Japan, and I was selling T-shirts before the show started. This 45-year-old fan came running up, saying, “Please sign! Please sign this!”

I looked down, and there was this huge pair of underpants, with “Cactus Jack” written on one side, and a faint brown stripe running down the back.

Cactus Jack had sold this son of a bitch his dirty underwear, from right off of his ass!

I asked him about it, and he just looked at me with those innocent eyes and said, “Well, I got 2,000 yen for them, Terry.”

My family wasn’t thrilled about my hardcore wrestling endeavors in Japan. My wife and both my daughters were worried about me doing more dangerous things, as I got older. But it was my choice, as it has always been. They were not happy with me doing those things, but a man’s gotta do what a man’s gotta do, and what I’ve got to do is provide. The way I provided was to be home as much as I could and perform as few times as I could while making us a good living. The pain and sacrifice of a couple of violent matches was not as bad, to me, as the pain and sacrifice of being on a wrestling tour and away from home for weeks, for the same amount of money.

Worrying about me in the ring was nothing new for my daughters. Just as my brother and I had, Brandee and Stacy grew up thinking their dad was really fighting for his life every night. Mike DiBiase told me once, when I was still a rookie in 1965, “You don’t ever insult the intelligence of your family. When they reach a certain age, and you’ll know when the time is right, you owe it to them to smarten them up to the business. You tell them.”

Vicki had known about the business since right after we got married. I knew she’d be worried enough about me without having to worry that my opponent might be really trying to kill me. And to this day she still worries about me.

As if being the love of my life wasn’t enough, Vicki was also a great asset to me professionally. She would protect the business as hard as I would, if not harder. She knew that a lot of the people in the audience knew she was my wife, and she was as good a worker in the audience as a lot of guys were in the ring.

I told Stacy first, when she was 13. The business was firmly entrenched in its “wrestling is real” mode, and I truly think waiting until they matured a little made their dialogue at school easier, when the subject of what Dad did came up, because when they defended it as sport, they truly believed. And so they handled it, and the other kids learned quickly not to bother them with it. I was the same way. Id had a few fights, growing up, but boys are different.

I also think growing up with that mindset gave the kids a healthier respect for the business, just as I’d had, growing up. It was something special, something worth protecting, as opposed to telling a five-year-old, “It’s fake. It’s phony.”

What respect is that kid going to have for it?

These days, it’s entertainment, and yes, there’s a difference between “fake” and “entertainment.” The difference is in the connotation. “Fake” doesn’t have a very pleasant definition, but “entertainment” does.

My daughters both always thought the world of the boys, but I was always happy that neither of them ever expressed much of an interest in getting into wrestling. There are easier ways of making a buck, and better ways of making sure you’ll have money to retire on—like being a greeter at Wal-Mart. Wrestling is tough on a family, and if anyone knew that, my daughters did.

Not long after they were smartened up to the business, I had a whole new problem to deal with concerning Stacy and Brandee. I’ve handled a lot of tough situations in my life, stood up to a lot of tough guys and stared down some of the most powerful men in the wrestling business, but I don’t know that I was ready for this.

My daughters were starting to date and bring home their boyfriends. And dating had the strangest effects on their personalities. If one of my daughters was dating a smart guy, she would study. If she was going with a triathlete, she would be out running every morning. If one of them was going with an idiot, she would become an idiot. Unfortunately, they were dating idiots most of the time.

Now, in all seriousness, my kids were always pretty good kids, and I’m very proud of them. But they did give me some heartburn with some of their dating choices.

I was never an intimidator as a father, but I got my point across when I needed to. Stacy was dating a guy once who just irritated the hell out of me. I wish I could remember his name.

On second thought, no I don’t.

Anyway, I would tell her to get home by 10 p.m. Well, 10 o’clock would come, and this guy wouldn’t have her home. He’d bring her home at 10:15 or 10:30. And then, he’d come in with her and sit on my couch and watch the evening news! He’d just sit there with a big smile on his face, just looking around the room like he knew something that I didn’t.

Well, this went on for a period of time, and I couldn’t knock him, because that wouldn’t get rid of him. Nothing else would, and he was getting the best of me. I had to figure something out.

Well, he was a cowboy and very proud of his pickup truck. It was a hell of a nice truck, so when he came over, he’d be sitting there, watching the news, and I’d yawn a little bit, stretch and announce that I was going outside for a little fresh air. I’d go out front, open up his gas tank and piss in it, about a cup’s worth.

I got great satisfaction from that. I didn’t like the guy—he was driving me nuts, and I couldn’t get rid of him. But every time he went to leave, his engine would sputter and cough before starting up. Piss isn’t like sugar, which will totally destroy a gas tank, but it can cause some problems. So there’s a tip for all the fathers in the world. Got a problem with a daughter’s boyfriend? Piss in his gas tank!

This kid eventually stopped coming around, and I don’t think he ever had engine trouble again.

But my daughters didn’t need boyfriends to get into trouble. One time, while Stacy was in high school, she got a wild hair and ran across the grass at McDonald’s and tore the grass up in her pickup truck. The truck was kind of messed up, with a hole in the muffler from her going up on the curb. Of course, someone at the place got her license plate number and called the police, who called us.

I got off the phone and asked, “Stacy, did you do that?” “No, I didn’t do it.”

“Well,” I said, “are you sure you didn’t do it?” “No! I didn’t do it!”

“Well, I guess we’ll find out, because I’m gonna have to take you to the sheriff’s department.”

She insisted, “But I didn’t do it!”

“Well, I’m taking you to the sheriff’s department. You’re gonna have to tell them that.”

We pulled up at the sheriff’s department, and I turned to look at her before we got out of the truck.

“Well, Stacy, we’re going in.”

She broke down and started crying.

“I did it, Dad,” she said. “I’m sorry!”

And she was, because she was a good kid. She ended up working it out and paying back McDonald’s. I just thought it was amazing what you could get out of people, once you put the pressure on them a little.

Brandee just about wore us out, too, and the two of them together were a handful. Once, when Stacy was about eight and Brandee was four, Vicki had bought a jar of pitted olives for a dish she was going to make in about four or five days. She put them in the refrigerator and told the girls that those were a no-no, and not to mess with those olives. Sure enough, the first chance they got, they went right into the olives and were walking around with pitted olive slices on their little fingers, like rings. Then they ate the olives right off of their fingers. Well, of course Vicki noticed that a good portion of her olives were missing. She came to me first and asked, “Did you eat those damn black olives?”

I didn’t even know what she was talking about. “No,” I said. “What black olives?”

Then she knew it was the kids. She confronted them separately, and all they could tell her was how, no, they never touched those olives! Finally, they kept talking and ended up ratting each other out.

One time, when Brandee was about four, she went out into the pasture with me, because I had a lot of work around the ranch to do. She stayed in the pickup truck, while I did my work. At the end of the day, I got back in the truck to go home. I looked down and thought some Arab terrorist had gotten ahold of my truck, because there was this incomprehensible writing on the edge of the window. I couldn’t figure out what that was, and a couple of days later, I walked up to the truck and realized that she had scratched “BRANDEE” into the paint. I had been looking at it upside-down and backwards!

About eight years later, I went to California to make Wildside, and one day she just decided she wanted to go for a drive, so my 12-year-old daughter stole my truck! Vicki had come out to visit me, and we decided that since Stacy was 16, she was old enough to keep Brandee herself. Well, we had a snowstorm, and Brandee just took the pickup truck to some friend’s house!

From the time they could, I made both the girls work. They worked here at the ranch and had outside jobs, too. I wanted to teach them the value of a buck. It was a lesson that took with Stacy, but not so much with Brandee! Bless her heart—Brandee can spend a few bucks.

Yes sir, I sure did enjoy spending time at home. And one of the reasons I stayed here through the years was that was it such a great environment to bring those girls up in. Financially, I passed up some good opportunities in order to stay, but I never regretted keeping the family in Canyon, and I never regretted staying home as much as I could.

Cactus Jack and I were the only independent wrestlers in the mid-1990s who could make a very good living by picking our shots and being independent wrestlers, up to the time Cactus joined the WWF in 1996. These days I would guess Raven, the former ECW champion, and I are the only ones who make a really good living working on the independent scene.

Around the same time I was spending the occasional weekend blowing myself up for Atsushi Onita, I ran into Tod Gordon. Gordon was working in Joel Goodhart’s independent promotion in Philadelphia, but told me, “Terry, I want to start a promotion of my own.”

Goodhart’s cards were loaded. Besides me, he brought in The Sheik, Abdullah and a bunch of others. This particular show drew about a $30,000 house, but he spent a lot to bring in that talent, so it wasn’t a profitable situation for him.