More Than Just Hardcore (38 page)

With me, if I was in a match with someone who gave and gave in the match, I was going to return the favor. Nash apparently didn’t have that attitude, but it ultimately fell on the company. When someone brings you in, it’s only natural to think that they see some value and want to use you, not abuse you. I probably should have asked where we were going with it. Nash certainly knew where he was going with it—absolutely nowhere.

All of a sudden, he was gone. The guy just disappeared from WCW not long after our match. We never even got into what we were doing. Maybe because of the turmoil regarding who was running the company, a lot of the big guys just vanished from TV. Of course, they were still getting their big paychecks.

Sullivan needed some names he could count on, and I happened to know a guy who worked hard and was something of a name performer. So I got on the phone to Sabu.

ECW, where Sabu had made his biggest name, was really just a stage for the talent to get exposure and to perform. In the 1990s, there were only two real places to make money in wrestling—the WWF and WCW. By 2000, ECW was having some pretty serious problems, and Sabu was looking for a place to make a better living. I told Kevin Sullivan that he wanted to come in, and Kevin said, “Great!”

Kevin knew that Sabu was a real piece of talent and got him a deal worth $250,000 a year, which was pretty damn good money, even with the inflated salaries some of those other guys were making.

Paul Heyman put a stop to it, citing a contract he had with Sabu, even though Paul was barely upholding his end of the deal and owed Sabu money at the time! To this day, I still consider Paul a friend, but this was one of the few times I was really upset with him. I just couldn’t stomach the idea that Paul would keep this guy from earning a living. I don’t pretend to know everything that went down between Sabu and Paul E. in ECW, but why do that to him?

Seriously, WCW was thrilled about the idea of getting Sabu, and Heyman threatening the possibility of legal action put the kibosh on the whole deal. It just chilled the whole deal.

With all of this going on, Mick Foley’s autobiography came out. It was called Have a Nice Day: A Tale of Blood and Sweatsocks, and it jumped to the top of the New York Times bestsellers list. It contained a less-than-flattering portrayal of Ric Flair, who was something of the elder statesman of WCW. Flair was booker when Cactus worked in WCW, starting in late 1989, and Cactus wrote that Flair was too concerned with other things (such as his hair) to book him in a way that he would get over. We did a short program with me against Flair, and we made the comments in the book part of the angle, but Flair never said one word about the book to me privately. If it truly bugged him, he never let me know about it.

That deal with Flair also exposed me a little to his son, David. Talk about a tough act to follow! I like David, and I think that he would have had a much easier time in the business if he wasn’t the son of one of the all-time greats. It was kind of like Dusty and Dustin, except Dustin finally found his niche. David never did, and it was just impossible for him to walk out to the ring without having people making a comparison to one of the greatest professional wrestlers there has ever been. Him having to suffer that comparison was a travesty in its own right.

Being out there with Ric didn’t enhance his career; it limited his career. It was different for David than it was for my brother and me starting out. A lot of that had to do with the image my father portrayed, as opposed to the image Ric portrays, and I’m not knocking Ric when I say that. My father had a different image to the Amarillo people—they knew the Funks. We had been around that place for a lifetime. Dory Funk, our dad, was just a regular guy, which was true— he was just a regular guy. The character Flair portrayed was larger than life. Dusty Rhodes was another larger-than-life image, and I think that made the difference between David and Dustin, and Junior and me. Greg Gagne ran into the same problems in the AWA, when Verne tried to push him. Verne had pushed himself as the larger-than-life man in that area that he had become the one and only. And he was to those fans. Today you see the same thing with Vince McMahon’s children, and you might notice they pull back from having his kids on TV all the time.

Unfortunately, my issue with Flair kind of fizzled out, just as my issue with Kevin Nash had done. It was almost as if it were written in stone that in WCW, there would be no continuity, no building on anything. It was as if, every week, they just threw a bunch of stuff out there, and none of it had time to get over with the audience, which was rapidly shrinking. In 2000, WCW had the unmistakable stink of death on it. There was a feeling in the locker room like everyone felt it wasn’t going to last much longer. I don’t think anyone doubted it. I knew it was doomed from the moment I walked in the door.

And I wish I could tell you what Sting was like in 1999 and 2000, compared to the Sting I knew a decade earlier, but I was never around him. Sting, like so many other top guys in WCW, appeared and disappeared into his own quarters. I’ve been in thousands of locker rooms in my life, and I think separating the top stars like that is completely absurd, and completely demeaning to the guys those top stars are wrestling. I wish I’d thought to ask one of them, “You mean that this guy is going to go out there and make you look great, so you can continue to be a star, and yet you can’t bring yourself to change in the same room with this guy?”

If I’d been in my prime and someone showed me that kind of disrespect, they might have found themselves doing real battle with me, in the ring. It was insulting and showed no dignity or respect for the people who were making the stars. Maybe I was just never a star the caliber of Sting, Hulk Hogan, or Kevin Nash, but when I was world’s champion in 1976,1 never dressed separately from the other boys, nor did I find myself bothered by the other boys. I can’t think of anyone who was or is so big a star in wrestling that he’s just too good to dress with the other boys. Take The Undertaker, for example. He never did that when I was around him, and I’d bet you $100 he doesn’t do it now. “Stone Cold” Steve Austin was a bigger star at his peak than anyone in WCW was at his peak, and I’d bet you $100 that Austin never did that bullshit.

To get away, to get out of the dressing room for a minute to discuss a finish is one thing. But to alienate yourself from your peers is beyond my comprehension, especially since those peers are doing you a favor by putting their shoulders to the mat.

WTiat that company needed was someone to take the reins a lot sooner. Kevin Sullivan tried it in 2000, but he had a lot of enemies in the company, and in truth, by then it was too late. It had gotten down to a level where a resurgence would have been impossible, especially since most of the guys who had been WCW’s top stars were just gone. Kevin was left with a group of guys who, except for Hulk Hogan and Ric Flair, were not the superstars WCW had been focusing on for years. It was also a group that changed constantly, which made long-term planning impossible.

Sullivan was still a great idea man, but it wouldn’t be long before he was also shown the door. I think Vince Russo played a part in that, and he was the guy who ended up back in charge, along with Bischoff. The entire company was falling apart, and Kevin Sullivan was there, trying to hold the pieces together. He ended up being WCWs fall guy, the guy blamed for all of that company’s problems, even though those problems were there before they put Kevin in charge.

I talked to him right before he left. He said, “Damn, Terry, I’m having to come up with shows, and no one’s here.”

Kevin Sullivan was one of those rare realists in wrestling, and I think he knew from the day he started that he was there to put together a TV show with whatever he could gather. I think he also knew he was only in for the short term, and that he’d be gone when it all started going to hell. But at least Kevin was trying to create. The ones who would replace him ended up doing nothing but destroying.

In April 2000, Sullivan was out and Bischoff and Russo both came back. Hell,
could have told them that wasn’t going to work! The last year of that company was a period of total idiocy.<
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Here you had Vince Russo, who was supposed to be a writer, and all of the sudden, he’s Vince Russo, the executive in charge. And then, he’s suddenly Vince Russo, the performer! Having a writer as a performer was the wrong move for the company, especially since WCW had the money to hire as many performers as it needed. What WCW ended up with was a “The Emperor Has No Clothes” scenario.

I’ll use Sylvester Stallone as an example. We were filming Paradise Alley in 1977. Sly was the director, and he was also the lead actor. Sly would finish a scene, and no matter how he did, people on the set would say, “Academy award!”

You get the same thing with someone in Russo’s position. No one was willing to be honest with him. You gain more by dishonesty. Remember the story about Dick Murdoch and Jim Herd? Dick told him the truth, but Dick would have been better off by lying to the man.

And if all you hear is how good you’re doing, it’s easy to start believing you actually are good, especially when you’re in main issues and you’re the one writing all this stuff.

As a creative person, he needed an overseer, as any creative person does. I think the guy could create good stuff, but he could create godawful stuff, too. And somebody needed to be there over him, to tell him which was which. And it needed to be someone who actually knew the wrestling business, someone who knew the kinds of things that worked and the kinds of things that were too off the wall to get over with anyone.

Even Vince McMahon has that problem sometimes. Sometimes McMahon’s WWE (as McMahon’s company is now known) does something completely off the wall, and it doesn’t work. But Vince has people around him, people who can be that conservative voice and help sort out some of those ideas. And even then, the “Stallone syndrome” still exists in that organization, as advanced as WWE is.

You just need a conservative voice, and that’s not hard to find in wrestling. Creativity is what’s hard to find, and Russo did some creative things. But if you just let a creative person go unchecked … well, that person might think it’s a good idea to go in front of an audience wearing a nylon stocking and baby powder over his head, and carrying a chainsaw.

And even if they did do well onscreen, pushing themselves is not what they should have been doing. Of all the talent WCW had, the best they can come up with to push is … Eric Bischoff and Vince Russo? What kind of ego would you have to have to think that was a good idea? Bischoff and Russo became the stars of the show, and to make things worse, the show went from being wrestling to being a sitcom of absurdities.

Russo did try to find things to do with guys who had been underused. Hugh Morrus was one of them. He was a guy who could work. I always thought he would find a niche somewhere, but he never really did, and I can’t understand why, because he had plenty of talent. He might just have been born too late. He was almost, to me, a Bob Sweetan type. Sweetan was a guy who a regional promoter would take one look at and think, “I won’t make a dollar with this guy,” but you could! Hell, Sweetan drew a lot of money for Bill Watts in Oklahoma, and he did well for Joe Blanchard in San Antonio. If Hugh had been back in that era, he would have found a niche and his opportunity to show he could draw a buck. But in this business and time, it’s very difficult to get a guy like that over. He’s not six foot six. He’s not the most handsome guy on the show, but if he had gotten a chance, he could have proven himself. But he never got a chance because so much of the business is based on the outward physical appearance of a guy.

Another guy Russo had an idea for was former ECW champion Mike Awesome. Unfortunately, his idea was to turn Mike Awesome from a sadistic monster of a wrestler into a guy who loved fat women, and then into “That ‘70s Guy.”

I’ve seen some bumbling bullshit in my life, but that is the most absurd thing I’ve ever seen. That was nothing short of being the destruction of an individual. The way they handled him was a travesty. I mean, here’s a guy who is a monster, a big boy, who could do anything. He could backflip off the top rope. He was a good-looking guy, too, with a great physique. He was pretty much everything you could want out of a pro wrestler in this day and age. He had it all!

So what did they do with this incredible piece of talent? They had him lusting after fat women and wearing leisure suits!

I saw him on TV once, wearing some stupid Hawaiian shirt. Well, hell, he was That 70s Guy! Think about it—how could you more effectively destroy an individual any more than that? In the year 2000, with wrestling changing quicker than it ever had, with the top minds in the business striving to keep up with the changes, WCW tagged Mike Awesome “That ‘70s Guy!”

They totally destroyed the guy. It was right up there with the Ding Dongs and Dr. Knows it All. The sad thing was, he’d worked his ass off to get his shot in WCW. He worked for Onita in Japan and was over as a top singles guy, but what you might not realize is that “That ‘70s Guy” hurt him all the way around the world. He was no longer Mike Awesome, the incredible Gladiator. He was now “That ‘70s Guy!”

Another thing about Russo, and his sidekick, Ed Ferrara—when they were in the WWF and I got there in late 1997, they never took a minute to say one word to me. I have no idea why. Later, when I got to WCW, I think they were too ashamed to talk to me very much. Maybe they were too busy thinking up their brilliant plan to screw over Hulk Hogan on a live pay per view and cost the company a few million dollars. How innovative!

They booked me into the hardcore division. WCW had just started a hardcore title after the WWE had some success with the idea in 1998. The hardcore title matches were different from other title matches in that you could score a pinfall anywhere. You could fight out of the ring—hell, you could fight outside of the building!

On one episode of WCW’s “Thunder” show in May, Chris Candido and I had a hardcore match where we ended up fighting in a horse stable. We were going at it when the damn horse just rared back and kicked the living hell out of me. I was actually very lucky not to be very seriously injured, because he kicked me right in the head. I went loopy and without thinking, jumped up and knocked the shit out of that horse.