More Than Just Hardcore (43 page)

It was a shitty deal, but it helps you keep things in perspective. That kid knew what he had, and knew how it would end, but, by God, he was going down the road! That’s a pretty tough kid.

I keep his picture up to remind me of that kid, but also to remind me what my friend John Ayers had to battle in the last years of his life. John, who played in two Super Bowls, who did so many wonderful things in his life, died after fighting liver cancer, such a terrible death.

When they had his funeral, we had a reception here at the ranch. It was amazing to see who all had turned out to pay their respects. Half of John’s 49er teammates, from Joe Montana on down, came all the way out here, out of respect for him, to say goodbye. He had so much respect from his peers.

And he loved the wrestlers. I had gotten him involved in Crockett’s NWA group in the 1980s, and he just loved being around the business. I think he’d have made his mark in wrestling if he hadn’t had so much success as a football player. Frankly, I’m glad he didn’t get into the business, because he was a guy with a laid-back attitude, and I don’t know how he would have fared with the manipulations of some of the people in the business. He might have been too honorable a guy to be in the business.

This was the kind of man John Ayers was. I would take off on a wrestling tour, and he would come every day and take care of my cattle and my horses while I was gone.

He was my best friend and was always willing to help me out in any way he could, even though he endured quite a bit because of me.

In the first round of the 1978 NFL draft, the 49ers picked Ernie Hughes, an All-America offensive guard (John’s position) from Notre Dame. John was playing first team, but he was spending all summer drinking beer and playing around.

One of John’s favorite tricks was to bring three or four people to the house, people I didn’t even know. They’d all be there in the den, where I had a bar and a keg at the time. Vicki and I would go to bed, and John would keep his entourage there until the wee hours! I had strangers drinking all my beer!

He also loved driving his Jeep all over my ranch, leaving tracks in my grass. That was really funny to him!

Anyway, he had been carrying on for a while, and I thought to myself, “John’s not getting prepared enough for this Ernie Hughes.”

I decided to call a local florist.

A few days later, a bouquet of green (Notre Dame’s color) carnations showed up at John’s house, along with a note that read, “Good luck, sucker! Notre Dame is number one and always will be. Signed, Ernie.”

And I’ll be a son of a bitch if he wasn’t out every morning at sunup, running around my pasture, dragging around a tractor tire he had tied to himself with a huge rope. He was training from the time he woke up to the time he went to bed. He became a crazy man! He wouldn’t slow down, wouldn’t have a beer with me, wouldn’t do anything. He wanted to kill Ernie Hughes and was getting prepared to do it.

It was like this for about three weeks. John was killing himself getting into shape, but even worse, I had lost my beer-drinking buddy. I finally decided to call him.

“John,” I said, “I’m sorry, but I’m the one who sent you those flowers.”

He was pretty mad at me, but hell—he was in tremendous shape!

I thought that trick worked pretty well, so a couple of years later, I used it again, when West Texas State played Abilene Christian in the Lone Star Conference championship game.

I had Vicki send to West Texas State’s locker room a bouquet with a note that said, “Sorry about the game today. Tough luck. Abilene Christian is number one.”

They had a riot! West Texas State won the game, but they were fighting from the time they got out onto the field. Even the coach was damn near ready to fight Abilene Christian’s coach.

What a motivator that is! You can really piss somebody off just with flowers and a carefully worded note.

I decided in this case it would be best to wait about five years to keep my mouth shut. When I finally told the West Texas State coach, he just half-smiled and said, “You son of a bitch! You damn near got me killed. I damn near lost my job over that!”

John had let the bouquet motivate him to get in shape, while my alma mater just got whipped into a frenzy.

I have tried to be there for John’s kids, the way I know he’d be there for mine if I’d been taken, instead of him. I love his daughter Jolee to death, and his death was very difficult on her and her brother John T, and on their mother. John T. ended up playing at West Texas State, like his dad, and he graduated with a 3.75, which is no small feat. He’s working in Houston now, and we always see him when he comes to visit his mother. Jolee is a 4.0 student at Texas Tech, and she’ll graduate this year. She’s married now, and I don’t see her as often as I used to.

They both remind me of John, but Jolee is probably more like him. She’s just got that easy way about her.

I think of John a lot, along with my dad and so many other friends. In June 2004, I turned six years older than the age my father was when he passed away. As I said, I’ve done a lot of living, but I’ve lost a lot of people in my life. I see them every day in the pictures on my study wall.

Some of them I get mad at. Larry Hennig is a dear friend, and has been for a long time. When he lost his son Curt to a drug overdose, it devastated him. I was torn up, too, but it pissed me off, too, because it was induced by Curt himself. I really think it killed a part of Larry, and I can’t help but blame Curt for doing that to his dad and his family.

I get mad at Eddie Gilbert, too. I tried many times to help him, to tell him he needed to be careful, but it’s hard. You see someone with a problem, but you also see that person as a friend, and you never can tell which guys you need to be watching out for. It’s not like there’s a glow around their heads to where you could say, “Wow, I’d better talk to him. He’s going to be the next one to go.”

Eddie knew he had a problem, and it was something he fought hard against. Eddie was extremely proud of himself in the summer of 1994. He was clean and sober and was actually trying to go into politics in Lexington, Tennessee, where he was from. He saw an escape and a totally different way of living.

About six months later he overdosed on cocaine and died in Puerto Rican hotel room while on a wrestling tour. If he had won that constable’s election, I think he’d still be alive today and still be drug-free.

Even though I knew he’d had a problem, the news of his death came as a terrible shock. He was only 34, and had such a great mind for the wrestling business. He was another second-generation guy. I also knew both his father, Tommy, and his brother, Doug, well. Tommy spent a couple of years wrestling for us and was a good man. Eddie had a very strong, tight-knit family, and I can’t imagine what they’re going through, even to this day. The toughest thing in the world must be, as a parent, to lose one of your own, and Vicki and I hope that God blesses us with death prior to either of our daughters.

Eddie Gilbert was a friend. But I’m at the point where, when I get news about one of them passing away, and drugs are involved, I’m pissed off at them. I’m mad, and I don’t know if that’s right or not, but it’s how I feel.

I don’t think it’s callousness, but I want to yell at them, “Goddammit, you’re cheating me, you’re cheating your friends, and and you’re cheating your family! By God, learn to count! How many pills have you had? Keep track!”

Hell, I even get mad at Eddie Graham, sometimes, for killing himself and taking himself away from all the people who loved him.

The sad thing is, a lot of times, I just feel numb to the news, when someone calls to tell me about another young guy in the business dying. There have been -so many, I’ve almost just grown numb to it. I know that anger and numbness is a horrible combination of feelings to have in reaction to news like that, but I feel like I’ve gotten that phone call 100 times.

And I think again, of the Von Erich boys who died young—David, Kerry, Mike and Chris.

There were some horrible stories about the Von Erichs, and I tend to believe a lot of the stories. I guess it was just a case of too much money and fame for kids that young.

I remember being on a plane in the mid-1980s with Kerry, headed for Saint Louis. Kerry and I were talking and he said, “Boy, I really feel good. I’ve really cleaned up. I don’t drink, or do drugs anymore. I’m finally clean and sober, and I finally feel like I’ve got my life back in line.”

Then the stewardess walked by, and Kerry ordered a vodka and 7-Up.

I thought it was quite funny at the time, but looking back, it’s really a sad story.

I remember when Kerry went to Japan for the first time, in March 1983. He walked around the room and introduced himself to everyone.

“Hello, Mr. Baba, how are you? Mr. Higuchi, how are you?”

After walking around the room and shaking everyone’s hand, he sat down for a few minutes. Then, he got up and walked around the room again, shaking everyone’s hands.

“Hello, Mr. Baba, how are you? Mr. Higuchi, how are you?”

I knew it wasn’t a good situation, but Kerry was able to work, so what were we going to do?

And there’s Kevin, Fritz’s oldest son, who had some problems of his own. God bless him—I’m proud of him. He’s discovered that money and family are better drugs than anything else. That’s the thing about being addicted to money—you have to live pretty clean to make it and keep it.

I remember Vicki and I used to go out with Randy Savage and his wife, Elizabeth, when Randy and I were both working for the WWF in the mid-1980s.

Elizabeth was a wonderful person, but things with Randy and her fell apart in the early 1990s, and she ended up dying a couple of years ago, mixing alcohol and drugs. I wonder how she could have gotten to that point, because when Randy and I would go out with our wives, Elizabeth wouldn’t even take a glass of wine.

She was living with Lex Luger at the time of her death. Now I never considered Luger someone I wanted to go have a beer with, but I don’t know how he could have let her get to that point.

What I do know is that must have been a horrible deal for her. Maybe this is just chauvinism on my part, but I don’t get mad at Elizabeth when I think of it, the way I get mad at Curt Hennig or Eddie Gilbert. I truly think hers was an exceptional case. I don’t think Liz would have been surrounding herself with that shit on her own. I can’t imagine Liz ever looking at Luger and saying, “Hey, let’s go get some drugs and do them.” I just don’t think it started that way. There’s no way it would have. I think she was enticed along the way. I think all that shit was made a part of her life, and it certainly wasn’t a part of her life when she was with Randy.

Sometimes, we become our characters in this business. Randy became the wired “Macho Man” on occasion. Luger probably doesn’t know who he is, to this day. He probably still thinks he’s the “Total Package.” I think that persona consumed him, and I hate to say that, but it’s true. It happens a lot, in this business.

I remember the last time I talked to my friend Mike Hegstrand, Road Warrior Hawk, just a few hours before he died.

A few days earlier, my wife had gotten a call from someone whose voice, she said, was awfully garbled. The caller said something like, “This is Hawk,” and then a bunch of stuff Vicki couldn’t even make out.

Now, we used to get a lot of strange calls at the house from wrestling fans, so in our last conversation, I asked Hawk if that had been him who had called the house.

“No,” he said. “It wasn’t me.”

He also told me how worn out he was.

“I tell you, Terry, I’ve been moving all day, and I’m just dead tired.”

We talked a little while longer and then, I told him I had to go. From what I understand, he hung up, laid down to rest and went to sleep. He didn’t wake up again.

I also talked to him a couple of months earlier. He called, asking if I knew anywhere he could pick up some work.

“I don’t really care where it is,” he said. “I just want to pick up some work. Do you know any of those independents that might be able to use me?”

Well, hell, this guy was one of the top names in the entire business in the 1980s, so there should be somebody, right? I checked with Court Bauer, who ran an independent group in Florida, and Court said he’d “think about it.” He never did say anything back to me on it.

Some guys didn’t get killed, but they sure hurt their careers. Scott Hall was, in my mind, a very talented worker in the 1990s, and he still could be an asset to someone in 2004. But he’s squandered so much time, and the real shame is that he’s hurt both himself (both healthwise and in terms of money in the bank) and the business (by keeping it from having another marketable star available much of the time). I hope he’ll kick himself in the ass at some point and get his head on straight, because I truly believe he’s one of the more talented guys in the business when he’s working right. I hope it’s not too late for him to turn things around, as a guy in his mid-40s. I’m afraid he might be approaching that point, where it’s just too late for him to turn it around. If he’s going to do it, he’d better do it soon.

I know a lot of people who don’t agree with me on this, but I’m telling you, having seen the guy, he can get heat with the best of them, and he also knows how to be a good babyface. I can knock the way the guy lives his life, but there’s no knocking his ability to get over with a crowd. Why throw it down the drain?

You can’t blame the drug deaths on Vince McMahon or wrestling. It’s not the promoters, or the agents who are the enablers. The enabler to all this stuff is the road itself. These were guys rolling around with a lot of cash in hand, and a lot of time on their hands while going from show to show. You had to be in charge of yourself. You had to take control of your life. The drug problem would be minute if the towns could come to the boys, instead of the wrestlers coming to the towns.

You don’t watch singers overdose and drop dead, and then say, “Oh, music is killing people.”

Yet the entire wrestling profession gets tied to these problems. It shouldn’t be the profession. It has to be the individual. It has to get to the point of wrestlers assuming responsibility for themselves.