More Than Just Hardcore (6 page)

Tully was a great athlete, and I think his success in the wrestling business was a testament to that, because he was a small guy by wrestling standards. Tully had a cockiness about him, and I guess I’ve never met a quarterback who didn’t have that. Back then a quarterback had to have that confidence because the quarterback was often the one calling plays on the field. Tully was able to translate that natural confidence into a successful persona in wrestling.

A guy who didn’t go into wrestling, but who became one of my dearest friends, also went to West Texas State a few years behind Stan. Ted DiBiase was the one who brought John Ayers out to the house.

My first thought about John was, “What a big goof,” but I liked him from the first time we met.

He was just a big, South Texas boy, as country as he could be, and he didn’t give a damn about much besides playing football. He didn’t care much about getting grades, although he had a great mind. He’d been at the University of Texas and was doing great as a player there, but he finished up his freshman year with something like a minus-four grade-point average or something like that.

As I got to know him, I saw that this “goofy country boy” could run a bead a hell of a lot better than I could on a piece of metal when welding. That goofy country boy could figure out millimeters and make them match on the welding projects he did. He could build anything. That goofy country boy could start out with a pile of metal and have a horse trailer at the end of three weeks, which is more than I could do.

He could also shoot a gun a hell of a lot better than I could.

In the back of his mind, John knew what he wanted to do the whole time. He wanted to drink beer and play football. Later on, he loved working on his ranch and always loved his kids.

Finally, in regard to the great wrestlers who came out of West Texas State, I want to clear up a long-standing rumor. Dick Murdoch never went to West Texas State a day in his life.

He always played in the “Exes” (alumni) game, though. It was amazing! He just proclaimed himself an alumnus, and no one ever checked him on it! To make things even better, he was the defensive coordinator every year.

In the end I guess I just wasn’t made for a classroom. One time I was late for an education class, and when I got there, they were taking a test. I looked over and didn’t know what it was, so I just decided to copy the whole damn test off the girl sitting next to me. It was all multiple choice, and I didn’t even bother reading the questions.

Come to find out, it was a personality test and for the next year the school officials thought I had female tendencies!

I left West Texas State lacking only four hours to get my degree. And today I still lack four hours.

I might have stayed, but I’d had a taste of the wrestling business from working in my father’s territory for a few months, and in 1966 I had a chance to go wrestle for Eddie Graham in Florida. So I just said, “The hell with it,” quit school and never looked back.

Sometimes I wish I’d stayed in school or spent more time studying things that I was interested in, but I didn’t. And hell, Florida was a chance to be in the business I loved and still earn $25 to $30 a night! That was pretty big money to me back then.

In 1965, as soon as football season ended in my senior year, I started wrestling in small towns on the Amarillo circuit. Growing up there was never any question that I wanted to follow in my dad’s footsteps.

I had a couple of matches, one with Jack Cain, my uncle who had been the substitute football player for Boys’ Ranch. These were supposed to be warmup matches, to help get me used to things, but these were little towns, and wrestling in front of 150 people didn’t really get me used to the Amarillo audience.

My dad wanted me to use the spinning toehold as my finish hold, just as he had done. I don’t know if Dory Senior invented that hold, but he certainly was the one who popularized it. The only other person I knew who used it as a finishing hold around the same time was a wrestler in Oklahoma named Wayne Martin.

The decision for my brother and me to use the hold was an easy one—it was over, and we weren’t!

For something or someone to be “over,” the people had to believe in it, or believe in that individual. Here’s an example of how over a hold could get.

In the 1960s, not long after I started wrestling, we had a guy come in from Kansas City. He wrestled as the Viking, and used “The Hook” as his big finishing move. Now, The Hook was nothing but an imaginary nervehold, but his opponents sold it like it was torture!

Well, the Viking was driving home one night, but pulled over after he saw a guy fighting with a cop on the side of the road. It looked like a traffic stop gone bad, and this guy was pounding the hell out of the police officer. The Viking got out to help before the officer got hurt. He ran up and started to pull the guy off, but the guy turned around and recognized him and gave up, right there on the spot!

He was screaming, “Oh, God, no! Please Viking, don’t put The Hook on

me!

It’s amazing to me how people never get a hold over anymore. All you have to do is put a hold on, week after week, and if the guys scream, holler and give up, before you know it, people recognize it as the culmination of the match.

Baron Von Raschke used to get his clawhold over with the people in a spot where he didn’t even put it on his opponent. He used to do a spot where he’d lunge with the claw, but his opponent would move, and Von Rashcke would have to pry his clawhold off of the turnbuckle! That was one of my favorite holds in the business. His clawhold grip was so strong that he couldn’t make his own fingers let go of the turnbuckle!

And the people believed in that! They believed he was truly unable to release the turnbuckle. What was it he had, that he could get away with doing something so absurd?

In Japan they got the Japanese armbar over so well that the people screamed when someone did it. Well, the armbar’s a whole lot harder to get onto a wrestler to cause real pain than what the Japanese viewers think from watching those matches.

My first match in Amarillo was against Sputnik Monroe. Sputnik was a great heel, but he didn’t feel like giving too much to a kid having his first match. He led the match, and every time I started to look strong, he would say, “OK kid, that’s good. Now let’s get back down on the mat, and I’ll get this hold back on you.

Also, I was gassed, just exhausted, early in the match from nerves. In fact, my nose started bleeding.

I was doing everything he said, and he was guzzling me until my dad ran down to ringside.

My father yelled, “Goddamn you, you dumb son of a bitch, you’re letting him eat your ass up! Get up off of your goddamned ass and do something, or I’ll beat your ass!”

When I heard that, I jumped up, hit some moves quickly and pinned Sputnik, but Dad had some more choice words for me when I got back to the locker room.

Sputnik was a great heel, but perhaps the top heel in Texas (and almost anywhere else he wrestled) for much of the 1950s and 1960s was Duke Keomuka. The irony was that Duke was a hell of a nice guy when he wasn’t incurring the wrath of wrestling fans everywhere. I would run into him again in Florida.

I had a few matches under my belt when I had some talks with Bud Grant about playing pro ball in Winnipeg. They offered a contract paying $12,000 a year. I also went to work for Verne Gagne in the AWA up there.

I got on AWA television and, in my first match there, had Dennis Stamp as a partner against Larry Hennig and Harley Race. Well, they knew my father and liked us. We went out there, and those guys made me look like a million dollars, and I didn’t know jack shit about the business. If anybody could wrestle a broomstick, they could, because they did it with me.

Then Verne sent me to Denver to wrestle Butch Levy. Butch was an old fart, tougher than nails. I thought I was going to do all this shit I did with Hennig and Race. They told me I was going 12 minutes, but that night I found out that 12 minutes with Butch Levy was like 12 days! I came out of that ring thinking, “Goddamn, there’s something wrong with me. I ain’t as hot as I thought I was.”

I got so depressed about the match that I went right up to the hotel and went to bed after having a couple of beers with another wrestler, Silento Rodriguez.

When I left Amarillo my father told me, “Now Terry, I don’t want you going and getting goofy-ass drunk up there. I want you to mind your Ps and Qs. You’re working for Verne, and I want you to act like a businessman.”

Well, this was the night he decided to check up on me, and he called my room. Unfortunately, Silento and I got our rooms mixed up I ended up sleeping in his room, and he ended up sleeping in my room.

Even more unfortunately, Silento Rodriguez couldn’t talk. He was deaf. He could feel the phone vibrate, though. He reached for the phone and finally got it.

And he said, “Heh-ho! HEH-HO!”

My father said, “Terry!”

“RUH MUH BUH BUH!”

“Terry!”

Silento hung up, and my old man was hot at me. The next time he saw me, the first thing he said was, “Goddammit! I told you not to get drunk! You act like a nut, and then you hang up on me?”

I explained it, and he finally believed it wasn’t me who hung up on him.

The football deal didn’t work out, though, and I soon came back home.

It was a while before I understood what I needed to do to draw fans to the arenas. Dick Murdoch and I wrestled in a main event in Abilene when he was a rookie and my career was still very young. I’m sorry to say we did not continue the Funk-Murdoch tradition of sellouts our fathers had started.

We drew about 450 people and were going all out, to a one-hour, time-limit draw. We thought that would really bring the house up next time, because we had people standing the whole time we were out there.

Next time in Abilene, we drew the same 450. The reason was, we lacked maturity. We knew what to do, yet we looked like a couple of kids out there, instead of two seasoned pros. I still had a lot to learn.

In 1966, I left Amarillo for a place where I would do a lot of learning— Florida.

Sputnik was in Florida when I wrestled there in the second year of my career. Not long after I arrived, Florida promoter Eddie Gtaham was having some problems with a Puerto Rican wrestler named Don Serrano, because Eddie was running shows in Puerto Rico at the time, and Serrano was starting to run opposition there.

Eddie told us, “Sputnik, I want you to beat the shit out of him, and Terry, you just stay in the corner.” “OK, Mr. Graham.”

Serrano was still working for Eddie at the time, because Eddie’s was the only TV wrestling running in Puerto Rico then, and he didn’t think Eddie knew about his plans to open up his own full-time office.

But Eddie did know, and since Serrano had given notice, his last chance to get him was in a tag match. The match was Serrano and me against Sputnik and Rocket Monroe. The idea was that if he got his ass beat on TV and looked bad, he wouldn’t do any business down there, because people would see him as being unable to compete with top stars and be a champion.

“There’s just one thing, Boss,” Sputnik said. “I can’t just go in there and do that to a guy without telling him it’s a shoot beforehand.”

“Well,” Eddie said, “I don’t give a damn how you do it. Just make sure you do it.”

“OK, boss, I’m going to tell him first.”

“OK, Sputnik, you just make sure you kick the shit out of him.”

We had the match, and at one point, Sputnik had Serrano down on the mat. Sputnik got up, yelled, “IT’S A SHOOT!” and kicked him right in the head.

Sputnik stepped back to make sure Serrano wasn’t going to get back up, and when he didn’t, Sputnik guzzled his ass, but good!

Sputnik was a big white guy with a bleached streak in his hair and a tattoo of a cherry just above one of his nipples. Below the cherry were the words, “Here’s mine. Where’s yours?”

Sputnik always liked running with black people. A few years after my first Florida trip, Sputnik came back to work for us. One night, we were in Amarillo, and he wanted to go to a “black bar.” He ended up getting so drunk that he told us he was going to sleep in the car.

We came out a little later, and there was no Sputnik. We figured he got a ride home, and so we took off.

What we didn’t realize was that he had gotten mixed up and climbed into the wrong car to fall asleep. A black woman got into her car to get home, and she was driving down the road when he sat up.

She looked in the mirror, saw Sputnik sitting there and ran her car right off the road. The cops arrested Sputnik, so we had to go get him out of jail.

I also worked several matches with Ron Garvin, an excellent wrestler who was just starting out, and with Bill Dromo. Dromo was probably the most temperamental guy I ever met, but what a worker! Luckily he took a liking to me, and we had some unbelievable matches.

One thing I’ll never forget during this time was a match in Lakeland, : iorida. It was Bronco Kelly versus Bob Nandor. Those two had, quite possibly, the worst match I’ve ever seen. It was one of the first matches where I ever saw all the boys come out of the dressing room to watch.

That was the only thing that was going to get the boys out to watch. You real-had to have a true stinkeroo going to get the boys out of the dressing room.

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Eddie Graham had been a partner of Art Nielson under the name “Rip Rogers.” That was what he was doing when Art and he came through Amarillo in the late 1950s.

He ended up buying into Florida the same way my father had in Amarillo, and he took the same approach that my father took in Amarillo in how he promoted and how he became a part of his community. I think he saw something that was successful for my father.

My father’s mentor, Cal Farley, once told him, “Dory, to do great things in here, you have to do good stuff for the people who live here, and if you do, they can’t knock you or hurt you.”

My father lived by that rule. He did a lot of great things for people for no money. When he was out at the Boys’ Ranch for years making $110 a month for running the thing, he loved what he was doing, but people also appreciated what he was doing. The community really accepted him for that. It was like arms were opened to him at every corner, businesswise and otherwise.