Straight from the Hart (25 page)

Dynamite snarled that, just like Bret back in the early ’80s, my dad had given
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him and Davey Boy complete autonomy over their finishes and they didn’t have to take “fookin orders,” as he put it, from me.

After all the bullshit I’d already encountered that year — with the dinosaur debacle, Keith’s abortive stint as the booker and trying to put the pieces back in place — I was pissed off with this latest aggravation. I informed my dad, who was trying to make out as if we could all work together, that I was through.

I submitted my resignation on the spot. My dad’s response was to appoint Dynamite the booker — which, as things would turn out, was like appointing the Taliban to handle peacekeeping detail in the Middle East.

As good a worker as Dynamite was — in my mind, one of the top five ever

— he may have been equally bad as a booker.

Being a booker, at first glance, doesn’t seem all that hard. Initially, it seems like it would be kind of a hoot to be telling guys who’s winning and losing and concocting finishes, off-the-wall scenarios and all of that.

For the shallow types, I guess, having people kiss their asses and blow smoke up their sphincters is also kind of appealing. I’d also venture to say that damn near any idiot can draw a house or two, the first few weeks that they have the book, if only by conjuring up some type of gimmick scenario — like a cage match, ladder match, lumberjack match or something out of the ordinary. It’s a totally different thing though to sustain things for weeks or months at a stretch, without losing your momentum.

After drawing not bad for the first few weeks, things began to quickly unravel with Dynamite and his trusty sidekick Einstein (Davey Boy) calling the shots. One of the most common blunders neophyte bookers are guilty of is immediately resorting to gimmick matches — cage matches, scaffold matches, chain matches and whatnot. That was my brother Bret’s weakness when he was a rookie booker a decade earlier and the same was the case for the Bulldogs.

Seeing as there was no method to the madness, or discernible reason for having most of the gimmick matches, the novelty quickly wore off and before long our gates hit the skids.

The Bulldog’s next brainwave was to have my dad import, at considerable expense, all their washed-up old cronies from the WWF, like the Moondogs, Magnificent Muraco and a bunch of other ass-kissing associates, such as the
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Power Twins and Sandy Beach, whom they’d befriended while in the WWF.

When those moves didn’t pan out, they began importing — also at considerable expense — midgets, girl wrestlers, wrestling bears and other so-called special attractions, none of whom drew a dime.

Beyond their shortcomings as bookers, Dynamite and Einstein continued right where they had left off in the WWF, perpetrating practical, or should I say impractical, jokes: defecating in wrestler’s bags, padlocking suitcases to the pipes, cutting the crotch out of wrestlers’ pants and — their stock in trade specialty — Metamucil Slurpees and that type of highbrow frivolity.

One of their crowning achievements, as far as ribs go, came in Kelowna, British Columbia, when they roofied this rookie from Florida named Tom Nash and after he staggered back to his hotel room and passed out, Einstein snuck in and set fire to his bed while he was sleeping in it. Fortunately, the smoke detector in Nash’s room went off, otherwise Nash probably would have died of smoke inhalation.

After a few months, the Bulldogs had more than worn out their welcome and, perhaps sensing it was imminent, saved themselves the embarrassment of getting fired by informing my dad that they’d accepted an offer to do a tour of Japan in April. They also related that, upon their return, they were planning on going to Florida to wrestle. The news was greeted with a sigh of relief by my mom and dad, not to mention most of the wrestlers. With those two out of the picture, my dad once again turned to . . . drum roll, please . . . you guessed it, none other than yours truly to pick up the loose ends again. It was kind of like wrestling’s version of Billy Martin and George Steinbrenner in the 1980s —

hire me, fire me, hire me, fire me. . . .

When my dad approached me this time around, I was probably more dubious about accepting than I’d ever been — with good reason. As usual, the prevailing pretext was that if I didn’t take the job, he’d probably just shut the territory down, which none of us wanted to see. So, once again, like some misbegotten masochist, I took the reins.

When I’d briefly taken the book, after Keith’s stint, the crowds had been bored to tears and needed to be kick-started, but after the British Bulldogs’

relentless stretch of gimmicks, hotshotting and overkill, it was about trying to
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get back to the middle of the road — I’m not really sure which was harder to follow.

In taking stock, about the only heel the Bulldogs hadn’t destroyed was this big, black guy named “Lethal” Larry Cameron — mostly because they were half racist and didn’t want anything to do with him, but also because they knew he was too impressive to just be jobbed. As such, they just left him in the undercard in essentially meaningless singles or tags.

Because of all the bullshit the past year or so, I hadn’t really worked the territory for most of 1989, which was almost a blessing in disguise. It almost made me a new face. On my first night back, I launched an angle with Lethal Larry and we got a surprisingly good pop and tried to build things from there.

Aside from that, we still had a few other good faces on our roster — most notably Benoit and my brother Owen, both of whom had been spinning their wheels under the Bulldogs’ ass backward booking. All things considered, given all the turmoil the territory had endured the past year or so, I was pleased that things were at least headed in the right direction.

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At the end of May 1989, after a not so triumphant tour of Japan, Dynamite and Davey Boy returned. To everyone’s chagrin, they informed my dad that since their sojourn to Florida had been canceled, they’d like to resume working for Stampede Wrestling. No one was that keen on having either one of them back, but since they were family, we were kind of stuck with them.

This time around though, at least my dad didn’t mince any words as to who was giving the orders and both of them seemed okay with that — at least at the outset. In retrospect, I think they were relieved, as handling the book had become more of a chore for them than anything else and I don’t think either of them wanted to admit they were in way over their heads as bookers.

When the Dawgs came back, I was kind of unsure as to how we could get any mileage out of them. They’d already chewed up and spit out most of our heels and there didn’t appear to be anyone left for them to work with. In considering our options, I got to thinking that back in the early ’80s, they’d drawn us a lot of money, with Dynamite working as a heel and Davey as a face. I, therefore, proposed to my dad that we could perhaps shoot some kind of angle calling for Dynamite to double-cross Davey and, from there, have him work heel — have them reprise their hot feud from the early ’80s.

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Somewhat to my surprise, they both seemed to like the idea, so we set things up for Dynamite to perpetrate the big swerve on Einstein.

Other than maybe the Road Warriors, there probably hadn’t been a more iconic tag team in the business in the ’80s than the Bulldogs and their breakup elicited a huge buzz, not only within the territory, but all over the business.

The Dawg vs. Dawg feud became a hot ticket in Stampede Wrestling, drawing huge gates all over the territory. Suddenly things appeared to be in good shape again — the best, in fact, since our breakout summer of 1987.

Even though they were drawing good crowds, I discerned that Dynamite and Davey Boy kind of resented the fact that I was getting credit for the turnaround.

Near the end of June, my dad sent us on this extended safari to the Northwest Territories, which is Canada’s answer to Alaska. I think the trip was close to 2,500 miles round trip and unlike the superstars in the WWF, we didn’t get to fly, but instead had to drive, which proved to be quite the ordeal.

According to our itinerary, we were supposed to leave after our Saturday night shot in Edmonton, then head about 500 miles due north to a place called High Level, which is near the Alberta/Northwest Territories border, for our first show of the tour on Monday. We then were supposed to set off right after that and make the 800 miles or so run to Yellowknife, where we would wrestle on Tuesday night. From there, we had a shot in Hay River on Wednesday, which was about five or six miles south of Yellowknife. We would then have Thursday off, in order to make the 1,100 mile return to Calgary in time for our Friday show.

We had a good house in Edmonton on the Saturday and everyone appeared to be in pretty good spirits as we set out on the road. I took the first shift behind the wheel and just after we got on the road, my old buddy Dynamite gave me a beer. Since I was driving, I refrained from drinking it. I didn’t want to appear to be disdainful and accepted his seemingly magnanimous gesture and took the beer and put it in the cupholder, figuring I might have it after I turned the wheel over to someone else.

I later on gave the beer to this Japanese rookie named Sumu Hara, who was riding shotgun and didn’t give it any further thought until we stopped to get
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coffee and gas at this truck stop in Fox Creek. Hara was so fucked up that he couldn’t even crawl out of the van. I immediately deduced that the beer Dynamite had given me had been spiked and that if I’d drunk it, while driving, we all could have been killed. I snatched both Dynamite and Davey — both of whom were half plastered and drugged out by this time and both not very convincingly denied that they’d drugged the beer. No one believed them.

About an hour or so later, we blew the engine in the babyface vehicle and had to abandon it on the side of the road. Fortunately, the heel van was behind us. We then all had to pile in it, about eighteen of us crammed in like sardines.

Finally on Sunday afternoon we dragged our weary asses into High Level.

Mercifully, we had a day to rest up before our first show. We drew a good house and then embarked for beautiful Yellowknife.

Since there were no Hertz or Avis rental outlets or anything of that sort up there, the van was still uncomfortably crowded, but we were able to ease the situation a bit by putting a few of the boys in the ring truck. A few others rode with our road agent, Bob Johnson, who had gone up earlier in the week in his Ford.

The haul to Yellowknife was close to 700 miles of mostly gravel and dirt roads.

You had to navigate a slalom course, dodging humongous buffalo and moose that I swear must have been on steroids. It was like one of those automobile rallies from Khartoum to Dakar.

Still, Yellowknife drew a huge gate and the show went great. I endeavored to show my appreciation afterward by picking up the tab for the boys at Yellowknife’s poshest restaurant and when I left them that night, most of them appeared to have been grateful and in pretty good spirits.

The last show of the tour was Hay River and seeing as I had to do a radio interview the next morning, I left that night with Bob Johnson. I left instructions for the boys to be on the road by noon. Most of them had done hundreds of road trips, so there was no need to take them by the hand or chaperone them, or so I thought. The next night we had our best gate yet — another standing room only crowd in Hay River, which was a relief, as poor old Bob Johnson had incurred a lot of heat for having arranged the trip in the first place. Since we’d drawn good gates, he was kind of vindicated.