Straight from the Hart (31 page)

The next night, we were at the “Fabulous” Forum in Los Angeles. Being a big Lakers fan, for years I’d heard of the Forum — Kareem, Magic and “Showtime” and all of that — but when I was sitting in the dressing room, I saw a big rat crawl out, almost nonchalantly, from under one of the benches and meander to the other side of the room. After that, I saw these humongous cockroaches conducting 100-centimeter dashes on the wall, and I came away with a decidedly different perspective on the Not-So-Fabulous Forum.

That night, the matches in Los Angeles were — move for move — pretty much the same as what I’d seen the night before in San Diego. Since San Diego is less than an hour from Los Angeles, there were probably more than a few fans going to both shows and I mentioned to Bret that doing the same things again might be an exposé. He and several other of the WWF wrestlers looked at me as
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if I was crazy or, perhaps, a mark and one of them said, “They already know it’s a work, so who cares?” I was taken aback at the cavalier attitude and told Bret that in Stampede there may have been some prevailing skepticism about the business being a work, but that through hard work and well-conceived schematics we’d made believers out of the cynics and we should be endeavoring to do the same down here. Bret shrugged indifferently and said he wasn’t planning on doing things much different than he had the night before.

The crowd was pretty listless most of the night, so I decided to take things into my own hands a bit with Owen and Jim. We did a bit of brawling on the floor and standard Stampede Wrestling style ass-kicking and wound up getting a pretty decent response. The next few nights, Owen, Jim and I continued doing more improvisational spots in the ring or out on the floor and each time, the fans really got into it.

In Denver, at the McNichols Sports Arena, we had our best crowd so far on the tour — around 10,000 people. The crowd seemed pretty lively from the get-go, so Owen, Jim and I decided to do some of our balls to the wall routines from Stampede Wrestling and the crowd ate it up. We ended up having our hottest match to date. After the match, when I arrived back in the babyfaces’ dressing room, I was amazed at how many wrestlers were coming over and giving me high fives, which, I thought, was pretty cool.

I noticed that Bret wasn’t in the dressing room, which was kind of odd, because most times, he’d come back with me, since we were a team. I thought that maybe he was talking to some marks or whatever and didn’t give it much thought.

After I showered and had changed, Bret finally returned and just after he came in, the WWF agent Jack Lanza came into the dressing room as well. Thus far on the trip, Lanza had been pretty nice, but this time around, he came over and began berating me, saying that since I was a “fucking schoolteacher” and not a wrestler, that I should be strictly following the script and not pretending that I was a fucking worker. I’d been ribbed in the past by guys like Terry Funk and initially figured Lanza — who was a seasoned old pro himself — was maybe pulling some kind of rib on the new kid, so I let him run his mouth off, without saying anything back. Like the Energizer bunny, he kept going and going . . .

and going. He was also kicking garbage cans and slamming doors and whatnot.

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He then launched into this diatribe about the WWF being a family show and that the type of bullshit we’d done back in Calgary didn’t cut it down here and all of that.

I continued trying to be diplomatic, but he continued his rant and began getting personal, making out as if I had no business even being in the ring.

When I realized he wasn’t ribbing, I finally began to defend myself and angrily fired back at him, kind of like Steve Martin in
Trains, Planes and Automobiles
unloading on the rental car women. I said, “Hey Jack, if I’m just a fucking schoolteacher and not a fucking wrestler, as you keep insisting, why the fuck did you bring me down here in the first place? And why the fuck do you have me working in the fucking main events on the whole fucking tour and why the fuck did you fly me down to fucking Detroit for SummerSlam and fucking Boston for fucking Survivor Series, if I’m not a fucking wrestler?” I was eagerly awaiting Jack’s reply, as were most of the boys in the dressing room, but he was suddenly at a loss for words and muttered that he didn’t have to take shit from a fucking schoolteacher — as if that was akin to being a criminal — and stormed out of the dressing room.

Afterward, Bret shook his head mournfully and laid this sanctimonious lecture on me that you
never
talk back to the office and told me that, once again, I’d blown it. Funny enough, a few years later, when Bret punched out Vinnie Mac in the dressing room after the Montreal screw job, I was half tempted to lay the same lecture on him.

In any case, after Lanza’s big tirade, I was treated like some kind of mark for the rest of the tour and wasn’t allowed to do much but stand in the corner and act like a half assed cheerleader. Typically, Lanza would now come in and blow smoke up my ass, telling me how much better the matches were going and making out as if he was happy with the performance. I felt like telling him not to lay the bullshit on too thick but most of the time just went along with it, because that’s the way it goes in the WWF — the Wonderful World of Fantasy, as my old friend Barry Orton used to call it. Overall, the Hart Attack Tour reminded me of that cynical Dire Straits riff — “Money for Nothing.”
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While I can’t say I learned a whole hell of a lot about wrestling on that tour that I didn’t already know, it was quite a learning experience in other ways —

especially about the proliferation of drugs and steroids. In light of the many drug and steroid related tragedies that have beset the WWE in recent years, I’ve been asked many times, why drugs and steroids have become so pervasive down there.

I’ve heard over and over that the “brutal” schedule in the WWF is one of the prevailing reasons for the rash of drug abuse, overdoses and whatnot. That might sound like a good excuse, but as far as I’m concerned, that’s essentially a horseshit copout.

From what I saw, their schedule is nowhere near as grueling as the schedule we used to have in Stampede Wrestling — where we were on the road for six, sometimes seven, days a week, averaging nearly 2,000 miles a week. We were driving, not flying, everywhere — often through brutal winter weather

— and staying in dumps, not five-star hotels. Usually we wound up eating at greasy spoons and fast food joints, not five-star restaurants, like the boys in the WWF.

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In its own way, our schedule in Stampede Wrestling actually served as a deterrent to taking drugs, because, since we were driving everywhere, everyone had to take their turn at the wheel, so there was no way you could be stoned or wasted.

Beyond that, in Stampede, even if you were inclined to do drugs, none of us were making enough money to indulge in coke, heroin, crystal meth or any of the so-called good shit that they seem to be using these days. As well, if you were stoned or had a drug problem, because you were among the boys all the time, it was pretty hard to do it for any length of time without everybody noticing it.

From what I could see, the two main reasons for the ongoing drug problems in the WWE are time and money. In the WWE, the wrestlers seem to have way too much time on their hands — on any given day, they have five or six hours before the matches and probably near that after the matches, which is a lot of time to kill. As well, since they’re making way more money than we used to make back in Stampede Wrestling, they seem to be able to afford all the expensive drugs. I need not point out that most of those drugs are highly addictive and have all kinds of dangerous side effects. Before long, they take over, and the results, all too often, are extremely tragic.

Another contributing factor is that a lot of wrestlers have come to equate being a worker with doing high-risk stunts — the Jeff Hardy, Sabu syndrome.

Because they’re all doing these dangerous moves on such a regular basis, they’re getting hurt a lot more and often have to wrestle injured rather than allow their injuries to heal. As a consequence, they’ve been resorting to heavy-duty painkillers — OxyContin, Halcions, Demerol, Placidyls and even morphine and heroin — all of which are highly addictive and have proven to be lethal.

One of the other things I noticed down in the WWF that’s a major factor in the ongoing drug problem is that the wrestlers really need to be “on” or normal for maybe fifteen minutes per day. By that I mean the only time they really need to be somewhat clear minded or coherent is when they’re in the ring.

Since most matches in the WWF rarely go past fifteen minutes, that’s the only time they really need to have their shit together, and since most of their matches are scripted as well, even if they’re half out of it, most times they
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can stumble their way through or have the other guy carry them and still get away with it. In any other normal line of work, except maybe for being a rock musician, you couldn’t get away with that. Because the body soon develops a tolerance for drugs, users invariably have to increase the dosage to achieve the desired effect and so on and so forth — to the point where things invariably seem to just spin out of control. This is pretty much what happened, I’d venture to say, with Pillman, Guerrero and so many of the other poor bastards you keep reading about in the obits.

What’s really twisted is that when one of the wrestlers overdoses, even though damn near everyone around them was well aware that they were on drugs, everyone — probably because they’re either covering their own asses or are in some fucked up state of denial — makes out to be stunned and claims that they never saw it coming. It is a classic case of a head in the sand attitude.

While I’m on the subject of drugs and whatnot, the other major one that continues to be a problem in the WWF is anabolic steroids, which, in many cases are intertwined with the other forms of drug abuse we’ve already been discussing. In recent years, there have been an alarming number of wrestlers who have died prematurely and damn near everybody in the business knows that it was due to steroid abuse, but more often than not, the cause of death is reported as a heart attack or natural causes — which is bullshit.

Even though the WWE supposedly now has regular, state of the art steroid and drug testing, there seem to be more anabolically enhanced guys on their roster than ever and the list of former WWE stars who keep dropping dead way before their time continues to grow.

I’m sure that the powers that be will tell me that I’m way off base, but I have no doubt whatsoever that if the WWE truly wanted to get rid of steroid abuse, it could do so in short order — simply by not pushing guys because of their look and by putting in place some legitimate educational programs about steroids and the damage they cause. As the old cliché goes: an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure. If they practiced what they so sanctimoniously preach, the steroid problem would have been eliminated a long time ago.

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In any case, I apologize for my somewhat lengthy dissertation on drug and steroid abuse in wrestling. It’s something I felt I had to address, somewhere and somehow in this book.

After the conclusion of my own version of
Dancing with the Stars
on the Hart Attack Tour, I once again figured that was the end of the line. As Ol’ Blue Eyes, Frank Sinatra, once so poignantly rhapsodized, “Regrets, I’ve had a few, but then again, too few to mention.” That’s about how I felt at that stage; even though I unfortunately hadn’t scaled the heady heights that Bret and others in the family had, I’d still been lucky enough to bask, if only briefly, in the spotlight, which was a lot more than I can say for many of my poor, hapless colleagues.