The Hardcore Diaries (33 page)

The move raises the ire of Dreamer, who temporarily breaks free of Edge—long enough to windmill me a couple of times with ineffective blows before being cut off once again by Edge.

Now it’s Socko time for Tommy, and “the innovator of silence” tastes the sock, and then feels the wrath of Edge’s Spear. It is the same lethal combination that dropped Dreamer in Anaheim, and the match is all but over. Except, Edge doesn’t want it to be over. Not yet. Not until he’s had his way with Beulah.

The “Rated R Superstar” picks up the fallen Beulah and toys with her, taunting her, placing her in position for the sexually suggestive pumphandle slam. Jeez, where the hell is Terry? We’re kind of expecting him, but so far he’s a no-show, prompting Edge and me to kill some time with yet another white-guy high five. Where is he? Where the hell is he?

Finally, we hear a rumbling, and turn to see Terry making his way through the crowd, a barbed-wire-wrapped two-by-four held aloft. His eye wound is wrapped in dramatic “Spirit of ’76” fashion. Please don’t tell me you’ve never heard of a “Spirit of ’76” comeback. Remember the fife and drum? Oh, come on.

This is going to hurt.

We all know it would seem completely ridiculous not to acknowledge the slothlike speed of the Funker’s return, so Edge, Lita, and I turn to face it, fully intent on beating it back, with the help of our superior numbers and trusty barbed-wire bat. But Dreamer will have none of it, and, in a moment that will go down in the Party Poopers Hall of Fame, administers a double low blow to the hardcore title coholders. This leaves Tommy face-to-face with Lita, who promptly bails, leaving Edge and me to face a barbed-wire bombardment.

I am the first recipient. Wham! A shot to the stomach. Wham! A second to the back. Edge is next up, and he takes a similar two-shot to the stomach and back. But Funk isn’t through. Though it seems to take forever, Terry is able to light the board on fire, and in an instant it is a mighty blaze, eliciting a roar of approval from the crowd.

The first blow is to my gut. The fire is hotter than I had imagined, and the flame seems to linger a moment near my midsection before swirling into hardcore heaven.

I’m not so fortunate with the second blow. It’s to the back, and it’s a good one; sending me down to my knees, where I come to the vague realization that my back is on fire. I should have stopped, dropped, and rolled, like all schoolkids are taught. Had I done so, the red and black flannel would have probably been extinguished. Instead, I crawl outside the ropes, waiting for blow number three, which will spell an end to my evening.

Here it comes. Wham, to the chest, and I’m propelled backward, off the apron, into the waiting barbs of the board below, which has been propped up against the guardrail only moments earlier by Tommy Dreamer. “Oh, my God,” screams ECW announcer Joey Styles, adding drama to the moment with his classic phrase. The impact puts out the fire, but I am soaked down with a chemical fire extinguisher anyway, as in the case of fire—which should never be used in any type of wrestling match—it’s always better to be safe than sorry. This may seem hypocritical, but it’s true. I’ve used fire two times during the course of my eleven-year association with WWE, and on both occasions, the stunt was approved by the fire marshal, who made sure every precaution was taken to ensure an exciting but safe maneuver.

The fire extinguisher makes breathing difficult, and the landing hurt like hell, creating the clawlike gouges on my back, but despite my predicament, I am gratified by the rabid “ECW” chants that permeate the building. My night is over. I am now free to lie back and enjoy the rest of the match, from the relative comfort of my barbed-wire bed.

Oooh, damn! I guess I was wrong! Funk just landed on me. He was knocked off the apron by Edge and landed right on me. What the hell? It seems as logical a way as any to see the ending; stuck in a bale of barbed wire with my friend and mentor, Terry Funk.

Dreamer stops Edge with a DDT and proceeds to apply a submission hold with the creative use of barbed wire thrown in for good measure. Edge later admitted that he was being choked out for real, and found Lita’s breakup of the move to be a genuine relief.

Lita turned to Beulah, and the catfight was on. Beulah on top, Lita on top, Beulah on top, Lita on top—until Dreamer grabs hold of Lita’s long mane of red hair and plants her on the canvas with a Death Valley driver. It is a stunning lack of chivalry, but one that the ECW faithful is in full support of. I guess one must actually have a girlfriend to hold a door open for her.

Tommy and Beulah strike a pose of unity, enabling Edge to sneak up from behind with an Edgeomatic, yet another example of the creative use of barbed wire in this very creative bloodbath. Beulah goes toward her man, checking up on him—an act of love that proves to be a very costly mistake, and the cause of the end of the match. For when she turns to Tommy, Edge readies himself for the Spear. Beulah recognizes her error, but not in time, for Edge is upon her, sailing through the air, crashing into her midsection with a Spear for the ages.

“Oh, my God,” Styles yells. “Edge damn near broke Beulah in half.” Which really doesn’t seem like much of an exaggeration, given the tremendous impact of the move. I give Beulah all the credit in the world for this. She’s not a wrestler. Her instinct must have surely been to turn from the impact. But she hung in there and took the blow, and allowed a tremendous exclamation point to be added to the very odd, but very effective story of suffering we’d just written in the Hammerstein Ballroom.

But wait, the story wasn’t quite over yet. Edge was about to add an exclamation point of his own, with the seediest, most provocative pinfall cover in sports entertainment history. Okay, maybe Verne Gagne and the Crusher had done something like…Never mind. It was the type of cover that even Jake Gyllenhaal and Heath Ledger might object to, saying, “Hey man, isn’t that just a little bit too much?”

Now it’s time to relax, once I get the hell out of the wire, which I finally do with Edge’s help. I know this type of match isn’t for everyone, but I also know it’s among the best of its kind that I’ve been in—and I’ve been in a lot of them. Time seemed to fly by—the match went almost twenty minutes—

and my conditioning was never a factor. I may not be so lucky in the Flair match, but on this one night, I feel lucky indeed. Lucky to have had a match that lived up to its billing. Lucky that I wasn’t more seriously hurt, given the risks that were taken. Lucky to have been in a match of such magnitude with the true hardcore legend, Terry Funk. And most of all, lucky that I’d have a chance to see Vince McMahon the next day, where I would demand an admission of misjudgment on his part. He had been wrong.

Afterword

October 1, 2006
Arlington, VA

Dear Hardcore Diary,

“Yes, Mick, you had a very good match,” Vince said.

“So, you’re admitting you’re wrong?” I asked.

“Yes, Mick, I was wrong.”

Just like that it was over—the shortest, most direct admission of error in the history of sports entertainment. One night earlier, I’d drifted off to sleep, comforted by the anticipated images of a vanquished Vince McMahon, his mouth filled with figurative poop, choking out an agonizing confession of major mat misjudgment and fundamental wrestling wrongdoing.

What a letdown! So brief. So direct. No hemming and hawing. No anguish. No shit in the mouth. Just a simple, “Yes, Mick, I was wrong.” What a small price to pay for all the frustration his error in judgment had caused me.

Speaking of errors in judgment, I guess I’ve got a confession to make as well. Remember my prediction that
One Night Stand
was going to be a financial disaster? Remember how I predicted that it might end up as the least watched Pay-Per-View in WWE history? Well, it turns out that I was, uh, wrong. Oddly enough,
One Night Stand
turned out to be a surprising financial success, far exceeding WWE’s initial projections, and decimating my forecast of impending doom. At this point, it looks to have a chance of eclipsing last year’s total of 335,000 buys, which in and of itself was considered a major success.

So, how to explain this success? Well, some of it stems from an increase in international purchases, which in general have been a major boon to WWE Pay-Per-View profits.

WWE has done an amazing job of opening and exploiting new revenue streams, utilizing international marketing and promotion, as well as remaining on the cutting edge of new technology to maintain its status as a very successful entity.

But international buys were not the sole source behind the success. I’m actually at a loss to explain it, with any degree of certainty. It probably goes back to the Dayton show, the late buzz, the Cena interview, the hardway promo. Maybe it was just enough to encourage an awful lot of people on the fence to take a chance. Or maybe, just maybe, the whole Foley/Edge/Funk/ Paul E./Dreamer story was more effective than I thought. Though I doubt that possibility will ever enter Vince’s mind. By my own estimate, Vince McMahon has given me credit for the success of exactly
one
Pay-Per-View—the February 2000 Hell in a Cell with Triple H. And when it comes to dishing out the credit for the success of
One Night Stand,
I believe Vince is going to “stay the course” with that anti-Foley philosophy.

Perhaps
One Night Stand
’s greatest, if least obvious, legacy is that it helped maintain Edge’s status as a certifiable main event performer. Much as I had hoped, Edge’s affiliation with me, from our
’Mania
buildup through the ECW show, was accepted by fans as a lateral move, not a step backward, and he emerged professionally (if not physically) unscathed from the June 11 carnage, ready to rejoin the WWE Championship picture.

So, by the time Vince called me into his office at the June 12
Raw
at Penn State University, I had already accepted the possibility that Edge, not me, might be wrestling John Cena at
SummerSlam.

So I wasn’t surprised, or even upset, when Vince said, “Mick, we think you and Ric have too much potential to just blow off your program at
Vengeance
.”

I saw where he was going, and decided to fill in the blanks, saying, “So you’d like me to work with Ric at
SummerSlam
?”

“Do you have a problem with that?”

“No,” I said. “As long as you and I can still do our angle after
SummerSlam
.”

“Which one was that?” he asked.

“The one with Melina. The ‘Kiss My Ass Club’ one.”

“Oh, yes,” Vince said, “we’ll still do that.”

Yeah, as you’ll see, we still did it, but the fact that Vince had to be reminded about the idea should have given me an indication that it wasn’t going to be treated with the degree of importance that I had hoped for.

Here perhaps is the biggest shocker of all—I really liked working with Ric Flair. I may have been disappointed with my actual in-ring wrestling performances, but the buildup and the promos were among the most enjoyable things I’ve taken part in.

In an odd way, Rob Van Dam’s misfortune was my good fortune. For following my
Vengeance
match with Ric, which was really just a glorified, bloody teaser for
SummerSlam,
I was set to take part in a six-man tag match on July 3, teaming up with Edge and Van Dam (or RVD) to take on the team of Cena, Sabu, and Flair. Personally, I would have preferred to hold off any physicality with Flair for several weeks. I had left Ric laying in a puddle of his own blood at
Vengeance,
and wanted to exploit that image for a little while longer. I really didn’t see how this six-man tag would advance our story, but didn’t think it would be politically wise to argue for scrapping it. After all, there were sure to be important creative battles worth fighting for in the future. I was willing to sit this one out.

I don’t know all of the technicalities of the fateful Van Dam/Sabu road trip that had been inconveniently interrupted by an officer of the law a few days earlier. But an hour before match time, a decision was made to ditch the six-man in favor of an Edge/Van Dam single match, in which the Edgester won the title that RVD had won from Cena at
One Night Stand.

I decided to stick around, asking writer Ed Kosky if I could perhaps try out an interview after the show. Hey, if they didn’t use it, no big deal. But if they did, it would save me a trip to the teeming metropolis of Sioux City, Iowa, for the next week’s
Raw.

So, in a sense, I pried the doors to Promoland open for an after-hours visit, summoned forth some real-life anger, circa 1994, and strapped myself in for a hell of a ride.

Of course, the promo had its detractors. Quite a few, from what I’m told. But fortunately, Vince was not one of them, and he green-lighted not only the Philadelphia pretape for Sioux City, but two additional weeks of pretaped promos as well. Those promos had their detractors as well. I was making Flair look bad, they thought. I will admit that I rode Ric hard in these promos, but I thought he would see them as a challenge, and respond accordingly. If I thought for one second that Ric Flair wasn’t capable of handling my best stuff, and knocking it out of the park, then I wouldn’t have gone at him quite so hard. I wasn’t sure he
would
knock it out of the park when we finally met face-to-face (which was scheduled for the July 31
Raw
in New Jersey), but I did know he had the potential to do so.

Besides, as I explained to Vince and Brian Gewirtz, WWE Superstars weren’t exactly lining up to propose scenarios in which they would suffer the most devastating loss in recent memory, to be followed by the most humiliating act of degradation and betrayal imaginable. I knew where I wanted to end up, and Vince trusted my unconventional method of getting there.

Flair trusted me, too—at least, I think he did. And I like to think that trust paid off for everyone—me, Ric, Vince, the fans—when we finally did face-to-face verbal battle in New Jersey. It really felt like we were making magic out there, feeding off each other, working from a loose basic outline but with a genuine sense of real emotion, the likes of which WWE fans rarely see. I hoped it could be a historic promo of sorts, the one that would finally put to rest the idea that Ric Flair only gives “eighties ’rasslin’ promos.” Surely his effort in New Jersey would serve as a harbinger for a post-
SummerSlam
Flair push.

Despite all the emotion of the promo, it was actually a hokey comedy line, delivered prior to Flair’s ring entrance, that will live on (if only in my mind) as one of my finest sports entertainment moments.

“Ric Flair and I were really not that different,” I told Melina, who had served, at my request, as my personal ring announcer.

“After all, Ric Flair and I both have famous friends. You see, Melina, Ric Flair is a personal friend of the president of the United States.”

Which is kind of true. Ric does know the current president, although he was better acquainted with the first President Bush.

“And I am personal friends with hardcore porn icon Christy Canyon.” Christy, I must say, received a much more friendly and enthusiastic response than the president.

“Now, one of our friends,” I told Melina and the crowd, “got to the top by screwing an awful lot of people…and the other one appeared in adult films.”

Yes! Now admit it, that’s a good line. Even if you do like President Bush, you have to admit that’s a good line. Hey, I just had lunch today with Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, and even he admitted it was a good line. Okay, maybe he didn’t say anything remotely like that, but I really did have lunch with him at chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Peter Pace’s house. Same house, different tables, limited (five or six words) conversation between us.

One of my relatives didn’t care for the joke. It actually caused quite an ugly scene at my cousin Kelly’s wedding the day before
SummerSlam.
The relative had never actually heard the line, but nonetheless, the very fact that I’d made a political joke was an affront to his heartfelt belief that celebrities should never use their status to advance political beliefs. Fair enough. He’s entitled to his opinion. But his feeling that he “shouldn’t have to listen to Vanessa Redgrave’s politics at the Academy Awards” as his primary argument was a little weak. Why? Because he’d never actually heard her speech. And because the speech took place in 1977.

My mother thought the line was quite funny. She did, however, have one question for my wife, which Colette later relayed to me.

“How does Mick know a porn star?”

“What did you tell her?” I laughed, guessing that this was not exactly a typical mother-in-law–type conversation point.

“Well, I said that you were on her radio show and that you really liked her because she’d helped children overseas.” Which is true, although her philanthropic tendencies never really crossed my mind when I first started liking her about twenty years ago.

Christy herself got quite a kick out of it. Although she didn’t see the show (I don’t know if she’s ever seen
Raw
), her phone apparently rang repeatedly over the next few hours, prompting the joyous voice mail I received the next day.

“Hey, Mick, this is your hardcore porn icon friend calling. You are so awesome.” Followed by several minutes of interesting life observations by someone who views life through a slightly different lens. I think I’ve only talked to Christy twice since our lone meeting in that Los Angeles radio studio, but I have been on the receiving end of many of her meandering (but never boring) stream-of-consciousness messages, leading me to believe that Christy Canyon may be to voice mail what Garrison Keillor is to public radio. Of course, Christy does occasionally throw in choice verbiage not regularly heard on the
Prairie Home Companion
.

Wow, where the hell was I? Oh, yeah, Ric Flair. During the course of my pretaped interviews, I had dared Ric to bring his “A” game to New Jersey. He did. He also brought his “A” game to Boston for
SummerSlam.
Unfortunately, I left my “A” game somewhere else, maybe at home, maybe in New Jersey, maybe at my cousin’s wedding, opting instead to bring my “C+/B-” game to town.

It wasn’t a bad match by any means, in fact it was pretty good. Maybe if I’d been an outside observer, I would have thought it was very good; it was certainly an intense, bloody spectacle, with many barbaric moments sprinkled liberally into the mix. (Although I doubt Ric would want any derivative of the word
liberal
used in connection with his name.) Take, for example, the classic Ric Flair open-hand chop to the chest, seen literally thousands of times by millions of fans over the last thirty or so years. Our match, however, saw the first “hand wrapped in barbed wire” variation of that chop—an idea that seemed great at the time of delivery, but somewhat less so while receiving twenty-five stitches in my chest after the match.

But I wasn’t an outside observer. I knew how good it should have been. And I know who was to blame for it coming up short. Ric! No, just kidding, Ric was great. I’m the guy to blame. Basically, I had a game plan for a match that would have been somewhat akin to a sweeping Hollywood epic. Maybe a complete thirty-minute drama, twenty-five minutes from bell to bell, plus entrances and aftermath. Except I couldn’t get thirty minutes to work with. I got twenty. So I began thinking of ways to lop off scenes, kind of eliminating the dialogue that would have made the action more memorable. I gave up on the idea of a sweeping thirty-minute epic, and settled instead on trying to give fans an incredible twenty-minute action movie. Except I became so consumed with giving WWE the twenty minutes they wanted that I forgot to deliver the three extra minutes I really needed.

Damn, I wish I had those three minutes over. What a difference they would have made. The difference between an intense, bloody spectacle and a hardcore classic for the ages.

In the end, I guess I changed my opinion of Ric Flair. Or, to be more accurate, I changed my opinion about his opinion of me. I think he respects me. He might even like me. But I think both of us are glad that we were able to put our past problems behind us and put together an inspired body of work.

But that’s not to say that I’ve completely forgotten about what he said about me in his book. Because I think it’s changed me; caused me to become less concerned about my career and whatever legacy it might leave in the wrestling business. I no longer expect my peers to say nice things about me. Quite the opposite. If they do happen to say, or write, something nice—great. If not, well, I guess that’s life. I guess now is as good a time as any to throw in a random Ricky Nelson quote, so here goes: “You can’t please everyone, so you’ve got to please yourself.”