The Road Warriors: Danger, Death, and the Rush of Wrestling (39 page)

As the story goes, thinking he had been hooked to the cable properly and was ready to suspend down, Owen stepped off the catwalk and free-fell to the ring, where he hit one of the corners with his chest and face. He died almost instantly due to the severe trauma. Like the rest of the wrestling community, and anyone who ever had the pleasure of knowing Owen, I was heartbroken.

In a great show of compassion and human understanding, Vince McMahon paid for everyone who’d ever worked in the WWF past and present to attend the funeral in Calgary. I took James with me. You see, because Minnesota is one of the gateway states to Canada, Owen used to stop by our house all the time and became a family friend. He’d come with me to watch Jessica play hockey and told me about his two little babies and post-wrestling plans.

Few people knew Owen had earned a teaching degree earlier in his life. “Joe, I want to teach,” he’d said. “I can’t wait for my days in the ring to be over. They’re numbered.” Owen was truly one of the good guys. He was thirty-four.

With great friends like Rude and Owen dying so suddenly and leaving behind families, man, it really hit home. I couldn’t imagine what it would be like if I, too, met with an untimely accident and Julie was left alone to raise Joey, James, and Jessica. As burned as I may have felt being made to sit out a year from working, being able to get even that much closer to my Laurinaitis clan made me quickly forget all about it. After all, I had coaching duties to attend to.

That’s right. From the day Joey, James, and Jessica were all able to walk, you can rest assured I had my coaching hat (or Zubaz bandana) firmly on. When Joey started getting to be around six years old, he gravitated straight toward hockey and stayed with it all the way through high school. I’m telling you, man, the kid had no quit in his heart, ever.

Joey wasn’t as big as some of the other players, but you never would’ve noticed because of his good, old-fashioned hustle. Whenever I came home, we’d go over his slap shots and passing in the driveway with a little net. Even with 300-pound Road Warrior Daddy completely blocking out the sun on the tiny little goal cage, Joey would nail shot after shot.

By 1999, Joey was a man of eighteen and had really filled out after finding a passion for weight lifting, as I had, in high school. He weighed about 185 pounds and stood at five feet nine. I’ll never forget the day he made me respect him man-to-man when he came in and announced to Julie and me that he was going into the military. And I was even prouder when his boot camp physical training scores came back as the highest in his company. Within another year or so, during the political turbulence after 9-11, Joey would enter the National Guard and go overseas to defend our country in Iraq.

Because Joey was now eighteen, the age difference between James and Jessica was a much bigger factor than it had been only a few years earlier. While he was busy departing for the big, waiting world outside our front door, he was also completely leaving behind the childhood stage that his younger brother and sister were still smack in the middle of.

From the moment James had started crawling around the house, I could tell how coordinated and sports-oriented he already was. In T-ball, he’d hit home runs every single time he was at bat. I kid you not. Whether it was a grounder and he ran all four bases before they could throw it home or he smashed it over the fence, the kid was a natural. He grew so rapidly that he was the same size as his eleven-year-old brother Joey by the time he was six.

After years of hearing him say, “Can I play football yet? Can I play football yet?” we finally enrolled him. He was a nine-year-old terror on the football field—and every other arena, for that matter, including baseball and hockey. But it was on the Pop Warner football field that James emerged as a definitive leader and I got to become Coach Animal.

I’ll never forget when James was only nine or ten years old and I had him and the other most advanced player on his team, Blake Wheeler (now a center on the Boston Bruins hockey team), running passing plays all day long. You would’ve thought those two were junior high varsity starters the way they instinctively picked up on what I showed them. At the actual games, I’d be laughing out loud with the other parents as James and Blake schooled every one of those other teams during the season.

Only a few years behind James was ten-year-old Jessica. When she wasn’t doing all of the regular girl things, like playing with her Barbie and Easy-Bake Oven, Jessica was doing amazing things on her hockey and softball teams. From day one, there was nothing she couldn’t do as well as my boys. From throwing the baseball to swinging the bat, Jessica had pure talent.

With Joey not around as much anymore, James didn’t hesitate to take Jessica over to our huge trampoline, which I called Thunder-dome, and would never get tired of chokeslamming and power-bombing his little sister until the cows came home. And you know what? Jessica loved it. She was a tough cookie by now and, even according to James himself, was “the best natural athlete in the whole family.” My boy knows what he’s talking about.

When she first started grade school, all of the kids were required to run around the whole school. Man, Jessica smoked everyone (including the boys) by a couple hundred yards. No doubt about it, my little baby girl was another fine charter member of the Laurinaitis and Co. Super Athlete’s Club. It’s quite exclusive, you know.

Now, of course, behind any squadron of well-behaved, well-juice-boxed young athletes is a dedicated team mom. That’s where Julie came in. Already the center of the universe for our own children, Julie devoted herself to making sure all of the kids on Joey’s, James’s, and Jessica’s teams were always looked after. Whether it was rides to and from the field or taking the time to slice up a few dozen orange wedges for the team’s midgame replenishment, Julie was the mom other moms looked up to, wondering,
How does she do it all?
Simple. She’s the real Supergirl. I pulled her out of the crater myself back in ’84.

At the end of the day, it was Julie who had to take up the role of both mom and dad in my absence, which was over two hundred days a year when I was on the road. I missed PTA meetings, school pageants, and birthday parties, but Julie was there, front and center, taking me along in spirit. There’s no question my family wouldn’t have turned out as brilliantly without her planted in the center. Like my own mother before her, Julie was the glue holding the Laurinaitis family together.

Before I knew it, not only was I completely rejuvenated by my time away from wrestling, but our WWF contracts had recently expired so we were free to go to work again. My long-term goal was to land us back in WCW by the end of the year, but those talks were yet to come. So at the end of July, the Road Warriors hopped on a plane for a series of shows Down Under with nothing but high hopes. Sadly, the whole experience would turn into a total nightmare.

The first two shows started off great in Wollongong, New South Wales, on July 28, when we defeated Public Enemy, Rocco Rock, and Johnny Grunge for the i-Generation Tag Team Championships. Two days later, we retained the titles against Rocco and Johnny at the Superstars of Wrestling PPV at the SuperDome in Sydney. Hawk was in great spirits and telling everybody crazy stories from his recent time off, including one about running into Randy Savage at a concert in Tampa. (Remember the rematch I mentioned?)

As the story goes, Hawk took Dale to the Sun Dome for a Kid Rock concert and was hanging out backstage when none other than Savage and his girlfriend came walking by. Hawk said he extended his hand in friendship only to be punched right in the face by the Macho Man.
Crack!

Mike smiled and asked, “Is that all you got?” He was about to grab Savage’s head and “give that son of a bitch a swirlie right there in the bathroom,” he later told me, but security grabbed them and put the whole thing to an end. (In case you’re wondering, a swirlie is when you stick someone’s head in a toilet and flush.) We were all dying laughing at that one.

It was right after our triumphant championship defense on the thirtieth that things took a hard left turn for the worse. We had a couple days off before our next show and stopped for a break in the city of Adelaide down in South Australia. The worst thing you could do with professional wrestlers was give them a few days of downtime in a foreign country; it was like giving them a license to party. No harm done. It’s just what they did. As always, Hawk and I split ways and agreed to meet at the show, which left him to run off with some buddies and see what kind of trouble he could get himself into.

Days later in Melbourne, Hawk and I painted up. When it was time to go into the ring, I looked around and saw a crowd gathering around someone lying on the ground. It was Hawk! He looked panic-stricken as I’d never seen him before. His chest was pounding so hard I could actually see his left pectoral muscle spasming out of control.

“Joe, don’t let me die, man,” Mike pleaded.

I was in one hell of a spot. We were about to go out for our match, and the place was sold out. There was no way I could just leave with Hawk and screw the promoter and fans. Thinking quickly, I grabbed a couple of guys and asked if they would take Hawk to the hospital and I’d be there as soon as the match was over. They agreed, and I found this giant Aboriginal Australian in the back to be my substitute partner. He had no idea what he’d do out there in the ring, but I reassured him. “Don’t worry about it. Just get in there with me, and I’ll do everything.”

After the show, I went to the back and called Hawk at the hospital in Adelaide.

“Animal,” he said, “you’ve got to come and get me. Where I’m at right now, three people just died with the same heart condition I’ve got. I’m freaking out.”

When I got there, Hawk was arguing with the staff about letting him go. He had a resting heart rate of 188, and they wouldn’t let him leave. I remember hearing him say, “I’ve got a 300-pound partner who says I’m gonna leave.”

And that’s what I did. The joke was on me: you’ve got to picture me in my do-rag wheeling my 275-pound partner out of there, through the Melbourne terminal, onto our flight, through the LAX International and US terminals, and to his gate in Tampa.

I cancelled the remaining dates we had scheduled in New Zealand and took a flight back to Minneapolis. With Mike’s latest escape from the icy fingers of death, I wondered how much longer his luck would last.

About a week after returning home, Mike gave me a call to let me know what was going on. He had been diagnosed with cardio-myopathy, a condition in which one of the valves leading into the heart becomes stretched out and can’t pump blood as it should. Due to his limited diet and the uppers and downers he’d been taking, his body had crashed. Thankfully, once home in the States, he’d been able to get the right kind of medication that would keep him alive.

The bottom line, though, was that Hawk was going to be sidelined with rest and recovery for the next solid year, so I decided to get back in touch with WCW, which had now burnt out in the Monday Night Wars and was a distant second to the WWF once again. I asked Eric Bischoff if they had a place for me until Hawk was ready to come back and reform the Road Warriors, and he said in fact there was.

In January 2001 Bischoff brought me back in a solo capacity as the “Enforcer” of The Magnificent Seven, created to protect WCW World champion Scott Steiner. Since the last time I had seen Steiner, he’d completely reinvented himself during the NWO craze as the crude and platinum heel Big Poppa Pump. Scott now had an ongoing feud with Sid Vicious, which Eric and none other than my own brother John injected me into.

John had retired from active wrestling and was brought into WCW as an agent to work out matches with the talent. It was explained to me that I would make my debut at the Sin PPV during a four-way match with Sid, Scott, and Jeff Jarrett as the fourth man and help take out Vicious with his own powerbomb finisher.

Minutes before the match, John went up to Sid and said that near the end, to cue my run in, he was to go on the second turnbuckle and take a high boot to the face from Steiner on his way down. Sid didn’t want to do it. At six feet nine with long, slender legs, he simply wasn’t meant for those kinds of spots. John wouldn’t listen and told him everything would be fine.

Far from it. When the time came for Sid to jump off the rope, he came down and landed at an awkward angle and completely broke his lower left leg in half.

When I came running down for my spot to powerbomb Sid, Steiner was screaming, “Powerbomb him. Powerbomb his ass!”

When I turned to Sid and saw his leg, I wanted to puke. It was completely broken at a right angle away from his body, exactly in the shape of the letter
L
. If it weren’t for his boot being on, Sid’s leg might’ve been completely severed from his body. Meanwhile, the poor guy was hollering and writhing in agony, and to this day I don’t know how he managed to stay conscious.

I looked at Steiner and pointed. “Holy shit, Scott. Look at his fucking leg!”

Steiner was so hopped up on the adrenaline of the match that he didn’t notice anything and was actually stomping Sid, making his leg dangle back and forth. It was the worst thing I’ve ever seen in a professional wrestling ring. Period.

After they wheeled Sid to the back and put him in the ambulance, I went up to him and asked him how he was.

“Tell your brother thanks a lot,” he said. “I told him it was a bad idea.”

After that match, I wrestled a couple more times in tag matches with Chavo Guerrero, of all people, against other cruiser-weights. I think they were also in the midst of pairing me up with Rick Steiner for a while until Hawk could return, but boy did all of
that
get permanently interrupted.

To make a very long and complicated story short and simple, back in 1996 Turner merged with Time Warner and stayed on as the chief stockholder, thus giving Eric Bischoff the financial backing he needed. With Turner in that supportive role, Warner might’ve dropped WCW entirely, but Ted was loyal to the show that had once helped him build a broadcasting empire back in the ’70s and ’80s, the classic
World Championship Wrestling
at 6:05 p.m. on Saturday nights.