THE STONE COLD TRUTH (11 page)

Before the match, I got together with Danny and he said, “Okay, kid, you ready? I’ll just listen to you.”

I said, “What are you talking about?”

He says, “Yeah, you call the match.”

I said, “Hell, Danny, this is my chance to learn something from you.”

He went, “No, no, I’ve seen you work. You’re great. If you need something out there, I’ll give it to you. You call the match.”

Hell, I went out there with Danny Davis and I called eighty-five percent of the match. That’s what kind of nice guy he was. He’d been working how long then? Ten or fifteen years? Of course, he was a great tag-team wrestler. He had a hell of a run in Memphis. I loved working with Danny Davis. He was a very unselfish guy. He helped me understand how to execute a solid wrestling match.

Danny was the first guy to trust my skills to call a match. But over my career I’d say I’ve called called ninety-nine percent of my matches. Even when I was just starting out, guys would be calling stuff to me in the ring and I couldn’t hear ’em. They’d be calling some spots to me, “Uh, kid, one tackle, hip toss, drop down, hip toss, arm drag,” and I’d say, “What?”

He’d have to call it to me two or three times so I could understand it.

Chris Adams wrote out for me these “rules” for working a heel match.

I’ve had a hearing problem in one ear since I was a kid. It’s not sports or wrestling related, but something I’ve had since birth.

I had my tonsils and adenoids taken out and was always going to hearing doctors as a kid because I had a lot of fluid in my ears. I never considered it a disability; I just dealt with it. It was something that was
ongoing, and then when I listened to lots of loud rock ‘tí roll music and made my loud wrestling entrances, it got worse.

I’m exaggerating when I say I’m half-deaf. But if there’s a lot of background noise, I don’t hear very well. Outside of wrestling, I lean into people and kind of watch their lips and face. In the arena, in the ring, I just can’t hear the other guy.

One time back in Memphis I was working with Undertaker, who was going under the name The Punisher at the time. He was an intimidating guy, pretty jacked up, and had been in the business a good year longer than I was. He was green, but not as green as I was.

He told me before our match, “Well, we’ll put over your strength in the beginning, so you’ll grab a headlock,” and we talked about it for maybe one minute. So we go out in the ring and he was trying to call me a spot. He was making the “sha-sha-sha” noises so the fans didn’t know what he was saying. He was telling me, “Okay, kid, one tackle, sha-sha-sha, drop down, sha-sha-sha, hip toss, sha-sha-sha.”

I said, “What?”

So he said it all over again.

I said “What?” about three times, and after that third time, here it came.
Bing, bam, boom,
he just hammered me. He couldn’t get any high spots out of me so he just beat me up.

So I guess I did have a disability coming in, and that’s why I learned how to call a match early on. That way I was the guy talking in the ring, and I didn’t have to listen to anybody. I talked and they listened.

It wasn’t anything that was a hindrance to me growing up. I just had to try and listen better.

Then there were Gary Young and Billy Joe Travis, who were part of my education too. They were journeymen wrestlers who would go out there and have a killer match, but they didn’t get any great breaks. They never had great physiques or were at the right place at the right time. But when it came to working a weekly territory, going around and around and around the horn, these guys were doing something different every night.

I’d ride sometimes with Gary Young. If I did something in a match, he’d say, “Hey, kid,” and give me a bit of advice. He showed me how to do different things I hadn’t known how to do. He was a big influence on me.

A ton of fine wrestlers, some stars and others not, helped me throughout my time in Memphis. That’s one of the great things about this crazy business—people helping each other, the boys helping the boys.

9
Dallas: Endings and Beginnings

W
hen I first went to Memphis, the wrestlers there were beating the crap out of everybody from Texas, including me, on a regular basis. After two months of working with all those guys, I was the new kid so I took all kinds of stuff like getting beaten with leather straps, I decided that it wasn’t getting me what I wanted.

Finally, after a few months of starving in Tennessee, the bookers in charge suggested a story line that would send me back to Dallas. I was going to turn heel—become a wresting villain—and go up against my mentor and teacher, “Gentleman” Chris Adams.

I came back to the Dallas USWA group and Chris Adams, and I had a great story line put together. I had been a babyface, a fan favorite, all this time in Texas, but I was going to turn heel against Adams. It was the old “teacher versus pupil” story that has been utilized in our business so often over the years.

The way it started out, I was Chris Adams’s friend, former student and tag-team partner, and I was returning to Dallas to help him. We got over with the fans and got cheered. Then, out of the blue, I turned heel on him. That came as a real shock to the Dallas fans.

After a lot of buildup, I beat Adams a few times on TV. I was the cocky ex-student gone bad and then there was Chris, who was over with the fans to a pretty good degree.

Chris Adams technically wasn’t the greatest worker in the world, but he did have a lot of great ideas for the business. When it came time for heat, he’d let me get all the heat in the world, and when it came time to win the right matches, he’d have me win the right matches. He was unselfish when it came to business and drawing money.

Also, it was a natural deal to promote his school. And we didn’t have all the top talent, so our little bogus program was one of the big drawing cards at the time in Dallas. It sold tickets. Man, we did some great business. It was a believable story—real life, real issues.

In the meantime, I was fixing to get married to Kathy, the girl I had met on the tennis courts back in Edna, Texas. I had dated Kathy all through high school and four years of college, and we were going to the marriage altar even though the road to get there hadn’t always been a smooth one.

As I mentioned, Kathy wasn’t a wrestling fan. That had led to some growing pains, and I can’t really blame her for them. Things just happened.

At one point, she had had a one-night stand, but at least she told me about it afterward. She was scared to death because it was the first time she had cheated on me, and I had never cheated on her during the ten years we had been together.

That would eventually change.

When we started talking about marriage, it was really just to save the relationship. It wouldn’t have survived otherwise. Kathy and I were planning on a Catholic ceremony. At long last, we would be man and wife.

Then Chris Adams suggested adding a couple of women to our ongoing story line. He wanted his real-life wife, Toni, to be on his side and his ex-wife, Jeannie, to be on mine. How could you go wrong with two good-looking blonde women getting involved in catfights all the time?

So, boy, we brought those two women out there and boobs were flying everywhere. They were pulling hair and rolling around and that was hot. It was like going back to Bill Watts’s wrestling shows when Missy Hyatt and Dark Journey or Sunshine used to get into it, and we’d go crazy. Missy Hyatt would be swinging that loaded Gucci bag, and ol’ J.R. would start yelling about it.

Man, that was some hot stuff. That’s what we tried to re-create, because it doesn’t get any better than that!

I remember the first time I was introduced to Jeannie. I was talking to Toni, Chris’ current wife, and as we were talking, she said, “Have you met Jeannie? There she is, right there.”

I had seen Jeannie before, but I had never actually met her. While she was married to Chris Adams, Jeannie had a daughter named Jade. The divorce between Adams and Jeannie had been a friendly one, and Jeannie and Jade used to come down and watch the matches.

Jeannie had beautiful hair, beautiful eyes and a great figure, but I didn’t think much of her at the time. I often don’t like people when I first meet them, and I didn’t like Jeannie at all.

DTA, you know? Don’t trust anybody.

At that time, I had some misgivings about bringing the women into the story line. It wasn’t that I didn’t think it would be hot. It was a matter of how Kathy would feel about it.

I remember thinking,
Hey, I don’t know how well this is going to sit with my girlfriend, who’s fixing to be my wife.

But Chris said, “Bring her over and I’ll introduce her to Jeannie and make sure everything’s cool.”

We never did that introduction, but we did the story line with the women, and, of course, everything snowballed from there. I married Kathy—a mistake, as it turned out. Before long, Jeannie and I weren’t just an item in the ring. We became an item outside the ring too.

Of course, this took place behind Kathy’s back. But eventually, Kathy found out that I had been sharing my hotel room in Tennessee with Jeannie, and she got the marriage annulled. I sure screwed that one up.