THE STONE COLD TRUTH (15 page)

So we came up with some designs for our trunks that showed off the name. We had the star and
HOLLYWOOD BLONDS
on the back, and three stars on the front. We had a black pair and a red pair. Then Brian had the jackets made—a silver leather jacket and a black-and-red jacket.

Brian said, “We gotta wear some chains,” and he got me a deal on one. It’s got more sentimental value than anything I own. It’s just a gold chain, but it’s the chain that Brian got for me when we were the Hollywood Blonds.

I had it ripped off one time in a fight and thrown a pretty good distance into the bushes, and wondered if I was going to lose it. But I looked real hard and found it. I wear that chain all the time. That’s the one you see around my neck on WWE television and in many photos, and Brian is right there with me.

About the same time, we came up with all the stupid little camera stuff and the “Brush with Greatness.” That was when Brian would do a comedy pantomime like he was filming me while I put a power move on a guy. We got a little bit more interview time and the fans were getting into what we were doing. We were different, and we listened to the fans to gauge what they were buying from us.

Then we started making fun of the legendary Ric Flair. We figured that would get us some heat from the crowd. It did, because we were so damn cocky, especially Pillman. He was the Hollywood Blonds’ guiding force.

The “Flair for the Old” segment got over real big. This was a parody that the Hollywood Blonds did on Ric Flair and Arn Anderson in WCW.

Every week, Flair had a televised segment called “A Flair for the Gold” with Arn Anderson as his cohost, and he’d feature himself or one of his friends in some kind of cheesy interview segment. Brian and I would rag on those guys in our promos and refer to that segment as “Flair for the Old” to get heat on us being wise-asses and not respecting the legends, whom we actually admired greatly.

It was all ad-libbed. We just went out there and did it. They turned out to be some very entertaining segments and the fans started cheering us. That got us legit heat with the office because it was turning us baby-face.

Brian always got more interview time than I did, because Brian could really run at the mouth. He had a very good command of the English language, so when they stuck the microphone in front of his mouth, he’d just start going. He was real good at making a point, and not like everybody else, and it was real well thought out. Just by hanging with him, I was forced to try and keep up on the mic. He was instrumental in getting my gears going, thinking about how to cut promos.

While Brian would be talking, I’d do “Arn Anderson” by just standing behind him like a statue, rubbing my chin and nodding in agreement with whatever he was saying. Yeah. That was some funny stuff we did. But we were put together as an interim tag team to put someone
else
over.

We ended up getting over ourselves. Pillman and I became a hot team.

They shut us down. They buried us. They didn’t want us to become popular. That was bogus and not good business, because the fans wanted to see us, and there was an opportunity for the company to make money.

Pay outs to “Steve Austin,” see what a difference a year of hard work makes.

Looking back at it now, I can see the fans were changing, what they liked was changing. WCW just couldn’t see that. Office politics suck, especially in the pro wrestling business.

When we went on road trips, I would always drive. Raven would talk and Brian would be laying in the back, reading words to us from his power vocabulary book. Brian had an unbelievable vocabulary as it was,
but he’d buy and pore through these vocabulary power books to learn ridiculous new words and their meanings, so he could turn around and use them in TV promos.

After Brian learned some new words, he would try them out on us in some of the most outrageous promos you ever heard. As I said, I always drove, because Raven had convinced us it was better for everyone’s health.

We called ourselves “The Comedy Trio.” We were three funny guys who traveled together. And we had our own Comedy League within the company, with a Comedy League Heavyweight Champion, as voted by his peers.

The Comedy League Heavyweight Champion at the time was Kevin Nash. We had a tournament to crown the champion, which consisted of Brian Raven and myself, Nash, Cactus Jack, Tex Slazinger (Mideon), Shanghai Pierce (Henry Godwinn) and Dan Spivey (Waylon Mercy). Spivey was a dark horse candidate for champion. He had a real dry sense of humor. Shanghai Pierce was our traveling secretary and head of security.

One time Brian, Raven and I were driving around the Cobo Hall in Detroit; we couldn’t figure out where we should park, and couldn’t find the back entrance. We saw Kevin Nash walking in the parking lot and asked him to find a security guy. Nash blew us off, so we voted to strip him of the title of Comedy League Champion. “Big Grouchy” was having a bad day.

I had wanted to be a singles wrestler and Scotty—Raven—wanted to be the tag-team wrestler with Brian. They would have been hilarious together! But the bookers at WCW put Brian and I together as a tag and ended up letting Scotty go, and he went up to WWE and wrestled as Johnny Polo.

Harley Race, who I had originally been given as a manager, was put with Lex Luger. I wish I would have had the opportunity to be with Harley, but it wasn’t in the cards. Luger never really took advantage of being with Harley Race, one of the game’s all-time great in-ring talents. Lex wasn’t blessed with a ton of common sense, in my opinion, though he did look good in an 8-by-10.

Harley Race, by the way, was a legitimately tough son of a gun. He had done it all, which was why I had so much respect for him. We would have been great together, I always thought. He was a great champion, an unbelievable worker and he cut a hell of a promo in the days when shows weren’t based on promos.

Back in WCW, when he was managing Luger, Harley Race was always doing something to torture the other wrestlers backstage and have some fun. He’d walk around with one of those stun guns in his pocket, sneak up behind one of the boys and take out the zapper. Then he would lay it right on the guy’s leg or on his ass and press that trigger button … and innocently keep walking!

People would jump and then look around! He never did it to me, I’m happy to report, but a lot of boys tasted that stun gun. I heard Theodore Long actually wet his pants thanks to Harley’s stun gun. The “playa” peed his pants!

Brian Pillman and I remained friends through the years. When I got to WWE and Stone Cold was “on fire” and shooting to the top, Brian Pillman came to WWE too. He had been doing “the loose cannon” deal at WCW and was acting like a crazy person, working both companies, the boys, the kayfabe sheets and the fans.

No one knew what Brian was doing. I didn’t know what he was doing. His own booker didn’t know what Brian was doing. There was so much “buzz” about Pillman that, out of the blue, he got himself a contract up at WWE—even though he had just had his Hummer accident and his leg was all banged up. Sometime before that, either his WCW contract had run out or he got out of it using a loophole. I’m not sure about those details, but there he was joining WWE.

I talked to him a little bit at that time, but I didn’t ask him about the “loose cannon” stuff because I didn’t want to come off like a mark. It was one of those deals where he figured I knew all about it, but I wasn’t going to ask him and he wasn’t going to ask me if I knew for sure. It was something I just stayed away from, as a professional courtesy. I think if I had asked him about it, I would have gotten some sort of sideways answer from him, and that’s not the answer I would have wanted from a friend.

I respected what he was doing, and he was breaking new ground. It was cutting edge. I just remember watching it and saying, “Damn, whatever this is, that sumbitch is off.” It was great. Brian was really talented.

When Bret Hart put his Canadian heel group together, Brian’s the one who made it work with his gift for gab. Whereas Bret would cut this straightforward logical promo, here was this trash-talking, raspy-voiced sumbitch who, everybody knew, could kick their ass. He always had a mouthful of words to spew at you, and he could do it with some real heavy sarcasm. When it came to cutting promos, he paved the way for a lot of guys, and certainly inspired me.

Brian and I didn’t talk much about his personal life or his problems. I knew that the guy was in a lot of pain from getting knocked around so much, but I didn’t know how many painkillers he was taking, and I didn’t know about any of the other stuff he was said to be taking. Around me, he never did any of that. At WCW and later at WWE, we always went our separate ways once we checked in at the hotel.

When I hooked up with Brian as the Hollywood Blonds in WCW, I remember sitting there at the bar one night and hearing him say, “I’ve stopped drinking.”

Maybe he started again later on in WWE, but here he was saying he had stopped. I gave him hell over it, just like he gave me hell in WWE when I was trying to be a heel and was getting cheered instead.

I was sitting there and pounding them down, and I was thinking, This is Flyin’ Brian. This is supposed to be one of the wildest guys there ever was. He ain’t drinking nothin’.

The other stuff people talk about? Maybe I saw him take a couple of Vicodin pain pills here and there, but I didn’t know how many he was eating. Cocaine? I never saw that. HGH or steroid injections? I never saw him do those either. I certainly never saw Brian smoke dope. It wouldn’t have jelled with his personality, I think.

But I wasn’t concerned about him because I didn’t think he had a problem. I really didn’t.

One night I saw him dragging his little suitcase behind him in Minnesota and I became worried about him then. To me, that wasn’t Brian Pillman. Here was a guy who was one of the smartest guys in the business, who was a hell of an athlete and had a great career and a beautiful wife and kids at home.

Just hours before the WWE
In Your House
Pay-Per-View on October 5, 1997, where Brian was to have wrestled, his body was found in his hotel room. At first, many thought that it was Brian’s use of drugs and alcohol that led to a fatal overdose. It was later established that he suffered from a rare genetic heart imperfection, which not only caused the early death of his father, but ultimately his own. There is no question, however, that Brian’s lifestyle and use of drugs aggravated his heart condition.