THE STONE COLD TRUTH (5 page)

And there never was any burglar. I still don’t know what that noise was.

After that, all the guns were locked up in my dad’s gun cabinet. We didn’t have one at the time, but Dad went right out and bought one—with a lock.

All boys should have a dog, right? When I was twelve or thirteen years old, my dad brought home a dog he found walking down the road. “Look, kids,” he said, “here’s an early Christmas present!”

We were thrilled with our new dog and named him Socks. Socks was cool and pretty smart. Kevin had a friend from a few blocks away named Anthony. My parents did not really like Anthony. He just always came over at the wrong times and was a pest, and Socks picked up on
that and always growled and gave Anthony a hard time, sometimes chasing him all the way home.

One day we had all just come home from church and Anthony showed up. Again, bad timing on his part. Socks started right in barking at Anthony and was going to chase him home, but I grabbed Socks and assured Anthony that it was okay. I said, “C’mon in, he’s okay,” while holding Socks back.

As Anthony got about four or five feet from me, I let the dog loose yelling, “GET HIM, SOCKS!” and that dog chased Anthony all the way home five blocks away. We got a big kick out of that. I was always messing with people even back then. Anthony would fall for it every damn time.

I was a pretty good student in school, and got mostly As and some Bs, and really wanted a football scholarship. I was serious about my grades and all the teachers seemed to like me, even though sometimes I was a class clown. Not really that bad, but I liked to make people laugh if the moment presented itself. Fortunately, I knew when to pick my spots and when to shut up.

I was an easy-to-get-along-with kind of kid and I was friendly to everyone in school. But I only had a few really close friends, as it is with me now. Nothing’s changed there.

Because of my good grades, they saw fit to put me in the National Honor Society. There were other kids that got better grades than I did,
but I met all the qualifications and was proud of it. My popularity in school might have helped me a bit. Those silly high school yearbooks voted me Most Popular my first three years and Mr. Cowboy my senior year, which is like Homecoming King, only more manly. In Edna, Texas, being elected Mr. Cowboy was a big deal.

I studied hard, but I was always into the physical fitness thing. Even before I knew what I was doing, I knew it was real important to be in shape to play sports.

In baseball, I played catcher. I was an all-star at that position five years in a row. But I wasn’t an all-star because I was the most gifted catcher in the league. I was good, but there were others who had better skills.

The reason I was an all-star was because no one hustled more than I did. If a ball got by me, I’d sprint to the backstop. I was a hustler. Hustle, hustle, always hustle. I never quit. That got me through sports. I was never the best athlete on a team, but I just wouldn’t quit.

But baseball wasn’t my main focus when it came to athletics. The main deal for me was football. I was attracted to football for lots of reasons. First, every kid in Texas wants to play football. If you were a big, athletic kid like me, that was where you wanted to put your energies. My dad was also an influence, having gone to Rice University on a football scholarship. He was a running back for Rice University in 1958 when they went to the Cotton Bowl against Navy. They lost, 20-7, but my dad scored Rice’s only touchdown.

I had no dreams of playing pro football. Later, I wanted to go to college and being good at football was my meal ticket. But I wasn’t thinking about college back then. I just wanted to be on the football team.

It was my dad who taught me to bust my ass at everything I did. And if I did something, I needed to do it right the first time so I wouldn’t have to come back and do it again. If I got knocked down, I needed to get right back up. And I wasn’t ever to let somebody tell me I couldn’t do something.

It was good advice. It would help me later on, after I became a professional wrestler.

Back when I was in high school, I was so heavily involved in athletics, so focused on throwing the discus, playing baseball and of course
football, that I got pretty muscular. I had a set of weights out on the back porch that my mom and dad had bought me and I worked out on those things all the time.

My dad during his days at Rice.

Of course, I didn’t really know how to do it right, but I worked real hard. I remember on Friday and Saturday nights, I’d be out there lifting weights all evening. Then I would finally go to bed, and Kevin and all his hell-raising friends would come over late and be making noise out on the porch. I’d be trying to sleep and I remember opening the window and yelling, “Shut the hell up! I’m trying to sleep!” I still can’t sleep well with any noise whatsoever.

In high school I didn’t drink beer (believe it or not, although I was
soon to take a crash course). When I was a senior I might have had one or two, but it was not my thing. I was an athlete, pretty much focused on playing sports and making good grades, and I wanted that college scholarship. I wanted to be the best.

Doing the Sears catalog pose with my brothers Kevin and Scott.

When I was in high school, we only lived a block or two from the football field and my dad would go over there and watch us practice and play and he’d always say, “Good game, Steve.”

He’d never come in there and gripe at me or tell me what to do, or tell me something I screwed up on. He was always one of my biggest supporters. He always encouraged me, even if I messed up. My folks went to every game they could go to. They are the best.

Neither my dad or my mom was ever overbearing. Sometimes I see situations where I think parents are overbearing to their kids, but my folks were not like that at all. All parents should encourage their kids to succeed. It really means a lot.

Because I didn’t drink and insisted on driving, I was always the designated driver for my crazy brothers and their friends. I’d take my mom’s Suburban, they’d load it up and they’d all drink beer—they were eighteen or older then—and I’d take ’em to the go-kart track or we’d drive into Victoria and they’d go nuts. Then I’d drive ’em all back home.

One time, we kind of tore up a go-kart track and the old guy who ran the place called the cops on us as we were leaving. The officer pulled us over, but I was driving and I had not drunk anything. After I spoke with the officer, explaining that I was driving everyone home, he let us go. I was my brothers’ friends’ ticket to a good time. Basically, I was just a big-ass baby-sitter. But we sure tore the hell out of that go-kart track!

As I said, I used to cut up a little in school and get people laughing in class. Sometimes I had something to say that I thought the rest of the class might find entertaining. Once in a while, I went a bit too far.

Then, in the eighth grade, I learned a life lesson that changed everything for me. That year, I had a math teacher named Mrs. Adams. She was a real nice lady, a real pretty lady too, and I was cutting up in her class. And while she was talking, I was running my mouth.

That was the wrong thing to do, because I knew better. But she got on me one too many times. I was really cutting up. I wasn’t sassing her, but I guess I was disrespecting her by talking while she was trying to do her job and teach us something.

Well, her husband was Coach Adams of the high school football team. After Mrs. Adams had taken enough crap from me, she apparently told her husband that one of the football players in her class was giving her a hard time.

Well, with me being a big football star in the seventh and eighth grade fixing to go into high school, I was ready for big things. I was ready to be a high school football star on Coach Adams’s team.

A few days later after class, here’s this big, intimidating coach waiting there. It’s Mrs. Adams’s husband. He says to me with a lot of bass in his voice, “Are you Steve Williams?”

I said to myself, Well, I guess this guy is noting my football skills. I was a cocky kid, for fourteen years old.

I confidently answered, “Yes, sir,” with a big smile on my face.

My first car, a ’71 Firebird

He said, “I hear you’ve been acting up in my wife’s class.”

To myself, I said, Oh crap, as I looked down at my shoes.

He didn’t jump down my throat or yell at me. He looked at me kind of real quietlike and said, “I can make things real hard for you in high school.”

I said. “Yes, sir,” because I understood exactly what he was talking about. It was that short and that simple. He was intimidating enough that all Coach Adams had to do was look at you. He didn’t have to raise his voice. And so from that point on I straightened up—not only in Mrs. Adams’s class, but every other class I was in.

Don’t get me wrong. When I went on to high school, I still was kind of a class clown, but I sure knew when to shut my mouth! You have to pick your spots.

Then there was the day I bought my first car. It had belonged to this dude we’d see around town and it was sharp! Every time we went to baseball practice or to the baseball park this guy had this car there. It
was a metallic brown ’71 Pontiac Formula Firebird, hood scoop, spoiler, white racing stripes down the hood, Crager chrome Supersport mag wheels all the way around, white letter tires. It was a helluva good-looking car.

It originally came with a 455, but when I got it, it had a Chevy 396 in it. It looked great, but turned out to be a real piece of crap. The cross-member motor mount that was under the transmission was lodged in there crooked. There were all kinds of problems with that car. My mom had wanted me to buy my grandmother’s two-door Subaru because that would have been a good, economical car to have—fifty miles per gallon and all that.

But no, I had to have this jury-rigged Formula Firebird, because I was cool, right? I paid $1,500 of my own money for it, money I’d earned mowing grass and doing odd jobs. And every weekend my brother Scott, who is mechanically inclined (I’m not), would work on it, fixing it. It was a pile of junk, but it was probably the best-looking car in Edna, Texas.

Then I got a ’73 Camaro from my uncle. It had a Corvette 350 motor in it, with a four-speed. That was a nice car. I ended up selling it to my younger brother, Jeff. That was the deal, we had to pay for our own cars.

Nothing in this world is really free. Parents who buy their kids whatever they want aren’t doing those children any favors. I know this … when you work your butt off for something, you sure as hell appreciate it a lot more when you finally get it.