The Wrestling Observer Yearbook '97: The Last Time WWF Was Number Two

by Dave Meltzer

  He started his career with Stampede Wrestling after doing an angle the previous week, in the main event of a November 5, 1986 show at the Calgary Stampede Pavilion. With numerous Stampeders in the babyface corner rooting him on, Pillman teamed with Owen & Keith Hart to beat Makhan Singh & Great Gama & Vladimir Krupov. At the time Stampede Wrestling was developing some of what would turn out to be the biggest stars in the world including the likes of Owen Hart, Chris Benoit, Jushin Liger and Hiroshi Hase.

  Another almost unknown piece of wrestling trivia was that during his early Stampede stay, an angle was done where heels attacked his supposed sister Teresa to build to a big match the next week. Teresa, real name Teresa Hays, resurfaced many years later as ECW’s Beulah McGillicuddy. Bruce Hart & Pillman as the tag team called “Bad Company,” clad in sunglasses and leather jackets in the final and most memorable run of Bruce’s career, were the territory’s top babyface tag team for most of the next two years.

  He was the 1987 Rookie of the Year in the Wrestling Observer poll. He survived the craziness of Calgary wrestling, including suffering a severe shoulder injury that nearly ended his career, and a tricep tear in a backstage fight where he was ambushed by a much larger Brick Bronsky, then after being knocked to the deck, got up and tore him to shreds. Although he remained good friends with Bruce and Owen Hart, that fight was a wake-up call to him that it was time to leave Stampede Wrestling.

  Largely through making a contact with Jim Ross, he was brought into World Championship Wrestling in the spring of 1989. He was supposed to start a few months earlier, with the original idea for him to be a heel managed by Paul E. Dangerously and team with Dennis Condrey as a new version of the Midnight Express. However, his job was nixed when new booker George Scott didn’t want to bring in a wrestler that he had never heard of. Shortly after Scott was let go, Pillman’s name resurfaced and he was brought in as a babyface with numerous musical videos.

  Pillman wrestled several television dark matches, but was very nervous and didn’t perform well, and gained a reputation immediately for being far more green and inexperienced than he really was. But it probably worked in his favor, because once the butterflies wore off and he got his confidence back up, he started having good matches, and the belief was that he was improving at an amazing rate. His first major match with the company would have been at the 1989 Halloween Havoc PPV show from Philadelphia, where he had one of the best matches on the card, more impressive since it was with Lex Luger, which surprised most since the feeling going into the match was that Luger was going to have a hard time carrying Pillman in his first major match.

  Pillman’s seven-year WCW tenure, largely as a mid-card babyface who was generally considered among the best athletic workers in the company, saw several different rebirths. He was “Flyin Brian,” the heartthrob pretty boy babyface with Tom Zenk, a role he was never comfortable with. He was the personal protege of Ric Flair, including a famous match on WCW Saturday Night that drew what is still to this day the largest audience ever to watch that program in early 1990. He was the high flying lightheavyweight champion having the best matches in the country against Jushin Liger highlighted by a Christmas week house show run in 1991, and a match-of-the-year candidate on the February 29, 1992 SuperBrawl PPV show in Milwaukee.

  Based on the Liger matches and his performances as champion, he signed a three-year $225,000 per annum base with numerous incentive bonuses contract with Kip Frey, who was at the time running WCW. When Bill Watts came aboard, Pillman’s contract, unusually high for his position given the industry standards at that time, particularly as a lightheavyweight, caused an immediate dispute. Just before that time, Pillman’s potential really began to show for the first time as he turned heel, which was his true calling. Watts gave Pillman an ultimatum, either re-sign a lower priced contract, or be jobbed out, Pillman refused.

  After a short period of being jobbed in the opener nearly every night despite being among the company’s hottest workers at the time, with lots of internal pressure on him to cave in to Watts, he stood firm claiming he was going to become the highest paid opening match jobber in pro wrestling history until the situation of his jobbing and the reasons for it became an embarrassment for the company and both sides settled their problems in a solution that was largely face saving for both sides. In the wake of all the problems, Watts decided to drop the lightheavyweight division.

  Pillman’s career was back in limbo until he was put together as The Hollywood Blonds tag team with Steve Austin in 1993. Ironically, Austin complained against the idea at the time, not wanting to be a tag team wrestler, but the two ended up becoming good friends and even better partners, and were voted in the Observer poll, tag team of the year for that year. At the time people thought they could become the great tag team of this decade.

  The two captured the WCW tag belts from Ricky Steamboat & Shane Douglas on March 3, 1993 in Macon, GA. However, business went into the toilet during that summer, and when Ric Flair was signed back into WCW after leaving the WWF, a feud was put together with Pillman & Austin as the obnoxious young heels against Flair & Arn Anderson, building up to Flair’s first match in WCW on a Clash of the Champions. When that Clash drew only a 2.6 rating, still the lowest Clash rating in history, the booking committee put the blame on Pillman & Austin being a failure as a heel team, a conclusion that almost nobody watching at the time would agree with, and broke them up, with Pillman being put back in a babyface role sans any push. By this point, Pillman suffered a serious back injury and did very little wrestling for months.

  Outside the ring, his personal life, which he largely kept quiet about, had major ups and downs. He had a reputation, well deserved, of being a wildman with an apparently endless supply of beautiful women. He had one girlfriend of many years, Rochelle, who he knew from Cincinnati and lived with in Atlanta who was viciously stabbed in a break-in while he was on the road. Their break-up years later wound up in one tragedy after another. The two of them had a daughter, and he also had another daughter from another woman. Rochelle developed a major drug problem and Pillman was far from perfect himself which turned into a child custody battle that turned his and his new family’s life into a one-year-long nightmare.

  By this time Pillman had married a former Penthouse Pet, Melanie, who ironically had her own background around wrestling as being the one-time girlfriend in a stormy relationship with Jim Hellwig when he was riding high as one of the two biggest stars in the WWF. After a whirlwind romance, Pillman proposed to her at the Grand Canyon. It was typical Pillman apparent insanity, as he saw her photo in a magazine and immediately decided this was the woman he was going to marry. In 1993, in the middle of the child custody fight, Rochelle was supposed to pick up Brittany and never showed up. She had disappeared, and nobody, not her family nor friends could find her. While this was going on, Pillman was literally scared to death feeling he was about to become the white O.J. as he became the obvious lead suspect.

  Pillman, drinking heavily based on fear he was about to be arrested for something he didn’t do, decided to play amateur detective to clear himself and went traveling in the worst section of Cincinnati, carrying a photo of her and talking to the corner drug dealers. While he was there, the police were riding by and saw a fairly well-known local celebrity hanging with drug dealers in the worst part of town. They thought he had swallowed something and arrested him. As it turned out, he had one or two pain killers, without carrying the prescription, on him. He ended up plea bargaining down to a drunk driving offense once he proved he had a prescription for the pills on him and no other drugs were found. He was still under suspicion in his girlfriend’s disappearance, until a few weeks later she was found in Florida, totally messed up, when the car she and a few men she was with was pulled over.

  In late 1995, knowing his contract had only a few months remaining and with him still not receiving much of a push and fear, which was totally well founded at the time, that his high price tag would be cut, he decided to take his c
areer into his own hands. In Wood’s kitchen, the two devised one of the more unique approaches in wrestling history largely as an attempt to emulate the late Bruiser Brody and make his own break into superstardom.

  He became, both in the ring and often out of the ring as well, the “loose cannon.” Someone who could and would do anything at any given time. He became a reactionary right-winger on a Cincinnati radio station to get the gimmick over. He continually would do things and say things on live Nitro to seemingly put his position in jeopardy, and his behavior outside the ring around the wrestlers was all part of his work in convincing everyone that he had lost his mind. He had seriously talked with friends, most notably Terry Funk who became something of a secret mentor to him, about doing a publicity stunt where he’d run on the field and chain himself to the goal posts during the 1996 Super Bowl game.

  Within the company, only Eric Bischoff and Kevin Sullivan were aware that what he was doing on Nitro and outside the ring with the boys was a work, which is why he stayed on television even though Bischoff continually threatened to both publicly and privately say he was on loose ice and on the verge of being fired. The work continued to the point that Pillman had an on-air confrontation with Sullivan, the booker, which they worked to look like a match had gotten out of control. The angle was so well done that people believed Sullivan was attempting to rip out Pillman’s eye in a fake shoot angle, however Sullivan blew the credibility of the shoot part of the angle, much to Pillman’s chagrin who wanted to fool everyone all the time, the next week on television by using the incident as part of his interview to build up a rematch on a PPV.

  So Pillman took his fantasy reality one step farther, in what was billed as a “respect” match on February 11, 1996 in St. Petersburg, where the loser would have to say he respected the winner, against Sullivan, Pillman took a few shots, sarcastically said the famous line “I respect you, booker man,” and walked out of the ring, out of the building and out of the promotion. But where Bischoff and Sullivan, who thought they devised the angle with Pillman, thought the angle ended, it really had only begun.

  Pillman had talked them into actually firing him, to work everyone in the company and the business, getting TBS to send out the termination notice and everything. At the same time they had worked out a deal with ECW, which was supposed to be the renegade independent group, to slide Pillman over (Pillman largely worked out the deal himself with Paul Heyman and WCW approved it) and his appearing on ECW would theoretically give credibility to the fact Pillman really was fired from WCW for whenever his surprise return would take place.

  Although he never wrestled one match for ECW, nearly every angle and video he did during his brief tenure was memorable. At the same time, Pillman had to undergo another throat operation which would keep him out of action a few weeks. Desperate for ratings in the Monday Night war, WCW ordered Pillman to show up in the audience just a few weeks later, and Hulk Hogan, seeing the pop Pillman got, attempted to get Pillman booked onto the heel team in an infamous 2-on-8 match on the Uncensored PPV show on March 24, 1996 in Tupelo, MS.

  Due to Pillman’s throat surgery, his doctor sent a note to WCW saying that he couldn’t perform that soon. Pillman probably shouldn’t have wrestled, but under normal circumstances, he probably would have, balking more because his not-so-amazing clairvoyant powers told him the match, which included Tom “Zeus” Lister as Ze Gangsta and the late Jeep Swenson, would near the top of every list of the worst matches in the history of the industry, and he didn’t want to be a part of it. WCW continued to advertise Pillman and pressure him to perform and even during the pre-game show were saying he was going to be there even though he had firmly told them several days earlier he wouldn’t.

  Pillman was technically fired from WCW, a worked firing with only Sullivan and Bischoff in on it, although by this time the fact it had almost all been an angle (about the only “memorable” thing during that run that was truly a shoot was when Pillman was grabbing Bobby Heenan during a Clash match against Eddie Guerrero, and Heenan freaked out because he was afraid Pillman was going to accidentally hurt his bad neck, swore on the air and walked off) was pretty well established. This made him the most talked about wrestler on the inside of the business, and a free agent at the same time.

  He began negotiating with Vince McMahon, who initially was leery of dealing with him because Pillman, acting completely out of his mind, approached McMahon at the NATPE convention in Las Vegas. After assuring McMahon that everything he’d done was a work, and after Ross and Jim Cornette went to bat for Pillman since McMahon and everyone in wrestling had reservations about him because he was living his gimmick to a scary degree, McMahon decided to start serious negotiations.

  The original plan was to use the WWF, which at the time wasn’t offering guaranteed money, to up his price to Bischoff, figuring Bischoff and Sullivan didn’t want to lose the character they helped create. At the same time, there was the consideration, with him just weeks away from his 34th birthday, that this next contract signing would be the prime years of his career for business and he knew the top of the mountain at WCW was blocked with the Hogan clique and with Kevin Nash and Scott Hall arriving, while the field in WWF was more wide-open.

  The basic WCW plan was for him to form his own Four Horseman with Chris Benoit and two others, and feud with Flair and Anderson once again. It was a good spot, but at that point, he was looking for a shot at the top spot. With a babyface Shawn Michaels being groomed to be the long-term WWF champion, size wasn’t going to be a major issue in being the top heel in that company.

  McMahon offered a guaranteed deal, believed to be only the third or fourth time in history he’d done such a thing (although it soon become commonplace given the realities of the wrestling war), which caused Bischoff, who had low-balled earlier negotiations, to up his offer to the $400,000 range.

  While Pillman was in the catbird seat, just a few days from becoming a real-life hot commodity free agent in the midst of a competitive Monday Night wrestling war, he was still going out of his mind, staying up all night, calling everyone and doing everything at all hours trying to get advice on how to play the game to make the most money.

  Soon after purchasing a humvee, he apparently fell asleep at the wheel on 4/15, went off the road, and got thrown 40 feet into a field where he was lying in a pool of his own blood. His face was so swollen that his friends who visited him in the hospital really couldn’t even recognize him. By the end of the week, after surgery which included taking bone from his hip to reconstruct his ankle, he was released from the hospital. Since Pillman had been orchestrating works on the entire world to keep himself the most talked about name inside the industry, many within wrestling thought this was simply the latest chapter of a bizarre work. But this was real.

  Even though the future of his career in the ring looked questionable, neither Bischoff nor McMahon let up on the offer. Pillman claimed he’d been told he’d recover 100% from the injuries in a few months, although secretly he feared the worst. Eventually Pillman chose McMahon’s offer largely because internally he thought there was no choice in the matter since Bischoff wouldn’t eliminate the 90-day termination cycles from the contract, and Pillman, fearing the possibility of not being able to return to the ring, didn’t want to risk his family’s future on what was he believed could have turned into a short-term deal.

  WWF tried to make a big deal of Pillman’s signing, rushing him onto television in a failed attempt to close the ratings gap. Although months from being able to wrestle, Pillman was running around the country constantly on airplanes trying to keep his gimmick strong while being unable to wrestle. Doing so caused his ankle to not heal properly, and a few months later they had to re-break the ankle, do another reconstructive surgery, and start the procedure from scratch, with the end result being an ankle fused into a walking position.

  WWF created an angle with its top heel at the time, Steve Austin, which positioned Pillman as strongly as possible to explain the injury an
d an absence while he truly rested and recovered this time, for his return. Just a few days after surgery, in a controversial desperate attempt to establish a new Raw time slot, the WWF did the infamous gun angle where Austin broke into Pillman’s house where Pillman was with his “bereaved” wife, was held off by a shotgun, and the satellite lost transmission as they teased that shots had been fired. Pillman was largely kept home for the next several months, until resurfacing doing the announcing on Shotgun to build for his in-ring return after WrestleMania.

  His return as an active competitor is probably going to be the most criticized and second-guessed decision, hindsight being 20/20, stemming from this entire situation. Hindsight being 20/20, his death unfortunately may not have been a freak occurrence, but as a simple end result to an emotional mathematical problem, just as 1+1+1+1+1=5.

  You had a person who spent his life doing things athletically people told him he couldn’t do. He did them not only to stick it to those who doubted him, but to prove things to his toughest critic of all—himself. Although he did defy the odds and numerous medical authorities by even coming back, and his acting ability was likely to keep him in the forefront as a star for years, his physical limitations had to be mentally driving him crazy and the constant pain didn’t help. Everyone goes through bad periods in life that leave certain scars, and he went through far more than most people and the scars were very deep.

  The fact he couldn’t perform physically up to the level he could mentally, because he literally lived for nothing but his family and the wrestling business, took its toll on him. The fact was, unlike many who seem to take advantage of injuries while on a guaranteed contract, Pillman had guilt feelings that he wasn’t earning his money during the entire period he was out and felt he had to do whatever the company wanted to feel in his own mind that he was earning his big contract.