Believe it or not, even while I was a SEAL, I had participated in the peace movement. I marched at peace rallies. I admit it wasn’t so much because of my great love of peace as it was because of my great love of female companionship. To the women in the movement, I was the poor beleaguered victim of the system, sent off against his will to fight this horrible war. They didn’t realize the navy had no draft!
I loved the braless thing. I’m very heterosexual. I’d see women out burning their bras, and I’d go over with a lighter, “Can I help?” I did participate seriously, though, in the antidraft movement. To this day, I’m against the draft. I believe that the military is much stronger if it’s an all-volunteer organization.
In San Diego and Coronado, I met up with some local bikers, the Mongols. Soon after, I started riding and hanging out with them. While I was still waiting for my official discharge, I decided to become a “prospect,” a candidate for Mongols membership. Prospecting is a little like BUD/S. You become a gofer, and the full-fledged members go out of their way to mess with you. They’d make you do push-ups. But after what I’d been through in the SEALs, this was nothing. I could do push-ups all day.
It was a new adventure. I’d ride onto base on my Harley, wearing my colors, then take them off and get into my navy uniform. Then at the end of the day, I’d take off my navy uniform and put it in a locker, put on my colors, and ride off on my Harley.
I was into the biker mystique and the biker lifestyle. I loved riding Harleys. In those days, when you bought your first Harley, you also got a pair of what they called “Originals”—Levi’s jeans. From the day you first put them on, you never wash them. After a while, they got so covered in oil and stuff that on hot summer days the oil would turn to liquid again and come off on my hands. I still have that same pair, still unwashed, in the garage.
The president of the Mongols was a huge, big Mexican named James “Fatman” Rivera. Many bikers have big potbellies. They aren’t exactly the cleanest guys on the planet. We were the largest club in Southern California, bigger than Hell’s Angels. We were 90 percent Mexican. I was one of the few white guys who could ride into East L.A. and not be bothered, because of the patch I wore on my back. I was a gringo, but they figured I must be OK if I rode with the Mongols. I’ve always had a thing for dark-haired women. Terry has dark hair. The Asian women I met in Olongapo had dark hair. And the Mexican women I met when I was riding had dark hair. Being accepted in that community had its advantages.
Technically, you might call the Mongols a gang, but that word gives the wrong impression. The biker mystique was mostly created by the movies, and the bikers started trying to live up to the image. Everyone assumed we rode around and took over little towns, like Marlon Brando did in The Wild One. Mostly, we were about riding Harleys and enjoying the freedom of life on the road. We wanted to be left to ourselves. We didn’t want trouble. If anyone messed with us, we would defend ourselves; we didn’t take shit from anybody. But we had a lifestyle, and we just wanted to be left alone to enjoy it. We weren’t looking for trouble. Unfortunately, trouble sometimes has a way of following you.
We used to ride onto an Indian reservation, slip the chief a few bucks, and throw a party on Indian land. The cops couldn’t do anything to us because we were inside the borders of a sovereign nation. They’d sit on the highway and watch, but they couldn’t touch us.
I didn’t stay in the Mongols long, but I rose to prominence quickly. I was hard-core to begin with, and they respected me for being a SEAL. When I was voted in, I became sergeant at arms, which was third in command of our chapter. But eventually, after I got my patch and became a full member, I started to see that it was a dead-end trip. I wanted to do more with my life. There were guys in the club, forty, fifty years old, who really had nothing but their Harleys. They lived in crappy little houses, and their only ambition in life was to have the best-looking Harley. I wanted more out of life than that. So I rode with the club for only about nine months, then I came home to Minnesota and started college.
I enrolled in North Hennepin Community College as a twenty-three-year-old freshman on the GI bill. I really didn’t know what I wanted to take at the time, and I really didn’t care, so I didn’t waste time and money going to a university. I had a vision of playing pro football. I figured if I started out playing at a community college, I could get a scholarship and go on to a university from there.
It was at North Hennepin that I made my acting debut. They were putting on Aristophanes’ play The Birds that semester, and one day while I was working out in the weight room, the instructor, Don Duran, came in, looking to cast the part of Hercules. He looked at me and decided I would be perfect, so he recruited me. It was fun, watching it go from all of us standing on the stage reading lines, to the full, polished production that sold out the four nights that it played in the auditorium. I went back there for a visit about two weeks before the inauguration, and they had me autograph the stage.
I also took introduction to theater and beginning acting; I had fun with it. But this was not yet the start of my Hollywood career, because by that time I had seen “Superstar” Billy Graham, and I had figured out what I wanted to do with my life. I took the acting classes because I knew they’d come in handy for my new career as a professional wrestler.
Wrestling is theater. I’ve always referred to wrestling as “ballet with violence.” It’s got drama, just like the shows you go to see onstage. But saying it’s “theater” is not the same thing as saying it’s fake. The “ballet” part is that maybe some of the moves are staged, choreographed, planned in advance, but the violence is real. I know; I’ve felt it. And feeling is believing. There’s no acting training in the world that can teach you to wrestle painfree.
I studied hard all that semester, even while I was training for wrestling. I started out the semester with a solid 4.0, straight As. But then I met Terry, and my 4.0 took a nosedive down to a 3.3. See what women do to you? They ruin all your good intentions! (Joke.)
While I was going to college, I got a job as a nightclub doorman, which is a polite term for a bouncer. On Thursday nights they’d have that sexist institution known as Ladies’ Night, where women got to go in and drink cheap. The bar owners knew that if they could entice the women in there with half-price drinks, they would soon be followed by a bevy of thirsty guys.
At that point, I was still having a tough time relating to American women. Life in Southeast Asia was so different, it was hard to readapt to a whole other set of rules. I wasn’t doing well on the dating scene with Minnesota girls.
I was working the door that night along with two cops. Terry walked in, and our eyes met. Her eyes were so beautiful. A feeling came over me, and I had to meet this woman; I had to know who she was. She showed her ID to one of the cops at the door, and then she headed toward me. As she approached, I was thinking, “God, what do I say? I’ve got to say something to her, I can’t just let her walk on by.” So I said, “Can I see your ID please?”
She said, “But I just showed him.”
I said, “I don’t care how old you are, I just want to know your name.” That was my line. But instead of just telling me her name, she went all through her purse and pulled out her ID again. Later, though, she admitted she’d felt the same way about me when our eyes first locked across the room.
At that time I was already evolving into “The Body.” I’d never gotten the chance to be a hippie, so the first thing I did when I got out of the navy was grow my hair down to my shoulders and bleach it blond. I was already pumping iron like a madman and training hard for wrestling, so my body was bulking out. I was working out three nights a week at the Seventh Street Gym at Seventh and Hennepin Avenue with an ex–pro wrestler named Eddie Sharkey. With the bleached blond hair I looked a good bit like my hero, “Superstar” Billy Graham, who was really hot then, so I was cultivating that look for myself. I’d decided that if I was going to get into wrestling, I was going for it with all I had.
That
night, when Terry and I sat down and started talking, the first thing she said to me was, “God! You look just like ‘Superstar’ Billy Graham!” That’s how I found out that Terry always watched wrestling on TV before she went out on Saturday nights.
“I ought to,” I said, devil that I am, “he’s my older brother.” I had to say something.
Actually, it turned out that she hated him. Graham was a villain, and he was always bragging. But we got talking about wrestling. She remembered when she used to watch wrestling with her dad as a kid. Here I had something in common with this beautiful woman, and it just happened to be wrestling, my new passion.
She excused herself, went over to the friends she’d come in with, and told them, “You’re not going to see much of me tonight. I’ve got to talk more with that guy over there at the door.” We talked all night. It was love at first sight. Although, it’s not really true that you can have love at first sight. Love comes later. But you can have lust at first sight; or at least I know I can. We definitely fell in lust that night.
I got her phone number and called her the next day to invite her out on a date. I took her to a place we South Siders called the Yacht Club. It was actually a quiet little neighborhood bar called the Schooner. It was the kind of place where you could chew tobacco and spit on the floor. That worked for me, because I’d taken up chewing tobacco while I was in the service. My dad had even gone there when he was working. I wanted to take Terry to meet some of the South Siders who hung out there, so I had worked hard to convince her that it was a nice, quiet, safe place right across from the Third Precinct police station.
I picked her up and brought her to the Schooner that night. We weren’t in there for more than ten or fifteen minutes when three or four huge cops burst in the door, yanked this guy off a bar stool, and started dragging him toward the door. He resisted, and they beat the shit out of him right in front of our eyes and hauled him away. It turned out he deserved it: He’d been roughing up his girlfriend in the parking lot, and she’d walked across the street to the precinct and filed charges on him. Quiet neighborhood bar. Yeah.
That was our first date. Believe it or not, she agreed to go with me on a second one. That time we went to the movies. Unfortunately, she let me pick the movie. Terry and I do have our differences, especially when it comes to movies. Even knowing her the short time I had, and especially given the fact that we were on a date, I should have guessed that she’d have been happier to see something like Ryan O’Neal in Love Story. Instead I took her to see Charles Bronson in Death Wish.
Even after that, she still wanted to keep seeing me. We started dating a lot and got deeply involved. At first, the other guys resented her a little, because I had always hung out with them in my spare time and now Terry was taking priority over them. I was the first of the South Siders to have a serious relationship. If you’d have told them back in high school, back before I won that first bet on New Year’s Eve, that I’d be the first to have a serious girlfriend, none of them would have believed it. Imagine what they’d have thought if they found out I’d be the first one to get married, too.
About that time, I was finishing my training as a wrestler and was sending out pictures to different promoters around the country. I got a call from Kansas City, Missouri, from the promoter Bob Geigel. Eddie Sharkey had talked to him earlier and told him, “I got you a kid here that I think has the potential to be a great wrestler.” When Geigel asked me to come down for a try-out, I jumped in my car, said good-bye to Terry, and headed down to Kansas City. I had a beautiful girlfriend back home, two hundred dollars in my pocket, a Chevy with a dented front fender, and no idea what I was getting myself into.
I was down there for a couple of months, and I really missed Terry. She came down to visit me once, and she cried when she saw how I was living. I was staying in a twenty-three-dollar-a-week hotel; I guess it was what you would call a flophouse. It didn’t bother me. I’d lived in worse when I was in the service. But I missed her even more after she left. I knew that I loved her, and I wanted to spend the rest of my life with her. I just knew it. But being the typical noncommittal bachelor that I was, at first I just asked her to come down and live with me. She had a job and her own apartment; she was very self-sufficient, and she said, “I ain’t leavin’ up here unless I get a bigger commitment than ‘come on down and live with me.’” So, over the phone, I said, “Well, I guess I’ll just have to say ‘Will you marry me?’” And she started crying and said yes.
We set up the whole wedding over the phone, and when it was time, I came home from wrestling for a week. Terry’s mom tried to talk her out of it; she didn’t want to see her giving up her independence so soon. She was only nineteen. But Terry has always said she was sure. She said she knew that this guy was going places, and she knew for sure she wanted to go on that journey.
Even on the day of the wedding, Terry’s mom was still trying to talk her into putting it off. But my mom was all for it. Terry had gotten close to my mom during the time that I was gone, while we were having our whirlwind courtship over the phone. She ended up being closer to my mom, in some ways, than I ever was.
Terry and I actually knew each other for only nine months before we got married. We were married in a little place called Timothy Lutheran Church in Saint Louis Park, a suburb of Minneapolis. Terry had made all the arrangements, sent out all the invitations, and handled just about everything except the date. I had promised myself that I wouldn’t get married before I was twenty-four, so I made sure our wedding date was set for July 18, 1975: three days after my twenty-fourth birthday.
The prime directive of wrestling is to protect your opponent as you would protect yourself. It’s their living, just as it’s yours. You have to learn to make the match as realistic as possible without doing real harm. Those body slams and turnbuckles—where the ropes are connected to the corner ring posts—they jar you, they bump you around, they certainly don’t feel real nice. But it’s your opponent’s responsibility to make sure that nothing that he does to you is going to cause you an injury, and it’s your responsibility to do the same for him.
So how do you make sure, when you’re slamming somebody with a folding chair for example, that you’re not going to injure him? Make sure he’s flat. Make sure you’re not hitting any vital parts. This is what you go through seven months of training to learn how to do. None of what you see is staged or rehearsed—it’s all spontaneous—but the technique behind it all is an art form that requires careful discipline.
But that in no way means that it’s fake. When someone body-slams you, they won’t injure you if they’re doing it right, but, rest assured, you feel it! When you’re in wrestling, you’re in pain so often you learn to take it for granted. I’ve always said feeling is believing. If you think wrestling is fake, get in the ring and let a professional wrestler body-slam you a couple of times!
It’s very much like dancing, like doing a waltz. Where in dancing it’s the man who leads, in wrestling it’s the bad guy who leads. The “heel,” as he used to be called, is the one who is driving the match. Back then, you were either a heel or a babyface. Today it’s different—today everyone’s a personality—but back then you were clearly one or the other. That was the shtick: It was a battle of good versus evil, babyface against heel. I was very certain from the beginning where I fit into the scheme of things: I wanted to be a heel.
You get a lot more creative opportunities as the bad guy. There are more challenges. You’re responsible for working up the audience, so you get out there and yell and scream and interact with them—far more than the babyface ever does. But one big reason I wanted to be the bad guy was because of that rebellious streak in me. I always rooted for the bad guy when I was a fan cheering “Superstar” Billy Graham just because it was what you weren’t supposed to do. The heels have their fans, too.
You establish yourself as a heel by taking on a persona that everybody can have fun hating. I knew that everybody hated beach bums; they figured
that beach bums spent their lives doing nothing but hanging out in the surf, getting tans, and chasing women. So I kept my bleached blond hair, wore outrageous sunglasses, earrings, and the big feather boas that later became my trademark. Then I named myself after a highway in California.
You also let the fans know you’re a bad guy by playing dirty. You cheat whenever you can, the more outrageously the better. You’re arrogant and boastful, you never tell the truth, and at the end of the match, no matter how things go, you always scream to the crowd that you’ve been ripped off. Or you use the old standby: hollering that the referee is biased against you and is sabotaging the match.
Typically, you’d fight somebody three times in a row or more and build up the hostility between the two of you. The babyface almost always prevailed, though it was the promoter who made that call. As a bad guy, it was usually my job to lose. But even though I’d lose the match, I still won, because I drew people in. The fans loved to hate me. And they had pretty short memories—even when I lost, I’d be back next week and nobody would even remember what had happened the last time.
My strength was in working the crowds—I was good with the psychological stuff. If you could get the crowds involved, the job was that much easier to do. I’d wait until the referee’s back was turned, and then I’d pull my opponent’s hair. The fans would start squealing, “He pulled his hair! He pulled his hair!” And I’d yell back, “Shaddap!” Of course, the referee could call only what he saw. It really was a three-way endeavor, because the referee had to be sure to turn his back every once in a while to give me the opportunity to pull my dirty tricks. That’s called building up your heat.
It’s very much a performing art, only with violence. You work on a dramatic build. You have moments when you build and moments when you settle back in, but if you and your opponent are really working well off each other, the two of you eventually build toward what’s called a peak. Then you go into the finish. Usually the match ended either when the babyface pinned the heel or, more likely, when the heel did something to get disqualified so that he didn’t have to risk getting pinned.
I Ain't Got Time to Bleed Page 9
