“Are you sure? Because they look like they want to kill me and burn my body.”
But it turned out she was right. I was fine. Thank God.
Back when I was in Oregon, main-event matches were two out of three falls. In between falls, you had to go back to the dressing room. Imagine what that was like for us villains: we had just beat up the fan’s favorite and people are screaming for revenge and we could barely walk to the back because there were no barricades to keep people away from us. After a short break of five or six minutes, we had to do it all over again to get back into the ring so that the match could proceed. Often I barely reached the dressing room before it was time to go back. I’m telling you, guys have it easy today. And San Francisco was even worse than Portland. People would jump us in the ring — there must have been nearly fifty people trying to get to us one night. I was scared many times, but that specific night I was sure I was going to die. If you want to read more about that night, well, you’re going to have to finish this chapter first. I’ll tell you all about it in Chapter Eight . . .
Even if it was occasionally scary, it was still a wonderful time in my life. As a top wrestler, life is great — you just need to be careful.
* * *
Rocky Johnson was dating Ata, Peter and Leah’s daughter. Eventually she became pregnant, and it seemed like all the Samoans wanted to kill him. I had to play peacemaker and get everyone to accept the situation. When that baby was born, they called him Dwayne. (I always felt they should have called him Pat, but that’s just me.)
I would fight Dwayne’s dad and grandfather, and then his mom would bring him backstage and I would bounce the baby Rock on my knees. It was an experience in the powerful cycle of life . . . Just as it was later when I would work with that same baby boy, now a man, as he headlined WrestleMania.
Looking back, I was blessed to gain the trust of my colleagues everywhere I went, and lucky to be matched against some of the best wrestlers from the get-go. I learned so much from them. When I became more seasoned myself, other guys would come to me to help them with their matches. I think it was because they didn’t want to have to talk to Roy Shire, who was yelling most of the time.
I never minded people criticizing or teaching me — as long as they weren’t yelling at me.
There is no goddamn reason to yell. If you explain what I did wrong, I can learn. I will never forget this: when I first started wrestling main events in San Francisco, no one ever told me there was anything wrong with my shit. And then finally, after watching my match, a dear friend of mine, Pedro Morales, and I had this conversation.
“Amigo, we need to talk. You are the best goddamn villain I have ever seen wrestle, but that goddamn thing you do in the corner . . . Your kicks? Your kicks look like shit.”
“What?”
“Your kicks in the corner look like shit.”
Thank you, Pedro.
Nobody ever wants to tell the top guy what he’s doing wrong. I’ve never forgotten that moment. He was my friend, and because he was my friend, he was ready to tell me the truth. Now, don’t get me wrong: that doesn’t mean I wouldn’t try to play a joke on my friend . . .
During a battle royal, everyone is in the ring. Well, one night, Pedro was booked in one and I wasn’t. Alone in the locker room, I took a big padlock and put it on Pedro’s bag. Probably not my smartest move, because, let me tell you, you don’t mess with Pedro Morales. No one else would dare play a joke on him. Each time someone was eliminated from that match, they came through the curtain and saw me: I gave them feedback on what they’d done in the ring, as usual, so no one would suspect me. When Pedro came to the back and saw his bag, he went crazy. He threw his bag and chairs everywhere.
“Nobody touches my shit,” he said, furious.
Everyone was looking at Mr. Fuji at that point, because he was usually the guilty party in that type of situation. Fuji looked at me, asking with his eyes if it was me. I made sure he understood it wasn’t by asking him the same question the same way. I never found out what Pedro did with his bag that day, but we did laugh about it. Today the truth can finally be told.
Roy Shire, however, was never a laughing matter. Roy was different. No matter how good you were in the ring, he didn’t care about your moves. All that mattered to him was the psychology. He didn’t care if you did something spectacular, he cared if it meant something.
I’m grateful that I learned that from him, because that’s my role today. I get to talk with the top guys and tell them what they did wrong or what they can improve upon, the stuff no one else will have the balls to tell them. And I love my job. Because a lot of the guys want to learn and they want to know how to get better and do things right.
With Shire in San Francisco, I started to work for the office, helping to run shows in some towns for the first time. Strangely enough, I never had a problem with the wrestlers not wanting to do what I needed them to do. I realized that this was something I enjoyed very much, because of the creativity involved, almost right away. I was lucky that I’d learned and understood the right way to do this kind of thing because of experience. Some people spend their life in the business and will never get it, because they only see things from a personal perspective, because it’s always about them. With the broader view of my understanding of what’s best for business, I could transition to working backstage once my in-ring career was over.
Wrestlers need feedback, and if you want to be a good teacher, you need to build trust with them by telling them both what’s right about their performance and, more importantly, what’s wrong. Today, I’m no longer in charge of specific talent or matches, but, often enough, one of the guys will come to me and ask what they should do or, even better, what I think about an idea of their own. I don’t pull punches; I tell them it’s shit when it’s shit, but I tell them why. And I also always try to explain how I think they might best reach the goal of their match. Sometimes, when I’m not at a TV taping, out of the blue, I’ll text some of the guys when they do something really great, because it’s hard to do what they do and to get it right. That positive feedback is important to their confidence and the trust we build with them.
I LEFT MY HEART IN SAN FRANCISCO
“I faced it all and I stood tall and did it my way”
While my professional career was reaching a zenith, both in the ring and in the office, I was about to experience, to that point, the most devastating loss of my life.
As I’ve said, as I was growing up, my mother was the only person in my family who truly understood me. We were very close. My mother always had a weak heart. At times, she was very sick and she would have to stay in bed for days. No one was allowed to go in there with her at those times, for as far back as I can remember. Never one to listen, I would sneak into her room and lie beside her, holding her in my arms. I always loved my mother. She spent her entire life taking care of me and my family.
When I was on top in San Francisco, you just couldn’t take a day off out of nowhere. But when I got the call that she was very sick and that it would be a good idea if I came back to see her, I didn’t hesitate to fly home immediately. When I saw her with the oxygen mask on, I fell to my knees, crying like a baby — I realized how bad things were. I spent the night at my sister’s and then, the following day, my mom didn’t need the oxygen anymore.
“Pat, it’s because you showed up; she’s doing better. It has to be,” my sister said.
As I was about to go back to San Francisco, she was back on her feet. I could hold her in my arms and give her a big kiss before going back to work. I wasn’t sure if I was ever going to see her again and we were both crying. About a month later, on January 22, 1972, I got the call I feared the most: she was gone. She was only fifty-eight years old. It really hurt me — I felt it in every bone in my body. I can’t describe the pain I was in. She was the rock in my life, the one person who was always there for me, who truly understood
who I was. We all come from our mothers, and it was as if I had lost a part of myself with her gone.
I was on the other side of the world when I received the news. On top of it all, I needed to work the main event that night, in a cage in Sacramento. I did the goddamn wrestling match, then drove back to San Francisco to catch a red-eye flight that brought me to Montréal just in time for the funeral. I went straight from the airport to the funeral. And then I had to go back to the West Coast almost right away because I was booked. That is how we did things. I had told Roy I couldn’t miss the funeral, but I could not afford to stay longer. I was needed at work. It had been eight years since I had brought her to Vegas, and in her bedroom in one of her drawers, the bottle of champagne the flight attendant had given her was still there.
The loss of my mother didn’t bring me closer to my dad. And he ended up meeting someone else and beginning a new relationship a few years later. It never became easy between the two of us. Once I came back for the Christmas holidays and stayed with him, but no matter what I tried we were never able to connect.
Let me try to explain just how stubborn he could be. He had an old television set that was in such bad shape that every sound was distorted. You couldn’t enjoy anything on that piece of shit. But he would say that the problem wasn’t going to last and that the sound would get better. Right. I spoke with the rest of the family and asked them how he could watch television like that.
“We tried to get together to buy him a new one, but he would not hear of it because of his damn pride” was what they said.
Anyway, I didn’t ask permission; I went to the store and I bought him a television set. When it got there, my dad was huffing and puffing. I told him I’d bought it and that the old one was going in the garbage. I also said, “If you don’t want the new one, when I’m gone, you can throw it in the garbage, too.” He went quiet and didn’t argue. He even finally thanked me.
I wanted to show him that he wasn’t the boss of me anymore and that he should enjoy life instead of being miserable. For years, that’s as good as it ever got between us.
When André the Giant worked in San Francisco, he was happy to meet me because I spoke French. We quickly became friends. When he arrived in town, my friend Davey Rosenberg, a publicist who got me a lot of coverage in the papers, arranged to take pictures of André in a Cadillac with his head sticking out of the sunroof. Of course, that made the papers; Rosenberg was so good at generating that kind of thing.
One time, André had a two-day break before heading back on the road, so I invited him to come to my place to relax.
“You can sleep. Louie is going to cook. It will be great.”
That night, after we ate, he went to bed and slept for two days. I actually had to wake him to check if he was still alive.
On another occasion, I went to Las Vegas with him because our television broadcast played there. We were going to see Tom Jones; waiting in line to get in, like everyone else, we stuck out like a sore thumb. I’m not sure if they knew who we were, but they gave us really good seats. Anyway, after the show, we both needed the bathroom. I found a hanger in there and had an idea. I decided to hook it onto the back of his jacket. Without knowing it, André proceeded to walk around the casino with this hanger, complete with a ten-dollar bill attached to it, dangling from his back. I think because no one was used to the surreal sight of someone that big, no one wanted to tell him. Finally, an old lady came up to him and pointed it out, asking what was going on. I was busted — and we had a big laugh about it.
We shared a suite on that trip, with two giant, king-size beds. As we were going back up to our room, this beautiful petite girl came out of the elevator and we almost ran into her.
André said, “Excusez moi.”
And she answered right back, “Excusez moi aussi.”
They started to speak a little French together, but I was tired and we were drunk and I pushed André into the elevator.
I was asleep for less than half an hour when I heard noises. I got up to find André dressing.
“Where are you going?”
“Don’t worry, boss. Half an hour, then I will be right back.”
He came back forty-five minutes later with the French lady. I was in my own bed, mind you, but I had a front-row seat for the rest of the evening. It was quite the sight.
During my time in San Francisco, the hippie movement blossomed. It was unbelievable for someone from my humble Montréal background. For a while, it really was all peace and love. And I was known everywhere I went. We traveled to Las Vegas every two weeks and were always treated like stars.
For the first time in my life, I met a lot of other gay people from all walks of life. There were many gay bars and we went to a lot of shows. After a while, I got tired of it. I wanted something . . . different. I was stuck in a gay-only world. Gay bars, gay restaurants, gay theaters, gay friends: it became too much. I wanted to get away from it. I told Louie we could have people over, but that I didn’t want to go out all the time. We decided to move just outside of San Francisco. It was a good life, sure, but I had learned an important lesson: you can have too much of a good thing.
As far as work goes, I had become more popular than I’d ever imagined in my wildest dreams. The territory was lucky to have Davey Rosenberg helping to get us coverage. He’d made a lot of money getting publicity for topless bars in San Francisco — the first city in the U.S. to have that type of establishment. He had great connections in the media. He was a real nice guy and we became good friends and had a lot of fun. One day, he said, “Pat, I have an idea that involves you and the lieutenant governor of California. We are going to have a photo op.”
“You gotta be kidding.”
“Pat, let me handle this.”
And handle it he did. The lieutenant governor, Mervyn M. Dymally, watched wrestling every Wednesday night with his wife, sitting in the front row, with security and everything. He was a big fan. Rosenberg called and spoke with Dymally’s secretary. He arranged for me to meet the lieutenant governor of California on the steps of the Capitol.
The lieutenant governor was excited about the arrangements: a 10 a.m. Monday morning meeting. The plan was for him to “give” me one of my jackets, the one I would wear in 1976 to promote the bicentennial of the United States. That’s when Rosenberg told me what he really had in mind.
“When he gives it to you, pick him up on your shoulder, and give him an airplane spin. We’ll have all the photographers there and we will make the papers for sure.”
The next day we made the front page.
We also did that with the mayor of San Francisco, George Moscone, just a week or two before he was killed with Harvey Milk.
In those days, it was really quite rare to get front-page exposure for wrestling. The sports journalists pretty much all hated Roy Shire and the paper barely even published results. Roy was always his charming self with journalists . . . When Rosenberg introduced me to the same journalists, they loved me. Every once in a while, they’d write something good about me. Today, that probably seems like no big deal, but back in those days, it meant something every time.
When you play the good guy, the threat of physical danger from the public disappears, but you’ve got new responsibilities: you need to be nice to everyone, all the time. And sometimes that’s a different kind of pain. It’s not always easy. Still, overall, I met more people who had a positive impact in my life than negative.
There was one young fan who was always at the television taping in Sacramento with his mother. One day, I asked them to check on my car and gave him two bucks for their troubles. Later they invited me to eat at their home. I’m still in touch with the kid today — he’s no longer a kid and he lives in Las Vegas now. And he still loves wrestling as much as he did back then.
The other pearl I got to know while I was in San Francisco was Dorothy Hopkins. She always seemed to be
ringside at the Cow Palace, filming the action with her 8mm camera. Any footage I have from that era is a gift from her. She was a big fan, and she loved me very much. She made me all of my ring jackets. In total, she made twenty-six jackets for me, without me ever asking her for anything. She would just surprise me with them, and I think her payoff was seeing me wear them to the ring. Louie and I became friends with her, and we invited her to some of the parties we had at our house. She really was quite the seamstress.
Not all interactions were quite so positive — crazy shit still happened. One day I was served papers — in a paternity suit. The girl must have been about fourteen when I’d met her for the first time, and she was always at the matches with her mother. They were into my character, big time. They were there early to take pictures and get autographs, and they brought me gifts. That went on for years. Then she disappeared for a while.
By now you know it was quite improbable that I was anyone’s father. One night, out of nowhere, they were both back at a show.
“Why are you doing this to me? You know it’s not true,” I said.
“No, Pat, it’s not you,” she said, in tears.
I learned that she had a boyfriend, an older guy, who got her pregnant. He turned around and accused me of being the father because he was jealous. The girl still had pictures of me everywhere at home, and he was looking for a way out of his responsibility.
It went to court and everything. The judge asked me only one question: “Did you have a sexual relationship with this girl?”
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