More Than Just Hardcore

by Terry Funk

  Some of the most outrageous characters we had in the Amarillo territory weren’t wrestlers at all; they were the promoters of the towns.

  Chief Little Eagle ran Hobbs, New Mexico, on an old air force base. God, what a rat-trap that place was! The closest thing to a shower in the building was a hose connected to a horse tank. Unfortunately, he never changed out the water in the tank, so the “shower” water got filthier every time it was used, because it just kept recycling through there.

  Little Eagle walked around with a .45 pistol sticking out of his waistband, and he’d wave it at anyone he got mad at.

  Our Albuquerque promoter was Mike London, and he had TV there Sunday mornings at 11 a.m. We’d have to leave Amarillo at 6 a.m. to get there. He had a one-day promotion. We’d go on TV that morning and beat the NFL and everyone else for viewers. Seriously, wrestling was the top-rated show there for years. Then, at 5 p.m. on Sunday he’d open up the box office and by God, they’d better be out of there by 9 p.m. or 9:30 p.m.

  Mike did his own ring announcing, introducing all the wrestlers, but he had some problems on the microphone. Sometimes Mike would forget who was in the ring, or who they were supposed to be. One time we had Nick Roberts out there under a mask as Mr. X, to fill in for a no-show, and London introduced him, saying, “Ladies and gentlemen, in this corner, from parts unknown … uh … NICK ROBERTS!”

  About every two years, Mike would have a robbery at the box office. He’d come into the locker room with his shirt torn up and a story about how he’d been beaten up and the money stolen. He always seemed to have some extra money after those weeks, and then he got an insurance payment to cover the “robbery!” It was like Albuquerque had a big holiday once every two years— Mike London Day!

  Actor Ernest Borgnine came to one of the shows in the late 1960s. Junior and I were talking to him backstage. Borgnine was amazed at the size of the crowd and couldn’t believe we ran the town every week.

  “This is really great,” he said. He started to say something else, but Mike walked up to him and asked him, “Do you have a ticket?”

  Borgnine didn’t.

  Mike asked, “Well, who are you?” “I’m Ernest Borgnine. I’m an actor.” “But you don’t have a ticket?” “No, I don’t have a ticket.” “Then get your ass out of here.”

  The other Texas promotions were undergoing some upheaval during my first years in wrestling. In 1967, Houston promoter Morris Sigel died, and his assistant, Paul Boesch, took over the city.

  In Dallas, a mid-1960s promotional problem broke out between longtime promoter Ed McLemore and Fritz Von Erich, who was trying to take over.

  Even though McLemore was the established promoter, my father backed Fritz because he and Fritz had always done good business together. Fritz talked to Dory Senior about taking Dallas over before he even tried it. My father was really a great deal of help to him. He had a great deal of respect for Fritz, and he liked him. They were friends.

  Professionally, Fritz Von Erich was an immediate box office draw wherever he went. It was heartbreaking to see what happened to his kids later on. Fritz outlived five of his six sons, and four of them had some kind of chemical problem. A lot of people tried to talk to Fritz about them, but I don’t think he was capable of listening because of who he was. He was their father, and he believed in those kids no matter what.

  I know Jack Brisco wrote a book stating that when he first came to Amarillo, Dory and I both beat him in a bunch of one-sided, two-minute squash matches after playing up his amateur credentials on TV. I can’t remember ever having a match with Jack that only went two minutes. I also don’t think pumping up his credentials so heavily is something we would have done in Amarillo—our audience was made up of people with names like Gomez, Martinez and Hernandez, and those folks didn’t give a shit about Oklahoma athletics.

  Jack Brisco was a great wrestler, though. His brother Gerald was also a hell of a wrestler and was a good babyface, even though he had that big potato nose (just kidding—Jerry actually has a lovely nose, really).

  We actually had the Briscos in as a heel tag team for a while, and they were great heels! It was a unique feud in the 1970s—they would come to Amarillo and we would go to Florida as heels to face them. The funny thing was, we could use the tapes from one place in the other place. So the Amarillo fans got to see us as heels in Florida, and the Florida fans got to see the Briscos as heels in Amarillo. It was kind of groundbreaking in a way, because it became more of an atmosphere like the Texas-Miami game in college football. Everyone had their local favorites.

  Junior and I also went into Georgia in the late 1960s, to battle the masked Assassins—Tom Renesto and Jody Hamilton. We had lines of people wrapped around Atlanta’s City Auditorium with people who couldn’t get in. We did a hot angle with them on TV, with the Funks as the babyfaces. The Assassins were a great team. Everywhere they went they did big business.

  The Georgia crowd was actually very similar to the Amarillo fans. And the product was very wrestling-oriented. Vince McMahon’s World Wide Wrestling Federation in the Northeast was seen as the place where there was more showmanship than wrestling at that time.

  One thing about Amarillo—it was the Funks’ territory, and that fact alone taught me a lot about wrestling. The best thing about being a performer in your own territory is that nobody can steal you—no one can take you out of there.

  But it has its drawbacks, too. From Verne Gagne in the AWA to the McMahons of WWE today, it can get easy to rely too much on yourself as a pushed character. The booker, or creator, needs to be someone who can live vicariously through others, so he can remove himself if need be.

  The excuse for a booker pushing himself too much is usually, “I know I can count on myself not to leave the promotion without notice, or hold us up for more money. I’m not going to leave myself.”

  It’s the greatest excuse in the world, and it lets you push yourself forever.

  The demise of a great many areas over the years was that the wrestlers who owned them inserted themselves into too many top slots, and when you do that you’re taking away an opportunity for your talent to prove itself, and it ultimately lessens the quality of what you’re putting out.

  Still, knowing the other NWA promoters made a big difference in my professional life. No matter where I ever went it was never, “Hi, how are you? What’s your name?”

  I already had a relationship with every one of them, and that helped me tremendously.

  CHAPTER 5

  Road Stories

  Travel in the old territories was just something you lived with. I would drive 250 miles to Abilene and back for a $25 payoff, thinking this was the greatest way of making a living in the world. It never even occurred to me there were people in the world making more than I was. We laughed a lot and shot a few rabbits along the way. Wed shoot rabbits, birds, anything that moved along the side of the road, and even the occasional cat in town.

  There were some real characters in Amarillo when I wrestled there in the early part of my career.

  I could tell Dick Murdoch stories all day. What was great about Murdoch was he was just completely goofy.

  When I first broke into the business, Dick was still in high school. Since he was about two years younger than me, he’d referee the matches. We went to Abilene one night, and the wrestlers didn’t even want the fans to know the referees traveled with them—that’s how serious they were about keeping appearances to protect the business.

  That night in Abilene, we did a deal where Dick, as the referee, got involved in the match, and he and I went at it in the ring.

  So later, we were getting ready to leave, and I said, “Dick, we can’t go out together. People will see us! You get in the trunk, and I’ll let you out as soon as we’re out of sight.”

  I shut the trunk and let him stay inside for the entire 165 miles to Odessa, and was he ever pissing and moaning!

  “Goddamn you, Funk! Let me outta here!”

  Finally, he just gave up
and went to sleep.

  And he never changed. In 1989, he, Mike Shaw (who wrestled as Norman the Lunatic), referee Tommy Young and I were on the road, and anytime Tammy Wynette came on the radio, Murdoch would give the high sign with his fingers crossed and bump me, as if to tell me he and she were real close. He never knew the broad! He didn’t know her from Adam, but he’d act like they were sleeping together for years!

  I used to like to change his country station while he was driving. I’d find some rock station, and he was like lightning, changing it right back.

  “Hey! Goddammit, you leave that goddamn thing alone,” he’d say.

  Murdoch was always afraid to go into a restaurant with me. He had his favorite places in every town, and I’d always screw things up by acting like an idiot. I’d ask where the restroom was and then walk into the kitchen, shit like that.

  One time we were in Saint Louis, and we were coming out of this bar next to a grocery store when I said, “Dick! You know what would be the funniest thing in the world? If you got into one of those grocery carts and let me push you in the cart. That would be really funny!”

  “All right, Terry!”

  So he got into a cart, and I started him off. Pretty soon he was going about 30 miles an hour when I slammed on the brakes and let him go. He went about a block and a half down the road, cussing me the whole way.

  “Goddammit, Funk, you son of a bitch!”

  I loved that goofy bastard. I really did.

  Dick Murdoch was really one of the greatest workers in the entire business, but he was temperamental. If Dick, for whatever reason, decided he was going to go out there and have a stinkeroo of a match, he’d have one. It would be stinkier than what anyone else in the world could do. But when he wanted to work, by God, he could work.

  I am serious about Murdoch being an incredible worker. His name actually came up once in the early 1970s as a possible NWA world’s champion, but he just didn’t have the political allies even to be strongly considered for it. The world title was a very political deal, as I would find out first-hand.

  What kind of champion would Murdoch have made? There’s no telling. He’d have drank a lot of beer every night. Hell, he probably would have traded the world belt for a case of beer on the right night.

  Murdoch had a son running around at six years old wearing a hat that held a beer and had a plastic straw going from the beer to his mouth. That kid would run around sucking on that beer, and Dick was so proud of him.

  “That’s my boy,” Dick would say.

  Murdoch also had a dog—a bull mastiff. One day, he said he was going to the lake and asked me to come around and check his place while he was gone. It was only about four miles from The Double Cross Ranch, so I said I would.

  He had been gone for about four days when I went down there to check the place out. I went to the pen where he kept that bull mastiff. Dick had put a big bowl of water and 50 pounds of dog food in there. I guess the dog was supposed to regulate how much he ate every day. Dick must have thought the dog would sit there and say, “OK, Dick’s going to be gone for six days, so I need to eat two pounds today and two pounds tomorrow.”

  Dick had the dog tied with a thick rope around his neck, and when I went out there, the 50 pounds of dog food was gone. That had made him thirsty, so he drank all the water. I guess he got hungry and thirsty because he had gotten so wound up that he’d pretty well hogtied himself with that rope. The dog’s tongue was hanging out of his mouth.

  It was really sad how Murdoch died in 1996. The Thursday before he died, he ran a show in Amarillo and did about 800 people, which was a big plus for him. Now, Dick Murdoch was one of the tougher guys that I knew in my life, but Murdoch’s idea about working out was, “Hey, I don’t need to do shit.”

  He’d do a set of bench press, get in two hours of bullshitting, and then he’d go home. He had a big gut on him, but that son of a bitch could go. I saw Murdoch run cross-field with John Ayers, and Dick ran about a 4.8-second 40-yard dash, big gut and all. Ayers only beat him by about three and a half yards.

  What I think Murdoch didn’t realize was that he had been keeping in shape by wrestling. Well, when he promoted his show in Amarillo he had done a match here and there, but hadn’t worked regularly in about a year. He was so enthusiastic about having such a good crowd that he went about 30 minutes that night.

  And to this day, I think that was the night it happened. Something happened internally to him. I think guys have to watch that. When you haven’t gone for that long, don’t put yourself out there for 30 minutes.

  The next night, Friday, he was pushing cattle at a rodeo. He and his wife owned a bar called Dick’s Dive, and he told his wife, “Dadgummit, honey, I’m not feeling good. I’m going to go on home. You go close up the bar.”

  She did, and then when she got home, he was lying on the couch. He had a bloody nose and he was dead. The bloody nose makes me think he had a stroke or something like that.

  Dick lived well when he was making money wrestling, but he had no money when he died. But this is an example of how Dick inspired loyalty among the people close to him. Janet, Dick’s ex-wife, paid all the funeral expenses, and she works hard for her money.

  Murdoch should be remembered, but there are things like the Wrestling Observer Hall of Fame, where Murdoch’s not in, and I don’t think he’ll ever make it in. I’d like to tell Dave Meltzer, the editor, to put him in, but he can’t just do that. He has to go by the balloters. I do think if you had the boys in the business vote, they’d vote him in. But you don’t have a true, balanced hall of fame if it’s just the boys voting.

  Murdoch and I certainly didn’t invent ribs (practical jokes) and ways to keep ourselves entertained on the road. In particular, jokes involving hitchhikers were always popular. Once when my father and Benny Trudell were traveling together, my father was driving when Benny spotted a hitchhiker in the distance.

  “Do-ree! Do-ree!,” he shouted, in his heavy, French accent. “There ees one! Let’s reeb (rib) the cock-suck-ier!”

  My father pulled onto the shoulder about 50 yards ahead of the hitchhiker, who came running. When he got about 20 feet from the car, my father took off, leaving the man in a cloud of dust.

  “Do-ree! Do-ree!,” Benny shouted, laughing. “That ees so funny! Do eet again!”

  My father stopped again, and knowing the hitchhiker wouldn’t believe him, stuck his head out the window and said, “Come on, I was just kidding.”

  The hitchhiker stood there and shook his head.

  “I promise we’ll wait for you this time,” my father said.

  Finally the hitchhiker came to the car. He got within inches of the back door when my father took off again. The hitchhiker was enraged, screaming every expletive known to man as he tried to run beside the car. Finally my father stopped again ahead of him, while Benny laughed hysterically.

  My father said, “Benny, you know what would be funny? Stick your ass out the window at the guy!”

  “Ha ha ha, Do-ree! I weel do eet,” Benny said, and he pulled down his pants and mooned the hitchhiker, who was screaming like a banshee in a rage.

  He raced up to the car, and as he got close, Benny said, “That ees so fun-nee, Do-ree! Here he comes! Let’s go!”

  Instead, my father turned and braced Benny’s shoulders with both hands, holding his ass in place outside the open window.

  The hitchhiker ran up and began pummeling Benny’s bare ass!

  Benny started screaming, “My God, Do-ree! My ass! He’s heeting me in the ass! Do-Ree!”

  My father finally let him go, and they raced away from the furious hitchhiker.

  Benny had his ass bruised, as well as his pride, because he knew the story would follow him the rest of his wrestling days.

  My father also rode a lot with Tokyo Joe, a wrestler who was actually from Hawaii. They were going to Borger, a town 50 miles away that they ran every Friday. The referee who was working the town that night was known as the office snitch, so J
oe and my dad decided to have a little fun at his expense.

  The referee always left at 6 p.m., so my father and Joe left at 5:30 and drove slowly, knowing that the referee, with his girlfriend in tow (she went to a lot of the matches with him) would pass them. Sure enough, the referee passed them soon enough.

  Then, my father pulled off the road and had Tokyo Joe get in the trunk of the car. The idea was, Joe would be inside the trunk, which was shut, but not locked. When they caught up to the referee/snitch and passed him, Dad was going to honk twice, which was Joe’s signal. Joe would then pop open the trunk and horrify the guy and his girlfriend with Joe’s ugly ass.

  Well, Dad got in such a hurry to pass the guy that he sped right by a highway patrolman. The patrolman came up behind Dad to pull him over, and Dad suddenly thought of something that would be even funnier than embarrassing the snitch and his girlfriend.

  He honked twice, and Tokyo Joe popped up from the trunk, only to find himself exposing his hairy ass at an officer of the law. I think he figured he was in hot water pretty quick, because that patrolman hit that siren immediately. Joe just reached up, grabbed the latch and pulled the trunk closed again.

  Of course, the patrolman let them go, but not until my father had gone to great pains to explain the joke that was being played.

  But when it came to ribbing, the greatest of all was “Killer” Karl Kox, especially on hitchhikers. Kox would make kung-fu artists out of every one of them.

  He’d pull up to the hitchhiker and roll down the window. Kox was a big, mean-looking guy, and he carried a glass eye that he put in when the occasion arose, so he looked pretty scary. He’d say, “You dumb son of a bitch! I’m gonna open up the goddamned door and come out there and kick your ass, you bastard!”