More Than Just Hardcore

by Terry Funk

  I had been working with studio musicians, and when we finished they presented me with an electric guitar that I couldn’t play, but I wanted to bring it back because my kids might have wanted to bang on it someday.

  I was only in Japan for a day before flying right back to the States. As I came through customs, with my long hair and guitar, the customs man said, “Come with me.”

  He took me into a room and asked, “Where are you coming from?” “Well,” I said, “I was coming over from Japan, you know, just cutting an album.”

  “You got a guitar in there, sonny?”

  I said I did, and they searched me like I was Public Enemy No. 1.

  I had some Motrin, an anti-inflammatory, and they broke up my pills, pulled down my pants, made me spread my cheeks, and stuck a finger up my ass! I think it was his finger. Hell, I hope it was his finger!

  I swear to God, they tore everything apart in every bag I had. They thought they had a goddamned hippie, punk-rock singer, or something. Hell, who knows? Maybe the guy knew who I was. He had an Indian look to him. Maybe he was a Brisco fan. Maybe that was a tomahawk he’d stuck up my ass.

  Baba inspired a great deal of loyalty on the part of guys who wrestled for him in All Japan, the group he formed after Japan Pro Wrestling collapsed. I would like to say it was only because of money, but that wasn’t all of it. I often like to think of myself as a good soldier, and I think a lot of Baba’s success came from his ability to select good soldiers. Those soldiers transformed into money guys over a long period of time.

  When Inoki formed New Japan, he didn’t try to get the Funks on board. He didn’t reach out for very many established stars. Inoki went at it as very much a loner. When he started up I knew there was no way he’d be anything but successful. He landed the TV slot he needed, and with his talent and ability, there was no question he was going to make it over there. Inoki had talent, and he had a mind for the business. He still continues to be creative in 2005. But it wasn’t a matter of making it at that time. It was a matter of one side preventing the other from finishing the war, because in Japan, with those two organizations it was a 15-year battle that we thought would only end with one of them swallowing the other. Many times they had us in the casket, but didn’t get that last nail in, and vice versa.

  The war between Inoki and Baba had effects in the States, as the NWA promoters argued over which side to give NWA backing to. Inoki had the support of Los Angeles promoter Mike LaBell, WWWF promoter Vince Sr. and San Francisco promoter Roy Shire. My father backed Baba, as did NWA president and St. Louis promoter Sam Muchnick, Carolinas promoter Jim Crockett, Portland promoter Don Owen, Oklahoma promoter Leroy McGuirk, Houston promoter Paul Boesch and Georgia’s Jim Barnett. It was almost like the major population centers on the two coasts against the Midwest, but we ended up having the votes, and the NWA went with Baba.

  Florida promoter Eddie Graham was almost in the middle, but he was leaning toward Inoki. He and my father had a friendship, and I think if my father wasn’t there, he’d have gone with Inoki totally, because of ties between Hiro Matsuda (one of Florida’s top wrestlers) and Inoki.

  Six years later, we watched as our rival tried to bury us by making himself a superstar on a completely different level. Inoki put on a show where he had a boxer-versus-wrestler match with Muhammad Ali. It was a big undertaking, with the match going out over closed-circuit television into arenas nationwide. Local wrestling promoters would show their own cards, then switch to the feed of Ali-Inoki.

  I knew that show would have been the coup de grace for us if it had been successful, so I was very happy to see that it wasn’t. It was a true stinkeroo.

  We were almost always over as babyfaces in Japan, but the match that really pushed us over the top was a 1977 tag match against The Sheik and Abdullah the Butcher. That match was really hot, and both the Sheik and Abdullah were excellent.

  The Sheik truly could convince you he was the meanest bastard in the world. Hell, when he’d come to Amarillo to wrestle and I was a teenager, I’d run like hell from him! He scared me to death. The Sheik was one of the reasons Lubbock became the best-drawing city in Texas for a short period of time.

  Years later, when I wrestled The Sheik in Amarillo, those were the only matches where my wife and kids didn’t want to be anywhere near ringside. If he made a move in their direction, they were gone!

  The funny thing is, when I’d sit and talk to him in the locker room, he was really a sweet guy, but you’d still be thinking of the insane Sheik, and you’d be scared to death of him, even as he spoke.

  The American wrestlers in Japan had always been the big heels, playing off of the very real animosity left over from World War II. When I went over there, the fans would bring up things for wrestlers to sign. The American wrestlers would write insults like, “You look like you could eat salad out of a fruit jar,” or something stupid like that.

  I realized these Japanese fans weren’t dumb—they could read the English we were writing. It was really something for them to associate with an American wrestler, and so I signed all the autographs, without the stupid insults. I showed those fans I really cared about them, and they appreciated it.

  The fans in Japan always reacted to wrestling differently than the fans here. A lot of it was the way it was presented to them, in the ring and from the commentators. The sense of realism stretched from their training to their booking. It created a domino effect—from the promotion, to the reporters and then onto the people. We all lived, and were all a part of, the suspension of disbelief. If you don’t believe in what you’re doing, the fans won’t.

  One time, Bruiser Brody and I were to appear on a Japanese television talk show. When we got there, they were making fun of the business, with one of Baba’s boys sitting right there, laughing right along. We looked at each other and both said pretty much the same thing: “Fuck this shit. We’re getting the hell out of here.”

  We weren’t just going to sit there while these guys sat there and made fun of what we did to make our livings, messing with the suspension of disbelief that was such a key to our business. They were going to present us as a couple of phony-baloney wrestlers. We got up and left.

  You might think storming off a TV set like that would have hurt us in the public eye, but it did nothing but help.

  To this day I think that suspension of disbelief is important. Yes, I know Vince McMahon sat in a courtroom in 1989 and said it was all predetermined, so he wouldn’t have to pay taxes to the athletic commission. I know the wrestlers do interviews on talk shows and in magazines every week, talking about it as entertainment. And I know that if you were to ask the guy next to you if wrestling was fake, he’d say, “Oh, sure, of course.”

  But if I were sitting next to the same guy, we’d get to talking and we’d be talking with that suspension of disbelief.

  That’s what we wanted to keep with our fans. They knew, in their heart of hearts, that what they were watching was not purely competitive sport. But we maintained that suspension, whether it was in the ring or walking around on the street.

  Today someone asks me about wrestling, and I’ll say, “It’s entertainment,” but that’s about it. I’ll take the conversation somewhere else, because the more I talk, the more I’m afraid I’ll be destroying their fun and emotional investment in watching it.

  Whether I like to admit it or not, I am something of a cartoon character from years of appearing on television as a wrestler. I’m not talking about the guy I go and buy feed from, or the waitress who brings me my eggs benedict. I’m talking about the fan. To that fan, I am not a guy who buys feed, or orders eggs benedict. I am the person that fan sees on TV, and I have to remember that. It’s pretty hard for some people to understand, even in this day and age, that maintaining even a fraction of that sense of mystery is the key to our business. The wrestlers have to have a mystique about them. The fan has to wonder, “Is this guy really the guy I see on TV?”

  Now I’m not saying that the heel,
even back then, needed to be the world’s shittiest person to everyone he met, all day long. But he didn’t need to expose himself completely and destroy his facade, either.

  CHAPTER 9

  Losing Dory Funk

  Just a few weeks after Junior lost the world’s championship to Harley Race, he and I lost something much more precious.

  My father had a cookout and a get-together with a bunch of the guys at his ranch.

  During the evening, my father began to talk about shooting and its virtues with Les Thornton and a few others. This was nothing new—I had seen these discussions between my dad and Larry Hennig, Harley Race and too many others to count. These guys would always get into some kind of debate. It was just something they did when they got together.

  Eventually, someone said, “OK, move the furniture, and let’s wrestle.”

  The deal this night was Les challenging my dad, saying, “Bet you can’t hold me in a front facelock.”

  My dad put the hold on, and Les struggled to free himself, but ended up passing out after a few minutes.

  My dad let go and sat on a bench in the kitchen next to me. He looked at me and said, “Not bad for an old man, huh?”

  A few moments later, it was very late, and everyone had gone, when my father walked out onto the patio and found my wife, Vicki.

  “Get Dunk and Terry,” he said. “I think I’m having a heart attack.”

  We took him to the Canyon Clinic, a small hospital that was the closest one to the ranch, but all they had was this old EKG machine that would take 30 minutes even to get going. At the time, Canyon only had two doctors. They had to call the doctors at home to get them to come in. They told my dad, “You’ve had a massive heart attack. Just roll with it, and we’re going to get you to Amarillo in an ambulance.”

  The ambulance took another 20 minutes.

  The whole thing took us about an hour and a half from the time he told us he was having a heart attack to the time we pulled into the bigger hospital in Amarillo.

  But by the time we pulled in, he was already gone.

  We were on our way to the hospital, and my father asked how long until we got there.

  I asked the ambulance driver, who said, “Five minutes.” Dad looked at us and said, “I’m going. I’m not going to make it,” just as calm as could be.

  The thing that haunts me is wondering, if we’d just gone to Amarillo first, would we have been all right? Would my dad have lived through it?

  My dad was only 54 when he passed on. Hell, I’m past 60, and I’ve done a lot of living between 54 and 60.

  After my dad died, I had anxiety attacks, thinking I was having heart problems. Six months after his death, I was coming back from a show in New Mexico when I started feeling flush. I went to the next hospital I got to, and my blood pressure was sky-high. I had just scared myself into it because of what happened to my father.

  A little later we were in El Paso, and Junior and I had just finished a tag match. We got to the locker room and I sat down and said, “Junior, I’m having a heart attack. I don’t want to move real fast, but get me to a hospital.”

  Junior said, “My God. OK,” and he got me in the car.

  We buzzed down to the hospital and I sat down in the emergency room. There must have been 20 people in there, and I sat down while Junior went to talk to a nurse about me.

  He came back over and said they would be over in a minute, but someone in the waiting room screamed.

  “Terry!”

  Junior kept trying to tell me what was going on, but… “TERRY FUNK!”

  I looked over, and coming my way was a guy who must have been waiting to see a doctor. Obviously, he was a wrestling fan.

  “I can’t believe it! Terry Funk! How the hell are you doing? I want to shake your hand! How’s it going, Terry? HONEY! Come over here! It’s Terry Funk! You got some paper, honey?”

  “Just a Kleenex,” she said.

  “Terry, would you sign this for me?”

  I just tried to stay calm as I signed the autograph.

  “Well, how are you? Here you go. Hope you enjoy it. Thanks for stopping

  by.”

  All the while, I was thinking, “Please, pal, have a little courtesy. Please, God, I don’t want to die like this.”

  I should have blown my nose on the damn thing!

  The doctors told me I had been causing myself anxiety and had been pumping up my own heartbeat. It’s pretty amazing what the mind can do.

  ––—

  Eddie Graham and my father had one of the strangest relationships. They loved each other, but it was strange. Every once in a while they’d just get into a damn fistfight.

  I’ll never forget, one time we were in Florida, at my grandfather’s house, and Eddie pulled up in his big, beautiful boat. He climbed out, and he and my father were walking together. All of the sudden, out of nowhere, Eddie hauled off and hit my father, and they went after it.

  But as many times as they kicked the shit out of each other, and there were many times—a little later—they’d be on the phone talking with each other.

  I think it went all the way back to Eddie’s days in Amarillo, when he teamed with Art Nelson. I loved Art, Eddie’s partner, but Art was sure capable of needling and instigating.

  Art would tell him, “You shouldn’t take that,” after Eddie’d had a disagreement with my father, and the next thing you know, there was a fight in the locker room. They’d wind up underneath the dressing room table, just beating the shit out of each other.

  But when my father passed away, the first guys who called, the first guys who came around and offered their support, were Bob Geigel and Eddie. We were having to deal with Japan, and titles, and who was going to get what in the territory, but they were there to talk us through.

  Twelve years later, when I got a call that Eddie had killed himself, I was stunned. Since then I heard a lot of stories about what happened, and I just don’t know what to believe. I know what I’d like to believe, that he was having financial problems and had an insurance policy on himself that would pay off for his family.

  I don’t know if that’s true. I might be so far wrong that it’s not even funny. I never asked his son, Mike, about it, although I’ve had the desire to, and I believe Mike would probably tell me if I asked. I just never have felt like it was enough of my business to ask. That’s a pretty damn personal thing, so I’ll just take the one that I think is true, because it’s a nice one.

  One time my brother and I were in an airplane being flown by Eddie, when business was just sky high, and when business is sky high, expenses get sky high. Junior said, “Eddie, what are you gonna do when the business goes down?”

  That’s just something that we all have to face in this business, because it does run in cycles, but when things are good, it’s easy to get full of yourself.

  Eddie looked at us and said, “It’s not going to go down.”

  Being a realist is hard, at times.

  Junior and I grieved a lot after our father died, but we were also filled with an obsession to show we could carry on the business and do well. It was an obsession to the point that I eliminated my family time and became entirely business-oriented, day in and day out. We did it and were very successful.

  But there was a cost. I got so obsessed with keeping the family business from going down the tubes, and so obsessed with making it better than ever, that I was neglecting my family at home, and Vicki eventually filed for divorce just a few months after my dad died.

  I was devastated. That reality was the hardest thing I’ve ever had to swallow. I didn’t want her leaving, but she was going, by God. She’d had enough of that isolation. I don’t think I could have salvaged things at that point if I’d offered to give up the business entirely. And as soon as it hit me, I knew what a terrible mistake I’d made by isolating myself like I had.

  Junior and I, along with Uncle Herman, had expanded into Colorado Springs, Pueblo and a few other towns. It seemed like it kept o
n getting larger, and we would have continued to do so if the national situation had not changed the way it did.

  I also got more experience dealing with wrestlers as an owner, and I found I wasn’t exactly one of the boys anymore. I was now on the other side.

  One time I went over a finish with Bob Roop, and he wasn’t thrilled with it.

  “They said this is what you need to do,” I told him.

  He said, “Terry, will you do me one favor? Tell me who ‘they’ are.”

  I said, “Well, uh … uh … that’s me, Bob.”

  But it wasn’t long before I couldn’t handle being in Amarillo, with Vicki and me apart, so I went to Florida in 1974.

  Dick Slater did me a great favor when I moved down to Florida to get away from all of it. I couldn’t sleep at night. I was a complete mental and physical wreck, and weighed 195 pounds.

  I called Bill Watts, the booker in Florida at the time, and told him I wanted to come in and work. He said, “Hell, yeah! Come on down!” He was expecting Terry Funk to walk through the door. Instead, here came this skinny, 195-pounder, looking like death warmed over.

  I lived with Slater while I was there, for several months of insanity. One time, we decided to try to help the promotion by getting some front-page publicity. Our plan was to drive to the middle of the Sunshine Skyway Bridge, leave a note in the rental car and then leave the car there, as if I had jumped off the bridge. Then we went home and I stayed in the bathtub for about four hours. Once I was good and wrinkled, we drove out to the beach and I laid down at the edge of the coast, as if I’d washed up onto shore.

  Hell, nobody came to my rescue! I laid there for three or four hours and just got up, went back home and forgot about it.

  CHAPTER 10

  Terry Funk, World Champ

  The vote over who would succeed Jack Brisco as world champion, held in Summer 1975, was a tough one for NWA promoters. It came down to Harley Race and me. My brother fought hard for me, and it got him a lot of heat.