by Terry Funk
I gripe about the travel, but don’t misunderstand me, there were a lot of glorious things to being champion. Still, pretty soon, it can burn you up.
The world champion traveled alone, not as part of a group of wrestlers. There was a real loneliness to it, because nobody made the champion’s reservations. I handled everything myself.
Sometimes you couldn’t even get a flight into the next city at a decent hour. The Dallas airport had a tram that went around it, and I picked up a trick from Junior. Whenever I picked up a redeye into Dallas, I’d land a few hours before sunup, so I’d get on the tram and just go to sleep, while it went around and around. I would wake up after a couple of hours, sit up and ask some befuddled stranger what time it was.
One of my most memorable trips as champion was one I made to western Canada, for Stu Hart’s Stampede promotion. Stu was the father of Bret and Owen Hart, both of whom became stars for the World Wrestling Federation years later. He was also one of my favorite characters in the wrestling business. When I went as world champion into his territory in 1976, he was taking part in the city of Calgary’s annual Stampede Week parade.
Every year they had a parade to promote their rodeo, and Stu made his wrestling promotion part of the event. Stu had a wrestling ring hooked to a trailer, pulling it through the streets as part of the parade. In the ring Stu had a menagerie of human oddities. There was a hunchback, and I don’t know if he was working around the house for Stu or what, but there he was. That ring contained several other people, including midgets, and many of the people were not wrestlers. Hell, I think there were even a couple of goats in there!
The gigantic, obese Maguire twins, Benny and Billy, were also in the parade, riding alongside the ring. They were on mini-bikes, but their cheeks hung down so far they looked like a couple of two-wheeled asses. And I don’t mean donkeys.
The trailer had small airplane tires, and after a few blocks of traveling on bumpy streets beneath that ring, the tires started popping out. One tire went, then the next and the next. When the last tire went, the decision was made just to shove the ring out of the path of the rest of the parade. I guess the human menagerie stayed behind, too.
I was riding in the back seat of a Cadillac convertible behind this collection of humanity. Andre the Giant was supposed to be in the back seat next to me, but he wisely decided he wasn’t going to be a part of this, and he stayed in the hotel room.
On one side of the Cadillac, the words “World champion Terry Funk” had been written. On the other side, it read, “Andre the Giant,” and they never bothered to take Andre’s name off of there. The parade was being televised live, and as the car went by, the side reading “Andre the Giant” was facing the cameras.
The host said, “Well, here comes Andre the Giant. And, well, he certainly is a good-sized fellow, but he doesn’t look like a giant to me.”
Riding with me in the car was Babette Bardot, a big-name stripper up there who spoke in a thick, French accent. Owen, the youngest Hart boy, was sitting in the front. At one point, Babette’s zipper broke, and the crack of her ass was hanging out of her dress.
After the ring collapsed, Owen decided he’d just about had it. Ten-year-old Owen was so embarrassed that he hopped into the back seat and crawled down onto the floorboard. He just lay there, refusing to get up until the parade was over! He was hiding.
As we drove slowly along the parade route, a cowboy on his horse rode alongside us. Every now and then, we had to stop, as the parade got congested. One time, he asked Babette if she wanted to ride on the horse with him. She said, “Oui, Oui, I would like that very much.”
She got on the horse and we kept on going, but he had to catch up a little, so he put the horse in a rough trot. That had Babette bouncing around a little more than she liked, I guess, and as they came by the Cadillac, she shouted, “Get me offa this goddamned horse!”
Her French accent was gone, too!
Those Maguire twins ended up having a rough tour. In Stampede, they would take vanloads of wrestlers to the next town. We had worked Edmonton and were headed for a big show in Calgary. That morning, we were packed in that van like sardines, and the van started to heat up. Bruce (Stu’s oldest son) was driving the van and told the Maguire twins, “You two fatasses have to get out of the van! We’re not going to make it into town. We’ll come back and pick you up.
So they got out, and we left them by the side of the road. And then they forgot about them!
That afternoon, Stu asked Bruce, “Where are Benny and Billy?” “Oh, shit!,” Bruce said. “I forgot all about them.”
So Bruce went back to get them, and when he got to them, they were just lying there on the side of the road, and they looked like two gigantic lobsters, or red whales! They were just roasted. Somehow he got them into the van, and they both just lay on the floor like two great big fat cells.
Another time, I stayed at the Hart House while I was in town. I woke up in the morning and went downstairs. I’d heard so many crazy stories about how Stu would cook breakfast for the guys and scoop up cat shit with the same spatula he used to cook the eggs, that I had my reservations.
But sure enough, I went downstairs (being very observant, looking for cat shit everywhere I went, because I’d heard those stories for years). Well, everything in the kitchen was spotless. Stu had eggs, pancakes, sausage and everything else you could imagine. Everything was just wonderful, and I was sitting there enjoying my breakfast, thinking, “What a bunch of crap! They spread all these stories about this guy, and everything’s as clean as can be and just wonderful.”
And I had a cup of coffee in my left hand. I took a drink and set it down. A few seconds later, I grabbed the handle in my other hand, which gave me a view of the other side of the cup for the first time. As I got the cup halfway to my lips, I noticed that there was a big booger, right in the middle of that side of the cup. I decided I had probably had enough coffee.
Another time, Stu had some of the wrestlers over for dinner, and he had a grand meal preparedroast beef, salad and the works.
He asked us, in his unique growl, “Eh, eh, who, eh, eh, wants, eh, eh, salad?”
Several of us asked for salad and he turned to the large bowl, where Bo, the Hart family cat, was laying all over the salad. The big salad bowl was normally one of Bo’s beds, apparently, and I guess he decided they had made a bed of lettuce for him to lay down on.
Stu shooed the cat away, “Eh, get the hell out, eh, of there, you, eh, damn
cat!
Bo scooted on out of the salad bowl, and then Stu grabbed the tongs and put batches of salad into smaller bowls.
“Eh, OK, now, eh, who said they wanted salad?”
But Stu was the greatest guy in the world, and we all loved him. In his day, he was one tough son of a bitch, and he was still putting submission holds on guys when he was 80! Of course, by that point he was tricking them, but it still hurt once he locked it in.
“OK,” he’d say, “lay down here, and, eh, let me have your arm back here.”
And the dumb bastards would do it! Next thing they knew, they were waking back up, and they’d pissed themselves.
But there was one NWA member I never did work for, and he knew better than to even ask. Even though Antonio Inoki’s New Japan group had gotten NWA membership since the initial fight over which Japanese company to back, I never went there as champion. Inoki didn’t even try to get dates on me, because he knew it would be a futile move. My allegiance was to Baba.
When it was all said and done, I had made more than $400,000 in my year as champion, which was huge money at that time. Sometimes I wish I’d kept it another year. Maybe I could have afforded to quit sooner. Maybe I could have done only one retirement match.
As NWA champion, I was paid 10 percent of the house. I tried to keep track of house sizes, but if I was getting the short end of the stick with a payoff after a match, what was I going to do? Even though I was called the world champion, I didn’t have the power or co
ntrol you might think.
I might make $1,500 working in the Omni in Atlanta, and then $750 in Kansas City the same day, yet they could afford to fly me on a Lear jet from one to the other. It was the kind of thing that made me think, “Something just doesn’t add up right. They can afford a Lear jet, because I have that much importance, but I’m only making that much money.”
The NWA president had historically controlled the champion’s bookings, but Atlanta promoter Jim Barnett, officially the NWA secretary, handled bookings for me as champion. The reason was, after Sam resigned, the NWA members wanted to figure out a deal where they could have someone who knew what he was doing book the champion, but they wouldn’t have to pay a percentage of their gates, like they’d had to with Sam. Besides, Fritz didn’t have time to handle all the details involved in booking the champion, because he had his own territory to run. Barnett was willing to take on the job.
Barnett was great to work with, although one night, Dick Slater and I stayed out all night before a meeting I was supposed to have with him the next morning.
When I got to Barnett’s office, I was so drunk I could hardly stand up. I still had the suit on that I had worn in the last town, for most of the last day and all night. That suit had booze, gravy stains, bits of eggs and God only knows what else on it from my midnight breakfast at the pancake house. It didn’t smell very nice.
I walked in for my 11 a.m. meeting, and as I got close, Barnett said, “My boy! You know … I have another meeting right now! I’d love to be with you at this meeting, but I have to go!”
Off Jim went, and that was the end of the meeting!
In general, though, we got along, because I was doing good business, and I was always there.
But when I got the championship, I knew what I was going to doI was going to run with it! I was going to wrestle as many times as I could with it, for as long as I could hold it. I didn’t complain about the crazy travel or even the bad payoffs because the bad payoffs I got as world champion were still a hell of a lot better than any payoffs I’d gotten before, and better than the other boys were making.
There were exceptions, though. One time I wrestled Ronnie Etchison, in St. Joe, Missouri, and it was raining, snowing and just basically colder than shit. They had a $25 guarantee for all their guys, but the weather kept people away, so my 10 percent amounted to only $17.50 that night! Etchison and I wrestled for 40 minutes that night, in front of a crowd of a few dozen. I don’t know how Etchison did it. Hell, he had to be around 60 years old at that point. And I remember thinking, “How could a guy that old still be wrestling?” Well, it doesn’t seem so far-fetched to me now.
From the start I wasn’t planning on holding it for three, four years or more. I knew better than that, and profited from seeing what people had done in the past and what it had done to them. I figured I’d be ready to drop it after two years, at the most.
I ended up lasting half that long. Vicki and I had started talking again, and she eventually agreed to get back together with me. It was just about the best news I ever got in my life.
I knew I’d have to give up the title, though. I just told the NWA I had a bad knee. I wasn’t lying. My knee was terriblestill is, in fact.
As for Vicki and me, we’re still together. My family has come first, which has been very difficult in the wrestling business. When I had gotten so obsessed with the business a few years earlier, there’d been a costmy familyand paying that cost just wasn’t worth it.
GHAPTER 11
Terry Funk, Ex-World Champ
My last week as champion was pretty typical, in terms of travel.
On Monday I was in Atlanta, wrestling Mr. Wrestling II. He was Johnny Walker, who also wrestled as The Grappler in Florida in the early 1970s. For Johnny, the greatest invention in wrestling history was the mask, because Johnny Walker couldn’t draw 10 cents without a mask. I don’t mean that as a knock on JohnnyI just mean he was plain-looking. If you saw him on the street, you’d never guess he was a wrestling star, but when he put that mask on, by God, he was Mr. Wrestling II and a hell of a draw. In the ring, everything he did got over with the people. You might think, “Well, he just got over in Atlanta because he was a local attraction,” but when he went back to Florida later, as Mr. Wrestling II, he was over there, too. He didn’t go many other places, but he didn’t need to. He stayed over where he was. He would cock his head to the side and do his wiggle strut, and people went crazy. I truly think if he came out today and did that, it would still get over. The guy could just get over.
On Wednesday I was in Tokyo, facing Jumbo Tsuruta.
On Friday it was Saint Petersburg, against Dusty Rhodes.
On Saturday I was in Austin, Texas, wrestling Ivan Putski. Ivan was a hell of a football player. As Joe Bernardski, he played fullback for Southwest Texas State University. One thing about Putski’s Polish strongman gimmickit fit him, and he did it well.
Finally it was Sunday, February 6, 1977, and I was in Toronto, Ontario, Canada, where I was going to lose the belt to Harley Race. The only people who knew this would be a title change were the NWA board member promoters, the referee, Harley and me. Those things were always kept very secret. Even the other guys on the card didn’t know.
The match ended when I submitted to Harley’s Indian death lock. I had wanted it to be a submission finish, because I thought people wouldn’t be expecting it. I thought it would be healthy for the business to have a submission finish. I wasn’t really worried about losing the heat by submitting. I knew I could get myself over again. I could always work my way around it. Even if I didn’t like a finish, I’d do it.
I never cared about doing jobs, and that one, in particular, was about doing what was right for the business.
And that was the approach I’d taken in deciding how I wanted to drop it to Harley. When the time came to drop the title, I had wanted to see it go to Harley because I felt obligated to him. I was the one who wanted it to be that way. I didn’t give the NWA a lot of notice that I needed to lose the belt, and they hadn’t really prepared anyone else by that time.
The closest they had to another candidate besides Harley was Ric Flair, by now a top star in Crockett’s Mid-Atlantic territory, but I felt like Flair would have another time, and Harley deserved a good run with it. I knew Flair would be champion someday, but if it had gone to Flair, I’m not sure Harley would have gotten another chance at it. I’m not sure I could have said I was a good, fair man if I hadn’t helped the championship go to the man who came close to getting the votes when I ended up with it. I wanted to do something to see that things were done right by Harley. It was a pretty damn big deal for Harley, who started wrestling when he was 14, to be able to be the top dog in his business. I felt like it was important to Harley. I talked to Junior about it, and he felt the exact same waythat I needed to do right by Harley.
I never was approached about being NWA champion a second time, and if I had been, I never would have taken it in a million years. I was at a point, and it was a point I was lucky to stay at for pretty much the rest of my career, where I could pick my own dates instead of letting someone else set them for me. With my ability to build up an issue, I think I could have gone into any territory and been a good draw, even if I’d never even held the world title. Besides, I had gotten back a much better prize than any wrestling championship.
Fixing my relationship with Vicki was probably the most important thing I ever did. She had remarried since our divorce, and I didn’t figure that there was any chance of us getting back together, due to me. I was the one who’d been making things difficult. But she ended up leaving her second husband, and we did get back together. I guess after all our battles and fights over the isolation I created after my father died, we had just reached a point where we needed some distance for those issues to settle down.
And if I had to give up the NWA title to get her back, well, hell, that was the best trade I ever made.
CHAPTER 12
Everything Changes
After I came back to Amarillo regularly, the territory was running fine. Having two former world champions in the area was a huge plus for the territory.
In 1979,1 noticed something newcable TV, in particular a wrestling show coming out of Atlanta. I knew there was a change coming in the professional wrestling business.
And once that change with national television hit, I knew that we would have fragmentation of this once-mighty alliance as everyone fought to be the national power. Sure enough, that’s what ended up happening, first with the WWF and then with Crockett, who ended up in 1985 on TBS, where I first saw Georgia Championship Wrestling.
Even in ‘79, I knew the day of the national wrestling promotion was coming. I also knew how much work it would be for Junior and me to keep Amarillo running. I didn’t want a repeat of what happened after my dad died, when I became obsessed with the business to the exclusion of all else, including my family. I knew that had been a mistake, and I would be damned if it was a mistake I was going to make again.
Junior and I talked and decided to sell the Amarillo territory to Bob Windham (Blackjack Mulligan) and Dick Murdoch. Before the deal was done, though, I told them both that I didn’t think the future was too bright.
“Gosh, guys, it’s going to be tough with the TV going the way it is,” I told them, and they knew it was a possibility, but they decided to take their chances. Junior and I decided to take the $10,000 apiece upfront from them for the territory and be on our way. They got five or six rings and the existing TV and arena deals we had. They were supposed to pay off the remainder to us over a period of time if they were successful. Unfortunately for all of us, times were changing and they weren’t successful.
The Amarillo territory had been a big part of my life for almost all my life, but it didn’t feel strange not to be in it, because I realized that with the way things were going, there was really no such thing as an area anymore. In this new era, it was the United States that was going to be the territory.
