More Than Just Hardcore

by Terry Funk

  Junior and I did work some matches for Murdoch and Mulligan, but the bottom line at that time was that I wasn’t making a promoter’s money anymore, and there were areas where I could make a lot more money as a wrestler. I had just bought the ranch here, and I needed to pay for the thing, so I had to go where the best opportunities were.

  Still, I sometimes think of all the talent that came through Amarillo. There are more names than you’d probably guess. Some of the names I came up with.

  Not all of my names were successful. Some of them had no greater purpose than to entertain me. We had a guy come in to work one time, and his name was Joe Pelardy. Well, I told him, “No one’s going to pay money to see Joe Pelardy. Let me come up with a new name for you.”

  He went to the ring and found out his new name, when they introduced the wrestling fans to Amarillo’s newest star … Joe Chit!

  Sure enough, the fans soon started chanting, “We want shit! We want shit!”

  The next night, he came to me and said, “I don’t like that name! I want my name changed!”

  “OK,” I said. “I’m sorry you don’t like it. I’ll change it, and you won’t have to be Joe Shi—, I mean, Joe Chit anymore.”

  The next week, he came to the ring and the announcer introduced him under his new name … Mike Chit!

  And the chant continued, “We want shit! We want shit!”

  Boy, he was mad. But it was just a rib!

  I spent my time doing short stints in a number of territories, making sure to leave myself plenty of time for Japanese tours, and plenty of time at home.

  It was kind of like the sentiment I saw another guy who I consider a great heel receiving. Earlier, I talked about Mr. Wrestling II. Well, there was a masked heel who was every bit as hated as II was loved—Don Jardine, a.k.a. The Spoiler. The Spoiler was actually very influential in the wrestling business. He was a big, tall man, but incredibly agile and able to put on a great match. He wasn’t just size, and no ability—he could move! He would go on to teach a kid named Mark Calaway the way to walk the top rope during a match. Mark used that knowledge in the 1990s, to help get him over as The Undertaker, working for Vince Jr. I watch the Undertaker today, and sometimes think I’m looking at Jardine himself.

  Jardine was that rare big man who could do anything in the ring. Truthfully, though, and I think Don Jardine would agree with this, Don Leo Jonathan was the man among big men, and he always will be. As mentioned earlier, he was about six foot eight, and he wrestled as the Mormon Giant. He was also one of the most agile men I ever saw. He was so good and so spectacular that in some territories there was a problem with fans believing there was no one who could beat him.

  Whether I was working with Dusty Rhodes or the Briscos, Florida crowds could be rowdy. Those people brought knives and everything else, but the worst fans might have been in Puerto Rico, home of the World Wrestling Council (WWC).

  The Puerto Rican fans were nuts. They hated me with a passion, and they threw stuff. I don’t mean beer cups, like they threw in the States. I mean rocks, bricks—dangerous stuff. Every time we went there, Junior and I had to battle them, not fight, but battle them, all the way to and from the dressing room. When I got close to the dressing room, I knew they had rocks, so I’d arm myself. I’d take beer cans, about five or six of them, and pop a couple open. Then I’d throw them, and with the beer streaming out they looked like grenades flying across the arena, and the fans would scatter to get away from them. I saved my last couple of cans for when I was about to get to the dressing room, and I’d haul off and throw one of the full cans I had left right at one of the nuts’ heads, if there were any fans left blocking my path. A full can of beer right in the head would stop a man.

  But a lot of the guys really enjoyed Puerto Rico. Pampero Firpo, a crazy-haired man who wrestled as “The Wild Bull of the Pampas,” used to love gambling at the casinos down there. He’d get going on the slot machines, and call out to me, “Terry! Terry! Come stand here!”

  I would stand in front of the machine, and he’d take off running. He had to take a piss, and he did it as quick as he could. He was afraid someone was going to put in a quarter and win while he wasn’t there. There were times he spent his entire payoff in a casino. I mean he spent every nickel he earned in Puerto Rico, plus every cent he could borrow, or get his hands on in whatever fashion. He used to collect pop bottles and turn them in for the recycling deposits and then gamble with that!

  The Puerto Ricans weren’t the only fans I whipped into a frenzy, though. I have two pocket knives on the wall of my office. Both of them came out of me after fans stuck me. One was from San Antonio, where a fan stuck a knife in my neck one night, and the other came from Florida. I never did miss a day. Hell, I wasn’t going to let a little puncture wound keep me from earning a buck!

  In a strange way, I took being stabbed as a badge of honor, the same as when the cops had to take guns from the fans. Those people were really giving me an award, even though they didn’t realize it. They were telling me I had done my job, as a heel, and done it pretty well.

  Aside from getting stabbed in the neck, I did like working in San Antonio for promoter Joe Blanchard.

  One of Blanchard’s top guys, Manny Fernandez, also came from West Texas State.

  Manny was a super worker and crazy as a March hare. Manny once got into it with a guy outside a bar in Amarillo, and ran over his legs with a car. Then he backed up and ran over the guy again. He was a wild man and another tough

  guy-Manny made quite a name for himself in Florida in 1979, when Eddie Graham got crosswise with his top babyface, Dusty Rhodes. Eddie elevated Manny to that top level for a time, and Manny did well. I worked almost every night with him, and we drew a lot of money. Everybody thought the territory would go to hell without Dusty there, but I drew well with both Manny and Skip Young, who wrestled as Sweet Brown Sugar. The fans were willing to accept some other favorites. Skip, in particular, was a guy who never really made it anywhere else, because other promoters just didn’t see it in him, but Eddie Graham did. He saw him as a money player, and as a result Skip Young did a lot of business in Florida.

  Vicki and I had come to Florida because we had just bought a ranch in Canyon for a couple hundred thousand, and we were having to pay 18 percent interest on it, so we had to go out to make money. We had a pickup truck that was so damn ugly that I didn’t want to be seen in it, because people would look and think, “Well, that guy doesn’t have shit.”

  But I ended up making myself an eccentric, because I put a cow’s skull on the front, almost like a big hood ornament, when I drove it to the arenas.

  I also wrestled quite a bit against Mike Graham, Eddie’s son. Mike was a unique case, as second-generation guys went. Eddie never pushed Mike to the moon, to make him a top superstar. You have to understand, it wasn’t that Eddie didn’t love Mike. Eddie loved his son,very much. In fact, I think it was that love that caused him to handle Mike the way he did, by making him slowly work his way up and only rarely putting him into the main-event picture. Eddie saw throughout his life what happened to the second-generation guys who hadn’t deserved their big pushes. He didn’t want that kind of resentment for Mike. He wanted Mike to be deserving of whatever push he got.

  When Eddie passed away in 1985, Mike was not that old, and there’s still a chance Eddie would have eventually pushed Mike at that top level. But Mike, once he had control of the company after Eddie’s death, really didn’t push himself to the moon, either.

  I also got to see a little of David Von Erich’s heel work in early 1980s Florida. He had been a lifelong babyface, but he was a great heel. He worked a lot with my brother, and I thought Junior did a great job of helping David attain a whole new dimension of his wrestling persona.

  If David hadn’t died so young in 1984, I think he would have been a great choice as a long-term NWA champion. I know his name came up, at least in discussions of possible champions, and he would have been very successful. He was a good talker and
had great ring psychology. In terms of being a pro wrestling performer, he had it all.

  It would have been interesting to see what could have happened with the Von Erich boys if the drugs hadn’t been there. We might have a completely different wrestling business today; it might not be Vince McMahon running it. It might be the Von Erichs as the major power. That’s one of the many sad things about that situation—that tragic moment when David died could have been a major moment that changed the course of the business.

  I had an NWA world title duplicate belt made by Reggie Parks (probably the best belt-maker around—I paid him $500 for it), and went on San Antonio TV to declare myself the real world’s champion.

  I’m sure there was a little heat in the NWA office about that, but I could have cared less. I mean, the whole thing was ridiculous, but it worked! In fact, it worked so well that it not only got over with the fans, it got over with the boys and the office in San Antonio! They got so goofy about it, they decided it was a real world’s title, and held a tournament for it! I’d just created it as something to get me a little heat, a little controversy.

  I even went up to New York City and Bill Apter (editor of the biggest wrestling magazines) took pictures of me with the fake belt. That’s what you call self-promotion! That’s what you have to do in this business, and it’s what I’ve always managed to do, one way or another.

  Soon after, though, the belt disappeared from the locker room. In 1984, several months after the tournament for my duplicate NWA title belt, the belt showed up around the waist of Dick Slater! Slater was on Mid-Atlantic TV, doing an angle with then-world champion Ric Flair, where Slater had declared himself the real world’s champion (sounds familiar, doesn’t it?).

  Throughout the 1970s, Junior and I were hated heels in much of the country, but in 1977 we popped the Detroit territory as babyfaces in a feud with The Sheik and Abdullah the Butcher.

  The night of our big, final match, we had the biggest crowd Detroit had drawn in a long time. However, that night we also got some bad news. Eddie George, Sheik’s son, came in the dressing room and said, “Daddy! Daddy! There’s been a robbery at the box office!”

  Honestly and seriously, I loved Ed Farhat, and I would have gone there for nothing. Hell, I went there several times for nothing. And who knows? There might have been a robbery. Who am I to say there wasn’t?

  I actually got to spend time around one of the toughest, craziest characters in wrestling while in the Detroit area. Dick Afflis was a stocky powerhouse of a man who wrestled as Dick the Bruiser. With his roughhouse style and flat-top haircut, he was huge box-office. He loved getting into bar fights with pro football players, or whoever else he could find. Dick was married to one of the city’s more famous ex-strippers. She was a pretty good-sized woman and wore these fancy wigs onstage. Sometimes he’d come home drunk, put on one of her wigs and one of her fancy dresses, get on his motorcycle and drive up and down the yards on his block, tearing up the lawns in his very exclusive neighborhood in the middle of the night. His neighbors would look out the window and think his wife had gone crazy, because all they saw was this burly figure with a long, blonde wig on a motorcycle.

  Bruiser also seemed to go to a lot of weddings. Whenever a promoter or booker would ask him to “get some color” (bleed), he’d always say, “Can’t. Going to a wedding.”

  Farhat came out with a movie about Detroit wrestling and The Sheik, called, I Like to Hurt People. I am in it but I never saw it. I don’t watch everything I’ve been in, that’s for certain. And the older I get, the more I try to avoid my own matches, because I have memories of doing beautiful moonsaults and I don’t want to watch the match and see what they really look like. Even when I am doing the things I do in the ring today, they feel like wonderful things I am doing.

  It’s like my memories of Dusty Rhodes talking about a finish with his opponent (of course, the discussion always ended with how Dusty was going to win). He’d say, “I’ll go ahead and I’ll climb up to the top rope before you can move, thinth you’ll be down on the mat after I thlam you. I’ll graithfully FLY off the top rope and land on yo’ body and cover you, one-two-three! And the crowd will go wild!”

  Of course, that was not what happened. Dusty would climb up to the top rope, taking quite a long time to get there. Then he would fall, like a 300-pound sack of shit, onto the other guy’s body and get the pin. You know, there’s a great deal of difference between graceful flying and falling like a sack of shit.

  But Dusty believed he was soaring like a damned eagle! And that’s why I don’t watch my matches—because I have occasionally watched a match of mine, and I know that I don’t look like what I think I look like.

  Florida was always a good territory, before I won the title and after. Starting in 1975 and for about a decade, Dusty was the top star there. It was hard to believe this incredible star was the lisping baseball player from West Texas State.

  Dusty had become a really big babyface—a 350-pound one! At five foot four! When he was born, Dusty was 14 pounds, eight ounces, and he was only 11 inches long! The intern dribbled him out of the delivery room and slam-dunked him into the incubator! I actually used that one on Dusty on TV once.

  Seriously, he was incredibly over. What was so surprising was that the guy had a lisp, and he utilized it! He took every single hindrance he had, from his speech impediment to his physique, and turned them to his advantage. In college, Dusty could be very difficult to understand. I mean, you’d seriously have a problem communicating with him. That’s how bad it was. He self-corrected that to a large degree and did it because he knew he had to be able to talk on TV in order to make a buck in the wrestling business. The lisp he still had he made into part of his character.

  I can’t say enough about the guy, because he was smart enough and tough enough to turn weaknesses into strengths.

  He was a classic, and he was another one of those who was very real. He really hurt, and he really meant it when he told the people, “I am the American Dream!”

  I also wrestled Scott Irwin in Florida. Scott would be better known as The Super Destroyer later on, but he died of cancer in 1987. He was tall and weighed about 280, but could move around like a much smaller man. His brother, “Wild” Bill Irwin, was also a very good worker, but just never seemed to find his niche in the wrestling business, which happened to a lot of people.

  I also loved working for Paul Boesch, in Houston. I was there one night in 1977 to wrestle Nick Bockwinkel for the AWA world title. Harley was supposed to be on the card, too, defending the NWA world title against Jose Lothario, but didn’t make it. I still don’t know why Race wasn’t there, but I know it happened again in 1981, and Boesch was so mad about Harley no-showing a second time that he pulled out of the NWA over it!

  Again, I don’t know why Harley wasn’t there, but I do know Boesch was utterly elated to see the Funker that night, even though he was pissed about the no-show. Bockwinkel ended up wrestling twice that night, once against me and once against Lothario.

  That was a big night for me, and not just because I had a good match with Bockwinkel. I brought Sylvester Stallone to the matches with me, and those crazy wrestling fans helped me out a lot that night. We were walking into the arena, and here came about 100 fans running up. Stallone thought they were going to attack him. He had bodyguards with him, and they were saying, “We have to get out of here now!”

  But those fans ran right up to me for autographs, not paying any attention to him. I think that was when he realized, “Hey, this wrestling is really something.”

  CHAPTER 13

  The Art of the Promo

  Week One …

  (I walk into the camera’s view—I am in a pasture, with a sign reading “Funker’s, Texas” behind me.)

  “This is Funker’s, Texas, on the Double-Cross Ranch! As far as you can see to the left, that’s my property. As far as the eye can see, that is my property. I have a gated entrance, so I can keep anybody out that I want to. And believe me, I
live a life of solitude.

  “All except for one individual. Jerry Lawler has taken up residence in my mind, and he’s been in my mind for the last 20 years! Over two decades since he destroyed some of the vision in my right eye.

  “I had a call from Memphis, Tennessee, in the hospital. It was from Corey Mac. He was blabbering and blubbering and bawling like an idiot, and he said to me, ‘Oh, Terry! Oh, Terry, I need your help! Please come down here now! Please come, Terry!’

  “And I said, ‘Why?’

  “He said because Jimmy Hart and Jerry Lawler had beat the hell out of him! I said to him, ‘Corey, don’t worry! I will be there, like I said, on the 28th of August, in the Mid-South Coliseum!’

  “I will be there! Not because I love you, Corey Mac—because I hate Jerry Lawler! Not because I love Memphis, Tennessee, or the people of Memphis, but because I hate Jerry Lawler with a passion! Take a look at the man! Look at his face lifts that he has! He looks like Bob Barker!

  “What I am going to do is, I am going to give Lawler an extreme makeover on the 28th! I am going to give him a two-fisted makeover! I’m going to lower his eyes! I’m going to widen his nose! I’m gonna fatten his lips, and I’m gonna realign his teeth! And then I’m gonna pull every transplanted hair out of his head! I’m gonna put my foot so far up his … so far up his … so far up his poo-poo, he’ll have to go the hospital to get it out!

  “Lawler, there has to be a finality to this, and it’s going to be the night of the 28th—I promise you this. Bring that wimp Jimmy Hart with you!”

  On August 28, 2004, Jerry Lawler and his manager, Jimmy Hart, battled Corey Macklin and me in Memphis. We drew nearly 5,000 people—one of the biggest crowds for a non-WWE show in years! We had no exploding cars, no fancy fireworks shows, no elaborate backstage skits. Hell, I wasn’t even in Memphis until the night of the show! How did we do it? With a tape I mailed to Memphis, containing four promos. We did it with carefully crafted promos— one a week, for a month of Memphis TV shows, leading up to our big match.