More Than Just Hardcore

by Terry Funk

  Shortly after I got to the WWF, they put me with Jimmy Hart as my manager. I didn’t think I needed a manager, because I could do my own talking, but almost all the heels had managers at that point.

  And one of the longtime heel managers, Lou Albano, was now a babyface as a result of the big MTV feud with Hulk Hogan, Roddy Piper and Cyndi Lauper. That feud went a long way toward putting WWF on the map.

  Albano ended up managing George “The Animal” Steele, who was a Michigan high school teacher named Jim Meyer who only wrestled in the summer. George was one of the true geniuses of the business, because George “The Animal” Steele convinced everyone that he was a teacher pretending to be an animal. In reality, he was an animal pretending to be a teacher! That’s what I accuse him of every time I see him.

  Steele was feuding at the time with Nikolai Volkoff, a big Russian wrestler. Here he was, the terrible, brutal Russian, doing all his power moves on his opponent. And then, out of nowhere, here came a cartwheel! He’d be working along, getting heat, and then out of the clear blue, he did a cartwheel. It had nothing to do with the match. I don’t know what crossed his mind. Maybe he had hopes of joining the Cirque du Soleil. Maybe he knew where wrestling was headed and was determined to be the pioneering WWF acrobat!

  I saw a lot of my old friends in wrestling while I was in the WWF, including tough guy Adrian Adonis. He was an absolute maniac. I had known him for years, and he always wanted to ride with me.

  Jimmy Hart and I had been riding together to a town in New York, and when we were getting ready to head to Newark, N.J., Adrian said, “Hey, can I ride with you guys?”

  I said, “Sure. Come on.”

  Boy, he was happy about that, so he got a case of beer and a five-foot submarine sandwich. I remember thinking, “What in the hell does a guy need with a five-foot sandwich?”

  He put that thing in the car, propped on a board, and it reached all the way from the dashboard, back into the back seat. It was sliced in four-inch sections, and I ate one four-inch piece and drank two of the beers. Jimmy Hart ate one four-inch piece of the sandwich and he didn’t drink.

  Adrian Adonis ate all 52 inches that were left of that sandwich and drank the rest of the case of beer.

  Then he decided he wanted to drive! Before that, he had me pulling over every 10 minutes, because he had to take another piss, so I had gotten to where I was too tired to drive. Jimmy Hart was asleep in the back seat.

  I was too tired to argue, so I said, “OK, Adrian, you drive.”

  He was going down the damn road at 105 miles an hour, when he passed a Connecticut police car, waving at the damn cops as he drove by!

  They pulled him over, of course, and ended up putting him in the back of their car.

  One of the officers told me, “We have to take him in.”

  They took Adrian to jail, and I drove to the jailhouse to get him out.

  They were giving him a drunk test at the police station, and Adrian was farting so bad it was awful, but the cops were all thrilled to meet the WWF star Adrian Adonis. His farts were godawful—they smelled like those Chinese eggs that are 2,000 years old, or whatever they are, but those cops were lining up to get his autograph, and they didn’t even seem to mind his gas!

  But they still had to test him, so Jimmy and I sat there, waiting, and I thought, “Damn, we are going to be here forever. He’s gonna be in jail, and I don’t know how we’re gonna get him out.”

  A few minutes later, here came Adrian—he’d passed every single one of their tests. All I can think is that the bread from the 52 inches of sandwich he ate absorbed the case of beer (minus my two) that he drank.

  God bless him, he was a slob. Sometimes we’d be in a restaurant and he’d have his plate cleaned off within minutes, and he’d start reaching over and eating off of my plate!

  Adrian really kept me on my toes, too, even though I never wrestled against him there. I was never sure if he was admiring my work, playing a rib on me, or trying to drive me nuts, but every night, he would watch my match. The next night, he would do all of the spots he had watched me do the night before, so I had to come up with a completely different match with the Junkyard Dog that night. The next night, he’d do all the new spots I had done the night before, and I’d have to change all of my spots again.

  Adrian’s gimmick changed in 1985, when he went from being a leather-wearing tough guy, to an obese cross-dresser, wearing a dress, makeup and everything. You might think he hated that gimmick, but I think he was utterly elated. That nut absolutely loved that, because if anyone was misanthropic, he was. Adrian didn’t care to fit in anywhere.

  Adrian was a tough guy, but he found out the hard way that he wasn’t as tough as Dan Spivey. They ended up in a beef over a match they had, where Adrian wouldn’t sell for Dan. And Dan didn’t do anything about it in the ring. He worked the rest of the match like the true professional that he was, but he sure did something about it in the dressing room. When they both got back there, Spivey beat the living crap out of Adrian. Spivey busted him up and just beat on him until he didn’t feel like beating on him anymore. It didn’t take long, either. It was a pretty short fight.

  I actually had wrestled Spivey in his first match for the WWF, in a little town in New York. I had to show him how to do every damn thing. Boy, he was green.

  “Spivey, take the headlock.”

  “Loosen up a little bit, Spivey.”

  “Now take me over, Spivey.”

  He was such a nice guy, too, although Adonis probably wouldn’t have agreed. Everything with Spivey was, “Yes, sir, Mr. Funk.”

  Spivey was a tough guy and a phenomenal athlete. A lot of people forget that he was an Ail-American football player as a sophomore at the University of Georgia. He probably could have played pro ball if he hadn’t torn up his knee in college. He was still a good hand in the ring, though.

  Later on I helped him get into Japan, and he really proved himself there. He worked his ass off for All Japan, absorbed a lot of physical punishment and was one of the company’s harder in-ring performers (and that was quite a statement, in that company). As a result, he became very successful there, but the punishment cut his career short, and he was out of the profession by the mid-1990s. But he didn’t let wrestling rule his life, and he ended up becoming a big success in the construction business in Florida. He went down the road, which is a tough thing for a lot of wrestlers to do. He still stays in touch with a lot of the guys, including me, but he doesn’t look back. He doesn’t linger, and I find that very admirable about him.

  Spivey’s tag partner, Mike Rotunda was another one—a smart guy and a great athlete. He made a lot easier transition than a lot of people have, from being a great amateur wrestler (at the University of Syracuse) to a very good pro. He also watched his money very well over the years. I can promise you, if Mike’s not working right now, his family’s not going hungry, because he’s been very smart with his money.

  Paul Orndorff was another nut, and tough on top of it, as his car found out one day when he got caught in traffic on the way to a show. He got in such a rage that he ripped the steering wheel right out of the car. Then he started reading The Bible. He said it calmed him. Paul was also the kind of guy who’d fight anyone. He didn’t care if you knew more wrestling than him—he was going to beat your ass. Don’t get the wrong idea—he was a great guy, but everyone knew you didn’t mess with Paul.

  Don Muraco was another crazy man, and another guy you wouldn’t want to meet in a dark alley. He was a true Hawaiian and didn’t care about much. Muraco was such a great worker, but he had that island attitude, and when he was ready to go back to the island for a while, he went back. He never let anything get to him, because he knew he could always go home and go surfing if he wanted to.

  Like with the NWA championship, the thing that finally wore me out was all the travel. If anything, the travel with the WWF was tougher than it was when I’d been champion a decade earlier. The WWF schedule had us taking a plane and goin
g to a town, taking a plane, going to another town, and so on, constantly. When I was NWA champion, there were many times when I’d go into a territory for a week at a time. If it was Florida, I might do a night in Tampa, then work Jacksonville and drive back to Tampa. I could work several cities but head back to Tampa each night, sleep in until noon and then head out to the next show in Orlando, or wherever. Each territory had a base. The WWF had no base. It was everywhere!

  Between the big paydays and the crazy travel, it was too much for some. A lot of the boys practically exploded from the combination of money and pressure. I saw a lot more drug use than I’d ever seen by the guys, on the whole. It was a situation that no one alerted Vince to that I know of. It stayed among the boys, and it got heavy at that time. And Vince was insanely busy, trying to run every aspect of this huge show. Would Vince have intervened, if he’d seen a problem? I don’t know, but I’d like to think so. Vince had road agents, guys who went on the road who were supposed to keep the guys in line. I think they were the ones who slipped, who maybe weren’t as observant as they could have been.

  The road agents knew of some of the issues and instances involving drug problems, but they tried to handle those things themselves. I think they were afraid if they told Vince, he might think they weren’t doing their jobs controlling the guys on the road. When they were asked, it was “all clear” on their front. Except it wasn’t.

  You can talk about drug testing, and I think there’s a point where it becomes necessary, but in 1985 we were a couple of years into a thing that was red hot, and everyone was blowing and going. I’d been around drugs, seen them, and had partaken of them a little bit earlier in my life, but certainly don’t now. My drug use had pretty much been confined to that time in 1973 right after my divorce, when I weighed 195 pounds and went to Florida. There were drugs everywhere there. The whole state was running amok, on cocaine, marijuana and everything else. And even then, I was never a big drug user.

  I went to parties and all that shit, but when I became NWA champion, there was no time for drugs. And when I got back with Vicki, there was no way that stuff was going to ruin my life. Even if I had wanted for it to, it wasn’t going to happen.

  In the 1970s, not long after we got back together, I got back home from several dates I had been working. I had some pot in my bag, and I said, “Hey, Vicki, you want to smoke some pot?”

  She said, “Terrence, you really have some pot, do you?”

  “Yeah, I sure do.”

  “Let me see it.”

  So I handed her my little plastic bag with the marijuana in it. She opened the bag, sniffed it, then walked into the bathroom and dumped the bag’s contents into the commode.

  As she flushed it away, she yelled, “Don’t you ever bring that stuff in my house again!”

  And I damn sure didn’t.

  Besides, once our family was back together, I truly realized life was the greatest trip of all. I think that’s one of the reasons that I’m still alive and a lot of the boys I worked with, including guys younger than me, are not.

  There were several guys on steroids, but I guess I was lucky when it came to steroids. Actually, I was lucky in a lot of ways—I was born into the business, and my father knowing the other promoters gave me a two-or three-year head start.

  My first experience with steroids was in college, although I didn’t know what they were. In 1964, we were playing for West Texas State and the doctor said, “We’ve got this stuff called dianabol. It’s supposed to make you stronger and gain weight. Do you want to try it?”

  Now, no one knew then the harmful side effects of the steroids, so hell yes, I wanted to try it! So did most of the guys on the team. It wasn’t illegal, and there was nothing wrong with it, as far as we knew.

  I took them for about five days, and I thought, “Geez, I’m not any stronger. This shit don’t work.”

  I threw them away. Some of the guys who stayed on them got stronger and bigger, but that’s how unknown steroids were back then. Later, when I got into the business, hell, we were too busy shooting jackrabbits and drinking beer on the side of the road to think about steroids or anything else.

  I’ll be honest, if I’d been 20 years old when steroids became better known and someone told me they were my ticket to getting into the business and having a good 15-to 20-year run, but it might cut some time off my life, I would have probably taken them. Fortunately, I was a little older, and pretty well established by the time all these other guys were taking them, and I just didn’t have any interest.

  There was only one other time I took steroids. In 1989, I broke my sacrum in a match with Sting, and it was the most painful thing I’d ever felt in my entire life. One of the NWA wrestlers (who I won’t name), a good friend of mine, gave me some tablets and said, “Terry, I really think these things will promote heal-ing.

  I ended up losing them a few days later, in a North Carolina airport, after airport security found them. The police asked me about them, and I told them the truth, without naming the guy who gave them to me. I just said I had been given the pills to heal my injured sacrum.

  One officer looked at me and said, “You sure don’t look like you take them,” and they let me go, without the pills, of course.

  But getting back to 1986, my time in the WWF was coming to an end. It just got to the point that I was working on a run of God-only-knows how many days without a break, without getting home even once, and there was no end in sight. The travel had gotten to me, and I’d finally had enough.

  One night I was splitting a room with Jimmy Hart. He was in one bed, and I was in the other, and I set my alarm for 6 a.m., hoping Jimmy would go right back to sleep. I snuck in the bathroom, packed my bags, shut off the light in the bathroom and started heading out of the door with my bags.

  Just then, Jimmy sat up and said, “Terry? Where are you going?”

  “Jimmy,” I said, “you caught me. I can’t take it anymore. I’m going home, going back to my girls.”

  CHAPTER 20

  Terry Funk, Part-Time Wrestler

  After leaving the WWF in 1986, I spent a lot of time at the ranch, only leaving for brief stints of wrestling.

  One of those turned out to be my last trip ever for the World Wrestling Council, and my last trip to Puerto Rico until 2002, when I went in for a shot for the IWA. I wrestled Barry Windham and Carlos Colon, and even in 1987, the fans where still crazy.

  It ended up being my last WWC trip because of what happened to my old West Texas alum, Frank Goodish—Bruiser Brody. In 1988, Brody was stabbed to death in a locker room bathroom by WWC booker Jose Gonzales. Jose was eventually found not guilty by reason of self defense, which surprised me. I did not believe he would be acquitted.

  The thing that still haunts me is, what brought Gonzales to the point of doing what he did to Bruiser Brody? Was it fear, or was it hatred? I’m not knowledgeable enough about the situation, even after talking to the wrestlers I knew who were in the locker room when it happened, to really have an answer to that. But it is beyond my conception that someone could take a life in anything except a completely self-defensive situation.

  I had always enjoyed my trips there, and it was always a good place to make a buck, but what happened to Brody took the fun out of it.

  I was never someone who made a point of saying publicly, “I’m never going down there again,” but I just didn’t want to.

  A year before he died, Brody ended up back with Giant Baba, in All Japan, after a tumultuous split.

  Brody had ended up burning his bridges in Japan, by jumping to Inoki’s side in 1985 and then wanting to jump back. When he returned, he went back for the same amount he had been getting when he left in 1985. He talked to me about it, after starting to work for Inoki, and he felt he had made a mistake by going there. He realized he would have been better off just staying where he was.

  Junior and I both talked to Baba, trying to get him to take Brody back. Bruiser was talented, and I don’t think he felt that they we
re pushing him as well as they could have. I agreed with Brody—Inoki didn’t really have any plans to make Brody a top superstar. His main benefit from having Brody was just that he had taken him from Baba.

  I truly believe that if Brody hadn’t been killed, he’d have made one hell of a run in the WWF, for Vince Jr. He certainly had shown no signs of wavering up to the end of his life.

  Brody was coming back in just as I was making my last shots as one of Baba’s soldiers in 1987. After all that time, Baba felt it was time to de-emphasize me, and I knew it. I wasn’t going to allow them to take me back to absolutely nothing. I felt like I’d paid my dues, and it was just time to go. My relationship with Baba had really grown strained over the years, from when I was on “Wildside” at a period when he wanted 100 percent of my time. Also, since Stan Hansen had started there in 1981, he had pretty much become the leading American for Baba. Baba felt like he could do without me, and I felt that I could do just as well without him.

  And I had been instrumental in bringing Hansen in, along with my brother, and when we did, there was no doubt in my mind that the route we were taking would be to make Hansen the superstar, and that was all right with me, so I never had any hard feelings for Stan, or for Baba, for that matter. But at the time, I didn’t feel I was ready to be put to pasture. Baba felt like I was just an old dog, and I felt like the old dog had a few tricks left.

  Around the time all this was going on in All Japan, something happened in New Japan that changed the course of the business.

  After a couple of years with Baba, Choshu (and most of the crew that went with him) had come back to New Japan. In a tag match, Akira Maeda kicked Riki Choshu full out, cracking his orbital bone. Maeda was fired, but ended up starting a group called UWF that worked a slower style that looked more like a shoot.

  The UWF was actually a restart of a similar promotion that popped up a few years earlier. This time, though, Maeda had convinced people he was the real deal, and he and the UWF were box-office magic for a few years.