by Terry Funk
Dusty and Lawler were at the show with me, and we couldn’t believe it. This crowd was the damnedest commotion we’d ever seen, but they were all clowns, and they all got along!
There was another guy there, a crazy wrestler named Madman Pondo. He sees himself as a combination of Cactus Jack and Jack the Ripper. He dreams about wrestling me. Every time I see him, he tells me how much he’d like to work with me. It’s his dream and ambition!
And I think once I’ve wrestled Madman Pondo, then I can call it a career. Once we’ve hit each other over the head with neon light tubes, shot each other with staple guns and all that other crap, then I’ll feel like I’ve done it all, because I’ve wrestled them all, except for Madman Pondo.
The funny thing was, the Insane Clown Posse were pretty damn good workers. My big match on the first show was me and the Insane Clown Posse against Lawler and two partners.
On the second show, I wrestled Dusty, but it wasn’t exactly just like old times. We’d both slowed down a bit. The day before, we walked to lunch together. It took an hour to get from our hotel to the restaurant, and it was only a block and a half away.
After my match with Dusty, I was watching the Insane Clown Posse against Madman Pondo and another psychopath, Necro Butcher. During the match, they did a spot that you might not think would get over, but it sure as hell did with this crowd.
At one point in the match, Shaggy 2 Dope was lying outside the ring, terribly hurt from the beating he’d taken. Pondo and Butcher were in the ring with Violent Jay. I was looking at Shaggy 2 Dope, trying to figure out what he was doing on the side of the ring, there. Well, he took out a lighter and was trying to light up a gigantic joint.
Seriously, the damn thing was about 18 inches long! Shaggy 2 Dope got it lit really good, then threw it over the top rope to Violent Jay. Violent Jay, in a great deal of pain, took a bit hit off that 18-inch-long joint… and he hulked up! He took another hit, and he hulked up more! He took a third hit, and he was, by God, invincible. He beat those guys all over the place, and the fans were just going out of their minds. I always thought the spinning toehold was a good finisher. Maybe I should have been keeping an 18-inch joint under the ring all that time! Who said marijuana was a depressant?
The smartest thing they did was, they figured out a way to make sure they weren’t getting screwed on the concessions. Live event promoters have always gotten screwed on concessions, because it seems a lot of the time the amount the concession people pay percentages on is less than what they actually sold. I’m not saying this goes on at every event, but it happens a lot. Well, the Insane Clown Posse figured out a way that it wouldn’t happen to them.
When you went through the gates at the Insane Clown Posse events, you traded in cash for Insane Clown Posse coins, and the only way you could buy your concessions was with those coins. At the end of the show, every concessionaire has to report all their sales, because they have to turn in their Insane Clown Posse coins for cash. The clowns win again!
And it was at that show that Lawler talked to me about doing some promos to build up for a match in Memphis. And that’s what we did, leading up to a match in August 2004.
Lawler was technically the heel, but I wanted to make my heel promos, and they still played like babyface promos, because our business has gotten to the point that there are no more babyfaces or heels.
The match itself, me and Corey Macklin versus Lawler and Jimmy Hart, was good, especially considering you had two old wrestlers and two non-wrestlers out there. I enjoyed the hell out of it. The crowd reacted pretty much how I expected. Lawler was a legend there, but he didn’t have that hard-edged crowd heat. Lawler’s a great entertainer, but he’s been there so long that the people have seen him go from heel to babyface and back, over and over. Those people love Lawler, and even when he was a heel there, for our match, the people loved him, even the ones who booed him. They were just acting like they didn’t love him, because that was what they were supposed to do. They truly love himthey just like acting as if they hate him.
And there are people making a living in the wrestling business, today. Two of them are the best world champs we ever hadmy brother and Harley Race. Junior makes a buck off of running a wrestling school, as well as a promotion. Harley is also running shows and making some appearances with Misawa’s group in Japan.
You can be successful in this business without having to set the world on fire. That’s the problem with a lot of guys. They come in and want to be the next Vince McMahon overnight. Well, hell, even Vince McMahon didn’t become Vince McMahon overnight.
And a lot of the successes are having problems staying strong. As I write this in 2004, I see the Japanese wrestling companies cooperating with each other, sending talent from one promotion to another. That never could have happened when Junior and I booked All Japan, because the rivalries were so business. But I guess it’s just another progression in the business, a new and necessary way to find new ways to draw.
To me, one of the strengths of Japanese wrestling was that they had very few “characters.” Most of the guys, ninety-five percent or so, were just themselves. There weren’t a bunch of name changes. When the Japanese press would talk to the guys, they would answer questions almost as honestly as they could, which is something we never really gave them in the States. What kept us from being strong with the media was the same thing we thought gave us life in the territorial era. We had life through not letting the media in and not leveling with people, keeping an air of mystery about it. Japanese culture allowed the people there to be more tolerant of something that was a work than we felt people here would have been.
We weren’t the circus coming to town. The circus comes once a year and does business. It might not have been the greatest show on earth, but when it only comes once a year, they can sell it that way. Wrestling, especially in the territorial days, went on week after week and night after night in the same area. If we told them we were totally entertainment, then that entertainment was going to get old a lot faster than sport. That was the reason we tried to maintain the facade we were a sport. Even though we didn’t get into the newspapers much, the people who did come believed what we were doing was real.
It worked for a long time, but we’ve progressed and gone more and more into entertainment as we went along. We were self-destructing on a weekly basis and didn’t even know it. The feeling was, if we wanted to keep doing business, we’d have to do something at least as good as we did last week.
There’s room for several angles on every show. One should be a long-term deal, and the others should be quick deals. There’s no real formula. It’s not like
I would go to book a show and say, “Let’s see, according to my calculations, I need three-point-five angles on this show.”
You just have to have a feel for it, and a feel for what’s working and when you need to add something. It’s always good to have underneath angles going, but there should always be one angle that is clearly your main thing.
But anything can be an angle if it’s promoted right. Wrestlemania itself is an angle because it’s something out there that fans are anticipating, and an angle is anything you talk about to create interest for a show down the road. It’s very healthy because WWE always has something to build to, and it’s something everyone knows is coming.
And people today think that doing a work is a thing of the past. But works are everywhere. Look at reality TV shows. Those are supposed to be people acting as they really would, but the cameras always magically seem to know when to go in for a closeup of someone. They’re all worked!
What is real today? My dad used to tell me, “Don’t believe that everything in life is a work.”
Well, I’m not so sure. It’s scary to think how much of this world is a work. And anything where money is involved, if it’s not a work, is at least manipulated. The buck is more important than the purity of the sport.
Hell, high school football is manipulated. Ever notice how a team gets a 20-p
oint lead at halftime and then sends in the second string? That’s almost a work! They’re influencing the outcome by sending in a squad that does not give the school its best chance of staying ahead. I understand why they do it. They don’t want to kill that other school, because the next time they meet, it might not be as big of a draw. But it’s still manipulation.
Sometimes it’s amazing to me how much the business has changed. But the manipulation has always been there.
The situation has changed for the wrestlers themselves. In the 1950s and 1960s, we had Cadillac Row in Amarillo, because all the wrestlers were making good enough money that they could buy the nicest cars. They were making $300 a week at a time when most people were making $50 to $75 a week. Today there are a few slots where you can become a millionaire, but those very few slots are in WWE, and if you’re not there, you’re having a hell of a time trying to make a living in the wrestling business.
In terms of the style and the product, the changes have been huge. When I was a rookie in 1965, wrestling was very accepted as a sport, maybe not in every area, but here in West Texas. The most spectacular move anyone saw in those days was a dropkick. And gimmick matches were few and far between. Remembermy dad did the death match with Mike DiBiase, and then they spent a whole year building up the second one.
Gradually though, everything progresses and changes. You have to be able to top what you showed the people last week, or at least have something new for them, to keep bringing them back and to do business. So the matches got wilder and the characters got bolder over time. No one did those things trying to hurt the business. It was all a matter of trying to stay in business.
And 1965 was the year things really started to pick up speed, as blood became more and more commonly used, and there were more and more stipulation matches. By the 1970s, we went heavily into the gimmick matches because we had run through all the 60-and 90-minute matches the people were going to stand.
And when competition became prevalent in the 1980s, it sped up that progression even more, because now you had companies trying to top each other. The stipulations have gotten wilder and more common, and the style of wrestling has sped up.
And it’s still progressing today. So what’s next? Well, progression can go in more than one direction. Ten years from now I see the progression leading the business to the point that the shoot wrestling will be the dominant thing, or what we really believe is shoot wrestling.
These shoot fight groupsthey’re all manipulated. I see it every time they put together an apparent mismatch. They are doing that because they are looking to create a star, and they are looking for a specific result in that mismatch. These companies invest a lot of money in the Bob Sapps of the world, and keeping their stars strong is in their financial best interests. It might not start that way, but it turns into that.
What I don’t understand is how any of the Japanese fans believe in anything they see, when the atmosphere over there now is that guys go from shoot fights to worked wrestling matches and back again. To me, once a guy participates in a worked scenario and you bring him back in a shoot, you are tainting the purity of the competition.
Sometimes they even intermingle works and shoots on the same cards. How do you tell the fans, “This one might not be real, but the next one will be?”
Once you do that, your business is a work. That might not mean that everything you do is a work, but you are manipulated.
But we follow Japan a lot. We follow them in wrestling and we follow them in business. They had their recession a few years back, and we’re having ours now. In wrestling, the Japanese have been very progressive, in large part because of the amount of media coverage the business gets over there. Now they have gone in a shoot direction, because they saw that was the way to progress, dollar-wise, at the box office. Why did things go from no bleeding to bleeding every night? Because it produces more money at the box office, or at least you think it does.
And American wrestling is going to progress in the same direction, whether you, or Vince McMahon, or I like it, or not. That will be the ultimate progression. We’ll still have wrestling from Vince, but the biggest dollars will be drawn through the shoot wrestling industry, regardless of whether they are actual shoots, or just proclaimed as shoots.
I actually think Vince would be the perfect guy to promote that. I wonder why he’s never tried that. Here he was, pushing bodybuilding leagues and goofy-ass football teams, but over here was another form of something he knew wrestling. He’s got the arenas, the equipment and the production teams already. If McMahon were to promote shoots the way he has promoted his worked matches, he might see the best ratings he’s ever had. And what the hellif they’re working in six months on the shoot show, who cares, as long as they’re not obvious about it? We want to be entertained, and if we think two guys are really kicking the shit out of each other, that’s going to entertain us.
That’s the only direction left. Worked wrestling has already gone to its greatest limit. What could be next? Reality is next.
And once we get to that point, the whole thing will start over. They say wrestling is a cyclical business, but the real cycle of its history will start over with shoots, and with the inevitable manipulation of those shoots.
The first time shoot wrestling gets on national TV and has a good show, that’s it. They’re off and running. They might not run every week, but they’ll run a few times a year. And eventually they’ll run a little more, so they can make more money. Then they’ll decide to manipulate things a little more strongly to protect the guys they’ve figured out are their superstars.
And wouldn’t you know it? When that happens, we’re working again!
I wouldn’t call it a “vicious cycle.” It is only the wonderful world of wrestling!
EPILOGUE
On a shelf in my stufy is a picture of Brock Glear, a young kid who had brain cancer. I went to see him before he died. He was the sweetest kid in the world, a wrestling fan, which was how I met him. He was nine years old when he died on New Year’s Day, 2001. Dennis Stamp, who sprays trees now, was spraying by Brock’s house, and got to talking with the kid. Dennis really loved him, too.
It was a shitty deal, but it helps you keep things in perspective. That kid knew what he had, and knew how it would end, but, by God, he was going down the road! That’s a pretty tough kid.
I keep his picture up to remind me of that kid, but also to remind me what my friend John Ayers had to battle in the last years of his life. John, who played in two Super Bowls, who did so many wonderful things in his life, died after fighting liver cancer, such a terrible death.
When they had his funeral, we had a reception here at the ranch. It was amazing to see who all had turned out to pay their respects. Half of John’s 49er teammates, from Joe Montana on down, came all the way out here, out of respect for him, to say goodbye. He had so much respect from his peers.
And he loved the wrestlers. I had gotten him involved in Crockett’s NWA group in the 1980s, and he just loved being around the business. I think he’d have made his mark in wrestling if he hadn’t had so much success as a football player. Frankly, I’m glad he didn’t get into the business, because he was a guy with a laid-back attitude, and I don’t know how he would have fared with the manipulations of some of the people in the business. He might have been too honorable a guy to be in the business.
This was the kind of man John Ayers was. I would take off on a wrestling tour, and he would come every day and take care of my cattle and my horses while I was gone.
He was my best friend and was always willing to help me out in any way he could, even though he endured quite a bit because of me.
In the first round of the 1978 NFL draft, the 49ers picked Ernie Hughes, an All-America offensive guard (John’s position) from Notre Dame. John was playing first team, but he was spending all summer drinking beer and playing around.
One of John’s favorite tricks was to bring three or four people to the house, peop
le I didn’t even know. They’d all be there in the den, where I had a bar and a keg at the time. Vicki and I would go to bed, and John would keep his entourage there until the wee hours! I had strangers drinking all my beer!
He also loved driving his Jeep all over my ranch, leaving tracks in my grass. That was really funny to him!
Anyway, he had been carrying on for a while, and I thought to myself, “John’s not getting prepared enough for this Ernie Hughes.”
I decided to call a local florist.
A few days later, a bouquet of green (Notre Dame’s color) carnations showed up at John’s house, along with a note that read, “Good luck, sucker! Notre Dame is number one and always will be. Signed, Ernie.”
And I’ll be a son of a bitch if he wasn’t out every morning at sunup, running around my pasture, dragging around a tractor tire he had tied to himself with a huge rope. He was training from the time he woke up to the time he went to bed. He became a crazy man! He wouldn’t slow down, wouldn’t have a beer with me, wouldn’t do anything. He wanted to kill Ernie Hughes and was getting prepared to do it.
It was like this for about three weeks. John was killing himself getting into shape, but even worse, I had lost my beer-drinking buddy. I finally decided to call him.
“John,” I said, “I’m sorry, but I’m the one who sent you those flowers.”
He was pretty mad at me, but hellhe was in tremendous shape!
I thought that trick worked pretty well, so a couple of years later, I used it again, when West Texas State played Abilene Christian in the Lone Star Conference championship game.
