More Than Just Hardcore

by Terry Funk

  I had Vicki send to West Texas State’s locker room a bouquet with a note that said, “Sorry about the game today. Tough luck. Abilene Christian is number one.”

  They had a riot! West Texas State won the game, but they were fighting from the time they got out onto the field. Even the coach was damn near ready to fight Abilene Christian’s coach.

  What a motivator that is! You can really piss somebody off just with flowers and a carefully worded note.

  I decided in this case it would be best to wait about five years to keep my mouth shut. When I finally told the West Texas State coach, he just half-smiled and said, “You son of a bitch! You damn near got me killed. I damn near lost my job over that!”

  John had let the bouquet motivate him to get in shape, while my alma mater just got whipped into a frenzy.

  I have tried to be there for John’s kids, the way I know he’d be there for mine if I’d been taken, instead of him. I love his daughter Jolee to death, and his death was very difficult on her and her brother John T, and on their mother. John T. ended up playing at West Texas State, like his dad, and he graduated with a 3.75, which is no small feat. He’s working in Houston now, and we always see him when he comes to visit his mother. Jolee is a 4.0 student at Texas Tech, and she’ll graduate this year. She’s married now, and I don’t see her as often as I used to.

  They both remind me of John, but Jolee is probably more like him. She’s just got that easy way about her.

  I think of John a lot, along with my dad and so many other friends. In June 2004, I turned six years older than the age my father was when he passed away. As I said, I’ve done a lot of living, but I’ve lost a lot of people in my life. I see them every day in the pictures on my study wall.

  Some of them I get mad at. Larry Hennig is a dear friend, and has been for a long time. When he lost his son Curt to a drug overdose, it devastated him. I was torn up, too, but it pissed me off, too, because it was induced by Curt himself. I really think it killed a part of Larry, and I can’t help but blame Curt for doing that to his dad and his family.

  I get mad at Eddie Gilbert, too. I tried many times to help him, to tell him he needed to be careful, but it’s hard. You see someone with a problem, but you also see that person as a friend, and you never can tell which guys you need to be watching out for. It’s not like there’s a glow around their heads to where you could say, “Wow, I’d better talk to him. He’s going to be the next one to go.”

  Eddie knew he had a problem, and it was something he fought hard against. Eddie was extremely proud of himself in the summer of 1994. He was clean and sober and was actually trying to go into politics in Lexington, Tennessee, where he was from. He saw an escape and a totally different way of living.

  About six months later he overdosed on cocaine and died in Puerto Rican hotel room while on a wrestling tour. If he had won that constable’s election, I think he’d still be alive today and still be drug-free.

  Even though I knew he’d had a problem, the news of his death came as a terrible shock. He was only 34, and had such a great mind for the wrestling business. He was another second-generation guy. I also knew both his father, Tommy, and his brother, Doug, well. Tommy spent a couple of years wrestling for us and was a good man. Eddie had a very strong, tight-knit family, and I can’t imagine what they’re going through, even to this day. The toughest thing in the world must be, as a parent, to lose one of your own, and Vicki and I hope that God blesses us with death prior to either of our daughters.

  Eddie Gilbert was a friend. But I’m at the point where, when I get news about one of them passing away, and drugs are involved, I’m pissed off at them. I’m mad, and I don’t know if that’s right or not, but it’s how I feel.

  I don’t think it’s callousness, but I want to yell at them, “Goddammit, you’re cheating me, you’re cheating your friends, and and you’re cheating your family! By God, learn to count! How many pills have you had? Keep track!”

  Hell, I even get mad at Eddie Graham, sometimes, for killing himself and taking himself away from all the people who loved him.

  The sad thing is, a lot of times, I just feel numb to the news, when someone calls to tell me about another young guy in the business dying. There have been -so many, I’ve almost just grown numb to it. I know that anger and numbness is a horrible combination of feelings to have in reaction to news like that, but I feel like I’ve gotten that phone call 100 times.

  And I think again, of the Von Erich boys who died young—David, Kerry, Mike and Chris.

  There were some horrible stories about the Von Erichs, and I tend to believe a lot of the stories. I guess it was just a case of too much money and fame for kids that young.

  I remember being on a plane in the mid-1980s with Kerry, headed for Saint Louis. Kerry and I were talking and he said, “Boy, I really feel good. I’ve really cleaned up. I don’t drink, or do drugs anymore. I’m finally clean and sober, and I finally feel like I’ve got my life back in line.”

  Then the stewardess walked by, and Kerry ordered a vodka and 7-Up.

  I thought it was quite funny at the time, but looking back, it’s really a sad story.

  I remember when Kerry went to Japan for the first time, in March 1983. He walked around the room and introduced himself to everyone.

  “Hello, Mr. Baba, how are you? Mr. Higuchi, how are you?”

  After walking around the room and shaking everyone’s hand, he sat down for a few minutes. Then, he got up and walked around the room again, shaking everyone’s hands.

  “Hello, Mr. Baba, how are you? Mr. Higuchi, how are you?”

  I knew it wasn’t a good situation, but Kerry was able to work, so what were we going to do?

  And there’s Kevin, Fritz’s oldest son, who had some problems of his own. God bless him—I’m proud of him. He’s discovered that money and family are better drugs than anything else. That’s the thing about being addicted to money—you have to live pretty clean to make it and keep it.

  I remember Vicki and I used to go out with Randy Savage and his wife, Elizabeth, when Randy and I were both working for the WWF in the mid-1980s.

  Elizabeth was a wonderful person, but things with Randy and her fell apart in the early 1990s, and she ended up dying a couple of years ago, mixing alcohol and drugs. I wonder how she could have gotten to that point, because when Randy and I would go out with our wives, Elizabeth wouldn’t even take a glass of wine.

  She was living with Lex Luger at the time of her death. Now I never considered Luger someone I wanted to go have a beer with, but I don’t know how he could have let her get to that point.

  What I do know is that must have been a horrible deal for her. Maybe this is just chauvinism on my part, but I don’t get mad at Elizabeth when I think of it, the way I get mad at Curt Hennig or Eddie Gilbert. I truly think hers was an exceptional case. I don’t think Liz would have been surrounding herself with that shit on her own. I can’t imagine Liz ever looking at Luger and saying, “Hey, let’s go get some drugs and do them.” I just don’t think it started that way. There’s no way it would have. I think she was enticed along the way. I think all that shit was made a part of her life, and it certainly wasn’t a part of her life when she was with Randy.

  Sometimes, we become our characters in this business. Randy became the wired “Macho Man” on occasion. Luger probably doesn’t know who he is, to this day. He probably still thinks he’s the “Total Package.” I think that persona consumed him, and I hate to say that, but it’s true. It happens a lot, in this business.

  I remember the last time I talked to my friend Mike Hegstrand, Road Warrior Hawk, just a few hours before he died.

  A few days earlier, my wife had gotten a call from someone whose voice, she said, was awfully garbled. The caller said something like, “This is Hawk,” and then a bunch of stuff Vicki couldn’t even make out.

  Now, we used to get a lot of strange calls at the house from wrestling fans, so in our last conversation, I asked Hawk if that
had been him who had called the house.

  “No,” he said. “It wasn’t me.”

  He also told me how worn out he was.

  “I tell you, Terry, I’ve been moving all day, and I’m just dead tired.”

  We talked a little while longer and then, I told him I had to go. From what I understand, he hung up, laid down to rest and went to sleep. He didn’t wake up again.

  I also talked to him a couple of months earlier. He called, asking if I knew anywhere he could pick up some work.

  “I don’t really care where it is,” he said. “I just want to pick up some work. Do you know any of those independents that might be able to use me?”

  Well, hell, this guy was one of the top names in the entire business in the 1980s, so there should be somebody, right? I checked with Court Bauer, who ran an independent group in Florida, and Court said he’d “think about it.” He never did say anything back to me on it.

  Some guys didn’t get killed, but they sure hurt their careers. Scott Hall was, in my mind, a very talented worker in the 1990s, and he still could be an asset to someone in 2004. But he’s squandered so much time, and the real shame is that he’s hurt both himself (both healthwise and in terms of money in the bank) and the business (by keeping it from having another marketable star available much of the time). I hope he’ll kick himself in the ass at some point and get his head on straight, because I truly believe he’s one of the more talented guys in the business when he’s working right. I hope it’s not too late for him to turn things around, as a guy in his mid-40s. I’m afraid he might be approaching that point, where it’s just too late for him to turn it around. If he’s going to do it, he’d better do it soon.

  I know a lot of people who don’t agree with me on this, but I’m telling you, having seen the guy, he can get heat with the best of them, and he also knows how to be a good babyface. I can knock the way the guy lives his life, but there’s no knocking his ability to get over with a crowd. Why throw it down the drain?

  You can’t blame the drug deaths on Vince McMahon or wrestling. It’s not the promoters, or the agents who are the enablers. The enabler to all this stuff is the road itself. These were guys rolling around with a lot of cash in hand, and a lot of time on their hands while going from show to show. You had to be in charge of yourself. You had to take control of your life. The drug problem would be minute if the towns could come to the boys, instead of the wrestlers coming to the towns.

  You don’t watch singers overdose and drop dead, and then say, “Oh, music is killing people.”

  Yet the entire wrestling profession gets tied to these problems. It shouldn’t be the profession. It has to be the individual. It has to get to the point of wrestlers assuming responsibility for themselves.

  You can look at Vince McMahon and say he should do more, but he has done a great deal through the years. He’s fired a lot of guys for being visibly high. He’s put a few who needed it through rehab. And over the past couple of years, it hasn’t been WWE that’s had the problem—it’s been the independent promotions, the guys who used to be with WWF, WCW, or ECW.

  I believe the drug problem in wrestling is subsiding and will continue to subside because there are people in the business who are realizing that staying employed in it is a way to become a successful individual and maybe even retire at a young age. Career spans will shorten as time goes by, not only because of injuries caused by guys working such a physical style nightly, but because of the monetary opportunities.

  And that might be a good thing, because this business of wrestling can be hard, and it forgets you. I think of Wahoo McDaniel, the only guy I ever saw who would fight for the underneath boys, every single place he went, to get them more money. He always busted his ass in the ring, and then he’d be in the back, fighting for somebody else’s payoff, which no one did. You weren’t going to find anyone else to do that, but Wahoo would.

  My wife and I drove 250 miles to his funeral in Odessa, Texas, a couple of years ago. There were two people connected to the wrestling business there—my wife and I.

  Guys don’t realize that Wahoo was someone who fought for them all those years. He was always the leader, the “Crusader Rabbit,” always the guy who’d go pitch the bitch to the promoter.

  What the business really needs is a wrestler’s union. In the old days, it would have been impossible because you would have had guys trying to bust one organization at a time when there were 30 organizations. That promoter could call one of the other 30 promoters and say, “Hey, I need a little help,” and there’d be new talent in the promotion, while whoever tried to start the union would find themselves alienated from the business.

  Today I think it’s possible. And I’m not talking about something that would mess up things for Vince McMahon or his company. I’m talking about something that would do nothing but help. Right now would actually be the easiest time in the world to do it. Wrestlers starting a union isn’t the same as wrestlers just trying to hang up Vince by his balls. People have to get over that idea that a union is the enemy. It’s not to put Vince, or anyone else, out of business. It’s just something to make sure something is set aside for guys who need medical care for their in-ring injuries, especially those guys who spend 15 years putting over the Triple Hs and Undertakers of the world, because those top stars didn’t get to where they are, making that huge money, without some help. And that help came from scores of guys who put them over, but who never made that huge money. Those are the guys who should be looked after, and it should be those top stars who are fighting for a way to take care of those other guys. Those underneath guys deserve a little something for busting their asses to help make the business the success it is.

  A union is not there to ruin Vince. It’s to help with health care, to do some good for the guys who have done good for that company for so long. Eventually, I wouldn’t be surprised if the one who figures this out is Vince himself. But it needs to be done, and it’s not for old Terry Funk, because I’m out of it, but the business needs to look out after guys, the guys who spend their time in it and don’t make enough to retire on. The few who are making that five million a year need to look at the other guys with some compassion. I bet you Benoit, Guerrero, Triple H and Undertaker all see it, because each one of them has been in the position where they weren’t making money hand over fist.

  And it wouldn’t be a big bite out of Vince, but it is something that needs to be looked at, because believe me, there’s a guy in that company for years who has made a decent living. And maybe he’s not the smartest guy in the world, or the most marketable, but he’s done a lot of jobs for you. And if it weren’t for guys like him putting the stars over, how would the wrestling business make stars? Maybe some will benefit who don’t deserve it, but better that than the guys who deserve the help not getting it. There have been and are a lot of guys who lived in this business who either need some help, or will, for the 2,000 backdrops they’ve taken in their career, or all the power bombs they’ve taken.

  The only thing is, people have to stop looking at it like it’s there to hurt the business. Unions want employers to succeed because when they don’t, suddenly there are a lot of lost union jobs, so they have a stake in the company doing well. If WWE had been taking $500 a night from every house show for the last 20 years, they’d have something started, for guys who needed it. I’m not talking about giving a guy $100,000 so he can buy caviar, or re-tile his swimming pool. I’m talking about helping the Wahoo McDaniels and Johnny Valentines of future generations, who would otherwise die with nothing, no way to pay their hospital bills, in their last days.

  When John Ayers died, his wife was able to send those kids to school because he had some benefits from the NFL players’ union. And she doesn’t live in the lap of luxury, and she still has to work to earn a buck every day.

  The business is getting a little better about acknowledging its history and the legends of the past, but a lot of greats don’t get the recognition they deserve.
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br />   I can’t finish this book without mentioning one guy who should always be remembered—Danny Hodge.

  Of all the guys I ever knew in wrestling, the one guy I never, ever would want to shoot with would be Danny Hodge in his prime. Hell, take Danny Hodge now, in his 70s, amputate his arms and legs, and I might have a 50 percent chance with him.

  I watch the shootfighting groups like Pride and Ultimate Fighting Championship, and they have some tough guys. But let me tell you—you can have all the Gracies, all the Shamrocks you want. They couldn’t hold a candle to Danny Hodge.

  Danny Hodge was a three-time NCAA wrestling champion, and one of the strongest men I’ve ever known. His grip strength was unbelievable—I’ve seen him crush a pair of steel pliers with one hand.

  Danny was world junior heavyweight champion for years and was a perfect fit as a legend in Oklahoma and other parts of the South and the Midwest. The rest of the country had no idea what they were missing.

  As a person, Danny was a great guy, just a lot of fun to be around. He was also the greatest shooting wrestler in the world for years, but if you dropped him into New York as the world junior heavyweight champion, the people there would look at him and say, “Oh, come on! Who are you trying to bullshit?”

  They would have prejudged him based on his size and appearance, because he didn’t have a musclebound physique, and I don’t know how his southern talk, peppered with “dadgums,” and “gollys,” would have gone over.

  But he was a great one, and everyone in Oklahoma and everywhere else he wrestled knew there was only one Danny Hodge. And there’s never been anything like him since.

  In a way, though, he reminds me of Jim Raschke, who wrestled for years in the AWA and Georgia as Baron Von Raschke. The baron was a tall, bald German who goose-stepped and used a clawhold. He reminds me of Hodge because the baron also did not have a very impressive physique. He was another guy you might take a look at and think, “Well, he couldn’t whip anybody.”

  But Raschke was a great amateur wrestler and one of the toughest guys you were likely to meet in the wrestling profession. He could stretch the hell out of damn near anybody if he’d really wanted to.