Dusty: Reflections of Wrestling's American Dream

by Dusty Rhodes

I told Jerry, “That’s it! Find yourself another ride tomorrow.”

  After the show when everybody calmed down, Terry, Bobby Duncum, and the German, Karl Von Hess, and I headed for old Mexico. Duncum and Von Hess brought the good doctor with them.

  We were in this little cantina drinking and talking to the whores, just having fun. The bar had this long sheet of glass that ran behind it; maybe about 20 feet long. Well, I was leaning on the bar when I looked in the mirror and noticed that behind me was Doc. He had a look about him like he was going to throw a whisky bottle into the glass.

  As Terry came up to the bar, I said very calmly that the Doc was getting ready to break the glass behind the bar.

  Crash!

  It happened! The sound of glass breaking filled the air.

  The bartender froze. We all put money on the bar and got the hell out of there. By the grace of God we got back over the border and avoided spending time in a Mexican jail!

  I got back to my room and to bed I went.

  It was the third day of this Texas odyssey, and our next stop was Odessa. If you think you’ve heard it all, you won’t believe the shit that happened next.

  We got up early, around 9 a.m., because from El Paso to Odessa you had to drive through Van Horn, Texas, which was like going back in time. You’d drive for forever before you got to Van Horn and the Dairy Queen.

  Anyway, we had finished breakfast, and Terry said that Harley would be taking the good doctor to Odessa. As we left the café, we noticed Jerry coming out of his room heading toward the café. He looked funny. He was blue-black.

  His suit was wet with a black-dye look. He had bought black dye, put water in his tub, and dyed his suit—with him in it!

  Holy shit, this was getting good!

  Dog had had his car washed and cleaned. It was spotless. Terry went into the café to talk to Harley as I cut off Jerry. Terry told Dog that Jerry was wet. When Terry came out while Harley was finishing his breakfast, Doc told us to get him a horse blanket from the western store across the street, so he could sit on it. We did and Jerry got in Dog’s car. We waited across the street so we could follow them.

  Harley came out and went off on the Doc!

  Harley drove as if he was in the Indy 500 all the time. We saw that he had put all his windows down so Dr. Jerry could maybe dry off. Dye was flying everywhere! Man, what a scene.

  We rode behind them, and I know that Harley tried to throw the good doctor out of the car three or four times going about 110 mph, but it didn’t happen.

  We all made it to Odessa and somehow we got through the match. Dr. Jerry was partly sick by this time, and Harley said he’d talk to Terry’s dad.

  The old man told Harley to rent a U-Haul truck and put Doc in the back and bring him to Lubbock and back to Amarillo … a fucking U-Haul! I loved it!

  “The Jerry Graham road trip was some of the craziest five days of my life.”

  —TERRY FUNK

  They were some great times, buddy. And running the road in the old territories was part of the business I miss.

  Some people in the business say I’m a son of a bitch fat ass. But, being great in all sports and overcoming adversity, some say I was and am the last “Bull of the Woods.”

  Back then there were lots of bulls in the woods.

  One of them who ran the road with me in pro wrestling was my late partner and friend, Dick Murdoch. As everybody who knows anything about me knows, he was my soulmate in the industry, which is why I dedicated the book to him.

  I could truly write an entire book about Hoyt Richard Murdoch, and I might do it one day.

  He was so close to me I couldn’t even go to his funeral. I am not a funeral guy. Everybody knocked me for that, and that’s cool, because I don’t care, as you can probably tell by the tone of my writing.

  This is the way I feel. I wanted to be able to keep his number in my phone book and I keep it on my cell phone. Some say all this life is only bullshit, so I said if I don’t see him for a while, I can always call him. If he doesn’t answer, I know he’s out somewhere. I didn’t want to see him dead, so he’s not dead to me. I have his number and every so often I will call him from the road; I just happen not to get him in. That’s the way I feel about it.

  The first time I saw Hoyt, he was running security at the fairgrounds in Amarillo when they had wrestling on Thursday nights, while I was wasting my life at West Texas State University. He was a big, tall, cotton-headed redneck kid who bleached his hair. I saw him there, and he would help all the bad guys back to the dressing room after the ass-kicking they got. I didn’t know at the time that he was Frankie Hill Murdoch’s son, one of the wrestling industry’s biggest stars of the Amarillo territory. Frankie had passed away a few years earlier.

  I didn’t see Hoyt again until we actually worked together in Kansas City, Pat O’Connor’s territory. I didn’t know that he had broken into the business as a wrestler, I believe in Tennessee.

  The Kansas City office was in a room of an old hotel. I had short blond hair and was sitting in Bob Geigel’s office when he said, “Man, we’re going to team you up. Your partner is right next door.” He opened the door and that’s the first time I met Murdoch, although I recognized him immediately from the Amarillo territory working behind the scenes as probably an 18-year-old.

  We hit it off instantly, and for the next three years or so it was as if you put two cowboys in a modern-day setting with a car instead of horses. With all of the whiskey and beer you could drink, the most fun you could have and the most fights you could get into, we had the most notorious legacy as a tag team in the history of our business. We were it buddy, and we were the outlaws … we were the Texas Outlaws.

  During that time of learning our trade, I went along with him because he educated me as he was the best plain-ass natural worker in the business, bar none.

  There were nights when he used to work and there were nights when he didn’t give a shit. When Dick Murdoch wanted to have a match with you, there was nothing he couldn’t do, and you knew it.

  To this day, in my opinion, one of the greatest televised title matches in the history of free TV was Hoyt against a young Barry Windham on Bill Watts’s Mid-South Wrestling promotion TV show.

  But I noticed right off about Hoyt that he got a bad reputation. Just like the old gunslinger Jesse James got a reputation about being a bad ass and not liking people, Hoyt had this reputation of not liking black people or any ethnic group.

  But he had some great friends who were black. Ernie Ladd—”Big Red” as I called him—and Hoyt were like brothers; they loved each other. So they must have known something that I didn’t. And I would think there’s got to be something here, because through the years of my traveling with Dick and staying with him 360 out of 365 days a year on the road, in a car, or at a Shady Rest Inn, you know there’s more to someone than that so-called reputation.

  It was phenomenal times when he would break down and lose that feeling of hatred toward ethnic groups. So, I really knew how he was inside; he had a heart.

  There were times when he would say he was not going to go pick this guy up that could have ridden with us, and I’d talk him into taking him and then he would curse the guy all the way there, making the guy feel so bad that he had to do it. But Dick was going to do it anyway. He was going to help out because he had a big heart.

  He was funny, he was obnoxious, and his pickup line in the bars was one of the greatest in history. Because he was from Texas, he thought everybody understood what a “flank” was, which was slang for the part of a woman’s body right down by their asshole. And his line to these girls would be, “How would you like for me to snort in your flank?”

  Well, there’s not a flank to be snorted in there.

  “My God you know, Hoyt,” I’d say, “no wonder you can’t get laid.”

  I went through this whole thing with him, so he would change it and he would say his next line, which was, “Are you married?”

  She would say, “
No.”

  “How would you like to be married?” He thought that was the best. “Watch this,” he would say, and the girls would look at him like he was fucking stupid with his white cotton hair. He would use those lines continuously.

  Years later, after I was established as the Dream, we were outside of New Orleans one night at a bar and he said, “Let’s go change bars.” So we got in a truck with some guys and we drove down the road right inside of New Orleans and I saw this fire burning. Now this is the ‘70s and we were driving up the fucking road and they were burning a fucking cross there. It was a fucking Ku Klux Klan rally. Murdoch was taking me to a fucking KKK rally. I am the American Dream. Everybody in this town loves me.

  “What the fuck are we doing?” I asked.

  He laughed like hell because he really thought this was a funny deal. This fucking belligerent bastard dragged me up there, and I just wanted to hit him in the fucking mouth, the heathen he was.

  Sometimes he felt that he had to live up to the reputation he created. But he didn’t have to live up to that reputation, because he wasn’t really like that. He only did it because of the reputation, and the believability and respect for the business I talked about earlier. There was never a gray area with Hoyt, it was either one way or the other; only black or white.

  Dick and the politics of the business didn’t mix. He didn’t go to West Texas State University when he played on the alumni football team; he became their mascot. He supposedly graduated with a 3.0 grade point average there, but he never went there. He had that knack of getting you to accept him. If you liked him, you were his friend, and he was a precious guy. He truly was. And he was the best babyface worker I’ve ever seen in his prime. Without a doubt there was nobody there who could compare to him to this day. Not Ricky Steamboat. Nobody. Hoyt was out in fucking Amarillo and he could tell a story. Others could tell a story, too, but Hoyt was in a class all by himself.

  In 1969 the two of us set out to work for Jim Barnett in Australia. We would stay 13 weeks; it was Murdoch’s second trip, my first. Dick was to get $800 a week and I was to get $700 a week. What’s up with that shit? Anyway, it was to be a trip to remember.

  Australia was pretty wild back then, and we stayed at the Plaza Hotel on King’s Cross! The Cross was the Bourbon Street of Sydney, Australia, the red light district, if you will. The hotel had no air conditioning, small rooms, and a funky smell. The rooms were like small jail cells, and the bathroom was so tiny that when I sat on the toilet, my legs were in the other room. But we were happy, young, and ready to raise some hell.

  We pretty much lived in our hotel room, and on our tour were midgets; the little people, both women and men. To this day I have a great deal of respect for them as they worked hard and endured much harassment from people.

  We worked hard, too. Jim ran a top wrestling group headed by his booker Mark Lewin; yes, the same Mark Lewin who teamed with Don Curtis earlier in his career and would later become a disciple of Kevin Sullivan as “The Purple Haze.” Mark became one of my favorite people.

  He taught me a lot about being a pro wrestler from the business side. He was Barnett’s right hand, much like Pat Patterson was Vince’s right-hand man for many years. Next to Eddie Graham, I learned more about the wrestling business from Jim than anybody else.

  I was very fortunate in that I met a lot of great people in the business.

  One of the great ones was “Bulldog” Bob Brown from Canada. He billed himself as Canada’s greatest athlete. As a matter of fact, every Canadian wrestler I ever met was billed as its greatest athlete. How is that even possible?

  Anyway, Murdoch and I had to get from Kansas City, Missouri, to Wichita, Kansas, for a match on Monday night. So we caught a ride with “Bulldog” Bob Brown. He had a new car, one of those big 1969 Oldsmobiles. It was fine.

  Hoyt always liked to fuck with Bulldog. He would get him so mad that he would turn red, heart-attack red. After the matches we would get our beer, and Hoyt and I always tried to drink at least a case on the trip back to Kansas City.

  As the long trip went on, we were feeling good from the beer, and Hoyt slapped Brown in the back of the head. Man, he was getting pissed!

  Bulldog had a blackjack he kept under his seat. Well, he pulled out the blackjack and while driving, he turned and tried to hit Hoyt with it.

  Being a smartass, I moved my hand under the armrest and got his .22 (caliber) pistol and slowly removed six bullets onto the floorboard.

  As the loud country music, laughter, and talking was at its peak—with Bulldog driving around 90 mph—I quickly put the gun to the side of Bulldog’s head. He turned white as a ghost as I pulled the trigger. To make it worse, I began laughing, too.

  Then, one of the greatest statements of wrestling road travel was about to come out of my mouth.

  “Shit, Bulldog, the gun wasn’t even loaded. See!” I put the gun between my legs, aimed at the floorboard, and pulled the trigger.

  Blam!

  Holy fucking shit! I almost killed the bastard!

  The sound turned Canada’s greatest athlete into a babbling idiot. As he pulled the car over to the side of the road, the reality set in that these road trips with Hoyt and me were only going to get worse. By all accounts we should have been dead a long time ago!

  “Dusty and Dickie always liked to mess with Bulldog. One time on a tour of Australia, they found out that Brown was afraid to fly. So during a flight in one of the little puddle jumpers we took, they convinced him we weren’t going to make it. Bob Brown fell to the floor and began praying.”

  —GARY HART

  When we were together, we were really inseparable. We did some crazy shit.

  One night in Edina, Minnesota, we were at this bar and we had had a little too much to drink, so we bought a mule off of some guy, but we had no place to keep him, since we lived in this apartment complex. We ended up bringing the mule upstairs to our second floor apartment and he lived there. The mess finally got so bad we just had to get him the hell out of there.

  Also when we were working for Verne Gagne up in the AWA territory, just to rib Kosrow Vasiri, the Iron Sheik, we drove from Minneapolis to Fargo, North Dakota, and put him in the back of my pickup truck in freezing 30-degree weather.

  There were many, many stories like this and I will tell a few more later on, but it’s time to explain why it was my decision to break up one of the greatest tag teams in wrestling history.

  After something like 300 days on the road, I’d wake up in the morning and the room would smell like at place where they would slaughter cows and horses and pigs and ducks. On this particular morning I woke up and the smell finally hit me, coming right out of my mouth. After a fifth of whiskey, 37 beers, and all the Slim-Jims and potato chips you could eat, it was horrifying.

  I opened my eyes and I looked over to the other bed and there was Hoyt, his big white ass sticking up. His BVDs probably hadn’t been washed in days as they were really brown in the back. I got up and I swear to God, washed my face with the cowboy wash; that’s where you put your whole head in the sink under the water. I washed my face really good and looked in the mirror and asked myself, “What the hell are you doing?”

  After we both got up and had some lunch, I said, “I’m giving my notice tonight to Jack. I’m going to work for Eddie [Graham].”

  Jack Cane was the booker for the territory and I said, “I think we need a little time away.” I just couldn’t get that scene out of my mind right after telling Hoyt … the brown streak in the back and the yellow stain up front. He thought that was fucking hilarious.

  So it was show time in Dayton, Ohio, and I walked in to talk to Jack— who happens to be the stepfather of Billy Bob Thornton—and I saw Hoyt trying to follow me in.

  We were a tag team, so he said, “Me, too.”

  I turned around, “No. Wait. Stop!”

  Back then you gave four weeks’ notice so the promotion could do what they needed to get things done. If you gave two weeks or less, you f
ound yourself in a world of shit, pile of shit, or whatever other kind of shit you can get into … because you know what’s going to happen to you.

  “Just one second … just one second. …”

  It was hard to say, but I had to.

  “Dick, I need to go by myself and you need to go by yourself for a while, know what I mean? We’ve been on the road 360 days a year with each other and missed a lot. I’ve got to move on and try to find myself. We’re young and we got a shot.”

  So he kind of said he gave his notice at the same time I gave mine, not knowing what we were going to do and that was pretty much the split.

  Sure, we worked with each other in Japan, we saw each other off and on and had a feud with each other, but we never partnered all over the country again like we did those first three years as a tag team.

  He went his way and I went mine.

  I became whatever I was going to be, but he had a thing about him that he had to live up to, like the thing I mentioned earlier about the racism. Now that I think about it, he probably had to live up to that reputation like I had to live up to the reputation of being the American Dream.

  If I wanted a new car, it was important I had one. I was going to be in the hole financially, but it didn’t matter as long as I was driving my new car in downtown Tampa, and they—the fans—would see me in it and that would be cool … that would work because that was part of living the dream as “the Dream.”

  Like I said … believability and respect. …

  CHAPTER 5

  I’ve often told people that I feel I was born a black man in a white man’s body. I know that probably sounds crazy, but for those of you who are following my story closely, reading between the lines if you will, I’d like to believe that you understand where I am coming from. Perhaps my thinking comes from my childhood, having lived in a mixed neighborhood of whites, African Americans and Mexican Americans. Maybe it comes from the fact that I feel like I’ve struggled in my life to gain acceptance in my profession, as a black man would struggle for acceptance in his everyday life.