Wrestling with the Devil

by Lex Luger

  Peggy experienced some scary moments during this pregnancy, more so than when she was carrying Brian. Several times it seemed like the baby was going to come prematurely. It happened in early August and again in early September, but the doctor was able to give Peggy some medication to stop the contractions. The doctor explained that it was important to keep delivery from happening too soon in order for the baby to grow and to minimize any potential health issues. Each time Peggy called, I was ready to hightail it to the closest local airport and hire a private plane to get me home if necessary. Fortunately, those were all false alarms.

  Finally, toward the end of September, the doctor thought we could schedule a date to induce labor safely. The baby would still be premature, but not dangerously so.

  On the morning of September 24, 1990, Peggy and I checked into Northside Hospital in Atlanta. They induced labor, and we had our beautiful baby daughter, Lauren. As I held my precious baby girl in my arms, I felt sheer joy and relief at the same time. She was perfectly healthy and had made our family complete.

  In the meantime, my career and Sting’s were both on the rise. One unforgettable match we wrestled in together was SuperBrawl I in St. Petersburg, Florida, on May 19, 1991. It was a rare face-versus-face match with the two of us wrestling the Steiner Brothers, the reigning world tag-team champions. Pulling off those kinds of matches was always difficult because when good guys are squared off against one another, the crowd doesn’t know who to root for.

  Wrestling insiders predicted it would be a real stinker. What often happens in this type of matchup is that one of the babyfaces has to cheat to win, which most fans don’t buy into.

  But for this event, Sting had a brilliant strategy. He recommended that we all go all out, performing our signature moves in succession on one another. Fans would be kept guessing because there would be no clear good guy or bad guy. We fed off the crowd and let their reactions direct the action, wowing them with all our best stuff—suplexes, running clotheslines, pile drivers, and just about everything else. It was pure genius. The crowd loved it.

  We were all very happy with the outcome. Even Ric came up and congratulated us afterward, saying, “Man, guys, I hate having to follow that match.”

  Ric wasn’t the only person to pay us a compliment. Pro Wrestling Illustrated named it the 1991 Match of the Year.

  The WCW world heavyweight championship title held by Ric Flair still eluded me. However, the baton was about to be passed. I was scheduled for a steel-cage match at the Great American Bash in Baltimore on July 14 for the final blowoff between Ric and me. This title match had been years in the making.

  Unbeknownst to us, Ric was embroiled in a contentious contract battle with WCW officials. Talks continued up to the day of the match, with the WCW brass still holding out hope that they’d be able to keep Flair in their stable. Unfortunately, Ric walked. We had to go to a contingency plan. Barry Windham was stepping in as the number two contender to face me for the now-vacant world heavyweight title.

  “If you wrestle Barry and cheat to win, you will be our heel champion,” booker Dusty Rhodes explained. “We’ve flown in former world champion Harley Race to be your manager. I’ll have Harley slide the belt under the cage at the end of the match, and I want you to use Harley’s finish—the pile driver—on Barry on top of the belt.”

  “And one more thing. At the end of the match, don’t hold the belt up. Ric took the belt with him when he left, and we didn’t have time to make a new one.” They had slapped a makeshift belt together and wanted to be sure the ringside photographers didn’t take a picture of me holding up a phony belt. I found it all pretty humorous; after years of such a buildup, at the last moment we were all scrambling around like the Keystone Cops. Despite all the last-minute problems, the match went just as planned, and I left with the title.

  Ric’s move to the WWF was a huge loss to the WCW. There was a lot of unrest and uncertainty in the WCW front office, which began to really concern me. Personnel cutbacks were being made, and I knew I didn’t want to be known as their marquee austerity champion. I felt it was time to move on, and I had to find a way to make that happen. So my first call was to Vince McMahon.

  Vince had launched a new organization—the World Bodybuilding Federation (WBF)—which was going to showcase a group of professional bodybuilders through a weekly television show, WBF BodyStars, leading up to a pay-per-view championship in June 1992. On the phone, I threw out an idea to Vince. “What do you think about signing me to a one-year WBF bodybuilding contract if I can get out of the last year of my wrestling contract with the WCW?”

  I was already planning to sit down with my current employer to ask for a year off. “I’ll tell them that I won’t be wrestling anywhere for a year but may possibly explore other opportunities. If they agree, I can be a bodybuilder for you and then segue into wrestling the following year.”

  Vince was intrigued by my proposal and said he’d get back to me.

  My next meeting was with the WCW front office, where I made a confession. “I’ve been going hard for six years. I’m burned out and need a year off to rest and be with my family.”

  That was certainly true, and since I suspected the company was looking for more places to save money, I thought it could be a win-win situation. So I wasn’t surprised when they responded, “We can’t pay you if you aren’t wrestling for us.”

  “That’s okay. I might be looking into some other opportunities over the next year, but wrestling will definitely not be one of them.”

  I didn’t elaborate; I let them think what they wanted. They accepted my offer, and we both agreed to the terms.

  Meanwhile, Vince had gotten back to me. He agreed to sign me to a WBF contract, assuring me he would take care of me financially. It was a sweet deal.

  I didn’t feel as if I were doing anything unethical or anything that might have been considered a breach of the deal I had reached with WCW. I wasn’t wrestling for Vince, I was simply showcasing my body.

  Things got somewhat nasty, however, a little while later when WCW officials saw me promoting WBF BodyStars in a commercial running alongside promotions for the WWF’s upcoming WrestleMania. The WCW officials were irate. They sued, claiming I had violated the terms of our buyout. But since I never attended WrestleMania, let alone wrestled on the card, the legal action wasn’t viable.

  I had two big events to go as the WCW world heavyweight champion. The first week in January 1992, I appeared in the Tokyo Dome in Japan to defend my world title. I felt the international exposure was a great opportunity to expand my relationships with promoters and fans around the world.

  February 29, 1992, would be my last appearance as the WCW world heavyweight champion. That night, in Milwaukee, I would turn the title over to Sting at SuperBrawl II.

  I showed up at the arena just before it was time to make my entrance. I know Sting wasn’t happy with me. For one thing, he hated it when I was late to anything. He has always been the ultimate pro and wants to put on a good show for the fans. He had looked for me before the match to discuss our strategy in the ring, but I was nowhere to be found. I was being elusive on purpose—I just wanted the match to be over and done with, and for me to emerge unscathed. We got the job done.

  Now I could finally focus on getting ready for Vince’s show, which was slated for the summer. I worked hard, getting myself in the best shape of my life, even to my own critical eye.

  Two weeks from the airdate, life was about to change again.

  One evening in June 1992, Peggy was getting ready to put some salmon and asparagus on the grill for dinner.

  “I’m just going out for a quick spin on the bike. I’ll be back in fifteen minutes,” I said to her, grabbing my full motorcycle helmet instead of my stylish half-helmet that I usually wore with sunglasses during daytime rides. I thought my customized turquoise-and-white Harley was beautiful, but I didn’t feel Peggy shared my enthusiasm. I had taken her out for a ride right after I had bought the bike. When I tr
ied to make a tight turn in the cul-de-sac, the bike tipped over. We both jumped off in time, but Peggy never got on the bike again.

  It was dusk as I started down the two-lane road. I had a route I liked to take from our residential area to the more rural, forested Georgia countryside.

  As I approached a long, sharp curve at forty-five or fifty miles an hour, I realized I was going too fast to hold the bike on my side of the road. With the sun disappearing, the curve had snuck up on me. So midway through it, I started moving to the middle of the road, still blind to what was ahead and hoping no one was coming the other way.

  But someone was. Coming out of the curve, I saw the car with two teenagers inside. The young driver’s expression was wide-eyed in panic, and the girl next to him was screaming. Like me, the driver had drifted to the middle of the road to execute the curve.

  I steered more to the left and gassed it, hoping to avoid a head-on collision. In that split second, I also lifted my right leg up so it wouldn’t get crushed between the bike and the car. The impact catapulted me into the air—I was soaring like Superman for a few seconds. I was aware that my feet were flying up over my head, and from my years of wrestling I knew what that meant. If I didn’t do something fast, I would land on my neck or my head. So I put out my right arm to break my fall.

  Amazingly, I didn’t hit any trees; I just bounced about 150 feet down the wooded slope, doing twisted cartwheels that made me feel like I was in a clothes dryer. I couldn’t keep my legs from splaying. I almost felt like I was being split in two. When I finally stopped, I was lying with my feet pointing up the slope.

  My first thought was, Am I alive?

  Once I had established that, I looked at my left arm, which had been gashed in several places. Since I was only weeks away from appearing on Vince’s WBF pay-per-view extravaganza as a guest poser, my only thought was, Man, these gashes won’t look good onstage under the lights. My next thought was, Don’t lie here. Get back up to the road. I could move my legs, but I had trouble sitting up.

  I felt a strong stinging sensation in my right arm. I was wearing a tank top under a baggy, three-quarter sleeve workout pullover. I pulled up my sleeve, and my right arm looked like it was going to fall off. It was dangling like a wind chime, nearly severed just above the elbow. Below my elbow, bones were sticking out four or five inches. Blood was everywhere. I lay back down and tried wrapping the right sleeve tightly around my elbow to make a tourniquet. I said to myself, “This is bad.”

  It was getting dark, and I could sense people around me. I could hear them, but I couldn’t see them very well with my helmet on. (Recently, I met a couple who had been a few cars behind the driver who hit me. They saw me fly through the air, and the woman—who found me in the woods—told me she stayed by my side praying until the paramedics came.) I’m not sure what happened to the two teenagers in the car.

  Once the paramedics arrived, they refused to remove my helmet and strapped me to a backboard, which killed my tailbone. While lying in the ambulance, speeding to North Fulton Hospital in Roswell, Georgia, I thought it had all been a bad dream.

  I was stabilized at North Fulton, but the doctors kept me on the backboard because I was too big to lift easily. I distinctly remember a nurse saying, “You’d better be thanking God that you’re alive. People involved in motorcycle wrecks like yours are usually DOA.”

  “What’s DOA?”

  “Dead on arrival.”

  I so desperately wanted to see a familiar face. I was busted up, in a lot of pain, and—for the first time in my life—I was filled with true fear. I felt scared and helpless.

  Finally, a face appeared that I knew. Sting was hovering over me, and boy, was I happy to see him. He had come as soon as he had gotten home from his match and heard the news from his wife, Sue.

  I was so thirsty and dehydrated at that point. I said, “Stinger, I need some water.” When the staff wasn’t looking, he got a gauze pad, soaked it in water, and squeezed it over my dry, cracked lips. Man, that felt good.

  Before Peggy got there, Sting overheard the doctors talking on the other side of my bed in the emergency room.

  “He’s going to have to lose the arm,” one of the doctors said. “There’s just too much damage.”

  I was hearing bits and pieces of the conversation, including a word that caught my attention. When I heard the doctor mention the word prosthesis, I was horrified. I immediately envisioned myself wrestling as a “Captain Hook” character.

  Sting was infuriated at what he felt was their lack of professionalism; instead of discussing the prognosis with me, they chatted about me as if I weren’t even there. But the reality was that I wasn’t about to sign any papers giving them permission to amputate my arm. Sting took matters into his own hands and contacted Dr. Jim Andrews, a world-renowned sports medicine and orthopedic surgeon from Birmingham, Alabama. Dr. Andrews was known for treating not only professional wrestlers but also many other professional athletes. While Sting paged Dr. Andrews, Peggy finally arrived.

  Not knowing what had happened to me all those hours and fearing the worst, my wife was an emotional wreck. She was upset and angry. I thought, Here I am, the most scared I have ever been in my life, and she’s angry at me? I was looking to be soothed and consoled. I took her reaction the wrong way. I didn’t consider that she had suffered a shock too—believing that she and the kids might have lost me forever. When she began to get light-headed from seeing all of the blood on the floor, they had to assist her out of the room.

  Sting heard back from Dr. Andrews immediately. He agreed to do my surgery in Birmingham. That was welcome news. I wanted to leave North Fulton with my arm intact. The North Fulton staff followed Dr. Andrews’s instructions to fix the dislocated elbow and finally give me some pain medication.

  I was transferred to Birmingham the next day. I had lost so much blood, it was necessary to delay the surgery. Dr. Andrews worked wonders, inserting a titanium plate in my arm. He admitted afterward to me, “When I first saw the damage, I thought, I can’t do anything with this. But then I put that together and then that together, and I realized, Maybe I can do something with this.”

  Fortunately, my vision of being “Captain Hook” never materialized. With the surgery a success, Dr. Andrews had no doubt that I’d eventually return to where I had been physically. I did need to give my bones time to heal, which meant I couldn’t lift weights for a few months. After that, I would only have a short period of time to get ready for my WWF debut, which was beckoning.

  The Total Package was going to be rewrapped. But Vince wanted a unique twist to my character. “Everybody knows you as Lex Luger, ‘The Total Package,’ but let’s get them thinking of you as ‘The Narcissist,’” Vince excitedly explained.

  In Greek mythology, Narcissus was known for his physical beauty (including his physique!). One day when Narcissus passed a pool of water, he was drawn to his own reflection and became so enamored with it that he wouldn’t leave.

  A marketing and character-development genius, Vince thought the self-worship angle was an ideal fit for me, especially since I was always striving for the perfect body in real life.

  I was training steroid-free for the unveiling and my debut because of the stringent mandatory drug testing that was taking place for all the wrestlers in the WWF. I was pleasantly surprised that I could look as good as I did without steroids, so I didn’t take any during my tenure at the WWF.

  I was unveiled in a guest appearance at the sixth annual Royal Rumble that was held at Arco Arena in Sacramento, California, on January 24, 1993. I stood alongside my manager, Bobby “The Brain” Heenan, draped in a silver cape before lifting it to show my physique. The idea was to tease WWF fans with a taste of what was to come a few short months later.

  Actually, I was still healing from the motorcycle accident and not physically ready to resume wrestling. But Vince wisely figured that this would be a great way to start the buzz and build up the anticipation for my pay-per-view appearance whil
e I continued my rehabilitation.

  Two months later, I was ready for my WWF debut. The buildup crescendoed when I entered the arena for the pre-match introduction at WrestleMania IX, held at Caesars Palace in Las Vegas on April 4, 1993. I had done a few house shows prior to that, but this was the event where most of the world’s wrestling fans would watch me perform in the WWF for the first time. I walked toward the ring, flaunting my self-indulgent attitude, accompanied by beautiful showgirls who held up large mirrors for me to admire myself. My entrance was much more dramatic than my opponent’s—“Mr. Perfect” Curt Hennig.

  Curt was renowned as a great worker and one of the very best tacticians and technicians in all of wrestling. I was thrilled that they’d chosen him to work with me at WrestleMania. It was hard for anybody to have a bad match with him because he could bring out the best in anybody, just like Ric Flair.

  I wasn’t considered a premiere worker. I had always followed Matsuda’s advice, “Keep it simple.” I was best known for simply flexing my muscles and showing off my sculpted physique, so the pairing seemed like a great idea. The two of us had talked in advance about how we were going to structure the match and were confident that we had everything covered.

  As the match began, I was startled when Curt and I locked up and he said, “What are we doing?”

  “What do you mean, ‘What are we doing?’” I shot back, the panic building in my voice. “Aren’t you the one leading this match?”

  “I’m drawing a blank! I’m drawing a blank!”

  “Oh, no! Now what are we going to do?”

  Somehow we managed to get through the match with me leading. As you can imagine, it wasn’t exactly one of my best matches or even one of the better ones on the card, so I was glad when it was over.