The Road Warriors: Danger, Death, and the Rush of Wrestling

by Joe Laurinaitis

  Officially, it was explained that a few days before our TV debut, we’d won the titles during a tag team tournament in Chicago. It never happened. What did happen was that the Road Warriors became NWA champions without having to wrestle a single match. On June 11, 1983, we made our first ever TV appearance for GCW and came out with the belts around our waists as if we’d always had them.

  Having the NWA National Tag Team Championship title was a huge deal. It immediately established us with the fans as legitimate forces to be reckoned with, and the boys in the back realized we were going to be around awhile, too.

  Ole later told me that from time to time a few of the guys would complain about our stiff style and instant push. “They wanted you gone,” he said. “I told them if they wanted you fired to go do it themselves because I sure as hell wasn’t going to.”

  It was still hard to grasp, though. Only a few weeks before, Hawk and I were in Minnesota debating if we should go to Atlanta or not, and now we were champions. We were in the company of other known National Tag Team champion teams like the Freebirds, Brad and Bob Armstrong, and the Wild Samoans, Afa and Sika.

  It really showed how much Ole believed in us, too. He knew we were raw but that with Paul at our side, we’d learn from one of the most brilliant minds in the business. As our manager, Paul developed a vaudevillian carnival ringleader type of gimmick complete with a top hat, blue coat with tails, a pink tie, and his trademark folded up issue of the Wall Street Journal.

  Paul hyped us during interviews with quick, creative articulation and a deep, gravelly tone. “Here come the Monsters of the Midway,” he’d yell. “I’m bringing the world something that’s never been seen before. The most dominating tag team of all time! You better run for your lives.” Paul was a phenomenal talent and businessman and exactly what we needed. He made the claims, and we backed them up. It was a perfect circle.

  One thing many people don’t know is that Paul was our real manager. All of the managers in wrestling at the time—guys like Bobby Heenan, Jim Cornette, and Jimmy Hart—were playing a character role. Paul, on the other hand, did everything from booking our appearances, flights, and hotel rooms to sitting us down and strategizing our matches.

  Almost every night, Hawk and I watched as Paul would sketch out a ring and stick figures on a piece of paper. “Okay, guys, this is the ring. Now, we don’t want to do too much at one time, so pick two moves to add to the match every week. Once you’ve perfected the timing and execution, we’ll move on.” Then he pointed with his pencil and gestured with his hands. “Now, Joe, if you’re here, bring the guy back to the corner and tag Mike. Then throw the guy into the ropes. As you get down and let the guy jump over you, Mike’s going to clothesline the hell out of him.”

  Paul was so fluid and easy to follow that we learned something new every night. As a result, our confidence started to increase and we were able to elongate our matches.

  Paul was more than a manager to us. He was the third Road Warrior.

  4

  ASSAULT ON GEORGIA CHAMPIONSHIP WRESTLING

  When Hawk and I came into GCW as the Road Warriors, Ole said we were going to be killers. He sure wasn’t kidding. I remember him saying specifically, “Listen, you guys. You can’t wrestle a lick, and you can’t talk. Shut your mouths and learn your craft. So for now, let Paul be your mouthpiece and murder whoever’s put in front of you.”

  That was just fine with us. We trusted that Ole knew what he was doing, and I think he really enjoyed shaping our image as indestructible monsters. He liked to throw us into the mix whenever he could to show the GCW audience what we were all about.

  One night during a sold-out show at the Omni in Atlanta, Ole decided to have us run in on Dusty Rhodes and make a statement. Dusty was a former NWA World Heavyweight champion and was about the most charismatic star that professional wrestling had to offer at the time. Fans absolutely loved him. So it was only natural that as Dusty was celebrating in the ring after a victory, Hawk and I ran down and started beating his brains out. The people were deafeningly loud, and it was the most exhilarating feeling I’d ever had in the business.

  It was also the first time I worked with color.7 Dusty was notorious for epic displays of blood, and this was no exception. His forehead practically exploded while Hawk and I pummeled him with fists.

  “Harder. Hit me harder,” Dusty kept shouting. “Open me up.”

  We were only too happy to oblige.

  Dusty was a master to watch as he drew the most sympathetic emotions from the crowd. Many were on the verge of tears. There’s no way to accurately explain how emotionally invested wrestling fans were back then. To them, this was as real as it got. Ole wasn’t finished with them yet, either. It was time to even up the score for Dusty.

  As Dusty was being mercilessly manhandled, Ole had Stan “The Lariat” Hansen run down to even up the score. Hansen was a six feet three, 300-pound wild cowboy known for being stiff as a board, tough as nails, and blind as a bat without his glasses, which he never wore. He came down the aisle wildly swinging his trademark cowbell and hollering up a storm. As he tried to climb into the ring, Hawk and I ran full speed and knocked him onto the floor. The Lariat didn’t seem to like that one bit. After grabbing a steel chair, he climbed into the ring and started swinging for the fences.

  Earlier in the evening before our rundown on Dusty, Ole had told us about the upcoming spot with Hansen and the chair shots. “Take as many as you guys can. Show everyone what the Road Warriors are made of.”

  Sounded simple enough, right? Well, when Hansen smashed me across the back for the first time, I knew exactly what I was made of: flesh and blood. It hurt like a son of a bitch. Hansen wasn’t holding back at all.

  After a second chair shot, I bailed to the floor and looked up to see Hansen smash Hawk right across the face with a wild clothesline. I thought he was knocked out cold. He rolled out to the floor next to me, and both of us had to dodge cups of piss and dip juice and other trash coming at us from every angle in the stands. I remember some bikers, thinking we were part of the family, handed us Ku Klux Klan cards.

  Although Hawk and I were cleared out of the ring, our point was made. It didn’t matter who you were or what you were doing. At any random time, you might look up and see the Road Warriors coming up on you. There was nowhere to run, nowhere to hide. Sooner or later, we would find you.

  You know, at that point, in 1983, everything about us—even our attitudes with each other—was crude and almost infantile. In fact, one time we actually got into an offstage altercation with each other. Sort of.

  I think we were in Atlanta at the airport picking up our luggage and for whatever reason, Mike and I started mouthing off to each other.

  “What the fuck did you say?” Mike yelled out.

  “You heard me, motherfucker. What are you going to do about it?”

  But instead of World War III erupting right then and there at the baggage claim, we let it go and went to the Omni for the show.

  While I was in our section of the locker room tightening up my boots and getting ready, Hawk came up and cracked me with a slap to the face. Wham! Paul was right there and immediately jumped in front of me as I was about to swing with everything I had. Hawk and I stood yelling threats at each other while some of the wrestlers came to see what the commotion was all about.

  I turned and walked away, burning up and thinking, I’ll get that son of a bitch. He’ll see.

  Well, a few minutes later, I came back to the scene of the crime to find Hawk about finished strapping his boots on. I didn’t think twice. Whack! I delivered a nice open hand of my own to my partner’s face.

  Hawk jumped right up, the veins in his neck ready to burst. “Let’s fucking do this now.”

  As we stood there nose-to-nose, ready to swing for the fences, we looked at each other and laughed. What the hell were we doing? Neither one of us had an answer. We shrugged it off and chalked it all up to being young, dumb, and full of . . . well, you know
.

  Oddly enough, as ready as we were to kill each other right there in the dressing room of the Omni, I can also remember a time shortly after that when Hawk actually saved another wrestler. After a show in Columbus, Ohio, we were rooming with a guy named Jesse Barr.

  Jesse was another guy coming up in the business, and since he was also a heel, we traveled and shared rooms occasionally. Well, that particular evening at about midnight, Jesse wanted to borrow our rental car and find some action at a local bar, so we let him. Sometime around 3:00 in the morning, he came barging into the room and staggered like the big drunken mess that he was and crashed into bed.

  Maybe thirty minutes or so later, Hawk and I were startled back awake by a horrifying gurgling sound in the dark coming from Jesse’s area. Hawk sprung up and ran over to Jesse and turned the light on to reveal a sight I’ll never forget. Jesse was so comatose that he had vomited several times while lying flat on his back and was in the process of choking on his own puke.

  “Holy shit, Joe,” Hawk said as he pushed Jesse onto his side. “This motherfucker would’ve died if we weren’t here.” Jesse was so hammered that other than a couple of throat-clearing coughs, he didn’t even wake up.

  In the morning, when we went out to grab something to eat, Hawk and I jumped into the rental car and discovered a gigantic mess. In the middle of Jesse’s drunken romp through Columbus with our car, he had managed to stomp muddy footprints all over the floor, ceiling, and seats.

  Hawk was fuming. “Joe,” he calmly said, “I don’t know why I saved Jesse’s life last night because now I wanna fucking kill him.”

  We let Jesse slide for his little escapade, but a couple years later in 1987, Jesse really paid the price for his antics. During a bar fight, Haku, a WWF wrestler, famously popped Jesse’s eyeball right out of its socket.

  When Hawk and I weren’t trying to kill each other or save other wrestlers’ lives, we were focused on improving our presentation in the ring. We still needed our hands held when it came to team dynamics and match construction, but Paul and Ole had shown us enough by that point for us to get by. Looking back at a typical match against a couple of jobbers illustrates how elementary our skills were. A good example is our match with Randy Barber and Joe Young.

  The bell rang and Hawk started off, grabbing Randy and giving him a strong knee to the stomach before hooking him under each arm and driving him back into the corner. As soon as Hawk had him pinned against the turnbuckles, he unloaded three more knees to the stomach. Bam, bam, bam! Randy could barely even stand as Hawk dragged him over to our corner and tagged me in.

  I jumped through the ropes, threw an elbow at Randy’s head, and whipped him across to his corner, where he crashed hard. As he landed in the turnbuckles, I came charging full force with a knee to Randy’s midsection three times before uppercutting him in the face. When Randy fell on his back, I jumped and landed with a gigantic leg drop across his neck and chest. Crack!

  Fortunately for Randy, his part in our little dance was pretty much over. I picked him up, pressed him over my head, and launched him like a missile over to the other corner. When he landed, Randy almost skidded out of the ring, but he managed to reach up and tag in Joe Young. Joe had a grave look on his face, and for good reason.

  I wasted no time grabbing Joe by his neck and walking him over to Hawk. When I tagged him in, we threw Joe into the ropes and ran in for a double clothesline. He might as well have run into a brick wall. As soon as he fell back, Hawk went running to the corner, climbed up to the second turnbuckle, and dove down for a body splash and the pin. The impact we made on our opponents left the audience feeling like they’d witnessed a disfiguring car accident.

  Our matches back then were like a smash-and-grab robbery. I don’t know what’s funnier: the fact that those guys didn’t know what hit them, or the fact that we didn’t really know what we were doing. The bottom line was that Ole liked what he saw in us and even decided to get in on the fun.

  See, even though Ole was booking GCW behind the scenes, he was still an active wrestler on TV. He came to a point when he wanted to turn babyface8 and figured he could use us to do it. So Ole inserted himself into an angle that had been unfolding since our debut when Matt Borne had been forced to leave the company due to his legal situation.

  When Borne had gone out, so had Arn, who’d gone from a prime spot in the company to a state of limbo as he struggled to reestablish himself. When Hawk and I came in, Paul developed a stable of heels around us known as the Legion of Doom, or LOD for short.

  A funny side note is that Hawk came up with the Legion of Doom name while we were all sitting around watching TV one afternoon. This cartoon, Challenge of the Super Friends, came on and as the intro played and showed all of the bad guys led by Lex Luthor, a voice announced them as the Legion of Doom.

  “We’ve gotta use that,” Hawk said.

  “Great idea, Hawk,” Paul said. “We’ll be the Legion of Doom and destroy everything.”

  The LOD also consisted of Jake “The Snake” Roberts and the Spoiler. Jake Roberts was a second-generation wrestler under his father, Grizzly Smith, and had great runs throughout GCW, MCW, and Bill Watts’ Mid-South Wrestling (MSW), winning many championships along the way. Jake understood ring psychology better than any other worker I knew back then. Ring psychology basically refers to a wrestler’s ability to read the crowd and call the match spots9 on the fly according to their reactions.

  Jake was a seasoned, classic heel because of his slick, calculated demeanor and was one of those ring veterans who knew how to work the people. A great worker in the wrestling business like Jake or Ric Flair has all of the performance intuition of a successful stand-up comedian. He can quickly determine what material starts to pick up the audience and manipulate his act on the fly. That’s exactly what ring psychology is all about.

  Not too long after Hawk and I came into GCW, Jake and I even moved into a small apartment in Atlanta together. It didn’t last long. I quickly grew sick of Jake’s bad habits, such as his constant drinking and drugging, but it was his cigarette smoking that got the best of me.

  Jake had these big ashtrays filled with cigarette butts all the time, and the place stunk on ice. I’d be sitting there trying to eat a good, healthy meal, and there’d be Jake on the couch passing out, looking like a crusty grim reaper. In retrospect, I should’ve persuaded Hawk to avoid Jake because of his self-destructive tendencies. Little did I know that Hawk would be more influenced by the same type of behavior as time progressed.

  Also in the Legion of Doom, aside from Hawk, Jake, and me, was a masked wrestler in the twilight of his career called the Spoiler, portrayed by Don Jardine. During his peak in the ’70s in the MCW territory, Jardine was better known as the Super Destroyer, a similar masked character, when he wrestled both Jack Brisco and Harley Race for the NWA World Heavyweight Championship.

  Around the time Hawk and I landed on the scene, Paul had been trying to convince the “orphaned” Arn Anderson to join us, letting him know the LOD was the winning team. Paul even suggested Arn call himself Arn Ellering instead of Arn Anderson to further distance himself from Ole, who was also his kayfabe uncle.

  Being the ever concerned “uncle,” Ole kept coming out and warning Arn he’d be making a big mistake if he joined up with the LOD. It quickly became our job to show everyone that it was Ole who was making the big mistake by getting into our business.

  During a Saturday morning taping of World Championship Wrestling, Hawk and I paid Ole a visit. Ole was in the middle of giving an interview with Gordon Solie when Paul came out to interrupt him. As Ole got in Paul’s face, Hawk and I ran up on him and started hammering him with forearms and punches before throwing him into the ring. We were kicking the crap out of him until Ronnie Garvin and “Pistol” Pez Whatley ran down and made the save.

  Just as they arrived, King Kong Bundy, who for the last few weeks had been trying to join the Legion of Doom, came stomping through the ropes on our side, setting up a
six-man tag match. It worked like a charm.

  The fans sided with Ole, and our heat10 was off the charts. It was awesome. You should’ve seen Ole when he came back to the dressing room. He looked as if a bus had hit him. Arn never did join the LOD, and although he pleaded with Paul, King Kong Bundy never made the cut.

  It all culminated on TV when Bundy crossed the line and we had to take care of business, Road Warrior style. During an interview with Gordon Solie on World Championship Wrestling, Paul was doing one of his typical monologues about how elite of a group the Legion of Doom was. As he brought up Bundy and his vain attempts at joining us, Gordon said it was time for a commercial break.

  When the show came back on the air, they cut back in with Paul midsentence as he told Gordon how disgustingly fat and lazy Bundy was. “There’s no place for a slob like King Kong Bundy in the Legion of Doom.” It was made to look as if Paul didn’t realize he was back on the air.

  All of a sudden, an enraged Bundy came out of nowhere and grabbed Paul. He had heard everything. Bundy tossed Paul like a rag doll into the ring and started delivering big kicks to his stomach. In a flash, Hawk and I ran out to help Paul.

  I remember hitting the ring first and pounding Bundy with a double axe handle so hard that he immediately dropped to his knees. Whoops. I didn’t mean to do that, seriously. When Bundy started going down, I didn’t realize I’d hit him so hard. I felt bad and whispered to Bundy, “Sorry, man. Quick, hit me back even harder.”

  Without any delay, bam! He cracked me with a clothesline harder than I’d ever felt before, and I immediately went down. As I hit the canvas, Hawk and Jake Roberts ran Bundy down and started giving him the boot. I jumped right up and joined in.

  As we triple-teamed the hell out of Bundy, in came Wahoo McDaniel and Ronnie Garvin to set up yet another six-man tag match. The crowd went out of their minds cheering for Bundy, who wasn’t used to hearing that kind of reaction. It was fascinating to witness. For months, Bundy had been one of the hottest heels in the promotion, and after Hawk and I victimized him, the people embraced him. It was one of my first lessons in ring psychology and story line development.