They did? I almost asked the news bearer what planet he was from.
We definitely wrestled those guys in a really stiff and heated match, but aside from my body slam of the 470-pound Blackwell, there’s nothing memorable about that night at all.
But there it was. Once rumors in pro wrestling start floating around, they take on a life of their own. Larry and Blackwell probably wanted to make it sound as if the old big dogs had shown the new guys how it was done. And you know what? Fine. We had nothing but respect for them, and I still do.
I remember how good it felt to be back home in the groove of the AWA travel loop and seeing the guys. But when Hawk and I went to tell everyone about our overseas exploits, nobody seemed interested. Instead, something else buzzing around the locker room had everyone’s attention. Something called WrestleMania.
Apparently while we were away, the WWF had begun heavily promoting WrestleMania as the Super Bowl of pro wrestling. It was the next big step in the evolution of both Vince McMahon and the entire professional wrestling industry. A couple of years earlier, on November 24, 1983, Jim Crockett Promotions had presented the first major closed-circuit television event called Starrcade. The show was a huge financial success and featured all of the top stars of the NWA, including Ric Flair and Harley Race, who wrestled in a historic cage match for the World Heavyweight Championship.
Vince took one look at Starrcade and knew he had to do something even bigger. He had already been hard at work trying to market the WWF to a broader audience and eventually found the perfect face to make a push into the mainstream when he lured Hulk Hogan from the AWA.
Hogan was hot off of his appearance as Thunderlips, a hyped-up version of himself, in the movie Rocky III, and Vince knew he had a star on his hands. On January 23, 1984, Hogan defeated the Iron Sheik for the WWF Championship, giving birth to the campaign that Vince would build an empire around: Hulkamania.
All of a sudden, WWF faces like Hogan, Captain Lou Albano, the Iron Sheik, and Roddy Piper were being seen on Cyndi Lauper music videos. MTV even held a couple of highly rated wrestling specials called The Brawl to End It All and The War to Settle the Score. Those shows did so well that a new special called Saturday Night’s Main Event (SNME) started showing every couple of months at 11:30 p.m. on NBC. SNME blew everything else away those nights, even the ratings for the show it bumped when it aired: Saturday Night Live. The WWF had really penetrated the mainstream. I saw it for myself when I picked up a Sports Illustrated magazine at an airport during that time and saw Hulk Hogan staring back at me.
The WWF wasted no time capitalizing on the boom, as action figures, lunch boxes, cartoons, record albums, and even WWF Popsicles began appearing all over the world. What had once been seen as a carnivalesque attraction in dark, smoky arenas filled with drunken old men was suddenly a colorful and bright spectacle that was a hit even with women and kids.
The WWF wasn’t the only company seeing an explosion of popularity. I remember the first time I saw the AWA Remco Toys line of wrestling figures featuring Hawk and me. The figures had little cloth chaps, plastic title belts, and dog collars. They were even rereleased later with a “Precious” Paul character. You can imagine the feeling I had when I handed my son, Joey, a Road Warrior Animal action figure. Pretty damn cool.
When WrestleMania finally happened at Madison Square Garden on March 31, it came off big-time. Vince pulled out all the stops by bringing in major celebrities to attract the mainstream media, including Cyndi Lauper, Muhammad Ali, Mr. T, and Liberace, who danced with the Radio City Rockettes. It worked. Over one million viewers saw WrestleMania, making it the largest closed-circuit TV event to date.
Sure, ’Mania was huge and deserved all of the hype on the streets, but honest to God, at the time, as when Black Saturday was going on, Hawk and I really didn’t care. We were caught up with what we were doing and focused on the road. Our heads were spinning all day long with travel schedules, personal appearances, interviews, and main event matches. We knew we had a great payday in the AWA as the main attraction, and that was all that mattered.
One thing I definitely did start to take notice of after Wrestle-Mania, however, was the growing trend of “the body.” With so many eyes now focused on the wrestling product, a lot of wrestlers felt the pressure to stack up to bigger, more muscular physiques. Hogan, Hawk, and I, and other guys like us, were having such success with our massive physical presence that everyone started to look at themselves and think, I need to be competitive with these guys, or I won’t be around long.
Before you knew it, steroids seemed to be running rampant and 250-pound guys started sprouting up out of the woodwork. I could see it all happening a mile away. With the wrestling industry heating up as it was, there was no time to waste in making a level playing field. That was why I’d discovered them in the first place back in my powerlifting days. Who wants to get run over by someone with an edge? Not me. Not anyone. When livelihoods and millions of dollars are at stake, that decision pretty much makes itself.
There’s no need for me to get preachy about the steroid issue. There’s enough of that already out there. In 1985, steroids weren’t illegal to use for nonmedical reasons. (That didn’t happen until the Anabolic Steroid Control Act of 1990, when steroids were placed on the federal controlled dangerous substance list.) Not only were we not criminals for having and using them, but we were also completely unaware of their potential health hazards. By the time they passed the law in 1990, I had already stopped using them altogether. I hate to say it, but ’80s professional wrestling wasn’t the era of “the body”; it was the golden era of steroid use.
By all accounts, Hawk and I were slamming through the spring of 1985. By the end of May, we had wrestled makeshift teams of my old buddy Sgt. Slaughter, Jerry Blackwell, and the Hennigs all over the West Coast. On May 21, we had a match up in Portland for promoter Don Owen’s 60th Anniversary Wrestling Extravaganza for Pacific Northwest Wrestling (PNW).
We loved working for Don every time we went up there. PNW was one of the great NWA territories because of Don’s traditional sense of doing good business. He put on great events, knew how to treat (and pay) the talent well, and had a phenomenal following in Oregon and Washington for his locally syndicated Big Time Wrestling TV show. A lot of top guys got their start with Don, including Roddy Piper, Jimmy Snuka, “Mad Dog” Vachon, and even the legendary Gorgeous George.
That night in Portland we lost a match by DQ to none other than Larry and Curt Hennig. Ric Flair and Portland favorite Billy Jack Haynes wrestled to a sixty-minute draw for the NWA World title in a hell of a match that had people, including me, on our feet the entire time. At six feet three and 250 pounds, Billy Jack was another big, young stud coming up in the business with a ton of promise. When we’d first met backstage, he really made me laugh when he pointed at me and said, “Holy shit, this guy’s got arms as big as legs.”
Right after Portland, Hawk and I hit another quick run over in Japan for Giant Baba. That’s how it went our entire careers: whenever we wanted a quick getaway and some great money, we took off for All Japan Pro Wrestling. While there this time, we once again faced off with Jumbo Tsuruta and Tenryu. I remember that match on June 6 in particular because it was the first time Hawk and I double press slammed Jumbo and Tenryu the second we hit the ring.
When we slid under the ropes, Hawk ran up on Tenryu while I took Jumbo. We kicked them in their stomachs and in perfect sync pressed them over our heads. As Hawk and I stood there holding the NWA International Tag Team champs in the air, all we could hear was the astonishment of the fans: “Oooooh!” It sounded like a tornado was sucking all the air out of the place. Then we slammed them down. Boom! That spot became the match opener whenever we wrestled Jumbo and Tenryu from then on.
We got back to the United States just in time for Jim Crockett Promotions’ first annual Great American Bash on July 6 at American Legion Memorial Stadium in Charlotte, North Carolina. Verne and Crockett had a great relationship and
knew we should participate, so they made it happen. With 27,000 screaming lunatics crammed in with almost standing room only in an old outdoor football stadium, we were brought in to face off against the NWA World Tag Team champions Ivan Koloff and Krusher Khruschev (more familiar to me as Barry Darsow). What happened that night is Road Warriors history.
One thing you have to remember is that back in 1985, we were still in the Cold War with the Soviet Union. To say the overall American sentiment was “Fuck the Commies” is the understatement of the century. Under President Ronald Reagan the United States was charged with huge national pride, and far be it from professional wrestling to fail to cash in on the pulse of the nation. Even Hulk Hogan went to the ring holding a big United States flag, while his theme song, “Real American,” unified the crowd into a rally.
The anti-Soviet tension in the crowd was extra hot that night in Charlotte, too, because the main event was Ric Flair versus none other than Nikita Koloff. I did find it interesting that two of my closest friends (Barry and Nikita) who made it in the business were both Russian heels in the same company.
The program Flair and Nikita had going into the Bash was a pressure cooker on the verge of exploding. When it finally did, Hawk and I got to ride right in on the political tidal wave they had caused. But we never anticipated the magnitude of the reaction we’d get against Ivan and Barry (Krusher).
Ivan Koloff, the Russian Bear, was a longtime veteran in the business who even famously defeated Bruno Sammartino in 1971 for the World Wide Wrestling Federation16 (WWWF) title. Now, in 1985, Ivan was teamed with Barry’s gimmick of Krusher Khruschev, an American-born Soviet sympathizer who rejected his citizenship in favor of Communism. Ivan and Krusher had the kind of heat most heel teams dreamed of and worked entire careers trying to achieve.
Although we’d been getting some babyface reactions here and there since our debut in St. Paul against Curt Hennig and Steve-O, nothing ever could have prepared us for the ovation we’d receive this time as we ran toward the ring with the AWA belts in our hands. As “Iron Man” pumped behind us, it might as well have been the national anthem. The Road Warriors, the new American heroes, were coming to bust some Soviet heads.
When we dove under the ropes and ran up on Ivan and Krusher, they took a powder to the ground as the stadium erupted in chants of “USA, USA.” The whole thing was odd and completely overwhelming. It was one thing adjusting to cheers, but USA chants? That was a new one.
I remember Paul leaning over and saying, “Boys, tonight you guys are the biggest babyfaces in wrestling.”
There was no argument from me on that one. At that moment, the Road Warriors turned babyface forever.
Because our match was another example of champion versus champion and no titles were being dropped, the four of us gave the fans an evenly battled DQ. The finish came when Hawk and I were setting Ivan up for my new powerslam from the second rope. Hawk hoisted Ivan up heels-over-head and helped position him on my shoulder as I was sitting perched on the turnbuckle.
Just as I was poised to dive down for the big slam, Krusher jumped up onto the side of the ring with a chair. I let go of Ivan while Hawk grabbed the chair away from Krusher and smashed them both. Bam! Then Hawk tossed referee Earl Hebner across the ring onto his ass, and that was it. Disqualification.
We couldn’t have been more thrilled by what happened that night. And I’m not talking about the match. Those Charlotte fans, who had Crockett Promotions/NWA Mid-Atlantic in their blood, fell in love with us right then and there. More importantly, so did Jimmy Crockett.
What transpired at the Great American Bash was similar to the Japanese fans’ response to us during that first tour. Once we had that North Carolina face turn, you couldn’t book us as heels if you tried. Our tide had completely turned, and the people were behind us for life. Jimmy Crockett saw the bond we made with the fans that night and couldn’t get it out of his head. Now he, too, had Road Warriors fever. It was an epidemic.
To start luring us into thinking about hopping over from the AWA, Crockett started booking us to do big money shots throughout the rest of the summer in all of his big towns, such as Charleston, Greensboro, Raleigh, Roanoke, Baltimore, and Philadelphia. Taking our cue from what had happened in Charlotte, we took on various formations of Ivan and Nikita Koloff and Krusher, sometimes making six-man tag matches with Paul joining us in the ring.
That summer especially was when Crockett really started mounting his big push into the national spotlight like Vince McMahon and the WWF. Jimmy had recently been reelected as the president of the National Wrestling Alliance board, comprised of all the other NWA territory owners, further solidifying his role as the most powerful figure in the entire organization. In the time following Black Saturday when Vince had sold the Saturday night time slot on Superstation WTBS to Crockett, he consumed the scattered remains of Georgia Championship Wrestling and consolidated all its talent and championship titles.
Although Jimmy still operated under the Mid-Atlantic Championship Wrestling name on the books, he repackaged the promotion to reflect a less regional-sounding name, giving birth to the World Championship Wrestling moniker. World Championship Wrestling (WCW) emerged as the center stage of the NWA, which was now on the heels of the WWF. The AWA was becoming more and more an afterthought as one of the Big Three.
Even though Verne had worked diligently on his national TV deal on ESPN for the joint AWA/NWA experiment, Pro Wrestling USA, the whole thing tanked in less than a year. Now Verne was doing a new, exclusively AWA program on ESPN called AWA Championship Wrestling, but it still didn’t stand a chance against World Championship Wrestling on the Superstation at 6:05 p.m. Hawk and I were getting that sinking feeling again, as we had in Georgia when things had gotten sticky. That proved it: Hawk and I were becoming Rhodes scholars at reading writing on the wall everywhere we went.
We’d been in the AWA for well over a year and had no complaints about anything. Verne brought us aboard and unleashed us full steam ahead into the next stage of our evolution. We made more money with Verne than we’d ever had before and were exposed to Japan thanks to his relationship with Baba. Having said all of that, after a year of working so closely with Verne, we realized he wasn’t getting with the times. It’s not that the AWA wasn’t still doing well, because it was. It was Verne himself. All of the drive he’d had seemed gone.
Unlike Verne, his son Greg Gagne understood the absolute necessity to expand the AWA product through better branding, as Crockett and the WWF were doing. Greg wanted to strengthen their TV presentation and was even friends with corporate executives in the NFL who were interested in investing. But with Verne, it all fell on deaf ears. He thought he knew best and wouldn’t budge. It was frustrating to see a powerhouse like the AWA start driving around in circles, while in Charlotte and Atlanta Jimmy Crockett was kicking ass and taking names. I realized that between Verne and Crockett, there was no comparison.
While Hawk and I mulled these business issues over, we jumped headfirst into our new wrestling lifestyle as babyfaces. Being cheered on as good guys was an awesome change of pace. It turned the whole concept of our gimmick upside down and made it feel completely new. The villains in black were now the heroes in black. That was the thing. We may have been faces in the sense of being legit fan favorites, but we had more attitude than ever. What did change was our audience dynamic.
Hawk and I used to have hostile attitudes toward the fans in the arenas and civic centers, making it totally clear that we were the ones not to fuck with. We’d invite people to step up and fight us all the time and never hesitated to throw punches if the need arose, as it had in the riot back in Hammond, Indiana.
Now the rug had been pulled out, and the people were more than allies; they were our lifelines. During our matches we came to depend and thrive upon the crowd interaction, fueling ourselves with the energy exchange. When we stormed the ring, we could triumphantly raise our hands, pose, and get an “LOD, LOD” chant going instead of getting p
elted with batteries and nickels. Now when an opponent had us down and out, the people stomped their feet and clapped their hands for us to rally.
Being a babyface even made me feel better as a person. I didn’t have to frown so much in public anymore, for one thing. No shit. I felt like a town sheriff or something, being seen out shaking hands and kissing babies (just kidding). People in public everywhere would pat me on the back and give me thumbs-up or slap me five. Yes, sir, babyface living was my kind of style; just call me Joe Public.
I knew I’d kind of miss being a heel, though. It seemed only yesterday that we’d first come into the AWA and cut one of our first interviews in the ring. I’d taken the mic and said, “Hey, all you people at home getting fat, watching Happy Days, and eating potato chips, take a good look at us.” Now, instead of belittling the fans, we were their defenders.
The reaction from the fans now was getting out of hand, in a great way. With each successive show, the pop grew more intense than at the previous event. Eventually the eruption of the crowd during our “Iron Man” entrance became so distinct that some of the other boys started referring to it as the “Road Warrior pop,” a term known throughout the industry to this day.
Another fine benefit of turning face was watching our typical DQ win/loss ratio turn into a landslide of wins by definitive, destructive pinfalls. Even Paul, who was once our world champion of outside interference, was now the purveyor of truth, justice, and the Road Warriors way. Now he was the one countering any heel managers looking to stick their noses where they didn’t belong.
The spin took a little time to get used to, but it sure was fun as hell. And because the dates we worked throughout August and September for Crockett turned out to be so profitable, we decided to sit down for a face-to-face with him to see what he had in mind.
Since we were each already doing somewhere in the neighborhood of a couple hundred grand for the year with Verne’s payouts, I decided to highball the figure a few bucks to nearly a million for negotiation leverage with Crockett. I also wanted a guaranteed contract. It was going around town that both Ric Flair and my bud Nikita Koloff had signed exclusive, multiyear deals with Crockett Promotions. When I heard that, I wouldn’t accept anything less. Paul said we had the drawing power to respectfully ask for what we thought we were worth.
The Road Warriors: Danger, Death, and the Rush of Wrestling Page 12
