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

by Joe Laurinaitis

It was a shame, too, because Starrcade ’87 was a damn good show. Hawk and I wrestled a hell of a match in front of our kayfabe hometown of Chicago against Tully and Arn for the tag team titles. We didn’t go over that night, but rest assured that crowd was ours from beginning to end.

  The competitive war between Jim Crockett Promotions and Vince McMahon was really getting out of control by that point. The two of them were hell-bent on beating each other and emerging as the clear victor, but at what cost? What happened with Starrcade caused Jimmy to kick into overdrive to develop an answer to Vince’s tactics. Should he have slowed down and focused on the strong points of his NWA franchise? Probably. But there was no hitting the brakes. With Jimmy Crockett, it was all or nothing.

  By early 1988 Hawk’s and my attention was once again directed into the path of a new feud. This time it was against our newest set of clones. The Powers of Pain (POP) was Paul Jones’ freshly formed tag team of his two biggest and baddest clients, the Barbarian and Warlord, my old student. Barbarian, or Barb, had been in and around the business about the same amount of time as we had and his gimmick looked very similar to mine.

  He had a Mohawk, face paint, and the exact same tights and boots as we did. Not to mention, at six feet two and near 300 pounds, Barb was about my equal in size and strength. When Warlord was brought into the picture, he was given Hawk’s reverse Mohawk, face paint, and the same gear as Barb’s. Together, the POP looked almost exactly like us and had their own conniving manager in Paul Jones, who spoke exclusively for them just as Paul Ellering had for us in the early days. They were immediately booked into a program with us.

  The angle was pretty simple. Jones came out on TV and announced that he had this new monster tag team and started making claims that Barb and Warlord were stronger than the Road Warriors. From there, we started working against the POP in house shows throughout early January, which warmed us up for Jim Crockett Promotions’ second attempt at a PPV, the Bunkhouse Stampede.

  The Bunkhouse Stampede was another Dusty invention and another ambitious move by Jimmy Crockett to compete with the WWF. Dusty and Crockett even decided to take the show up to Long Island at the Nassau Coliseum. It was a bold statement. It would’ve been like Vince taking the WWF to North Carolina at the Greensboro Coliseum and thumbing his nose at Jimmy.

  Well, history repeated itself in the form of the Starrcade/Survivor Series scenario from the previous November. As soon as the Stampede PPV was announced, the WWF decided to create the first annual Royal Rumble and offer it for PPV on the same date. Man, it was getting ugly. Not only were the gloves off, but there were brass knuckles.

  Hawk and I and the majority of the locker room had zero idea how bad things were actually getting. All I knew was that I had a great time in the Bunkhouse match itself, which was basically an every-man-for-himself, no-rules battle royal in a cage.

  Six thousand fans watched as the POP, Dusty, Ivan Koloff, Arn, Tully, Lex Luger, and I kicked the crap out of each other for a kayfabe $500,000 prize and a big bronze statue of a cowboy boot. After personally eliminating Ivan and Warlord, I took a boot to the back of the head from Barb, which sent me through the cage door and out of the match. When it was all over, Dusty emerged as the winner of his own main event.

  Hawk, on the other hand, got another chance to wrestle Ric Flair for the World title. He was really amped for that match. He always loved working with Flair, so when the rare opportunity popped up for him to step into the spotlight with the Nature Boy, Hawk soared to the occasion. It was essentially the same match as their Bash ’86 encounter, only this time it was Flair who DQ’d himself by hitting Hawk over the head with a steel chair.

  Unfortunately, as solid of a show as the Bunkhouse Stampede might’ve been, it was blown out of the water by the inaugural Royal Rumble, which also featured a huge battle royal for its main event. Jimmy Crockett was against the ropes and needed to come up with an answer to the WWF and try to stop the bleeding.

  When the Stampede was over and Hawk and I resumed our tag team rivalry with Barb and Warlord, wouldn’t you know it? I got injured for real. On January 28, we were in a six-man tag match with Paul against the POP and Ivan Koloff in Hammond, Indiana, when things went very wrong. During an attempted Samoan Slam, in which the 330-pound Warlord would prop me laterally behind his back and slam himself and me down to the mat, he landed on the side of my head. Bam! When we first impacted, I swear my left eyeball popped out of and back into the socket like a jack-in-the-box, and it completely freaked me out. All I knew was that I was in a ton of pain and couldn’t see out of my eye. I grabbed my face, rolled out of the ring, and yelled to Hawk, “Aw, shit, man. I think my eyeball’s hanging out of my head.” Fortunately, it wasn’t, but I knew something was wrong. The pain was excruciating, and my whole head and face were pounding. It was agony.

  But Hawk thought I was kidding. He hadn’t noticed the fall. “Yeah, your eyeball’s hanging out. And your head’s off of its shoulders, too.” And then he pushed me back into the ring.

  When I slowly got to my feet, Ivan was coming at me, and I told him, “Ivan, I’m messed up. Let’s take it home.”

  We quickly finished the match with me getting a super quick, weak clothesline off on Ivan and grabbing the pin. As soon as it was all over, Paul and Hawk drove me to the emergency room.

  Photos courtesy of the Laurinaitis family.

  Top: The Laurinaitis brothers: Marc, John, and Joe in Clearwater. Bottom: With my father (left), brothers, and mother at John’s wedding in Clearwater, Florida.

  On our way out, Warlord ran up and apologized, asking if there was anything he could do, but it wasn’t necessary.

  “Haven’t you done enough already?” I joked.

  Just like J.J.’s injury at the War Games, this was an accident. Anytime you’re performing a high-risk maneuver that involves a 330-pound behemoth falling onto your face, all bets are completely off.

  When we went to the medical center in Hammond, the X-ray machine they had was outdated to the point that it wasn’t strong enough to read through my thick head. No kidding.

  “Nothing but rocks in there,” Hawk quipped. “I’ve been saying it for years.”

  So we hopped in a car and drove twenty-five miles to a Chicago hospital, where the injury was diagnosed. “Mr. Laurinaitis,” the doctor said matter-of-factly, “your nose is broken, your cheekbone is fractured, you have a hairline fracture in the back of your skull, and your orbital bone is completely smashed.”

  I looked at him, thinking, No shit it’s smashed!

  I remember sitting there holding my nose and feeling like I had to blow out all of the resulting congestion that was building up. Big mistake. As soon as I went to blow my nose, all of the skin under my left eye started puffing out, indicating that my sinuses were all messed up, too. It was horrendous.

  Even worse was the fact that I had to put off the necessary surgical repair until after the TV tapings in Greensboro two days later. We had a highly anticipated little bench press contest to attend. Because Paul Jones had been mouthing off for so long about how much stronger Barb and Warlord were than us, I’d suggested to Dusty that we have a bench press contest for $10,000 (kayfabe). The event would also serve as the perfect chance to have the POP attack us, kayfabe injuring my orbital bone. It was a rare example of incorporating a legit injury into a story line as a way to explain its origin.

  So, with my face literally needing reconstructive surgery and my mind half out of it due to the pain medication, I walked out into the Greensboro Coliseum to put on one hell of a show. Only one person from each team was selected to compete: Barb and I.

  The bench was set up right next to the ring on a large piece of plywood, with various sizes of weight plates lying all around. They even had a bin of chalk powder so we could secure our grip on the bar. We opened with a legit starting weight of 475 pounds, and I went first and banged it right up. My eye didn’t even hurt. The crowd gave me a big ovation, chanting my name, “Animal, Animal, Animal.” It
was music to my ears.

  In response to my lift, Barb sat down to the bench, got a tight grip, and pressed the weight up as if it were 135 pounds. Barb was one strong dude.

  After our first lifts were officially completed, we added another plate, bringing the real weight to 500 pounds. For extra drama, Hawk and I acted like we were strategizing off to the side and finally announced we wanted no part of 500 pounds; we wanted 600 pounds.

  Again, the crowd went insane and gasped as an additional two more plates were added to the bar, which was starting to bend in the middle. Paul Jones, who didn’t want anything to do with such big weight so early in the contest, told Ellering that he only wanted 500 pounds and then poked him in the chest.

  In an instant, “Precious” Paul smacked Jones across the face. Whack! We ran to his side and got into a stare down with the POP and their cohort Ivan Koloff. The slap would prove to be the spark that would light the impending powder keg of tension. With the 600 pounds loaded onto the bar, I paced back and forth like a snorting bull, turned to the audience and posed with a big roar, and sat down to take position for the lift. And that’s when all hell broke loose.

  As Hawk, my spotter, was about to help lift the bar from the rack, Ivan grabbed the pin of chalk powder and dumped the whole thing into his and my faces. While we were both blinded, the POP, Ivan, and Paul Jones attacked us, taking me in particular and ramming my face into the bar. Boom! Now everyone had a kayfabe explanation for my very real injury.

  The funny thing about the attack is that after I was thrown into the bar, it fell backward. Bam! I yelled to Hawk to get out of the way, and it landed two inches from his arm, which would’ve been crushed on impact. The bar started rolling toward the audience. Finally, at the very last second, two of the officials ran over and stopped it from flattening the ringside fans. When it was all over, Hawk, Paul, and I were laid out on the floor in shambles.

  The whole scenario gave me the proper amount of time to sell my “new” injury and get the overdue surgery. When I did have the procedure, as high of a threshold of pain as I may have, it was beyond brutal. In order to gain the proper access to the damaged orbital, the surgeon had to cut through the roof of my mouth while simultaneously slicing through the bottom of my eye. In order to reconstruct my orbit, bone had to shaved off of the side of my nose for building materials. Then the doctors actually used a sort of superglue to painstakingly adhere tiny bone fragment to tiny bone fragment until the shape and structural integrity of the orbit had been restored.

  After the surgery, I was out of commission for almost the entire month of February. In my absence, Hawk and Paul wrestled against the POP all around the country. By the end of the month, I had healed enough to make run-ins during matches where Paul Jones or Ivan Koloff decided to get involved. To protect my face and ensure I didn’t suffer any accidental shots, I wore a custom white hockey mask, which I painted in a cool black variation of my spider and webbing face paint.

  I thought my mask was the coolest thing. When I came running down wearing it for the first time, I felt like Jason Voorhees from Friday the 13th, ready to hack my victims to pieces. I got plenty of time to live out my Jason fantasy, too, as I wound up wearing the mask for the next six weeks or so. As a matter of fact, I wore it for our match at Crockett’s latest entry into the professional wrestling wars with the WWF, the Clash of the Champions.

  In direct retaliation to what the WWF did to both Starrcade ’87 and the Bunkhouse Stampede by promoting new PPVs on the same night, Dusty and Crockett came up with a last-ditch trump card in time for WrestleMania IV on March 27. Clash of the Champions was an NWA/Jim Crockett Promotions wrestling card from the Greensboro Coliseum of PPV magnitude that was broadcast for free on Superstation WTBS, opposite WrestleMania.

  For that show, Dusty joined Hawk and me, hockey mask and all, in a no-holds-barred barbed wire match against the POP and Ivan. What a fucking mess. I guess because we’d done it all by that point, everyone figured, Hell, let’s put the Road Warriors in a match with barbed wire surrounding the ropes. That’ll work. Great idea.

  I’m pretty sure I speak for everyone involved when I say barbed wire matches are the most useless and dreaded in the business. Seriously, I’d take the Russian Chain, the scaffold, or the War Games over the barbed wire match any day of the year. There simply wasn’t any room to negotiate with, and most of the time even if you didn’t intend to get cut or to bleed, you did. How could you not? There was barbed wire at every turn, twist, and bump. No, thanks.

  Fortunately the match wasn’t booked for more than five minutes, and I scored the pin on Warlord at the hands of a personally autographed Road Warrior Animal powerslam. After the match, the three of them attacked me and pried my mask off, but at the last second Dusty came running back in for the save.

  The main event of the Clash was a twenty-minute time limit draw for the World Heavyweight Championship between Ric Flair and the rising new star carried over from the defunct UWF, Sting. The match, a lightning-fast barnburner between Flair and the young rookie, made both of them shine brighter than they ever had. When it was over, Sting was a bona fide superstar. And to think, only two years earlier Sting was a Road Warrior clone as one of the Blade Runners.

  Watts’ selling out the UWF to Crockett was the best thing that could’ve happened to Sting’s career. He had the look, the charisma, and the desire to learn and improve: traits that were music to Dusty and Crockett’s ears. In Sting, they saw the future of the NWA for years to come.

  The emergence of Sting as one of the company’s brightest new talents wasn’t the only good news to come out of the night. When the numbers came back, Clash of the Champions had successfully destroyed WrestleMania’s PPV buy rate. Compared to ’Mania III’s monster profit yield, ’Mania IV was a flop. The war battled on.

  I have to admit, though, being a part of such a huge, free-roaming business enterprise like Crockett Promotions had really gotten me thinking during the last few months. Here I was making a great living and raising a new family, but I hadn’t been planning for the future. What I needed to do was find a sound investment and start making my money work for me in the long run. But what could I find to invest in? Sure, I’d recently put some money toward financing and partnering with Hawk and our old pal Jim Yungner for a new fitness facility called the Twin Cities Gym, but now I was thinking bigger. Little did I know that the answer was right in front of my face the whole time. Literally.

  13

  AND IT ALL COMES CRUMBLING DOWN

  I’d been thinking of how I wanted to invest my money for quite some time and still had no idea what to do, until one fateful afternoon at the Twin Cities Gym. Wearing a big, baggy pair of bodybuilding pants I’d picked up on tour somewhere, I went strolling in for a quick workout. When I got there, Hawk and two of the sales guys, Dan Stock and Bob Truax, took notice of my pants and asked about them.

  After I told them, I mentioned how I was sick and tired of trying to find comfortable clothes that could actually fit guys like me. Whenever I went to a big and tall store, the pants I’d find that would fit over my legs would have something ridiculous like a forty-eight-inch waist. The only places I found pants that really fit well and were active enough for my lifestyle were at the gym. As I was explaining the background of the pants, it was like a lightbulb went off over all of our heads at the same time. “Why don’t we make our own versions of these things?” I asked.

  Hawk said, “Yeah, why don’t we?”

  As it turned out, a girl who worked at Twin Cities had experience in stitching and pattern work. We loaded her up with a bunch of different fabrics and my original pair of pants and had her go to work. She deconstructed the pair and took notice of everything from the style of the fabric to the type of stitch used. By examining my pair of pants, we developed our own interlock stitch pattern on a custom nylon, polyester, and cotton blend. I know, I know, it sounds like I was turning into one of the Fruit of the Loom guys or something, but this is one Animal who takes
business seriously, powerslam and sewing machine alike.

  The bottom line was that Hawk and I liked what we saw with the first few prototypes of our new pants so much that we agreed to invest $75,000 each into opening up Warrior Distributing Corp. We also came up with a great name for the pants themselves, Zubaz, which was gym lingo for “in your face.”

  Because Hawk and I knew nothing about the garment industry, we partnered up with Bob and Dan and put them in charge of Warrior Distributing. They would oversee all aspects of production and secure retail distribution. To their credit, those two stepped up and immersed themselves in learning the ins and outs of the textile business, giving Hawk and me the breakdown when we came back from the road.

  When we finally tested the first line of Zubaz pants in Twin Cities Gym, the response was overwhelming. In the first month alone, selling exclusively out of our own pro shop, we totaled over $13,000 in revenue. Not bad, but it was only the beginning.

  Although we had started out with solid colors, it was when we started experimenting with zebra print designs in wild colors that things really took off. Smelling big success at hand, we got all of the other top gyms in Greater Minneapolis to carry Zubaz and even started placing mail order ads in the back of Muscle and Fitness magazine. Six months later, the Zubaz clothing line was available for purchase in national clothing store chains like JCPenney, Macy’s, and Foot Locker. It was far beyond our expectations.

  Hawk and I were so proud of Zubaz that for the next couple of years we were rarely seen not wearing them. We knew better. Being on the road as much as we were made us the perfect traveling advertisement. Basically, all of our fans took one look at the new pants the Road Warriors were wearing and climbed all over themselves to be the first on the block to have a pair.

  All of a sudden, Zubaz was everywhere. Love them or hate them, they became an instantly recognizable part of the late 1980s, like us. No doubt about it, Hawk and I had become damn fine entrepreneurs. Within a couple more years, Zubaz would gross over twenty million dollars in wholesale orders to retailers and become an official clothing brand for the NFL. Everyone from Jim McMahon of the Chicago Bears to the soccer mom across the street was wearing Zubaz. It was a beautiful thing.