SMW offered more of a slower-paced, old-time style of wrestling than what the glitzy WWF was selling. To a certain extent the fans in the Southern states preferred Smoky’s style to the WWF’s, with a lot of them still believing that they were watching a legitimate sport and behaving accordingly. This included automatically cheering or booing a wrestler based solely on whether he came to the ring from the heel or babyface locker room.
The company also relied more on wrestler interviews to build up the big matches. This was the opposite of wrestling in Germany or Mexico, where there was less emphasis on cutting promos. If I was ever going to get to the WWF, I would have to learn how to deliver a better promo, and working for Jim Cornette, one of the greatest promo men of all time, would help me to do that. I got his number from Lance and gave him a call.
I was surprised when Jim called me back excitedly the next day. He’d already seen some of my work via an audition tape Lance had sent him chock-full of highlights of the two of us wrestling each other. One of the clips featured me taking a crazy bump over the top post straight to the floor and Cornette wouldn’t stop raving about it. When I brought up that I’d interviewed him for my college newspaper five years earlier, he laughed and then cut to the chase. “I would love to bring you and Lance in to work as a tag team.”
There was more emphasis on tag teams in SMW and the top stars in the company were the Rock ’n’ Roll Express. Ricky Morton and Robert Gibson were former NWA and WCW tag team champions and one of the biggest drawing acts of the 1980s. I thought Lance and I would be a perfect fit for the company. I didn’t want to spoil any of Lance’s plans though, so I called to ask his opinion. He liked the idea and we were Tennessee-bound.
Cornette’s plan was to put us together as a young and fearless team called the Thrillseekers. Our gimmick was that we were more extreme than the rest of the performers in SMW. This extreme didn’t mean that we broke tables or shot staple guns into our heads; it referred rather to our devil-may-care attitude as we walked the earth seeking thrills...or something like that.
The idea was that we’d explode into the territory performing flashy moves and working diverse styles that had never been seen by these fans before.
Cornette made the arrangements to fly us down to Knoxville to sell us on his company. He also had an idea of what he wanted us to wear in the ring and sent us a few rough designs. They featured a pair of stickmen wearing singlets, resembling a Southern Spirit Squad. Cornette’s notes stated that our first names were to be written on the front in “gold lamé or similar material.”
It was lame all right. We would’ve been better off wearing loincloths.
We were both excited about the prospect of working full-time in the States and we had no idea what kind of money we could expect to make. I had left Mexico on good terms and even though the peso had crashed, I knew I could go back and make a good living. But I felt at this stage of my career it meant more to get the gig with SMW even if it meant a huge pay cut, although Cornette didn’t need to know that. So it was time to do some hardball negotiating.
From the moment Lance and I stepped off the plane in Knoxville it was as much of a culture shock as being in Mexico City the first time. For starters, even though we were still in North America I had a real problem understanding a damn word the people were saying. Trying to figure out the Southern accents was harder than trying to decode carny and Cockney combined.
Cornette met us at the gate wearing a tight SMW T-shirt that barely covered his ample belly and a pair of Zubaz workout pants that were in style a decade earlier. He had a haircut like a first-grader, short and parted with an ax to the side, and was sporting a pair of Coke-bottle glasses.
“Hey y’all.”
“Pardon?”
“Jeet yet?”
“Excuse me?”
“Jeet yet?”
I just nodded politely until I decoded that he was asking, “Did you eat yet?”
When I finally jate, the food was just as alien as the accent. Blooming onions, grits, okra, BBQ that wasn’t actually BBQ at all, but some kind of mystery meat covered with a cold, slimy sauce. And what the hell was a Waffle House?
The culture shock continued when I saw a huge billboard on the side of the highway featuring a familiar face.
“Why is there a picture of Burt Reynolds from Smokey and the Bandit on that billboard?”
“Burt Reynolds?” he asked in amazement. “That’s not Burt Reynolds, that’s Richard Petty...one of the most famous NASCAR drivers ever!”
I’m from Canada. What the hell did I know about NASCAR?
He took us to a fancy riverside restaurant and began the hard sell about how good it would be for our careers to work with SMW. Jimmy unveiled his plan to build us up by introducing the Thrillseekers to his fans with television vignettes.
We filmed the first one in the Smoky Mountains at Pigeon Forge, the home of Dollywood (me likey Dolly). We wandered around the tourist attractions while Jim filmed us performing such death-defying thrill-seeking activities as ice skating, horseback riding, go-cart driving, video game playing, and the extreme coup de grâce of jumping onto a Velcro wall whilst wearing a Velcro suit. Another wacky scene showed Lance throwing treats into a bear pit only to pan down and reveal that it was really me jeeting the treats. HILARIOUS!
The whole concept of the vignette was goofy to begin with (now I know why Jim’s nickname was Corny) but I made it worse with my horribly cheesy overacting. I was bopping along to Danger Danger’s “Rock America” (Corny couldn’t have picked a worse hair metal entrance song for us if he tried) once again trying to be David Lee Roth and once again ending up as Screech. If you didn’t know me you might’ve thought, “This guy’s an idiot.” (Then again, you might think that even if you do.)
Then he wanted to end the clip with the two of us banging our fists together, which would cause a lightning bolt (to be added in post) to shoot out of our hands.
“Wonder twin powers activate! Form of Dweeb.”
The next (and worst) one was set to “I’ll Sleep When I’m Dead” by Bon Jovi, and began with me rousing Lance out of bed at 8 P.M. to go party. Apparently, one half of this hot young tag team had to be in bed before sundown. This was to show that Lance was the straitlaced guy and I was the rock ’n’ roll animal.
The video continued with me and my reluctant party partner in the bar drinking mugs of milk and winking to each other about it like we were too smart to be seen drinking beer on camera. Later when I propositioned a pretty Southern belle, she promptly slapped me in the face. I guess this was to show that the Thrillseekers were so cool, girls would rather slap us in the face than speak to us. At the end of the video, Lance knocked on the door of my room at eight in the morning and I’m passed out drunk with the goofiest generic drunk face. You might as well have drawn X X over my eyes.
Beer bottles were lying all over the room and I was wearing the same clothes that I wore the night before. Then again so was Lance, who apparently went home, got a good night’s sleep, and put on the same clothes to come wake me up. This folks, is your new babyface tag team.
The last vignette showed us working out in the gym wearing the shortest of short-shorts and string tank tops, close-ups of our butts in slow motion, the works. It was almost as if the territory was based in San Francisco not Knoxville. Then we return to our hotel room and find two girls waiting for us. When I saw them I begged Jimmy to give me two minutes to go to a strip club, a Hooters, a mall, a nunnery, anywhere, so I could find two different girls. Hell, I could’ve thrown a dart into a crowded street and hit a hotter chick. But he insisted upon using these girls and we were forced to act excited that we were going to get lucky; high-fives and all.
The hot young babyface tag team had just picked up a couple of skeezers and had it captured on tape, killing our sex appeal and our cool factor in one fell swoop.
With the vignettes in the can (in the toilet would have been more appropriate) we attended SMW’s “Sunday, Bloody Sunda
y” at the Knoxville Coliseum.
Three or four times a year Jimmy would blow off (wrestling speak for the end of a feud) the hot angles of the company with a big show at the Coliseum. He had a lot of credibility and a good name throughout the business and was able to book some legendary names for his big shows. Earlier in the night I got to meet Terry and Dory Funk, two of the biggest stars in wrestling history. I was agog when Terry busted out a moonsault during his match with Bullet Bob Armstrong. He worked his ass off and so did the entire crew as the show brought out the best in the company, its wrestlers, and its fans. Seeing 4,000 fans going crazy for the matches in this big arena made it seem like SMW was the place to be.
The Thrillseekers were ready to come aboard. We just had to agree upon the finances, so after the show we met with Cornette to talk numbers.
There was no way Corny could afford to pay me what I’d been making in Mexico and I didn’t expect him to. After what I’d just seen, I wanted to work in SMW more than ever but I still wanted to make the best deal I could. Lance had given me his blessing to work out the deal for both of us, so I decided to swing for the fences. I told Jimmy I couldn’t come in for anything less than $850 a week and of course Lance would have to make the same.
Without a word, Jimmy grabbed a pen and after a few minutes of number crunching, he said he might be able to do it.
A major revenue stream for the workers in SMW was the sale of merchandise, or gimmicks. Guys would peddle T-shirts, pictures, mugs, buttons, anything. They would have sold turds if there was a Sharpie that could write on them. Cornette told us he could guarantee the $3,400 to each of us monthly by keeping the proceeds from our gimmick sales.
I think he figured he could pay us 100 bucks a match for four matches a week and make up the remaining $1,800 with Thrillseeker gimmicks. It might have been possible except I think Corny forgot that Lance and I would have to generate $1,800 a month in gimmicks EACH to cover the guarantee. Therefore the Thrillseekers would have to sell $3,600 a month in merch for him to break even. So the deal put him in as much of a hole money-wise as our crappy vignettes put the Thrillseekers in image-wise.
What made his offer stranger was that even with the biggest push in history, nothing was going to make us more popular than the Rock ’n’ Roll Express in SMW. He’d just made a deal to pay an unproven tag team twice as much as he was paying his top-drawing main event tag team.
The bottom line: great deal for us, bad deal for Cornette.
With Cornette in charge of producing our gimmicks, it wasn’t a priority for us to put any thought into what we were selling. It didn’t matter if we sold 1 or 100 dollars’ worth because we got our monthly guarantee either way. So we refused to take the beefcake pictures of us soaking in a hot tub in Speedos that were standard for babyfaces in the Southern territories. We wanted to be known as serious wrestlers and the only pictures we agreed to take were of us on horseback, wearing jackets and jeans. We didn’t even show off our physiques, which was what a lot of the female fans wanted to see. It was a piss-poor attitude to have because Jimmy was paying us a lot of money to play the pretty boy role. It was almost embarrassing to compare our inventory with the rest of the guys who made the lion’s share of their income from the sales of merchandise.
The Rock ’n’ Roll Express were the kings of the gimmicks. They made hundreds, sometimes thousands of dollars a night by selling anything and everything, including shirts, buttons, dog collars, key chains, can openers, and ball caps. They’d buy a white bedsheet, rip it into strips, write R+R on them in black marker, and sell them as official headbands. Once I saw a fan give Ricky Morton a rebel flag license plate as a gift. As soon as she turned her back, he signed his name on it and sold it ten minutes later for twenty bucks. They’d shamelessly shill their stuff to any fan in the place who had more than a dime to their name. If a dime was all you had, they’d take that too.
The more you schmoozed the fans the more you sold, but the whole concept of whoring yourself out bothered me. Here we were, so-called big-time superstars sitting at a table during intermission, hawking a button for a dollar as if our lives depended on it. You never saw Hulk Hogan at the merch stand at intermission selling red and yellow headbands and I didn’t think I should have to do it either. I felt that it really destroyed the larger-than-life status wrestlers were supposed to have. My wrestling motto was No Mystique, Big Mistake.
In retrospect, that mind-set hindered the Thrillseekers from reaching our full potential and from getting over as much as we could have in SMW. I didn’t understand it at the time, but selling gimmicks and interacting with the fans was a huge factor in gaining popularity in the territory. But whether I understood it or not, I should have just done it, as it was part of my job and my deal with Corny.
But with the deal done and the contract signed, the next step was to pack up my stuff from the Palkos’ house (my North American base for the whole time I was in Mexico and Germany) and move to Tennessee. SMW’s referee Brian Hildebrand had found an apartment I could share with a couple of the other wrestlers in Morristown, about forty-five minutes outside Knoxville, so I was good to go.
Brian was a short slightly built man who was one of the easiest guys to talk to that I’d ever met. He was obsessed with 1970s music and had a good wrestling mind and worked the independent scene as manager Hymie P. Schwartz (the best name ever). He had immense respect for the business, as he’d learned to wrestle in Pittsburgh at the same school as Mick Foley and Shane Douglas. But he’d never fulfilled his dream of becoming a wrestler because he was too small for his time so he’d become a referee instead and was now Corny’s right-hand man in SMW.
Brian worked at a shoestore by day and became the SMW man Friday by night. He helped book the matches, run the shows, and produce the TV program, a little bit of everything. He had a massive wrestling tape collection from all over the world and knew my entire history from my first match on. He was even familiar with Bret Como (or as he called him Bret Cuomo, like the governor), and wanted to convince Corny to bring him in. We really hit it off and he assured me that my apartment was ready to move into, so I flew back to Calgary to pack up my stuff and make the three-day drive to Tennessee.
Leaving the Palkos’ house was quite emotional for me as their home had been my home base for the past four years. No matter where I went or how long I was gone whenever I returned, I went back to live at their house. I was always welcomed with open arms, my mail piled on the freshly washed sheets of my bed. I’d become part of their family and Jerry and Bev treated me like one of their own. I could probably still be living there as the wacky sitcom roommate guy.
I was able to hold back my tears as I pulled out of their driveway for the last time, but when I saw Mrs. Palko waving at me in the rearview mirror the same way my mom had when I’d moved from Winnipeg, the tears dashed down my cheeks. My supposed six-week stay had turned into three and a half years and now I was leaving home for the second time. Once again, if it wasn’t for the Palkos, I never would have made it as far as I have in wrestling or in life.
I drove for three days across two countries and finally pulled up to my new digs in Morristown. It was a two-story duplex that I’d be sharing with Anthony Michaels, a rookie from New York who’d moved to Tennessee to find his fame and fortune. I don’t know how much fortune he found, but he did have a quick taste of fame when he wrestled as the original Dudley Brother Snot years later in Extreme Championship Wrestling (ECW).
Unfortunately, Anthony was out of town and hadn’t informed anybody else in the place that I was moving in. I walked into my room to find Goldilocks in my bed and I recognized him instantly as the guy who’d been too wasted to assemble a crib in Christopher Love’s house in Wichita. His name was Rex King and he begrudgingly vacated my bed when I explained that it was my room now.
I found out that my new home had been given the nickname SMF, the Smoky Mountain Flophouse. Wrestler Chris Candido had coined the phrase because anytime a new performer came into the
company and needed a place to stay, he would move in there.
No wonder Brian was able to hook it up for me so easily.
Candido was right. There were people drifting in and out of the SMF on a nightly basis. There was no air-conditioning so it was ceaselessly hot and damp inside and I’d never experienced that kind of brutal humidity or the horrible amounts of pollen in the air. After a week of being red-eyed and bushy-haired, I was ready to stick my head in the microwave...if only the SMF had one.
Our groovy pad also boasted fake wood paneling right out of the ’70s and smelled like a mouse had crawled behind the fridge and died. Coincidentally, when I pulled it back, I found out that a mouse had crawled behind the fridge and died.
At least I got along well with my new roommate Anthony. He was into the metal scene and, like me, he’d been born in Long Island. He played guitar and I’d brought my bass, so we formed a glam band called Slippery Nipple. We were the first metal band in history without a drummer or any songs but we rocked all the same.
Living in Tennessee was a big lifestyle adjustment, as I’d gone from living on the Reeperbahn going out every night and meeting all the girls I could handle, to living with a bunch of stinky dudes in a cheap apartment in the middle of a dry county. A dry county meant that there were no bars in all of Morristown, which really limited the places we could go to hang out and meet girls. There was nothing to do, except watch The Real World on MTV (that Puck...what a rogue) and hang out at the brand-new twenty-four-hour Wal-Mart. Ain’t no party like a Wal-Mart party!
In old-school Southern territories one of the responsibilities of a babyface was to, shall we say, service the female gender. This was done to ensure continued attendance and the continued buying of gimmicks by enraptured female fans.
But Lance was married and I had standards, so we drove Cornette absolutely nuts.
A Lion's Tale: Around the World in Spandex Page 18