The Hardcore Truth

by Bob Holly

  Gary was definitely hands off. I don’t get why he was like that — he knew what he signed up for when he married my mother. She had two boys, so we were part of the deal. Maybe he just saw the marriage as a good way to get some cheap labor. That wouldn’t surprise me — Gary was a real tightwad. It wasn’t just sports gear I had to pay for; I had to buy my own school clothes. He bought us two pairs of jeans, a pair of tennis shoes, and some white T-shirts, and that’s all we got for the year. If we wanted anything else, we had to work a regular job to earn the money. Once I started working, the bastard made me pay rent. Here I was, still in high school and I was paying 50 dollars a month to my stepfather. That was a lot of damn money to a 17 year old, especially back in 1980! I understand paying rent to your folks if you’re living at home after you’ve graduated — but not when you’re still a minor.

  My brother and I were nervous wrecks whenever he was around. It was horrible. He never laid a hand on us, but he made us uncomfortable all the time. He didn’t care if we were upset, if we were hurt, if we had any problems; all that mattered to him was that we were able to work around the yard and the house. I’m sure my mom wasn’t too happy, but what could she do? She was as dependent on him as we were, if not more so. She was just trying to keep the peace. Aunt Elaine told me that my mother did stand up for us behind closed doors, but in the end, she had to follow Gary’s lead and say, “Well, you gotta work.”

  It was too bad that we had to work so much, because I could have been really good at football. Whenever we played it in PE, I played wide receiver. I was small but fast, and I had great hands. If I could touch the ball, I’d catch it. The Grants Pass High School Football coach was also my PE teacher, and he told me that if I played for him in my senior year, he was sure I would get a college scholarship — a full ride. I had to tell him I couldn’t because my parents were making me work. It was a damn shame that I didn’t get to play college football.

  Still, for all of the negative thoughts about Gary I had during my teenage years, I did develop a very strong work ethic because of him. I’m very particular — the engine bay of each of my vehicles has to be spotless, for example. Everything has to be in a pristine condition; everything has to look good. All of my tools are in a certain order. Nice and neat — everything clean. I pay attention to detail. This work ethic was reflected in my time as a wrestler. I always strove for the perfect match. You never get it, but you always strive for it. You’re constantly working to have better matches. I am a perfectionist and my own worst critic. I may never reach perfection but as long as I’m striving for it, I’ll always do the best I can.

  Despite how it might sound, and even though Gary made me feel like a slave a lot of the time, I didn’t grow up unhappy. He and I didn’t have much in common, but we both liked auto racing and we both liked wrestling.

  CHAPTER 2

  THE OPENING BELL

  One of the good things about moving in with Gary was that he had a TV. This was new to us because we had never been able to afford one. I discovered roller derby pretty quickly and thought it was great. If you look at it now, it’s obviously a work, but back then I thought it was real. Later, when I was in fourth grade, my stepdad’s parents and siblings moved from California to Oregon so we moved too. I can still remember flipping through TV Guide and finding Big Time Wrestling.

  I tuned in and I was hooked right away. I’d never seen anything like it. Pat Patterson, Pepper Gomez, Rocky Johnson, Peter Maivia, Mr. Saito . . . it was the greatest thing on the planet. I couldn’t wait for the next Saturday so I could see some more. Pat Patterson was the big babyface. It’s mind-boggling to think that I ended up working alongside Pat, and that about 25 years after I first saw him wrestle, I cussed him out in front of the entire WWE locker room.

  A while after we got to Oregon, I found out that there were other wrestling groups, including Portland Wrestling. I was in heaven! I still remember the guys who made the biggest first impression on me. There was Jesse “The Body” Ventura, Jimmy “Superfly” Snuka, and, of course, “Rowdy” Roddy Piper. Those guys were great, but the guy I liked the most was “Playboy” Buddy Rose. His interviews were good, he was a great worker, and he made everything so believable. Even now, I still think that he was one of the greatest workers who ever lived. Buddy Rose never got the respect he deserved. He was such an awesome heel. I had my other favorites — Mr. Saito, Bob Roop, Ricky Hunter, Rocky Johnson, Patterson, Ray Stevens, Kenji Shibuya, and Peter Maivia, but in my opinion, Buddy Rose was the man. He didn’t get a shot when he joined the WWF because the owner, Vince McMahon, just didn’t like most fat guys. People remember Buddy Rose as the fat guy in Vince’s stupid blow-away diet ads and as a wrestler who lost to everybody. I remember him as my first real wrestling hero.

  1971: the 3rd grade.

  Gary and I tuned in every Saturday like clockwork for Big Time Wrestling at 3:30 and then Portland Wrestling. It wasn’t a family thing. Mom never watched and my brother didn’t like it either — he was more into Star Trek. He and his friends picked on me sometimes because of the wrestling thing but I didn’t give a damn. Come on, seriously, which is nerdier — wrestling or Mr. Spock? Hey, if people like Star Trek, good for them. Just don’t tell me I’m a nerd for being into wrestling!

  Even though my brother didn’t care much for it, some of my friends got into wrestling with me. Whenever Gary couldn’t watch with me, Mike Brown would come over and we’d watch the shows together. Inevitably, some of my friends and I would end up wrestling each other. When I was in junior high, my friend Scott Clause and I would take a roll of aluminum foil from the kitchen cupboard. We’d start with a little ball and make something the size of a basketball. Then we’d take it outside and beat it down until it was as compact and hard as we could make it. Then we’d have a wrestling match — an “Aluminum Foil Ball Match.” Whoever got to the ball first could use it on his opponent. The problem was, back then, we still thought wrestling was real. We beat the holy hell out of each other. Everybody on TV bled from the forehead, so I’d pound his face with the aluminum ball to try and split his head wide open — until he’d start crying. He gave as good as he got, though: he would get the ball from me, crack me upside the head, and try his damnedest to make me bleed. But no matter how hard we tried, neither of us ever managed to get the job done.

  When Dutch Savage and “Playboy” Buddy Rose went on TV and had a coal miner’s glove match . . . well, that wasn’t going to end well for us after we saw that. In that match, there was a pole on the corner post of the ring with a glove hanging from it. The “coal miner’s glove” was a welding glove with a piece of steel flat bar attached to it. The first wrestler to get up the pole and get the glove could use it. So, thinking this was probably the best idea of all time, I got myself a glove from the shed at home, found a piece of flat bar lying around, and duct-taped the metal to the glove so we could have our own coal miner’s glove match. My friend and I would lay out some garden hose to outline the wrestling ring, stick a pole in the ground, and put the glove on top of it. Then we’d fucking kill each other. We ended up with bloody noses, busted lips, and a few headaches here and there. Our parents never knew. If I got a fat lip or a scraped face, they would ask what happened. “Oh, we were just outside playing,” I’d say, and they bought it.

  Later, when I was in high school, I’d end up pretending to fight with another friend, Randy Rudy, in the front yard. We were doing it to see if we could get people on the highway to slow down and watch us (and they did), so I guess that was my first taste of fighting to entertain other people! We didn’t hold back on each other because we still hadn’t quite figured out that the wrestling on TV wasn’t real. Back then, wrestlers protected the business more than anything, and the way everything was done was so much more realistic than nowadays. When I was a kid, I guess I always had it in my mind that it might be a work, but I also had that doubt, that little something that tells you it just migh
t be real. It was sort of like believing in Santa — you question it but you also really want to believe in it. Then you’re kind of disappointed when you figure it out.

  We couldn’t afford to go to a show when I was a kid, but by the time I was a senior in high school, I had a job and a little money left over after I’d paid rent. When I found out that Portland Wrestling was on tour and coming to Grants Pass, I asked for the night off but my bosses wouldn’t give it to me. I was furious. I decided I was going to go to work, do everything I could as quickly as I could, and then haul ass out of there to go straight to the show. I thought I might get fired but I didn’t care. It was a regular house show and a lot of my favorites were there, including “Playboy” Buddy Rose. The next day, I didn’t get fired but I definitely got in trouble. It was absolutely worth it.

  I loved wrestling. Even back then, I knew I wanted to do it for a living. It just never occurred to me that I actually could . . .

  CHAPTER 3

  NEED FOR SPEED

  I’ve had a number of concussions. This shouldn’t surprise anyone, especially after they learn that my childhood friends and I beat on each other with steel-plated gloves for fun, but my first concussion actually happened before those childhood wrestling matches. I was five.

  I remember getting a tricycle for my fifth birthday, back when we lived in the second story of an apartment block in Glendale. Mom was asleep. Unsurprisingly, my brother didn’t care to help me get this tricycle down to the ground level so I decided I’d ride the damn thing down the stairs. Well, I got to the bottom but I sure wasn’t on my trike anymore . . . I slammed my head on the concrete and my mom woke up to the sound of me screaming my lungs out. Within seconds, I had a bump the size of a big egg on my head. Off we went to the hospital — which wasn’t an easy task back then.

  Everything we needed was about three miles from our apartment. Mom’s work, the stores, and, of course, the hospital. We didn’t have a car so she had to play human ambulance with me — she carried me in her arms all the way there and back. That wasn’t the only time we had to make that trip. Far from it, because I always seemed to get myself into some sort of trouble. In my defense, there were always plenty of things around to injure myself on. I was playing in a nearby field one day when I stepped right on a four-inch nail sticking out of a discarded board. That nail went clean through my foot. Back to the hospital we went. I was hard work for my mother . . .

  My daredevil streak led to bike riding. By the age of 16, I’d gotten into dirt bikes. It was something I kept up with until recently. Even when I was with WWE, I was on a dirt bike every chance I got. Whenever I had a day off, I would come home, load up, and go riding somewhere. In my WWE days, after I’d had a couple of decent earning years, I decided to buy a custom-built CR500 built by Service Honda out of Indiana. It was the best bike on the market. A CR500 put in a 250 aluminum frame — that thing was a damn rocket ship. Back when I was 16, though, I couldn’t afford anything like that. I was working at a golf course as a range picker and, after I’d bought what I needed for school, I was able to afford my first dirt bike. It was a Yamaha YZ125, and I loved that thing. Around the time I graduated, I bought a Suzuki RM250 and started doing hill climbs.

  If you don’t know much about dirt bike racing, I can tell you that a hill climb is usually on the side of a mountain or a massive hill, which is at a 45-degree angle or more, and you’ve got to get up the ridge as quickly as you can. The flag drops, the timer starts, and you just twist that throttle, hope you go straight, and hang on for dear life. One of the guys in our group lived in a house on the edge of a big mountain, so we’d practice there. The hill was pretty steep, so it was ideal. Rain or shine, we rode those dirt bikes. Sometimes this wasn’t the smartest move. One time, when we were about to do our final run of the day, it started to rain pretty hard. It was my turn, so I twisted the throttle, dumped the clutch, and shot up that hill like a cat with its ass on fire. All of a sudden the bike did a 180 because the ground was slick with rain. I shot back down with the throttle wide open. I didn’t have time to think or be scared. I plowed straight into some trees, which stopped the bike dead. I was thrown forward, against the handlebars, and I just hung there. After a few seconds, I started moving around. I was shaken up but thought I was okay. When I took my helmet off, the pain hit me like a bolt of lightning. It was so intense that I thought I was going to die right then and there. I’d gone from wide open to a dead stop in a split second. My head was killing me from the whiplash, and I’d smacked my right leg so hard on the handlebars that I thought I’d broken the bone. My bike was pinned between two of the trees. Even with four guys pulling, they couldn’t get it out. In the end, they had to get a chainsaw to cut that bike free. I was amazed to find that the rims, forks, and handlebars were not damaged — the crash felt like it damn near killed me and the bike hardly got a scratch!

  I could barely move, but I was so stubborn that I decided I was going to get back on and go up that damn hill one more time. I couldn’t throw my leg over the bike, so my friends helped me. I started going back up the hill but everything hurt so much, I couldn’t stay on. I just laid it down, got off, and dropped down there with it. My friends came up the hill, got the bike, got me, loaded us both onto the truck, and headed off. I struggled to walk for about a month after that. I had such a bad contusion on my leg that it was as useless as if I’d broken it. By that point, I was working at Gold River Distributing, the beer warehouse, and a lot of my job was driving a forklift. My leg really wasn’t in good enough shape to do that, but I couldn’t afford to take time off. I had to earn money, so I forced myself to carry on through the pain.

  As upset as I was, it wasn’t long before I felt the need to get back on the bike. About four months later, I threw my leg back over that thing and kicked it. I wasn’t going to let something like a crash stop me for long.

  By 1983, the bike to own was a water-cooled dirt bike with a radiator. Since I had a pretty good-paying job, I was the first one of my friends to get one. I was the talk of the town. Everywhere we went, everybody wanted to look at my bike. Man, that thing was fast too — really fast. That’s when I got into motocross. I thought it was awesome. A track with ruts and big jumps and whoop-de-doos, where you pin the throttle and haul ass — where could I sign up? I started entering motocross races, but I wasn’t really good enough to compete. I did it for fun, but some of the other guys rode every single day. Racing was their job, and it was all they ever did. I would have loved to do that but, number one, I wasn’t fast enough and, number two, I didn’t have the support needed to be successful.

  It’s always something I come back to for fun. Whenever I was off from WWE with an injury, I traveled to Delbarton, West Virginia. The town holds hillclimb races every month during the summer and people come from all around the country for them. At one point, the hill gets up to something like a 70-degree gradient. It’s a fucking big hill. I managed to get over it once and they timed me at about 16 seconds. I was happy with that.

  So from the age of 16 all the way through until the end of my WWE run, I always had a dirt bike. I don’t have one now because my CR500 was stolen in 2009. One Sunday, I’d been washing down the bike outside my workshop, along with a Rincon 680 four-wheeler that I’d just got. As it was getting late, I left them outside and went in for the night. I lived out in the country in Mobile, Alabama, where there were very few other homes, so you could leave everything unlocked. Or so I thought. When I woke at 6 a.m., I looked out the kitchen window. Something didn’t look right. I thought, “Wait a second . . . my pressure washer is sitting there, my dirt bike stand is sitting there, but my dirt bike is gone . . .” I started second-guessing myself, so I went to see if I’d put the bike back in the shop. That’s when I noticed the four-wheeler was gone too.

  My property sat about three hundred yards off the main road, and I could see where the four-wheeler and the dirt bike had been pushed through the grass down the hill to
the access road. I called the police and filed a report. The next day, I got to thinking that the guys who had stolen my vehicles had probably looked in my workshop too. I had a lot of things in there — all my tools, shop equipment, a welding machine, and burning rigs. I figured, if they’d seen all of that, they would probably come back and try to take more. Sure enough, three o’clock in the morning, when I woke up to get some water and looked out of the kitchen window, I saw headlights. The car was moving slowly and stopped at the bottom of the hill by the pond. I stood and watched, wondering what this was all about. A truck turned up and parked at the bottom of the hill. Then another one. And a third truck and a second car. They all sat at the bottom of the hill with their parking lights on. This is pretty frickin’ interesting, I thought to myself . . . so I went to my bedroom, got my 9mm Smith & Wesson, and loaded it. I went outside, hid in the dark where they wouldn’t see me, and waited. I stood barefoot in just my boxer shorts, holding my 9mm with a full clip, ready to unload if they came onto my property.

  After about 10 minutes, they cranked up their vehicles and pulled away really slowly. I was damned if I was going to let this one slide, since I figured they’d stolen my dirt bike and four-wheeler, so I ran back in and grabbed my truck keys, still barefoot and in boxers. There was a little gas station/convenience store at the end of my road where I thought they might stop to plan what to do next. I drove to the store but they weren’t there, so I ended up driving all around the area, searching. I couldn’t find them anywhere, which is probably for the best given how crazily I was acting. I got home and sat there, hoping they’d return. For several nights, I didn’t sleep — I just kept looking outside and waiting for someone to come back. They never did. I’d always taken great care of my bikes; after each ride, I’d spend two or three hours, sometimes up to half a day, making sure they were spotless. If you’d seen them, you’d have wondered if I ever rode them at all. They looked like they just came off the showroom floor. I’d invested about $14,000 in that dirt bike and the four-wheeler had cost me about $10,000. It still makes me mad.