The Hardcore Truth

by Bob Holly

  They brought the bear out and it was pretty impressive. It was about 6'4" and must have weighed a little over 300 pounds and, let me tell you, that motherfucker was strong. It would probably have taken Mark Henry and tossed him around like a rag doll. I didn’t think I could take the bear, I just thought it would be a good story, something entertaining. It sure was — and all at my expense.

  I know it sounds ridiculous but I was afraid I might hurt the bear and then I’d feel terrible. Now, I’m not saying that I’m a monster who can whip the shit out of anything, but I didn’t know how much I could do without hurting the bear. I knew that it could rip my head off if it wanted to and I also knew that when you play rough, somebody always gets hurt. And that somebody was probably going to be me, so I kind of danced around with it and took it easy. I tried to muscle it down. Needless to say, that didn’t go well. I was no match for a bear. I wasn’t going to punch the bear — punching it would probably just have pissed it off, and if it got too excited, there was not a damn thing anybody was going to do about it. They had a big long chain on the bear but that wasn’t going to do any good. I would have been the sacrificial lamb.

  I’ve still got the video of that fight. For the first few moments, it looks like I’m doing okay. Then that fucking bear bit me on top of my fucking head and that was it — the beginning of me going bald. I had a full head of hair until that point! The bear got me down and ended up on top of me, putting me in an extremely compromised position. Basically, it looked like the bear was sexually assaulting me. That pretty much ended my bear-wrestling career. Believe it or not, my friend actually took the bear down. He stepped into the ring after my turn was over, and he had learned what not to do by watching me. Obviously I weakened the bear for him, so I’m going to claim the assist on that one . . . !

  After I’d finished bar-fighting, enjoyed my brief bear-wrestling career, and split up from Stephanie’s mom, I started thinking more about what I wanted to do with my life. I now knew I could hold my own in a fight and that I was pretty tough, and I thought about wrestling more and more. A respected boxing trainer had seen something tough enough in me to offer to train me for free, so I knew I had some potential. I just didn’t know how or where to get into wrestling. The business was all hush-hush back then and you had to know somebody who knew somebody to find a trainer. It wasn’t like nowadays, with everything out in the open and all these nobodies who have never done anything in the business running training schools. I had a fortunate break. When the manager of the auto shop where I worked found out I liked wrestling, he introduced me to a girl who was friends with a local wrestler. She and I got talking, and that’s how I met Marcel Pringle.

  CHAPTER 6

  CHASING DOWN A DREAM

  I’d worked as a mechanic for about three years and had no idea what was in my future. I was paying the bills, doing my best to be a good dad to Steph, and just getting on with my life. I wasn’t on the fast track anywhere but I was okay with that. I knew that if the opportunity came along to do something better, I’d take it — but there was nothing I really wanted to do as a job, so I had nothing to pursue. I still thought that maybe I could wrestle, but I had no idea how to get started. Back then, you had to know someone in the business to get in the door.

  Even so, the weekends were still the best part of my week because of the wrestling — the only thing that had changed from my childhood was which promotions I had access to. I didn’t get Portland Wrestling anymore; Mobile’s main wrestling TV show was called Gulf Coast Wrestling, which became my new favorite thing to watch. There was “Bullet” Bob Armstrong, Mike “The Hippy” Boyette, “Cowboy” Bob Kelly, and, of course, “Marvellous” Marcel Pringle. Those were the top guys and they were pretty big names locally. It wasn’t the only wrestling show, mind you. I had access to so much more wrestling than ever before, including WCCW out of Texas with the Von Erichs, Continental Championship Wrestling out of Birmingham with the Fullers, and Florida Championship Wrestling with Dusty Rhodes. There was so much wrestling on TV, I was in hog — or wrestling — heaven down there in Alabama. I was so wrapped up in wrestling that I’d spend a lot of work time talking about it with the others. The manager there was a wrestling fan too, so he ended up bringing a TV in and we’d both work Saturdays and watch wrestling when we weren’t busy.

  The National Wrestling Alliance show — that would end up being WCW — was starting to get exposure on TBS, and the World Wrestling Federation was expanding nationwide from its New York base. Hulk Hogan was starting to come through and get hot. The territories were great and I loved those shows, and it became obvious that the WWF was going to get big. I thought it was the greatest thing in the world. The amount of talent there was unbelievable. Many of those wrestlers were monsters too — these huge, powerful guys who would turn your head if you saw them in the street. In the NWA, I liked the Road Warriors and the Barbarian because they were big, rugged guys. They intrigued me. I liked their style, their look, the way they wrestled — just full on and in your face. But in the WWF, I loved Bret Hart as soon as I saw the Hart Foundation. Even though Bret is not a small guy by any means, he was small compared with some of the others. He was cool and he was just so realistic. His wrestling was incredible, even way back then. As time went on, he would get even better. Everything he did made sense and nothing was just to do something — everything he did had a reason and led to something else. He was a great storyteller.

  Still, as much as I liked all the new guys I saw, “Playboy” Buddy Rose was my favorite, bar none. It was a shame that, because I didn’t get Portland Wrestling, I couldn’t watch him anymore. I was excited when he joined the WWF in 1989; he’d done some stuff with the WWF before and I figured he was finally going to be a top guy in the business because he had everything it took. He had so much talent, as much as anybody could ever have in wrestling. He had charisma, cut great promos, knew how to tell a story; he could be a babyface, he was a fucking great heel — but he fell flat on his face in the WWF. Honestly, I thought he easily could have been the WWF’s top guy but Vince didn’t like fat guys. That was Buddy Rose’s gimmick. Back in Portland, he wasn’t obese; he was just a bigger guy who didn’t work out and lift weights but still looked like a wrestler and could move. The WWF was becoming all about physique. Sure, some fat guys got pushed, including King Kong Bundy, Earthquake, and Yokozuna, but Vince blew hot and cold with them all. For instance, when Yokozuna came in, Vince put a big sumo-style diaper on him as a rib. He wound up getting over, so Vince ended up pushing him anyway. No such luck with Buddy Rose — he probably got told to put on weight and get fatter, and then Vince gave him a terrible gimmick, the “blow-away diet,” and had him lose to everybody. It was such a waste of one of the most talented men to ever lace up a pair of boots.

  Every Saturday, as I watched all that wrestling at work, I still held the dream that maybe somehow I could be a wrestler. Back then, there wasn’t really anywhere to learn. Finding a wrestling trainer back then was almost impossible, because the internet didn’t exist and wrestling schools weren’t listed in the Yellow Pages. It was all word of mouth and you had to know the right people. If you were able to get trained, then you would learn your craft and perfect all your moves in the territorial promotions before you went to the big time of the WWF or the NWA, but getting in the door was hard unless you knew somebody.

  Although I didn’t know anybody, my manager did. One Saturday, we were working and watching wrestling and he came out and said, “I know this girl who knows one of these guys. . . .” So knowing what a big fan I was and how much I wanted to wrestle, he said he’d call her and see if she could get me to meet this guy. I thought this was going to be my only chance to get into the business, so I bugged my boss and his friend to death for this guy to get in touch with me.

  Marcel Pringle, when he was not on TV being “Marvellous,” worked a regular job as a welder at a cryogenic plant called Taylor Wharton. One day, after he got off work, h
e came by and I finally got to meet him. I asked him if he could train me. He told me he couldn’t. I asked if he could put me in touch with a trainer. He told me he couldn’t do that either, that there weren’t people around there who could train a guy like me. Like I said, everything was really closed-shop back then. He thought I was just another guy who said he wanted to be a wrestler because he’d seen it on TV. I managed to get his phone number — which he reluctantly gave to me — and was persistent, calling him and asking him if he’d train me. He kept putting me off and putting me off and then one day, out of nowhere, he told me that there was this place in Pensacola, Florida, that was opening a training school. He told me years later that this was his way of getting rid of me since I was bugging the hell out of him all the time!

  I didn’t need telling twice. I got in my car, drove about an hour and twenty minutes down to the Border Street Arena in Pensacola, and signed up. The guys who were running the school were Bob Sweetan and Rip Tyler. I’d seen both of them on TV and I knew they were rough, intimidating guys. They didn’t work out like the guys who were in the WWF. Instead, they were just tough guys who could beat your ass in a second. Sweetan was about 5'10" and 280 pounds. Tyler was 6' and 250 pounds. Neither were muscled, they were just big and powerful — Sweetan, in particular. He was a hard-nosed Texan and came across on TV like a flat-out evil bastard. As a heel on the shows, he would cause all sorts of mayhem, so when I first met him, it was like “oh shit . . .” — he was intimidating as hell. I didn’t know they were characters back then.

  They were charging $3,000 to train, which I didn’t have, but they gave the option of making payments along the way. I had to scrape together every penny I could for those payments plus gas money to get me down there. They didn’t care what sort of condition you were in when you signed up. They didn’t smarten you up to the fact that it was a work either, that’s for damn sure. I got the crap kicked out of me by Sweetan several times. He kept trying to get me to quit. They both absolutely tortured me, using old-school wrestling stuff to stretch me. Everything was so hush-hush back then that they wanted to make believers out of us all. They were so rough with me, it’s a wonder that I even kept wrestling. But that’s how bad I wanted it. That’s what they wanted to test. They didn’t want to waste their time on somebody who wasn’t going to be able to take the hardships of the business. Sweetan fucked with us physically and mentally because wrestling is a tough business. It takes a certain mentality to survive, and he wanted to see if we had it. Most of the guys just flat-out didn’t have it. Our class had about 20 people in the beginning. By the end, there were only three of us left.

  To start with, they taught us the basics, not the fancy stuff — how to fall and how to take bumps without killing ourselves. We took one bump after another. Sweetan ran our asses into the ground: bump — get up — bump — get up — bump — get up . . . over and over again. He constantly made us run stairs to improve our conditioning and go for runs by the arena while he rode his bike behind us. We’d run in a group and if any of us slowed down, he’d make us start over. Even if we’d run two miles, if one of us slowed down, he made us run the two miles back to the arena and start all over. It was absolutely brutal. A lot of the guys just couldn’t take it. It got even worse in the summer because it gets humid as hell in Florida. The arena didn’t have air conditioning, so that place was like an oven.

  Bob and his manager, Marvelous Marcel Pringle (Lenny Hawkins).

  As brutal as it was, I was excited. I drove over there every weekday after work and trained. By the time I’d get home, it’d be midnight and I’d have to be up by 6 a.m. to get ready to go to work. I did that for God knows how long. When I’d been training a while, I called Marcel and invited him to come with me. He still thought I was somebody who was just wasting his time, but I finally got him to come. Seeing me in the ring, he realized that I did have some talent and was actually serious about being a wrestler. He started to warm to me and have more to do with me. Lenny (Marcel’s real name) and I became pretty good friends. He even got me a job at Taylor Wharton. They needed a pipe-cutter and, while it wasn’t a complicated or great job, it was a foot in the door at a great place to work. He looked after me once I was there. Later on, Lenny asked me if I wanted to learn to weld, since he was friends with the welding instructor. I knew that if I learned, I’d be able to make more money, so hell yeah! I would stay about an hour after work to learn how to weld, then get in the car, go to Pensacola to train, drive all the way back, grab a few hours’ sleep, then do it all again. I was exhausted. After a few months, I took a welding test and passed, so I got promoted to flux core welder. It’s the dirtiest job in welding — dirty and hot — and it’s where everyone starts out. I was paying my dues in both the wrestling and the welding industries. No wonder I was so run down! I wanted to learn to TIG weld, because that was a better job with more money, so I started to practice that after work until I passed my TIG test. You’ve got to be really good, because you’re welding stainless pipe and that stuff has to be X-rayed to make sure there are no breaches in the weld whatsoever. It was government stuff for the big cryogenic tanks with different sized pipes running in and out and around it — that was the next job I got.

  Through all of that, I kept wrestling. After eight months or so of training, I “graduated” from the wrestling school along with just two other guys. They even gave me a “wrestling license” as a kind of diploma. I’ve still got that card somewhere. . . .

  My first match ever was in front of about 30 people, against a fat guy whose name I can’t even remember — it was Tim something. We were absolutely horrible. There was no pace, no story, and no reaction from the audience — it was just a bunch of moves. Of course, at the time, I was so excited to be in the ring in front of a crowd that I thought the match was great. I’ve got a tape of that match somewhere — and nobody is seeing it!

  I started out as “Hollywood” Bob Holly. Rip gave me that name — I was a white-meat babyface, so the “Hollywood” part wasn’t really a gimmick; it was just a nickname designed to give me some sort of flavor because I had none. I had a pair of trunks, a pair of boots, and some kneepads. I was just a plain babyface, but that was how people always started in those days. You learned to wrestle as a babyface and you started in front of the crowds as a babyface because the heel called the match, dictating what we did in the ring and the pace of the match. The heel told the babyface when to go to certain moves or spots, and had to know how to get heat (meaning how to get the crowd to boo him and root for the babyface to beat his ass) and how to get that babyface over. You had to have experience to call a match, so until you had enough experience, you worked as a babyface. They turned you into a heel once you understood how to tell a story in the ring and how to control the pace of a match in order to get a reaction from the audience. The heels had the gimmicks, the flashy robes, and the characters. The babyfaces had a nothing nickname and a pair of trunks. Even if you were an experienced babyface and had got over — which means the crowd reacted to you like you were a star — the heel still called the match. Wrestling has changed since then. It evolved in the ’90s to a point where the most experienced guy tended to call the match, whether he was a heel or a babyface. If you were the less experienced wrestler, you might make suggestions depending on how well you knew the guy you were working with. If you knew him well enough, you might throw a few ideas in here and there, but if you were working with a guy you just met, you didn’t say a fucking word and you let the senior guy call the whole match. You have to build up trust in the other wrestlers by proving that you know what you’re doing and that you understand how a match works before you start suggesting things.

  After I’d been working on independent shows for a while, Rip Tyler set up a deal with a Japanese star who went by the name Mr. Ito. Since the school was going well, Tyler and Sweetan thought it would be a good idea to get a TV show going too. It cost money to run TV and Mr. Ito was g
oing to be the main sponsor, which is how World Organization Wrestling TV got underway. They used me and Lenny, of course. Tyler and Sweetan both wrestled, and they also called in talent from around the area — we ended up using “Mr. Olympia” Jerry Stubbs, Ron Starr, and even the Rock ’n’ Roll Express a couple of times. There was a lot of talent on hand and it turned out to be a good TV show that ran for two years. There aren’t many clips of it out there, but I know Lenny has got all the shows recorded on Betamax.

  Bob had this picture taken in 1986 and sent a duplicate a long with a letter to Continental Championship Wrestling out of Birmingham, Alabama. In his letter he stated he would do anything to get hired. He never heard back!

  He and I were still both working at Taylor Wharton, so on Wednesday nights we’d load up the car and drive down to Pensacola to tape two hour–long shows. It wasn’t just a two-hour deal though, since we had to do promos too. The wrestling part of the show was taped in front of about 40 people, and that was fine. The promos took the longest time to get done. Back then, you had to cut a two-minute promo and you had up to 15 guys all recording them. Fifteen guys each doing a two-minute promo should equal half an hour, right? Wrong! Everybody screwed up, over and over. If you screwed up, you had to start again. It took forever. You’d get to the last 15 seconds of the promo and they’d count you down so that you could end the promo right on time. If you missed the mark, back you went to start all over. We’d be there until 4 a.m. sometimes, with work the next day and over an hour’s drive in front of us too. You had to really want it. I wanted it but Bob Sweetan had his doubts about me. About two months into wrestling with WOW, my career nearly ended before it even started. Sweetan called me into his office and came close to firing me. I was so burned out from both wrestling and working a full-time job, but Sweetan didn’t care. He told me to step it up or he’d have to let me go. There were plenty of others who wanted to wrestle. I was tired but I kept on going.