The Hardcore Truth

by Bob Holly

  Bret stuck it out and kept trying to balance things but other guys didn’t stick around. WCW had Hulk Hogan, Randy Savage, Sting, and Ric Flair, and they were just about to launch a live TV show to go head to head with RAW. They were genuine competition for the first time and they had an aggressive boss in Eric Bischoff, who wanted to prove he could beat Vince. They also had the unlimited financial resources of Ted Turner, who owned the company. Jumping to WCW became a very realistic possibility for the boys who weren’t happy. I remember flying back home the week after SummerSlam ’95. I was in first class, sitting next to Lex Luger, and we were talking about working out. Lex had been traveling by himself but it sounded like we had a pretty similar schedule, so I said I’d like to work out with him in the future. He gave me his number so that when we started back on the road we could travel together and work out together. The next thing I knew, he showed up live on WCW Nitro. I called him but his cell phone number had changed already. We’d talked for hours on the plane and he hadn’t said a word about jumping ship. I guess he’d had enough of being ignored in favor of Shawn and his gang. Still, no matter how I felt about the Clique, I felt like Luger was a traitor. None of the boys could believe it. Vince had invested huge money in Luger, paid him well, and given him every chance to be the biggest star in wrestling, including a highly publicized bus tour around the country to build a fan base. Yet Lex just upped and left. Where’s the loyalty? I’ve always felt that when someone is good to you, you have to be loyal. And Vince was very good to Luger. I thought that he just never clicked with the WWF audience. He fit in better with WCW because that’s where he started — he seemed like a fish out of water in the WWF. That’s no excuse though. You don’t just up and leave without a word of explanation.

  Luger wasn’t the only one who acted like a jerk that year — Jeff Jarrett took his ball and went home too. He was about to work a program with Road Dogg and he didn’t like what they were planning to do, so he decided to walk out on the big company that had made him a star so he could jump to WCW. And he and Road Dogg were good friends — or so Road Dogg thought. When Jeff wanted to leave the WWF, Road Dogg stuck with him and left too, but when they got to Atlanta, WCW only wanted Jarrett. Jeff didn’t go to bat for Road Dogg; he just took the offer WCW gave him and left his so-called friend behind without a job. Jeff’s a charming guy to your face but I wouldn’t trust him as far as I could throw him.

  He might not have been trustworthy but he was good enough in the ring. I had a number of matches with him earlier in the year and it looked like they might actually go somewhere. The company had put a lot of effort into Jeff and he’d been the Intercontinental Champion a couple of times. He and I had a match for TV that was going to be for the IC title, and they told me before the match that I was going to win and become the champion. I was glad to hear that, because the IC title was second only to the WWF Championship at that point. We did the match and it went well, and the finish came off fine, with me hitting him with a clothesline off the top. I went for the cover and Jeff got his foot on the rope to break the pin, but the ref didn’t see it and counted three. I’d been told to get out of the ring quickly, grab the belt, and come straight to the back, so I did. My music was playing, I was high-fiving the fans, and Jeff was kicking up a stink in the ring with a bunch of referees because his foot had been on the ropes. The idea had been to use the controversy to build up to a rematch for the title at the next pay-per-view. When I got backstage with the belt, they told me that I was going to go back out there, they were going to announce the title was vacant and I’d never actually won it, and we were going to do the rematch right away — and Jeff was going to win. It was incredibly frustrating; they kept nearly going with me and then pulling back at the last second.

  We didn’t get to do the match on pay-per-view after that. Instead, Jeff and Road Dogg found themselves in a match with Razor Ramon and the 1-2-3 Kid. I wasn’t surprised to see Shawn’s buddies in that match instead of me. Heading into that event, Kid got injured, so Razor needed a partner. You’d think I would have been the logical choice, given what had gone down between me and Jarrett, but they just had Razor fight two guys by himself. God forbid anyone else got a chance to get over or collect a payday. So, in the end, I never won the IC title. Interestingly enough, the guy who won it from Jarrett a couple of months later? Shawn Michaels. He was meant to go on to SummerSlam to defend the title against Sid. At the last minute, plans changed and Sid was taken out of the match for no reason. Guess who replaced him? Razor Ramon. They controlled everything.

  I did, at least, get a pay-per-view appearance on that SummerSlam show. My job was to help kick-start the push of a new guy named Hunter Hearst Helmsley. He had just come in from WCW and had kept to himself in the locker room — he was quiet, spoke when he was spoken to, and took everything in. I liked him back then and we worked a lot of house shows leading up to SummerSlam, so we were able to perfect our match. Hunter is probably one of the easiest people to work with. No matter what else I might say about him — and we’ll get to that later — he is really fucking good and there’s no other way to put it. He knows what he is doing; he knows where to be and when it’s time to do certain things. He’s not selfish, he doesn’t do things off the cuff, and everything he does makes sense. He’s a great storyteller in the ring.

  I liked our SummerSlam match — he looked strong and I looked competitive. He got the win and started to move up the ladder. I didn’t mind — I figured one of these days, it’ll come back to me. I’d started proving that I could hang with these guys and wrestle just as well as them. Even though I was putting people over, every time I went out there I proved I could work. That was almost the problem — the office ended up thinking, “Bob’s a good hand — he can make people look good so let’s keep him in that role.”

  They had me do the same at some of the other pay-per-view events. I put over Jean-Pierre Lafitte at In Your House 1 and Goldust at In Your House 3, and actually got to beat Rad Radford at In Your House 4. All three matches were dark matches — untelevised bouts to get the crowd warmed up before the main show. It felt like management thought I was good enough to wrestle in front of an audience but not worth paying to see. That was demoralizing.

  The money hadn’t got better, either. The most I’d got paid all year was still the $2,500 from the Rumble. I got something like $1,200 for my SummerSlam match with Hunter. The other pay-per-view matches were about a grand each. Nothing special. Don’t get me wrong, I appreciated any money they paid me and I appreciated any time I got on the big events. I just wanted to be more than the person they turned to when it was time to put a new guy over or they needed a last-minute fill-in. At King of the Ring in 1995, I wrestled Road Dogg and lost to him. Up until that point, he had only been acknowledged as Jeff Jarrett’s roadie (hence the name) and not a wrestler, so like Bam Bam and the football player at ’Mania, it looked like a non-wrestler was beating a wrestler. I didn’t appreciate that. How the hell was I supposed to have any credibility if I couldn’t beat a roadie?! That was the night I really started to question company politics and began to think that it didn’t matter how good somebody was. Road Dogg had the connection to Jeff. The other guys they were pushing on that show weren’t good workers. Kama, Mabel . . . neither were good wrestlers but they were buddies with the Undertaker. Since they wanted to get those guys over, they needed a good wrestler to help people believe in them. It felt like I was doing all the work and they were getting all the rewards. Jerry Brisco even said to me, “We need guys like you who can wrestle to get over the guys who can’t.” That seemed fucked up to me. Why not just push the guys who could actually wrestle? I knew what I was doing and I didn’t screw up spots, but I felt like I was getting penalized for being good at my job. They kept beating me with guys who were not good at their job until the fans were programmed to say, “Okay, he’s going to get beat because he’s lost every night for the past year.” Everybody was conditioned to see me as a loser, so h
ow the heck was I meant to get over or make any money?

  By the end of the year, I was only on pay-per-view as a last-minute fill-in. At Survivor Series in November, they pulled Al Snow from an elimination match because they’d tried to get him over with a new gimmick and he’d fucked up his finish move on RAW. They lost interest in him right away and put me in his spot in the match. I even got to beat Tom Prichard before they eliminated me. I was sure they wouldn’t have made me look strong by beating someone else unless they were going to do something with me but, as usual, that was just wishful thinking. 1995 had started with promise and ended with disappointment. I had moved down the card over the course of the year rather than up, and, believe it or not, the next few years were going to get even worse.

  At this point in my wrestling career, the most notable thing I had done was back on the racetrack. In the first year or so after I joined the WWF, trying to get myself a push, I went to Vince with an idea to expand our fan base. I said that the car-racing demographic was similar to ours; racing fans were like wrestling fans. If we reached out to that community, we might draw more interest. Since I was a race-car driver for real, I suggested the WWF sponsor me in all the pro-circuit races, using a WWF car to get us some attention. I was upfront with Vince and told him that it would cost a lot of money to get started, but he liked the idea so much that he asked me how I would act if Frito Lay was sponsoring me? I told him that, if it was a big corporation like Frito Lay, I’d get whatever I needed. He said, “Run the race car just like that then — get whatever you need.” He left me in charge of an unlimited spending budget. The company bought three motors, at about $25,000 each, and two Super Late Model cars. I had one of the cars out with me on the tracks and the other one, brand new, sitting in my workshop. Vince was fucking great to me — whatever I needed for the cars, I got. I always told Vince that I would treat his money like my own and try to shop around to get the best deals possible. I kept track of every dime we spent. Vince appreciated that.

  A friend of mine named Ricky Crawford hooked me up with Randy Dorton, who worked for Dale Earnhardt — they built our motors at Automotive Specialist and they were top of the line. Vince wanted the best of everything and it was all high-dollar stuff. Ricky did everything he could to help me, pointing me in the right direction and guiding me along the way. He was running the All Pro Series against me, but even at the racetracks he’d come over and help me as much as he could to make sure my car was running well — a really good guy who went on to bigger and better things and ended up in NASCAR. To this day, I’m grateful to Ricky for all his help back then. He’s the promoter for the Mobile International Speedway now and doing a great job.

  It was great to be racing again, and getting into the All Pro Series was a big deal — some of the races were even on TV. It was the Late Model series that everybody in racing wanted to be in. I found it hard doing the traveling involved. I was used to racing at only one track. Since the All Pro Series was a traveling event, I was going around to different tracks in the southeast. That by itself would have been fine, but I was still doing the wrestling shows at the same time. When there was a race every couple of weeks, I’d fly home from a show, drive out to whichever track we were at, do the race, drive home, fly back out, and wrestle somewhere else. At first, I was okay because I was still young and my body wasn’t beaten up yet, but after a while it wore me down. I couldn’t fit everything in, either — when you’re racing, you’ve got to work on the car every single day — so I told the WWF I needed to hire somebody to work on the cars when I was out working the wrestling shows. They told me to choose someone and they would put him on payroll, so I gave the job to Jimbo Walker. It was pretty cool that I was able to get my buddy that job. He was so good to me in helping me win my championship back in 1993, so my loyalty lay with him. It was an eight-hour-a-day job, just like any other. Nine to five. Jimbo started out doing that, but as we got more into the racing he got a little bit lazy. Sometimes, I’d be on the road with the WWF and I’d get a phone call from the workshop to tell me it was midday and Jimbo hadn’t arrived yet. I tried to get him back on track but it turned out he was doing a lot of cocaine, so I had to let him go. Emotionally, that killed me but I couldn’t have someone who was doing drugs working on my race car, no matter how much I liked him. That could have literally killed me.

  Bob posing next to one of his race cars, 2001.

  Without Jimbo, I had to cover the work on the cars by myself and it got to be so much that I ended up missing races. I was working every hour of every day. I’d get to the track with the car and start working on it right there, trying to get it ready. When you show up to a track, that car needs to be ready as soon as you unload it from the trailer. Maybe you’ll have little things to do when you get there but you’d better be ready to race. I was pulling the truck and trailer ten hours to a racetrack, trying to get ready at the last minute, failing to qualify because the car wasn’t ready, missing the race, driving back home, and then flying out to wrestle. I kept interviewing people to help out but I couldn’t find the right person. I wasn’t about to hire any person off the street. Doing everything by myself was exhausting but I still enjoyed getting the chance to race at some great tracks. We were coming up to a race in Bristol, Tennessee, and I was so excited about that. Some of the best racing in the world goes on there. It’s a super-fast track — a half-mile oval with 36-degree banking in the corners. You can flat-foot it around that track in a Super Late Model and not even lift.

  About a week before the race, I got a call from Vince telling me that he was going to have to cut the racing program. I felt like somebody had popped my balloon — why couldn’t they have just waited another week until I’d been able to do Bristol? Vince explained that the company had lost a lot of money through the steroid trials in 1994 and business hadn’t been great for a few years, so he had to cut a lot of stuff. I understood, but I was disappointed that I didn’t get to race Bristol. I told Vince that I would sell all of the equipment and get him his money back. He said that since I’d been behind everything and loved racing, he wanted to sell it all to me. There was about $300,000 of equipment and I couldn’t afford that. He told me, “Don’t worry, you can afford to buy it, I want to sell it to you . . .” He had his attorney on the phone too. “I’ll just take the money out of your check.” If he’d done that, he wouldn’t have paid me another dime for years! I protested, telling Vince that I was glad he’d let me race, but there was no way I would ever be able to afford all the equipment. He said, “I’m going to sell it to you . . . for $100.”

  I didn’t know what to say to that. I told him again not to worry, that I would sell everything and get him his money back and he just said, “No, I want you to have everything. I’ll write it off.” No matter how much I protested, he wouldn’t have it any other way. He said it was a done deal, his attorney would FedEx me the paperwork to confirm it was all being transferred to me and that they’d take the $100 out of my paycheck.

  I ended up racing on my days off — just local tracks at Mobile and Pensacola. I did that for another year but I was on the road with the WWF so much that I’d be gone for weeks and home for only a couple of days. I just didn’t have time for racing any more. I sold everything and got a good chunk of money for it. I made sure to offer the money to Vince, but he didn’t want it — he just said, “Bob, that was your stuff, you keep the money.” That’s one of the main reasons I was always loyal to Vince — he took care of me. Whether it was letting me keep all the car equipment or making sure I was fully paid whenever I got injured, he always took care of me. The only thing I question about him is why he lets other people dictate how he runs his show. Apart from that, I have nothing bad to say about him.

  And, in the end, he never even took that $100 out of my paycheck.

  CHAPTER 14

  THE CLIQUE TAKES OVER

  Heading into ’96, management seemed to have given up on Kevin Nash being the
top guy since we were getting godawful ratings with him as champion. Instead, they were going to go with Shawn. People voiced their opinions pretty gingerly but it was obvious that Shawn and Kevin were running the show, and almost nobody liked it. Everyone tiptoed around backstage because they knew the members of the Clique had a lot of influence over Vince and were more than happy to use it. Everyone was job-scared.

  Drugs and alcohol were everywhere. It wasn’t something anybody talked about; you could just see who was in and who was out. I was out. I was never a drink or drugs guy, so I’d just go to my room after the shows and go to sleep. As I said earlier, I’ve never felt comfortable in a bar environment. The problem was that the attitude seemed to be “if you don’t go out with the guys, you’re not going to fit in.” I’m not a follower and I don’t care what other people think, so I wasn’t about to give in to peer pressure. I felt like I shouldn’t have had to go out with the guys to fit in. If they were going to like me, they were going to like me whether I went to the bar or not. If they didn’t like me because I didn’t go drinking, fuck ’em. I was going to stay true to myself. I’d gone out a couple of times when I first got to the WWF but it wasn’t for me — just one of those things. Even though I didn’t go out, I still heard from the boys in the locker room about the events from the night before.

  Right in the middle of it all was Shawn — he was the ringleader. He dictated everything that was going on. He’d go out partying every night, drinking, taking drugs, getting in fights . . . he’d show up the next day hungover as hell but still work like crazy. He never screwed anything up — whatever mind-set he was in, he still went out there and put on the best match of the night. He was a machine. Not a great ambassador for the company though — and not a great influence backstage. The Clique just kept on fucking with people and wanting to work only with each other, hogging all the money. Anybody who looked like he could get over and make some money was put in his place. The prime example of that was Sid Eudy — Kevin and Shawn didn’t like him. Sid is misunderstood; he’s very humorous, in a sarcastic way, and people take it wrong. He was always good to me. When we traveled together, he knew I wasn’t making a lot so he paid for our rental car, the hotel, a lot of my meals. I wouldn’t have made it without him — I owe him a lot. I think I helped him out a lot too, by keeping him sane!