The Hardcore Truth

by Bob Holly

  Al didn’t want any part of it so he tried to get Mick to apologize. Al hadn’t really caused the problem; he was guilty by association. Apparently he’d kept saying to Mick, “We’ve got to find Bob,” but Mick wasn’t worried about it. Hawk told Mick, “You need to pay Bob back the money for the rental car, his hotel, his food, and his gas.” In the end, Al convinced Mick that he didn’t want to be in Wrestlers’ Court so he gave me $500. Mick is so tight that you couldn’t drive a pin up his ass, so it must have killed him to pay me that money. And when he did, he said, “I still don’t think I did anything wrong.” That was quite something.

  Edge and Christian ended up in Court one time because they were buying gifts for Brian Gerwitz. He was writing all their stuff so they wanted to keep him sweet. They knew he collected these science fiction action figures, so they got him stuff like that. It said explicitly in our contracts that we are not allowed to buy gifts for any office staff, so the two of them got hauled up in front of ’Taker. The verdict: to make amends by getting a fifth of Jack for ’Taker, some cases of beer for Ron and John, and since I was the next senior guy there, some protein powder for me because I don’t drink. If you break the locker room protocol, you have to pay for it. The penalty was never physical. Unless, of course, you really pissed everybody off.

  The Public Enemy came in for a couple of weeks. These guys acted like they were superstars when really they were nobodies. They were working with Ron and John and told them that while they weren’t prepared to go through a table, they still expected Ron and John to do it for them. That pissed Ron and John off like you wouldn’t believe. They went to the ring that night and beat the everlasting shit out of The Public Enemy. That was basically the end of The Public Enemy in the WWF. You don’t tell Ron and John what to do, and you don’t say, “I can do this to you, but you can’t do it to me.” It just doesn’t work that way.

  As for me, I was working regularly and getting paid well but at times I felt like I was getting lost in the shuffle. They were starting to push Crash on his own and he was getting over doing the hardcore stuff. The Hardcore Title was now defended 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, and Crash became the guy who had to keep fighting anybody at any time because they wanted the belt. People tried to attack him after matches or backstage at first, but they got a little too creative with it and started filming clips of him getting attacked at a grocery store or in a romper room. I thought that was a little ridiculous and that the Hardcore Title lost a lot of credibility. I’m not saying that the belt was important, but it was a useful title that we’d worked to build up and now they were treating it like a joke. Some of the managers and some of the women would sneak in after Crash had been knocked out and win the title from him. I could just about cope with Jerry Brisco winning the title because he was actually tough in real life, but Terri Runnels winning the Hardcore Title? Really? Anybody walking down the street can apparently get that belt, and here we’re meant to be an elite group in which only the toughest win that title. It didn’t annoy me but I thought they were going to ruin something good. They do it every time, stretching the creativity more and more until they go too far and ruin it.

  WrestleMania that year had me working in a hardcore match with a 15-minute time limit to fight 12 guys. Crash was going in with the title and whoever was the champion at the end of the time limit was the winner. They told us to go out there and beat the crap out of each other but have Crash win at the end. The idea was that I would be just about to beat him and the buzzer would go off before the ref could count three so that Crash escaped with the title by the skin of his teeth. The match was an absolute clusterfuck. So many people were out there and nothing made sense. It was just people hitting each other with anything they could find. No one was wrestling. The last minute was good though, when it came down to me, Crash, and Tazz. Crash was the champion at that point and Tazz had him about to pass out in a submission move. I grabbed a candy jar from the announcer’s table and smashed it over Tazz’s head. He went down, Crash was out, and I covered him. As the ref, Timmy White, made the count, he said, “We nailed this perfect.” Timmy couldn’t look at the screen so somebody backstage counted him down over his earpiece. Crash stayed down and Timmy pulled his arm just before he was about to hit three, because the bell was meant to ring to signify time had expired. The problem was that the guys backstage who were counting Timmy down weren’t in synch with the clock on the screen, so it looked like I’d pinned Crash with two seconds left. They made a snap decision backstage and had Howard Finkel announce that I won the match, not Crash. They had Crash’s music cued up and played that, but they lucked out since he and I used the same music. I was still confused about what had happened. So was everybody else. Crash didn’t know what was going on. He thought he was supposed to win, then grab the belt and get out of there, so he did. Timmy had to go get the belt off him and bring it back to me. Crash wasn’t upset because he didn’t go over as planned; he didn’t care about that. He was just glad to have a job and enjoyed what he was doing. Backstage, management said, “We’ll fix it on RAW and switch the belt back to Crash,” which they did. Even so, the agents and Vince himself chewed Tim White out. That seemed unfair to me. The blame should have gone to the people in the truck who gave him the wrong information. Tim was just going off their cues. It was a big old mess but I got paid $9,000 for that match, so I was happy enough.

  The main star of the show that year was The Rock, who had become the top guy in the business. My hat is off to him because pretty soon after he started with the WWF, they were going to stick a fork in him and call him done. The fans didn’t give a crap about him and he was on his way out the door.

  When he first came in, I thought he was terrible. He couldn’t cut a promo to save his life. There was one in particular in England, when he was the IC Champion. He cut the most generic promo ever, along the lines of “I’m the champion and I’m going to beat you and walk out the champion.” It was the godawfullest promo that I’d ever heard. We made fun of him over it in the locker room and he laughed at it too. He was fixing to sink, then he pulled a rabbit out of the hat and started doing all of his promos in the third person. It was brilliant, and he came up with it himself. It saved his career. He ended up getting really good at promos and got over huge. It was purely a confidence issue when he started out. He still wasn’t the greatest worker but what he could do, he did well. He just got better and better and went on to become one of the greatest entertainers in professional wrestling.

  As he became a bigger and bigger star, Dwayne himself changed. He didn’t become an egomaniac though; he became more confident in himself. If you were to walk up to him and say, “I’ve always wanted to meet you,” he’d shake your hand, take a picture, sign an autograph, and say, “Thank you for being a fan.” He’s one of the kindest, most genuine people you’d ever meet. He doesn’t have a big head, he’s just very confident in what he can do and who he is. Even after he became the hottest act in wrestling, we’d rib him about his old promos and say, “Do you remember that one you did in England?” and he’d laugh and say, “Yeah, that was fucking awful.” I guarantee that, to this day, even as a big movie star he is still down to earth. The last time I saw him was at the WWE Hall of Fame ceremony in 2008, when he inducted his dad and granddad. I talked to him for a while and I could tell he was the same person he always was — over-the-top nice to everybody, just a class act.

  I’ll be honest, I haven’t seen many of his movies. I saw The Other Guys, which he did with Samuel L. Jackson, where they were smart-ass cops. I thought he did a good job. It wasn’t a big part but he was as funny as hell. That’s who he is though — if you get to know him, you find out he’s hilarious. I can see how Dwayne is a great actor. Steve Austin became a good actor too. I tried watching The Chaperone, which had Hunter in it, and I had to shut it off because it sucked. It wasn’t Hunter’s fault — he’s a funny guy, as he proved on Saturday Night Live, but they need to find a role that s
uits him. I think anybody could become a good actor if they’re put in the right roles. Being on TV as a wrestler can open acting doors, but if you work for WWE, they control who does what. I know for a fact that a lot of the boys have had opportunities to be in TV shows and movies but never even knew because the producers called the office and the office has told them, “No, he can’t do it . . . but we have so-and-so available instead.” Then they try to give the role to one of their top guys. They play favorites. We found out one time that somebody had called in and asked Test to be in a movie but the office had blocked it, saying that they were using him that weekend and had plans to put him in an angle on TV. He would have received a good payoff for the movie and they blocked it. When he got to TV, do you think they used him? Fuck no, they didn’t. That’s the kind of thing that goes on with the office sometimes. It’s awful — they don’t want anybody getting over without them, I guess because then wrestlers might think for themselves or something.

  They did let me do a movie at one point. We were in Louisville and I was in catering when Kevin Dunn came up to ask if I wanted to do a movie titled Operation Sandman. It was going to be filmed in Mexico and was going to star Ron Perlman. I said sure. Why not? I guess they came to me because nobody else wanted to do it. It probably wasn’t a big enough role for the top guys. Whatever, I thought I’d take the job and have some fun.

  I loved doing the movie. It was a made-for-TV thing and I thought it turned out pretty good. It was easy work, a lot of “hurry up and wait” — you have a lot of time on your hands on a movie set. We would shoot from six at night until six in the morning in an old GE warehouse in Mexico City, so there were long days, strange hours, lines to learn, and a lot of waiting around. But it was a lot easier doing a movie than wrestling. On a movie, they take 20 different shots from different angles, so you have a chance to perfect your character. In wrestling, it’s in front of a live audience, so you don’t get a chance to do things over. They say, “You’d better go out and nail it because we’re not going to give you another chance.” The movie people took care of me while I was there — my hotel suite was as big as a house and had three bathrooms. It was crazy!

  I honestly didn’t think twice about whether it would lead to other acting jobs. We were so busy on the road with the WWF and were making such good money that I was fine with what I was doing. If the opportunity came up, I’d love to do more movies. I never used my wrestling experience to make contacts or get an agent though. Just like anything else, getting into movies is about who you know, and I absolutely hate to know people in order to use them. I don’t want to make people feel like they’re being used. Hell, I could have kept in touch with Ron Perlman but I didn’t. I got on great with the other actors but I didn’t keep in touch with them. I had wrestling, I was keeping busy — I didn’t want to feel like the only reason I was keeping in touch was so that later on down the line, I could use them. It’s sad that, nowadays, to get anywhere, you have to use somebody. I’ve met so many people throughout my career who could have given me opportunities to do other things, but I refuse to use people. I don’t regret that. If I want something, I want to have to work for it. Sure, it’s nice for somebody to hand it to you but where’s the achievement in that?

  CHAPTER 23

  AN UNFORTUNATE BREAK

  Another guy who wasn’t ever handed anything is Kurt Angle. He won a gold medal at the Olympics and then joined the WWF in late 1999. Kurt excelled so fast, it was scary. Over the years, I had some of my best matches, bar none, with him. Anyone who has ever worked with Angle knows that he doesn’t work light. You don’t have to tell him twice to lay it in there; he will clean your clock in a New York minute. It’s funny that people on the internet bitch about how rough I am but are fine with Kurt. He goes balls to the wall and isn’t going to apologize for anything. That’s the way I like it. He really was a wrestling machine in the truest sense. I’ve got no idea how his mind operates anymore now that he’s in TNA, but when he was with Vince, he kept growing as a wrestler in terms of being smart in the ring, learning how to work well, and telling a story with the best of them. At his peak, I could have almost put Kurt on the same level as Shawn Michaels. He should have been the top guy in WWE from 2002 onwards but, of course, it had to be Hunter. I didn’t get it — by that point, Kurt was much more over than Hunter.

  In June of 2000, they were still building Kurt up and pushing him hard, so I was one of the guys who helped get him over and make him look really good. We were at a TV taping for Smackdown in Hartford and were going over the match backstage. He was still pretty green, so I was calling the match. He was making suggestions and that was fine; I don’t have a problem with a new guy suggesting something as long as it fits what we’re doing and makes sense in terms of when we do it. Kurt had this spot he did in a lot of his matches where he went for a moonsault and missed, so I told him, “You need to hit the moonsault.” If he didn’t hit it sometimes, it would become too predictable when he went up to the top rope for it. Everyone would know he always missed. He said, “I don’t know if I can do that — I’ve never landed on anyone.” I told him he would be fine and that it would be a good swerve. Everybody would be expecting him to miss so why not nail it this time?

  We got to the ring and the match was fine. When the time came, he slammed me and started to climb the ropes for the moonsault. I was laying there, thinking, “He’s put me too far out.” But I decided that he was a good athlete and he had pretty big legs so he’d be able to jump far enough and make it. As soon as his feet left the buckle, I knew he wasn’t going to make it. I could see his legs were going to land on my ribs so I rolled towards the ring post to protect myself. As I turned in to him, his shin caught me on my forearm and it sounded like a damn shotgun had gone off. I rolled over, saying, “You broke my fucking arm!” Kurt didn’t know what to do, so I said, “Cover me!” That was what we’d planned to do. I guess he figured I’d just stay down but that wasn’t what we’d called, so I kicked out. The expression on Kurt’s face was of total disbelief.

  “What the fuck are you doing?!”

  “Just hit me!”

  “What?!”

  “Fucking hit me, Kurt!”

  In his book, Kurt said that once he’d broken my arm, he had to take over and become the ring general. No, sir, he did not! He was freaking out, so I told him to just keep going. I called the rest of the match. It was my decision to keep going, not his. Even the ref asked me, “Why are you still going?” I didn’t answer him, I just got on with the match. At one point, I was supposed to lift Kurt’s legs to do a stomach stomp and I couldn’t even grab his right leg. My arm was just dangling there. We got through the rest of the match as planned and I went to the back for the doctor to check me out. I was wondering if maybe it was just a bad bruise. After all, I had finished the match and if I had a broken arm, I wouldn’t have been able to do that. About 15 of the boys were circling me, checking on me. I actually felt bad for Kurt because he felt so bad. They took me to the hospital to get it x-rayed.

  I was waiting for the doctor to come back with the results when Kurt walked in. I was surprised that he came to visit me — he hadn’t needed to do that. It was appreciated though. I told him that I didn’t think my arm was broken, just badly bruised. He dropped his head and said that he’d seen the x-ray as he was coming in and it was definitely broken. My heart sank. I’d just signed my new contract, and I felt that I was in a good spot and that they were going to start pushing me seriously again. I had been working my ass off, I was making plenty of money, and everything was going great. I was happy. Now my arm was broken.

  They fixed me up with a temporary splint and sling and Kurt drove me back to the hotel. He made sure I got up to my room and got me settled before he left. A while later, there was a knock on my door. It was Kurt — he’d brought me up a bunch of food. When he left, he asked what time my flight was in the morning so he could help me get to the airport. I said he didn
’t have to do that but he insisted. That’s what kind of guy Kurt Angle is. I didn’t even know him that well, he’d only been around a few months, and he was doing all that? It says a lot about his character. Just turning up at the hospital to check on me was enough, but the next morning he showed up at 4 a.m., brought me breakfast, helped me pack my bags, carried them for me, checked me out of the hotel, checked in at the airport — he went above and beyond.

  I went home and had surgery. They put a 10-inch titanium plate in my arm. Vince called me up after the surgery and commended me on working through a broken arm, but told me to never do that again. He explained to me that the broken bone could have cut an artery or something and I could have bled to death. I hadn’t realized that could happen. He said if something like that ever happened again, I would have to stop the match. I know he was looking out both for me and his company when he said that but stopping a match because I get hurt just isn’t me.

  When I was home recovering, Kurt called me for the first couple of months on a weekly basis to check on me and make sure things were going well. He and Karen, his wife, sent me care packages and went way beyond what was necessary. They were so thoughtful and I really appreciated it. I was just looking forward to getting back because they had a ready-made angle: me going after Kurt to get revenge for my broken arm!

  Being off as my arm healed was awful. I couldn’t do anything. I still worked out but I was limited in what I could do. I couldn’t ride my dirtbike or work on my race car. It was a killer. I just had to wait, and I was fit to be tied. I went to a lot of NASCAR races during my time off and hung out with Hermie Sadler because his younger brother Elliott was racing on the circuit. I practically lived with Hermie while I was off. I’d get to hang out in the pits with the drivers. I enjoyed it but it was quite boring when the races started. When you’re in the infield, you can’t see anything apart from a split second of the cars and then they’re gone again. I would watch a lot of it sitting in Hermie’s motor coach. We also built a new race car together, which was good fun. It was ready to go around the time the big full-arm cast came off my arm so guess what I was doing?! Even though the doctors told me to take it easy, I was back behind the wheel and racing, even though my arm was broken and I was still in the forearm cast. We had some problems with the motor on that car so didn’t do great in the races, until we finally figured it out in time for me to finish 12th in a 28 car race. I thought that was pretty good, considering I got spun out twice during that one! It was good to be back doing the extreme stuff. Unfortunately, on the next race, we blew the motor and that was that — it was time for me to get back on the road for the WWF.