by Bob Holly
I had been working out hard to get ready for my comeback. Most guys who are out with injuries do vignettes to promote their returns and built up the anticipation. They didn’t do any of that for me.
Sure enough, for my first night back on TV, Kurt was in a match with Crash, and after he’d won, Kurt was putting the boots to Crash. I ran out to make the save. It was a way to get me back onscreen as a surprise rather than by building up a return match for me. I don’t know why they chose to do it that way. You would have thought that the revenge angle between me and Kurt would be a starting point. It wasn’t. The next night, I was tagging with Crash against Test and Albert. Nothing was done to follow up on the run-in on Kurt, nothing was made of the broken arm. It was another opportunity for building me up and they dropped the ball. Kurt was the WWF Champion at the time I got back, so it would have been a good way to elevate me in a feud with the champion. At that point in my career, I would have been credible as a challenger and Kurt needed some good wins. I don’t know why they didn’t do it. It wasn’t because of my work, and it wasn’t because I was out of shape. It puzzled me, but I never questioned it. It wouldn’t have done me any good to ask questions. Mouth shut, eyes forward. I show up, they say this is what you’re going to do. That’s just how it was.
I had suspected there wasn’t going to be a program with Kurt because I had talked with Bruce Prichard a few times while I was off and suggested different scenarios for my return. After two or three calls, I realized they weren’t really making any plans for me and Kurt to work together. It was a shame because I would have made that much more money if I’d done a program with Kurt but it wasn’t the end of the world. At that point, everybody was making shitloads anyway. I went back to putting people over and was still making a ton of money. That year was the only year in my career that I made more than my downside guarantee. All in all, I made double what I had the previous year — and I didn’t have to defect to WCW to do it.
CHAPTER 24
THE END OF THE WAR
Rather than getting a run against the WWF Champion, I got another cousin. Crash came up to me in catering one day and said, “We’ve got a new relative. Her name is Molly Holly.” I didn’t have a problem with that — if they were going to introduce someone new to my onscreen family, that just meant more TV time for me. I thought she was a very good worker, a hell of a lot better than Trish Stratus ever thought about being. She was smart too. A few years later, when the company was building up to WrestleMania XX, she hadn’t been scheduled to be on the show so she went to management and suggested that she should do a match with Victoria for the women’s title. But if she lost — and she was going to — she would have her head shaved bald. She sacrificed her hair for a spot on that card and got the WrestleMania payoff. I was never particularly close with Nora (Molly) but I respected her as a worker. She ended up in the traditional Holly role of doing all the hard work to make other people look good. I was much closer with Mike (Crash) — he and I had a decent relationship and I ended up liking the little fucker. He grew on me, so I wanted to look out for him and protect him.
Moving into 2001, the three Holly cousins did a few things together here and there, including a program with the Dudley Boys that went nowhere. For the most part, we did our own separate things. I got to work with both Benoit and Jericho as a sort of middle-man, bringing them together to move their program along. It was great working with those two. All our matches were good fun — especially the ones with Benoit. I had some of the best matches of my career with him and always looked forward to them. He knew what my role was but, despite that, he would always make sure to go out with me and put on a main event–level match and deliver something special for the fans. To be honest, I didn’t like the matches where an enhancement guy had to put me over; I preferred the ones with guys like Jericho, Benoit, Eddie, and even Hunter, where I would put them over but we’d put together a good, hard-hitting match. I would look strong even though I got beat. I’d rather lose three or four of those matches than win 100 squash matches.
I did my thing with Chris and Chris, Molly went off to be a workhorse in the women’s division, and Crash floundered. He got a quick run as the Light Heavyweight Champion but that wasn’t anything to write home about. Over the next few years, Crash began to struggle and complained a lot backstage. He was having a bad time outside of work because he had a kid with a woman in California who was giving him a hard time. He wasn’t a drug guy but he drank like alcohol was going out of style. He became his own worst enemy. I told him to keep his mouth shut loads of times, to stop worrying about other people and start worrying about Mike Lockwood. He didn’t pay attention to my advice and ended up getting released in 2003. It was a shame but what was I going to do? We lost contact and I didn’t hear much about him until Stevie Richards called me later that year. Mike had been staying with Stevie out in Pensacola after his life fell apart. Stevie told me that Mike had died. He choked to death on his own vomit. The court ruled it a suicide from an overdose of alcohol. I felt awful for Mike. He’d lost his job, he found out that his girlfriend was screwing one of the boys, and he had kept on drinking like a fish. I hated that it all happened, but just like with Owen, I shut off my feelings to protect myself.
After having been in the last three WrestleManias, I was disappointed that I got passed over for WrestleMania XVII in 2001. I wasn’t in a storyline at the time, so I didn’t get in. The biggest story in wrestling had just kicked off, however — WCW management had finally thrown in the towel and sold the whole promotion to Vince. There’s a lot of hearsay about what brought down WCW. Some people say it was Bischoff, some say it was Russo, some say it was Hogan. It wasn’t one person; it takes a bunch of people to bring a company down. In my opinion, it was a lack of leadership that brought WCW down. They had too many Chiefs and not enough Indians. The WWF had one boss — Vince. Everything was run by him, every match, every storyline, every idea, every piece of merchandise — everybody answered to him. In WCW, people had no idea who their boss was. If Ted Turner had known the wrestling business and had been at TV every week, that’s who everybody would have answered to, but he gave control over to too many people. WCW ended up being about who you knew, not how talented you were. Eric Bischoff definitely took advantage of that, just like he took advantage of Ted Turner’s money. He wasn’t spending his own money, so he didn’t think hard about his investments. Vince was spending Vince’s money — that meant Vince had to be smart and care about all of his decisions. Bischoff didn’t care the same way because he was playing the big man with someone else’s money.
So after over five years, the WWF had finally won the Monday Night War. A lot of people started speculating that Vince was going to keep WCW running and have two different crews.
I think Vince’s idea was always to shut them down and kill the competition, because he hates competition.
We didn’t hear anything in advance. Nobody said a word. We found out what had happened when Vince went live on air and announced it. Everybody backstage thought, “We’re going to have way too many guys now . . .” We were worried that we would get lost in the shuffle but we weren’t job-scared. The guys who were job-scared were the ones who had walked out on Vince to go to WCW.
Wrestling fans were excited by the idea of a big WCW invasion on WWF TV. It didn’t work out too well. I truly believe that Vince sacrificed a great idea and a huge money-making program in order to get his revenge and bury some people who had walked out on him. Us vs Them done properly would have been great TV. We needed to have the major stars from WCW in order to make it work, but the guys who came across just weren’t at that level. Sting would have been ideal but they didn’t sign him. The same with Goldberg. I would have put my hand in my pocket and brought them both in. Business is business. Sure, it would have cost a huge amount of money to get a Sting or a Goldberg, but the way I look at it, if they’re going to bring in a guy who sells tickets, that’s fine because he is go
ing to make everybody more money. If they pay that guy ten times what they pay me, that’s fine as long as he sells tickets. Back then, they could have paid Austin $10 million a year and I wouldn’t have cared because I knew he was going to make me more money. That was the way I looked at it, but Vince wasn’t willing to pay the money to get all of the big names, so we were left with whoever came over in the buyout. At least we got Booker T, but he was the only real star who came across. Diamond Dallas Page was a pretty big star in WCW and he came over too, but he wasn’t as big a deal as he thought he was.
Don’t get me wrong, DDP was a good worker. He had star potential and he could have been a lot bigger in the WWF than he ended up being, but he screwed the pooch for himself on that deal. He was so particular about his matches that it pissed everybody off. He would sit down and write out the whole match in great detail, three to four pages of writing . . . he would actually write things like “we circle each other to the left” and “we lock up and I take your arm. I’ll punch you and you’ll sell my punch and grimace.” He would actually write facial expressions in his match plans! It was unbelievable. He even tried to dictate what ’Taker should do in the ring at one point. That’s why he ended up on TV getting pinned by ’Taker’s wife. Unless you’re Vince, you don’t tell ’Taker what to do. Ever.
I had the pleasure of working with Page for his last WWE match. I got to the arena in Texas and was talking to Benoit when the agent came over to tell me I was with Page that night. Benoit started laughing and said, “Have fun with that one.” I’d never worked with Page before that, so I asked what was so funny. Benoit said, “He’s gonna annoy the fuck out of you all day long about that match.” Benoit told me about the times he had worked with Page in WCW and how Page would present him with a seven- or eight-page detailed outline of the match. Because DDP was in tight with Bischoff, Benoit had to go by this book that Page had written for the match and it had driven him nuts.
“As soon as he knows he’s working with you, he’ll come find you and he’ll want to go over the match with you right there and he’ll go over it again and again and again.”
I was like, “No the fuck he won’t!” Chris just laughed. “He’ll find you!” I hid for a while before going into catering so I could eat before all the food was gone. Sure enough, Page saw me and rushed over. “Hey, brother, let’s go over the match . . .” he said. I told him to hold on because I had a couple of things to do but I’d meet him at the ring in a while and we’d go over it there. I never went to the ring. Page sat out there waiting for me for God knows how long. I went to get dressed about an hour before the match.
“Thank God I found you . . .” Page was sweating now. “I’ve been looking for you all day, brother, we need to get this match down.”
I said, “Don’t worry, I’ve just got to go do something.” He looked nervous and said, “You’re gonna come right back, right?” I nodded.
“I’m gonna come right back.”
He fucking bought it again! I showed up at Gorilla about 20 minutes before the match and started warming up. He was already there, pacing, saying, “Oh my God, thank God, how come you didn’t come back?” I said I tried to find him but couldn’t and I guessed we were just like a dog chasing its tail. He was panicking now.
“I’m fucking sweating this . . . we’ve got to get this . . . I usually go over the match earlier in the day so I can get it down . . .”
I said that I just usually went over a couple of ideas in the last few minutes and then went out and did it. He didn’t like that one bit. We talked about the match and he said he would prefer to not take my finish because he had a bad neck so I arranged to beat him with a dropkick. It ended up being a pretty good match, so it goes to show that maybe DDP didn’t need to script everything as much as he thought.
Booker was completely different when he got to the WWF. He had respect for everybody when he walked in the locker room that first time. He was somebody in the wrestling world, a five-time World Champion, one of WCW’s top guys, and he came in as if he were just another new guy starting out. That got him a lot of respect. He introduced himself to me like he was brand new in the business. We became good friends. When he had his wrestling school years later, he asked if I would help out, so I went and did a show for him for free. I stayed with him and his wife, Sharmell, and they are two of the kindest people you could ever meet. I always felt like Booker was one of my best friends in the locker room. I thought he got a fair shake with WWE and had a good run. He worked for years to make it to the top of that promotion because when he came in, they made him go back to square one. He took his ass-kickings and he did what he was told to do. He deserved every bit of working on top in WWE and I was so glad to see him get the World title eventually, because he earned it.
There were some other guys who came across in the WCW invasion who could have been built up more than they were. Hugh Morrus was a good talent, one I felt they could have used better. Lance Storm was a great worker, although as a character he was very plain. My in-ring personality has been criticized, but I was told not to smile and told to look like I was miserable. Believe me, I was not — and am not! — a naturally miserable person. But I think the Lance you got on camera was the Lance you get off camera. They tried to give him a fun, dancing character a few years later and it went nowhere. It just didn’t feel right and Lance couldn’t pull it off. Sean O’Haire had a fucking great look. He was a big bastard at 6'6" and very agile. They could have made him a killer, but instead, they dropped the ball with him.
I remember chasing O’Haire and his partner, Chuck Palumbo, through Madison Square Garden. The two of them had just interfered in a match and beaten up the WWF guys, so a bunch of us went out there to chase them off. They tried to escape into the crowd but we blocked their way, got them back in the ring, and beat the hell out of them. It was the first time any of the WWF guys got their hands on these invaders and I’ll tell you something — in that ring that night, it was one potato, two potato, three potato more. . . . The agents said, “It’s TV, just lay it in there.” We knew what that meant. It was seek and destroy. Those two were the sacrificial lambs and the beating they took — and they took a hell of a stiff beating — was a message to the rest of the new WCW guys to know their position. There was no real reason why it was O’Haire and Palumbo specifically who took the beating, at least not a reason I ever heard of.
I kind of ended up as one of Vince’s enforcers during the invasion. I was told to go out there and beat the shit out of a few of them. They needed the legit tough guys there just in case something happened, so Vince turned to me, Ron Simmons, and Bradshaw a lot. We wanted to make sure the WCW guys knew that they wouldn’t be coming into our locker room and taking over. In WCW, everybody had an ego. They were going to have to get used to leaving their ego at the door or they were going to get their asses handed to them.
The biggest jerk by a mile was Buff Bagwell. He had a horrendous attitude and he got what he deserved. He messed up by not getting that he wasn’t in WCW anymore. He showed up to house shows when he wanted to show up. He wouldn’t shake anybody’s hand and wouldn’t change in the same place as everyone else — he wanted a room to himself. Sometimes, when he decided he didn’t want to come to the house shows, he had his momma call in to the office for him to say he was sick. Somebody took him aside and smartened him up, telling him, “This is the way it is, this is our procedure.” But he still refused to play along with it and he paid for it dearly. Jim Ross got Ron, Bradshaw, and me together and told us to go out to the ring after Bagwell was done wrestling and, in Jim Ross’s words, “Kick the shit out of him.” That’s what we did — we hit the ring and we took turns with him. I didn’t beat him hard enough to break his nose or knock his teeth out, but I hit him pretty hard. Bradshaw and Ron did a lot more damage than I did — they were competing to see who could beat him harder. I was a distant third in that competition. I would say Bagwell wouldn’t speak to me
after that, but he refused to speak to me even before we did that. That pissed me off.
They ended up sending him up to Connecticut to the WWF TV studio so that he could learn how to work properly and fit in. I guess he smarted off too much while he was up there because Shane Helms blasted him with a water bottle and knocked him out. Bagwell got fired pretty soon after that. It was never going to work out with him because he thought he was too much of a superstar. Most of the others got it pretty quickly and knew where they stood in the locker room; they knew they had to start fresh.
I saw the whole invasion thing as another chance to show people what I could do, get people over, and get myself over, and I hoped that maybe they’d give me a spot at the next WrestleMania. That’s how I looked at everything along the way. Every new chapter was another opportunity to build towards ’Mania. I didn’t get many chances to be on pay-per-view that year though and didn’t have as good an earning year as the previous one. I didn’t get on the ’Mania card either. I was pissed off that after the whole invasion angle had fallen apart and been forgotten, they brought back fucking Kevin Nash and Scott Hall, two of the guys who had been the most disloyal to Vince, and gave them spots at WrestleMania. By this point, Kevin was washed up and couldn’t work anymore, and Scott was a wreck because he drank too much. They paid these guys all this money and gave them big programs leading in to ’Mania. Within six months of their coming back, Hall got fired and Nash tore his quadriceps off the bone because his body was done.