The Hardcore Truth

by Bob Holly

  For every decent worker they brought in who had potential, they brought in other guys who were trouble backstage, didn’t work hard enough, or were just plain awful.

  Jon Heidenreich was the biggest waste of money that company ever spent. That guy needs to be in a loony bin. He was a fucking maniac from the word go. He would show up late when they were trying to push him. We were supposed to report to the arena on TV days by 1 p.m. but he would show up about 7:30 p.m. When Johnny Laurinaitis told him that he’d get fined if he carried on showing up late, Heidenreich threatened to beat Johnny up, then go and beat up Vince. . . . Fucking idiot — he didn’t have a clue what he was doing. Fuck him and the horse he rode in on.

  I couldn’t understand why they went with Carlito at all. He was boring, he was slow in the ring, he wasn’t a good worker, he telegraphed everything he was going to do . . . I just didn’t get what they saw in him. He would complain backstage all the time and threaten to quit — and for a while, they catered to him! He got a good mid-card push and made some decent money, probably more than his talent and attitude deserved. He should have been grateful for it but all he did was complain. There were guys at his level, like Shelton Benjamin, who were so much better at what they did, but they went with Carlito and he was still always unhappy. I never understood that.

  Simon Dean was a stooge. Nobody liked him. Any piece of information he could find out that would get somebody in trouble, he stooged them off. He ended up in management but they quickly realized he wasn’t cut out for the position and let him go.

  Luther Reigns was a big, impressive-looking guy but he just couldn’t get it. He didn’t understand how to put a story together, the psychology of why you might do a headlock or an armdrag, or why a babyface should shine at a certain time He was a guy from Venice Beach who dabbled in entertainment and grew up as a wrestling fan. He figured he’d give it a go and because he looked impressive, WWE tried to make him a major player. He just couldn’t wrestle, period. It was the wrong industry for him.

  The Bashams didn’t have the “It factor.” Mark Jindrak was too worried about being pretty. Nunzio was too small. Kenzo Suzuki couldn’t work or understand English but they pushed him anyway.

  I put every single one of these guys over. As I write this, not a single one of them works for the company. They all started with WWE in or after 2003, when I’d already been in the company for almost a decade. Of them all, only John Morrison and Carlito outlasted me. All the rest of the guys didn’t last much more than a year each, if that. I wasn’t the only one putting them over. The company wasted good talent like Jamie Noble, Rhyno, and Val Venis, to name a few, by making them do neverending jobs to get these new guys over. Then, when all these guys didn’t work out, all the talent who had been losing week after week were now worth nothing. What could they have achieved if they’d pushed me or the other guys instead? We were good, we were respected backstage, we fit in, and we worked hard. We’d proved ourselves but they kept going with these new guys and hoping that something would stick.

  You need people to go out there and lose, sure. Some guys were ideal for that role — Funaki and Scotty 2 Hotty, for example. Good guys who were good workers but just weren’t credible at a higher level because they were too small and didn’t look like they had any killer instinct. Jamie Noble was a pit bull out there, and funny too. They kept starting things with him and then stopping for no reason. Rhyno was a good worker who deserved a break. Val Venis was always over but they ended up putting him underneath for no reason. Even Charlie Haas was used as a glorified enhancement guy. He should have been kept in his team with Shelton. They could have drawn money against La Resistance.

  La Resistance. Now, there’s a story . . .

  CHAPTER 29

  TICKET TO A FIGHT

  Sylvain Grenier was Pat Patterson’s boy. Everybody knew why he got the job and a good push to start out. That relationship lasted a while, but Pat got tired of the taste of the same candy over and over, so he decided to switch flavors. Pat wasn’t a bad guy or anything and we always got on fine, but I probably didn’t do myself any favors with him later in my career. I bent to pick something up and he happened to be there. He said, “If you bend over and I’m behind you, you’re fucked.” I shot right up and said, “No, motherfucker, if you touch me, you’re gonna be fucked.” He looked at me as if to say, “Hey, I was just kidding.”

  I definitely wasn’t kidding though.

  All the boys in the locker room couldn’t believe what I’d said because Pat had a lot of stroke. Once Pat got bored of Sylvain, the guy didn’t go anywhere. To Sylvain’s credit, he did actually get better in the ring. I think they should have kept him together with René Duprée as La Resistance because they had that French heel thing going. Whenever they walked into the arena, it was automatic — you couldn’t help but hate them. It was a natural gimmick with natural heat and if they’d been up against a team who meant something, they would have drawn money for the company. Management decided to break them up and see if they would sink or swim by themselves.

  René Duprée had a lot of heat in the locker room because of the way he acted. Nobody liked him. He was a prick to everybody. His biggest misdemeanor was against me. The internet picked up on some of this story and made me out to be a bad guy, but as usual, they didn’t have the facts. Here’s what happened . . .

  It was in the middle of 2004 and René was traveling with me for the first time. We’d been working house shows together so we figured we’d ride together to the TV taping. I thought he was a decent worker as a heel — he knew how to get heat, so it was easy to work with him. This was around that time bad hurricanes had been hitting so I had to get back home. Before I left, René asked if I could leave my rental car with him in Spokane. I told him that was fine as long as he made sure to fill the car up with gas before he returned it.

  A couple of months passed without incident. Bradshaw and I were on a layover in the Houston airport, eating lunch, when my mom called to tell me that I’d got something in the mail from the City of Spokane District Court. When I was on the road, I had all my mail forwarded to her. She then told me that my driver’s license had been suspended because of an unpaid parking ticket and that there was a warrant for my arrest in Washington. I just about blew a gasket. As it happened, René was walking by just as I got off the phone, so I confronted him about it. He told me that he didn’t know what I was talking about and he’d never got a parking ticket using my rental. He totally denied it. Both Bradshaw and I had a few choice words for him. I ended up having to fly to Spokane, and it cost me the flight and a whole weekend of missed work including a TV taping. This wasn’t cheap to take care of. René still denied it. Whenever I confronted him about it, he’d deny it and refuse to make it right. That really pissed me off, so I decided to take matters into my own hands. I gave him a little warning on the plane the day before I was planning to get even with him. I found I was sitting behind him, so I tapped him on the shoulder and told him, “You’ve got 24 hours to learn how to fight.” All the boys turned around and looked at him, and René just sat there looking like a deer in the headlights. If he’d owned up right there and admitted his wrongdoing, that would have been it. Everything would have been fine. I guess he didn’t think I was serious . . .

  Twenty-four hours later, he still hadn’t apologized. We were in Rochester, New York, and the match was me and Charlie against René and Kenzo Suzuki. I started hitting René, laying it in and telling him to hit me back because we were fixing to go. He ran away from me — just took off backstage, where he thought he’d be safe. I went after him and caught him, dropped him, and proceeded to beat the living shit out of him. Big Show grabbed me from behind and threw me off him and Dave Finlay, who was an agent at that point, came over and said, “What the fuck, Bob?” I said, “No, what the fuck, Dave? You don’t know?” I told him about the parking ticket situation. Dave responded, “He deserved to have his ass kicked.” I
fucked René up enough that they had to take him to the hospital for a bunch of scans. I got a call from Johnny Laurinaitis that night at the hotel, asking what happened. After I told him, he said, “You can’t be doing that,” and then started laughing. He carried on with, “But who am I to tell you that when I used to do that sort of thing myself?” He told me later that Vince wasn’t mad at me, but he didn’t want this sort of thing going on any more. By TV on Monday, Vince’s mood had changed — or been changed.

  Bob with his mom in 2011.

  Johnny came to me and said, “Vince wants to see you in a bit and he’s pissed. Somebody got in his ear and said that what you did to René was bullshit.” I said, “Let me guess, that wouldn’t be Hunter, would it?” Johnny told me he’d come to get me when Vince was ready. He advised me to stay quiet and listen to what Vince had to say. I thought, “Yeah, like I’m just going to sit there and take it . . .”

  I went into Vince’s office later — Johnny came with me because there always has to be a third party present in cases like this for legal reasons — and as soon as I sat down, Vince started in on me. I threw my hand up and said, “Whoa, whoa, whoa — don’t sit here and yell at me when you don’t know the story because I will just get up right now and walk the fuck out.” Vince was taken aback. He couldn’t believe somebody was talking to him like that. He looked at Johnny, then at me, and said, “Okay, tell me what happened.” He went from yelling to being as calm as could be just like that. It was the only time Vince ever yelled at me.

  I explained what had happened and started talking about the sort of person René was. I told Vince how he acted towards people in public, how he would talk down to waiters in restaurants if his food wasn’t fixed right. I told Vince that he wasn’t the sort of person who represented the company well and that I had kicked his ass because he deserved it. Vince said — and these are the words out of his mouth — “I don’t know René, all I know is that the guy kisses my ass every time I walk by.” He went on to say that the majority of the people who worked for him only ever told him how good his hair looked or how nice his tie was and he couldn’t stand the ass-kissing. I couldn’t believe he was telling me all of this. He said that he understood why I did what I did to René but he couldn’t have that going on at his shows, so he was going to fine me $10,000. I said he could fine me as much as he wanted because I believed what I did was the right thing to do. René had refused to own up to what he’d done. He’d cost me my driver’s license and he could have caused me to be thrown in jail. Nothing Vince said or did could have changed my mind. Vince shook my hand and said, “Just don’t be doing that anymore in my ring — if you’re going to do it, do it somewhere else.” I said, “No problem. Can I do it in the locker room?” He knew I was joking and laughed. We left it there.

  Later that day, Johnny came up to me and said, “When you told Vince to be quiet, I thought you were done . . .” After the meeting, apparently Vince turned to Johnny and said, “I have a lot of respect for that guy.” A lot of people are intimidated by Vince because of his stature. But he ain’t no different from anybody else — anyone can walk up and talk to him. I have no problem with Vince — I like him. He’s a businessman and one of the smartest men in entertainment.

  About a week after this all went down, René came to find me. He apologized and said that he shouldn’t have thrown the parking ticket away, and he shouldn’t have lied to me afterwards. He said he knew it had cost me a lot of money and he promised to pay me back. I told him not to worry about that. All that mattered was that he’d owned up to it and apologized. That was good enough for me. After that, our relationship was great. I never had a lick of trouble with him for the rest of his stay with the company, which, just like all of the other new guys, didn’t last long.

  Although I didn’t have any more problems with René, I think this incident caused me big problems in the long run. I heard later that Hunter did interviews where he said that what I did was inexcusable and I was lucky to have not been fired. I guarantee that if Nash had been the one to kick René’s ass, Hunter would have been fine with it all.

  Instead of properly using the existing workforce, WWE tried to create new stars with another season of Tough Enough. MTV wasn’t interested anymore, so WWE did it as a weekly segment on Smackdown. It was horrible. The whole concept just didn’t work. A guy named Daniel Puder won and he got immediate heat in the locker room because of something he did with Kurt Angle. In one of the segments, the contestants were going to shoot fight with Kurt. Only it wasn’t a shoot. They’d been told backstage it was going to be worked but presented as a shoot. Kurt ended up wrestling with Puder and was taking it easy, leaving himself exposed because he thought they were just working. Puder grabbed him in an armbar because Kurt basically let him have his arm. It looked like Puder had Kurt in trouble, and Kurt took offense to this. If it’d been a real fight, Kurt would have stretched his ass in a heartbeat. All of a sudden, Puder was going around, bragging on the internet that he could beat Kurt Angle in a fight. All of the boys took offense.

  After Puder won Tough Enough, they put him in house shows — against me of all people. My first night with him was in Lowell, Massachusetts. Here was a guy who had only just won a reality contest for a wrestling contract, with absolutely no clue how to work, and I had to put him over. I kept it quick and simple — took him out there, chopped him up, and he beat me with a roll-up. It was fine. The next day, Jimmy Yang told me about something that happened when he and Puder had been riding together to the next town. Apparently, he called his buddies and said, “Guess who I beat tonight?!” and was bragging about beating me. Jimmy said he was making it sound like he’d beaten me for real. I didn’t say anything to Puder about this and just got on with my job. I put him over again that night, three minutes and finish with the roll-up. Afterwards, I asked Jimmy to let me know what he did in the car that night.

  We flew into Chicago the next day and I caught up with Jimmy.

  “Did he do it?” I asked.

  “Yes, he called everybody and said he beat you again.”

  “Did he tell them that it was a work?”

  “No, he was talking like he really beat you.”

  That was all I needed to hear. Chicago is a town with die-hard fans who want to see violence — and that night they were going to get their money’s worth!

  I started chopping Puder like I had in our first two matches. The crowd kept chanting “more!” so I kept on going. And going. And going. I stopped counting after 20. His chest was black and bloody. I just kept on chopping because they kept on chanting — and because Puder deserved it. He won the match and the crowd booed; they knew it was bullshit. I went up to him backstage and said, “When you’re riding down the road, go ahead and call your friends and tell them that I let you beat me, because if this was a shoot, I would have stomped a fucking hole in your ass.” Jimmy told me the next day that Puder hadn’t said a damn word to his buddies in the car. What happened with Kurt went to his head, and he convinced himself that he’d beaten me for real. He was his own worst enemy. WWE gets rid of people like him real quick. Even if they’d kept him, he’d never have been any good — he was too into himself.

  Before he got released, we had some fun with him. In the 2005 Rumble match, Eddie, Benoit, and I decided that we were going to mess with him a little bit to put him in his place and let him know he wasn’t in charge. It was all in good fun. For us, at least.

  Eddie and Benoit started the match and Puder came out third. I was out fourth and we all laid into him. It got to the point where Chris and I were taking him from each other to have our turn. Eddie was just hanging back and laughing. We were all laughing about it afterwards. Eddie was in such constant pain in those days that it was good to see him laugh.

  PART 13: DRESSING FOR SUCCESS?

  It’s important to look good in the ring and you won’t find many guys from WWE who don’t have great gear. Wh
en I was there, everybody was expected to get gear that reflected the promotion’s standing as the top in the industry. That went without saying. Where I took issue with them was when they started trying to dictate to me what I could wear when I wasn’t on their shows.

  Sometime during 2004, we were told there was going to be a meeting about a dress code. This came about because Johnny Stamboli got on a plane wearing an offensive T-shirt. I believe the T-shirt had on it something along the lines of “I’m going to fuck your mother.” Word got back to Vince and he was pissed — understandably. He would have been within his rights to discipline Johnny after that, but Vince decided he wasn’t going to give anybody else the option of doing that sort of thing, and that what was needed to help make WWE look more credible and professional was a dress code.