The Hardcore Truth

by Bob Holly

  Word got out among the wrestlers that management was definitely going to tell us what we would wear when traveling to shows, and they were just trying to decide whether to go with suit and tie, or dress pants and shirts. Everybody was pissed about this in the locker room. I was pretty vocal about it but I wasn’t the only one. When I said, “I’m damn sure going to say my piece in that meeting,” everyone else was jumping in and saying, “I’m with you, I’m going to speak up too.”

  At the meeting, Vince told us he was implementing the dress code effective next week and we were all going to have to wear dress pants, shoes, and shirt. No jeans. No T-shirts. No exceptions.

  Except for the guys whose gimmicks wouldn’t make sense for him to be dressed up.

  Then he said Steve Austin, Mick Foley, and John Cena were exempt. Two top guys and one guy they were grooming for the top spot. I stood up and said, “Okay, Vince, look at my gimmick — Hardcore Holly, tough guy redneck. Is Hardcore Holly going to wear dress pants and a nice pair of shoes?”

  Vince looked at me and said, “He sure is.”

  I shook my head and said, “But that’s not my gimmick.”

  “Well, that’s what you’re going to be wearing.”

  I stood there for the next 20 minutes and debated it with Vince in front of all the boys and not one of those sorry motherfuckers said anything. I told Vince that we were traveling all the time and needed to be comfortable. He just shot back, “Businessmen travel and they wear a suit and tie. I can make you guys wear suits and ties if I want.” I pointed out that businessmen didn’t travel as much as we did, and that we were on the road 24 hours a day sometimes in the same clothes. “Bring a change of clothes” was his reply. Any time I brought up a point, Vince just shot me down by basically saying that “this is my company and this is what I want.”

  Back in the locker room, I was pissed. Everybody was thanking me for speaking up and defending them. I just said, “All you motherfuckers do is talk for the sake of hearing your own voices. When it comes down to it, you’re not going to say a damn word because you’re so job-scared.” I couldn’t believe they were all thanking me for speaking up when they could have done it for themselves but didn’t have the balls.

  So we had a dress code. Hardcore Holly, angry redneck, had to dress up. Chris Jericho, rock star, had to dress up. Eugene, mentally challenged manchild, had to dress up. Even Kane, a pyromaniac, was sure to put on nice pants and a dress shirt before he went about his business. The Undertaker didn’t have to — he chose to. That’s the sort of man ’Taker is. If the boys are going to have to do something, he’ll do it too.

  We had to observe the dress code whenever we went out in public on the way to or from shows. This included if we were going to the gym, or even if we were going for breakfast at the hotel. I’d always worn track pants and a good T-shirt — I looked fine and like an athlete. Now I had to dress like a businessman, even though I was supposed to be an independent contractor? I was so against it. Every day, I would dress any damn way I wanted and pull up in my car about a mile away from the arena to change into my dress clothes. Then I’d go right to the locker room and change back into something comfortable. I did that for years and they never got wise to it.

  The only time I got into any trouble was when we were on a European tour. I decided to not bother with the dress code at all because we were overseas and always traveling, so I wanted to be comfortable. One morning, when we were all checking in at an airport, referee Mike Chioda was still drunk from the night before and, when he saw me in my cargo shorts, T-shirt, and tennis shoes, yelled out, “Nice dress code, Bob” really loudly. I just stared a hole through him and Hunter grabbed him by the collar, saying, “Shut your fuckin’ mouth, Mike.” Word got back to the office on this because Timmy White had to mention it in his agent’s report, so Johnny Laurinaitis took me aside and gave me a slap on the wrist. He didn’t fine me; he just said, “Don’t do it again.” Hunter, to his credit, didn’t say a word about any of this as far as I know. He told Mike, “You had no business saying that to him” at the airport and then let it drop. I know Hunter was reporting to Vince daily at this point, so I was surprised that he didn’t say anything more about it. Sometimes he stuck up for the boys; sometimes he threw them under the bus. You never knew where you stood with him.

  When it comes to any sort of dress code in wrestling, as far as I’m concerned, an athlete dresses like an athlete and a businessman dresses like a businessman. You didn’t see Vince putting many of us in business class on the flights and you didn’t see businessmen sitting in coach either, so the least he could have done with the amount we traveled was to let us wear comfortable clothes.

  CHAPTER 30

  EDDIE

  Chris, Eddie, and I were pretty close. We rode together for a while, but I couldn’t deal with Eddie’s travel habits for long. He was always on his own clock. If we agreed to leave at a certain time, Eddie would show up 30, 40 minutes later . . . it was the same with going to the gym. Eddie did things when Eddie was ready. In the end, I told Chris that I couldn’t deal with it and he understood. Eddie ended up riding with Chavo. That worked better.

  It was obvious that Eddie was struggling with his health. He was run down when they made him WWE Champion. They work you to death when you’ve got that belt. You don’t have days off. Time away from the ring is for public appearances and things like that. No matter how hurt Eddie was, he went out there and gave it his all. His body started breaking down. He had a ruptured disc in his back and asked for some time off — they wouldn’t give it to him. They told him he was the champion and working hurt came with the territory.

  One of the saddest things I’ve ever seen is Eddie backstage, lying down in the trainer’s room on one of the tables, hurting so much that he couldn’t tell if he had to go to the bathroom or not. He would just lay there backstage on the table at the house shows until 10 minutes before his match, when he’d take some energy drink or something with honey, then drag himself all the way to Gorilla. He would go out there and put on such a good show that no one could tell he was beat down and worn out but, as soon as he was back through that curtain, he came right back down again, walking slowly like he was a defeated man. He would drag himself right back to the trainer’s table and lay down again. Nobody sent him home to get well because they didn’t give a fuck. He begged for time off and they didn’t give it to him. They took the belt off him, thinking that would take away the pressure, and then they went and put him against Kurt. A wrestling program with Kurt Angle is not time off!

  Eddie kept struggling onward. He found it hard to cope. I remember talking with him in early November 2005 — we were in Kentucky at a show and he seemed unhappy. I asked him what was wrong and he went off on me. He was upset about something that would be going on TV and my question lit the powder keg — wrong place, wrong time. Hey, we were good friends, it was okay for him to vent to me. After he had finished yelling, he walked away.

  I hate that this was the last time I spoke to him.

  A week after that conversation, we were doing a show in Minneapolis. It was at the same arena where we’d had a problem with Eddie right after he’d joined the company. Back then, management had a big program lined up for him and he didn’t turn up. Nobody could get in touch with him. He had finally arrived at 5 p.m. and he had been so wasted he could barely get out of the cab. Benoit and Malenko grabbed him and hurried him into a room to sober him up before anybody could see the condition he was in. He had his demons, which led to his release in 2001. He turned his life around, got himself clean, got his job back, and lived a good life. In November 2005, in Minneapolis, that life ended.

  When I entered the arena for the show, everybody had long faces. They told me Eddie had died. I couldn’t believe it; all I could say was “Are you fucking kidding me?” He was in so much pain and under such a lot of stress that his heart had given out. I was immediately pissed because I thoug
ht the company had treated him pretty fucking badly. Here was a guy who knew his own body, knew he was hurt, and had asked for time off. They bullied him to continue working. They pushed him and pushed him until he had a heart attack. I don’t think it would be fair to blame Vince McMahon personally for Eddie’s death, but the business certainly had a hand in it. It’s the reason Vince has made sure to look after Vickie, Eddie’s widow. Of course, Eddie always could have just said, “I’m taking time off, I’ll see you later.” Believe me, management didn’t want to lose Eddie so they would have done whatever he wanted. He was too valuable to the company and they had too much invested in him.

  Eddie’s death took the wind out of everybody’s sails. While you couldn’t compare it to Owen’s death, it was a similar kind of mood. The company filmed two TV tributes to Eddie that night. I didn’t work on either of the shows and I didn’t record one of the backstage interviews talking about him. I didn’t want to talk about it. I still don’t. I shut myself off. I hated how our last conversation had gone. I couldn’t even go to his funeral because we were on the road, heading to Europe. Anyway, I shouldn’t have been going to Europe in the first place.

  A few weeks before Eddie died, I was scheduled to have elbow surgery but I noticed a bump under my right armpit. I figured it was either a pimple or an ingrown hair. I can’t leave anything alone, so I tried to pop it but it wouldn’t go away. It was a really hard bump. I had no idea how I’d got it. The next morning, it was so painful that I couldn’t pull my bag with my right hand. When I got home, my doctor checked me out and said that it was an infection, and we were going to have to wait for it to clear up before we did the surgery. I ended up back on the road. By the time I got to Minneapolis, I felt like I had the flu. Dr. Rios checked me out backstage and said I had a staph infection and it had spread to the forearm. He told Johnny Laurinaitis that I was really sick and needed to go to the hospital to get it taken care of. Johnny said that I was needed on the overseas tour, so the hospital would have to wait. I’m not one to complain but even I said to Johnny, “I’m as sick as hell, man.” Johnny insisted I go overseas. I thought it was just another case of working hurt — you work through it and it goes away eventually. If I’d refused to go, they would have probably fired me. Maybe that’s how Eddie had felt.

  We finished filming TV and got on a plane at midnight. By the time we’d landed in Germany, my forearm was twice its normal size. Larry and Dr. Rios came to my room to take care of it. Larry held me down and Dr. Rios made an incision in my forearm to relieve the pressure. He started popping and squeezing and all of this green and red and yellow stuff came out. It smelled absolutely awful. They spent about 20 minutes trying to drain and clean my arm, then taped me up from my wrist right to my shoulder to make sure the infection wouldn’t spread to anybody else. Even Dr. Rios said I shouldn’t have made the trip to Germany, but I told him that Johnny had insisted that I was needed, so I figured they must have had an important TV match for me or something. I still felt like I had the flu but I went to the show, ready to work. I found out that I was in a battle royal at all the shows that week. They didn’t need me for that! Anybody could have filled my spot, or they could have run the match with one less person and nobody would have blinked twice. I was furious with Johnny for doing that to me. They had to drain my forearm every single night and day and it still got worse. When we got to TV in England, I went to Johnny and insisted I go home. It was the last night of the entire tour at this point anyway but Johnny arranged for me to fly right out.

  When I got back, my doctor took one look at my arm and said, “You need to go to the hospital right now.” He called ahead so they knew to expect me. I ended up staying in the hospital for four weeks. They did surgery to get the infection out of the bone. It didn’t work, so they brought a disease specialist in to talk to me who put me on Vancomycin, which is one of the strongest antibiotics out there. It’s basically a last resort. If that didn’t work, he told me, they were going to have to amputate my arm from the shoulder down. That just about ruined my day, right there. Thankfully, the Vancomycin worked and my arm started to get better. They put a PICC line in me and let me go home. After two weeks of home visits from a health care worker who took my blood, did tests, and changed my PICC line, I went back for a check-up. The doctor said that if I’d gone to the hospital when I’d originally been told to do so, we would have avoided the whole thing. I told him that Johnny had insisted I work through it. The doctor said, “That man is the reason you ended up in the hospital and nearly lost your arm.”

  Because they’d gone against Dr. Rios’s orders, the company was very liable and they knew that they had set themselves up for a huge lawsuit. I could tell because they were kissing my ass the whole time I was off, telling me not to worry about anything and that they’d get me anything I needed . . . I just wanted them to give me a decent push when I got back! I figured if I hadn’t deserved it for all my hard work, I definitely deserved it now for what I’d been through.

  I hadn’t been in a great mood on that European tour. I’d been with the company long enough to be considered a locker-room leader, one of the veterans who unofficially helped run things and kept the boys in order. I was pissed off because I was sick as a dog and had just been dragged all the way across the ocean to be in some irrelevant matches, but when I thought the guy who was going over in those matches wasn’t grateful, that was the straw that broke the camel’s back. They were busy giving Ken Kennedy a good starting push and he was winning these battle royals. One night in Italy, we got back to the locker room and Ken didn’t thank the guys in the match for putting him over. Thanking the guys who put you over is the very first thing you should do after a match because they just made you look good. I gave Ken several minutes to do this and nothing happened. I called him out on it in front of everybody. He said he would have gotten around to it. I told him you don’t go and do whatever else first, you thank the people who put you over and shake their hands. The next night at another arena in Italy, when Ken came in, I marched right over, grabbed his bag, and threw it in the hallway, saying, “Get the fuck out of my locker room — you’re not changing in here until I say you can.”

  It seems pretty harsh when you see it on paper but I was the veteran teaching respect to the new guys. Hell, Benoit made The Miz change in the hallway for six months because he caught him eating chicken over Chris’s bag and making a mess he didn’t apologize for. The veterans supported each other on this sort of thing. You all had to band together to make sure the new guys stayed in order. Kennedy was the only person I ever threw out of the locker room.

  A couple of days went by before Benoit came to talk to me. Kennedy had started riding with him back in the States, so Chris knew a few things I didn’t. He told me that Ken had just lost his dad. Chris knew Ken was going through a rough time, and said that he respected and supported my decision to throw Ken out of the locker room, but suggested that I should go and talk to him. I found him and said “Why didn’t you tell me about your dad?” Ken said that he didn’t feel like it was something he needed to tell people but, yeah, he was having a tough time. He started crying. I felt bad for him, I really did. It broke my heart to see him crying like that. I told him to get his ass back in the locker room and apologized for upsetting him. From that moment on, we became good friends.

  We all had plenty on our minds at that point, anyway. We were all coping with Eddie’s death in our own ways and the office had just announced that they were going to introduce a “Wellness Program” to make sure nobody else slipped away like Eddie did. At the very start, it looked like something that Vince was putting in place to help everybody out. It took a while for people to see it as the crock of shit it was.

  CHAPTER 31

  STEROIDS

  The Wellness Program was a political move in response to Eddie’s death to make WWE less of the “bad guy.” This new program was going to enforce much stricter testing for prohibited substances, incl
uding steroids. Eddie was a small man naturally, so I’m sure he took something to gain size and get as big as he did. That said, I don’t think steroids were entirely responsible for his death; it was more to do with how much stress he was under and how exhausted he was. Benoit was concerned about this new testing policy. He told me he was worried about having to get clean because the steroids helped him recover and he was in such constant pain. He was going to do whatever he could get away with. We left it at that.

  I get asked a lot if I used steroids. Hell yes, I did. I’ll be the first to admit I was on the gas. So was almost every single person in that locker room in the ’80s, ’90s, and into the 2000s. I’m not ashamed of it. The real question is did I abuse steroids? No, I do not believe I did. There is a big difference between steroid use and abuse, just like there is a big difference between drinking alcohol and abusing it.

  I started taking steroids after the New Midnight Express finished. Oddly enough, that was when I started to get noticed more in the locker room and to get used more in matches. Go figure, right? It just goes to show what you need to do to get used. People don’t pay to see a wrestler who looks like your everyday guy walking down the street. They pay to see larger-than-life characters. The office never dropped hints though. It was an unwritten thing that you had to do what you had to do to keep your spot. Nobody ever told me to take them. You just had to look around the locker room to know what had to happen. It was like we were all racing cars and everybody else was using racing fuel while I was using regular unleaded. Wrestling is a competitive industry, plain and simple. After four years underneath, I knew what I needed to do. I took Deca Durabolin and testosterone: one CC of Deca every 10 days and a shot of testosterone every seven to ten. Honestly, that was probably more than I should have been taking but not by much. I never felt that I was abusing it like some of the other guys. They were taking so much of the stuff.