The Hardcore Truth

by Bob Holly

  The company was building up to WrestleMania and was going to do a match with Vince and Donald Trump each choosing a wrestler to represent him and the guy whose wrestler lost would have his head shaved bald. It was going to be a really big deal, heavily publicized as one of the main matches on the show. Vince took me aside and told me he was going to go with Bobby representing Trump and with me representing him. He said that he would greatly appreciate it if I would put my surgery off until after WrestleMania so I could work that match. I said sure, no problem — hell, I was going to be in a main event match at WrestleMania, I could tolerate being uncomfortable for a little bit longer!

  Then, close to ’Mania, I had a cage match with Bobby on ECW TV in which he had to beat me in less than five minutes or he would lose the title — and he was going to go over. I thought that was sort of fucked up to have him beat me in less than five minutes on TV in the build-up for a big match on pay-per-view. It didn’t make me look like I had a chance. I soon discovered that it wasn’t meant to. During the match, Umaga came down to the ring and after Bobby had beat me, he did a running jump into the cage wall. He busted it down and made the whole thing collapse on Umaga. Right there, I knew I was out and Umaga was in. They didn’t even have the decency to let me down in advance. I wasn’t angry, just disappointed. Given how many times they hadn’t done anything with me before, I probably shouldn’t have been surprised. I have no idea why they ended up going with Umaga. I guess they just thought it would be a better program.

  When I saw Vince after the cage match, I asked him what happened. He said that things had changed but he promised me that I’d have a match at WrestleMania. I said, “As long as I get to be in the show, that’s okay.” I’ll bet you can see where this one is going . . .

  I showed up in Detroit for WrestleMania and my name wasn’t on the sheet. I wasn’t in any of the matches. There was another ECW match there, an eight-man tag team match. One of the teams was made up of four new guys who, combined, hadn’t been with the company a fraction of the time I had been, and they were going to get on the pay-per-view? I was fucking furious and management knew it too. They knew they’d done me wrong but Vince never apologized.

  That was my breaking point. I felt so hurt. I had been so loyal to the company and worked so hard night after night. I’d worked hurt, I’d done everything I could to make the up-and-coming stars look good, and then had my hopes built up and broken down like that. It was such a letdown. After all the years of working hard because it might be my time soon, I realized it just wasn’t ever going to happen for me. The next day at TV, I went to see Dusty Rhodes and his writing team and told him that if he wasn’t going to use me, I was going to go home and get my elbow fixed. So that was that — they never did give me the ECW title. Instead, they wrote me out of the storylines with an injury. That was the end of my run in ECW. Another wasted opportunity.

  What made that whole situation even more disappointing was that Bobby didn’t stick it out. He got hurt and ended up quitting. They had put so much time and money into marketing him and building him up as one of the next big guys and he bailed on them. He would have been a World Champion on one of the two main shows but, like Batista and Goldberg, he was never a wrestling fan. He didn’t love the business, he was just a big, strong guy who said, “I’d like to try that,” then got pushed because of how he looked. So Lashley came in, worked for the company for a couple of years, was heavily invested in, put in a main event at WrestleMania, and then turned around and said, “This isn’t for me.” Meanwhile, I’d worked hard and stayed loyal to the company for 13 years. I think my frustration is justifiable.

  To put it all in perspective, the guys they pushed instead of me in the first half of 2007 were Lashley, Test, and Umaga. Lashley quit because he didn’t care about wrestling. Test and Umaga both died from drug overdoses in 2009.

  I got my elbow fixed, got back in training, and told WWE I was ready to come back but I really didn’t care anymore. If I got a break, great — but I wasn’t expecting it.

  PART 15: TRAVELING FOR THE RIGHT REASONS

  The travel was always a major pain in the ass. Sure, I got to see a bunch of countries, but so much traveling got to be pretty tiresome. Despite the long flight, I did enjoy Australia whenever we toured there. The weather is great, the country is beautiful, and it’s so clean with such pleasant people. Once, we all had a day off and nothing to do. Hunter arranged a bus to shuttle us the two hours to Steve Irwin’s zoo. He paid for the bus and the zoo entrance fees out of his own pocket. I’m a huge animal lover, so I enjoyed it hugely. We were all offering some food to the kangaroos when one of them picked me out of the group and hopped over. I squatted down to feed him and this kangaroo took a sniff of the food, then leaned in to me and bumped his mouth on mine. Ken Kennedy just happened to get a picture at that exact moment so it looked like I was kissing a kangaroo! It was a fun day, even though it was raining. Believe it or not, Hunter bought us all raincoats too. The whole thing was nice of him. He’s a strange guy — I could never figure him out.

  Montreal is completely the opposite of Australia — there seems to be a lot of rude people in Montreal. Several times when I stopped to ask for directions, the French Canadians just looked at me funny and walked off. I never did like going into Canada, period. Not many of the boys did. It was always such a hassle at customs. We entered other countries without a problem but getting into Canada could be brutal. They’d take forever with us; it was torture. Any time we worked there, we’d get paid in Canadian dollars, so when the exchange rate was bad, we lost money like crazy. You’d better believe that seeing Canada on the schedule was a real buzzkill.

  I actually preferred going to Iraq.

  WWE started putting shows on for the troops in the early 2000s, and those shows were always looked forward to. They’ve continued to this day. We were told participation was completely voluntary and nobody was going to be forced to go but Rob Van Dam got huge heat when he refused. Vince was fucking pissed. I don’t know why he told us it was voluntary if he was going to get pissed at someone for not volunteering. I thought that wasn’t right. I don’t know why Rob didn’t want to go; that’s his business. I was more than happy to volunteer. Every time we went, I wondered whether Linda, my high-school sweetheart, might be in the audience somewhere — and, if so, would she even recognize me?

  I didn’t ever feel in danger over there; they took good care of us. We had to have all the lights turned off in the plane when we were landing to keep from being detected. We had to wear military helmets and flak jackets as precautions to make sure we were safe. On one of the trips, all of the wrestlers were put up in one of Saddam’s many palaces — it was unbelievable just how lavish it was.

  The wrestling shows were great over there; the military audience was really into it. When they gave us plaques and medals at the end of one tour, the general told us that of all the acts brought in to raise morale, the troops wanted to see us more than anything else. More than the Dallas Cowboys cheerleaders, more than any country singer — above all, they wanted to see WWE. It was a great experience. These people are putting their lives on the line for our freedom, so going over there and giving them a great show is the least we can do.

  I also loved doing the stuff for Make-A-Wish and the Special Olympics. Say what you will about WWE, they go out of their way to give those kids something to smile about. Going through all the locker-room politics and the never-ending travel was worth it for the look on those kids’ faces when they saw us. Doing that superseded anything else I did. It was definitely a gratifying experience.

  CHAPTER 33

  CHRIS BENOIT

  When people ask me about Chris Benoit now, I don’t say anything. They ask because they know we were friends. It’s an uncomfortable subject, but here are my thoughts, for what they’re worth.

  Chris Benoit was one of the nicest people I ever knew. We rode together, we worked out together, we were cl
ose. He loved his job and he loved his family. He was steady. Twenty-four hours a day, when he was around the other wrestlers, he never went up or down. To most people, he was like a brick wall, absolutely stone-faced. If you could make Chris Benoit laugh, you sure did something. He found the misfortune of others hilarious. That’s not to say he was mean-spirited — it just tickled him. Everybody backstage liked and respected Chris. He was a man’s man. He rarely had anything bad to say about anyone, but if he had something to say about you, he would say it to your face. He was a locker-room leader — how could he not be? If people came to him, he would offer advice, and if he knew you were serious about your craft, he would help in any way he could. Take MVP — he was a good guy who truly wanted it. Chris knew that he wasn’t just another guy going through the motions because he kept asking questions, taking in everything Chris told him, and trying to apply it every night. Chris took him under his wing and mentored him. MVP found it hard to keep up sometimes and that was a little frustrating for Chris. He’d been one of the best wrestlers in the world for so long that everything was just second nature to him.

  And make no mistake about it, Chris is up there with the best of all time. When he got in that ring, there was not one person who took his job more seriously than Chris Benoit. If you were in the ring, you’d better be on your game or he’d eat you alive. It meant a lot to him to be World Champion. In my eyes, for those few months he was champion, he was the perfect representative for the company. He was a consummate professional. He took his job seriously and he took the welfare of his family seriously.

  When we had a house show in Mobile, he stayed at my house and got to meet Snickers, my giant schnauzer, and he was really impressed. Snickers was the best guard dog you could ever want. He sat right beside me and wouldn’t take his eyes off Chris. I told him, “You can come over, he’s fine,” and Chris replied, “No, I’m going to stay over here . . . !” He was so impressed with the demeanor and stature of my dog that he just kept saying “wow” over and over. That was where he got the idea of getting a couple of dogs to protect Nancy and their son, Daniel. He ended up getting a couple of German shepherds.

  In all the time we rode together, I didn’t once see him get mad or worked up about anything. He was always polite. If somebody is rude to me, I’ll be rude right back. Chris? He was nice to everyone, no matter how they acted. If he was ever brought the wrong order at a restaurant, he never got mad, no matter how tired or hurt he was. Whenever someone walked up to him, wanting an autograph or to talk, he was always polite. I never saw any anger in him. He got frustrated at times with his work or his home life but who doesn’t? The frustration never seemed to turn into anger. He was balls-to-the-wall rough in the ring and got a lot of his frustrations out in there. That was one of his outlets. The other was alcohol. He’d sometimes grab a six-pack after a show and drink a couple in the car while I was driving us to the next town, but I never saw him drink more than two or three beers at a time. I know that he and Nancy liked to drink a lot when he got off the road though.

  I liked Nancy. When she came with Chris to TV, I often wouldn’t be working, so she and I would sit together and talk. She liked most of the boys but she despised Hunter. We both had the same view of him, that he was a backstabbing son of a bitch. She was a good woman but somebody you definitely did not want to piss off. I know that she and Chris had had problems for quite a while because Chris talked to me about it here and there. He never divulged too much regarding what they fought about, but he did say that both he and Nancy would get pretty volatile. He said that he would get worked up but it would never turn physical. If it was getting to be too much, Chris would leave for the apartment he had elsewhere in Atlanta and stay there for a couple of days. That was his way of calming down.

  One thing I did know was that Nancy wanted him to take time off and he didn’t feel he could. He was always one of the main guys and always in the middle of a storyline. The company had a lot of money invested in him. She wanted him home and he wanted time off but he didn’t think the company would go for it. It got to the point where Nancy wanted him to quit but he wouldn’t ever have done that. He loved wrestling too much. There were other stresses at home — Chris had two kids from a previous marriage so he had to pacify his ex-wife. He told me it was hardest when his kids came to stay for the summer. His son was fine and accepted Nancy as Chris’s wife but his daughter wouldn’t speak to her at all. She would live with them for the whole summer and not say a single word to Nancy, which caused a lot of tension. Chris didn’t get to see his kids much, so he didn’t want to scold his daughter for being rude, but he had to think about Nancy’s feelings too. He felt like he was caught in the middle. He didn’t elaborate hugely on things like this and I didn’t push him. I don’t ask those sorts of questions because it’s none of my business. If he volunteered it, that was fine, but I wasn’t going to push him. We didn’t talk that much when we traveled — we both liked it that way. It might sound like a boring commute but everything else is such a whirlwind that you need that downtime. It was a chance for us to both decompress. I’d drive and he’d drink a couple of beers.

  It turns out that a lot of Chris’s close friends in wrestling had died. At the time, I didn’t know he had lost so many friends. He never spoke about it. The only person I knew Chris was close to who died was Eddie, and he hardly spoke to me about that. I knew that Chris kept an action figure of Eddie in the passenger seat of his Humvee. Everywhere Chris went, that action figure of Eddie went too. I thought it was odd, but people grieve in different ways. I try to separate myself from grief because I don’t want to let it affect my life. I figured Chris was handling it in the best way he knew. He was deeply religious, as was Eddie. They both carried a bible on the road and read it every day and night. They wanted to educate themselves about the whole religious thing. I guess that was their way of feeling closer to God. When Eddie died, it did something to Chris.

  Chris was also upset when they moved him from RAW to ECW in 2007. He took that personally. I told him that I truly believed they needed star power on that show and were moving him so he could be the guy everything would be built around. He felt he was being phased out of WWE and being put out to pasture. He was concerned that he would make less money there, because RAW and Smackdown were the bigger shows.

  During my recovery from elbow surgery, I found myself in Chris’s neck of the woods in June because I had to go to Atlanta for a meeting with an attorney. Chris was getting off the road on Wednesday, so we had arranged for me to stop by his house. As I was driving back from my appointment, I figured that he probably wanted to have some time with his family because he’d only just got home. So I just went on home. I got a call from him that Friday, asking me why I hadn’t stopped by or called. Chris chewed me out about it. I said, “You just got off the road, I know what it’s like — I figured you’d want to spend time with Nancy and Daniel.” He said, “That doesn’t fucking matter, you’re one of my best friends, you should have come over.” I told him that I was off for at least a few more months, so I’d definitely come to see him. “Okay, you fucking better!” he replied, and then he told me he’d just been to see Dr. Astin and was heading home. I asked how everything was with him and Nancy and he told me, “She’s acting like Hitler.” I kind of laughed it off but he said, “No, really — she’s acting like Hitler. I had to get out of the house.” We talked a little bit more, then hung up.

  I went about the rest of my day.

  Chris went home and killed his wife.

  The next day, he killed his son.

  Then, on the Sunday, he killed himself.

  Kevin Fertig was the one who told me. He was close to Chris too, and called to let me know that Chris had been found dead. I was in disbelief. Kevin told me that somebody had broken into their house and killed Chris, Nancy, and Daniel. I immediately knew that something wasn’t right. Nobody was going to just walk into that house because they had two big dogs, n
ot to mention that wolverine named Chris Benoit.

  When I heard what had actually happened, I didn’t want to believe it. How could someone do that to his own family? I have no idea what happened in Chris’s head. I accept the facts but I just don’t get how it could have happened. WWE immediately went about distancing themselves from the situation — it was necessary, self-preservation. I was glad I wasn’t in the locker room at that point. I heard from a few of the boys but, for the most part, they were in their own world. When you’re on the road, you’re on the road. By the time I got back in the locker room, the whole thing was over.

  I dealt with it the same way I dealt with Owen, Crash, and Eddie — I put it aside and didn’t let it affect me. It was a real tragedy but I wasn’t going to let what happened affect the rest of my life. I was close to both Eddie and Chris and just had to shut myself off. I would have been a mental wreck if I hadn’t. I would have been bawling my eyes out 24 hours a day. I looked at it like, “That’s life — it was that person’s time to go.” It might seem removed but it’s how I cope. I accepted that it was Chris’s time.

  What was difficult for me to accept was that Chris killed his family. Because we traveled together and broke bread together, it’s really hard for me to cast judgment on him. On the one hand, he was my friend. On the other hand, I wanted to say he was a sorry motherfucker for doing what he did, especially to a kid who had nothing to do with any of Chris’s problems. Every time Chris brought Daniel to the show, you could see how much he loved that boy. Daniel would walk around with tape on his wrists like he was a wrestler. That’s my memory of that child. It breaks my heart to think about how much Chris loved him and what he ended up doing.