More Than Just Hardcore

by Terry Funk

  After he told me what the truth was, I continued to defend it as a shoot, because I understood it was necessary to present it as a shoot, especially in this area and at that time, because of the small populations of the areas and the number of performances they had to do. If it wasn’t looked at as a shoot, they wouldn’t be doing much business. Wrestling wasn’t the circus coming to town—it was a weekly pastime.

  I first saw how seriously my dad took protecting the business when I was five years old. We were on our way home from the matches and stopped off at Joe Bernarski’s, a steakhouse in Amarillo belonging to and named after an old-time wrestler. I was sitting at one of the tables with my brother, who was nine. My parents were at another table, sitting and talking to some other people.

  This man came over from another table and sat down next to me. “So,” he said, “you’re Dory Funk’s son.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Then he started asking me questions about wrestling—questions he really shouldn’t have been asking me. He should’ve been asking my father.

  Finally, he said, “Come on, you can tell me about this wrestling and how it all works. It must be all fake, right?”

  My brother got up, got my father and told him what this guy was saying, and that was one of the first times I remember seeing someone truly get the shit beaten out of them.

  A few years later, we owned a public swimming pool called Gem Lake Swimming Pool, and my father had mats on the roof so some of the guys could work out up there. One day, my father and Bob Geigel (a tough wrestler from Kansas City) were working out up there, and I mean truly working out, truly wrestling. While they were up there, this guy came onto the roof with them and said, “Hey, I think I can do that! Isn’t all this wrestling phony?”

  My dad said, “Is that right?”

  My dad untangled himself from Geigel and beat the shit out of the guy. The guy took off running and jumped off the roof. He was trying to catch onto a tree that was about 20 feet from the building, but he missed. I think he ended up OK, but he spent a little time in the hospital.

  When I got into wrestling years later, I took very seriously the idea of protecting the business, and I had a number of confrontations over that very thing. None of these confrontations ever started with me deciding I just wanted to punch someone out. Someone would tell me how phony my business was, and my answer was always, “Well, I’ll show you it’s not.”

  And I did just like my dad did. A lot of times, it was just easier to just shoot in on a guy, take him down and make him look like an ass.

  One night, I was in a bar in Amarillo, talking with my wife, Vicki. A man came up to the table where we were sitting and asked her to dance.

  I said, “Sir, would you mind waiting a little bit? I’m talking to her right now.”

  He said, “Terry Funk!”

  I said I was, and he put out his hand. I put my hand out to shake, but he grabbed my hand and started squeezing as hard as he could.

  He was about 300 pounds, not the most solid guy in the world, not a monster with muscles, but he was big.

  I was trying not to register it, but his squeezing was hurting like hell. I rared back with my left hand and slapped the shit out of him.

  A diamond ring I had just bought (and was really proud of) flew off my hand, and he went down to the floor. Now, this bar’s tables were made of iron, including the one where we were sitting. They were very heavy, and after the big man fell to the floor, he grabbed one of the tables with both arms. I reached down to pick him up by his pants, and as I tried to lift him, his pants ripped right off of him and his underwear, too! I was looking down at his bare, fat ass!

  I thought, “Shit, I might as well,” and so I dove down and bit a chunk out of his ass, and that was the end of that.

  Until the next day, when he sued me. I ended up settling out of court for $750. It was the most expensive piece of ass I ever had.

  As I said, my father was violent at times, but other times, he was the softest person in the world. Laura Fishbacher was a girl from Umbarger, Texas, who had leukemia. She was 11 years old, and she was going to die. My father wasn’t a rich man at this time, or ever, for that matter, but he took $1,000 of his own money and put it into a checking account in her name to let her buy anything she wanted to for herself. She wasn’t related to us. That was just the kind of guy he was.

  It was nice to stay put, not to have to go somewhere else and start anew. As I’d said, though, my brother Dory was the one who endured switching schools so many times. I started first grade at the Boys’ Ranch where my father worked as superintendent. I would like to add that I received an award that year for being the best speller in the class. Of course, I was the only first-grader at Boys’ Ranch, and they had a rule that each class got at least one award.

  My dad didn’t show any favoritism to me, even though I was his son. The first fight I ever got into there was when I was six, and I got into it with a kid named Dickie Harp, who was two or three years older than me. He was a tough kid, but when I got up from my seat at the mess hall during lunch one day, I came back, and he was in my seat, so I snuck up behind him and put the first illegal hold I guess I ever used on him—I grabbed him from behind, put both fingers in his mouth and pulled back as hard as I could. Come to think of it, I guess I invented the dastardly “fish hook.”

  Anyway, he was screaming and hollering, and my father came over, yelling, “All right, all right! What’s going on over here?”

  Dickie wasn’t doing anything, so I was feeling pretty good, like a tough guy.

  “Dickie,” my father said, “what’s the deal here?”

  “Mr. Funk, Terry grabbed me from behind and pulled me down,” Dickie

  said.

  “Well, why didn’t you fight him?”

  “Well, I didn’t want to, Mr. Funk. That’s your son. I thought I’d get in trouble.”

  “That’s OK, Dickie, you go on ahead.”

  In addition to being my first fight, that was also my first loss, because Dickie beat the shit out of me.

  Every Thursday night, my dad would take the boys from the ranch to the matches. Each week, there’d be a bus out there to bring the kids to the arena, where we had our own roped-off area to sit in.

  I went every week, but not everyone could. It wasn’t an automatic deal—it was a treat. It was a good incentive for them, which they needed, because this wasn’t exactly a bunch of good kids living out at the Boys’ Ranch. There were some rough, troubled kids there.

  One kid, Roger Landing, is probably worth a book all by himself. Roger was 10 years old and very street smart. Roger would sneak onto airplanes parked at the airport because they didn’t have any of the security like they do now, and he’d get on the radio and start calling, “Mayday! Mayday!”

  Roger didn’t have any parents or anyone who gave a shit about him, so sometimes he’d just go to a motel at night, find an unlocked room, go in and crawl into bed right with the guy in the room. In the morning, the guy would wake up, look at Roger and say, “What the hell are you doing here?”

  Roger would say, “Well, you brought me here.”

  One day at the ranch, after weeks of Roger on his best behavior (really, he was conning my father), my father made the big mistake of telling Roger, “Take my car keys down to my wife at the office.”

  “Yes, sir, Mr. Funk.”

  And that was the last my father’s new Cutlass 88 was seen in one piece. Roger took off in that car, and Dad got a call from the neighbors a little while later.

  “Dory,” they said. “Your car just went by, and it was Roger behind the wheel, going about 80!”

  About another mile up the road, he flipped it three times, and when my father got to him, he said, “Roger! What the hell are you doing?”

  “I’m sorry, Mr. Funk, but I didn’t want to run your battery down, so I shut the engine off.”

  The damned thing was totaled, but at least Roger saved the battery!

  I was four years old o
ut there, running around with kids who were in their teens. I thought they were my friends. Hell, I thought I was just one of the guys, so they’d have me stealing cigarettes. So there I was, four years old, smoking stolen cigarettes. I didn’t know any better.

  They didn’t have any cigarettes on the ranch. Anyone my father caught smoking, he’d take to the gym. He’d make them drink a glass of warm milk, and then roll around on the gym floor until they puked.

  I took a pack at a time of my father’s, sliding the rest of the carton down, like they were all still there. Well, it only took my father a couple of times for him to figure out something funny was going on. He finally caught me stealing his cigarettes, so he took me outside where there was a big bell. He rang the bell, which meant everyone had to come running. All 140 kids came running.

  He knew all the kids liked me, so he had everyone gather around, and he said, “I caught Terry stealing cigarettes. Now, Terry, climb up on this stepladder.”

  I climbed up on the stepladder he had set up out there.

  “Now, pull down your pants.”

  I pulled down my pants, and he pulled off his belt and beat my ass in front of 140 kids.

  Then he said, “If you want Terry to get his ass beat like that again, you just go on and have him steal cigarettes for you again!”

  Well, nobody asked me to do that again. They liked me, and they loved him.

  Dory Junior had a few scrapes at the ranch, too. My brother was on a woodpile once, just playing, and there was also a beehive near the pile. I don’t know if he touched the hive or what happened, but those bees went crazy after him. He had bees buzzing all around him, stinging him, and one even made it up his pants and stung him 13 times on the end of his pecker!

  Well, naturally his pecker swelled up and looked like a gnarled tree limb. Now, my parents used to have the Boys’ Ranch teachers up to the house in the morning for coffee. Dad’s favorite deal became to show his boy’s disfigured pecker to everyone who came by the house in the morning.

  “Junior,” he’d yell, “come here!”

  My brother would come into the room, and my dad would say, “Show ‘em where the bee bit you!”

  “Dad, I don’t want to show them!”

  “Dammit, show them where the bee got you, boy!”

  So Junior would unzip his pants and pull out this knotty, horrible-looking thing that used to be his little pecker, and those women would scream in horror!

  I’m surprised Junior didn’t end up with a lifelong complex about bees because of that.

  My father also coached the Boys’ Ranch football team. One time, not long after he got there, he brought his brother-in-law, Jack Thornton, to a game. Jack, who was married to my mother’s sister, Eleanor, was only about five years younger than my dad, about 130 pounds and 25 years old. He was balding, though.

  The Boys’ Ranch hadn’t won a game since two years before my father started there. They just didn’t have many boys, and all the boys had to go out for wrestling, but they didn’t have to go out for football. My dad’s thinking was, if you’re too small he could put you in another weight class to wrestle, but if you’re too small for football, you couldn’t participate.

  On this day, the Boys’ Ranch was ahead by 20 points—it was the first game they were going to win in years! But they had injury after injury, and pretty soon, they were down to 10 players.

  My father had to weigh things now. On one hand, he didn’t want to cheat. On the other, it was really important that these kids win for their self-esteem.

  He got a football helmet and put it on my uncle’s bald head and put bailing wire for a chin strap so it would stay on.

  He told Jack not to run the score up, just to keep it close, and that’s what he did. The Boys’ Ranch finally got its win.

  Don’t ask me why, because my dad was really hard on those boys, but I swear, when he finally left that place in 1951, there wasn’t a dry eye at the ranch.

  Leaving was pretty hard for me, too, because I had made all kinds of friends at the ranch, from the other kids there to the adults working at the place.

  At one point, after my dad left Boys Ranch, he got into a disagreement with Dory Detton, which resulted in us leaving the territory for a while. We headed north—far north. My father wrestled under a mask during one stretch in Vancouver, British Columbia, working for promoter Rod Fenton. That was actually where the “Double Cross Ranch” name came from. My father wrestled as The Outlaw and was billed as being from “The Double Cross Ranch.” It was a great name because it had that double meaning, both as a brand (two “x”s side by side) and in the sense that The Outlaw would double-cross you.

  It’s a name that stuck with me. I’ve lived on the parcel of land known today as The Double Cross Ranch (yes, it’s a real place) for 27 years. These days when I go to church, I tell people it represents two crosses.

  The two Dorys eventually worked things out, but we ended up spending a lot of our summers in other areas. We went to North Bay, Ontario, Canada, where my dad wrestled the Vachons—”Mad Dog” Maurice and Paul “The Butcher.” As ugly as those guys were, believe it or not, they were the babyfaces against the mean roughneck from Texas. And that feud drew well. The town had about 25,000 people living in it, and the matches drew 3,500!

  Sometimes it drew too well. My father would get the fans so fired up that riots would break out in the arenas until they played “God Save the Queen” over the PA. system. When the song started, the fans would stop throwing stuff and would stand at attention, which allowed my father a chance to make his escape out the back. This worked for three or four weeks, but those fans finally got tired of it, said, “Piss on the queen,” and just kept rioting.

  This was the first time I ever saw my father work as a heel, and it was before my father smartened me up to the business. But I never questioned why he was now being a “bad guy.” We were from Texas, and we thought our home was better than Ontario, Canada. It made perfect sense to me!

  Canada was a real experience, but I was glad when the two Dorys patched things up and we got to come back home. Not long after, my dad ended up as part-owner of the territory. Doc Sarpolis, a booker and promoter, had come in and bought the Amarillo territory in 1956 from Dory Detton for $75,000, which was a tremendous amount of money.

  Sarpolis then offered my father a chance to buy in, and so Dory Funk Sr. became part-owner of the Amarillo wrestling promotion.

  Nineteen fifty-six was also the year I met the love of my life. Vicki and I had gone to different elementary schools in Canyon, but were in the same middle school together. I always thought she was pretty great, but we were really just friends until high school, when we started dating.

  On a couple of nights, this very rules-oriented father of mine would spend his nights wrestling under no rules in a Texas Death Match. I think my father invented the Death Match. I never heard of anyone doing them before he did. These were violent matches where there were no disqualifications and no countouts. In fact, even pinfalls didn’t count. If one wrestler pinned the other, there was a 30-second rest period, followed by a referee’s 10 count. The match only ended when one man could not answer that last count.

  One of the most successful feuds in Amarillo in the early 1960s was when my father battled “Iron” Mike DiBiase for the right to be called “King of the Death Match.” Their first death match went about 30 falls, well over the three-hour mark, without a winner. They called a curfew at 1 a.m., and they both went for hardways (where wrestlers are truly busted open, usually from punches to the head) in the match, so they both had to go the hospital to get stitched up afterward. That’s just the way things were done for believability and to make things intense, which helped the business. You opened the sports page the day after a guy went hardway, and there was his picture, with a head looking like a melon. What would you think about the believability of what that guy was doing?

  A lot of times they’d do a hardway if they had a bunch of smartasses in the front rows, yellin
g, “It’s all bullshit!”

  We’d go right out in front of them and let them see someone getting punched right in the face. It would keep them wondering if it was real or not. I’ve done hardways on other guys before, and I’ve had them done to me.

  Both my dad and Mike had black eyes and busted mouths after the match, and naturally, after getting out of the hospital with his stitches, my dad was exhausted.

  Over the next few months my father wrestled DiBiase just a few times, usually in tag matches, to build interest in the rematch.

  The amazing thing was they came back a year after that first death match and did a rematch for the anniversary. The entire card was the Texas Death match and a standby match—only four people on the card. It sold out. I don’t want to be one of these old-timers saying everything “in my day” was a sellout, but they really did have people lined up outside trying to get in to see this and getting turned away.

  And the standby match didn’t even go! They just had two guys dressed in their gear, just standing by like they were ready to go. Hell, they knew they weren’t going on, so they weren’t really even standing by, and they still got a payoff! Now, that’s a hell of a deal!

  My father won the Texas Death rematch with DiBiase, but that one also went long—more than 90 minutes.

  My father also wrestled the original Gorgeous George. George Wagner was the original, bleached, flamboyant pretty-boy wrestler, and they wrestled in Dick Bivens Stadium in Amarillo. The match drew 7,000 people, which was more than 10 percent of the number of people living in the area at the time.

  Even though we were based in Amarillo now, my father still wrestled outside the area occasionally. He was never the biggest wrestler, but he was a tough guy, and people knew it. In the late 1950s, there was a wrestling war between Houston promoter Morris Sigel and Ed McLemore, from the Dallas area. They would line their cards with shooters to protect themselves, because you never knew in that situation if someone from the opposition would come in and challenge your guys some night to make your wrestlers look like fools. Morris brought in my father, Rikki Starr and Ray Gunkel as his shooters, and those guys could damn well shoot. At that time, Dad was making $500 a week, which was huge money in those days.