by Terry Funk
Finally, in regard to the great wrestlers who came out of West Texas State, I want to clear up a long-standing rumor. Dick Murdoch never went to West Texas State a day in his life.
He always played in the “Exes” (alumni) game, though. It was amazing! He just proclaimed himself an alumnus, and no one ever checked him on it! To make things even better, he was the defensive coordinator every year.
In the end I guess I just wasn’t made for a classroom. One time I was late for an education class, and when I got there, they were taking a test. I looked over and didn’t know what it was, so I just decided to copy the whole damn test off the girl sitting next to me. It was all multiple choice, and I didn’t even bother reading the questions.
Come to find out, it was a personality test and for the next year the school officials thought I had female tendencies!
I left West Texas State lacking only four hours to get my degree. And today I still lack four hours.
I might have stayed, but I’d had a taste of the wrestling business from working in my father’s territory for a few months, and in 1966 I had a chance to go wrestle for Eddie Graham in Florida. So I just said, “The hell with it,” quit school and never looked back.
Sometimes I wish I’d stayed in school or spent more time studying things that I was interested in, but I didn’t. And hell, Florida was a chance to be in the business I loved and still earn $25 to $30 a night! That was pretty big money to me back then.
CHAPTER 4
Breaking in
In 1965, as soon as football season ended in my senior year, I started wrestling in small towns on the Amarillo circuit. Growing up there was never any question that I wanted to follow in my dad’s footsteps.
I had a couple of matches, one with Jack Cain, my uncle who had been the substitute football player for Boys’ Ranch. These were supposed to be warmup matches, to help get me used to things, but these were little towns, and wrestling in front of 150 people didn’t really get me used to the Amarillo audience.
My dad wanted me to use the spinning toehold as my finish hold, just as he had done. I don’t know if Dory Senior invented that hold, but he certainly was the one who popularized it. The only other person I knew who used it as a finishing hold around the same time was a wrestler in Oklahoma named Wayne Martin.
The decision for my brother and me to use the hold was an easy oneit was over, and we weren’t!
For something or someone to be “over,” the people had to believe in it, or believe in that individual. Here’s an example of how over a hold could get.
In the 1960s, not long after I started wrestling, we had a guy come in from Kansas City. He wrestled as the Viking, and used “The Hook” as his big finishing move. Now, The Hook was nothing but an imaginary nervehold, but his opponents sold it like it was torture!
Well, the Viking was driving home one night, but pulled over after he saw a guy fighting with a cop on the side of the road. It looked like a traffic stop gone bad, and this guy was pounding the hell out of the police officer. The Viking got out to help before the officer got hurt. He ran up and started to pull the guy off, but the guy turned around and recognized him and gave up, right there on the spot!
He was screaming, “Oh, God, no! Please Viking, don’t put The Hook on
me!
It’s amazing to me how people never get a hold over anymore. All you have to do is put a hold on, week after week, and if the guys scream, holler and give up, before you know it, people recognize it as the culmination of the match.
Baron Von Raschke used to get his clawhold over with the people in a spot where he didn’t even put it on his opponent. He used to do a spot where he’d lunge with the claw, but his opponent would move, and Von Rashcke would have to pry his clawhold off of the turnbuckle! That was one of my favorite holds in the business. His clawhold grip was so strong that he couldn’t make his own fingers let go of the turnbuckle!
And the people believed in that! They believed he was truly unable to release the turnbuckle. What was it he had, that he could get away with doing something so absurd?
In Japan they got the Japanese armbar over so well that the people screamed when someone did it. Well, the armbar’s a whole lot harder to get onto a wrestler to cause real pain than what the Japanese viewers think from watching those matches.
My first match in Amarillo was against Sputnik Monroe. Sputnik was a great heel, but he didn’t feel like giving too much to a kid having his first match. He led the match, and every time I started to look strong, he would say, “OK kid, that’s good. Now let’s get back down on the mat, and I’ll get this hold back on you.
Also, I was gassed, just exhausted, early in the match from nerves. In fact, my nose started bleeding.
I was doing everything he said, and he was guzzling me until my dad ran down to ringside.
My father yelled, “Goddamn you, you dumb son of a bitch, you’re letting him eat your ass up! Get up off of your goddamned ass and do something, or I’ll beat your ass!”
When I heard that, I jumped up, hit some moves quickly and pinned Sputnik, but Dad had some more choice words for me when I got back to the locker room.
Sputnik was a great heel, but perhaps the top heel in Texas (and almost anywhere else he wrestled) for much of the 1950s and 1960s was Duke Keomuka. The irony was that Duke was a hell of a nice guy when he wasn’t incurring the wrath of wrestling fans everywhere. I would run into him again in Florida.
I had a few matches under my belt when I had some talks with Bud Grant about playing pro ball in Winnipeg. They offered a contract paying $12,000 a year. I also went to work for Verne Gagne in the AWA up there.
I got on AWA television and, in my first match there, had Dennis Stamp as a partner against Larry Hennig and Harley Race. Well, they knew my father and liked us. We went out there, and those guys made me look like a million dollars, and I didn’t know jack shit about the business. If anybody could wrestle a broomstick, they could, because they did it with me.
Then Verne sent me to Denver to wrestle Butch Levy. Butch was an old fart, tougher than nails. I thought I was going to do all this shit I did with Hennig and Race. They told me I was going 12 minutes, but that night I found out that 12 minutes with Butch Levy was like 12 days! I came out of that ring thinking, “Goddamn, there’s something wrong with me. I ain’t as hot as I thought I was.”
I got so depressed about the match that I went right up to the hotel and went to bed after having a couple of beers with another wrestler, Silento Rodriguez.
When I left Amarillo my father told me, “Now Terry, I don’t want you going and getting goofy-ass drunk up there. I want you to mind your Ps and Qs. You’re working for Verne, and I want you to act like a businessman.”
Well, this was the night he decided to check up on me, and he called my room. Unfortunately, Silento and I got our rooms mixed up I ended up sleeping in his room, and he ended up sleeping in my room.
Even more unfortunately, Silento Rodriguez couldn’t talk. He was deaf. He could feel the phone vibrate, though. He reached for the phone and finally got it.
And he said, “Heh-ho! HEH-HO!”
My father said, “Terry!”
“RUH MUH BUH BUH!”
“Terry!”
Silento hung up, and my old man was hot at me. The next time he saw me, the first thing he said was, “Goddammit! I told you not to get drunk! You act like a nut, and then you hang up on me?”
I explained it, and he finally believed it wasn’t me who hung up on him.
The football deal didn’t work out, though, and I soon came back home.
It was a while before I understood what I needed to do to draw fans to the arenas. Dick Murdoch and I wrestled in a main event in Abilene when he was a rookie and my career was still very young. I’m sorry to say we did not continue the Funk-Murdoch tradition of sellouts our fathers had started.
We drew about 450 people and were going all out, to a one-hour, time-limit draw. We thought that would really
bring the house up next time, because we had people standing the whole time we were out there.
Next time in Abilene, we drew the same 450. The reason was, we lacked maturity. We knew what to do, yet we looked like a couple of kids out there, instead of two seasoned pros. I still had a lot to learn.
In 1966, I left Amarillo for a place where I would do a lot of learning Florida.
Sputnik was in Florida when I wrestled there in the second year of my career. Not long after I arrived, Florida promoter Eddie Gtaham was having some problems with a Puerto Rican wrestler named Don Serrano, because Eddie was running shows in Puerto Rico at the time, and Serrano was starting to run opposition there.
Eddie told us, “Sputnik, I want you to beat the shit out of him, and Terry, you just stay in the corner.” “OK, Mr. Graham.”
Serrano was still working for Eddie at the time, because Eddie’s was the only TV wrestling running in Puerto Rico then, and he didn’t think Eddie knew about his plans to open up his own full-time office.
But Eddie did know, and since Serrano had given notice, his last chance to get him was in a tag match. The match was Serrano and me against Sputnik and Rocket Monroe. The idea was that if he got his ass beat on TV and looked bad, he wouldn’t do any business down there, because people would see him as being unable to compete with top stars and be a champion.
“There’s just one thing, Boss,” Sputnik said. “I can’t just go in there and do that to a guy without telling him it’s a shoot beforehand.”
“Well,” Eddie said, “I don’t give a damn how you do it. Just make sure you do it.”
“OK, boss, I’m going to tell him first.”
“OK, Sputnik, you just make sure you kick the shit out of him.”
We had the match, and at one point, Sputnik had Serrano down on the mat. Sputnik got up, yelled, “IT’S A SHOOT!” and kicked him right in the head.
Sputnik stepped back to make sure Serrano wasn’t going to get back up, and when he didn’t, Sputnik guzzled his ass, but good!
Sputnik was a big white guy with a bleached streak in his hair and a tattoo of a cherry just above one of his nipples. Below the cherry were the words, “Here’s mine. Where’s yours?”
Sputnik always liked running with black people. A few years after my first Florida trip, Sputnik came back to work for us. One night, we were in Amarillo, and he wanted to go to a “black bar.” He ended up getting so drunk that he told us he was going to sleep in the car.
We came out a little later, and there was no Sputnik. We figured he got a ride home, and so we took off.
What we didn’t realize was that he had gotten mixed up and climbed into the wrong car to fall asleep. A black woman got into her car to get home, and she was driving down the road when he sat up.
She looked in the mirror, saw Sputnik sitting there and ran her car right off the road. The cops arrested Sputnik, so we had to go get him out of jail.
I also worked several matches with Ron Garvin, an excellent wrestler who was just starting out, and with Bill Dromo. Dromo was probably the most temperamental guy I ever met, but what a worker! Luckily he took a liking to me, and we had some unbelievable matches.
One thing I’ll never forget during this time was a match in Lakeland, : iorida. It was Bronco Kelly versus Bob Nandor. Those two had, quite possibly, the worst match I’ve ever seen. It was one of the first matches where I ever saw all the boys come out of the dressing room to watch.
That was the only thing that was going to get the boys out to watch. You real-had to have a true stinkeroo going to get the boys out of the dressing room.
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Eddie Graham had been a partner of Art Nielson under the name “Rip Rogers.” That was what he was doing when Art and he came through Amarillo in the late 1950s.
He ended up buying into Florida the same way my father had in Amarillo, and he took the same approach that my father took in Amarillo in how he promoted and how he became a part of his community. I think he saw something that was successful for my father.
My father’s mentor, Cal Farley, once told him, “Dory, to do great things in here, you have to do good stuff for the people who live here, and if you do, they can’t knock you or hurt you.”
My father lived by that rule. He did a lot of great things for people for no money. When he was out at the Boys’ Ranch for years making $110 a month for running the thing, he loved what he was doing, but people also appreciated what he was doing. The community really accepted him for that. It was like arms were opened to him at every corner, businesswise and otherwise.
I think Eddie saw that, because when Eddie went to Florida, he also set up a boy’s ranch, and it was successful for a while. He was also very active in the Florida Boys’ Ranch and would visit burn patients in the hospital. He did a lot to build good will in that area.
Amarillo had been built on a great deal of wrestling, and Eddie also saw the success of that. He built Florida on great wrestling with guys like Don Curtis, Hiro Matsuda and so many others who were selling the product as real.
Eddie had a great mind for the business and a great feel for the fans. Eddie did not have a great deal of formal education, but he was a very self-educated person. He could fly airplanes, or captain a boat anywhere he wanted to. He was very much a self-made individual.
Eddie had a great mind for the manipulation and continuation of what you would call storylines today. Back then we just called it being a manipulatornot in the sense that he was crooked or anything, but in the sense that he would manipulate what was going to happen from week to week, month to month, year to year. Eddie had a great feel for what the people wanted and were interested in. He was also very progressive. He broke the territory in on wrestling, but he progressed with the times and was very ahead of his time in terms of how he promoted.
He was also fortunate in that he was in a growth area. Florida just grew and grew, and Eddie turned a lot of that growing population into wrestling fans.
He used very complex finishes, as my father did, but don’t get the idea that means that the finish is the match. He also understood how to make the TV the lifeblood of that area, and he really educated Gordon Solie. Many times I heard Eddie lecture Gordon about what to say and how to get an idea across. Gordon, who passed away in 1999, would have been the first one to tell you that, too.
Eddie was also very influential in how I came to view the wrestling business. He was not only progressive in how he presented his angles and finishes, but he was also very heavy on the wrestling aspect of it. Eddie was very serious about maintaining kayfabe, the wrestling code of secrecy. Protecting the business was a big deal.
Announcing with Gordon was John Heath, who was wonderful for describing holds and getting into the wrestlers’ athletic backgrounds. Gordon and John were able to announce with such sincerity because they’d been educated to it by Eddie.
Eddie was also able to get some great wrestlers into that territory just through the draw of the territory itself. It was the greatest place to live. It was a great life, the weather was beautiful, and everyone in the state knew you and treated you well.
The location was so attractive, compared to say, Minnesota, that Eddie didn’t have to pay the boys what Verne Gagne had to pay them in Minnesota, to get them there. Amarillo was similar to Minnesota. Trying to get boys to come out to this little West Texas town, where there was nothing but sand (and not beach sand, like they had in Florida), it was pretty hard to compete with places like Florida. If you’re running a place like Amarillo, you’d better have a lot more money for the boys, or they’re not going to come.
His son Mike became a very good worker after breaking in in the 1970s, but Eddie looked at things a little bit differently than my father in that respect. Eddie would hold Mike back to a degree. He never tried to get Mike over as a superstar.
Eddie was also a great mentor to me. Eddie gave me so much advice about how to work, took me under his wing and taught me what to do. I can’t say enough ab
out how much I learned from Eddie Graham.
As I mentioned, another of my early mentors in the business, aside from my dad, was “Iron” Mike DiBiase, Ted’s father. Mike was a star in multiple sports, including wrestling, at the University of Nebraska. He was a tough, wonderful guy who taught me so much about the wrestling business. He taught me to really understand the boys and the camaraderie there. He led me like I was a child in the ring, working 30 or 40 minutes, and working with him was the best education I could get as far as being solid and being believable. DiBiase was a master at getting heel heat, but he was really a highly moral man and highly intelligent. He was a great heel, which would be kind of surprising if you knew what a nice man he was. It takes a smart man to be a smart heel, because getting the kind of heat that makes people want to come in the ring after you is not easy, and he certainly could do that.
Throughout my own career I felt I made a better heel than a babyface. To be an effective heel, however, you have to have the ability to be a great babyface, because you have to understand the psychology of what the people want out of you. The first time I really got a crack at being a heel, in Florida in 1966, I had already been a babyface in Amarillo for years. I found it was a wonderful way to go. I found that I really loved to make people dislike me. I really enjoyed making people believe I was a thoroughly rotten person, which I must have succeeded at, or else they wouldn’t have tried to kill me every night.
I also had some fun in Florida. We used to run Miami on Wednesday nights back then, in the same building Jackie Gleason used for his TV shows. They never locked Gleason’s dressing room, so every Wednesday night, I’d go in there and piss on the toilet seat. And every week when I watched his show on TV, I would have a laugh to myself, because I knew that at some point that day, he had been sitting on my piss. Hell, that was my biggest claim to fame at that time!
I was still in Florida in 1966 when my father’s partner, Doc Sarpolis, passed away. Dad called to tell me he had bought the remaining shares in the promotion from Sarpolis’s widow.