by Terry Funk
Superstar Graham is the first to admit he’s not the greatest in-ring performer of all time, but he had a great mind for what to say to get himself and his angle over.
I’ll promise you something else. No one would write a script for Terry Funk! No writer could come up with things like having me just spend half my promo glaring into the camera, to show you how much I hate my opponent.
Week 4…
“I look through my good eye (I point to my left eye), and I see my lovely wife and family. And I look through my bad eye (I point to my right eye), and I see an ugly, yellow haze. I look through my good eye (I point to my left eye), at my lovely dog, and I see the dog. I look through my right eye, and I see Old Yeller, and he’s a goddamned Jack Russell!
“Lawler, come closer! Come closer, JerryI want you to see the hate in my face!”
(I make a series of evil, hateful faces at the camera) “Don’t back away!”
(I scowl at the camera some more, and then break into a smile.) “Do you see that hate, Lawler? Do you see that hate?” (I make another series of faces at the camera.)
“Tonight, at the Mid-South Coliseum, I’ll be in the ring with you, Lawler. We’re going to have some finality to this. A closingwe’re going to close it out, Lawler, and I don’t mind if I die closing it out!”
(I make one last face at the camera, and walk off.)
CHAPTER 14
No Business Like Show Business
I met Sylvester Stallone in 1977, after getting this crazy letter that said, “Sylvester Stallone is doing a movie on pro wrestling and is looking for a wrestler to play a lead part in the movie.”
I think everybody else who read it must have just thought it was a rib and threw it in the trash, but I read it and sent a reply back to them. They responded back and asked for a tape. I sent them a tape of me cutting a five-minute promo on Stallone, talking about him coming down from New York City, and just my normal bullshit.
He loved it.
He brought me out there, and I read for the part. He liked me, I guess, because he told me I got the part. He also needed someone to stage the action scenes, so I choreographed those. He also wanted someone to teach Lee Canalito how to work in the ring a little, and I did that.
Shooting a movie was a lot different than performing in front of a live crowd, more than I’d thought it would be. In that one, I was kind of in my element because I was playing a wrestler, but you still have to watch for overacting.
Most of the time, it’s not easy for a wrestler to be an actor, myself included, nor is it easy for an actor to be a wrestler. There aren’t as many similarities between the two professions as there might seem, and I found this to be true in everything I did in Hollywood.
The business side is also different. As a wrestler, promoters would try to find me. In the entertainment industry, I was having to find producers of TV and movies. Unlike in wrestling, the entertainment industry doesn’t give a shit who you are. What matters is that you do a good job on the set. It’s a profession of rejection. It would be like playing pianoif I started when I was three, by the time I was an adult, I might be able to play a concerto. Same thing with actingif someone starts at age three, they can go along and do great later on. But to just walk out there and think you can play a part in a movie with heavy dialogue is like thinking you can play a concerto the first time you sit down to play the piano. When you get into dialogue, you’d better be pretty adept at what you’re doing.
I’ve seen The Rock’s movies, and he’s good, but they’re all action movies. You ask him to play a role on a show like Law & Order, where it’s 95 percent dialogue, and he’s going to find out it’s all very long, hectic and heavy.
As far as I’m concerned, the best actor ever to come out of pro wrestling was Roddy Piper. He was able to make the transition to acting, and acting well.
You know who else turned in a pretty damn good performance? Andre the Giant, in The Princess Bride. And trust me, as you’ll read later, I had plenty of chances to study that performance.
The toughest thing in acting is to play yourself, and that’s truly what Andre did in that movie. A lot of people don’t know this, but Andre was a very smart guy. He spoke something like six different languages. The first time I ever saw him, I was so in awe of the size of him that I didn’t immediately notice the intelligent guy that he was. I certainly didn’t assume he was a dummy. I’m not a prejudiced person, not the kind of person who’s going to assume that a big guy must also be a dumb guy.
Even though Stallone liked me, Herb Nanas had his doubts. Herb was one of the executive producers of Paradise Alley, and was married to Helen Reddy, the singer.
I just drove Herb nuts. He hated me by that time, because I had gotten him with the old “Japanese flier” trick a couple of weeks before.
Canalito was there, too, and I stood up a package of cigarettes and had them on the edge of a table. The trick was to stand about 10 feet from the pack with your right side facing them, with your hand at your side, but one finger sticking straight out to the right. Then you’d step sideways without looking at the pack, but instead, looking straight ahead. The object was to knock over the pack with your extended finger.
I told Herb this was how the Japanese qualified their pilots.
“You had to pass this test before they’d even consider you for pilot training,” I told him. “You have to pick yourself a spot before you look away, and concentrate on hitting that spot. I’ll give $50 if anyone can do it.”
Canalito tried, but couldn’t do it.
Herb said, “Hey, let me try! I think I can do that!”
“Well, come on then, Herb! But don’t cheat!”
“OK, I won’t.”
Herb stood sideways to the pack on the table and started moving towards it, while looking straight ahead. He couldn’t see me from that angle, so just before he got to the table, I pulled down my pants and spread my cheeks. Before he knew what he was doing, he had stuck his finger in my ass!
Canalito and I were laughing, but Herb went out of his ever-loving mind. He went absolutely nuts! He was convinced Stallone had brought a nut onto the set after that.
Paradise Alley went well and got great reviews, and I thought, “Well, this is great! I’ll just go home and wait for another job.”
Another job didn’t come. It took me a while to figure out why.
Who the hell was supposed to know me? How the hell were they supposed to call me up? I didn’t even know to have an agent. That’s how ignorant I was.
I just happened to be at a friend’s house in Amarillo a few years later, when Vicki called. She said Arthur Chobanian had called the house looking for me. He was one of Sly Stallone’s best friends and associate producer of Paradise Alley.
He told me, “We’ve had people calling, looking for you.”
He told me about a part that was open on a new Western series called Wildside for the ABC network.
Tom Greene, who’d written episodes of the shows Knight Rider and Magnum PL, among others, was the show’s creator. Chobanian told me to send Greene a tape, so I did.
The tape I sent Tom was a cornball thing, with me telling some stupid, five-minute joke. I filmed it right in front of a caboose on the ranch, a spot where I filmed a lot of wrestling promos over the years.
They had me come out and do a reading, and they offered me the part of Prometheus Jones, a former outlaw and lasso expert. Greene had really pushed for me with the Disney people.
Working on a series was difficult, because there’s new dialogue to learn every day. It changes every week, just a constant deal. You can’t just walk out there unprepared.
I thought the show was a pretty good series and could have had a long life if not for the competition. We were right up against the second season of The Cosby Show. Cosby just smoked us. But we had a great castMeg Ryan, Howard Rollins, J. Eddie Peck, Bill Smith and John D’Aquino.
I thought I’d learn from my Paradise Alley lesson and stay in C
alifornia for a while this time, and I did pretty well. I ended up doing a number of commercials, and I also realized I could get health insurance with membership in the Screen Actors’ Guild.
It was very beneficial, because in wrestling it was hard to get insurance at all. Every year I started going back just long enough to qualify for my Screen Actors’ Guild insurance. You have to make a certain amount of money through acting each year to be a qualified member.
Those commercials did really well for me. I did one for Lipton’s Cup-A-Soup and picked up $45,000, and all I did was take a a bite of a sandwich and a swallow of soup! The residuals worked out to where I got $35 every time the commercial aired, and it was playing on afternoon soap operas. I did Wendy’s commercials and a ton of other ones.
That was one thing that made acting completely different from professional wrestlingthe money. Filming Road House in 1988 took 17 weeks. It was an action movie about barroom bouncers, with Patrick Swayze, who was still a hot star from Dirty Dancing. It was only supposed to last four weeks, but it kept on running over. Well, hell, I was making $10,000 a week, which was a lot of money to me, huge money to me at that time, for sitting on my ass! I never had it so good!
Just to show you how times had changed, for Paradise Alley, where I had a much bigger part, I made $7,500 a week. And that was big money! I even cancelled a Japanese tour to do Paradise Alley, and I got in terrible trouble over it with Baba.
Before I really started making money, I used to save a few bucks by booking my flights from Amarillo to Albuquerque for $35, but I would always book it on a flight that was continuing on to Los Angeles. I would pay my $35 and get on the airplane. Then, when it got to Albuquerque, I’d be laid back, like I was asleep. I made it all the way to Los Angeles like that. Coming back, I’d do the same thingbook a flight to Phoenix for $27 and “sleep” my way to Amarillo. That was just what I had to do to make ends meet. They weren’t paying me to do readings, auditions and all that other stuff.
I also took a page out of crazy Roger’s book from the Boys’ Ranch. I would stay at the same hotel in Los Angeles over and over, and never would turn in my key. Once I had about five or six of them, I’d get into town about 9 p.m. and call the rooms I had the keys for. As soon as I found one where there was no answer on the phone, I’d go up into the room and sleep in the bed. The next morning, I’d get up early, make up the bed and sneak on out of there! Whenever I did that, I always left all my bags packed, just in case. Sure enough, one night, I was in bed, and this guy opened the room door.
He said, “Oh, I’m sorry, I must have the wrong room.”
I jumped out of the bed and said, “Oh! I don’t know! I don’t know!”
Then I grabbed my bags and ran out of there.
Road House was a heck of an experience. It was, among other things, the first and last time I ever worked for producer Joel Silver.
At the wrap party, once the movie was over, I told Roger Hewlett, another actor in the movie, to suggest that I go up and sing a song.
He went up there and told the M.C., “Hey, I’ve got this friend. Now he gets embarrassed very easily, but if you coax him up here, he’s a heck of a singer.”
The guy asked, “Well, who is it?”
Roger said, “It’s Terry Funk.”
The guy told Roger he’d be sure to invite me onstage. Pretty soon, here came the microphone.
“We understand we’ve got a singer in the house! Would Terry Funk come up here, please? “
I just sat back, motioning them off with my hands and saying, “Oh, no, no, I really don’t want to do that.” “Aw, come on up, Terry!” I finally said, “Well, all right.”
I finally made my way to the stage and the guy asked me, “We understand that you might be willing to sing a song for us.”
I took the microphone and the cast and crew who were now my audience, “Well, yeah. I wrote this song myself. In fact, Willie Nelson and Merle Haggard tried to buy the thing from me, but I just wouldn’t sell it to them. I wrote this many years ago, in Abilene, Texas, on Peach Street and Avenue A. I was walking down the street, came to the stoplight at Avenue A, and there was a little, old lady sitting on the other side of the street. I walked over and said, ‘Ma’am, what’s your name?’ And she looked at me and said, ‘My name is Lucy’ I said, ‘Lucy?’ And she said, ‘Yes, Lucy.’ And I looked down at her, and the words to this song just came to me.”
I paused for a second and began singing a touching little song.
“OH, LUCY’S GOT A PUSSY LIKE A JAVELINA HOG! LUCY’S GOT A PUSSY LIKE A HAV-A-LEE-NA HOG!”
Several filthy verses later, I was finished, and you could have heard a pin drop. I thought they’d think it was extremely funny, so I was disappointed. I thought it was a very funny song. But it was just dead silence. It was the strangest thing.
Vicki laughed a little, but she tends to think I’m rather funny. Joel Silver didn’t seem to think it was as funny. Joel Silver has produced a lot of movies since then, but I’ve never been asked back to work on one. I wonder why?
I also did a lot of low-budget pictures. I did one called Mom, Can I Keep Her? with Gil Gerard, who had played Buck Rogers on TV, and one called Active Stealth with Daniel Baldwin.
In 1992, I got hired for another series, Tequila and Bonetti, a police show where I played a police sergeant who worked with the main character. It lasted a full season, but that was all it lasted.
The producer of that show was Don Bellasario, and he had liked me enough to get me a shot on this show after I’d made a guest appearance on another show he had created, Quantum Leap.
On the show, Scott Bakula played a guy who travels through time, inhabiting other people’s bodies. On the episode I was on, Scott was playing a wrestler, and I was his main opponent. Bakula was just great, a great actor and a great gentleman. He must have had a photographic memory, because the dialogue he had was just amazing. He could go right from one scene to another, day after day, becoming a completely new character every week, without missing a beat. I had followed Quantum Leap since it first came on the air, so I really enjoyed being a part of it.
Looking back, working with Stallone was the best thing I could have done, because I ended up doing some stunt work on one of the Rambo movies. I acted with him again in 1987’s Over the Top and was the stunt coordinator for Rocky V. The whole time I worked with him, Stallone never changed the way he treated me, even though he was an even bigger star by now than he’d been when we were filming Paradise Alley. Stallone is a good guy to me.
CHAPTER 15
Japan’s Wrestling War
Junior and I spent a lot of the 1970s and the early 1980s as top talent and as bookers for Baba’s All Japan Pro Wrestling, and the war with Inoki was going strong by the end of the decade.
In 1981, out of necessity, I had what would prove to be one of my most successful ideas ever. Inoki, at the time, had just debuted Satoru Sayama as Tiger Mask. Between his moves and his character, which was based on a cartoon show, he was a junior heavyweight who was as hot as anything that had ever happened in Japan. Add that onto Inoki, and they had a hot show going.
Killer Karl Kox had been working for us in Japan, and I met him at the airport. I was heading to Japan, and he was coming back.
I said to Karl, “How’s business?”
“Terry, I’ll tell you the truth,” he said. “I don’t think we can keep on going. The other side is really hot, and we’re just dying out there.”
We had TV the first night, and I thought, “Damn, I’m not going to let us die. I’ve got to do something.”
As soon as I got to the hotel, the night before our scheduled match, I got together with Abdullah and I told him, “Abby, we have to do something, something extreme and different tonight, something that’ll get the people off their asses. Inoki’s been nipping at our heels, and he’s got us damn near dead.”
We swapped some ideas, and between us, we came up with the idea to do something in our match that the people
hadn’t seen before.
I went ahead and had my singles match with Abdullah, and during the match, he took a fork to my arm, making it bleed heavily.
To this day, I don’t think they’ve had 4,000 people at the hotels to see the wrestlers who were staying there, but I had that many trying to find out where I was, and how I was doing.
That angle really captured the imagination of the Japanese fans. It might not sound very historic now, but at that time in 1981, nothing like that had ever been seen in Japan, and I never heard about anyone doing it in the States, either. Doing this angle wasn’t exactly a pleasure, but I did it out of absolute necessity for the company. It wasn’t done to help me, but to help the company by giving the fans there something to buzz about. It was meant as an act by a good soldier.
My bleeding arm was also the birth of hardcore wrestling to a degree. In Amarillo, we always had the occasional gimmick matchchain matches, death matches and the restand they were always violent matches. We never killed the territory with them. A chain match was only used as a blowoff to a feud, the climactic match between two longtime foes. So I was always in violent matches, but the more hardcore brawling style grew out of this angle.
Japan didn’t transform into hardcore matches. It stuck to the physical style of wrestling. Full-fledged hardcore wrestling wouldn’t hit Japan for about another decade, when Onita formed Frontier Martial-Arts Wrestling shows. But Baba was smart enough to ride the brutality of that fork angle for years.
Hell, Paul E. would have come back the next night and had two forks, if it had been ECW! The next week, he’d have had an eight-man fork match!
Just a few months after the fork-in-the-arm angle, Inoki really went for the jugular when he took Larry Shreeve, a.k.a. Abdullah the Butcher, right out from underneath us. I understood why Abby was doing itmore money for him. But it was a terrible blow to us, so we decided to hit back.