More Than Just Hardcore

by Terry Funk

  Later, in 1983,1 came back to Memphis as a babyface, teaming with Lawler! We had a TV match my first day there, against a team managed by a young manager named Jim Cornette. I chased Cornette around the ring and ended up tearing his clothes off. He had no idea. There was nothing preplanned about it—I just disrobed Jim Cornette for the hell of it! Cornette went on to become one of the all-time great managers and mouthpieces in our business, but I’m proud to say I was the first one to tear the pants off of him on television. And if I see him today, I’ll do the same thing. Next time I see him at the Cauliflower Alley Club reunion, his pants are coming off!

  Memphis had Lance Russell as an announcer. Lance was right up there with Gordon Solie. They were probably the two best announcers in the country. He had believability with the people. They took different approaches, but they had a lot in common, in that they were like good whiskey—they had the age and maturity behind them.

  Junior and I also did an angle in Florida in 1982 involving our uncle, Herman Funk. Uncle Herman came out to back us up and ended up getting beaten up by Mike Graham, as part of the story. He was on vacation in Florida and was with us in the dressing room, and somehow he got talked into coming out with us.

  Around that time, one of the young up-and-comers was a kid named Barry Windham. Of course, I had known his dad, Blackjack Mulligan, and Barry himself was another West Texas State boy! Dick Murdoch got hold of him and ruined him, too! Barry was a great athlete and was doing all right for himself on the football field. He was big as a house and probably could have gone pro, but Murdoch got hold of him, and down the road he went!

  Seriously, I always loved working with Barry, because he was from the old school. And he was a big, tough kid who didn’t take shit off of anybody.

  In San Antonio in the 1980s, I became a beloved babyface after years as a heel. It was the only time I ever babyfaced there. Blanchard really had the place popping at the time.

  Southwest had a very talented crew, including Gino Hernandez, who was a great performer. I’d met him when he was 16—by then he had two years in the business! This teenager already talked and acted like a seasoned wrestler, because he was one.

  Gino could get heat like no one else. He was just a natural-born heel. Joe put him in a tag team with Joe’s son, Tully, and they were a damn good team. I loved Gino Hernandez, and I liked his work. I never saw a kid who achieved success in the business and adapted that quick. I mean, here was a kid who was 17, 18 years old in the late 1970s, and he already carried himself like an experienced wrestler. Hell, he was an experienced wrestler! He could do great promos and everything, as if he’d been around for 10 years. The way he could do things, and do them well, was just unheard of for a kid that young. And with all his talent, he didn’t have the big head! He got along with all the boys in the locker room. Gino’s success was always something that was hard for me to understand, because I’d always believed in maturity. I always believed it took three or four years to really understand what you were doing in wrestling, but Gino jumped right in and took off.

  Joe Blanchard had been working with Fritz Von Erich in Dallas. Fritz had been doing the booking, and Joe felt like he could do a better job at it, so they just had constant problems. It wasn’t even that they both had wrestling sons they wanted to push, although there was some heat between Tully and the Von Erich boys. Joe just got tired of paying Fritz a percentage of his houses as a booking fee. They also couldn’t agree on which town belonged to whom.

  Joe was also working with Houston promoter Paul Boesch, until 1982, when Boesch started working with Bill Watts’s Mid-South Wrestling to bring talent in.

  My sympathies were with the Southwest guys, but as Boesch started easing Blanchard’s guys out and Watts’s guys in, I just kind of backed away from the whole deal. I could see where things were headed, and I knew if I wanted to keep working in Houston, I’d have to go work for Watts’s territory. There was no reason for me to want to work there. Bill would have had me running from town to town seven nights a week.

  Even though I’d sided with Blanchard, I certainly wasn’t trying to screw Paul Boesch around.

  A few months later, Joe decided to promote a show, with a world title tournament, in Houston, against Boesch, who ran a show the night after ours. In the tournament, I beat Bob Orton Jr. in the first round, but then we did a deal where Abdullah the Butcher injured me in the second round, knocking me out of the tournament.

  I don’t know what plans Joe might have had for running Houston, but the tournament was just kind of a one-time deal for us in Houston after the split with Boesch, and the aspect of competing against him never even crossed my mind.

  Orton was a very, very talented wrestler. I had seen his father wrestle, and now, I watch his son, Randy, on the WWE shows. They remind me of each other, and I promise, Randy has never, or hardly ever, seen his grandfather wrestle, but all three of them wrestle alike. They all have that same, great psychology.

  I still get a call from Bob Sr. every Saturday morning. He calls to talk to me about how Randy’s doing, and to warn me about the latest activities of the communists, or the terrorists, in his gravelly growl.

  “Hey, kid, you gotta watch those airplanes. Goddamn, I don’t want to get on those airplanes anymore. You don’t know who you got sitting next to you. They might have something in their shoe, or wrapped around their leg, or some other damn thing. You can’t take any chances, kid. You got them broads walking up and down the aisles, taking drink orders. Hell, could be the pilot’s drunk— you don’t know! Anything can happen up there, kid!”

  And every few seconds, I say, “Uh huh.”

  And that’s my weekly conversation with Bob Orton Sr. I love him, but he’s always been nuts! This isn’t like some creeping senility, some new thing brought on by old age. We used to ride together, 30 years ago or more, and he’d bundle himself up in blankets and tell everyone, “Now, don’t breathe on me, kid, there’s goddamn germs everywhere! And turn that air-conditioning off! You don’t know what the hell’s coming out of there!”

  Bob Jr. never wanted to be like his dad, but damned if he didn’t turn out exactly like him! In the late 1970s and early 1980s, Bob and Dick Slater were one of the truly great teams in wrestling. There was a real crop of incredible wrestling talent that came out of Florida, educated by Eddie Graham into the business, and many of them became dominant performers. Steve Keirn, Bob Roop, Bob Orton Jr., Dick Slater, Paul Orndorff—a great many wrestlers came out of Florida who could really work their asses off during that time period, and I’m just scratching the surface. Eddie impressed the importance of that background and education in pro wrestling on them as children viewing the product, and it greatly influenced their desires, and even the types of performers they became.

  Bob Jr. and I worked a tour of Germany for promoter Otto Wanz, which turned out to be a nightmare for poor Otto.

  I was always something of a nightmare for Otto, but I had nothing on Bob Orton—he was just a maniac over there. Bob was laying into Germans on the street, executing wrestling takedowns on them; it was like he thought the second world war was still going on!

  I liked Otto. I went 40 minutes with Otto once. We did a big match right before he retired. Over there, they did matches in three-or five-minute rounds, and I don’t remember how many rounds we went, but we tore the house down because of Otto’s ability to get over to his fans. As an in-ring performer, he was just amazing. I’m not saying whether he was amazingly good, or amazingly bad—just amazing. But I’ll tell you this—big Otto was over like a son of a gun over there, because he understood what he could do, and he understood what the people wanted. He gave it to them.

  There were some great European workers, like Tony St. Clair and David “Fit” Finlay, over there. And there were also some real crowbars, too, some guys who I thought shouldn’t even be there.

  I used to think the same thing about some of the guys my dad brought in to work Amarillo.

  “Dad,” I used to say, “why
do you keep that guy around? He can’t do a thing.”

  “Son, it’s my company, and I like the guy. I want him to be able to make a living,” he said.

  He kept guys just for that reason, which was a perk of being a promoter, and it was something Otto did, too, for the same reason. Even today, you can see examples of Vince McMahon doing the same thing. He takes care of people, just because he thinks they’re good people.

  I loved going to Germany because I had relatives in the little town of Krauthausen. They treated me like my family had never left there. Two of them were teachers, and they had children who played the cello and piano, who were highly educated and refined. It made me wonder—what the hell happened when Adam Funk crossed the seas to get to America?

  Germany was a great place for guys to work. It’s a real shame that the promotion isn’t there anymore. Otto would bring guys in, and we’d work the same building every night, the whole summer. They’d change the matches, but we were in the same building every night. It really taught guys how to be creative because you had to be in that situation. You had to change up your match every night.

  Having to work that more scientific German style and always adapting helped give a guy a sharper wrestling mind, because you always had to adapt and change. Plus, you had to be real enough that they came back the next night.

  One of my favorite people to work with was in San Antonio around that time—Dick Slater. I’ve heard from a lot of people over the years that I had a big influence on Slater’s wrestling style. Well, Slater wore trunks like me, but there wasn’t anything wrong with that.

  As long as I knew Dick Slater, he worked like I did. He worked like me before he ever saw me. We just had a lot of the same ideas about what would get over. We became good friends, and I don’t think he changed his walk or anything for me. I think he walked like a goof, because he was half-goofy, and he did some pretty wild things.

  Hulk Hogan once told me the first time he ever saw Dick Slater was on Clearwater Beach, Florida. Slater had a cat by the tail and was swinging it around over his head while running down the beach, according to Hogan, and the cat was on fire.

  Slater was one of the toughest guys you’d ever want to meet—just hard-nosed. There was a promotional war in the Tennessee area, with a bunch of guys claiming on TV that the Fullers couldn’t wrestle, and neither could anyone on their roster. Well, Slater was booking for the Fullers when he went to the bar where the other company’s boys hung out, and he beat the hell out of Bob Roop. Now, Roop was no slouch–he was a national AAU amateur wrestling champion and represented the United States in Greco-Roman Wrestling, in the 1968 Olympics. You don’t get those distinctions unless you are tough and can handle yourself.

  As I went through the territories, I also got to see a lot of young talent that was on the rise. One young wrestler was Paul Taylor. I wrestled him in Georgia and thought he has a lot of wrestling talent. Plus, he had good taste in his choice of favorite wrestler! I always thought he had a lot of sense, too, and it looks like he had a lot more sense than I did, because he got out of wrestling in the ring full time and went to work in the office end of things, working behind the scenes in WCW and the WWF. I think it’s a hard job, and Taylor is a guy with a good mind who added to whatever company he worked for.

  Another couple of impressive talents were Don Kernodle and Sgt. Slaughter. Junior and I wrestled them once in the Mid-Atlantic territory, where Junior was booking in 1983. Junior brought me in for a shot so we could work a tag match with them.

  Slaughter and Kernodle were both excellent. I really think a lot of Don Kernodle’s work, and he really doesn’t get his due. Slaughter was great, too, a really great-moving big man. Putting those two together was a great idea, and those two did a great job with it.

  There was almost the sense that they were the new big hell team, taking over from Gene and Ole Anderson, who had been one of the top teams in the area in the 1970s. The Andersons were another good team, and they drew some money. As far as work and style were concerned, it seemed to me Gene was the bigger influence. The original Andersons team was Gene and Lars (Larry Heinimi). Ole became Lars’s replacement on the team, and Ole went from being Alan Rogowski to really being Ole Anderson in those years. I don’t know what he would have become if it wasn’t for Gene Anderson and the style Gene did.

  One of Gene’s last runs as a wrestler was him being managed in the Carolinas by Sire Oliver Humperdink, who later had a lot of success in the 1980s in Florida. I loved Oliver, but he was one goofy bastard. He had a sign on the back of the old van that he drove, which said, “Onward through the fog.” I don’t know that any phrase could have fit someone any better than “Onward through the fog” fit Oliver Humperdink.

  One night in Tampa, he went through the fog

  and a stop sign, and a dead-end barricade, and the side of some family’s house. I think that was a very foggy night, and yet, the weather was clear.

  I might have stayed in Mid-Atlantic, but Jimmy Crockett, who owned the territory, didn’t want too many Funks there. He was enjoying a lot of success and felt like his way was the right way of doing things. Junior and I actually brought Hansen and Brody in to work there, and they were one of the hottest teams in the world at the time, based on their work in Japan. Jimmy thought they would be too much too handle, and he might have been right.

  I don’t know that me staying there would have helped their business, because their business was great at that time. Why did Jimmy need me, Hansen, or Brody down there?

  Crockett did a good job of protecting his area. He ran the Carolinas and Virginia, and it was a very isolated area. If you thought about the places for big money in wrestling, you might think of Chicago, or Detroit—one of the major metropolitan areas. Yet, that Carolinas territory, with all those small towns, was kicking ass and taking names in 1983, making more money than anyone else in the country! They were doing much bigger business than the World Wrestling Federation that year, and the WWF territory back then included New York, Philadelphia, Boston, Washington, D.C.—some of the biggest cities in the world!

  I didn’t just travel around to wrestle. I also traveled around for about six years trying my hand at rodeo.

  My daughters got into rodeoing while they were in school, and I think between them, they won more than 50 saddles. My younger daughter Brandee was a natural, but she got burned out on it before she finished high school. My older daughter Stacy won a scholarship to West Texas State in rodeo.

  Whenever I was out on the road, hopping around territories, and they had a rodeo event, I would always try to squeeze in a short trip home to see them. Vicki, God bless her, would pick me up at the airport and drive the pickup truck to the event while I slept in the bed of the truck. It was the greatest thing in the world to watch my kids compete and do well. Those girls were incredible, and that’s not just “Proud Papa” talking, either. They were both state champions in barrels and pole bending.

  We also got the girls a good horse. His name was Lightning, and he was a little albino horse, about half the size of a regular horse, but he had a huge heart and would just win for them, time after time. And the kids knew exactly how to work with him, to get the most out of him.

  CHAPTER 17

  My First

  Retirement Match

  I announced my retirement in Japan in 1981, two years in advance of my planned 1983 retirement show. It was around the same time as the Abdullah angle with the fork to the arm and was born out of the same sense of necessity to compete with Inoki.

  I wanted All Japan to have something that the fans could follow along with for a long period of time, and my idea was to announce my retirement that far in advance and then build to it slowly.

  I discussed the idea with Baba and Junior, but it was my choice and my idea, and it was my idea to have it for two years. I thought we’d have something built up by then, and at that point, All Japan would have some other things with momentum to carry the company from that point.

  Things kept on pe
aking, and the company was really rolling by the time we did my retirement match. The match was Junior and me versus Stan Hansen and Terry Gordy.

  If I hadn’t done what I did when I did it, I truly believe Inoki would have eaten All Japan, and the company wouldn’t have existed much longer. New Japan was leaps and bounds ahead of us at the time, in 1981. My retirement was an enabler; it enabled All Japan to have some long-term programs to build to the future while it was going on. I’m not just patting myself on the back when I say that I unselfishly gave that company three years to get back on track and then willingly gave up my position as one of its top attractions. I would call that being a good soldier. Give me a medal, please?

  The night of the show I had a tough time. It was very emotional for me, because I truly had no intention of ever going back to Japan. Baba certainly never said anything that night, or in any of the nights leading up to it, to make me think there was a plan to bring me back. I had gotten close to a lot of the wrestlers there, and even a lot of the guys in the press, and I was very much taken aback by the whole thing.

  The point of the match was almost as much to show Gordy in a new light, with more of a main-event feel, as it was to spotlight my retirement. I think the match really did a lot for Gordy. He was a hell of a hard worker and had unbelievable natural talent.

  After that retirement match I was done. That was it. I still got paid a meager amount as a booker, but I had no involvement with the company. And they had programs going so strong that things just kept on rolling for the next 15 months, and I just stayed retired that whole time.

  Now, we must be clear—I said I was retiring in Japan. I never did say I would never wrestle again, and it was never my intention to stop wrestling everywhere. I didn’t lead Baba, the fans, or the press to think that was what I’d meant. I had worked a handful of matches by early 1985 in the United States, but I really did stay out of the ring for most of that first year after the retirement match.