More Than Just Hardcore

by Terry Funk

  And the retirement ceremony that night was very real to me. It was very, very emotional to me and, I think, for the whole audience. My kids were there and they were crying. It really wasn’t a work. I was really retiring, and I felt I could. I felt I had the knowledge and fortitude to survive in the real world of business.

  In 1984 Baba asked me to come back and referee a match in February, in which Jumbo Tsuruta would win the AWA world title from Nick Bockwinkel. Several months later, Baba asked me to come back on a tour, and I did. Coming back in Japan after retiring hurt me somewhat in the fans’ eyes there, but it wasn’t like I could tell them that it wasn’t me who had asked to come back. And it hurt me personally, to know that my return hurt the fans, but there was a financial reward to returning that I could not ignore.

  I must have been some kind of idiot. I had paid off the Double-Cross Ranch, and had a good chunk of money in the bank. I thought, “My gosh, we’re finally going to be all right, for life. I can probably make more money in the States than I was making in Japan, anyway.”

  Only a fool would think something like that.

  Somehow it never came out that Baba asked me to come back. It always seemed to the fans as though coming back out of retirement was all my idea, but it wasn’t. I knew when I agreed to come back that I wouldn’t be as hot as I’d been. But it must have worked to some extent, because otherwise you wouldn’t be seeing 101 Japanese wrestlers retire and then come out of retirement, over the past few years.

  The company I came back to in late 1984 was somewhat different than the one I’d left.

  All Japan scored what was considered a major coup in 1984 when Riki Choshu, one of Inoki’s top stars, and 12 other wrestlers from New Japan jumped to our side. Well, it was a coup, but after they got to All Japan, it became a chaotic coup. I really don’t think getting them was a smart thing to do, and never did.

  We ended up with too much of a crew, more than even Baba could handle. What we got were more guys vying for main-event positions than we had main-event positions, not even counting the main-event guys we already had. There is strength in numbers, but Baba got the numbers a little out of balance there. I think the proof of that is that almost the whole group jumped back to New Japan a few years later.

  They were a clique, and cliques can cause chaos because they start from a stronger position than a single individual. I was glad to have Choshu because of his stature, and Yoshiaki Yatsu (one of the wrestlers who jumped with Choshu) was a good guy who I liked, but Choshu wanted more control over the matches than Baba wanted to give him, so Choshu wasn’t going to be happy. And when Choshu wasn’t happy, none of those guys were happy.

  Baba also had a tough choice to make—which of his two top stars, Tsuruta or Tenryu, would get the shot to work the feud with Choshu? It was a big slot— imagine what it would have been like if Vince McMahon could have gotten Goldberg from WCW in 1999. That’s what Baba getting Choshu was like, and the person getting to feud with Choshu was going to work a lot of main events.

  Choshu and Tenryu had been friends from their days before All Japan, but I don’t think that played into Baba’s decision to give Tenryu the slot. Tenryu used the octopus, which was also Inoki’s hold, so it was a natural to put those two in together. I also think that since Tsuruta was Baba’s main boy there was a desire to keep him from Choshu for a while. I know he didn’t trust Choshu enough to take care of Tsuruta. Now, I’m not saying Tenryu was a sacrificial lamb, because he wasn’t. But it didn’t hurt Tenryu to be beaten by Choshu, whereas it would have hurt Tsuruta. And to have Choshu beat Tsuruta would have given Choshu too much power, which Baba wasn’t about to do. But whatever the reason, Choshu and Tenryu made for a very successful feud.

  I mentioned earlier about Choshu stiffing me in a match, but it was really the office stiffing me. I honestly think he was under orders from Baba not to give me too much out there. I think Baba decided, after getting me out of retirement, that he didn’t really want me back there after all, and the Choshu match was his way of sending me that message. Maybe Baba thought I had too much power. He wanted the total availability of Terry Funk, and I was not going to give him that availability, because I wanted my family to have it.

  In addition to the $7,500 a week I got for Paradise Alley, the movie also helped me in Japan in terms of exposure. When I was filming the TV series “Wildside” in 1984, I got $10,000 a week. And I was getting that huge money for not wrestling. Compare that to the $7,500 a week I was making in Japan, for helping book and for killing myself every night in the ring.

  I loved Baba, loved Mrs. Baba and loved Wally Yamaguchi, one of Baba’s right-hand men. But the fact that I loved those people didn’t keep me from seeing that I wasn’t getting everything from All Japan that I probably could have.

  Case in point: Wally Yamaguchi would bring me this stack of 12-by-12 cards, which I’d sign. I’d sign 25 or 30 of them, “God bless, Terry Funk,” or whatever, hand them back to Wally, and he’d take them to be sold. During the big shows, Wally Yamaguchi would sit in the back of the locker room, and he’d be like a machine, signing my name on those cards, in what I would have sworn was my own handwriting if I didn’t know better! He could sign those things at a clip you wouldn’t believe—he could actually do an exact duplicate of my signature, and do it faster than I could sign my own name! They were selling these for 2,000 yen apiece. Guess how many yen I saw out of those? Not a one. Was Wally the pirate profiting from my name? Of course not.

  I didn’t complain. I looked at it as part of the package. But All Japan also took a cut out of everything I did outside of wrestling, whether it was the record album, or whatever.

  And there was always the unknown in Japan. The unknown part of the business is what goes on behind the closed doors, and it’s a very big part of the business. Gaijins have very little understanding of that part of it. I’ll probably never know how many opportunities for commercials or other ventures I lost out on because Baba shot them down.

  Baba didn’t make many bad moves, but bringing in Choshu’s entire crew was one of them. And that move set a precedent of doing more Japanese versus Japanese main events. I saw it happening, with fewer American wrestlers involved in the big matches, which I knew wasn’t going to be good for any of us.

  A better move was when we offered some good money to Tom Billington, the Dynamite Kid, the most famous opponent of the original Tiger Mask in New Japan. Dynamite came to work for us in 1984 with his cousin Davey Boy Smith. They were a great team, but there was no question Dynamite was running that show.

  Dynamite was a guy who would go out there night after night after night and physically destroy himself in the ring. I’ve seen him go into the ring with a melon-sized swelling on his lower back, barely able to walk. He would still work the match and take some ungodly bump. Then he’d get on that bus with the rest of the boys. He really needed help to get to his seat, but he wouldn’t accept any. He’d make it all the way to the back by himself, because he was too damn tough to take help. He’d get to one of those seats, get himself a beer and do the same thing the next night. Dynamite loved to have the respect of the boys, and he certainly had it, but it would just kill you to watch him climb onto that bus.

  Sometimes I think of Dynamite and some of the insane things I’ve done in my own career. Why do we do that stuff? Why do we shorten our careers, and maybe our lives, physically? Why did I drag my 50-year-old ass up to the top rope for a moonsault? Why do I hurt myself on small shows where there’s not a lot of money to be made? I have absolutely no idea what drives us to do some of those things. Maybe guys like me are just queer, but in a different way. Instead of being queer for guys, maybe I’m queer for wrestling.

  In 1985, Junior and I got to work with two guys who had become probably the top-drawing tag-team in the world—Mike Hegstrand and Joe Laurinaitis, better known as Hawk and Animal, The Road Warriors. At that time, they were probably the best box office attractions in the world, aside from Hulk Hogan. I always loved w
orking with them, except for one thing. Mike Hegstrand, Road Warrior Hawk, loved to imitate me, so every time I saw Hawk, I’d have to listen to 30 minutes of him doing Terry Funk before we started talking about the match. He really loved me, but I think that might have just been because he could imitate me so well!

  I actually hurt my back badly in a match against them in Puerto Rico. They stormed the ring, and I bailed out, but when I did, I misjudged my landing, thinking that there was an elevated platform outside the ring, like on the other three sides. I took a nasty fall and could barely finish the match. I was in a tremendous amount of pain.

  The Road Warriors were also sharp businesswise, and I think their manager, Paul Ellering, was a real boon to them. Hawk knew that he needed that solid platform that Ellering provided, and Animal (Joe Laurinaitis) knew that he needed Ellering there, because he couldn’t handle Hawk all by himself. Hawk was a wild man, and Animal was a stable person, but I don’t think he could have handled Hawk like Ellering could. And I’m not talking about in the ring.

  CHAPTER 18

  1983: The Wrestling War Begins

  As I ended my full-time Japanese career in August 1983, the industry there had changed a lot. On my first tour there, in 1971, it had been me, Dominic DeNucci, Bruno Sammartino, Jerry Kozak, Mike Paidousis and Junior. That was the crew, along with Baba and his boys. We had TV, but the houses weren’t always great, and it was a struggle.

  By the early 1980s, business had grown and grown and was just phenomenal by 1983. It’s a funny thing. When business is going strong, the strong points infect the rest of the promotion, and it gets healthy all the way through.

  Baba had some great talent and was about to steal Inoki’s thunder a bit by buying the rights to the TV cartoon character Tiger Mask and giving the gimmick to a young wrestler named Mitsuharu Misawa. Baba really ingratiated himself to the creator of Tiger Mask and capitalized on the relationship he had cultivated to get that license.

  The new Tiger Mask created interest, but I don’t know that Misawa was the best choice to be the new Tiger Mask. Misawa might have been better just as Misawa, all those years, and he was (and is) a great performer, but Misawa was Baba’s protege. Baba felt like the gimmick would be an instant success.

  Misawa wrestled in a style that was very reminiscent of Jumbo Tsuruta. He was brought along slowly and taught the heritage of his wrestling. I truly think that his training and education were the reasons he was so successful in the long-term. He was taught to respect his business and take it seriously, and wrestling was his life.

  Hell, Tiger Mask wasn’t the only character who existed in both the wrestling and cartoon worlds at that time. Years before, a popular cartoon magazine strip debuted called “Terry Boy.” In the story, Terry Boy wrestled, and he looked awfully familiar, but I never saw a nickel from it. He even became a TV cartoon. Ol’ Terry Boy did all right!

  Meanwhile, in the States, the wrestling business was shaping up to change more than ever before.

  Up to the 1980s, the NWA was the power in pro wrestling. In 1983, Vincent K. McMahon decided to challenge the territorial boundaries and try to establish his World Wrestling Federation as a national promotion.

  The NWA was not strong enough to stop Vince McMahon Jr. from expanding his company into a nationwide promotion. They hated him in the 1980s, and I’m sure some still do today, but any one of them who thought he could pull it off would have done the same thing. Everybody knew that opportunity was going to come.

  Hell, Vince wasn’t even the first person who tried it. In the mid-1970s, Eddie Einhorn stared a group called the International Wrestling Association which included Pedro Martinez.

  Einhorn was a sports guy who helped create the NCAA tournament and the “Final Four,” a great concept. This was before cable came out, and he put the promoters in the position of trying to keep a national program from taking over. Einhorn’s idea was to make wrestling a nationally syndicated show.

  I actually got sued over that deal.

  It happened while I was NWA world champion. Pedro Martinez was on an airplane that Dusty Rhodes and I were also on.

  Dusty spotted him and said, “Terry, you thee that goofy thun of a bitch back there? That’th Pedro Martineth!”

  I wouldn’t have known him if Dusty hadn’t pointed him out, but I did know that the IWA had gotten on TV in Odessa, Texas It was just one small town in our territory. Who gives a shit, right?

  But it was serious business to me, so I asked Dusty, “Where is that son of a bitch?”

  Dusty said, “He’th thittin’ back thayuh,” and motioned his head toward the back of the plane.

  I said, “Well you just point him out to me when we land.”

  After we landed and were walking in the terminal, Dusty pointed Martinez out to me. I walked up to him, touched his collar, grabbed his lapels, got right in his face and said, “Keep your goddamned tapes out of Odessa, Texas.”

  He said, “What are you talking about?”

  I guess he had tapes going in stations all over the country and didn’t know every single city he had. I told him he’d better stay out of our area, and to be ready for a fight if he didn’t.

  I let go and Martinez took off.

  I went back to Dusty and said, “Well, I guess I showed that son of a gun.”

  As we were passing security, there was Pedro Martinez, only now his lapels were ripped and torn, his shirt ripped open and his belly hanging out. He was pointing me out to the two police officers with him.

  They put me under arrest and took me to jail.

  I got right out, but soon after that I found out Martinez was suing me for S18 million and Eastern Airlines for $1 million. I went to court, and Martinez passed around a picture of a testicle that had swollen to the size of a basketball. He said I kicked him in the nuts.

  I never touched his nuts! What happened was, he’d found another wrestler who had a swollen testicle, took a picture of it, and they found me guilty off of that! It wasn’t even his nut, the dirty son of a bitch!

  I appealed, but I ended up settling out of court with him for $5,000, but that was $5,000 I shouldn’t have even had to pay for another guy’s testicle!

  The NWA, Jim Barnett in particular, wasn’t very happy with that situation. I thought they’d be very pleased. Hell, I thought the entire wrestling industry would be proud of me handling Pedro Martinez for them.

  The entire NWA ran from it. Anytime you had a lawsuit, you had no friends. Even Eddie Graham would run from me when he saw me, if there was a lawsuit! Here I was, doing the right thing to help protect their business, and they ran from me!

  I’ve dealt with a lot of lawsuits, but I have to say, what’s wrong with our country today is that we say you’re innocent until proven guilty, but the fact is, in a lawsuit, you’re guilty until proven innocent, and it can be very costly.

  Someone once told me about an old curse: “May you be involved in a lawsuit in which you are in the right.”

  Einhorn ran out of money and closed up a few months later in 1976, but Vince and the WWF weren’t going down as easily in 1984.

  Months before the younger Vince McMahon started his national campaign, I saw something else that I knew would have an impact on the business.

  This kid from California I had seen and talked to a couple of times at shows over the years gave me a copy of his typed wrestling news bulletin, called the Wrestling Observer Newsletter.

  As I read it, I immediately thought that this thing was going to take off. There would be no stopping it. Instead of talking about the matches as if they were real competitions, like the newsstand magazines had done, Dave Meltzer wrote about the business behind the scenes. It had news and results from all over, and was obviously written about someone who understood the business.

  A lot of wrestlers thought it would “expose the business” and ruin it, but I saw it as a thermometer of sorts, to see how different things were getting over in different places. For me, it was a fine tool to look at, to s
ee some of the trends in the business.

  CHAPTER 19

  Working for Vince McMahon

  By the mid-1980s, Vince McMahon Jr. was “the enemy” to every NWA promoter in America.

  From Christmas 1983 on, McMahon was breaking all the boundaries and putting his wrestling shows in markets that had been exclusive to their respective regional promoters for years.

  I knew it was coming. The day I first saw the TBS show, back in 1979, I knew the business was changing and changing fast. It was Jim Barnett’s Georgia Championship Wrestling, and Tommy Rich was his big star. Jim stayed within his own area, and I don’t know why, because he could have made a stab at it himself, since he had the national outlet.

  I would love to say I was a visionary in this regard, but I wasn’t even the first Funk to see this. My father always knew that someday, someone was going to get control of national television. It was no premonition, just a belief that someday someone was going to get on nationally. We didn’t know who it would be, but we knew someone would. The best thing that could have happened, for the individual promoters around the country, would have been to have it run through the old National Wrestling Alliance. But that was almost an impossibility.

  Nor was Georgia the first show to be shown far outside of its own territory. In the 1970s, we saw Los Angeles wrestling in Spanish on a Spanish-language UHF channel in Amarillo.

  Vince Jr. first got people’s attention when he got the USA Network slot for his WWF show, from Joe Blanchard’s Southwest Wrestling group. There was a money dispute between Joe and the network, and USA pulled Joe off the air. I don’t know exactly what the dispute was, but I do know that it wasn’t Terry Funk’s idea of dumping cowshit all over Bobby Jaggers. Yes, that was my idea, but that was not the reason the show went off the air.

  And if you think about it, that would be such a mild angle today. And we poured real shit on him! We had to be “real,” so it had to be real cowshit—wet, runny cowshit! Now, why we had to do that, I don’t know, but the ammonia, the shit and the piss that was in that stuff damn near blinded Jaggers.