by Terry Funk
We’ll never know what went into that kick, but I’d guess Maeda decided that Choshu just needed to be kicked. And he damn sure kicked him!
What surprised me was that Choshu never went after him. That was the thing I never understood, because getting kicked full in the face would anger me. I think I would have had to have a second time around with that boy. When my bones mended, I think I would have gotten right out of bed and gone looking for that son of a bitch! And Choshu was a tough guy.
A couple of months before that happened, in August 1987, I found myself working one last WWF show. It was in Houston, for a show commemorating the retirement of Paul Boesch. A few months earlier, Boesch had switched from Watts’ Mid-South (which had become the Universal Wrestling Federation in 1986, not to be confused with Maeda’s UWF) to McMahon’s WWF. But now, he was calling it a career.
Halfway during the show, they had a ceremony in the ring for Paul, with a lot of his old friends. One of them was Verne Gagnea bitter enemy of the WWF, standing in the WWF’s ring! It took a hell of a man to get him there.
Verne Gagne, Gene Kiniski, Lou Thesz, Danny McShain and the rest of them were there because they knew it was the end of something special, something they only had a chance to deal with on occasion in their careersan honest man. And Paul was an honest man, to the penny, throughout his entire career, and he took care of people when he really didn’t have to.
CHAPTER 21
On the NWA’s Side
After I finished up Road House in late 1988, I was working out every day, several hours a day. I’d been doing 1,000 crunches a day, every day for years. And I was ready to get back into the ring.
Here I was, 225 pounds, in the best shape of my life, and Dave Meltzer, in his Observer newsletter, said I was “too skinny!” Skinny, hell! I had well-defined muscleshell, I had abs, for the first time!
I also started back into wrestling, first in Dusty Rhodes’s group in Florida. The old Championship Wrestling from Florida office closed down in late 1987 and a year later left Dusty the promotion on TBS that used the NWA name, although the old coalition of promoters using that name was no more. Dusty formed a new Florida office in 1989 and asked me to come in and work some shots with him and his son, Dustin, who was a rookie wrestler with a lot of promise.
We did some pretty creative stuff. On one spot, I was about to drag Dusty behind my pickup truck, but he somehow got himself untied and got away. I wish he hadn’t (just kidding, Dusty!).
Working with Dustin was an experience, because I’d known him since he was a child. He would turn out to be an excellent worker, and although he was a little green in 1989, his potential was obvious.
For Dustin, overcoming the shadow of the American Dream was always difficult. With me, I went out from Amarillo, where Dad tended to stay, so it was easier for me to overcome the image of my father. With Dustin, his pop had worked on top in all the areas where Dustin found himself now trying to get over. It was hard for Dustin to overcome his dad’s notoriety and force of personality. It wasn’t a matter of ability, because Dustin was damn good in the ring.
If Dustin had been able to come along when his father was at his peak in the late 1970s and early 1980s, I think he would have melded a lot easier. Sometimes it’s easier when you’re with the legend than it is to follow the legend. You get the rub from being with that legend, and there’s also not the same type of comparison. You’re not trying to live up to people’s gilded memories of what the legend was like. But when people saw Dusty for years, and then Dusty was gone, and then Dustin appeared, the comparison was inevitable.
Dustin bleached his hair like Dusty’s and had a lot of the same moves, but could not become a duplicate of his father, and the best thing he ever did in wrestling was to quit trying to be a duplicate of Dusty. In 1995, Dustin went to the WWF and became Goldust, a really flamboyant character that was totally different than anything he had portrayed previously. I truly believe Goldust was one of the greatest characters in wrestling, and I don’t think people realize that this guy was doing something quite special. I give Vince McMahon credit for creating the idea of Goldust, but it was Dustin who brought Goldust to life, and it worked because he was good enough to make it work. A lot of people think that was a stupid, absurd character, but I thought it was great. And he did a great job with it. I think that character could have gotten pushed to greater heights than it ever was, but Vince put limitations on Dustin’s push, because of what the character of Goldust was. If Goldust, as the exact same type of character, had debuted in late 1997, instead of late 1995, I think he would have been a huge deal from a box-office perspective. But in 1996, just as the character was taking off, Vince just didn’t want the kind of flak that character was getting, and he toned it down.
Not long after I finished up with Dusty, I got a call from Jim Herd, the TBS executive running WCW (still calling itself the NWA) after TBS bought it from Jim Crockett, to come in for a Clash of the Champions show on April 2, 1989, where they wanted to honor past NWA world champions. I also announced the main event of Ric Flair versus Ricky Steamboat, with Jim Ross.
Steamboat was a world-class pro wrestler and a hell of a guy. He was one of the few guys I know of who never turned, over the course of his career (Bruno Sammartino was another). I think he would have made a hell of a heel, because it is the guy who grows to learn babyface crowd psychology who can become a great heel by doing the opposite, or depriving the people of what they want to see. But he was a career babyface, and I think it was because he was such an asset as a babyface to whomever he worked for that it just never crossed their minds to turn him. That also says a lot about Steamboat’s ability to get over and stay over. A lot of guys have to be turned, or have to leave an area, so they can be fresh, either in the opposite role after turning, or in their new area. But Steamboat was able to stay over, to the extent that he spent years in the Carolinas in the 1970s and 1980s as a top babyface, and I think he was more over when he first retired in late 1983 than he was in 1977, when he got his first huge push.
A month after the best-of-three-falls match, they wanted me back to “judge” the last Flair-Steamboat rematch on their “Wrestle War 89” pay per view, with the storyline being I would help determine a winner of the match if it was a time-limit draw. They also wanted me to do an angle with Flair, and they wanted me to serve as a member of the booking committee. That appealed to me, because I thought it would be a chance to use some creativity.
The booking committee was me, Ric Flair, Jim Ross, Kevin Sullivan, Jim Cornette and a few other guys. They didn’t exactly work together, though. There was a lot of division and conflict within that committee. I had no idea I was walking into a loaded situation, because the committee wasn’t in agreement with Herd. I walked into my first meeting, completely unaware of the problems. When Herd talked to me about coming in, he’d made it sound as if things were as smooth as glass. I ended up being the outside individual, almost alone, compared to everyone else in there. What was asked of me ended up being damn near nothing. It was a pretty shocking situation.
The conflict seemed to be a power struggle between the committee and Herd. The members of the committee, all of whom had put in years in the wrestling business, felt Herd was inept. Herd, a former St. Louis TV station manager and executive with Pizza Hut, was fighting to show he was boss. If everyone had been on the same page, I think we’d have had a much stronger product.
Jim Herd was as qualified to run that company as anybody whom Turner would have put in that position. Anybody put in that position was going to have problems. Especially a non-wrestling person is going to have to be led. Because of the shape the thing was in by the time I got there, I don’t know if they had tried to lead him in the right way and educate him into the business, or if they just tried to muscle him around, or if he had tried to muscle them around. To this day, I don’t know what happened between those people before I got there.
All I knew that on one side was Jim Herd, who had just si
gned me to one of the better deals I’ve had in my life, and on the other was people in the business I knew and respected.
Not long after I started, Kevin Sullivan approached me before a meeting and said, “I just need to know one thing, whose side are you on?”
I said, “What? I’m on the NWAs side!”
He said, “No, that’s not what I mean! Are you on our side, or Jim Herd’s?” “I’m on the NWAs side!”
I thought that was the most ridiculous question I’d ever heard, but my answer was not the politically correct answer. But I’m not a dummy. I saw that the best thing I could do, for myself, was to keep from falling into one side or the other.
And there were some very creative guys on that committee! Kevin Sullivan was one of the greatest idea men I’ve ever known. He had a gazillion creative ideas and could go one after the other, never running out! Here’s an idea you wrestling fans might not know was Kevin’sGoldberg. The undefeated streak was Kevin’s idea, and it was the last thing in WCW that really got over like a million bucks. It was a very basic thing, but something that really worked. That idea made a ton of money for WCW before they found a way to screw it up, although that wasn’t Kevin’s fault.
The thing about Sullivan was, someone had to be there to separate the good ones from the bad. I’d recommend Sullivan for a booking committee anywhere, even today. He just needs to be regulated, is all.
There was such a mix of strong personalities on that committee that there was no one boss, no one steering the ship. Herd thought that booking committee was the way to go, because when he was an executive at Pizza Hut that was how they did things. For the wrestling business, a committee like that needs a strong leader, someone who can control and fire the other members of the committee and who could make the final decisions, instead of having eight people who wanted to go in eight directions. But you weren’t going to fire Ric Flair, the world’s champion (although Herd did just that in 1991). You weren’t going to fire me, not in the middle of such a hot program with Flair. That concept just doesn’t work in wrestling.
And again, you don’t need guys booking who are working in the ring.
Here’s an example of how little control over things I had. I brought in a talented young man to wrestle, and even though he put me over in his first match, I thought his talents were obvious, but they never brought him back. His name was Eddie Guerrero. Maybe you’ve heard of him.
I hadn’t brought Eddie in just to do a job for me. It wasn’t like I was sitting around one day and had the brilliant idea to bring in Eddie just so I could beat him up on TV. I knew he was a hell of a worker, because I had watched his early matches, and I told Herd and the rest of them, “This guy’s got it. He’s really good.”
I thought the world of his work, and I was shocked that he didn’t get an offer after our match. I did everything I could do to get him in there, which shows you how much influence I had as a member of the booking committee.
Eddie, of course, ended up making his own way, as part of a great tag team with Art Barr in Mexico, and then (after Art passed away) a great talent with ECW, WCW and WWE, where he finally rose to the top.
I also couldn’t do much to help my old friend Dick Murdoch. Dick was working for the NWA in 1989, but he didn’t last long after I got there.
We were having one of our meetings in the dressing room, with Herd trying to figure out what was wrong with the company, when Murdoch walked by. Herd had always liked Murdoch, so he called him in and said, “Dick, come in here and tell us what you think is wrong with the business.”
Murdoch said, “Well, Jim, it’s you. You don’t know a goddamned thing about this business.”
Well, hell, that was the truth! Jim Heid’s idea of a good concept for professional wrestling was the Ding Dongs, a tag team that wore little bells all over their costume!
But for Murdoch, that was also the wrong thing to say. About a month later, Dick was let go. I still loved Murdoch, and he was probably right, but I couldn’t blame Herd. Hell, that’s not what you want to hear from one of your workers.
After Murdoch left TBS, he went to work for the Coors distributorship in Amarillo. He was the Coors goodwill ambassador, which meant his job was to go from bar to bar, buying Coors for people everywhere he went. It was the perfect job for Murdoch$90,000 a year, and all he had to do was go to bars and say, “Hey, how are you, pal? You’d better drink a Coors. Herelet me buy you a beer. Let’s have one together.”
That was his job!
Coors sponsored a rodeo in Amarillo, and Dick was there. So was this guy who was a bit of an asshole. He was in the stands, cussing at everyone and just being obnoxious. Right in front of 3,000 people in the stands, Dick just beat the shit out of the guy.
Vance Reed, who owned the distributorship, was there. He wasn’t thrilled, but Vance was a great guy, so he let that one pass. A short time later, Dick took his new pickup truck to the distributorship, where they had these huge delivery trucks. They also had a high-pressure wash system for the trucks, and Dick told one of the guys there to wash his truck.
The guy said, “We’re not supposed to wash people’s pickup trucks.”
“Goddammit, wash my truck! Get the thing in there and wash it!”
So the guy washed the truck, and the high-pressure system blasted all the paint off of it. Dick took the truck and had the body shop repaint it. Then, he sent the $2,800 bill to Coors!
Needless to say, Dick was not the Coors goodwill man for much longer.
It ended up that just about the only thing I could affect was the stuff I was doing in the ring, although that was the program with Flair, which I was pretty pleased with. The program itself, after the initial attack, was my direction. It started when I came in the ring after Flair regained the title from Steamboat and challenged the new champion. When he pointed out that I’d been in Hollywood and out of wrestling for a few years and needed to work my way into contention, I went berserk and attacked him, piledriving him onto a table. It ended with Flair being carried out while I screamed, “He said I wasn’t good enough!”
The story was, the attack would leave Flair injured for several weeks, and they would tease that the injury was serious enough that he might have to retire, before he came back and got his revenge on me. While he was out, I cut some really intense promos on Flair, including one where I brought out a skinny Ric Flair imposter with a yellow stripe painted down his back.
Flair was really bothered by this stuff, and I was told to tone it down a little bit. I didn’t see the problem, because I was the heelthe ending was going to be that Flair was going to kick my ass! I sure wasn’t going to say all these outrageous things, only to beat up Ric Flair and then go home and hang up my tights.
I don’t know if Flair was upset because he was insecure, or because he wasn’t there. You see, he was home, selling the injury angle, and all he knew about what I was doing was what he saw on TV. All he saw was me blasting him every week. With all the divisions in WCW at that time, I wouldn’t be surprised if he thought I was working on behalf of someone else there to make him look bad. He had been having his problems with Jim Herd even then, fighting over his contract, which Herd thought was too much money for him to make.
All that stuff was done to create a heated atmosphere for our match. If it hurt him, that certainly wasn’t my intent. I’m certainly not sitting here apologizing, because I didn’t see any real damage that was done to him. I did it as a kick in the ass for business. I had certainly done heavy heel promos like that and had never hurt a babyface before. I never did hear about Dusty Pvhodes being upset about the things I’d say about him, because he understood it was business to build up revenue at the box office. And while the Funk-Flair feud did very strong business, I think its box office was hurt by me having to tone down the heat.
I’d toned down promos a few times before when the heat got to be too much, particularly in Puerto Rico, but I had never before had to take it down a notch because someone’s feeling
s were hurt.
I wasn’t the only one Flair had a problem with that year. There was a lot of heat between Flair and Paul Heyman, known then in wrestling as “Paul E. Dangerously,” manager of the Samoan Swat Team. What was Paul E.’s heat with Flair over? Hell if I know, but one night, they were screaming at each other in the dressing room, and not long after, Paul E. was out of WCW It was a definite personality clash.
Paul E. was young guy who would play a big role in my professional life. I knew right away that he was nuts. The thing that really showed me that was when he rented a car on his credit card and let the Samoan Swat Team drive it on their own.
About $4,000 worth of damage later, the car was sitting in front of the rent-a-car place, and Paul E. realized he had made a mistake. Sometimes, Paul E. was not the genius many people think he is! But when it came to wrestling, the guy had a feel for it, a great mind and unlimited energy, as I would find out when I worked for him a few years later.
Regardless of how he felt personally about my promos, Flair was a pleasure to work with. I truly enjoyed every one of our matches. We had some very solid encounters. How could I not love a match when I was in there with one of the best performers in the world?
But I paid a price for those matches. One night I went over the top rope in a match with Sting and hit the rail outside, cracking my sacrum. It wasn’t anybody’s fault, just a bad landing. I ended up riding around on a plane every day going from town to town, and I couldn’t sit on the plane, except foi takeoff and landing. The only way I could stand it was to kneel on my seat, facing the person behind me.
I also had a nasty staph infection. I had torn my bursa, and my elbow swelled to the size of a baseball. 1 got myself some needles from a veterinarian in Amarillo and drained the damn thing myself, every night. I was thinking I was some kind of doctor, but I was almost Doctor Kevorkian, because I almost eliminated myself. While draining the fluid out, I was letting germs in, and the result was a staph infection. I just didn’t feel like I had the time to go to a real doctor about it, but Dr. Funk ended up putting me out of action for a couple of weeks. He wasn’t one of my better characters.