More Than Just Hardcore

by Terry Funk

  When I went into shock from it, Paul E. was the one who took me to the hospital. They operated on me, and it was quite a deal. But Paul E. was there for me, when everybody was gone, and he stayed with me. No one else did.

  What heat was left after I toned down my interviews for the last couple of weeks built up to a main-event match at the July pay per view, the Great American Bash ‘89. And what I’d said must have done the trick, because the show was a sellout in Baltimore, and it drew the best gate for a live show the company ever had, until 1996.

  I had announced a big surprise for Flair, which turned out to be Gary Hart as my manager. Again, I was given a mouthpiece, even though everyone in the company knew I could talk on my own. Why? Hell, I don’t know. Ask Jim Herd—or maybe the booking committee!

  Gary was a good manager, though. Managers have all but disappeared today, but there used to be a role for a guy who couldn’t wrestle but who could talk for a wrestler with limited verbal skills. The best I ever saw was “Wild” Red Berry, who managed the Fabulous Kangaroos. They came through Amarillo when I was a kid, and I was fascinated by him. He threw around big words, half of which weren’t even real words! Where he got them from, nobody knows. He mixed in a lot of condescension and made himself a very hated man among wrestling fans.

  Another one who was really good was J.C. Dykes, who managed the tag team of The Infernos. The Masked Infernos, in their blue outfits, were Frankie Cain and Rocky Smith. They were really talented guys, and that gimmick was really over for a long time in Florida, because they knew how to get heat, and so did J.C. He did all the talking, which created a kind of mystique about the Infernos.

  In 1989, Gary Hart was also managing Keiji Muto, who wrestled as “The Great Muta.” He was a hell of a talent, but was kind of standoffish with me at first, since I’d been an All Japan man for years and years, and he was someone Inoki was grooming for stardom in New Japan. Maybe he had a sense of, “What is Funk going to do to me?”

  But that soon disappeared, and we worked well together. They used him exclusively as a heel in his year from 1989 to 1990, but he could have been a big babyface, because he was doing flashy moves that no one had ever seen before.

  Muto wasn’t the only great, young talent I met that year with the NWA. I was also introduced to a young man who would play a big part in my life in years to come—Mick Foley, who wrestled as Cactus Jack.

  He introduced himself to me at a company party in late 1989. My first impression of him as a wrestler had actually come about a year earlier. I can’t remember where I was, but I was watching the World Class Wrestling show out of Dallas, and there was Cactus Jack. I immediately picked up on him as a major piece of talent. They weren’t doing any business, but I saw him and thought, “Damn, that guy’s got something,” and I knew he wasn’t going to wind up working preliminaries for the rest of his life. He really captured my imagination.

  And as a person I liked him from the day I met him. He introduced himself at that party (he had only started working for the NWA at that time) and asked me what I thought of his work. I ended up telling him I really thought a lot of his stuff, but I had to give him a hard time first, so my immediate response was, “I think you’re the shits.”

  He also had some serious questions about his work, and how he could get over better. His desire to learn and improve was obvious to anyone who would have taken the time to look at him.

  I told him he needed to be more aggressive in the ring, because he’d been letting his opponents punish him in the match, which showed he could sell, but wasn’t going to get him over.

  He said, “Why?”

  I thought, “What am I talking to this guy for? Jesus!”

  “All you’re doing is having the shit beaten out of you the whole goddamned time,” I said to him.

  And yet, 15 years later, I look back on wise Terry Funk advising foolish, young Cactus Jack, but who became the rich man first? Hell, maybe I should have been less aggressive! Maybe I’d be as rich as he is.

  Another one was Brian Pillman, who would become a good friend.

  He was a real character, from the first time I met him. He was a fun guy and never at a loss for words.

  He was just a great guy, and he’d call me in the middle of the night and talk about the business for an hour or more.

  When Vicki answered the phone, she’d hold the receiver to her chest and whisper to me, “It’s Brian Pillman.”

  “I’ll talk to him, honey.”

  “Terry! You’re gonna be on the phone for an hour!” And she was usually right.

  I had a lot of heat with those NWA fans, almost everywhere I went. One night in Marietta, I was on my way to the ring to wrestle Flair, and a woman went after me with a butcher knife. Now, why would she defend a banana-nose instead of a good-looking Funker?

  Now, if you’ll notice, I did say almost everywhere. Flair and I had a match during our 1989 campaign in Amarillo, where no Funk had ever been a heel. Even if I’d wanted to be one that night, those people weren’t going to let me. They booed the hell out of Ric Flair! He didn’t get flustered, because he understood it, having been through the same kind of thing in the Carolinas. To this day, no matter how big a heel he is everywhere else, they still love him in the Carolinas, and that’s how it was for me when he and I wrestled in Amarillo.

  The truth was, when I went out to the other territories and played my heel role, that only made me a bigger babyface back home, because a big part of my routine was to talk about how great Amarillo and Texas were, and how crappy every other place was. There was no way I could have ever turned heel in Amarillo. The people just wouldn’t have accepted it.

  After we did a round of singles matches, we did a tag match at 1989’s Halloween Havoc pay per view, me and Muta versus Sting and Flair, in a steel cage match with an electrified roof. Well, it was supposed to be an electrified roof, but it kind of went south on us. Our first problem was that there were these crepe paper Halloween decorations in the cage, and the electric fence caught the crepe paper on fire, so they shut off the electricity! It was the damndest pile of crap anybody ever saw in their lives. Nothing worked.

  The finish was supposed to be that someone would touch a ball attached to the fence roof, and shocks would fire out and shock the hell out of him, but it didn’t work. Actually, I’m kind of glad it didn’t work, because I think it was supposed to be me!

  They told me before the match that it would really shock me, “but not too bad.”

  Well, how bad is “too bad?” Fortunately, I never found out. We ended up doing another finish, where Ole Anderson (in Flair’s corner) decked Gary Hart (in ours), forcing Gary to throw in the towel for us.

  It ended up being one of the most ridiculous damn things I ever participated in, and that covers a lot of ground.

  Fortunately, sometimes fans accept things better than you think they will. Cactus Jack and I found out the same thing a few years later, wrestling in an explosives match in Japan, and the damned explosives wouldn’t go off! The fans knew it wasn’t our fault and accepted it. Maybe the Havoc deal would have worked better if we’d just touched the damn electric ball earlier in the match, shown that it didn’t work, and just gone on.

  Leading up to the Havoc match, we had a deal where I attacked Flair by putting a plastic bag over his head and suffocating him. That deal could have been extremely hot if TBS had gone along with it. They ended up getting so many complaints about it, they never replayed it. People were calling in and complaining about it so strongly, you’d have thought I was really trying to murder Flair. Maybe the complaints were from Vince McMahon, because that angle did get over.

  That was so tame compared to the stuff they do today. If you did that same angle today, they’d just laugh at you.

  While all this was going on in 1989, the McMahons were testifying in New Jersey, and to get out of paying taxes to the athletic commission they admitted in public that wrestling was predetermined. Right after I heard about it, I thought it wa
s lousy. Within a few weeks, though, I thought it was one of the wisest things they could have done.

  Ultimately, what it did was make the business stronger, because it opened us up to the media. The big issue of whether it was a real sport was gone, and so the media didn’t have that to harp on, which meant they could focus on the kinds of stories that could improve public awareness of his business.

  It was the smartest thing he could do—not the smartest thing that we could do, but it was the smartest thing for him because of the ridiculous commission situation and because of the change in dealing with the media.

  The Flair feud wound up with an “I quit” match, where the loser would submit and shake the winner’s hand. It was time for me to get my comeuppance, time for Flair to finally go over in a big way, and time for the feud to be over. The idea of doing an “I quit” match was my idea. Actually, I’m the guy who created the “I quit” match in the 1970s, with Dusty Rhodes. We’d sold out the Bayfront Center in Saint Petersburg, Florida, with the match, and I thought it would be an exciting end to the Funk-Flair feud for the fans. This was one of the times I was right, because it was broadcast on WTBS and became the most-watched wrestling match in the history of cable television, up to that point.

  In an “I quit” match, two men fight until one says those two words. I thought when I said, “I quit,” I’d be quitting the match. I didn’t realize Herd’s idea was that I was saying, “I quit wrestling.”

  My age was one of the reasons they wanted to push me out, but the other was that I just did not fit. I didn’t belong to one side or the other in those power struggles I described earlier. I wasn’t for any group of the wrestlers, or for Jim Herd—I was for the promotion. I really was on the NWAs side.

  I was never worried about being ruined by losing a big match, in part because I always believed I could get myself over with the people through my working ability and my interviews. Maybe that was foolish of me. Maybe if I’d been a more selfish guy, I’d have gotten a lot richer. But to me, my way was a successful way. Maybe it came from the way I grew into the business, as the son of a promoter, with the mindset that we had to do business to be able to keep writing checks to all the guys and making a living for ourselves. That sense of putting the company first and helping the company never left me.

  After that match, they asked me to do commentary. I finished out my time there by calling matches with Chris Cruise, and then I went home.

  They were building up Sting to be the main guy, taking over Flair’s spot, but it was too quick of a switch. What ended up happening was, on the February 1990 Clash of the Champions show that was one of my last nights with the company, Flair, Ole and Arn Anderson turned on Sting. It was supposed to lead to Sting taking Flair’s championship, but Sting ended up injuring his knee later on the show. He was out for four months, and when he came back that summer, he beat Flair for the belt in his first match.

  But with Flair having been such a strong babyface and having that sympathy built up in our feud, Flair was in position to be more over as a babyface than Sting ended up being. It was a premature push for Sting. If they’d taken the time to build to it, then fine, but they rushed right into it. Their feud peaked in that first match, where Sting won, and that was that.

  Chris Cruise was easy to work with. He knew his stuff and was a good announcer, and I think I taught him a fair amount. He always listened to me, because if he didn’t I would kick him in the ass!

  I’m just kidding. He was actually very good, and I was surprised he didn’t have a long career behind the microphone.

  I saw the writing on the wall, though. They wanted me to take a pay cut, to an announcer’s pay, after my year’s deal ran out, and I wasn’t about to take a cut in salary for all the back-and-forth travel. I felt I could make more money doing other things, picking my shots.

  CHAPTER 22

  Back to (What Was Left of) the Territories

  My next significant wrestling campaign was a return to Memphis in late 1990.

  Once again I was working with Lawler, but by now Lawler’s was one of the last territories left. Over the 1980s, most of the regions that had thrived for decades died out. The WWF had been gathering momentum as time went by. This is a hard thing for me to say, but not only were they like the circus coming to town on occasion, they also had great performers, better performers overall than anyone else had. McMahon had been picking off the best talent from around the country for years, and the other promoters were left trying to dress up whoever was left over. Well, you can cover a turd in chocolate, but it’s still hard to sell. And I’m not talking bad about the other guys, but from top to bottom, Vince had the highest-quality performers.

  One of them was Ted DiBiase, whom I’d known since he was a kid. The WWF picked him up in 1987 after they told him McMahon had a gimmick for him that would be McMahon’s own, if he was a wrestler. Ted called me and asked what I thought he should do.

  I said, “Teddy, make your move, because if he’s got something that good in mind for you, you’ll be able to set yourself up financially for life in a shorter period of time than any other way. You’re not ever going to get another opportunity like this. You’d better get it while you can.”

  Ted ended up out of the business after hurting his neck in 1993, but he was financially secure because he had spent six years as “The Million-Dollar Man.”

  The first time I saw him in the role, he fit it like a glove, and I knew he’d made the right choice.

  Memphis was the last surviving territory because it was the last one to keep its top star. Lawler had never been pulled out of Memphis because he was part owner of the Memphis promotion, and whether it was 1976, 1981, 1983, 1990, or today, Lawler never changed. I’ll tell you something about Jerry Lawler— Lawler, right now, could step into a WWE ring, get on the microphone and cut as good a promo as the top 10 percent. Lawler could get into the ring and work as well as the top 10 percent, if he wanted to, and he can also throw a better punch than 99.9 percent of anyone working today. I worked a show in 2004 with Lawler, and he hadn’t skipped a beat.

  And there’s none better to connive or manipulate than Jerry. Thank God he’s never had a reason to put a dagger in my back. And that’s a compliment to Lawler, because I’ve been around the best, the smartest and the slickest.

  To be able to survive in Tennessee for as long as Lawler’s been able to, you’ve got to be awful sharp. Hell, Cactus Jack should have taken Lawler as his mentor, instead of me—Mick probably would have ended up owning the wrestling business!

  Lawler could also be a hell of an addition to the WWE writing staff. I promise, the only reason he’s not doing that is that he has no desire to do that anymore.

  In 1990 and early 1991 I was working a Texas versus Tennessee feud with Lawler, and I was teaming up with Eric Embry and Tom Prichard. Embry was a good worker, and Prichard was just great.

  I wasn’t in Memphis long, but it wasn’t because I got sick of it or anything. The plan all along was for me to come in for a short time and help spice things up. It was Lawler’s idea, and I think it was a good one.

  Just as I hadn’t worked in Memphis for some time, I had not worked for Baba in Japan for five years. Andre was also on the tour (one of his last in Japan), and it was one of the last times I ever saw him.

  He was hurting so badly, and people would look at him all stooped over and say, “He’s not so big.”

  Let me tell you something. When he was around in the 1970s, he was pretty damn tall. I don’t know how tall, but I guarantee he was over seven feet, but that acromegaly that he suffered from made him stoop so badly that he was probably a couple of inches shorter than he’d been several years earlier. I think gravity also took its toll on the massive Andre.

  One night, we were on the bus going from one town to the next. Andre brought out a jar and showed it to me. It had all these huge chunks of bone in it. They were pieces that had been taken out of his knee.

  Andre was in a lot of pain, but he�
��d see me and say, “Terry.”

  “Yeah, hey, Andre.”

  “You wanna watch a movie?”

  “Yeah, Andre. I want to see it.”

  “OK.”

  And he put The Princess Bride in the machine, and we watched it. The next day …

  “Hey, Terry. You wanna watch the movie again?”

  “Yeah, Andre. Let’s watch that movie.”

  I had to watch that damn movie every damn day of that tour. Andre would ask, “Hey, Terry. You wanna play cribbage?” Well, what was I going to say to Andre the Giant?

  “You’re goddamn right I want to play! Come on, Andre! Let’s play some cribbage.”

  And I stayed in touch with a lot of other people I had met in the business. Brian Pillman still called the house at weird hours, and we’d talk for 60 minutes or more. He was a fun guy, like I said, but he thought a lot about the business. If you didn’t know Brian well, you might not know he was as enthralled by the wrestling business as he was. I mean, he really loved it. Maybe he loved it a little too much.

  He was talking to me when he came up with the idea of the “Loose Cannon” character that he played on WCW and WWF, a character who was crazy and unpredictable, even by wrestling standards. And I wonder if he didn’t fall prey to a hazard that a lot of guys did, of becoming his character. He truly became a loose cannon, just as Louie Spicoli became the crazy idiot who was a bigger nut than everyone else, which was his character in wrestling.

  But Pillman was a sharp guy. In 1995, Pillman was working an angle where Eric Bischoff (head of WCW at the time) thought he and Brian were working everyone, including the boys in the locker room. The idea was he was in such a bitter feud with Kevin Sullivan that Pillman was let out of his contract. And they really did let him out! Turned out, the ones getting worked were in WCW, because what Pillman did was sign with the WWE once he was free.