More Than Just Hardcore

by Terry Funk

  But every ticket he had was counted as one already sold by the promotion, which was similar to how the Yakuza, Japan’s version of the mob, used to contribute to a lot of sellouts for wrestling in Japan.

  The Yakuza always had numerous ways of making money. They weren’t involved in the drug trade back when I went to Japan regularly for Baba, and I don’t know if they are now or not. Back then they made money from gambling—they ran every pachinko parlor in Japan. They also ran events, and the way they ran events was that they bought 2,000 tickets to a wrestling show in a 2,500-seat hall, almost “buying the show,” in effect. Then they went to every business in town and sold tickets. Not buying tickets was not an option.

  They were very fair about it, though. They would go to a big business, making a lot of money, and say, “You buy 100 tickets.”

  The next guy might be a mom-and-pop operation, in which case they’d say, “You buy two tickets.”

  And when they were done selling their tickets, the show was officially declared a sellout, which it was. There might be a few hundred empty seats, but the tickets were all sold.

  The deal with the King of the Death Match was, every match in the tournament was a different kind of bloody stipulation match. I worked the semifinals with Tiger Jeet Singh, a big foe of Inoki’s in the 1970s. Our match was a barbed wire/broken glass match. I knew Tiger well enough to know that even though I was going over, I would also be the one taking the bumps into the barbed wire, because he sure wasn’t going to. What else did I expect? Tiger was Tiger, and I knew and accepted that before the match even started. As long as I accepted that beforehand, by God, we’d have a match!

  After defeating Tiger, I moved into the finals against my good friend, Cactus Jack. By that time the show had gone from afternoon to nightfall. It was the Forever Show, but the fans were still there and still elated. They had known it was going to be a long one. Hell, some of them brought their lunches!

  The final match, billed as a “barbed wire explosion ladder match,” turned out not to be all it was cracked up to be, kind of like the electrified cage match from Halloween Havoc 1989.

  The idea was, we’d have all this stuff in the ring, which would be surrounded by explosives. At the 10-minute mark in the match, they would all go off, causing an incredible explosion of the ring. Before the match, Cactus and I went to talk to Asano. We didn’t care about the explosive force, the dangers to our own bodies, or any of that. We just wanted to know, “Is this going to work?”

  Asano said, “Oh, going to work very well. I spend $20,000 on this.”

  We said, “OK, that’s good, then.”

  We figured if he was spending that much on the damn thing, it would work.

  They also had some explosive boards with barbed wire around them, and those weren’t any pleasure. Asano had huge amounts of barbed wire rolled up onto a board, and hitting those was just atrocious.

  Finally, the countdown started as Cactus and I kept battling, and the crowd was in great expectation of this tremendous explosion that was going to take place.

  I said to Cactus, “We’d better be ready for this one.”

  Finally, the sirens went off, the lights were flashing, and Cactus and I figured we had them, as we both lay dead in the ring. And then the huge explosion went, “Poof.”

  Poof! That’s all there was! Hell, compared to the bombs they used in FMW, these felt like a puff of fresh air. There was nothing to them! They were half-assed explosions, from a half-assed promotion.

  I looked at Cactus and he looked over at me, and we didn’t know what to do. Finally, I stood up in the middle of the ring, put my hands out and said to the fans, “WHY?”

  All those people had sat through all these matches for the big death match finish, and all they got was “poof.”

  But my reaction showed them I was as disappointed as they were, and they accepted it as Cactus and I went on and continued the match. Eventually Cactus tangled me up in another exploding barbed-wire board and beat me, but we both left the ring with some nasty burns.

  I still had a name in Japan, and I felt that Cactus beating me in the finals of that tournament would help him a great deal, and I wanted to help him. When we first went over there, Mick was not looked at in Japan as a top wrestler. The first time Mick had gone to Japan, it was a few years earlier, and he had gone in for Baba. Baba saw nothing in him and wasn’t willing to look at him as a potential success. That’s nothing against Mick—it’s just that Baba wasn’t willing to try to make successes out of people who had not proved themselves in the States, in his eyes. Until the American companies started signing guys to guaranteed contracts, Baba had always been able to get away with his approach, because he could pick from the cream of the crop. Everyone wanted to work Japan, because that was where the biggest money was, so Baba could pick and choose who he wanted. Those contracts for Americans changed everything in Japan, because the Japanese had to make their own boys now. I’m not so sure shoot wrestling would even exist over there today, much less be as popular as it is, if the Japanese groups still had access to the top Americans.

  What happened to Mick in his first trip to Japan happened to a lot of guys. You have to prove yourself in Japan, and Baba almost always reserved his big pushes to Americans for the ones who had already made a name for themselves in the States. If an American who hadn’t made a name for himself in the States was coming into Japan, he was coming in to do jobs, and that was Mick’s role in his first tour.

  By 1995 in the States, Mick had already become someone special, in WCW and the independents. But in Japan, he needed a bump, a push, and I felt winning the tournament would be a good push for him. I think it helped him.

  We ended up going to the hospital together, and the next day we got on the same plane. Neither one of us looked too good, but it was great money, and I would do it again.

  Now you might ask, “Why would you do these things to yourself?”

  Well, we were with an independent promotion, and that meant very little coverage and no TV, so Cactus discovered what I had learned a long time ago, in Japan. They have a great many newspapers and magazines covering wrestling, and if someone was entangled in barbed wire, or had a stick up their ass, that guy was much more likely to find his picture in one of those periodicals than if he had a headlock on someone. We endured the crazy spots to steal coverage in the weeklies and dailies for what we were doing.

  One thing that got us a fair amount of press was the “fire chair.” Cactus and I were wrestling on his first tour for IWA, when he lit a chair on fire, and proceeded to wear my ass out with it. Now we had discussed it, and he was only supposed to hit me once. He ended up hitting me about six or seven times, until I finally just tackled his fat ass and told him, “OK, Cactus, now that’s enough of that shit! That’s enough!”

  But damned if the flaming chair didn’t make a few magazine covers! And it should have—it looked like Cactus was holding the goddamned Chicago fire over his head.

  The other thing about it that struck me (if you’ll pardon the pun) was that when I walked by it on to my way to the ring for the match, I noticed the thing had been completely doused in kerosene. I could see it glistening, and I could smell it.

  I thought, “You know, I was the one who was supposed to soak that thing, but I didn’t soak it that damn much! Is that damn Asano trying to kill us?”

  But the more time passes, the more I think my buddy Cactus might have been the one to come behind me with an extra gallon of gas.

  Cactus and I represented IWA on a show at the Tokyo Dome, April 2, 1995, where 13 promotions were represented, each providing one match. The match was Cactus and the Headhunters against me, Shoji Nakamaki and Leatherface, who had wrestled for Vince Jr. in the 1980s as Corporal Kirchner, in a barbed wire match with baseball bats.

  Weekly Pro Wrestling, one of the wrestling magazines there, was the show sponsor and was involved in getting me to come in for the show. When I first heard the idea, I thought it was utterly absur
d! Thirteen different offices were going to be able to work together to put on a show?

  We had worked out a spot where the Headhunters and my partners would be outside the ring fighting, and I would do a moonsault, crashing onto them. It worked out beautifully, with the Headhunters catching me.

  The Headhunters were about the only guys who ever did. In another match in Japan involving Onita, I did my courageous moonsault off the top rope. Onita, Cactus and Mike Awesome somehow missed me. Nothing was there for me, except the floor.

  I ended up with a hematoma on the side of my head the size of the Softball, and for the rest of the match, I wasn’t sure where I was or what I was doing. Onita tried to toss me back in the ring, and Victor Quinones, my manager, came running down to the ring to stop the thing because I was out on my feet, just knocked silly. After the show was over, I ended up taking another trip to the hospital. I am grateful to this day for Victor’s help.

  I sure hope those guys never get the idea to try to play baseball, because they damn sure can’t catch!

  But getting back to the Tokyo Dome match, Cactus and I came close to getting into some real trouble. During the match, Cactus was going to set fire to a board. We had talked about it earlier, and were both in agreement that we needed to do something special to call attention to our match, which was only the fifth match on the big card.

  One of the Japanese officials apparently had seen some of the things we had done before, because he said to us, “No fire. You use fire, fire marshal close down whole Dome.”

  But Cactus and I felt like we’d get some great publicity out of this and decided to light the board anyhow. We got to the spot in the match, and Cactus and I were the only ones in the ring. He squirted fluid all over the board and got out the lighter, while we were both lying on the mat. He kept flicking and flicking the lighter, but wasn’t having any luck, mainly because he was holding his hand upside down and was trying to light the board as it lay on the mat. He kept on burning his hand, and then he’d drop the lighter, pick it up and repeat the whole process.

  If he’d thought to raise up the board and light it on its side, it would have gone up beautifully, and I guess we would have closed the show, because after his fourth failed attempt, the fire department guys saw what he was doing and started going nuts! The referee was trying to stop the thing, but all that kept it from happening was that Cactus kept burning his hand and dropping the lighter. If we’d closed that show down, we’d have been immortal in Japan, and that was what we had in mind. Of course, we never would have been asked back to Japan to work for anyone, but we weren’t looking that far ahead at the time. Between the wrestlers and the fans, we also might not have gotten out of the Dome alive!

  With fire department officials hopping up on the ring apron, Cactus finally gave up and went on with the match.

  When we got back to the dressing room, Asano was screaming, “No fire! No fire! You ruin me! You ruin me!”

  Then he grabbed the referee and bitchslapped him! He was slapping the referee, I guess, because there was no way he had the balls to try to slap Cactus or me. He didn’t mind paintbrushing that poor referee about 20 times, though. I guess it was supposed to impress Cactus and me. That poor referee’s head was bobbing back and forth.

  All told, though, we busted our asses on that match. After the referee-slapping concluded, Masa Fuchi came up to me and said Baba wanted to talk to me.

  I went over to Baba, and we smiled at each other.

  He looked at me for a second and said, “Very good. Very good.”

  That was about the highest praise Baba ever gave someone.

  It was the last time Baba and I ever spoke.

  But being over there with Cactus was always fun, even if we did tend to come back with some new scars or burns.

  Cactus was all about business. Like me, he was in Japan to make as much money as he could. Unlike me, this meant he was willing to sell any goddamned thing he could get his hands on.

  One time, we were in Japan, and I was selling T-shirts before the show started. This 45-year-old fan came running up, saying, “Please sign! Please sign this!”

  I looked down, and there was this huge pair of underpants, with “Cactus Jack” written on one side, and a faint brown stripe running down the back.

  Cactus Jack had sold this son of a bitch his dirty underwear, from right off of his ass!

  I asked him about it, and he just looked at me with those innocent eyes and said, “Well, I got 2,000 yen for them, Terry.”

  CHAPTER 24

  Home on the Ranch

  My family wasn’t thrilled about my hardcore wrestling endeavors in Japan. My wife and both my daughters were worried about me doing more dangerous things, as I got older. But it was my choice, as it has always been. They were not happy with me doing those things, but a man’s gotta do what a man’s gotta do, and what I’ve got to do is provide. The way I provided was to be home as much as I could and perform as few times as I could while making us a good living. The pain and sacrifice of a couple of violent matches was not as bad, to me, as the pain and sacrifice of being on a wrestling tour and away from home for weeks, for the same amount of money.

  Worrying about me in the ring was nothing new for my daughters. Just as my brother and I had, Brandee and Stacy grew up thinking their dad was really fighting for his life every night. Mike DiBiase told me once, when I was still a rookie in 1965, “You don’t ever insult the intelligence of your family. When they reach a certain age, and you’ll know when the time is right, you owe it to them to smarten them up to the business. You tell them.”

  Vicki had known about the business since right after we got married. I knew she’d be worried enough about me without having to worry that my opponent might be really trying to kill me. And to this day she still worries about me.

  As if being the love of my life wasn’t enough, Vicki was also a great asset to me professionally. She would protect the business as hard as I would, if not harder. She knew that a lot of the people in the audience knew she was my wife, and she was as good a worker in the audience as a lot of guys were in the ring.

  I told Stacy first, when she was 13. The business was firmly entrenched in its “wrestling is real” mode, and I truly think waiting until they matured a little made their dialogue at school easier, when the subject of what Dad did came up, because when they defended it as sport, they truly believed. And so they handled it, and the other kids learned quickly not to bother them with it. I was the same way. Id had a few fights, growing up, but boys are different.

  I also think growing up with that mindset gave the kids a healthier respect for the business, just as I’d had, growing up. It was something special, something worth protecting, as opposed to telling a five-year-old, “It’s fake. It’s phony.”

  What respect is that kid going to have for it?

  These days, it’s entertainment, and yes, there’s a difference between “fake” and “entertainment.” The difference is in the connotation. “Fake” doesn’t have a very pleasant definition, but “entertainment” does.

  My daughters both always thought the world of the boys, but I was always happy that neither of them ever expressed much of an interest in getting into wrestling. There are easier ways of making a buck, and better ways of making sure you’ll have money to retire on—like being a greeter at Wal-Mart. Wrestling is tough on a family, and if anyone knew that, my daughters did.

  Not long after they were smartened up to the business, I had a whole new problem to deal with concerning Stacy and Brandee. I’ve handled a lot of tough situations in my life, stood up to a lot of tough guys and stared down some of the most powerful men in the wrestling business, but I don’t know that I was ready for this.

  My daughters were starting to date and bring home their boyfriends. And dating had the strangest effects on their personalities. If one of my daughters was dating a smart guy, she would study. If she was going with a triathlete, she would be out running every morning. If one of them wa
s going with an idiot, she would become an idiot. Unfortunately, they were dating idiots most of the time.

  Now, in all seriousness, my kids were always pretty good kids, and I’m very proud of them. But they did give me some heartburn with some of their dating choices.

  I was never an intimidator as a father, but I got my point across when I needed to. Stacy was dating a guy once who just irritated the hell out of me. I wish I could remember his name.

  On second thought, no I don’t.

  Anyway, I would tell her to get home by 10 p.m. Well, 10 o’clock would come, and this guy wouldn’t have her home. He’d bring her home at 10:15 or 10:30. And then, he’d come in with her and sit on my couch and watch the evening news! He’d just sit there with a big smile on his face, just looking around the room like he knew something that I didn’t.

  Well, this went on for a period of time, and I couldn’t knock him, because that wouldn’t get rid of him. Nothing else would, and he was getting the best of me. I had to figure something out.

  Well, he was a cowboy and very proud of his pickup truck. It was a hell of a nice truck, so when he came over, he’d be sitting there, watching the news, and I’d yawn a little bit, stretch and announce that I was going outside for a little fresh air. I’d go out front, open up his gas tank and piss in it, about a cup’s worth.

  I got great satisfaction from that. I didn’t like the guy—he was driving me nuts, and I couldn’t get rid of him. But every time he went to leave, his engine would sputter and cough before starting up. Piss isn’t like sugar, which will totally destroy a gas tank, but it can cause some problems. So there’s a tip for all the fathers in the world. Got a problem with a daughter’s boyfriend? Piss in his gas tank!

  This kid eventually stopped coming around, and I don’t think he ever had engine trouble again.

  But my daughters didn’t need boyfriends to get into trouble. One time, while Stacy was in high school, she got a wild hair and ran across the grass at McDonald’s and tore the grass up in her pickup truck. The truck was kind of messed up, with a hole in the muffler from her going up on the curb. Of course, someone at the place got her license plate number and called the police, who called us.