More Than Just Hardcore

by Terry Funk

  Ironically, a documentary crew following Bret around caught all of this on tape, just as Barry Blaustein was filming the rest of the wrestler segments for his documentary, Beyond the Mat. The documentary about Bret was released about a year later and was called, Wrestling With Shadows.

  It was a hard time for Bret. A month earlier, he had lost a friend, as I had, when Brian Pillman passed away. Brian was found dead in his hotel room, the day of a WWF pay per view, October 10, 1997.

  I was shocked at the news of Brian’s death. I still feel sad when I think of Brian, because it was such a surprise. Maybe I should have, but I didn’t see it coming. He had crushed his ankle in a car wreck, but it never occurred to him that he wouldn’t come back. He always had in mind that he was still in the business and that he’d be getting back in the ring.

  In addition to the 50 Years of Funk show, Barry Blaustein’s cameras caught me at a banquet, at my daughter’s wedding, at the doctor’s office, even getting out of bed one morning!

  The strange thing was, the camera started out intrusive, but they followed me around for such a long period of time that, eventually, it just became part of the scenery. At first, I was doing things that weren’t my normal things, acting in a way that wasn’t natural. In other words, I was performing. But after a period of months, I got used to Barry and his camera being there, and there was no performance.

  You might think they’d have been reluctant about having the whole thing shot for a movie, but the wedding party for my daughter Stacy’s ceremony was actually pretty excited about the cameras being there.

  But my kids have always been like that. They never had to perform for the cameras. They were never shy about cheering me on at my matches, even if they were being filmed in the crowd. In fact, if you go back and watch the tape of my retirement in 1983, my younger daughter Brandee is in the crowd, crying. I guess I did something right, because those girls love their dad, and my matches would often get emotional for them.

  Anyway, the wedding ceremony made it into the movie, and when I saw the finished product, I thought Barry did an excellent job with it. I understand Jake Roberts was pretty upset with it.

  Jake “The Snake” Roberts had been a big star in the WWF, among other places, in the 1980s. By the time Barry caught up to him, though, Jake wasn’t doing that well. He was appearing at small independent shows and, judging from the movie, smoking a fair amount of crack cocaine.

  I can’t really understand why Jake was upset with the movie. Hell, he smoked crack right there on camera! It wasn’t Barry’s fault. Barry just filmed Jake doing what Jake did.

  My segment came out as me. What you see in that movie is pretty much how I am.

  Every now and then, someone will come up to me and say, “You did a great job in that Beyond the Matf

  I always say, “Well, thank you, but I didn’t really do anything. I just kind of walked around and was just myself.”

  CHAPTER 27

  Cactus and Chainsaw

  One time in the late 1970s, I wrestled once (and only once) in San Antonio under a mask, as “Dr. Knows It All.” I honestly thought it was a clever idea to go on one week as the mysterious “Dr. Knows It All.”

  It didn’t last long. As soon as my match was over, I pulled the mask off. I knew it wasn’t working.

  Another one that didn’t work was Chainsaw Charlie.

  The WWF was in trouble in late 1997. Eric Bischoff and WCW had recruited away a lot of Vince’s stars. Vince damn near lost it all. If WCW had been smart and hadn’t gotten complacent in the late 1990s, they could have finished him off. They thought they were smart, but he was the one left standing.

  And he was left standing because he was forced to push some new names, and a lot of them clicked with people. One of the ones who clicked was my Japan and ECW running buddy—Mick Foley, a.k.a. Mankind, Dude Love and Cactus Jack. And Mick was about to get a tag-team partner. He hadn’t yet reached his peak as a superstar, but he was definitely getting there.

  Jim Ross, the great announcer who had come to the WWF and had become Vince’s right-hand man, was the one who gave me the call. I’m pretty sure Cactus had promoted to him and Vince the idea of us working together, but hell, if they didn’t want me at all, they wouldn’t have called.

  I agreed to come in because I wanted to help that company. There’s just a challenge to going to a company that’s an underdog and trying to make whatever changes you can, to be a part of its improvement. And I think I was part of it. I wouldn’t say I was the swaying factor, nor did I ever expect I would be, but I pitched in my two cents.

  I also wanted to go for Cactus. I wanted to do anything I thought would help Cactus. And I still would. Now, why I would want to do something for the big goof, I’ll never know. I guess I just like the guy.

  I was actually supposed to work in the WWF in late 1993. They had called me about becoming head booker. They were doing their big Survivor Series show in Boston, and they wanted me to wear some silly outfit with a blue mask, to be one of Jerry Lawler’s knights, taking on Bret Hart and three of his brothers in a big tag match. Their plan was, Bret was going to beat me, then take my mask off and put his finishing hold, the sharpshooter, on me and beat me again. After that, “they” said, I would become the creative head of the company, replacing Pat Patterson, my old friend. Patterson had gone from being Ray Stevens’ tag partner to being the WWF’s booker, but Pat was looking to step down and take it a little easier.

  I went to meet with them about it, and going from my ranch, with all the open space, to New York City, with the cabs and people, the hustle and bustle, was culture shock. It was an hour to get here, an hour to get there. There was no place to go that I was going to get to very quickly.

  I met with them and then had dinner with Pat. It was great—we laughed a lot and told old stories. Then, I went up to my hotel room and went to bed. As I lay there, I got to thinking, “I’m not sure if I want to follow through with this deal.”

  I got up the next morning and left a note for Vince. It read, “My horse is sick. I think he’s dying. I’ll see you later.”

  A couple of hours later, I was at the airport, when I heard them call my name for a call on the airport paging system. I was running by that time!

  And I came home. I escaped again.

  As it turned out, that was when Lawler was having his legal troubles, so they replaced him with Shawn Michaels. I would have been one of Shawn Michaels’s knights!

  When I came to work for him in late 1997, one of the first things Vince said to me was, “So how’s your horse?”

  The first time I walked in, in 1997, the atmosphere there wasn’t really very positive. I don’t know if the deal with Bret Hart and Montreal was the cause of it, or if it was just that WCW was kicking the WWF’s ass (which it was). There was a definite feeling from McMahon and from the guys in the locker room that WCW had become the real power in the profession.

  Coincidentally, this was also around the time Vince was starting to make his stuff counterprogramming, by incorporating some of the hard-edged style that allowed a niche group like ECW to make a national impression.

  I got ready for my big debut on Raw that Monday night in December, and the plan was for me to come out of a box. Bruce Prichard, one of the backstage guys, was describing to me what they wanted me to do.

  I said, “That’s it? You just want me to come out of the box?”

  “Well, yeah,” he said. “Just come out of the box. Do you want to come out as anything?”

  Before my brain could fully process the question, my lips blurted out, “Chainsaw Charlie! Get me a chainsaw, so I can go out there!” I can’t explain it. It just popped into my mind.

  They asked me what I wanted to wear and then got me some Levi jeans and a pair of suspenders. I already had a red shirt, so I kept that. Then, they got me a woman’s pantyhose stocking and some baby powder to put on my head, all at my request (what an idiot). I guess I could have just gone out there without anything over
my head, but I wouldn’t have been Chainsaw Charlie with Terry Funk’s head, would I? I’d have been Chainsaw Terry!

  I came out of that box with my chainsaw and my stocking over my head, and the crowd, expecting some great surprise, let out a sound that seemed strangely reminiscent of escaping gas. I had visions of coming out to a tremendous roar, but that wasn’t exactly the reaction I got.

  I started out teaming with Mick right away, but they had us in a situation where we also liked to fight each other. This culminated in a falls-count-anywhere match on Raw where we brawled all over the place.

  The match ended with us both in a dumpster that was going to be pushed offstage by The Road Dogg and Billy Gunn, the New Age Outlaws. Road Dogg was Brian James, son of Robert James, whom I had wrestled no telling how many times under his ring name of Bob Armstrong.

  We set up for it by Cactus tossing me into a dumpster set up on the stage at the top of the ringside ramp. Then Cactus climbed up the railings alongside the monitor and delivered a big elbow onto me, in the dumpster. It was supposed to be a thrilling, dangerous spot.

  But when Cactus did his big dive onto me, the thousands and thousands of little Styrofoam puffs, put in there for our protection, poofed up into the air. That was not our idea of hardcore. I guess we would have rather had just the metal floor on the bottom and killed our damn selves.

  We ended up at Wrestlemania XV, the WWF’s biggest show of the year, against the New Age Outlaws in a dumpster match, where the only way to win was to put both of your opponents into a dumpster at ringside.

  We did a spot during the match where Road Dogg powerbombed me into the dumpster, from the ring. This meant that he would pick me up over his head and fling me forward, sending me back-first over the top rope and into the dumpster below. It was a dangerous spot, because there wasn’t much room for error with a metal dumpster, but we thought it was worth it, because we wanted to do some memorable things for the major event. It was especially dangerous, because I was flying blind, so to speak, since I was going backwards. I was pretty much relying completely on Brian’s guidance to make sure I landed inside the thing OK.

  His guidance was perfectly good, but what we didn’t know was that there was a big, two-by-12 plank in the dumpster. We hadn’t checked the dumpster beforehand. Hell, who would think that there would be a huge plank in the dumpster we were going to use for our match?

  I hit the board right on the right cheek of my ass. Immediately, a hematoma swelled up on me. It looked later like I had a blue watermelon sticking out of the side of my ass. I damn sure didn’t feel like moving, but I knew I had a match to finish, so I got on out of there and kept going. Still, it was awfully painful, but that’s the kind of thing that happens.

  The match ended with us putting them in a dumpster backstage to win the match. Immediately after, I wasn’t looking to celebrate the victory. I went to the doctor backstage.

  To this day, I have no muscle tone to the right cheek of my ass. The whole cheek just hangs there, drooping. I have an indentation where I once had an ass cheek.

  Ever since then, I’ve been a half-assed wrestler.

  Mick and I also made a lot of personal appearances while we were in the WWF. Mick always tried to treat people right, but on one occasion, he got a little preoccupied, and it came back to bite him right in his big butt!

  Cactus and I were at an autograph signing, and the people were just coming one right after the other.

  I’d ask the guy how he was and what his name was. He’d tell me, I’d write it on the picture with my autograph and then pass it to Cactus, or vice versa. We did this hundreds of times that day, always with the same conversation.

  “How are you?”

  “I’m fine. How are you?”

  “Great. That’s great.”

  Finally, this gal came up and Cactus said, “Well, what’s your name?”

  She told him, and he wrote it down on the picture.

  He said, while signing, “Well, how are you?”

  She said, “Well, not too good. My husband just passed away.”

  He didn’t even look up.

  “Well, that’s great,” he said, and passed me the picture. I stopped.

  “Cactus! Did you hear what she said?” He looked up.

  “Whoa, no! What did she say?”

  “She said her husband just passed away!”

  He felt really bad, but he had just been in that mode, you know? Sign, make small talk, repeat.

  Cactus was a really good guy to travel with, though. Just like in Japan, we both wanted to make as much money as we could, which meant spending as little as we could. When we were on the road, we would rent a Pinto, or whatever the cheapest piece of shit was we could get.

  Sometimes we’d have another guy with us, so we were splitting the car three ways, splitting a motel room three ways and arguing over who was sleeping on the floor. Hell, we were making good money! We were working for Vince McMahon, and the WWF was making a big comeback! I guess we just didn’t want to take any chances, so we’d be ready for the bad times.

  Those damn Pintos had that high engine whine, and those little-bitty air-conditioners, and we’d be tooling down the road in our $ 18-a-day car, while the other guys would cruise by in their limousines and sports cars.

  And any time we saw another Pinto coming up the road at us, we knew who it was. He’d pull alongside us, and we’d wave at “Stone Cold” Steve Austin! Yes, the biggest star in all of wrestling was driving the cheapest son of a bitch he could find, too. The young guys could ride in the limos, but the guys who had been down the road before and knew what it was like to have hard times, by God, we weren’t sure things were going to continue to be all right!

  For a couple of years, Austin was as big a star as I’ve ever seen in this business. He was not only in the right place at the right time, but he had the ability to produce that “Stone Cold” character and to get it over with the people.

  Another star on the rise there was Dwayne Johnson, The Rock. It would be a little more than another year before he really hit the top. I knew from looking that he was a very capable individual and a talking son of a gun. He understood the business very well, from being a third-generation guy (his dad was Rocky Johnson, and his granddad was Peter Maivia, for you remaining 12 simple-minded people who might not have known that). His family was one of the few times I’ve ever been in the ring with three generations.

  Rock’s dad, Rocky Johnson, had a lot of charisma. And I had wrestled High Chief Maivia in Houston, in an NWA title defense. He was a great guy to work with and knew how to work his gimmick. Peter was a good draw for Paul Boesch in Houston, as well as all over the West Coast. He was a big Samoan, and tough as hell, but was so easy to work with. You had to be tough to get covered in tattoos from the waist down, which he had to do as part of his becoming a true Samoan high chief. And hell, between Rock and Randy Orton, the third-generation guys are batting a thousand! Maybe Vince ought to find out what Greg Gagne’s kids are up to!

  Cactus, even in 1998, making as much money as he ever had, would even save on hotels by finding some goofy-ass fan to stay with! He didn’t know them from Adam! It would just be some fan he met at the show!

  “Hey, Terry, I’m skipping the motel. I’m going to save some money.”

  “Well, what are you going to do, Cactus?”

  “Oh, I’m going to stay with this guy over here.”

  Well, how did he know it wasn’t some goddamned Hannibal Lecter who was going to cut him up and make Cactus Jack stew? Actually, the real question is, how did that fan know that Cactus Jack wasn’t Hannibal Lecter? Who would be nuts enough to take a guy who looks like Cactus Jack home with them?

  We went through a ton of shit, but I am proud to consider Mick Foley a good friend of mine to this day. My good friend Mick also got me to read his goddamned novel, Tietam Brown, by telling me they were going to make a movie out of it, and he thought I’d be perfect for the part of the father. And that’s how he got m
e to read his book, because he knew that was the only way I’d read the fucking thing! That son of a bitch.

  I’m just kidding, Mick! Actually, it’s a really good story.

  But he did tell me that it was going to be a movie.

  All joking aside, Mick Foley is proof that anyone can achieve something if they bust their ass for it. Here was a guy who certainly didn’t appear to have the physical endowments to be a wrestler. He just had the brains and the “want-to.” But he really, really wanted to, and he did. Of course, he also tried to kill himself in the ring a couple of times.

  Actually, one of the times he probably came closest, he wasn’t trying at all.

  At the June 1998 pay per view, King of the Ring, Cactus was wrestling as Mankind and had a Hell in the Cell match with Undertaker. Now, these are cage matches with one key difference—there is a roof on the cage.

  This was the final battle in the two-year feud between Mick and Undertaker, who had possessed one of the better gimmicks to come down the pike. One of the reasons it was so great was that Mark Calaway, the man called the Undertaker, did his gimmick so well and protected it so well. He took a gimmick that should have lasted a couple of years before burning out, and he got a career’s worth out of it. And he accomplished this by truly becoming the Undertaker. Hell, undertakers should be looking at him to see how they should be. Seriously, though, who would have thought he would have had that much staying power?

  Believe it or not, I gave Mark his previous name, when he came into WCW to team with my friend Dan Spivey, as the Skyscrapers. I came up with “‘Mean’ Mark Callous,” so blame me for that one if you want to.

  Mick and I drove up to Pittsburgh where the match was being held, and he was talking about how he wanted to do something spectacular and memorable. We somehow came up with the idea of Cactus taking a big fall off the top. Then, after he came back, to everyone’s amazement, Undertaker would still be on the top of the cage and would choke slam him onto the cage roof. The same prop guy was supposed to make sure the two sides of the cage were secure, so the impact from Mick’s body would cause the top of the cage to sag and gradually come open, so Mick would tumble into the ring. It would be a hell of a spectacular bump, but Mick figured he’d have the cage breaking his fall.