Dusty: Reflections of Wrestling's American Dream

by Dusty Rhodes

  One of my other favorite Dusty stories is when we were coming back from Jacksonville. Steve Keirn, Dusty and I were in my dad’s airplane. We used to always stop at an ABC liquor store to get beer, wine; whatever we’re gonna drink coming home. Dusty bought a bottle of Penn-Rose sausages, like the little Vienna sausages, but they got hot peppers in them. So we got in the airplane and took off and cracked a beer … for some reason Dusty was always trying to be Mr. ‘The American Dream’ better than everybody. So Keirn took a sausage, I took a sausage and Dusty reached in and pulled out one of these little jalapenos or whatever kind of peppers they used to season these sausages … he took one out and just—’These ain’t from Texas, I’m tough. We boys from Texas eat this hot stuff’ —and he threw the pepper in his mouth. Keirn and I didn’t think anything about it because we guessed that was what he did. Well, I was sitting right in front of him and Keirn was sitting next to him and the cooler was on the floor between all three of us. I looked at Dusty and his face went pale, starting at his chin … and as the color went out of his face, over his lips, up his cheeks, and when it got to his nose … literally his cheeks and nose turned white. Fluid started running from his nose, his mouth … he started coughing and hacking and just making all kinds of noises and crying and snifflin’ … and Steve and I were laughing—he grabbed the cooler and blew all the stuff into the cooler. It took him about ten minutes to get his shit together; he couldn’t even talk! Finally, when he could talk, he looked at Keirn and I and said, ‘Well boys, I guess the American Dream ain’t as tough as he says he is.’”

  Georgia Senator Richard Green

  “When you travel on the road with Dusty, he’s the type of guy who has to have breakfast at the Waffle House. Well, one day we were in Conyers, Georgia, and we were sitting at the counter. This real skinny cook came over … tall, about six-one, six-two, maybe 175 pounds, tattoos, sleeveless T-shirt … he came over and asked, ‘You Dusty Rhodes? Is that true?’ Dusty had just signed an autograph. Then he asked, ‘Is this wrestling really true?’ Well, Dusty looked at the guy and flexed his arm and clinched his fists together in front of his chest and replied, ‘If you don’t think so, why don’t you come get some of this!’ The guy’s expression was priceless. He sauntered away, never saying a word.”

  “Playboy” Gary Hart

  “Dusty had this long, white Cadillac with stars on the side of it. Dusty, Haystacks Calhoun, and Danny Hodge were riding in it, while Humpy [Sir Oliver Humperdink], Pak Song, the Hollywood Blonds, and I were riding in a van behind them. As we pulled up alongside them at a roadside rest area, Dusty and Danny were outside the car doing the stroll, dancing, and singing along with the song ‘Working at the Car Wash Blues’ by Jim Croce, which was playing on the radio. Dusty kept trying to get Haystacks out of the car, and Danny finally got so mad, saying to Dusty, ‘Leave the fat man alone!’ Dusty turned to Danny and smacked him in the face … in a long way. They stopped, looked at each other and started to laugh, then started dancing again. It just went too far.”

  Monsignor Laurence Higgins

  “One of my fondest memories was when Dusty couldn’t come to my 25th anniversary to the priesthood, so he did a video wishing me all the best. In it, he did a skit making up stories about me … some were true.

  I also remember doing a radio interview together, and I brought back an Irish flag from Ireland and gave it to him because he had won the world title. He showed me the tag on the flag … ‘Made in China.’”

  Nikita Koloff

  “We were in Hamilton, Ontario, and we jumped on the private plane to go see the Big Apple. I’m not a big partier, but I hadn’t been there before, so I was game. It was Dusty, Jim Crockett, Barry Windham, the Horsemen, and me. When we landed in the Apple, there were two limos waiting for us. The Horsemen went in one limo and went one way, and we got in the other limo and did our thing. Windham had contacts in the city from when he worked for the WWF, so he came up with the idea to go to a gay club, the Palladium, as a rib. We pulled up to this joint, we went inside, and sure enough, it was a bunch of gays in there. I didn’t even want to touch anything. … It must have been a staggering thing to witness, as I’m sure we were sticking out like sore thumbs. I was getting looks and stares that I wasn’t real receptive to. One of the high spots, however, was that I was up on the second level, looking down, and I saw Dusty and it looked like he was up to something. The next thing I saw is he was at the edge of this jammed dance floor. Then out of nowhere he did the John Wayne swagger across the dance floor. It was hilarious to watch. It was like Moses parting the Red Sea … as he walked, people parted in front of him, and as he passed them, the crowd closed in behind him. He was just Dusty being Dusty. We ended up at this little café. … ‘You’ve got to try this pate,’ he said. It was steak tartare! I about wanted to gag! I ordered normal food and passed the steak tartare along to him.”

  Black Jack Mulligan

  “Dusty liked to rib me. He ribbed me the first time I had a payoff. He had a stack of ones, but I didn’t know they were ones and he said, ‘How would you like one of these?’

  Well, that was nothing compared to what Dusty and Dickie did to me one time. In Texas they have these big, six-foot rattlesnakes. We were going from Austin to Corpus Christi and they put a dead rattlesnake on my car. It scared the shit out of me and I never forgot that. Years later, Dusty and I stopped in Ocala [Florida] for some chili dogs. He had this brand-new Dodge that was kept immaculately clean. We start driving again and I started talking about how I think there are bigger rattlesnakes in Florida than in Texas. Well, he started lisping and as soon as he does, you know he’s bullshitting. Anyway, I had bought this plastic snake and I popped it out while he’s driving and … he starts screaming like a woman … chili all over the place. There were tears in his eyes from laughing so hard. He said, ‘Bobby, sometimes you go way down too far with shit.’ What fun it was … I enjoyed it all the way.”

  Harley Race

  “Dusty won the NWA World Heavyweight title in Tampa, and the following night we were in Key West for Fantasyfest. I booked a charter flight … Dusty rented a Lear Jet. I got there just in time to see the big parade, and Dusty was in it. Three beautiful women jumped on the float with him, and Dusty grabbed one and kissed her and then the second one kissed him. At this point he realized he had just swapped spit with two guys who were dressed in drag. The third looked at him and said, ‘Aren’t you going to kiss me, too?’”

  Jim Ross

  “The Dream used to like to get ready, well, almost ready, for his matches early in the evening in the locker room. By that I mean he would get undressed, put on his Austin Hall cowboy-styled wrestling boots and, well, that’s it. So here you have a 300-pound man standing around a locker room full of male wrestlers wearing absolutely nothing but a pair of boots. I remember one time in Raleigh, North Carolina, at the old Dorton Arena on a hot summer’s night that the Dream’s pre-match locker room attire sent the late Jim Barnett running for the hills when James E. saw The Dream in all his glory.”

  So that’s a little bit of what it was like on the road or interacting with some of the boys and all the crazy shit that went on; stuff that always puts a smile on my face when I think back because we had so much fun. Sometimes we were like little kids in this crazy business we call pro wrestling.

  As we get a little closer to the end of the book, I remind myself that our business is not all fun and games, but it sure is easy to remember the good times, like the time Eddie took me fishing for the first time.

  We were on his boat right near the Howard Frankland Bridge and when I cast my reel I accidentally cast it up on the highway, snagging a passing truck. Well, there went my rod and reel … flying out of my hands. Eddie looked at me and just shook his head.

  Funny shit. As unbelievable as they sound, these things really did happen … and I wouldn’t give up any of them for any price!

  CHAPTER 14

  I was driving back home from an independent show in Lenoir,
North Carolina, where it was another sellout for “The American Dream” Dusty Rhodes—1,500 fans—as I teamed with the Rock-n-Roll Express, Ricky Morton and Robert Gibson, to defeat the Midnight Express, Dennis Condrey, Bobby Eaton, and Stan Lane, and it just struck me how quickly 20 years had passed … just like that—snap!—In the blink of an eye.

  On the card this particular December night were not only the guys I just mentioned, but Nikita Koloff was there as the special guest referee. “Sensational” Sherri Martel, Gary Royal, David Isley, and George South were also on the card, as was “The Ugandan Giant” Kamala. Wonderful Willie himself, Bill Apter, was there, too. And to top it all off, to culminate the night of déjà vu for me, up on the wall doing a promo to challenge me for a card the next month was a video projection of Tully Blanchard.

  As I gave my rebuttal to the video, I not only realized I was talking to a wall, but I remembered that nearly every one of those guys on that card had worked for me at some point in their careers. It’s was like a one point twenty-one gigawatt lighting ride to 1985, but when the night was over and I was looking at the long road home in front of me, it was I who was back to the future of 2004 … 2005 … and it got me thinking of just how I got here … in this new and often treacherous world of independent wrestling.

  After the fall of the small Roman Empire known as World Championship Wrestling in the late ‘90s, I found myself fucked over— first by my assistant for many years, James J. Dillon, and then by a real half-witted accountant who Turner properties put in charge of WCW, Bill Bush. Man, the business was shot to hell in a handbag. Anyway, out of work for about 20 minutes, I formed my own companies, Turnbuckle Entertainment and Turnbuckle Championship Wrestling, TCW.

  Little did I know, however, that the independent wrestling business was more fucked up than WCW. What I mostly found, aside from the handful of legit guys out there who were really trying, was that the business was now made up of kids promoting shows, because they went on the internet and bought a promotion book or something, or they read the sheets from the guys who never promoted a show in their life and ran those shows off of what these guys thought was good … and then they made or bought a belt— champion of the world, of course—and made themselves champion. It was no longer a blueprint of the Mafia with regional Godfathers, but rather a blueprint of “Our Gang Comedy” and the local wrestlers were Alfalfa and Butch … with Spanky and Darla as the promoters.

  And if all that wasn’t bad enough, some of these guys who never drew a dime’s worth of business with anybody and couldn’t draw flies if they were covered with shit, were opening wrestling schools teaching other guys who knew even less than they did, all the stuff they knew … which could fit on the head of a pin and still have room left over for some of the other promoters who were doing the same thing. That’s why I said earlier Murdoch would fart on them.

  I think you get the picture, and it ain’t really a pretty one.

  So, when I got let go by General Bush, the IRS agent, accountant, or whatever he was there, I started TCW and went into that, but I also started working independents. I never really worked independents before, and Terry Funk warned me it’s really rough out there but I didn’t believe it, because he’d been doing it for so long, making a living. He said, “It’s a constant hustle … it’s just really a hustle to do it.” So I kind of started out on my own, making myself available for independents, and in the process, one day out of the blue, I got a call from Paul E. Dangerously.

  Extreme Championship Wrestling at that time already had that cult niche going on around the country … around the world … and Paul E., Paul Heyman, called me to say they were going to be at the Tabernacle in Atlanta, Georgia, a building that used to be the “House of Blues.” He and his partner at the time asked me, “Would you like to come to ECW?”

  With ECW I knew that their unique fans were a group of loyal followers, kind of like the “Insane Clown Posse” followers, who were dedicated to the wrestling papers, the sheets, and the home of ECW of course, was in Philadelphia at Viking Hall, a bingo parlor that the fans renamed the ECW Arena. I met with Paul at a time when I was really down business-wise, because the independents were not paying what I wanted. I figured my price was a certain amount, and I wasn’t going to come off of it.

  Turnbuckle Entertainment did well the first year, but then it went on a downward spiral because we just didn’t do things right. While the people I had surrounding it and actually working for me, worked very hard, we just all didn’t do anything right. If I had to do it over again, I would, but you can’t go back. At that point I said to myself, “I’m going to have to go out and hustle some like Terry told me.”

  As a result I went down there and made a deal with them, a very lucrative deal at the time, and I really thought it was payback from Paul E. from when I hired him at WCW to do the original Midnight Express angle with the new Midnight Express and Jim Cornette. Anyway, he picked me up and it was like he said, “Come on, I’m gonna give you this amount of money, no matter what you do.” At that point in time it was kind of a Godsend, because it was really rough. Because of that, I was always very appreciative, and I honestly didn’t know at the time what was going on with their innerworkings or anything like that. So I went to the Tabernacle in Atlanta and I did the spot with me hitting the ring on Steve Corino; the first time I’d ever seen him.

  The guys I had been around on the independent circuit have all been so respectful, but never was there a group of guys, the ones Paul E. had, who were as respectful as these guys were to the old school and what I brought to the dance. They made me feel really at home, and it was really cool.

  “I remember the day I met him like it was yesterday. It was December 2, 1999, in Atlanta, and I thought that ‘The Dream,’ who had just left WCW, was there to say hi to some people he knew who were working for ECW at the time. Never in my wildest dreams had I thought I would be eye to eye with him in the ring less than three hours later!”

  —”KING OF OLD SCHOOL” STEVE CORINO

  There was a TV taping there and when I hit the ring, it was a phenomenal response. My debut was a surprise, but Corino and I went on to have a feud and I helped further his career when he beat me in a bull rope match at the ECW Arena. So we went on and made TV and I was still working, trying to make independents at the time on my own.

  Paul E. brought me up to the ECW Arena for the first time. It was about 20 degrees outside, ice on the street, cold as shit. I had read different articles on the internet about how the fans in this place received certain wrestlers, and I wondered how they were going to receive me if I didn’t go there. Well, of course, the fans knew I was in Philly, but they didn’t know how I was going to have it, how I was going to make my entrance there. Paul E. had me go outside and wait for the right time to run in from the side door. Like I said, it was about 20 degrees outside and I stood there about 20 minutes, just about freezing my balls off, and then the time came, and I hadn’t received a reception like I did from those fans in quite a long time. Anyhow, I think it was more out of the respect for me in coming down to their building, because it really was the fans’ building, coming into their home, coming into that organization, and they really respected me for it. That spot really gave me a shot in the arm at that point in time. So we went on and just kept on with ECW and I wasn’t doing a lot, just showing up, but I was getting paid and doing a lot of things.

  “I am sure most people would say that they admire Dream’s charisma or the way he sold for the heels or even his booking style. The thing I admire most about Dusty Rhodes is his heart. This is a guy who didn’t have to do what he did for a 27-year-old kid. Dusty was already a legend, he didn’t need to do a program with an unknown Steve Corino, but he did. Not only did he do it, but he made me look like a superstar and I became an instant success [with the ECW fans]. I was already claiming to be the ‘King of Old School,’ but Dusty made the nickname a reality, all for the purpose of ‘making’ someone. ECW didn’t have the money to pay Dus
ty what he deserved, he did it because that is the type of guy he is. In a few words, Dusty Rhodes made Steve Corino! There is no doubt about it. Before Dream came to ECW, I was a mid-level heel that had just prematurely finished a program with Taz and Tommy Dreamer. I had heat, but to the ECW fans Taz and Dreamer were not ‘Old School,’ they were ECW born. But when Dusty came to ECW, he legitimized my beliefs in old-school wrestling and put me at the top of the card almost right away. Steve Corino would never have been either the ECW World or NWA World champion without Dusty Rhodes.”

  —”KING OF OLD SCHOOL” STEVE CORINO

  Tommy Dreamer was a cool guy. Not only did he show me a lot of respect when I was there, but I have a lot of respect for him as he really took his time to hone his craft. A lot of people don’t realize just how much of ECW was Tommy’s. He had his heart and soul in that thing, which is why I booked him a few times with TCW.

  So anyway, I was still running Turnbuckle at the time, still trying to take independent bookings, and then shortly after ECW, Jerry Lawler’s booking agent, and that’s what he is—people say, “Aw, he’s just a guy you have,” and that shit—but booking agent Mike O’Brien came to me in Nashville when Lawler and I did an independent date for the first time where we had actually wrestled each other. “The King” introduced me to Mike and right away he said, “Let me handle this.”