CROSS RHODES
Gallery Books
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Copyright © 2010 by World Wrestling Entertainment, Inc. All Rights Reserved.
World Wrestling Entertainment, the names of all World Wrestling Entertainment televised and live programming, talent names, images, likenesses, slogans and wrestling moves, and all World Wrestling Entertainment logos and trademarks are the exclusive property of World Wrestling Entertainment, Inc. Nothing in this book may be reproduced in any manner without the express written consent of World Wrestling Entertainment, Inc.
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Photos on pages 6, 8, 12, and 13 courtesy of Pro Wrestling Illustrated.
Photos on pages 210, 222, and 224 courtesy of Dustin Rhodes.
All other photos © World Wrestling Entertainment, Inc. All Rights Reserved.
First Gallery Books trade paperback edition December 2010
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Designed by Akasha Archer
Illustration from istockphoto.com
Manufactured in the United States of America
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Rhodes, Dustin.
Cross Rhodes / by Dustin Rhodes
p. cm.
1. Wrestlers—United States—Biography. 2. Rhodes family. I. Title.
GV1196.A1R47 2010
796.8120922—dc22
[B]
2010022987
ISBN 978-1-4391-9516-1
ISBN 978-1-4391-9517-8 (ebook)
DEDICATION
I dedicate this book to all the people in this world who are having trouble with drugs and alcohol, broken homes and broken families, mothers, daughters, sons, and dads confused about life in general. I dedicate this to my sobriety and the new life I look out at every day clean and sober.
To my family, especially my sister Kristin, once I was lost and now I am found. To my sisters Mandy and Teil, I love you very much. It’s the least I can do to keep myself clean and sober for each and every one of you who have done so much for me. I owe it to all of you to be a better person and a better human being, and to leave something good in this world before I die.
To my father and mother, who have always been there for me, I love you very much. Despite all the trials and tribulations we have been through, you have been very good parents. You have taught me valuable lessons in life and I’m happy that we are so strongly connected with one another. It means the world to me. To other mothers and fathers out there who don’t have that kind of relationship with your children, find it. Fix your broken relationships somehow, some way. Do whatever it takes to get your family back.
To the angels in my life, my daughter, Dakota, and Ta-rel, the love of my life who has stood by me through thick and thin. Every day for the rest of my life I will treat you with respect, honor, and love. Dakota, I will never love anyone the way I love you. You are the angel who looks over me when I am on the road. When I say my prayers every morning and night, I am thinking about you. You are with me every moment of every day. You opened my eyes to how beautiful life can be when you took my hand and said, “It’s going to be okay, Dad.” I love you, angel.
CONTENTS
Prologue: Dying to Get into the Main Event
1: The Fever
2: Wrestling 101: Business School
3: Stepping into My Father’s Boots
4: The Long Goodbye
5: The Main Event
6: The Hard Way
7: The Darkness
8: The False Bottom
9: The Descent
10: The Rain on the Hill
11: The Escape
12: The Return
13: The Backside
14: The Next Generation
15: Angels on the Road Ahead
PROLOGUE
DYING TO GET INTO THE MAIN EVENT
I started writing this book years ago while sitting in my pickup truck with a handful of pain pills circulating through my body and a bottle of vodka on the passenger seat. For a little while, the pain turned into more of a dull ache than the full-on attack that I woke up to every morning. With a black pen and blue-lined paper torn from a small notebook, those sessions might as well have been a therapist’s couch. I was looking for the truth about me, drug addiction, and the old-school world of sports entertainment that grabbed me as a small child and has never let go.
The first words I wrote are scattered across the top of the first page:
Dying to Get into the Main Event.
In one way or another, I probably was dying. I certainly wasn’t living, at least not a life the average person would recognize. Hell, I barely recognized what was happening at the time. Looking back, it was just another example of my art imitating my life.
But that was then, when I couldn’t see through a daily haze caused by an addiction to prescription pain medication and the limits of self-medicating’s ability to dull the pain, no matter how high the pile of pill and vodka bottles. Yet through it all, one aspect of my life never changed and in some ways has never been stronger than it is today. My love and passion for the business of professional wrestling never wavered, not even in the depths of addiction.
ONE
THE FEVER
My dad, The American Dream, Dusty Rhodes.
I got the fever as a young boy growing up in the long shadows of a big man in Austin, Texas.
The American Dream, Dusty Rhodes, is my dad. As a young boy, all I knew was that my dad was gone all the time. For the most part, my mother, my sister Kristin, and I were left to fend for ourselves. I can remember being five or six years old and seeing my dad come home after a long trip. I was like any other small boy. I wanted to crawl all over my dad when he finally walked through the front door. But he was too tired and his body too sore.
Back then, wrestlers worked territories, and they were gone for months at a time. He might spend two or three weeks in one place, come home, then head off to Japan for a month or more. He would take us places and we would get time with him, but it was always cut short by his schedule. My dad was naturally charismatic and very smart. I certainly didn’t understand how smart he was about his career then, but as a little boy all I wanted was more time with him. He was larger than life to me.
On top of the world.
Then, one day, he was gone for good. My parents divorced right around the time I entered first grade at a private Christian school in Austin. I didn’t get the chance to know him the way a young boy wants to know his father. I was seven years old when my parents divorced. I remember crying for hours at a time during the days, weeks, and months that followed his departure. Even though he was gone a lot be
fore the divorce, I always knew he’d come walking into the house in his cowboy boots and hat. Divorce meant the exact opposite. My father was gone and he wasn’t ever coming back. In those days, his life was rolling along at one hundred miles an hour, and being home with family was the slowest part of his existence.
As his stature grew in the business, the shadow became larger and more difficult for me. I don’t know if I have ever wanted anything as much as I wanted to leave Austin and go live with my dad. My mother married three times over the next eight years. Like everyone else, she made some bad decisions. The first two stepfathers beat the hell out of my mother. Kristin and I would crouch in the hallway just off the living room. I wasn’t old enough to do anything to them physically. We’d just sit there with our backs against the wall listening to the violence. No child should have to live through that. We watched one man after another come into her life, and each one of them did the same thing.
My mother protected herself as best she could. Incredibly, she took care of us and made sure we never endured what she did. In every other way, my mom took care of us and never complained. She worked as many as three jobs and held together what little we had. She was a great mom, but sometimes stuff happens. Everybody makes bad decisions here and there. That’s life. My mom was a hairdresser and she’d put in as many hours as possible, sometimes working at two different salons. When she wasn’t doing hair, my mom cleaned houses and did whatever it took to make ends meet.
I’m sure all those men beating up my mother contributed to my desire to leave, but all I remember is crying a lot. It was just one incident after another. I don’t know how we became so dysfunctional that we allowed bad people into our lives. Maybe we attracted them in some way we didn’t realize. Maybe my mother had so much guilt about one thing or another that she felt like she didn’t deserve anything better. I remember one time, my mom and second stepdad came home, and both of them were getting out of the truck fighting. Jack and my mother were screaming and yelling at each other. She swung at him and he was shoving my mother into the cab of the truck. She got out and took a swing at him and he grabbed her hand and yanked it backward and broke her finger. Her wedding ring flew off her finger out into the grass near the front of the house. She came inside the house crying. Her finger was bent to one side. It’s hard for a child to process that kind of scene. But as soon as he left I went outside. I must have spent four or five hours combing through the grass looking for that ring. Finally around nine or ten o’clock at night, I found the ring. I walked back inside and gave it to her. I was probably eight or nine years old, and the only comfort I could provide my mother was to find that ring.
Looking back, it seems strange that I was trying to find a symbol of a busted marriage that had just led to a broken finger. I didn’t know what else to do or how else to help. I don’t know whether my father knew what was happening to my mother. I don’t know whether he cared one way or another at the time. My father never failed to send us child support, but he was young and I really don’t know whether he gave a damn. Like I said, his life was rolling and on the upswing. He was hell-bent on making a name in the business, which he most certainly did.
After they divorced, my dad would roll into town from time to time and we would go to the events. Still, it wasn’t until I was eleven or twelve that I really understood he was famous, or that he did something different from all the other dads. That’s about the time I started watching the World Class Championship Wrestling out of Texas with the Von Erichs. Kerry Von Erich, the Modern Day Warrior, was big at that time. The Freebirds were big, too. I remember going to the Coliseum in downtown Austin to see my dad wrestle. I was probably about nine years old, and it was the first time I saw my dad perform live. I was running around the floor as the show was going on. I was so excited to see my dad, and there were all these people jumping up and down cheering for him. It was really cool seeing people react to my dad that way. It was the way I felt about him, too.
Dad versus Ric Flair.
After the show ended, I walked up to the ring. I jumped up onto the apron and grabbed the ropes. That’s when I heard my dad’s booming voice. He was in the back behind the curtain. He came running out into the arena and started yelling. “Don’t you ever get into that wrestling ring again.” He was mad, and it was scary for a young boy. I mean, that was my dad. He scared me so much that I didn’t get back into a ring until I got my start a decade later. To this day I don’t know whether he was concerned about my safety, or he just didn’t want me ever to become comfortable with the idea of one day being in the business. I know one thing: I’ve never forgotten that experience. All I wanted was to be with my dad. It was as if all these people, all the fans in that arena and in cities all over the territories he worked, had more of him than I did. He was always good to us, but I wanted to be a larger part of his life. Many years later my daughter, Dakota, would come with her mother and me on the road. I always let her climb into the ring and bounce around with Hunter and Edge and just have fun.
I learned from the best.
As the years rolled on, my sister and I didn’t see a whole lot of our father. During Christmas, he would fly us to Tampa on Braniff Airlines. In the summer, we’d make the same trip again, this time staying for a month. That’s all we really saw of him. Even then he was gone working all the time. Once in a while we talked to him on the phone, but otherwise he was somewhere out in the world. When we did see him, the time passed so quickly that it seemed like within moments of our arrival it was time to turn around and go home. At Christmas we’d open our presents and, boom, a couple days would pass and we were headed back to the airport. He was never really there for us. Then again, this lifestyle comes with the territory. It’s more demanding than most people can imagine. He was a father when it came to child support and generally doing the right thing in terms of his responsibilities to us, but it was more of a formality. His life was so much bigger, and there wasn’t a whole lot of room left for us.
I don’t know why my dad chose his path, but he knew how to make just about everyone love him. It is awesome to see. As soon as I became conscious of it, I wanted to be a part of it all. I didn’t recognize the fact that sometimes the life is far from glamorous, or that the travel and physical toll can wear you down. Dusty Rhodes was my dad, and I was drawn to him in the same way a fan is. Meanwhile, his career just kept rising. It was like he could do no wrong, and all I saw was the wonder of it all. Everything was going for him and I wanted a life just like his. I wanted that experience. In some ways we were growing up together, though we remained far apart. It seemed like the older I got the bigger he became.
After my sophomore year at Lanier High School in Austin, my mother finally agreed to let me go live with my father. I’m sure she thought, “Okay, go find out for yourself what it’s really all about.” I was a tight end on my high school football team and I had a lot of friends, but I never stopped wanting to be with my dad.
He had a new family by then, and they were living in Charlotte, North Carolina. I had started to come into my own as a football player around that time, though football was more of my father’s idea than my own. I became a pretty good defensive tackle at East Mecklenburg High School, where I was known as Dusty Runnels. Everyone knew who my dad was, in part because longtime professional wrestler Gene Anderson’s son, Brad, was in the same school and played football, too. Both of us were far more passionate about wrestling than football or pretty much anything else outside of girls.
Prior to our junior season, we shaved our heads like the Road Warriors, Hawk and Animal. Every chance we had, Brad and I would do trampoline wrestling. We’d put on an entire show from start to finish. My girlfriend would videotape me pulling up to the house in my dad’s Mercedes as if I were arriving at the arena. I’d wear my dad’s robes. We’d have his replica title belts. We took time to create these elaborate setups, making the whole experience as real as possible. We each had our music playing as we came toward the trampoline, which
was our ring.
I liked playing football, but I loved wrestling. I’m sure it had something to do with the idea of wanting to be with my dad. But he tried to keep me away from it, that’s for sure. I probably should have taken a football scholarship, gone to college, and earned a degree, because then I would have had something to fall back on if wrestling didn’t work out. Maybe that was my dad’s thinking. All I know is that I was blinded by the desire to be a part of his life. The fact that it’s such a hard life never entered my mind. All I know is that I had the fever.
Transitionwise, it wasn’t a big deal for me to move from Austin to Charlotte. I was a big kid and an athlete, so I didn’t have much trouble adjusting to a new school. But it was not what I expected. My dad was still gone much of the time. He is a great loving father and both of us have changed in so many ways over the years. But at the time, I wanted and needed him to be the nurturing kind of father. I thought everything was going to be exactly how I had pictured it all those years when I was living in Austin. I thought there would be more father-son time, more time to build a deeper relationship with him. Instead, he always seemed grumpy and grouchy, which I understand now. He was working a lot inside and outside the ring. He was doing double duty as the boss working with Jim Crockett Promotions at National Wrestling Alliance before it became World Championship Wrestling. He was booking the talent and pushing himself, which meant there were always guys pissed off at him for one reason or another. Some guys were unhappy because they weren’t working enough. Other guys were mad that someone else was getting pushed ahead of them. He had to hire and fire guys. That’s the way it worked. He had the heat coming down from the wrestlers, but he couldn’t cater to every person because he was pushing himself, too. He also was a huge star at the time. He was the American Dream, Dusty Rhodes. He was as big as anyone in professional wrestling. My dad had to be creative and tough at the same time because he knew how to draw crowds and make money. If a guy wasn’t on the same page, then he had to get rid of him. I’m sure he created enemies along the way. As hard as it had to be physically, the mental stress of working both ends of the business had to be exhausting.
Cross Rhodes: Goldust, Out of the Darkness (WWE) Page 1