Dad pushing himself to the limit.
I didn’t mind playing football, because he wanted me to play. Besides, I thought I’d be playing in front of my father every week. As it turned out, I hardly got to see him. When I did see him he was riding me about homework, girls, grades, or something else. It was a letdown, but I had my buddies, so life moved on.
Although I wanted nothing more than to follow my father into wrestling, he hadn’t yet smartened me up. I played football and wrestled during my last two years in high school, and I did very well. Despite poor grades, I had a bunch of scholarship offers. Tennessee, Utah, and Louisville were among the schools that recruited me. I decided on the University of Louisville, where Howard Schnellenberger had taken over the program. But my heart wasn’t in the game. I had my mind oriented in one direction. I wanted to follow in my dad’s footsteps.
Back then professional wrestlers were very serious about keeping everything a secret. It was like a religion. There were a couple bosses I had early on who told us that if we went out drinking and got into a fight, we’d better not lose or we’d be fired. In my dad’s time if you wrestled somebody, you couldn’t be seen out partying with that guy later on. They would show up in separate cars and they never gave away their secrets. There were always people who thought they knew a little bit about what happened in the ring, though. I’d hear kids at school say, “Aw, wrestling’s fake. Your father isn’t really doing anything. It’s all just fake.” I hated that word then, and I still hate it today. It really annoys me when somebody calls what we do fake. And I kicked more than a little butt as I got older because of that word. But my dad kept it so quiet. All those guys at the time used to speak their own language. They called it “carny,” and my dad and mother, then later my stepmother would discuss a match or something going on in the business in this language that only they and other wrestlers could understand. That’s how protective they were of the business. They were serious about it in a way that’s hard to imagine today. Over time I picked up the language and figured out what they were saying. Little by little I learned how to speak it as well. Now it’s a lost art.
Rappers sing or perform in a kind of carny language of their own. I still talk in carny with some of the veterans because I love it. I don’t know where it went, though. You talk carny to some of the young guys and they’re like, “What is he talking about?” These young guys should know this stuff because it’s part of the history of our business. That’s the way we were raised, using carny language to communicate inside and outside the ring. It was like our own secret society and everyone followed the rules. It was great. Some of the bosses back then, if you got caught riding with a guy you were doing an angle with, they’d fire you on the spot. I kayfabed all the time. That is the art of keeping it all real for the fans by staying in character at all times. If I was driving with a guy I was wrestling that night, I’d jump out of the car down the road from the arena so we could keep the angle pure. I couldn’t see doing it any other way. We took it very seriously. When Steve Austin and I had our run in the early 1990s, we were very cautious about being seen together. Today, guys who just wrestled on television are out having a beer together and no one thinks twice about it.
To this day I don’t really know why my father was against me getting into professional wrestling. Obviously he knew how hard the life could be and maybe he wanted something different, something better for his son. I think that’s why he pushed football so hard. But I didn’t want to do anything else. Midway through my senior year in high school, my father moved back to Dallas. My little brother, Cody, was only a baby when they left, so I stayed behind and finished up my school year. Then I packed up what little I had and drove to Dallas.
By then my father knew I wasn’t going to go to college to play football. He called me up one day and said, “Pick me up at the airport in Dallas. We have something to talk about.” The airport was about a forty-five-minute drive from our new house in Texas. He got into my truck and launched into a forty-five-minute crash course on professional wrestling. He not only smartened me up about the way everything operates, but he covered the business outside the ring and beyond the arena. I took it all in. I probably knew by that point that the outcomes were set up in advance, but he explained how angles were developed. I remember being so impressed by his business sense and creativity. He understood every corner of it. He clued me in to some of the private verbiage wrestlers used, the carny language, between themselves in the ring so fans wouldn’t understand.
“Tomorrow night I want you to be in Amarillo,” he said. “First, go to a sporting goods store and buy yourself a referee shirt and some black cotton pants. You are going to referee two matches.”
This was 1988 and I was nineteen years old. I did exactly as my father asked, stopping by the store, then driving 350 miles to Amarillo in my used red Jeep Comanche pickup. Everyone else, including my father, took a private jet. My dad wanted me to pay my dues, so I hit the road. He laid it all out in that speech. He told me that I had to work hard for anything I got. It was the first and only time he smartened me up about the business. He went through the whole deal and I just did what I was told.
In the second match I refereed, my pants split from the top of the front all the way around the back when I went down for the three-count. And there was nothing under there. I was holding up Rock-n-Roll Express’s hands and my privates were hanging out. All the boys were at the curtain watching to see how I would do. I thought I did a pretty good job, but then I saw Tommy Young, the head referee at that time, pointing down at my crotch. There I was, holding up Rock-n-Roll Express’s hands, and everything was just hanging out. I remember thinking, “Oh my God.” I came back through the curtain and it was like I parted the Red Sea. Everyone was lying on the floor laughing like crazy. That was how I got my start. I had never even been in a wrestling ring before that night.
That night I took my dad to the airport so he could fly back to Dallas. He gave me a few bucks for gas and I drove the 365 miles back home.
I made $20 that night.
TWO
WRESTLING 101: BUSINESS SCHOOL
The ride back from Amarillo was one of the easiest six-hour drives in my life. I didn’t care what came next. I was ready to soak up the world I had spent my entire life thinking about.
When I returned home, my dad sent me to train with Jim Wehba, who was known as Skandor Akbar. My dad had known Skandor for years and he trusted him to teach me the basics at Doug’s Gym in downtown Dallas. The place was bare-bones, to say the least. It had been a hard-core weight-lifting gym, but it was pretty much empty when I walked through the door for the first time. As you walked through the place and toward the back, there was a large cinder-block wall with a hole in it. Someone had literally just punched a hole through this wall. On the other side was an old broken-down boxing ring crammed into a small room. The floor of the ring was up on cinder blocks and there were no ropes. The walls were really close and the floor had no give whatsoever. We did a lot of mat wrestling initially. The first thing Skandor said was, “Take ten falls onto your back and get up as fast as you can.” There were a couple other guys there, along with Jacqueline Moore, who later became a WWE Diva. Landing on that floor felt like falling onto a dirt field. I was sore as hell after that first day, but I loved every minute.
Skandor was in his mid-fifties at the time and had been around sports entertainment for years working for Bill Watts’s Universal Wrestling Federation in the 1980s. He worked a lot of the regional territories with my father. I spent only a couple months with Skandor before my father sent me to Tampa to learn at the feet of Steve Keirn and Mike Graham. My father’s mentor was Mike’s dad, Eddie Graham. When Eddie was inducted into the WWE Hall of Fame in 2008 following his death, my dad accepted the award for him.
Mike was running Florida Championship Wrestling at the time, working out of the Sportatorium on Albany Street in Tampa. My dad sent me to Florida with $2,000 and my truck. I grabbed whatever cl
othes I had, put on my boots, and took off.
I lived with my stepmother’s sister and worked the Florida territory for two years and got $20 a night. If I was lucky, I’d find a photographer to take pictures and we’d sell those inside the building for gas and beer money. I’m sure my father was watching and paying attention to how I was doing, but I didn’t know that at the time. Mike, being his mentor’s son, was no doubt on the phone with my father and keeping him updated on my progress. But I was having the time of my life. That was probably the most fun I have ever had in my life.
The first couple months I trained at the Sportatorium, where we had shows every Thursday night. The offices were upstairs in the same building and that’s where I would go to train a couple hours every day. Other than that, I lived with my aunt and went out drinking every single night. The training schedule amounted to Steve or Mike telling me what time to show up every day. I was there to learn everything, including the psychology of performing in front of people. I took it all in. I just soaked up every ounce of information. Back then, though, I never went to the gym and worked out. I hated the gym. Very few guys really worked out seriously. Ironically, it’s only been the last year and a half that I’ve come to love working out. I lift and train now to the point that it’s become an obsession. Something that I hated so much when I was younger and naturally in great shape is what I crave now. I’ve lost fifty-six pounds in eighteen months, and I’m in the best shape of my life.
Mark Starr, who started out at the same time, was probably the only one who really trained hard. What training we did was at bars. We worked and drank, and a lot of nights we partied until the sun came up. I had no money, but I was home every night or morning, whichever came later.
We’d load up and drive to wherever we had to be for that night’s show. Orlando was easy because I could get there and back on a tank of gas. No one had any money, so a hotel was pretty much out of the question. Gas wasn’t expensive in 1988, so a couple of us would drive together and split the costs. We had an event every night—Tampa, Sarasota, Ft. Myers, St. Petersburg, Miami, Jacksonville.
Once a month we’d go to Nassau, Bahamas, for a couple days. There was a little bar we went to called Club Waterloo. We always had a good time, but in those days you kind of had to sleep with one eye open, if you know what I mean. Everyone would try to screw with you, particularly if you were the first one to pass out. You always had to worry about waking up with your head shaved, or missing a big chunk of an eyebrow. Sometimes you woke up with really awful crap written all over your body with a permanent marker. They might shred your pants. Those ribs were really fun.
There were a lot of guys learning the ropes the same way I was in those days. The Nasty Boys were around when I was in Tampa. There were a lot of guys I worked with at that time who were good enough to have made it big. For whatever reason, politics or timing, most of them didn’t make it very far. But a lot of those guys really deserved more than they got, that’s for sure. Guys like Mark Starr and Jimmy Backlund taught me a lot, and they deserved a bigger profile.
It was a lot of fun. I was doing exactly what I wanted to be doing and I was having the time of my life. There were a few fights along the way, and I wasn’t shy about throwing down. If somebody started in about how wrestling was fake, or said something about my dad, then I would go. I remember walking across the street from a wedding reception to a local bar. I saw this kid in the parking lot but I didn’t pay much attention until I got closer. He said, “Hey, Dustin Rhodes. Your dad’s a fat piece of crap.” I didn’t say a word and I barely changed my pace. I walked right up to him and just dropped him with one punch. His girlfriend started swinging at me. She was screaming and making a scene while the guy was flat on his ass. I kept right on walking toward the entrance to the bar. Fred Ottman, a huge guy who went by Tugboat and by Typhoon (of the Natural Disasters) in WWE for a long time, was the bouncer at the bar that day. He also was marrying one of my aunts, so I was good to go there.
Just as I was getting to the door, another guy came rushing out. He was every inch as big as Fred, but this guy was a jacked weight lifter. He was at least six three and probably close to three hundred pounds, just a massive human being. He looked like a killer. He had gold chains all around his neck and he was angry. I had suspenders on and a white shirt that now had a splatter of blood on it from the first guy I decked. The guy said, “Did you just hit my brother?” I thought, “This guy is big.” He kept talking, getting louder and louder, the veins on his neck getting bigger and bigger. Then he turned his head and I just popped him. I dropped him with one punch, but I knew he wouldn’t stay down, so I jumped down and just kept drilling him. By the time Fred arrived, I had one of the guy’s gold chains broken off in my hand. I hurt my hand hitting him. He had a head like cement. Fred grabbed me and took me into the bar so I could calm down. Turns out Fred worked out with the guy at a local weight lifters’ gym. He said, “Dustin, if he ever sees you, he’s going to kill you.” I got really lucky because there were a lot of times I could have been stabbed or killed. That was no doubt one of them.
You knew there were guys out there who wanted to see how tough you really were. It happened to me. But I got some very good fatherly advice early on. My dad said, “Always be the bigger man and walk away because people are going to talk shit about me and you. Just walk away from it.” I didn’t walk away very often when I was young, but I eventually figured out better ways to deal with those situations.
Another night, I met the party queen of Tampa in a nightclub. She was thirty-eight years old. I was nineteen and I thought I had fallen in love. She was putting it on me. She was teaching me stuff I didn’t even know existed. For about two weeks I was mesmerized by everything about her. I never failed to show up for work because I loved what I did. But I was out every night all night. We’d drink at crazy bars all over town. I didn’t have a care in the world—no children, no wife, no girlfriends, no rent. I was shacked up in her house for two weeks going out with her every night. Finally a week went by and Mike said, “Dustin, you’ve got to call your aunt. She’s worried about you.” I said, “Okay, whatever.” Another week went by and I finally decided I should stop by to see my aunt. Now, my aunt comes from a Cuban family. They have their wild, loud, and scary side and I saw it all that day. My aunt came to the door, and she went to town on me and kicked me the hell out.
So I moved all my stuff, which wasn’t a whole lot of anything, into the Sportatorium. I used Mike Graham’s upstairs office as living quarters because I still wasn’t making enough money to afford real rent. Every once in a while we’d get $40 for an event in Tampa if we did really well, but mostly it was still $20 a night. It was a struggle just getting to and from the events because no one was making any money. I had a lot of my stuff stolen out of the Sportatorium during my time there. My truck was broken into a few times. Mike would come to work and I’d be out cold in his office with the door locked. I’d usually just gotten in from the night before. Like I said, the ribs, jokes, and pranks wrestlers played on one another back then were unbelievable. I can thank Mike, though, for saving my eyebrows. He told everyone, “Dustin’s eyebrows are not to be touched. That’s an order coming from his dad.”
Then one day it all ended. Mike called me up to his office and said, “Dustin, your dad wants you to go up to the National Wrestling Alliance.”
I wasn’t ready to go. I might have been ready to take the next step, but I was having way too much fun. I’d learned a lot and I was getting better all the time. But I didn’t want the fun to end.
“No, I don’t want to go, Mike. What are you talking about? I want to stay here.”
Mike said he’d never seen anybody who wanted to stay in Florida making no money, particularly somebody living in the office of an old arena. I was barely twenty years old. I was going to go be tag-team partners with Kendall Wind-ham (the brother of Barry Windham, who was a top star) as the Texas Broncos.
I pulled my few possessions together a
nd climbed back into my truck for another drive into a new life, this one in Atlanta. But I was a mess. I really didn’t have any clothes because I barely needed them in the life I was leading in Tampa. Half the time one of the pranks wrestlers played on one another was to rip up your clothes. When I got to Atlanta, I looked terrible. My father took me to a mall and bought me some decent clothes so I didn’t embarrass him or myself.
I learned a lot and I made a lot more money, like $100,000, but otherwise the NWA experience wasn’t nearly as memorable as my time in Tampa. I went from sleeping in the office of a sports venue with raggedy clothes to having real money and a real career. But I also lived an often-repeated story. I didn’t respect the money. If I had $1 in my pocket, then I’d try to spend $2. I traveled all over the United States for about a year as part of the Texas Broncos. Barry Windham remains one of the most important teachers I have had. I learned a lot from just watching him.
My dad always told me that some of my movements looked just like Barry’s. He was a great worker. I guess Kendall never really got the push the way Barry did. Kendall could work, but that’s just how it goes. One guy makes it over another and sometimes it has more to do with timing than anything else. I don’t know why Kendall didn’t get that push or didn’t realize his potential, because he was a natural, just like Barry.
Then again, my dad was a natural, too. And as far as I was concerned it was just as natural for me to follow in his footsteps.
THREE
STEPPING INTO MY FATHER’S BOOTS
Cross Rhodes: Goldust, Out of the Darkness (WWE) Page 2