My dad never stuck out his hand and said, “Here, son, let me pull you to the top.” He knew how hard it is and there wasn’t much he could do to help if I didn’t help myself. That’s why he did everything in his power to dissuade me from becoming a professional wrestler. But when he realized that I wasn’t going to do anything else and that I loved it, he made sure I received the right direction from the right people.
But there were no shortcuts. If my dad had anything to do with it, then I had to earn anything and everything that came my way. That was the best approach, no question about it. Bill Watts pushed his son, Erik, too fast in WCW and both of them took a lot of heat for not going slower. It wasn’t Erik’s fault. He just wanted to get to the top. But he wasn’t ready, and I was able to see that experience firsthand. Here’s the boss’s son, so okay, he’s going to get a little more push than the next guy. When he’s not ready, though, the other guys have very little tolerance, and a lot of them weren’t too happy about it. Ultimately, I don’t know if the heat got to Erik, or why he never made it as big as he probably wanted. Everybody knew I was one of the bosses’ sons, too. No one knew that better than me. But other than being around my dad, I didn’t want any favors. I was a stud in those days, and I wasn’t afraid of doing whatever I had to do—on my own—to get to where I wanted to be. Did it help that Dusty Rhodes was my father? Sure. But I worked my butt off and I loved every minute of it.
For a long time I was comfortable being in the shadow of my dad. I was happy just trying to get into his shoes. So when my dad left the NWA for WWE, I was more than happy to follow him there a few months later.
Vince McMahon wanted to take a look at me, so I had what they called a tryout with journeyman Black Bart. Bart led me through the match, and I did fine. So Vince hired me and I started working on an angle with my father. I always wanted to wrestle with my dad, but he never did. He was wrestling Randy “Macho Man” Savage and he was fixing to start something with Ted DiBiase, the Million Dollar Man. They had me in the front row next to the ring like I was watching the match. This was my first big-time shoot and it was huge. I was sitting there cheering for my dad when Ted and his bodyguard, Virgil, came out. They started handing $100 bills to everybody in the front row so they could take all the seats and get the fans out of the way. They wanted to buy my seat, too, but I wouldn’t take the money. Ted sat to one side of me and Virgil on the other as I watched my father in the ring. Every time I stood up, they yanked me back down into my chair, which was one of those old wooden folding chairs. Ted handed me the money and I crumpled it up before throwing it into Virgil’s face.
Then all of a sudden, I turned around and hit Ted. I was a big guy, in great shape at the time. It was just really cool to be interacting with all these guys and my dad in a big event. I also had this mullet going, long bleached-blond hair. Then I hit Virgil, and Ted reached over and clotheslined me over the rail. My dad was doing his thing in the ring, so he hadn’t realized what was happening yet. Then Teddy picked up one of the wooden chairs and hit me square in the head with the corner. It was the first time I was really busted open. Boom, he hit me with a straight-on shot and I went down. I was bleeding like crazy and wondering, “Was that supposed to happen?”
My dad came running out of the ring. He was screaming, “Oh, my God!” He was selling it so well for the camera that it was amazing. He knew exactly how to pull it off to maximum effect. I watched him, almost as if it was in slow motion, and marveled at how good he was at selling the moment. To this day, I don’t know if they planned that without telling me. Back then you never knew with those guys. I ended up with a few stitches. So what? I loved it. We ended up having a tag-team match with my dad and me against Ted and Virgil at the Royal Rumble in Miami.
In between, the Million Dollar Man had an angle going with my father and me. Ted would tell my dad, “I can beat your son’s ass in ten minutes or less,” but he couldn’t do it, so that really set me up. Ted was a great teacher.
Soon after the Royal Rumble my dad left WWE. I wanted to do the same for no other reason than to be with him. My father wanted to go back to Florida to open up Professional Wrestling Federation under his name and management. He wanted to get it back to where it had been in the old days. So I asked Vince for my release. It wasn’t a hard decision personally or professionally. When I decided to leave, Vince told my father, “You take him right now, Dusty, but one of these days I’m going to steal Dustin back and make a star out of him.”
I learned early on that Vince is a genius. He could make a star out of a stick of chewing gum. When it comes to virtually any aspect of the business, Vince is unbelievable. Still, I didn’t know if I’d ever work for Vince again. I was just going with the flow, and the flow took me back to Tampa.
My dad was running the show back in Florida and I had proved myself during the brief runs at NWA and the World Wrestling Federation. So he made me the Florida Heavyweight Champion. I was having fun, but it wasn’t the same compared to my earlier days in Tampa. I still wanted to be as big as my dad. That desire was as strong as ever and I worked as hard as I could to make that happen.
At the time, though, I was still in his shadow and that was fine by me. In terms of money, returning to Florida was an economic step back, but so what? I loved being with my dad. I was twenty-one years old with no ties, no commitments, and very few bills. It might not have been as much fun as the first time around, but I was living a little better. I had very few complaints.
At one point my dad sent me to Japan for a month. It was my first trip to Japan and I had no idea what to expect. For some guys, a month over there is a long time. I had heard so many stories about guys cracking over there because everything, even the wrestling, was so totally foreign. But I loved it. It was a different style, unbelievably different. Wresting of any kind has always been huge in Japan. Everyone knows about sumo wrestling, but the Japanese are passionate about professional wrestling, too. Even the sumo wrestlers came to our matches over there.
I was paid $1,500 a week in Japan, which was huge because I was there for a month. The food was the only thing I hated about Japan. Thank God for McDonald’s and the Hard Rock Cafe. I ate at McDonald’s every day.
Japanese crowds are very old school. They are very quiet and proper, almost to the point of being weird. There would be seventy thousand people in the stands and you could hear a cricket. There would be collective oohs and aahs, but otherwise they were stone silent. American fans are crazy. They’re drinking, screaming, and behind the match from the opening minute. In Japan, a big move would produce a loud sigh and some very controlled clapping. Then they would shut up again and watch. Toward the end of the match, when you have a series of close falls and a guy kicks out, that’s when they started to get into it.
The Japanese wrestlers were into keeping it real, known as kayfabe-ing, for the fans. Everything was very secretive, even more than it was in the States back then. Before the show you couldn’t even talk to the guy you were going to wrestle. The referee would go back and forth between dressing rooms relaying information, which made everything a lot more difficult. They spoke very little English, but enough that I could understand what they wanted me to do in the ring.
We were stars over there because of how big wrestling was in general. A guy like me, six four with blond hair, really stood out. In those early trips to Japan, they didn’t necessarily know who I was, but they would stop and stare at me. They knew my dad because he had been over there probably a couple dozen times over the years. As the years went on, they knew I was Dusty Rhodes Jr., which is what I was always called in Japan. I enjoy the country, or anywhere overseas, for that matter.
There is a big difference between a live show and a television show. Everything moves so much faster on television. You have very little time to set up the match. A live event is much different in terms of time and what you can do. At a live event, the opening match might go twelve minutes and you can tell a story out there.
I try
to focus on that one person in the front row who I know doesn’t want to be there. I find him, too, because there is always somebody who comes to the match because his son or daughter is a big fan. That dad isn’t interested. He hates wrestling, and you can see it on his face. “This stuff sucks. It’s fake. I can’t wait to get out of here.” I can see the kids are jumping up and down as the dad sits there hating every one of those first few minutes. Then, after a move or two I start to see a little bit of a sparkle, a barely visible twinkle in his eyes. Still, he’s not there yet. He isn’t even close to getting out of his seat, much less getting emotionally involved in the match. When I see that first glimmer in his eyes I know he’s starting to pay attention to what’s happening in the ring. I do a couple more moves. Maybe I get slammed in a way that looks like the other guy has killed me. I look over again, this time I can see the look in his eyes change. He’s focused on the ring now. He’s wondering, “Can this crazy guy with the face paint even stand up after that? That looked real.” The dad looks over at his son or daughter, who is either near tears or in tears because I’m getting the crap kicked out of me ten feet away. They look to their father, “Is he okay, Daddy?” Now I’m conscious of directing every action, every fall toward this guy. I’ll go right over to the ropes near his seat and make sure he sees the emotion on my face. The guy is cradling his kid, who is still in tears. And I know what he’s thinking: “This guy is really hurt. He needs some help out there.” I know that’s going through his mind because now he’s looking around. Is somebody going to go into the ring and help that guy? Is there a doctor approaching? Then his eyes change again. Now they start to light up. I begin to make a comeback. The kid stops crying. The dad can’t believe I might be able to get to my feet. I move my shoulders a little bit, shake the cobwebs out of my head, and slowly come up to one knee. The dad isn’t out of his seat yet, but he’s fixated on what’s happening in the ring. His kid is starting to see some hope. Then I start whipping the other guy’s butt. I’m on fire. The next thing I know, the dad and the kid are out of their seats. Both of them are screaming now. Everybody in the arena is on his or her feet screaming.
My goal was to get that one guy onto his feet. I needed him to believe that what he was seeing was real. When he got off his chair, that’s when I knew I did my job that night. I lived for those moments.
When we went back down to Florida, my dad ran everything. I was his son and he took care of me, but nothing was easy. Eventually my dad went back to WCW and I went my own way for a while. I hooked up with the United States Wrestling Association out of Tennessee. I worked that territory with Jerry Jarrett, Jeff Jarrett, Jerry Lawler, and some other guys for eight months to a year.
There were a lot of guys who helped me along the way. Mike Graham and Steve Keirn taught me how to work and hone my trade during those years in Florida. Then I was fortunate to get hooked up with guys like Barry Windham, Arn Anderson, Bobby Eaton, and Larry Zbyszko. Those guys taught me the nitty-gritty of professional wrestling. A lot of my work is like Barry’s. He is so smooth and so good. Thanks to what I learned from Barry, I work smooth as well. Arn, Bobby, and Larry were guys who did things the right way. They paid attention to detail and they were passionate about the business. Those guys all made me a bigger star than I was at the time simply because they were so good and they cared about what they were doing. They knew how to work the crowd and at the same time they were taking a kid like me to the next level. Ricky Steamboat taught me how to get beat up. It might not sound that difficult, but there is a fine art to showing people you are in pain and being able to completely sell that emotion. He taught me when to move, when to stay down on the mat, when to show my face, and how to do it in the most convincing manner.
When I wrestled with Arn or Ricky Steamboat, sometimes we would go for an hour. We did that several times. One night at the Omni in Atlanta, we went for nearly an hour and we never lost the fans. Arn, Ricky, and Bobby were just that good. They knew how to operate in the ring, how to tell a story and keep it compelling for sixty minutes. They were remarkable. They didn’t run around the ring trying to take time off the clock. Those guys worked.
That night Ricky and I were fighting Bobby Eaton and Arn Anderson, who were the Tag-Team Champions at the time. It was a live event and the Omni was sold out. Since there wasn’t any television, we were supposed to go an hour and end the match in a draw. As I said, those guys were so good that I wasn’t worried about anything. With about ten minutes left in the match, I was blown sky high. By that I mean that I was sucking wind in a way that felt like I was having a heart attack. I couldn’t catch my breath. I was huffing and puffing, gasping for air.
Both Arn and Bobby were looking at me like, “What is wrong with this kid? Is he dying or something?” Meanwhile, I was freaking out. Literally, I couldn’t breathe. I couldn’t get any air. It probably looked like I was dying because that’s pretty much how I felt. We had spent so much time building up to the final tag that I was spent. At about the eight-minute mark, Arn said, “You guys are going to win the title tonight.” We switched the planned finish over the last few minutes because I had freaked out. That was the first time I had ever gone beyond twenty-five or thirty minutes in a match, and I was blown out by all the work. The guys were looking at one another, tagging in and out saying, “What’s wrong with this guy? What’s going on?” They would look at me and say, “Just breathe. Take a breath.” Then I’d scream back, “I can’t. I can’t breathe. Oh, my God.” It felt like I was being suffocated. Finally somebody said, “Just do something.” That’s when I rolled over and tagged with Ricky. At that point I knew what they were thinking. “Now what are we going to do? We have built up a hell of a match and Dustin just screwed up the whole thing.” They had to improvise and let us win at that point because we had every person in the Omni on their feet. They were ready for us to win the title and we couldn’t let them down. When the match ended and we all got back behind the curtain, the guys said, “What happened to you, man?” They weren’t upset or anything like that. We had a really good match, which was all they cared about. Ending it the way we did was probably the best outcome possible for the fans.
I don’t know how they did it, though. I don’t know if I could have done it without them. I’ve always believed you are only as good as the other person in the ring with you. And they made me better, no question about it. I’m not saying it’s a lost art, but those guys were different.
Steve Austin was in the same mold. When my dad was back in control at WCW, he brought me in. That’s when I got my first big push. Steve was there at the time and we had some tremendous matches working together in the early 1990s. He was Stunning Steve Austin and I was the Natural, and man, we tore down some houses. We had wars. We were young, highly motivated, and totally committed to what we were doing. We’d go out and do twenty to twenty-five minutes a night. Either he was the United States Champion or I was, and we weren’t afraid to try something new because we absolutely loved what we were doing. All we cared about was walking away knowing we had a great match. We knew the fans were pleased with us, but we were also pleased because of the effort and skill we put into those matches.
I met Steve at the USWA. We were two guys from Texas just going for it all the time. It was old-school wrestling. We had the same attitude because we had been taught the right way. We were tearing it up night after night and having a hell of a time along the way.
One night we were in Phoenix for a match. Lex Luger and Sting were really hot at the time, and they were there, too. I was the United States Champion working with Steve. Grizzly Smith, Jake “the Snake” Roberts’s dad, was the road agent. I love Grizzly. What a good man. Austin and I were talking about the match and what we were going to do that night. Now, this was a bought-and-paid-for show at the local fair. So the audience was made up of wrestling fans, but there were also people coming to the show because they just happened to be at the fair that day. None of that mattered to Austin and me. We didn’t care whe
ther there were ten people in the stands or ten thousand. We were all about tearing down the house every time we stepped into the ring.
Steve and I knew how to work. We could grab hold of the audience from the opening minute and have them the entire way. Steve was a natural. We exchanged ideas, but most of the time he called the match. Sometimes I’d call something out in the middle of a match, and Steve would go with it. We worked really smooth. It was like ballet in the ring when we were together. He is a good guy, just a good old boy.
I was just doing my job and keeping my nose clean, literally. I wasn’t doing any drugs or anything else other than drinking. I was still in my early twenties and was learning from the best. I didn’t do a program with Rick Rude the way I did with Steve, but Rick was another guy who helped me tremendously. He had that old-school savvy and he helped, no question about it. Everything was going pretty well, though my demons were circling. I just didn’t notice.
Around that time I started recognizing the fact I really was in my dad’s shadow. The more successful I became, the more obvious it was to me. I started getting weighed down by the idea that I was never going to be my own person, that I was always going to be Dusty’s kid. Sure, I did well, but I knew people thought my success was due in part, in large part according to some, to being Dusty’s son.
Wrestling Vader in my WCW days.
It didn’t help matters that I had all kinds of insecurities. No matter how well I was doing, my father never really articulated how he felt about me or my performance. It wasn’t until later in my career that he would say, “Good job” or “I’m proud of you, son.” He’d tell me he loved me, but I needed to know how he felt about me as a wrestler. I wanted his approval just like every son wants his father’s approval. He was the boss, and I understood that, but I also was his son. There didn’t need to be any office politics between us, just some affirmation. “Tell me how you feel,” I wanted to say. “Tell me I’m doing a good job. Tell me you are proud of me.” I never really knew how well I was doing. As a result, I was always very critical of myself. To this day I can’t watch myself on television. All I see are the flaws. I became very self-conscious about my performances. I’m insecure about a lot of things, so self-doubt came naturally. I’ve had to figure out life by myself, but in a lot of ways that experience didn’t make me a stronger person. To the contrary, figuring out where I fit and how I measured up with my dad made me weaker in a lot of ways because I always questioned myself. I am still very hard on myself. I’m a perfectionist. I could have used some words of encouragement or support from my father along the way.
Cross Rhodes: Goldust, Out of the Darkness (WWE) Page 3