All I remember was blistering heat and the smell of my singed eyebrows. I grabbed my face and rolled around as if it were melting off. In the meantime, Paul got a hold of Cornette’s tennis racket and took a good shot at Jimmy’s back. Then I recovered enough to grab the racket, and as I started whacking away on Stan and Bobby, the referee saw me and called for the bell. We lost by DQ. Rats.
In May we flew down to St. Petersburg, Florida, to wrestle at the Eddie Graham Memorial Show in honor of Eddie, a great guy and promoter who had shot and killed himself on January 21, 1985, after years of serious alcoholism. In front of a sold-out crowd at the Bayfront Center, Hawk and I wrestled NWA World Tag Team champions Manny Fernandez and some guy named Ravishing Rick Rude.
Yeah, tell me about it. It seemed like every time I turned my head, I was in a match with one of my old hometown buddies. Not only that, but between Hawk, Barry, Rude, and myself, we had held or were holding every major tag team championship from around the world. Eddie Sharkey had to have felt like a proud father.
By now, Rude had real swagger as the robe-wearing, narcissistic, egomaniacal heel who went to the ring to the tune of Sade’s “Smooth Operator.” I had to give it to him, after struggling for quite some time to come into his own, Rick had developed one smooth gimmick, and I couldn’t have been prouder. Now he was half of the NWA World Tag Team champs. Hell, that was a title Hawk and I had yet to win.
Manny Fernandez was an interesting guy, too. He’d spread the funny rumor that he was in fact the same Manny Fernandez who’d played for the Miami Dolphins in the 1970s. I knew he was full of shit and told him so, but he sure pulled that rib on everybody else. They just didn’t know their football like I did.
We had a great match that night with a double DQ finish when manager Paul Jones came into the ring and broke up the pin I was about to score after powerslamming Manny. Then “Precious” Paul ran in and started beating Jones down, and the ref called for the bell. That didn’t stop Hawk and me from getting one last lick in on Rude. We picked him up from the mat, threw him into the ropes, and double clotheslined his head off. What else are friends for?
Funny enough, also that month, the entire wrestling industry got a little black eye when Jim Duggan and the Iron Sheik got arrested together in New Jersey. On May 26, Duggan and Sheik got pulled over on the NJ Turnpike and were both found under the influence of drugs. But forget about all that, because the kicker is that those two were currently in a hot feud in the WWF. Talk about breaking kayfabe, brother!
There they were, hateful enemies on TV, caught being the best of buddies. As you can imagine, the WWF wasn’t very happy about Duggan and Sheik exposing part of the business and drawing negative publicity to the company. They were both released shortly after.
So, after finishing up in St. Petersburg with Rude and Manny, we had a few dates to hit in the Southwest, where we suffered a big hit to our gimmick—and our wallets. We were staying at a hotel in Weslaco, Texas, slightly above the Rio Grande River from Mexico and west of the Gulf of Mexico. I guess somebody had been watching us during our stay. All I know is that the next morning when Hawk and I went outside to our van, one of the side windows was smashed in. When we opened up the van and took a look inside, it was as I feared: they’d taken our spiked vests. I could’ve killed somebody.
Hawk was livid. “Fuck, man. That’s bullshit.”
I felt violated in the worst way and cursed the fact that we had spent $3000 each on them, including big, custom foam carrying cases. Poof! Gone. It makes me sick to think that today, somewhere out there, Hawk’s and my prized vests are probably sitting in a pawnshop collecting dust.
But you know what? Maybe it was all meant to be because the loss made me think even bigger. I decided to give a call to a buddy who worked at Riddell, makers of collegiate and professional grade football shoulder pads, and ran some ideas past him. He sent me a couple pairs of the pads, and I went to work on the vision I had for the Road Warriors’ newest piece of artillery.
I called an old coworker from my days at Honeywell and asked him if he could fabricate a few nickel-plated spikes in various sizes. He said it would be no problem and got to work right away. The next step was drilling holes in the tops of the pads and then spray-painting the entire sets with a flat black.
When the spikes were ready, I simply popped them in place like rivets into the holes. After clamping some chains between the breastplates, I tried them on. They were even better than I’d hoped. Like an excited little kid, I called up Hawk and told him to get his ass over and check out my newest creation.
“Holy shit, Animal, those are badass,” he said.
We both put our pads on and looked at each other in the mirror. It was love at first sight. The Road Warriors had been supersized.
Inspired by the new addition to our gimmick, I also started to experiment with a new Road Warrior Animal paint job. Sketching out some ideas, I began to draw a web with a spider in the middle. That was it! I drew the webbing onto my face in the same general shape as my standard devil horn look, only I didn’t fill it in with solid colors. I simply connected a series of lines into a point between my eyes and then painted a little black spider hanging right in the center.
It gave me chills looking at it. I thought, Don’t get caught in the web. Hell, yeah. Being stuck in Animal’s web meant certain doom for all unfortunate prey.
My Road Warriors inventiveness didn’t stop with the pads and the paint job. During another trip back to Japan in early June, after watching a match with the British Bulldogs, I was inspired to develop a new finisher to captivate audiences. Davey Boy Smith and Dynamite Kid were one of the most innovative and exciting teams I’d ever seen, and one spot Dynamite did in particular caught my attention.
The move was called the electric chair drop, which involved Dynamite bending over and scooping an opponent onto his shoulders in an upright seated position, as if to give him a piggyback ride. From there, Dynamite pushed backward as hard as he could, giving his opponent a back-bump from hell. Boom!
I wondered what it would be like if I put somebody up for the electric chair and Hawk clotheslined them from the top rope. Hmmmm. Only one way to find out.
A few days later we were doing TV tapings for AJPW against a couple of jobbers, and I thought we’d take my new idea for a test run. When we got to the end of the match, I told Hawk to climb to the top. I walked up behind one of our dazed opponents, stuck my head between his legs, and raised him high up on my shoulders. When I’d adjusted to the additional weight, I pivoted around to face Hawk, who launched off and clotheslined the guy with a ton of force, knocking him for a full backflip. Whoom!
The resulting carnage was incredible and perfectly Road Warrioresque. The move was like a decapitation and a graceful trapeze act all at the same time. Hawk and I knew we had a winner the second we watched it back on tape. No one was doing anything like what we had executed. The only thing we were missing was a name, which we quickly came up with: the Double Impact. But when we went back to the States, we eventually settled on a new, permanent name for our finisher: the Doomsday Device.
When we came back to the United States and used the Doomsday on our first TV taping, the guys in the back were less than thrilled. “Oh, great,” Arn Anderson said. “Now we get to do that? What’s next, a firing squad?”
12
THE GOLDEN AGE OF JIM CROCKETT PROMOTIONS AND THE NWA
We’d just revamped our Road Warrior gimmick with the addition of the shoulder pads and the Doomsday Device when the time came yet again for the Great American Bash, another monthlong tour in July of 1987. But this year the Bash itself would be a mere backdrop for the event Hawk and I felt was the defining moment of each of our careers—War Games: The Match Beyond.
War Games was another brilliant invention of Dusty Rhodes, who’d been thinking of a way to get all Four Horsemen in the ring with himself, Nikita, and us in a super match. I don’t know how he came up with it, but Dusty envisioned two rings, side by sid
e, enclosed by one giant, ceilinged cage. The resulting concept would become the uncontested king of the gimmick matches.
I remember arriving with Hawk at the Omni for the match on the Fourth of July, the kickoff night of the Bash. We couldn’t wait to go out on the floor and see what this thing was all about.
I couldn’t believe what I saw. There in the empty arena, hanging ominously about 70 feet in the air above the two rings, was the giant War Games cage. It’s an image I’ll never forget.
Like little kids in awe, Hawk and I walked to the rings and checked them out. Right away I noticed there was about a five-foot gap between the ropes where the rings were side by side, and got big ideas. “I got it, man,” I said to Hawk. “We hit a set of double flying shoulder blocks.” With a new playground like this, the possibilities were endless.
The match was in two parts: the War Games and then the Match Beyond. The way it all worked was so simple that it was brilliant. War Games started off with two men, one from each team. After two minutes of no-rules combat, a coin toss decided which team got to send in another member for a two-on-one advantage. Then after two more minutes, the opposite team was able to even up the score with another entrant. This sequence went back and forth every two minutes until both teams were completely in the ring at the same time, at which point the War Games became the Match Beyond. The Match Beyond itself had an even simpler premise than the War Games: the first person to submit or surrender lost the match for his team.
I thought the whole idea was amazing and couldn’t wait to get painted and geared up. In a lot of ways, the War Games meant so much more than being a wrestling spectacle; it was a symbol of the heights the NWA and Jimmy Crockett had scaled in the industry. At that time, the company was in the midst of a golden era of popularity and profits, and it was because of our loaded roster of top guys.
In all seriousness, the Road Warriors, Dusty Rhodes, Nikita Koloff, and the Four Horsemen’s stable—NWA World Heavyweight champion Ric Flair, NWA World Television champion Tully Blanchard, Arn Anderson, and Lex Luger (who had recently replaced Ole)—were the hottest ticket in the company. Any combinations of singles, tag team, six-man or even eight-man tag matches drew sellout business wherever we went. With that in mind, it was a no-brainer for Dusty to figure out how to take all of us and do something the world had never seen before. Crockett hyped the coming of the War Games for months on TV, too, with cool commercials for the Bash showing pieces of the cage being welded together.
I’ll never forget how excited and nervous I was for the match to start, and when our music hit and it was time to go, my mind went blank. Hawk and I looked like full-scale monsters in our giant shoulder pads as we plowed down the aisle with Nikita, Dusty, and Paul. That night, not only was Paul involved in the match as our fifth member, but so was Tully Blanchard’s manager, J.J. Dillon, the Fifth Horseman in the match.
With the lights out and spotlights scanning the screaming audience, a loud voice announced over the PA, “Let the War Games begin.” It was like something out of the movies, and I had chills up and down my arms. It was so loud in the Omni that it was hard to hear anything.
When it all finally started, it was Dusty and Arn first and then Tully, me, Flair, Nikita, Luger, Hawk, J.J., and then Paul. The event was total chaos, and I absolutely loved it. Everyone was hurt, exhausted, and bleeding by the end.
When I first jumped into the cage, I leveled Arn and Flair and then took Tully and launched him like an arrow over the ropes and into the second ring. I raced over there and, with my back to the cage, hooked his legs under my arms and picked him up sit-up style into the cage. After five or six face-first cage smashes, Tully was pulverized, and I dropped him like a big bag of bones.
Tully also served as cannon fodder for Hawk when he first tore into the War Games like a starving tiger. After climbing into the ring and knocking Lex Luger half unconscious, he grabbed Tully and yelled, “Press. Spear.”
I wasn’t sure what he meant until I saw him press Tully over his head, then throw him like a human spear into the corner, where he landed in a crumpled heap.
Because everyone, especially Dusty, had been so impressed with our new Doomsday Device finisher, we’d been told we had the honor of bringing the match home. It was also decided that J.J. Dillon would have the distinct pleasure of receiving our fine little maneuver.
The plan was to be extra careful. Well, sometimes things don’t go quite as planned.
Referee Tommy Young started frantically yelling over to us, “Wrap it up. Wrap it up. Let’s take it home.”
We knew there were time constraints, so we hastily got ourselves into position. The ceiling on the cage complicated the whole Doomsday dynamic. When I had J.J. up on my shoulders, he had to kind of hunch over to the side in order to fit upright. When Hawk clotheslined him, he jumped off the top a little before I was ready and poor J.J. fell awkwardly on his side and separated his shoulder.
As soon as he landed, I knew there was a problem.
“Oh, shit. I’m hurt.” J.J. groaned. “I popped my shoulder out.”
To end the match, we quickly made J.J. submit and the bell was rung. I have to admit, winning the War Games was bittersweet because of the injury. Rule number one in the code of professional wrestling is to protect each other at all times.
When we got to the back, Flair, Tully, and Arn weren’t happy at all. They said we were careless, but J.J. spoke up and came to our defense. “It wasn’t their fault. There wasn’t enough room between me and the top of the cage. I couldn’t take the bump right.”
Although I felt horrible about J.J. and appreciated that he defended us, I personally didn’t think it was anybody’s fault. The War Games were too fast-paced and out of control. Hawk, J.J., and I rushed the Doomsday together and, far beyond our control, J.J. took the fall. It was just one of those things. One thing is for sure, though: the ten of us made professional wrestling history that night. Over twenty-three years later and counting, I get asked more about the War Games than anything else I ever did.
War Games was such a huge success, in fact, that Dusty decided immediately to have a sequel. War Games II took place at the final show of the Bash on July 31 in Miami at the Orange Bowl. All of us returned for the big sequel, except of course J.J., who was replaced by War Machine, who was actually Big Bubba Rogers under a mask.
Our team again won the Match Beyond, but in my opinion it didn’t compare to the first one. Sure, all of the key players were back, but like many part twos, the magic wasn’t the same. A lot of people don’t know that we actually had two more War Games that August: one in Chicago at the Pavilion and one in Long Island at the Nassau Coliseum. We won both of those as well.
The Great American Bash ’87 was another success for the NWA and Jim Crockett Promotions, and Jimmy sure wasn’t shy about spreading the wealth to his main players (us, Dusty, Nikita, and the Horsemen). Not only did Jimmy start treating us to Caribbean vacations, city-to-city limousine rides, and four-star hotels and restaurants, but he even reached in really deep and sprung for a company Falcon 50, one of the most exclusive private jets money could buy. Honestly, there was nothing cooler than leaving a show and being chauffeured directly to our own plane.
We were all having so much fun that no one ever stopped to wonder how long it would last. When business is booming like it was in 1987 in the NWA, no one ever imagines a day when things might take a different turn. Right then and there, the only things we were all concerned with were making sure the jet was fueled up and the champagne was on ice. There were others, however, in the business who weren’t faring as well.
Bill Watts’ Mid-South Wrestling, now called the Universal Wrestling Federation (UWF) for a more global marketing appeal, was starting to tank. As a result, Jimmy Crockett figured it would be a great idea to buy out Watts and absorb the UWF, which he’d done around the same time as the Crockett Cup back in April.
When the Bash rolled around in July, several UWF talents, such as announcer Jim Ross a
nd wrestlers like Dr. Death Steve Williams, “Hot Stuff” Eddie Gilbert, Rick Steiner, and Sting (the former Blade Runner) were able to successfully make the transition into the NWA over the months leading up to Starrcade ’87 in November.
Usually the premier event for the NWA and Jim Crockett Promotions, Starrcade proved to be a monumental disaster in 1987. First, Jimmy decided to hold Starrcade in Chicago instead of Atlanta or Greensboro, removing the event’s traditional territorial Southern roots for the first time.
It was also Crockett’s first attempt at doing a PPV, a market Vince McMahon and the WWF had firmly monopolized since the first WrestleMania back in ’85. When the WWF discovered Crockett’s bold ambition to host the Starrcade ’87 PPV on Thanksgiving night, they decided to step in and squash it.
In retaliation to Starrcade, Vince developed the first ever Survivor Series PPV to air opposite our show on the same night. He then called up all of the major cable companies he normally did business with, the same ones that had already intended to commit to Starrcade, and informed them that if they didn’t exclusively run Survivor Series instead of Crockett’s show, then they’d lose out on all future WWF PPVs, including WrestleMania.
One thing you have to understand is that earlier, in April, WrestleMania III had featured Andre the Giant against Hulk Hogan at the Pontiac Silverdome. The show had become the biggest indoor sporting event of all time, with a live attendance of almost 94,000 people. It crushed all buy rate projections with revenue in the ten-million-dollar range. It was record business.
With that fact still fresh in the minds of cable executives, the thought of losing out on a guaranteed moneymaker like the WWF caused many of them to quake and opt to heed Vince’s ultimatum. The outcome? The WWF outsold Starrcade by more than a two-to-one ratio and really stuck it to Jimmy, killing profits and stirring up a lot of uneasiness within the company.
The Road Warriors: Danger, Death, and the Rush of Wrestling Page 19