We were there early in the day, when the only people around the arena were security guards and the tech crew. The ring was set up, so I let the boys get in there and bump around. I was standing way up on the entrance ramp watching when I heard someone call my name.
“Hey, Joe, hit that button right there.” It was Stone Cold. He was telling me to press the button if I really wanted to freak the boys out.
The next thing you know, Joey, James, and their friends heard the familiar sound of glass breaking followed by Austin’s music as the man himself stormed down to the ring for some action. The boys didn’t know what to do. James was a really brave little boy, though, never moving an inch when Austin charged in and delivered a perfect Stone Cold Stunner on him. When he got in there, they jumped all over him and he went with it. It was hilarious.
As much fun as the show was later that night, the biggest shock of the year came early the next morning when we were told Brian Pillman was found dead. Brian was another guy who’d lived a tough and troubled life with drugs and alcohol and struggled to keep basic composure.
I remember when Ken “The World’s Most Dangerous Man” Shamrock had first come into the company a few months earlier and had no clue about the levels of excess going on all around him. We’d all been at Denny’s near the Philadelphia airport after one of Ken’s first shows, and he couldn’t understand why Brian was facedown in his cereal.
“What’s wrong with this guy?” he asked. “Is he always like this?”
Pillman died at only thirty-five years old.
I’VE ALWAYS APPRECIATED THE RESPECT THE FANS HAVE GIVEN ME. 1999.
18
OUR CONTINUING JOURNEY INTO THE UNKNOWN
Two days after Brian Pillman’s death, we were in Topeka for an episode of Raw (which was dedicated to Brian). It looked as if things were finally on the upswing.
“You guys are going over the Godwinns tonight for the belts,” Vince said. “You deserve it.”
Was there fine print on his forehead? I thought maybe I was in the twilight zone or something. Twenty minutes later, though, when Hawk pinned Phineas for the WWF titles, I knew I was right where we should’ve been all along: on top.
It lasted all of six weeks. We dropped the championships to another faction of DX, the New Age Outlaws. Badass Billy Gunn and “The Road Dogg” Jesse James were also the latest part of Vince’s answer to the NWO, which meant we were in for a few months of humiliation and losses the likes of which I never knew possible. We lost more matches in the first few months of 1998 than we did in the entire fifteen years prior. When Hawk came up positive for whatever (just pick one substance) at the end of February, we sat out for thirty days while Vince and his team of creative writers literally planned the rest of our miserable fate in the WWF.
When we came back, we were immediately subjected to a gimmick overhaul into the LOD 2000, which included Hawk and me growing out our hair into regular flattops, completely changing our shoulder pads and intro music, wearing ridiculous airbrushed motorcycle helmets, and getting a little piece of eye candy named Sunny as our new female manager.
Sunny was great, and the fans loved her for her undeniable charisma and sizzle, but man, I remember thinking, What the hell happened to the Road Warriors? We were getting further and further away from our roots, which was the worst thing that could’ve happened to us.
Well, almost the worst. By June, Sunny started getting phased out of the LOD 2000 picture in favor of adding a third member to the team. Now things were completely out of control, and I hated every second of it.
Adding Darren Drozdov (Droz) to the dynamic of Hawk and Animal was like saying, “The Road Warriors need help. They can’t cut it on their own.” The truth, which bothered me most of all, was Vince’s message to me that Hawk’s unreliability had to be dealt with any way he saw fit.
But he wasn’t finished yet. “Animal,” Vince said to me during a creative meeting, “I’m thinking about going very dark with the Legion of Doom. I want you to personally take on an angle where you’re staggering around drunk and high on TV, constantly causing the LOD to blow winning opportunities in the ring.” So that was Vince’s plan: to play off our real-life situation.
I felt the same as I had when Jack Lanza said Hawk would take a Doomsday in Japan against Hogan and Tenryu. “Absolutely not,” I said. “I’m not touching anything like that. It’s a terrible business decision for us.”
The echo from my voice didn’t even silence when Hawk spoke right up. “I’ll do it. I don’t give a fuck.”
Vince smiled. “That’s the spirit, Mike. I like a team player.”
The irony of it all made me sick. Now Hawk was given an open excuse to justify his substance issues.
“I have to do it for the gimmick, Animal.”
Great. Just great.
Week after week, Hawk would come out and either fall off of the stage, stumble off of the walking ramp, trip through the ropes, or lose his balance on the top rope. On a good night, he’d do all four. And what no one realizes is that Hawk wasn’t merely working his new story line. He really was blasted all of those times. It was method acting at its drunken best.
The whole angle came to an embarrassing climax when a drunk and frustrated Hawk pretended to fall off the top of the 25-foot-tall Titantron video screen during Raw as I pleaded with him to be careful from the stage below. And that was it.
Shortly afterward, life imitated art, as Hawk gave his very last dirty urine in the WWF. We were told there was nothing left for us creatively and were sent home.
So there we were, excused from our duties with the WWF. Honestly, that whole second run in the company left a terrible taste in my mouth (and I’m not talking about the Godwinns’ slop). Although I was still collecting a guaranteed check, it wasn’t as much as I would’ve made with the now monthly PPV schedule. Everyone always got kickbacks from those shows, especially Wrestle-Mania, when you could always count on an extra big payday.
As far as my relationship with Mike at the time, it was pretty nonexistent. There’s no question I was frustrated beyond belief when my career with Mike kept stalling out due to his lifestyle decisions. We rarely spoke, but when we did it was short, sweet, and usually about business. Truth was, I’d never give up on our partnership as the Road Warriors. We were brothers in paint and had been through way too much to just smother it out and go our separate ways. Hawk and Animal were bigger than Mike and Joe. Whether or not we wanted to acknowledge it, our alter egos had taken on lives of their own since we’d created them back in ’83.
By the spring of ’99, I started becoming aware that everywhere I went, people were referring to the Road Warriors as legends and the greatest tag team of all time. When you hear stuff like that, it’s easy to get embarrassed and quickly shrug it off with a “Thank you very much,” but at the heart of the wrestling business, money aside, gaining the respect of your fans and peers is what it’s all about. That was around the time it really hit me how amazing of a run Mike and I had and were still on.
We had also been around long enough that we had to face our own share of tragedies. I got a call from a friend on April 20 that Rick Rude had died in the middle of the night in his hotel room due to drug-related heart failure. Rude and I, along with Mike and Barry, had started out together all those years before in Eddie Sharkey’s crappy basement ring with no clue what the hell we were getting ourselves into. We were bonded for life by that experience.
In that time, the four of us saw the very best and the very worst of the professional wrestling business, and not one of us was ever completely immune to the dark elements of it all. It was no secret that Rude had partied hard and, in a lot of ways, was actually very much like Mike, except that he had a wife and three kids at home. Richard Rood, known to the world as Ravishing Rick Rude, was only forty years old.
About a month later, on May 23, the entire world was shocked when Owen Hart fell 78 feet from the ceiling of the Kemper Arena to his death during a WWF PPV in Kansas City. I was sitting a
t home when James came running in saying something horrible had just happened during the show, which he was watching downstairs.
“Dad, Owen Hart just died on TV. Come quick.”
What? I couldn’t believe it. I ran down and watched as Jim Ross and Jerry Lawler confirmed what James had said. It made me sick to my stomach thinking about it. Owen, in his sparsely used Blue Blazer gimmick, had this big entrance to the ring where he would drop from the rafters strapped into a small harness and cable, which he’d always told everyone how much he hated.
As the story goes, thinking he had been hooked to the cable properly and was ready to suspend down, Owen stepped off the catwalk and free-fell to the ring, where he hit one of the corners with his chest and face. He died almost instantly due to the severe trauma. Like the rest of the wrestling community, and anyone who ever had the pleasure of knowing Owen, I was heartbroken.
In a great show of compassion and human understanding, Vince McMahon paid for everyone who’d ever worked in the WWF past and present to attend the funeral in Calgary. I took James with me. You see, because Minnesota is one of the gateway states to Canada, Owen used to stop by our house all the time and became a family friend. He’d come with me to watch Jessica play hockey and told me about his two little babies and post-wrestling plans.
Few people knew Owen had earned a teaching degree earlier in his life. “Joe, I want to teach,” he’d said. “I can’t wait for my days in the ring to be over. They’re numbered.” Owen was truly one of the good guys. He was thirty-four.
With great friends like Rude and Owen dying so suddenly and leaving behind families, man, it really hit home. I couldn’t imagine what it would be like if I, too, met with an untimely accident and Julie was left alone to raise Joey, James, and Jessica. As burned as I may have felt being made to sit out a year from working, being able to get even that much closer to my Laurinaitis clan made me quickly forget all about it. After all, I had coaching duties to attend to.
That’s right. From the day Joey, James, and Jessica were all able to walk, you can rest assured I had my coaching hat (or Zubaz bandana) firmly on. When Joey started getting to be around six years old, he gravitated straight toward hockey and stayed with it all the way through high school. I’m telling you, man, the kid had no quit in his heart, ever.
Joey wasn’t as big as some of the other players, but you never would’ve noticed because of his good, old-fashioned hustle. Whenever I came home, we’d go over his slap shots and passing in the driveway with a little net. Even with 300-pound Road Warrior Daddy completely blocking out the sun on the tiny little goal cage, Joey would nail shot after shot.
By 1999, Joey was a man of eighteen and had really filled out after finding a passion for weight lifting, as I had, in high school. He weighed about 185 pounds and stood at five feet nine. I’ll never forget the day he made me respect him man-to-man when he came in and announced to Julie and me that he was going into the military. And I was even prouder when his boot camp physical training scores came back as the highest in his company. Within another year or so, during the political turbulence after 9-11, Joey would enter the National Guard and go overseas to defend our country in Iraq.
Because Joey was now eighteen, the age difference between James and Jessica was a much bigger factor than it had been only a few years earlier. While he was busy departing for the big, waiting world outside our front door, he was also completely leaving behind the childhood stage that his younger brother and sister were still smack in the middle of.
From the moment James had started crawling around the house, I could tell how coordinated and sports-oriented he already was. In T-ball, he’d hit home runs every single time he was at bat. I kid you not. Whether it was a grounder and he ran all four bases before they could throw it home or he smashed it over the fence, the kid was a natural. He grew so rapidly that he was the same size as his eleven-year-old brother Joey by the time he was six.
After years of hearing him say, “Can I play football yet? Can I play football yet?” we finally enrolled him. He was a nine-year-old terror on the football field—and every other arena, for that matter, including baseball and hockey. But it was on the Pop Warner football field that James emerged as a definitive leader and I got to become Coach Animal.
I’ll never forget when James was only nine or ten years old and I had him and the other most advanced player on his team, Blake Wheeler (now a center on the Boston Bruins hockey team), running passing plays all day long. You would’ve thought those two were junior high varsity starters the way they instinctively picked up on what I showed them. At the actual games, I’d be laughing out loud with the other parents as James and Blake schooled every one of those other teams during the season.
Only a few years behind James was ten-year-old Jessica. When she wasn’t doing all of the regular girl things, like playing with her Barbie and Easy-Bake Oven, Jessica was doing amazing things on her hockey and softball teams. From day one, there was nothing she couldn’t do as well as my boys. From throwing the baseball to swinging the bat, Jessica had pure talent.
With Joey not around as much anymore, James didn’t hesitate to take Jessica over to our huge trampoline, which I called Thunder-dome, and would never get tired of chokeslamming and power-bombing his little sister until the cows came home. And you know what? Jessica loved it. She was a tough cookie by now and, even according to James himself, was “the best natural athlete in the whole family.” My boy knows what he’s talking about.
When she first started grade school, all of the kids were required to run around the whole school. Man, Jessica smoked everyone (including the boys) by a couple hundred yards. No doubt about it, my little baby girl was another fine charter member of the Laurinaitis and Co. Super Athlete’s Club. It’s quite exclusive, you know.
Now, of course, behind any squadron of well-behaved, well-juice-boxed young athletes is a dedicated team mom. That’s where Julie came in. Already the center of the universe for our own children, Julie devoted herself to making sure all of the kids on Joey’s, James’s, and Jessica’s teams were always looked after. Whether it was rides to and from the field or taking the time to slice up a few dozen orange wedges for the team’s midgame replenishment, Julie was the mom other moms looked up to, wondering, How does she do it all? Simple. She’s the real Supergirl. I pulled her out of the crater myself back in ’84.
At the end of the day, it was Julie who had to take up the role of both mom and dad in my absence, which was over two hundred days a year when I was on the road. I missed PTA meetings, school pageants, and birthday parties, but Julie was there, front and center, taking me along in spirit. There’s no question my family wouldn’t have turned out as brilliantly without her planted in the center. Like my own mother before her, Julie was the glue holding the Laurinaitis family together.
Before I knew it, not only was I completely rejuvenated by my time away from wrestling, but our WWF contracts had recently expired so we were free to go to work again. My long-term goal was to land us back in WCW by the end of the year, but those talks were yet to come. So at the end of July, the Road Warriors hopped on a plane for a series of shows Down Under with nothing but high hopes. Sadly, the whole experience would turn into a total nightmare.
The first two shows started off great in Wollongong, New South Wales, on July 28, when we defeated Public Enemy, Rocco Rock, and Johnny Grunge for the i-Generation Tag Team Championships. Two days later, we retained the titles against Rocco and Johnny at the Superstars of Wrestling PPV at the SuperDome in Sydney. Hawk was in great spirits and telling everybody crazy stories from his recent time off, including one about running into Randy Savage at a concert in Tampa. (Remember the rematch I mentioned?)
As the story goes, Hawk took Dale to the Sun Dome for a Kid Rock concert and was hanging out backstage when none other than Savage and his girlfriend came walking by. Hawk said he extended his hand in friendship only to be punched right in the face by the Macho Man. Crack!
Mike smile
d and asked, “Is that all you got?” He was about to grab Savage’s head and “give that son of a bitch a swirlie right there in the bathroom,” he later told me, but security grabbed them and put the whole thing to an end. (In case you’re wondering, a swirlie is when you stick someone’s head in a toilet and flush.) We were all dying laughing at that one.
It was right after our triumphant championship defense on the thirtieth that things took a hard left turn for the worse. We had a couple days off before our next show and stopped for a break in the city of Adelaide down in South Australia. The worst thing you could do with professional wrestlers was give them a few days of downtime in a foreign country; it was like giving them a license to party. No harm done. It’s just what they did. As always, Hawk and I split ways and agreed to meet at the show, which left him to run off with some buddies and see what kind of trouble he could get himself into.
Days later in Melbourne, Hawk and I painted up. When it was time to go into the ring, I looked around and saw a crowd gathering around someone lying on the ground. It was Hawk! He looked panic-stricken as I’d never seen him before. His chest was pounding so hard I could actually see his left pectoral muscle spasming out of control.
“Joe, don’t let me die, man,” Mike pleaded.
I was in one hell of a spot. We were about to go out for our match, and the place was sold out. There was no way I could just leave with Hawk and screw the promoter and fans. Thinking quickly, I grabbed a couple of guys and asked if they would take Hawk to the hospital and I’d be there as soon as the match was over. They agreed, and I found this giant Aboriginal Australian in the back to be my substitute partner. He had no idea what he’d do out there in the ring, but I reassured him. “Don’t worry about it. Just get in there with me, and I’ll do everything.”
After the show, I went to the back and called Hawk at the hospital in Adelaide.
“Animal,” he said, “you’ve got to come and get me. Where I’m at right now, three people just died with the same heart condition I’ve got. I’m freaking out.”
The Road Warriors: Danger, Death, and the Rush of Wrestling Page 29