Sadly, their reign wouldn’t last long: During a more or less insignificant match in December 1986 against “Cowboy” Bob Orton and Don Muraco, the Dynamite Kid leapfrogged awkwardly over Orton—in the midst of the most pedestrian of moves—and landed with a severely injured back. He lay on the ground getting pummeled by his opponents before anyone in the ring could comprehend what had happened. It’s hard to blame anybody there: It wasn’t a bad fall or a hard hit, just an odd twist to a body that had been so tortured over time by night-in, night-out wrestling, the extra burden of steroidal muscles, and drug abuse. Billington eventually dragged himself along the bottom rope to the corner and tagged in Smith and then was carted to the back in a stretcher. He had back surgery and yet improbably returned the next month to lose the titles to the Hart Foundation. Davey Boy carried him to the ring piggyback, and a supposed hit to the head from Hart Foundation manager Jimmy Hart’s ever-present megaphone left Dynamite lying prone at ringside throughout the match. It was an odd sight, particularly in a sport where participants often recover from the most brutal attacks in mere moments. As the match dragged on, and Smith held his own against both Hart and Neidhart, who were double-teaming him at the allowance of corrupt referee Danny Davis for what seemed like ages, the camera regularly cut back to the Dynamite Kid pitifully squirming on the floor. He was writhing while the match was proceeding in a sort of reverse suspension of disbelief: Suddenly, mortality was part of the storyline.
When Billington returned to real action, the Bulldogs had fully embraced literalism as they were newly accompanied to the ring with a pet bulldog named Matilda.* If the whole company was skewing in the direction of cartoon buffoonery, it was technically proficient guys like the Bulldogs whom the trend hit hardest. Neither of them were great actors, but their promos with Matilda were laughable; one can almost see Billington roll his eyes as Smith orates.
The Bulldogs didn’t last much longer in the WWF. Billington was a notorious asshole. Backstage, despite his size, he bullied wrestlers whom he didn’t respect, and played sometimes cruel pranks even on the people he liked. After Billington had supposedly pestered Jacques Rougeau of the Canadian tag team the Rougeau Brothers for months, Jacques hit him in the mouth with a roll of quarters in his fist. Billington lost four teeth, and purportedly because so many in the locker room were happy to see him finally get his comeuppance, the WWF didn’t punish the Rougeaus. The Bulldogs quit in protest. It would be the first of many odd exits in Smith’s career.
Back in Stampede,* the Bulldogs didn’t provide significant star wattage, so the promotion split them up to feud against each other.* And as happens so often in pro wrestling, life would imitate art: Smith and Billington’s relationship began to deteriorate in earnest. As if he needed any more real-life metaphor to distance himself from his previous life, in 1989, Davey Boy was in a car full of wrestlers* when it crashed, sending Smith headfirst into the windshield, through it, and then twenty-five feet through the air. He needed 135 stitches, but his wrestling career continued.
In 1990, Smith went back to the WWF alone. He had personally trademarked “British Bulldogs” during their earlier WWF run, so he claimed the moniker as his own upon his WWF return. By this time, his relationship with Billington had fallen apart, and Smith supposedly threatened promoters in Europe, where Dynamite was wrestling at the time, with legal action if they used any reference to the British Bulldogs in promoting his cousin.
Smith was reintroduced not just as a singles competitor but as a wholly new man: He was noticeably bigger, deeply tanned, and his short hair had become a mane of dreadlock-style braids. The WWF was expanding its reach into Europe and had a regular spot in England on Sky TV, and Smith was the centerpiece there. He was never given a run at the heavyweight belt, but he was conferred high-profile second-tier wins in battles royal and the like. The apex of this run was in 1992, when the WWF held the SummerSlam pay-per-view event at Wembley Stadium in London. It was one of the biggest houses in WWF history, with a reported 80,000 people filling the arena to see Davey Boy defeat his old friend* Bret Hart for the Intercontinental Championship. The match was the main event, despite it being for the company’s secondary title.*
It was the best match of Smith’s singles career, and it was a thrilling moment to see him celebrate in front of his countrymen, but the thrill would be fleeting. Smith lost the title to Shawn Michaels a month and a half later. He was released shortly thereafter (along with the Ultimate Warrior) for receiving shipments of human growth hormone from a British doctor.
He turned up next in WCW, where he feuded with Big Van Vader and Sid Vicious, but he got into a bar fight when a man supposedly hit on his wife, whereafter Smith supposedly powerbombed said man and broke his back.* When the aftermath got too litigious, WCW dumped Smith.
He returned to the WWF in 1994 as part of the burgeoning Hart family drama that pitted Bret against his jealous younger brother Owen. Smith returned to the tag team scene, pairing up with similarly overmuscled American Lex Luger as the Allied Powers—a pretty brilliant name, but a lousy team—and then with his brother-in-law Owen, with whom he passably recaptured some portion of the magic he had shared with the Dynamite Kid. There’s a rumor that he was poised to jump ship back to WCW to be the fourth member of the nWo but instead re-signed with the WWF after McMahon made a load of promises that, if the story is true, he never kept.
After the infamous Montreal Screwjob in 1997,* all of the Hart family, except for Owen, left WWF for WCW, where Smith teamed with Bret’s former partner Jim Neidhart.* During a match at 1998’s Fall Brawl, Smith landed on his back awkwardly; it turned out that WCW had installed a trap door for the Ultimate Warrior’s special entrance later in the night and not told any of the other wrestlers.* Smith contracted a staph infection in his spine, and he was fired, via FedEx, while lying in a hospital bed recuperating from back surgery.
Even if he hadn’t already been abusing drugs—and certainly, his physique hadn’t regressed since his HGH bust—the surgery left him addicted to morphine. Soon after Owen Hart died in a WWF ring, Smith was back in the WWF, wearing jeans instead of spandex, but his ringwork was notably faltering. In 2000 he went into rehab, paid for by the WWF, and divorced his wife.
His last match was an independent show alongside his son Harry, who was breaking into the business. In 2002, while on vacation with his girlfriend, Davey Boy Smith died of a heart attack. His brother-in-law Bruce Hart straightforwardly said that “Davey paid the price with steroid cocktails and human growth hormones.”
For his part, the Dynamite Kid continued wrestling, but his self-destructive ring style—and his own penchant for hard drugs—left him in tatters. Back and leg injuries cut short his career. His last match was in a showcase match in Japan, called “Legends of High Flying,” featuring other fading stars like Mil Máscaras and Billington’s old foe Tiger Mask. Billington was such a shadow of his former self that it’s hard to watch in a way that betrays the hyperbole of other “hard-to-watch” matches. Today he’s paralyzed in one leg and wheelchair-bound, largely a shut-in. He occasionally gives interviews about the cruelty of the wrestling industry.
The dream of almost every tag team wrestler is to reach glory as a singles competitor. Davey Boy Smith reached his mark, though his success as a singles wrestler was always in the context of—and so always subjugated to—his earlier success as one half of a seminal tag team. And although Smith was undeniably the bigger star to emerge from the Bulldogs, his legend is tempered to this day by the comparison to his partner. In the ’80s and ’90s, Smith’s physique pegged him as the breakout star, but in today’s wrestling world, not only are a generation of wrestlers indebted to the Dynamite Kid’s revolutionary ringwork, but a crop of diminutive wrestlers—none much bigger than Billington—have found stardom. Which is to say that now he would have had a chance, and Smith might not have gotten his third, fourth, or fifth chances.
But he did, and he was the biggest inte
rnational wrestling star of the ’80s and ’90s, an international hero who charmed American audiences with a British accent. A sort of real-life James Bond—on steroids, as they say.
“MR. PERFECT” CURT HENNIG
Between November 1991 and January 1993, the WWF’s flagship show, Prime Time Wrestling, became a bizarre experiment in pugilistic cross talk. Since debuting in the early ’80s, Prime Time had seen several incarnations—it was best known as the recap studio show hosted by the legendary duo of Gorilla Monsoon and Bobby Heenan, and probably best forgotten for the subsequent talk-show-style show helmed by Vince McMahon and Heenan.* After that setup fizzled, the show mutated into a roundtable-style show, with McMahon at the head of the table, and two wrestlers on either side of him, two nominal good guys—Gorilla Monsoon and Hillbilly Jim, say—and two from the heel division; Heenan was, of course, a regular on that side.
The WWF has always had an impulse to be anything but a wrestling company: It costumes its shows as talk shows and ESPN-style studio shows, it clings to mainstream endorsement (like the imprimatur of MTV during the Rock ’n’ Wrestling Era) in a sometimes needy way, and the company has occasionally become preoccupied with nonwrestling endeavors: a music label, a movie studio, the XFL. It’s a corollary of the wrestling industry’s penchant of employing “legitimate” athletes to buoy its roster of presumably inauthentic grapplers. Over the years, the WWF has employed Olympic weight lifters like Ken Patera and Mark Henry, Olympic wrestlers like Kurt Angle, and MMA fighters like Ken Shamrock and Brock Lesnar, and, for brief runs, sports stars like Lawrence Taylor and Mike Tyson. (And even in the case of career pro wrestlers, announcers often make more noise about their college athletic records than their in-ring accomplishments.) In each of these cases, it’s an unsubtle cry for legitimacy from a sport too often guffawed at.
Even so, the roundtable format of the last years of PTW is slightly galling when one confronts this line from Wikipedia: “This format appears to have been inspired by the PBS series The McLaughlin Group, which was growing in popularity at this time.” Some things are simply beyond parody. Nevertheless, the show was an often entertaining forum for its talking heads—if not so much for the wrestling matches. When the show was at its best, the babyfaces were bland and befuddled and the heels were given free rein to enliven the proceedings. And the best heel duo on that show was Bobby “The Brain” Heenan and “Mr. Perfect” Curt Hennig. Heenan was bombastic and grating, and Hennig was all smarm and sarcasm. Whereas Heenan could never leave well enough alone in an argument, always pursuing a point until cut off by commercials, Hennig was the king of the one-liner, jabs that were often punctuated by him angling his chair toward the camera, smiling broadly, and, almost absentmindedly, flipping a pencil into the air and catching it without looking. It was an act built upon poignant insinuation; nobody could pull off that pencil toss bit except Hennig, and that was all the physicality he needed to express his dominance.* There are few examples of pure heel distillation as memorable as that Mr. Perfect pencil-toss-and-grin. Sadly, his presence there had less to do with his charisma and more to do with his tendency to get injured; Hennig’s WWF tenure was largely spent on the Injured Reserve.
But when he was in the ring, it could be a spectacular sight. Hennig was a top-shelf in-ring technician, and his résumé reads like a Who’s Who of wrestling talent in the late ’80s and ’90s. The son of Territorial Era brute Larry “The Axe” Hennig, he entered the wrestling world in the AWA, a scrawny, half-awkward shadow of his future self and yet still a powerful emergence in the star-depleted world of Minnesota wrestling. His second-generation credentials also placed him (favorably) in stark contrast with AWA owner Verne Gagne’s son, Greg: From the start, Hennig felt like nothing less than a formal apology for Verne’s overpushing his son. As Hennig would prove, second-generation wrestlers weren’t necessarily destined to fail.
In short order, Hennig held the AWA World Tag Team Championship with fellow future superstar Scott Hall, who was working a persona that was more of an anabolic Magnum, P.I., than the Razor Ramon shtick that would make him famous.
When the territorial system began collapsing around the AWA, and with much of their top-level talent absconded to the WWF, Hennig was positioned as the last great hope of the AWA. He beat the iconic Nick Bockwinkel for the AWA heavyweight title—a feat Hulk Hogan and many others never achieved—and lost it to Jerry “The King” Lawler when Gagne and the Memphis wrestling promotion that Lawler and Jerry Jarrett ran teamed up to try to stave off the coming tide of WWF expansion.* As great as Lawler was, he was lucky that he was the most prominent champion standing after all of the others on or above his level had already decamped for the WWF or Crockett’s NWA. A couple of years later, there would be no question that Hennig was the superior star.
After Hennig relinquished the AWA title, he followed Hulk Hogan and many other former AWA stars to the greener pastures of the WWF. Prior to his AWA run, he had wrestled for a couple of years in the WWF, never reaching any great acclaim. And in his first matches back in New York, the signs didn’t point toward him surpassing his old record; if he was more muscular and a little more confident, he was basically the same Curt Hennig. He came to the ring with an ’80s Chyron dubbing him “Mr. Perfect” Curt Hennig, but there wasn’t much substance to the act. Soon, though, he was pulled off TV and reintroduced through a series of video packages that redefined his career.
Mr. Perfect—his real name from thenceforth was only acknowledged offhandedly by announcers and stray graphics—was delivered to the WWF audience as a flawless all-around athlete in commercial-length videos that showed him doing honestly impressive things (bowling a strike, hitting a home run, throwing a bull’s-eye in darts) and feats of camera-trickery (hitting every shot in a basketball drill, throwing a football a field length to himself), along with oddly comical odds and ends (a diving board backflip, a moderately impressive golf putt, a competent horseshoe toss). He was often accompanied by a real star of the sport at hand—Wade Boggs for baseball, Pervis Ellison for basketball, Mike Modano for hockey—who attested to the greatness of Mr. Perfect. The videos, which aired on every WWF television show for weeks on end, were the—ahem—perfect mix of comedy and competence, of arrogance and self-consciousness. The power was in the athletic feat, but the potency was in the borderline ridiculousness of it all: Finally, the WWF fans said, an asshole who doesn’t take himself so seriously.
It goes unsaid that those videos were as much a testament to the power of steroids, tanning beds, and hair bleach as anything else. In his first matches back, he was only scraping the surface of the Perfect character; he was basically the AWA Hennig with a nickname. Now, suddenly, Hennig looked the part of a top-tier pro wrestler, and it seemed that by osmosis he’d absorbed the power of character that went with them. Walking to the ring, he would toss his towel over his shoulder from behind his back and catch it without looking. He would spit out his gum and swat it away without difficulty. They were minor affectations but significant ones. Everything he did was expertly queued to make him look like an ideal.
To this day, his contemporaries attest to Hennig’s excellence in nearly everything he did. He really did excel in horseshoes and darts and bowling and billiards and whatever else he tried. And for months the WWF booked him so as to underscore his perfection: He went undefeated for a year, even beating Bret Hart with an illicit pull-of-the-tights roll-up. He was paired up with the Genius, a graduation-robe-and-mortarboard-clad blowhard formerly known as “Leaping” Lanny Poffo.* Before long, Perfect and the Genius were feuding with Hulk Hogan, and Hennig’s future was looking bright: Tellingly, even though Hogan pinned him at a few untelevised house shows,* those losses were never reported on air. The desire to keep him unblemished was paramount. Apparently always in the market for an upgrade in association, Perfect took on Bobby Heenan as his manager and captured the Intercontinental Championship. And then he got injured.
They were mere “nagging in
juries” in wrestling terminology, but they would be debilitating to anyone else: He had bulging disks in his back and a broken tailbone when he lost the title to Bret Hart. After trying to continue on after dropping the belt, he took over a year off to recover. It’s a bit ironic that a company with such a love for authentic athletes finally found one and had the wisdom to market him as such, only to be betrayed by the bane of the real athlete: injury. It’s not that wrestlers don’t get injured; they do, often. But it’s poignant that, in an artificial world, a wrestler as “legit” as Hennig could be bitten with injuries of such severity and frequency.
During his recuperation time, the WWF started using him as a color commentator, and Hennig found a second calling. He acted as Ric Flair’s second when Flair made his triumphant (and ultimately disappointing) jump to the WWF and worked side by side in the announcer’s booth with Vince McMahon, tossing that pencil or pen and catching it flawlessly whenever the camera was on him. His running buddy Heenan ultimately provided the vehicle for Hennig’s return to the ring, when Heenan scoffed when Randy Savage asked Perfect to team with him against Flair and (Hennig’s AWA partner) Razor Ramon. In reality, Hennig was healed enough to return to combat; in the storyline, he was motivated solely by pride. He poured a pitcher of water over Heenan’s head, and fellow panelists McMahon, “Hacksaw” Jim Duggan, and Hillbilly Jim cheered.
He was back, and then within a year, he was back on the shelf. When his spine problems reemerged, he was suddenly a guest referee, an announcer on numerous shows, and a manager to Hunter Hearst Helmsley—later shortened to Triple H—in his first big WWF push. During this stretch, Hennig was receiving payouts from Lloyd’s of London, with whom he’d taken out a sizable insurance policy,* which may have delayed his return to the ring and definitely made his WWF appearances increasingly sporadic. Despite his potency as a talker, with his physical excellence sidetracked, there was nowhere for him to go. What good is the perfect athlete, after all, when he can’t play the game?
The Squared Circle: Life, Death, and Professional Wrestling Page 21