Have a Nice Day (63 page)

Vince seemed intrigued, especially with the notion of a ring exploding at Terry’s ranch. “We might possibly be able to do this,” the evil McMahon stated.

A few days later, Jim Cornette called me up. “Cactus, Vince loves the idea, but we’re going to change it up a little bit,” Corny told me. “We want you and Terry to start off as a team at the Royal Rumble in January. Somehow, you two have a falling out, and Terry challenges you to a Texas death match right there in Houston, for the February Pay-Per-View. And then you’ll have the damnedest fight they’ve ever seen at WrestleMania.”

That sounded great, but there was one problem. Vince was planning a huge surprise, which would turn out to be Mike Tyson, and he was expecting a lot of mainstream media to be covering the event. He didn’t think that having two human beings blow each other up would be the best way to expose our product to this new audience. In retrospect, he was probably right. They still wanted the Funker, but they wanted him as my tag team partner.

Hell, that didn’t sound too bad. After all, Terry and I had probably done enough damage to each other. Maybe it was time that we were on the same side for a while. Now all we had to do was come up with a way to introduce Terry to an audience that, unfortunately, hadn’t been privy to the Funker’s exploits over the last thirty years.

We put the ball in motion by having Dude Love wrestle Billy Gunn, while his teammate, the Road Dogg, did humorous commentary. The Dude pulled out the match (squeaked out a victory), but was jumped from behind by the Dogg. We fought up the ramp to the top, where a referee tried to break up the melee. Gunn grabbed me and sent me sailing off the seven-and-a-half-foot stage. I once heard the ring referred to as being fifteen feet high, but that would make me about thirteen feet and ten inches tall. Still, the distance seemed large as I hurtled earthward, toward the table that I knew would break my fall. Oops! I missed the table-grazed it, to be accurate-and one of its legs bent as I sailed past it and crashed in a heap on the cold, hard Durham, New Hampshire, concrete.

Gunn and Dogg, collectively known as the New Age Outlaws, reacted with great remorse to my injury. Together, they climbed down the stage and rushed to my aid. As soon as they saw that I was helpless, they immediately began putting the boots to me in one of the funnier examples of poor sportsmanship that I have ever seen. It didn’t seem funny at the time, however, as the fall had legitimately shaken me up and would bother me for several weeks.

A holiday season pilgrimage to Santa’s Village seemed to revitalize me the next day, as I was allowed to walk around the snow-covered Christmas Wonderland at my leisure. My wife thought I was crazy when I wrote to the owners of my desire to walk around an empty kids’ park and even joked that my photo would be on the wall as if in a post office mug shot. Instead, the owners were delighted to hear of my fondness/obsession with their little park. There’s just something about that place, I guess, that makes me feel like a kid. To me, there’s just nothing like being on a Ferris wheel with my daughter, with the sun setting on a beautiful summer’s day, with a gorgeous view of the White Mountains surrounding me. Even if, in the back of my mind, I’m thinking of busting someone open with a steel chair.

I went home for the holidays and enjoyed the feeling of sixteen hours of Christmas music bombarding my senses. Unfortunately, I think I overloaded on Christmas spirit by force-feeding carols and Christmas videos to my kids. “What do you mean, you don’t want to watch Frosty,” I actually yelled at my kids. “Don’t you have any respect for Christmas?” Adding to my Yuletide woes was the fact that I’d been staying awake for hours every night transferring our camcorder family memories onto standard VHS videos. By the time Christmas morning rolled around, I was shot. I tried to be at my Christmas best, but a parade of stinky gifts that Colette had bought me had me about ready to snap. Finally, I opened the gift that broke the camel’s back. I opened up Colette’s expertly wrapped box to find, of all things, a Tommy Hilfiger T-shirt that was red, white, and blue, with a big, bold TOMMY on the front. You think that I would know better, having seen my mother pretend to like gifts that I knew she’d never use. I remember hearing my dad swear up and down that he “loved” the flowered button-down shirt I’d gotten him when I was nine, only to discover it in his drawer, still in the wrapper, ten years later. Proper gift etiquette eluded me, however, as I searched for the words to describe how I felt. “I hate this thing, Colette,” probably wasn’t the right choice, but it’s the one that I made. Minutes later, I stumbled into my room for a long winter’s nap before returning to apologize to all. The next day, I headed for the Nassau Coliseum to introduce the world to the Funker.

I went to the TV studio early in the morning to shoot another unique introduction with Chris Chambers, which would feature the Dude “morphing” into Cactus Jack. It was there that I learned that Terry Funk wouldn’t be my partner but that Chainsaw Charlie would. For reasons that I still don’t quite understand, Terry was, at his own request, turned into Chainsaw Charlie, and the result wasn’t quite what I was looking for. Cactus Jack stuck around for three months this time, but in truth his impact was not all that great. It might have been a lack of interview time, or it might have been the somewhat anticlimactic debut of Terry chainsawing his way out of a wooden box with a pair of baby-powdered pantyhose on his head, but for some reason, our team didn’t quite take off as we had planned.

Don’t get me wrong-the team wasn’t a failure, but it did fail to live up to what I thought it could be. I thought we could usher in a new era of danger and dynamic promos into the world of sports entertainment. Instead, we were just a couple of popular wrestlers who were miles apart from Steve Austin on the food chain.

At one particular six-man tag in Louisville, Kentucky, my value became very clear to me. Originally, Terry was contracted to do all of the five shows with the Federation. When he became my partner, he went on the road full-time. As a concession to the fact that he was fifty-four years old and still working as hard in the ring as ever, the office would occasionally give Terry a few days off. As a result, on this night, I was teamed with Owen Hart and Stone Cold against the Outlaws and The Rock. The crowd was chanting the familiar “Rocky sucks, Rocky sucks,” when Road Dogg got on the mike to disagree. “No, he doesn’t,” said the Dogg. “His timing’s good. He looks great, plus he’s a pretty good guy.”

The match started, and Owen and I got nice responses to our respective moves. Then I tagged in Austin, and the place went crazy. “Did you ever get the feeling that he’s the main course and we’re just a couple of side dishes?” Owen jokingly asked me. Austin threw some punches, and the crowd went wild.

“Kind of like a baked potato,” I said to Owen. Austin flipped off Gunn and the roar got even louder.

“Jack, let’s face it, you’re like a three-bean salad that no one even wants,” Owen countered. Austin hit the Lou Inesz press, a move so silly it could actually be called “the dick to the mouth,” and the Louisville Gardens erupted.

“Owen, let’s face it, you and I are just little sprigs of parsley that will just be thrown out after dinner,” I only half-jokingly answered back.

“Yeah, you’re right,” Owen agreed. “That’s exactly what we are.”

As I’ve mentioned, Steve Austin is a great guy, but I’d be lying if I said that the attention he was receiving in comparison to me didn’t hurt me just a little bit. Sometimes more than a little.

The Austin phenomenon notwithstanding, Terry and I did have several great moments together. Our Royal Rumble appearance, where Terry and I willingly traded headshots before teaming up to kick The Rock’s “rooty poo, candy ass,” was a definite highlight. I actually appeared as all three “faces of Foley” in the contest, but I will always best remember the Rumble for the reaction of Terry when he realized I had him dead to rights with a steel chair. He rolled up his pantyhose so I could clearly see his face, nodded his head up and down to give me the okay and waited like a man for the chair shot that nearly leveled him. Terry recoiled from the blow by staggering around and throwing two or three Fred Sanford jabs into the air. I presented Terry the same chair, which he accepted as if it were a cherished family heirloom. I then gave Funk the go-ahead, and he clobbered me three times. It was a truly warm moment between friends.

We also had a famous ride in a Dumpster, courtesy of the Outlaws. I had a match with Terry just for the hell of it, which culminated in my flying elbow onto the fallen Funker from the side of the Titantron into a Dumpster. With both of us incapacitated, the Outlaws shut the lid and wheeled us off the ramp, leading to a crash landing on the cold, hard concrete below. It should have, could have, and would have been a truly great image, but the details were all wrong. For one thing, my dive off the Titantron should have been a highlight to match the later Hell in a Cell fall for sheer drama. I had told Vince that I would climb only about eight feet up the massive screen, but I had every intention of going up to about fifteen when we were live. During the course of our brawl, the Dumpster had rolled too far, and when I started climbing, I realized that a higher fall would send me way past the outer limit of the Dumpster. Rather than get down and roll it to the proper distance, I just took off, which would have been impressive enough, if not for the cloud of packing peanuts that poofed up in the air upon impact. When we were helped out of the Dumpster, there were peanuts everywhere. I swear the china I had shipped for Christmas from England didn’t look as snuggly as we did when we were helped out of the trash bin.

Finally, we probably overexaggerated our condition, which didn’t help our credibility when we came running down the aisle to end the show. Within an hour and a half, we went from being unconscious in an ambulance to hitting the bad guys with our IV stands. Terry was even wearing a hospital gown, although, mercifully, his wrinkled ass never made the air.

Also, we did have a tremendous Dumpster Match with the Outlaws at Mania, which saw us capture the belts and helped set the stage for the next part of my career. With the help of a forklift, we were able to dump both Gunn and Dogg into a backstage Dumpster for the tag team championship. How were we to know that we would be the victims of the little-known “wrong Dumpster rule,” which would lead to the stripping of the belts and a rematch inside a steel cage the next evening on Raw? Unfortunately, Terry had suffered a bad injury to his lower back when, at fifty-four years of age, he was powerbombed off the ring apron into the Dumpster below. Within minutes of the fall, his back was visibly bruised, and within hours, had filled with liquid. He somehow was able to get through the next night at Raw, but it would be the last time that Funk and Cactus would team.

I don’t mean to demean what Terry and I did, because, in truth, we had some excellent matches. With all wrestling considerations aside, I will always fondly remember my three-month union with Chainsaw, for it gave me the chance to ride the road with my hero and mentor and to get inside his “middle-aged and crazy” mind. Terry Funk is simply everything that is right about this business. I think my fellow Florida Panhandle neighbor, the Road Dogg Jesse James, put it best when Terry walked past one day and he said, “I don’t care what the announcers tell everybody-that’s the real toughest son of a bitch in the World Wrestling Federation.”

I don’t know if people can fully appreciate how difficult it is to continually get up for big matches. I know the general public just sees us as a silly spectacle filled with “make-believe” fighting, but I doubt that even real fans know what it’s like to try to get up for big matches again and again-even when the mind and the body are exhausted. We were all battered and bruised after WrestleMania, with Funk needing hospitalization, but somehow we all needed to suck it up one more time for the cage match that would change my fortunes.

I had received a surprise phone call from Vince Russo about a week earlier that had changed my outlook on the business. Until the phone call, I was looking at a post-WrestleMania program with Marc Mero, who by this point was Marvelous Marc Mero and was having big problems with his valet/wife, Rena (a.k.a. Sable). Of course, the problems with his wife were fictional, but the new “Marvelous” image had given fans a whole new persona. Since recovering from knee surgery, Mero had altered his wrestling style, abandoning high flying for a more conservative ground game.

I actually came up with a good idea for me and Mero that I thought would be entertaining and I had a little bit of hope for the match.

Russo’s phone call changed all that. “Vince, how are you,” I said into the phone, as I walked around the small gym that Colette and I had just opened.

“Cactus, I got some good news for you,” said Russo, with a voice that was pure Brooklyn even though he’d grown up only five miles from me in the middle of Long Island.

“What is it?” I said, with great anticipation running through my mind. “You didn’t reconsider that Mero thing, did you?”

“It’s better than that,” Russo quickly replied. “We want you to wrestle Austin at the next Pay-Per-View.”

I loved it, but I knew better than to get excited. “Are you sure it’s okay with Steve?” I asked.

Russo quickly assuaged my fears. “Are you kidding?” he said. “It was Steve’s idea.”

I knew that a program with Steve could be a big success, but as Michael Hayes had reminded me years earlier, I would need a reason. The night after WrestleMania gave it to me.

Terry and I had a short but brutal fight with the Outlaws and a host of others inside the cage. He could hardly move due to the “Dumpster bomb.” I guess because of that, Terry was handcuffed to the cage as the Outlaws worked me over. Showing the intestinal fortitude that was my trademark, I battled back against the odds and was climbing the cage en route to victory. When I got there and hung my body over the cage, the returning X-Pac (who had just jumped ship from WCW) was there to meet me with a chair over the head that sent me back inside. I was beaten up some before being piledriven onto the same chair for the crushing defeat. (In this cage match, a pinfall could also signal victory.) With the match over, XPac entered the ring to resume the assault and was joined by Triple H and Chyna. This was the birth of the new D-Generation X (or DX), and a pretty good birth it was. They took turns beating on me, with X-Pac giving me the “bronco ride” in the corner, Hunter giving me a pedigree on the chair, and the Outlaws giving me a couple of extra chair shots for good measure. The combination of X-Pac’s balls bouncing up and down in my face and the repetitive feeling of steel against my skull had me feeling both pissed off and pained as I lay on the canvas.