Hitman My Real Life in the Cartoon World (42 page)

Three weeks later I went to talk to Vince at the Cincinnati TVs. The lineups at his door had been getting longer at every taping. When my turn came I began to address my financial problems, explaining to him that I wasn’t making enough money to cover my expenses and pay my own way home. Vince bluntly said that if I wasn’t happy I should go somewhere else.

“As hard as I’ve worked for you, all you can tell me is that if I don’t like it, I should go somewhere else?”

His expression was cold, and all he said was, “Yes.”

By coincidence, that night Flyin’ Brian Pillman was in Cincinnati for a visit home. Dynamite had taken a huge dislike to him, and with Stampede Wrestling floundering, Pillman had decided that the time was right to look for another spot. He’d just been hired by WCW. He came to the WWF show with me that night, and when he heard what was going on, he gave me Ric Flair’s number and urged me to call.

Ric Flair was NWA world champion and was their booker too. I knew Flair liked me, because Bobby Heenan had brought him into the WWF dressing room earlier in the year just to meet me, which was more than unusual because the competition was just not allowed backstage. Flair was immaculately groomed in a flashy designer suit and had long, platinum-blond hair. He strolled right up to me with a piercing smile.

“Sir,” he said as he shook my hand. “What a pleasure it is to finally meet you. I’ve waited a really long time to tell you that you’re one of my heroes and a great worker. It’s truly an honor, and I’ve waited a long time to say it to you!”

The Observer often raved about Flair being the best in the business. I’d never seen him work because it was impossible to follow the rival TV show on my schedule. Steamboat, Piper and Harley, among others, all had great regard for Flair as a worker. We chatted for a time, and he left me saying that if I ever needed a place to go, to call him. Now seemed like the right time.

The very next morning I put in a call to WCW. I spoke with a wrestler named Kevin Sullivan, who was their assistant booker, and at first he didn’t believe it was really me. He told me to call back in an hour, and when I did, he told me that Ric Flair fell off his chair when he heard that I’d called. Sullivan declared, “He’s a real mark for you!” Then he put me through to Flair, who immediately offered me a contract for $200,000 a year, all expenses paid, and with plenty of time off.

WCW’s offer was appealing, especially considering that with Vince we were supposed to get an unspecified percentage of the house, and Vince paid whatever he felt like. That was his game. That’s how he kept all the heat in the dressing room: expertly feeding that competitive fire called jealousy.

I told Flair that I’d think about it. At that moment the Carolina coast was being pounded by Hurricane Hugo, so Flair and I agreed to talk again in few days, literally after the storm passed, to see if we could make the deal.

Four days later in Spokane, rumor of my possible departure, which could only have been leaked by the WCW office, had spread throughout the wrestling media and the dressing room. I didn’t confirm or deny, I didn’t talk about it at all, but still Jimmy Hart shook my hand with tears in his eyes. “I can’t believe they’re gonna lose a talent like you. You’re the greatest, and I’m not just saying that. I don’t understand why they treat you the way they do. God bless you!”

Hugo had ripped up the Carolinas, leaving ten people dead and doing millions of dollars in damage.

When I was finally able to get through to WCW to accept their offer, a somewhat embarrassed Ric Flair dutifully explained that he wasn’t authorized to make any money offers and that I’d have to discuss terms with the boss, Jim Herd. I was put through to Herd, who gruffly gave me a story about meeting his budget, then passed me off to Jim Barnett, who used to work for Vince. Barnett offered me a contract for $156,000, which was barely more than I was already making. The impression I got was that Barnett viewed this as a chance for him to show his worth and save the fifty grand. I felt they were reneging and turned them down flat. It was like I’d just done an eight-day broadway in which I didn’t win and I didn’t lose. But deep down I was relieved. The WCW had not yet had a chance to prove that they would be serious competition to the WWF, and they were still widely regarded as second-rate. I never said one word about my discussions to any of the boys. Eventually it was dismissed as just a rumor and forgotten.

When I arrived home on October 4, Julie seemed nearly as pensive as I was. She suggested we walk over the hill to meet the kids when school let out; Jade was now in Grade 1 and Dallas in kindergarten. We left the nanny to watch baby Beans, and as we walked Julie told me that she was pregnant again, due in June. When we first got together, we had always dreamed of a family of four children, so I was overjoyed. I wrapped my arms around her and told her how happy I was. Julie was reluctant to have another baby, but I deeply wanted our fourth child, hoping maybe that this one would be the glue that kept us stuck together. As we walked home, Julie had her arms crossed in front of her chest and a scared look on her face. I held Jade and Dallas’s tiny hands, and it was tough to say which of the three of us was the happiest about the news of another baby coming.

In the five years since I’d started with the WWF I’d become accustomed to flying more miles each year than most pilots. I’d acquired a knowledge of which airlines and airports were good and bad and compiled maps in my head of almost every town, big and small, in North America. With a decline in house show gates in the United States, Vince decided that the WWF would seriously invade Europe, so my mental compass was about to broaden even more.

On October 20, 1989, in André’s hometown of Grenoble, France, I sat staring into my espresso at the Park Hôtel, my mind reeling with an overload of images. Vince’s circus had tripped together from New York to London to Brussels and now all over France, and after a week straight we were all sick and tired of one another. Because of the unfamiliar surroundings and the language barrier, the wrestlers clustered together more than ever, like a chain gang. Italy had been bad, but the mood amongst the wrestlers on this European swing was combustible. Payoffs were down and we were far from home. On the bus between towns I couldn’t help but joke, “Which one of you crazy bastards is going to crack first?” I called the waiter over and paid the check and decided that the thing I needed most was to go for a walk, away from all of them.

As I walked past the marble and bronze statues of Le Jardin des Fontaines Pétrifiantes, I was remembering our first night, in London. The televised special went well enough. After all, England had its wrestling fans, and it was a rarity for them to see the likes of Hulk and André: We were just beginning to get over big in the U.K. I couldn’t help but see a glimpse of the future and the past when Rollerball Rocco and a bunch of the English boys dropped their bags in the dressing room. Pat had hired them to work the opening dark match. Rollerball’s Black Tiger gimmick had long since died in Japan, and now he and the other lads toiled endlessly for a few quid, crisscrossing the U.K. riding four to a car. In the WWF dressing room they wore envious expressions that reminded me of pack horses who suddenly found themselves corralled with groomed Clydesdales.The Brits were awestruck as André lumbered past. To them he might as well have been a brontosaurus.

Roller’s face lit up when Hulk came into the dressing room. They’d been good buddies in Japan and Roller had no doubt bragged to everybody that he and Hulk were friends. But that was millions of dollars ago; sadly, Hulk barely remembered him. The dejection on Roller’s face was pitiful, and at the same time, I felt empathy for Hogan. So much had changed for all of us.

I’d by lying if I said that it hadn’t bothered me that after I made my entrance at the London Arena to a rousing ovation, second only to Hogan’s, I then had to dutifully, and in short order, put over that lethargic boulder, Dino Bravo.

After a couple of hours I’d walked quite a distance from the hotel, and decided to stop and relax on a bench. I leaned back, remembering how all hell broke lose on the third day of the tour, in Brussels.

After the show most of the boys surfaced at a rock ’n’ roll bar near the hotel. The proprietress, a stunning Mulatto woman with a sexy French accent, made the kind mistake of giving all the wrestlers drinks on the house. Jack Daniels appeared before me; the price and the timing were perfect. I proceeded to get smashed.

A while later Jim Duggan and I found ourselves alongside the train tracks in front of the bar toking a hash pipe with a bunch of college kids, one of whom said he was the son of the Australian ambassador. Duggan and I had become close friends. Sometime later, I was high and drunk and reeling in the arms of a comely French college girl, when I somehow ended up engrossed in conversation with a very drunk Jim Troy, who was now Vince’s vice president of operations, the second highest position in the company after Vince’s wife, Linda. My ear began to bend when he started to talk about Stu, Vince and loyalty. I remember him poking Shawn Michaels in the chest hard and snorting, “You don’t know shit, kid! This guy,” he continued, pointing at me, “his family is the business.”

At maybe 3:30 a.m., André lurched toward me, leering with a gray-toothed grin. He took a huge bite out of a big pear soaked in high-test grain alcohol and handed it to me. I took a bite, as did Shawn, Koko, Duggan, even Jim Troy. If you think you can get into a lot of trouble biting an apple in Eden, you wouldn’t believe what happened after biting that pear in Brussels! There are few times in my life when I actually got insanely drunk. This was one of them. I ended up enlisting the French girl to literally carry me back to the hotel, where I crashed into bed with the whole room spinning. She curled up next to me and promised to wake me up so I could make the nine-thirty bus. At around 5

a.m. I was jarred from my sleep by the sound of breaking glass and what had to be a wrestler, obviously one who had cracked, yelling profanities. I wanted no part of it.

In the morning I had a massive hangover. On the way to the elevator I couldn’t help but notice that dozens of the tiny, elegant crystal chandeliers that hung outside each door lay on the carpet smashed to pieces. When the elevator door slid open in the lobby I was startled to see an army of police in riot gear, with billy clubs and shields, glaring at me with eyes that said, Try your bullshit now, wrestler man.

The whole lobby was pretty well demolished.

On the bus I found out that a huge fight had broken out between Koko B. Ware and Troy, seconds after I’d stumbled away from them at the bar. Troy, a former hockey player who once gooned for the New York Rangers, held his own before fleeing in a taxi with Koko in hot pursuit. Koko somehow got to the hotel first and decided to wait in the lobby for Troy. When Troy came through the doors, an enraged Koko tackled him, crashing through the plate glass walls of the gift shop.

Around the same time, The Rockers were in the hallway on my floor, drunk and angry, destroying chandeliers because the hotel operator couldn’t connect a long distance call for Marty, who was concerned about his dad’s recovery from heart surgery.

That morning Koko boarded the bus looking scared that he was going to get fired. The whites of his eyes were blood-red and his hands were covered with glass cuts. And he was fired—that night. The Rockers were spared, I think mostly because Pat had a bit of a crush on both of them. They only had to pay the cost of the damage they’d done.

We took a plane to Paris. I remember the coach driver zooming by the Arc de Triomphe and the Eiffel Tower. No time to even stop. It was how I often saw the landmarks of the world, with my forehead pressed up against a bus window. The most striking image I’d ever seen of the tower was of Hitler’s army marching victoriously past, and it came back to me vividly now.

The show in Paris went out live on TV across France. There was heat between Hogan and Macho over how Hogan had carried a supposedly wounded Liz back to the dressing room at the conclusion of their match in Brussels. Hogan professed innocence, honestly having no idea how he could have done it any differently. Randy became insanely jealous if any man even looked at Liz, which happened a lot because she definitely wasn’t hard on the eyes. He never let Liz out of his sight, and she lived her life like a bird in a cage.

In the dressing room in Paris we learned that Troy had been fired too. None of the boys had believed that Vince would can Troy, as the office usually was held to a different standard than the rest of us.

After the show I ran into Koko in the hotel lobby, surrounded by sympathetic wrestlers. Fighting to hold back tears, Koko implored me to understand that Troy instigated the fight by hurling racial slurs at him. “What was I supposed to do? He kept telling me to eat fried chicken, watermelon, and I couldn’t let him talk to me like that!”

“Koko,” I said, “you can’t beat up the second-highest suit in the company and not know you’re gonna get fired!” Koko started to sob uncontrollably. Everybody looked at me like, You big meanie, why’d you have to go and say that for? Well, because it was the truth!

Having walked about ten miles from the hotel to get away from all the other wrestlers, I was stunned to see none other than Hacksaw Duggan stroll by, his trademark two-by-four replaced by a newspaper under his arm. He was as surprised to see me as I was to see him. Many years later we’d still laugh about the coincidence.

When I called home Julie was in an exceptionally foul mood. She’d acted this way the whole time she’d been pregnant with Dallas, and I calmly decided that if I had to go through this kind of hell for nine months, I’d endure it without complaint because it was probably a sign that our last child would be another son: We’d have a matched set, two girls and two boys.

At Maple Leaf Gardens in Toronto on October 29, after we’d got back from the crazy European tour, Chief pulled me aside to tell me that Vince wanted him to personally thank me for everything I was doing lately. Tonight, for the first time, I’d be going over on Dino Bravo. Chief added, “I told Vince to tell you himself. You’re working so hard, your stuff is selling, you’re over with the fans, and they’re not doing anything with you.”