The Road Warriors: Danger, Death, and the Rush of Wrestling (30 page)

As we had with James, we’d kept the gender of our new baby a surprise, and I had my catcher’s mitt ready for the big reveal. With one big, final push, Julie unveiled our beautiful new daughter, the first Laurinaitis girl born in fifty years. Keeping our letter
J
theme intact, we named our little sunshine Jessica. Now we were Joe, Julie, Joey, James, and Jessica Laurinaitis. What a crew!

Now with Jessica and Julie, I had my two girls and my two boys. It was funny with Joey and James. All they knew was that one day we went to the hospital with Mommy and then, like magic, they had a baby sister of their very own. Those two lit up when they saw Jessica. In an instant, Joey and James became protective big brothers. I have pictures of them holding her tiny hands. I gotta tell you, moments like those are the ones that burn into your memory forever. No matter how old my babies continue to grow or how far away they may travel from me, I will still see them all together as they were that August day when Jessica was born.

Soon Julie and I would make another big decision to bring our family closer together. We decided to take full custody of Joey and bring him home full-time. Julie and I could offer Joey a home where he had his little bro and sis always looking up to him, following his every move. It was the right thing to do, and everyone was excited to have him permanently under our roof.

We got Joey started out in youth hockey, which he loved. The little guy fit right in, and none of us ever looked back. As always, Julie didn’t miss a beat. She made sure Joey’s transition was smooth and tenderly cared for him.

It was also around this time that my parents had decided to retreat from the harsh Minnesota winters for a more favorable climate in Florida. My mom suffered from lupus, a disease that causes the immune system to treat the body’s own tissue as a foreign substance and produces antibodies to fight it. It was literally wearing her down with each passing day, but she never complained and kept as busy as ever.

I returned to the road in September for Clash of the Champions VIII: Fall Brawl, where the Road Warriors defeated the Samoan Swat Team of six feet four, 260-pound Samu and six feet one, 375-pound Fatu. Those guys had great chemistry with us, and much later, in the late ’90s, I was happy to see Fatu get another run in the WWF as the dancing, “big ass in your face” character Rikishi. The other guys we faced in the closing months of 1989 worth mentioning were Doom and the Steiners—at Starrcade ’89.

On December 13 in Atlanta, we were put in the Iron Team tournament with the Steiners, SST, and Doom at Starrcade ’89: Future Shock. The team with the best two-out-of-three match record won the title of Iron Team. Well, by the name of the tournament, everyone should’ve guessed who’d emerge on top.

In the first round of the tournament, we easily dispatched of Doom, who were for all intents and purposes another variation of our Road Warriors gimmick. Ron Simmons and Butch Reed were two big, tough, masked brawlers who were assembled by referee-turned-manager Teddy Long. Simmons was a six feet two, 270-pound two-time all-American defensive nose guard at Florida State University and former Cleveland Brown, while Reed was a six feet two, 260-pound former Kansas City Chief and an eleven-year wrestling veteran. They were a brand-new team with a ton of potential, but that night at the Omni in front of 6,000 people, they were just another couple of Road Warriors victims.

The most dangerous team we faced that night (and maybe in our careers) were the current NWA World Tag Team champions, the Steiners. Rick and Scott Steiner, legitimate brothers and former collegiate wrestlers from the University of Michigan, were two of the greatest, most innovative workers. With Rick’s brazen, smash-mouth style of power moves combined with his younger brother Scott’s reckless and unorthodox array of suplexes and aerial maneuvers, they were among the greatest teams in wrestling history.

At Starrcade with the Steiners, we put on a tremendous show, with both teams doing the majority of their trademark moves. In the end, though, the Steiners stole the win. After Hawk and I delivered a Doomsday Device to Scott, I fell back with him in a sort of belly-to-back bear hug so my arms were wrapped around his midsection.

When we landed, both his and my shoulders were on the mat so that when the referee made the three count, Scott picked his right arm up at the last second and was credited with the pin. Damn, screwed again, wouldn’t you know?

Well, not really. In the end, we went on to win the Iron Team tournament with a final victory over the Samoans, proving once and for all who the true Iron Team was. Did you ever doubt us?

Starrcade ’89 also saw the return of Arn Anderson to the newly reformed Four Horsemen along with Sting and Ole Anderson. It was great to see Arn come back from the WWF, but he was originally supposed to arrive with teammate and original Horseman Tully Blanchard. After Tully and Arn spent the better part of a year as The Brain Busters under the management of Bobby “The Brain” Heenan in the WWF (even becoming the World Tag Team champions by defeating Demolition), things fell apart.

In November, before the WWF PPV Survivor Series, Tully failed a drug test for cocaine, which proved to be a double-edged sword. Not only did the WWF release Tully for the violation, but then WCW decided not to take him back because of it as well. Arn had no choice but to return without his longtime partner, even though the two of them had looked forward to reuniting with Flair and Ole. Left with nowhere else to go, Tully spent the next year or so making random appearances for the AWA and other independent promotions before ultimately retiring for good.

It was a shitty end for one of the best workers I ever stepped inside the ring with. I saw that whole thing as another example of Jim Herd dropping the damn ball. Sure, Tully made a bad choice, but bringing him back into the mix with the original Four Horsemen would’ve been big business. Maybe even big enough to prevent the disaster looming on the WCW horizon.

14

WHEN ONE DOOR CLOSES, SMASH YOURSELF A NEW ONE

Even though Hawk and I approached the beginning of 1990 with a positive outlook and concentrating on doing good business, there were too many distractions. Ric and his creative team of Jim Cornette and Kevin Sullivan were under fire from Jim Herd for their booking decisions. According to Herd and some of the other boys, Flair was being self-serving by putting himself and the other Four Horsemen over in major angles. It was also thought that Flair was refusing to drop the NWA World title, which was bullshit because Ric had been carefully building up a feud with Sting for that very purpose. Unfortunately, it all went wrong for both of them.

At the Clash of the Champions X on February 6 in Corpus Christi, Texas, Flair and the Andersons were in a main event cage match against Muta, the Dragonmaster (a new masked Japanese wrestler), and none other than old Buzz Sawyer, who was crazy as ever.

The angle was that Sting had been kicked out of the Four Horsemen and was looking for revenge, especially against Flair.

Near the end of the match, the plan was for Sting to come running down, climb the cage, and get his payback, thus setting up the feud with Flair for the impending title change.

As Sting came running down the aisle and started to make his way up the cage, we heard a loud
snap
. Sting’s left patella tendon ruptured; his kneecap was shoved up into his thigh. The injury would keep him out of the WCW for six months. Even though the accident was no fault of Ric’s, Herd looked to make some changes to the booking committee.

Hawk’s and my match at the Clash was completely unremarkable but distinctly memorable only because of one of our opponents. We were facing The Skyscrapers, only Sid Vicious had been replaced after suffering a legit broken rib during a match with the Steiners. His replacement was a six feet ten, 300-pound, redheaded Texan named “Mean” Mark Callous.

Mark was only twenty-five years old at the time and had only recently started in the business, but he performed and carried himself with the maturity of an old pro. In about nine months, the rest of the world would take notice of Mark when he emerged on the scene in the WWF as the Undertaker.

For the rest of February and into March, we went through the motions of a few dozen haphazardly thrown together matches against Doom (who lost their masks in a match against the Steiners at Clash X) and The Skyscrapers, but burnout was setting in. In a move that would prove to hammer the final nail in the WCW coffin, Ric, under insurmountable pressure from Jim Herd, resigned as head booker.

With Flair out of the creative picture, Herd decided to put Ole Anderson in charge of the booking committee, which also featured guys like Jim Ross, Terry Funk, “Wahoo” McDaniel, Kevin Sullivan, Jim Cornette, and even Jim Crockett (who was given a job as part of the sale to Turner). During the course of the last few weeks, Ole had been forced out of the Four Horsemen and active duty as a wrestler due to his age. He was seen as an experienced and viable candidate to take Flair’s place, which he was, until the disagreements began.

Within no time at all, Ole and Herd started butting heads over the direction of WCW, and everything went straight into the toilet. Ole thought the guaranteed contracts Herd was giving out to all the new talent undermined his ability to control their story lines. If someone had a guarantee with Herd, where was the motivation or urgency to follow Ole’s direction? A guy feeling slighted by Ole could go over his head and appeal to Herd directly and get what he wanted. In response, Ole figured he’d roll the clock back to the early 1980s and recruit many of his trusted, loyal old talents from the GCW days.

All of a sudden, it was like a time warp back to 1983 as Hawk and I saw Paul Orndorff, Iron Sheik, Thunderbolt Patterson, Tommy Rich, Stan Hansen, Tim Horner, and even Mr. Wrestling II walking around in the dressing room. Ever heard the expression “Take one step forward and two steps back”? Well, what we were seeing in WCW with the pissing match between Herd and Ole was more like two thousand steps back. There was a hostile divide, and nobody knew what the hell was going on.

“Precious” Paul, in all of his infinite wisdom, decided he’d finally had enough and decided to quit. Paul was such a concise and calculated businessman that he marched right into the office and talked them into paying him the rest of the balance for the year on his contract. As I’ve said before, pure genius.

I’ll never forget Hawk’s reaction to Paul’s leaving, which was completely directed at Herd and WCW.

We were at the UIC Pavilion in Chicago when Paul broke the news to us. “I’ve had enough, boys. This shit with Herd has me burnt out. I’m leaving.”

Hawk flipped out. “What the fuck? That motherfucker Herd has no clue what he’s doing to this company.”

As I leaned over to put my boots on, I felt something fly by my head, missing me by mere inches. In his rage, Hawk had picked up a chair and thrown it as hard as he could at the wall, smashing the thermostat into a few dozen pieces.

We couldn’t believe Paul was leaving, but we couldn’t blame him either. If Herd was hell-bent on unwittingly destroying WCW, great, but now he was fucking with the Road Warriors equation. I was sad beyond words to see my trusted friend leave. Paul had overseen everything we’d done since day one and was as responsible for the success of the Road Warriors as we were.

Forcing Paul out was the last straw. We had to weigh our options, and if there was one thing the Road Warriors always had, it was options. We knew we could hop over to Japan or pick up the phone and call the WWF, or both. We decided to get out while the gettin’ was good.

“Fuck this shit, Animal,” Hawk said one day. “We’re way beyond a place like this. Let’s get the hell out of here and give Vince a call.”

We decided our match at Capital Combat on May 19 in Washington, DC, would be our last for WCW. Considering what we witnessed that night, Hawk, Paul, and I couldn’t have made a wiser choice.

First of all, one look at the match we were booked in at Capital Combat told the entire story of where our WCW career was going: nowhere. Hawk and I were teamed with a 400-pound guy named Norman the Lunatic against Bam Bam Bigelow, Cactus Jack, and Kevin Sullivan. I mean, absolutely no disrespect to any of those guys, but at that time in our career as the Road Warriors, we were used to being in main events with a purpose. That night in Washington, DC, I felt drained of all desire to step into the ring, but the capper for the event was still to come.

You see, because Turner had a film distribution division and was about to release
RoboCop 2
, Herd and everybody else thought it would be a stroke of genius to cross-promote the movie on WCW programming. However, rather than simply putting
Robocop
promos on during the Capital Combat PPV, they came up with an even better idea: they’d have Robocop himself make an appearance. Not only would the science fiction movie character show up in person; he’d play an important role in the most pivotal story line of the whole PPV.

Man, I’m telling you, Hawk and I watched in amazement with our mouths agape as Robocop made his way down to the ringside area. After arriving next to a small cage that Sid Vicious and Barry Windham of the regrouped Four Horsemen had thrown Sting into, Robocop ripped the iron door off its hinges. Can you believe it? Neither could we, but he sure did.

There they were, Sting and Robocop side by side, making the Horsemen back off. The whole thing was spectacularly bad, and we had a hearty laugh at Herd’s expense as we grabbed our stuff and headed to the armory doors.

“Let’s get out of this dump,” I said, referring to WCW. And that’s exactly what we did.

We weren’t alone. As the months dragged on, Flair and Herd would reach such an unprecedented level of dissension that Ric would eventually defect to the WWF as the reigning NWA World Heavyweight champion, taking the belt with him to use against WCW.

The resulting fallout from Herd’s lack of foresight to prevent such a nightmare not only cost him his job, but WCW wound up falling into its darkest era, yielding the worst ratings in company history. It would take several years and many more personnel changes than you can imagine to turn things around.