4
Breaking In
“Find out what you want most in life, and go after it.”
—Napoleon Hill, “Build a Positive Mental Attitude”
I spent the spring quarter of my senior year student-teaching in North Dakota at Fargo South High School, under Jerry Larson, the high school wrestling coach. I was still hoping to get drafted to play pro football in the NFL.
That spring, however, I learned that Coach Erhardt had been telling the pro scouts that I “wasn’t interested” in playing professional football. I have no earthly idea why he would have been telling people that, because playing professional football in the NFL had been my goal the entire time I was at NDSU. By the time I found out what Erhardt was telling the scouts, however, it was too late to do anything about it.
It is hard for me to have any respect for that man. I know that Erhardt ended up as a head coach with the New England Patriots and offensive coordinator with the New York Jets, but I just didn’t have any respect for the way he conducted himself, the way he treated his players at NDSU, or the way he unilaterally downplayed my NFL prospects. To this day, I don’t know for sure what our issue was, but I suspect that it might have had something to with the fact that I was recruited to NDSU by Coach Maughan, and not by him. I always worked hard for Coach Erhardt, but it is very clear that he and I were just not on the same page. It’s funny how life tends to work these things out, though. Who knows what would have happened if Erhardt had pushed me to the pro scouts, and I had caught on with an NFL team?
After college, I ended up in Mundelein, Illinois, playing semi-pro football at the Chicago Bears training camp. I made so little money playing for that team that I had to hand out brochures for a company door-to-door just to make enough money to live. I was paid per piece for doing that, so I just incorporated it into my workout routine and ran my entire delivery route, so I made it work for me. I made enough money to cover rent, to have a place to work out, and to buy enough food to get by. I was living in a boarding house with ten other guys doing the same thing I was doing, so I had a three-foot by ten-foot space on the wood floor just big enough to roll out a sleeping bag, and that was about it.
It was a pretty depressing scene and it would have been very easy to get demoralized and just give up.
But I didn’t.
In the face of that totally discouraging situation, I stayed positive and worked out harder and harder every day to keep myself in absolutely peak physical condition while I waited for my chance to come. I knew that I didn’t have control of when that chance would come—but I did have control of what kind of shape I would be in if and when it did.
Deep down, though, I knew that I didn’t have much chance of getting into the NFL from a semi-pro team, because the NFL was getting a steady stream of talent from the college ranks every year, and anyone they plucked from a semi-pro team never seemed to stick. Those were the guys who always seemed to be in the first round of cuts during training camp and ended up getting stuck on the practice squads. The writing was on the wall for me. I recognized that my chances of actually making it to the NFL were pretty slim.
There were players on that team that had been there ten years waiting for their chance to make the pros. I decided I wasn’t going to wait around for a chance at my dream—I was going to go after it! Little did I know that one of life’s little coincidences was about to strike again.
When the season was over, I went back to NDSU and finished the credits I needed to graduate, and in the spring, I moved to Anoka, Minnesota, outside Minneapolis and lived with a guy named Elroy Carpenter, who had been a friend of mine in high school. I was taping sheetrock during the day, and working out every day at the 7th Street gym in Minneapolis when my chance finally did come.
There was a man at the 7th Street gym who would always watch me work out. I knew he was somehow involved with professional wrestling because he was working in the gym with a lot of the guys, like Mad Dog Vachon, Billy Red Lyons, and Red Bastien, who I had grown up watching in the AWA. The man turned out to be pro wrestling trainer Eddie Sharkey.
One day, Sharkey just came up to me during my workout and introduced himself. As Graham had before, Sharkey asked me if I had ever considered getting into professional wrestling. He knew that I had excelled in high school and college wrestling, and mentioned that, with that background and my build, I should give it a try.
It seemed like the fates were steering me toward an outcome. Twice in one year, I was being invited to join the pro wrestling fraternity. This time, I wasn’t going to let the chance pass me by. So I said “yes” to Eddie Sharkey.
And that’s how it all began for me.
I became a student of Eddie’s, who charged me a flat fee of $500 to train me. He had a professional-style ring in the 7th Street gym, which was just lying on 2x6s on the floor—it was not on a platform—so we couldn’t learn how to get thrown out of the ring. We trained for three days a week in the evenings after work, learning holds and maneuvers, how to hit the ropes, and how to “chain wrestle”—putting together the strings of moves that you would use in a professional wrestling match.
Obviously, there were major differences between wrestling in the amateur ranks and professional wrestling. In the amateurs, the goal is to pin your opponent’s shoulders to the mat for one second, or to win the match on points by dominating your opponent on the mat, taking him down, and controlling the action. Joint locks and any other kinds of submission moves were forbidden. Of course, amateur wrestling is also a legitimate athletic competition. In professional wrestling, the goal is to pin your opponent’s shoulders to the mat for a three-count, or to make him concede the match by submission. You could also win the match if your opponent was counted out of the ring, or disqualified, or if the match was stopped because your opponent was bleeding too severely to continue. Professional wrestling, while certainly still very athletic, was entertainment. While a working knowledge of amateur wrestling certainly helped in professional wrestling by providing you with a catalogue of moves you could call upon to tell a story in the ring, or to protect yourself if you needed to, it was also important to remember that professional wrestling required a give and take in the ring that necessitated allowing your opponent to get the upper hand on you in a match. To me, that was one of the hardest adjustments!
Eddie trained me for about seven months. We worked on “ring presence,” submission holds, and professional pinning combinations that had more visual flourishes than the amateur ones did. He taught me how to throw a dropkick. Most importantly, though, he taught me how to execute high spots without hurting my opponent, and how take “bumps” without getting hurt myself.
Taking a bump, whether it is a hiptoss, a bodyslam, a suplex, or a piledriver, is all about making sure that your body and your opponent’s body are in the right position to land at the end of the move. As the person taking the bump, it is about learning to land as flat as you can, and dispersing the impact over as large an area of your body as possible. Think of it like going across thin ice on skis. You can make it across a sheet of thin ice on skis, where you would fall through on foot, because you are dispersing your weight over a larger area. It is the same principle in wrestling. If you take a bump with your entire body, rather than landing on, say, a shoulder or your hip, you can properly disperse the impact and avoid injury. You want everything to hit the mat at the same time—and your opponent is supposed to protect you by executing any move so that your body is in the proper position to make that happen.
As the person calling and then executing the “high spot,” you have the responsibility to ensure that the move is understood, and that the timing is right so your opponent can react properly to what you are doing. Professional wrestling is often compared to a “dance,” and that is really pretty accurate. You are constantly responding to what your opponent is doing. Every move needs a countermove to support it. Miss even one, and someone can get badly hurt.
It doesn’t really matter that a move is predetermined if you have a 280-pound man up above your head upside down in a vertical suplex. If you move him too close to the ropes or the turnbuckles, if your timing is off, or if your move is not predictable, you might as well be doing it for real. And of course, while you are busy protecting yourself and your opponent—you need to make it look like it’s real and that you are, in fact, trying to hurt him, so that the fans’ suspension of disbelief isn’t dispelled.
It was a lot to take in. One day, though, Eddie pulled me aside and told me that I was ready to make a go of it. He told me where to go to get some professional photographs taken, and then gave me a list of names, addresses, and phone numbers of regional wrestling promoters all around the country. He told me to send a photo to each of those promoters and then follow up with a phone call about two weeks after that and to tell them that Eddie Sharkey sent me.
He wished me good luck.
And that was that.
I sent those photographs all over the country—to Stu Hart in Calgary, and Jim Barnett in Georgia, and Paul Bosch in Houston and Eddie Graham in Florida, and Fritz Von Erich in Texas and Roy Shire in San Francisco and Mike LaBell in Los Angeles. I kept working taping sheetrock for minimum wage, training at the 7th Street gym at night, and waiting for the responses that never came.
Finally, Eddie told me to just start calling the promoters. Once I started doing that, I realized how hard it was to actually get a wrestling promoter on the telephone! It seemed that they were always too busy. Or not in the office. Or at least saying that they were not in the office! That’s if they even had an office! Others said they were full, or to try back in a few months.
I remember feeding coins into a payphone waiting and waiting (and waiting!) for Stu Hart from the Calgary promotion to get on the phone. When he finally got to the phone, he talked so slowly that the phone cut out because I had run out of money. I never did call him back—and thus managed to avoid getting stretched in the infamous Hart dungeon—the basement of the Harts’ family home in Calgary which was set up wall-to-wall with wrestling mats, and where Stu Hart was famous for working over his students while teaching them the craft.
A couple of days later, when I had money in my pocket again, I called Leroy McGuirk’s office in Tulsa, Oklahoma. McGuirk was the head of the Tri-States promotion that, ironically, actually covered parts of four states: Oklahoma, Louisiana, Missouri, and Texas. McGuirk was also a former NCAA champion himself, having won the Division I title at 155 pounds wrestling out of Oklahoma A&M (now known as Oklahoma State) as a junior in 1931. At the time he won that title, he was blind in one eye, which made the feat even more amazing.
By the time I called on him, though, Leroy was totally blind, having lost the sight in his other eye in a horrific automobile accident. He obviously couldn’t see my pictures personally, but he had some office person there review my credentials with him, and he learned that I was also an NCAA champion. He liked that about me, and we talked on the phone about amateur wrestling a little bit, and after chatting for a while, he offered me a tryout. He gave me a house show date in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, in two weeks’ time, and told me he would meet me there.
I was on my way.