5

From the Sheraton to the Trunk (Tri-States, 1973)

“Turn all unpleasant circumstances into opportunities for positive action. Make this an automatic habit, and your success will multiply.”

—Napoleon Hill, “Build a Positive Mental Attitude”

The Sunday after receiving the invitation to try out with Leroy McGuirk, I packed everything I owned into the back of my very used 1968 green Chevrolet Impala that I had bought earlier that summer for $200. In retrospect, I probably should have invested in a better car given how much driving I was about to be doing—and because that Impala would end up being much more than just a car to me in those early years.

When the car was packed, my mother stood in front of our little homestead in Princeton, gave me a big hug, told me she loved me, and told me to do my best. The naysayers, though, were out in force. People told me that I was wasting my time, and that I would never make it in pro wrestling. They said, “We’ll see you back here in a month hanging sheetrock.” Fortunately, I didn’t listen to them, and I made myself a little promise to prove them all wrong. And with that, I struck off from Princeton, Minnesota, a twenty-one-year-old, bound for Baton Rouge, Louisiana, and determined to make it as a professional wrestler.

At the time I left Minnesota, I had $20 in my pocket, and by the time I got down there, I had spent it all on gas and food. Fortunately, I was about to have my first professional wrestling match, and I knew that the match was going to be held at a pretty decent-sized arena, so I made a hotel reservation for myself at the Sheraton Baton Rouge, because I had picked up, through bits and pieces of conversation in various places, that a lot of professional athletes stayed at Sheratons.

My first match ever was against Ron Starr—who was pretty green himself back then, but who would go on to have a long career in the NWA and the WWC down in Puerto Rico. During my days training with Eddie, we were always in a ring in a gym with no fans watching—so having an arena full of people waiting as I left the locker room and went to the ring was a very different feeling.

Although I had wrestled in front of large crowds before, it was always as an amateur. Had this been an amateur match, I would have been fine, but it wasn’t, and so I wasn’t. My head was spinning as I tried to remember all the things Eddie had taught me about knowing my place, not stealing too much thunder from the guys on the top of the card, and how to listen to the crowd and get them on your side. I was young, naïve, very nervous, and wanting very much to make a good first impression. As I got to the ring, I climbed up the steps and tried to vault myself over the top rope and into the ring, but the ropes were looser than I expected, and I ended up spinning around and falling into the ring. I could hear the crowd laughing at me, which obviously wasn’t the reaction I was looking for.

I don’t remember much about the match—I was told to job for Starr, and that’s pretty much what I did. He called all of the spots, and I just worked on following his lead and selling for him. He didn’t give me much offense, and I didn’t really expect to get much. I was just trying to make the timing look good, and to make sure that neither of us got hurt.

When the match was over, I rolled out of the ring on the wrong side of the arena, and got completely disoriented trying to find my way back to the dressing room. One thing you probably haven’t thought about is how similar the four sides of an arena look when you’ve been wrestling for ten minutes and have sweat and the lights in your eyes. These weren’t places like Madison Square Garden with one central aisle that you walked down, and lots of people working crowd control to steer you to where you needed to go. This arena had four walkways through the crowd, one on each side of the ring, and I had no idea which one of them led back to the dressing room. So I just tried to sell it like I’d had my bell rung—but in reality, I was actually lost and growing increasingly nervous about it. I’m sure everyone in the back was probably thinking “rookie!” But I had gotten through my first match unscathed, and I did eventually find the way back.

I took a shower, and checked out with the promoter running the building that night. He told me that I had done a good enough job to earn some additional bookings—and brought out a book that had a calendar in it with the list of dates for the rest of the month. The matches were listed there—and I was told to find my name on each night’s card, and to write down which towns I needed to be in and on what days. I could also see my opponent for each night, although that didn’t mean much to me since I didn’t know anyone in the territory. My next date was not until five days later in Shreveport—but after that, it looked like I was going to be working pretty regularly.

I was excited to have survived the tryout, and I could barely contain my enthusiasm. I signed a requisition, and got an envelope with my first payday in it! I stuffed it into my pocket and didn’t open it until I was back in the front seat of my car.

I pulled out the envelope and thought about what I was going to do with the money. First, of course, I was going to have to pay for my lodging at the Sheraton. I thought about treating myself to a good steak dinner to celebrate making it as a pro. And then, I thought about sending some home to my parents to help out with my younger sister Mary.

I opened the envelope and found …

Five bucks.

One five-dollar bill.

That was it.

I had grown up watching the AWA and given the size of the crowds the AWA was drawing at the time, I had always assumed that wrestlers made a good living. Obviously, I had assumed too much. As I sat there in the parking lot, I was trying to figure out how to ration the five dollars in order to put enough gas in the Impala to drive to Shreveport, buy food, and find a place to stay for the next four nights.

And then I went to a payphone at the nearest gas station and cancelled my reservation at the Sheraton!

With no money to get a room at even the cheapest motel in the area, I found myself 1,000 miles away from home, and effectively homeless. I bought a couple of cans of tuna and a can opener, and that became dinner. I drove around, and eventually found a church parking lot, pulled in, and with nowhere else to go, I curled up and went to sleep in the trunk of my car.

All my earthly possessions were there in that car with me. Fortunately, I could lock the trunk from the inside, which was a good thing. That first night down there, I didn’t get much sleep. In the Louisiana summer, even the nights were stifling. The air in the car was oppressive and heavy. It was hard to breathe, and I was worried about getting enough air. I was also worried about getting robbed, because all night, there was a gang of pretty rough guys standing near my car talking. One time, they even sat on my car. I could hear their voices clearly, and felt the car sink down when they sat on it. They clearly didn’t realize that there was someone sleeping inside it!

The next day, I went to the YMCA to work out and started to have some real doubts about what I was doing. I was twenty-one, very far from home, didn’t know anyone, and was sleeping in the trunk of my car. It was hard not to feel a little desperate. As crazy as it sounds, though, I was better off than a lot of the people I saw down there on the streets at night.

I gathered my wits and decided that my next order of business was finding a way to defend myself if someone tried to break into my car. I couldn’t afford a gun, but I did manage to procure an old wooden baseball bat for some extra protection.

My second night in Baton Rouge wasn’t much better. The same gang was hanging around the area, so I moved the car to a different church parking lot, but just found a different gang! It was hard to get any rest. I kept wondering whether someone might try to break the windows during the night, and whether I was going to end up in a fight with a gang trying to steal the few things I had. I slept fitfully, clutching my bat and struggling for air. I thought a lot about home, about Corki and my parents.

I wasn’t ready to quit, but I didn’t want to stay.

I was getting used to sleeping in the trunk, but my body was getting run down. I couldn’t believe I had worked this hard, and that this was the return that life was giving me. In retrospect, those first few weeks were rock bottom for me. No one could write to me because I had no permanent address, and I couldn’t even afford the few coins to call home, because I needed every dime I could muster for food. I was lonely—and the wrestling fraternity provided no help, because I didn’t know anyone in the territory.

As I have done so many times in my life when things looked bleak, I turned to exercise to keep my spirits up. I went to the local gym every day, and I trained as hard as I could, and washed up in their bathroom. Working out put my mind at rest and gave me a release.

As it turned out, wrestling in the Tri-States territory was pretty tough. The trips between the towns were long, and the crowds were rough. One night we’d be in New Orleans, the next night in Tulsa, Oklahoma, 700 miles away, and then back to Shreveport, Louisiana, for the TV tapings, and then off to Houma, Louisiana, which was about 30 miles from New Orleans, where we had just been. Because Leroy was blind, he relied on others for the information that promoters use to make decisions about who to push. There was a real diffusion of responsibility. It wasn’t always clear who you were answering to, and internal locker room politics were running rampant.

Jake Smith, who was known as “Grizzly” both because of his appearance and his disposition (and who was the father of Jake “The Snake” Roberts), was the booker. More than anywhere else I wrestled, the Tri-States territory bore the closest resemblance to professional wrestling’s origins in the traveling carnivals. Everywhere we went, it seemed like there were fans who wanted to challenge the wrestlers. So in many of the towns we visited, before the matches began, Grizzly would bring four or five of us out of the locker room and out into the ring. There, he had also lined up four or five “marks” (fans who were not smart to the business) who wanted to try their hand against one of us.

Grizzly usually arranged it so that the other three or four guys in the ring looked a lot meaner than I did, so the marks almost always picked me. This, of course, was all part of Grizzly’s plan, because he knew that I could handle myself easily against these mostly drunk guys trying to show off for their girlfriends.

Night after night, I would wrestle these marks, one after the next, before the matches started. Because I was a clean-cut babyface, I wasn’t intimidating to them, and so they weren’t expecting to get manhandled—but that’s what Grizzly expected me to do—manhandle them. None of those arenas were air-conditioned, so on most nights, the arenas were oppressively hot before the fans crowded into them. Once the bleachers and the seats were full, the temperature rose by at least 15 degrees and the air smelled like a combination of body odor, sewage, and stale beer. On some nights, it was hard not to throw up—except that I didn’t have much in my stomach anyway!

Against the bigger marks, I would usually just break them down to the mat and ride them, making them carry my body weight in the oppressive heat until they blew up, gasping for air, too tired to continue. I would pin some of them with headlocks, put them in full nelsons, or the Chickenwing Crossface, or an arm bar, or a hammerlock and apply just enough pressure to make them give up. At that time in my career, I wasn’t as schooled in hooking and shooting as I was later on in my career when I needed those skills to protect the world title—but I relied on my strength, amateur wrestling knowledge, and a few tricks I picked up along the way to take care of business. Slowly, these little “exhibitions” earned me the respect of my peers and the office guys.

To me, though, wrestling these marks was like playing around—a chance to break a sweat and get in a little extra workout. One night in Lafayette, I wrestled nine people in a row out of the crowd before the matches began. I loved it! For some of the other pros who didn’t have a background in amateur wrestling, though, these bouts sometimes got pretty scary, and they’d have to break a nose or gouge an eye, or use a rear naked choke to subdue a bigger mark. Failure in one of these scenarios was simply not an option. If you were a professional wrestler and got manhandled by a drunk mark who came out of the crowd in jeans and cowboy boots, it would hurt the legitimacy of the business in the eyes of the fans, and your career, at least in that territory, would be over.

For the entire time I worked the Tri-States territory, I ate tuna fish out of a can, drank as much water as I could get at the gym or the public library, and lived in my car. As I slowly earned the respect of my peers, I was occasionally able to hitch a ride with some of the other wrestlers, or to split the cost of gas with them if I was driving, which enabled me to save a little money. I trained hard, worked hard in the ring to learn the craft, watched almost every match every night to see how different wrestlers handled the crowds and built emotion in their matches, and slowly but surely, I earned the respect of the promoters working under Leroy.

Most nights, I was “jerking the curtain” (wrestling in the opening match) working as “enhancement talent”—selling other people’s moves to make them look good, thereby “enhancing” their own heat. In the beginning, everyone I stepped into the ring with was calling the matches, and the direction from the promoters was for them to squash me without giving me any comeback, rally, or any meaningful part of the match. I was effectively a crash-test dummy for everyone I stepped into the ring with. Given my amateur background, it was a humbling experience, but the fact that the office trusted me enough to wrestle the “marks” from the crowd provided me with a glimmer of hope.

I stayed positive and remembered Eddie Sharkey’s instruction that wrestling in the territories was professional wrestling’s real training camp. I was out there to learn the craft—and the small civic arenas and gyms in these small southern backwater towns were the classrooms of our profession. The opportunity to climb into the ring every night with a different opponent who wrestled a different style—those opportunities were the laboratories by which the art of our profession was taught and passed down from one generation of workers to the next. With that mindset, I worked hard every night to “sell” my opponents’ moves realistically, and to learn to take the bumps from a wide range of offensive maneuvers safely but convincingly. I was polite, respectful, never complained, and always willing to do whatever was asked of me. But for every moment of that time, I was also closely observing what people were doing, and soaking up knowledge like a sponge.

In retrospect, those few, laborious months in Tri-State were very important to me. I ended up having a pretty meteoric rise in the wrestling business, so being forced to spend that time at the beginning of my career, jerking the curtain, enhancing other people, and laying down for just about everyone I wrestled (many of whom couldn’t have gotten a point on me on their best day in an amateur match) kept me humble. I learned the business the way one should learn it—by starting from the bottom and working my way up.

As time went on and I paid my dues, I began to be booked into fifteen-minute draws at some of the house shows. I was given the chance to call some spots, show a few moves, and try to win over the crowds. Eventually, I even got a couple of wins.

Then, one day, Terry Funk came in to work a main event in one of the towns in the Tri-States territory. For some reason, he paid attention to me, and we got into a conversation in the dressing room. He knew I was a rookie and asked how I was doing. I told him that I was learning a lot, but I quietly admitted to him that I was getting pretty run down from living in my car. I didn’t know it at the time, but Terry and his brother Dory (who was known as “Junior”) were running the Amarillo territory. Before our conversation was finished, Terry gave me his phone number and told me to call him when I was ready to make a move. It was the first meaningful contact I made in the wrestling business—and, as will become clear as you read on, it turned out to be a really important one.

A couple of weeks later, Grizzly came into the dressing room and told us that Terry Funk wanted a couple of us to do jobs for him on TV in Amarillo.

I was one of the guys selected.

Anxious to explore something different, I made the long, hot drive from Shreveport to Amarillo. That set in motion a long chain of events that, one to the next, would ultimately take me all the way to the world championship.

It was the end of the beginning.