Sometimes you’ve gotta be careful what you wish for. I was so focused on getting into this Florida wrestling circuit, so focused on not letting Matsuda beat me down, so focused on being accepted, that I didn’t look at the bigger picture.
I still had blinders on.
After that first match, I expected I’d be able to make a living at this thing. Everybody else—like Brian Blair and Paul Orndorff—was wrestling six nights a week, rotating from West Palm to Tampa to Miami to Jacksonville to Sarasota. Me? I was only getting two bookings: Wednesday in Miami, which is a five-hour drive each way, and Monday in Tallahassee, which is a five-and-a-half-hour drive each way. And I was always the one who had to drive. All of the other wrestlers would pile into my van and drink beer, and then sleep on the way home.
This went on for like three or four months. I was barely making any money. More than that, it started to feel like some kind of a rib again—like I was being taken advantage of.
Finally I mentioned this to my friend Charlie Lay, the old guy at the front desk at the Sportatorium, and he looked at me and said something I must’ve been just too deaf to hear until that moment. “Kid, don’t you get it? They don’t want you around here.”
I knew he was right. We all know that feeling, when you hear something you know is the truth but it’s something you’ve been dreading and just didn’t want to hear. It knocks you in the stomach. And I mean, I had been fighting that truth from day one. Day one.
Even though I’d had my first match, and the matches after that all went really well—I was getting real good in the ring and starting to find ways to really pump up the crowd—and even though I survived Matsuda’s training, and even though I’d suffered through that hazing or whatever you want to call that shit they put me through, I was never gonna escape that stigma of being a mark. These Florida wrestlers were always going to treat me like some kid who didn’t deserve to be there.
With one last flicker of hope, I met with Matsuda and Jack and Jerry Brisco—people I thought were real friends by that point—to ask about wrestling six nights a week. The solution they came up with was to transfer me to another territory up in Kansas City.
That was that.
No offense to Kansas City, but I wasn’t about to be banished off to Hicksville. And I sure wasn’t going to sit there and be humiliated any more than I already had been for the last year and a half.
So that was the end. Three, four months into my professional wrestling career, I walked away. I was done.
I called a guy named Whitey Bridges over in Cocoa Beach. He owned a place called the Anchor Club that was part of the rock ’n’ roll circuit I used to be in. He was this really built, forty-year-old blond-haired guy who loved to party and always had lots of girls around. I’m not sure why I called him. Maybe I thought I’d go visit him, hang out for a while, blow off some steam while I tried to figure out what the heck I was going to do next. Maybe I just wanted to say hi and see how he was doing. Anyway, when I mentioned that the wrestling thing wasn’t really working out, much to my surprise Whitey made me an offer.
“Why don’t you come over here and help run my club?”
Done deal, brother. I was gone. Cocoa Beach, here I come!
Not only did I help him run the Anchor Club, but we decided to go into business together and open up a gym.
Everything fell into place real easy, like it was meant to be. In a matter of weeks we unlocked the doors to Whitey and Terry’s Olympic Gym—right near the beach, in the middle of town.
Splitting my time between the two places was a lot, and I decided I needed someone I could really trust to work the door of the club and handle the money. Since I hardly knew anybody else in Cocoa Beach, I wound up calling my buddy from Port Tampa, Ed Leslie.
Ed’s a bit younger than me, but I went to school with his older sister and always liked the guy. We just hit it off. He wasn’t into wrestling at that point, but still he was big enough and had the kind of build that I thought he could easily handle any situation at the door. In case you’ve forgotten, Ed became better known later in life as Brutus “the Barber” Beefcake.
Over the course of that year, Brutus and I got real serious about two things: working that club and working out in that gym. I mean, I got crazy focused on building my body. Whether it was some kind of a reaction to the whole wrestling fiasco or not, I made up my mind that I was going to get as big as I possibly could.
I had a pretty good starting point—I was already in fantastic shape—but even with the muscle base I’d built, and how fit I was from those Matsuda workouts, and the God-given gift of my natural size, there was no way I could achieve that over-the-top, thick, massive golden god look I was after without help.
The help I needed came in two forms: needles and pills.
By the late 1970s, steroids were everywhere—and I’m not just talking about the wrestling world. You could walk into almost any gym or locker room in this country and find steroids if you had your eyes open. It was a different era. They were legal. Doctors would pretty much hand you a prescription for whatever you wanted—all you had to do was ask. There wouldn’t be a federal ban on steroids until the end of the following decade.
In Cocoa Beach, in 1978, I didn’t even have to go looking for them. Instead, steroids found me. They just walked right in through the front door of Whitey and Terry’s Olympic Gym.
A couple of local weightlifters came through to check out the facility, and before I knew it they were talking like traveling salesmen. “Hey, man, why don’t you take Dynabol? You won’t believe the results! Just try it and see. And if you really want to see some bulk, you should take this and take that.” There was no indication that this stuff could hurt you—or kill you—and anyone who used the stuff was the best spokesperson possible because they all looked great! Brutus and I were sold, right then and there, and when we got into it, we got into it heavy.
We found pretty quickly that it was all about finding the right cocktail that worked for you, and once you hit the correct combo, the results were fast and furious. There was always a base of testosterone—it could be 1 cc, maybe more. You just went by feel. Then there was “Deca,” Deca-Durabolin, an oil-based steroid, and you’d take that once or twice a week. Then there were pills, like Anavar and the aforementioned Dynabol, which I know now is actually very toxic—it’s like an androgen that makes you hold fluid. All steroids are stressful on your internal organs. But I was young and invincible, you know? I took pills every day and shot up about every third day. The results were incredible, so I just kept going.
In just a couple of months I was seeing that sort of Greek god swell I envisioned.
There was no limit to the amount of steroids we could do. And as much as we wanted, the local weightlifter-dealers could provide. If you wanted to buy a hundred pills, you could; and if you wanted to buy ten thousand pills, you could. The way we understood it—whether this was true or not—if you had a prescription from your doctor, then you were covered because they weren’t illegal. Even if you got caught with a thousand bottles from a drug dealer, as long as you had that prescription for that substance in your bag, you were okay.
A local doctor there who was friends with Whitey was kind enough to write down whatever we wanted, so we’d be street legal. Then once we had his prescription for, let’s say, one bottle of testosterone, we’d run right out and buy fifty bottles from one of those dealers down the street.
The thing is, I didn’t have any second thoughts about pumping my body full of this stuff because everybody said steroids were safe. I guess it’s kinda like in the 1950s when everybody said smoking cigarettes was safe. Hell, some people even said smoking was good for you, right? In the ’70s, everyone just upped the ante a little. They went around saying it was perfectly safe to smoke pot, and it certainly wasn’t gonna kill you to snort some cocaine, and in locker-room circles it was just a given that shooting steroids was safe, too.
It was also sort of a social thing. When you took steroids, you were just like every other muscle-head in the gym. And if you didn’t? It was almost like, “Why are you wasting your time in here?”
The convenience and availability just pushed it over the top. Why make an appointment and waste all that time at a doctor’s office to get one bottle when I can buy ten bottles of what I want right now, and do it for three dollars a bottle? I remember testosterone was like ten dollars a bottle and had ten shots in it. There was just so much of it, everywhere, it actually made you feel “in place” as opposed to “out of place” to take steroids. Before long, everybody in the gym was doing it, everybody who worked at the bar was doing it, and you could look at the way the top athletes looked and know that they were all doing it, too.
So it wasn’t considered a reckless thing. In fact, that whole year I spent in Cocoa Beach was anything but reckless.
Even though I was running the Anchor, I didn’t drink. I went all of 1978 without putting a drop of alcohol into my body. Alcohol just wouldn’t cut it with the schedule I was keeping.
After working out and running the gym all day, Brutus and I had a pretty standard routine. We’d open up the bar and get everything settled, and then we’d come back and watch David Letterman’s Late Night show. Man, we laughed our asses off. While we watched, we’d drink these power shakes. I’d take the most fattening protein there was, called Metabol, and dump it in a blender with half a cube of vanilla Häagen-Dazs ice cream, a banana, and two huge wads of peanut butter. Probably the most fattening shit you can eat. We’d drink two blenders of that crap, watch Letterman, then go back to the bar and stay until closing at 4:00 A.M.
I would have been wrecked the next day if I’d been boozing it up. So alcohol was out.
And pot was in.
I had started smoking pot a little bit in the last couple of bands I was in. The other guys would disappear on me during breaks. I’d put the bass guitar down and ask, “Where the fuck did everybody go?” It’s as if they had a secret code to lose me or something. They would come back smelling like weed. I finally asked David, the keyboard player, about it, and he said, “You should try it!”
I never wanted to. I was a pretty clean-cut kid. But then the whole band went on this camping trip down the Withlacoochee River, and I finally smoked a joint. Nothin’ happened. So I smoked another one. Nothin’ happened. I must’ve had four, five joints that first time, and I didn’t feel a thing. Then all of a sudden when we stopped to pitch the tent I started eating everything in sight—potato chips, Oreos, everything I could get my hands on—and they’re all laughing, “Oh! You’re stoned! You’re stoned! You’ve got the munchies, man!” It sure didn’t feel like I was stoned, but I guess I was.
Maybe that’s why those fattening shakes went down so easy in Cocoa Beach—I was stoned!
Part of me could have stayed in Cocoa Beach just living that laid-back life forever, but settling in one spot wasn’t in the cards for me. Life has a way of always keeping you in check, doesn’t it? Just when things seem to be settled and going great, the rug gets yanked out from under you.
At the end of that year, Whitey decided to get married. He’d had it with the whole beach scene and he decided to sell the bar. I couldn’t keep the gym open without Whitey’s backing, so that had to close down, too.
Poof! Our little bachelor-party lifestyle was shut down.
The thing was, enough time had passed that I’d started to think about wrestling again. The crap I went through took a backseat in my mind to that amazing feeling of being in the ring with a big crowd of people hollering and oooing and aahing to my every move. Plus, now I had this body on me. I finally looked like those heroes I worshipped as a kid. In fact, I looked better than them!
I started to wonder—if I got out of Florida and away from the stigma they had put on me because of the way I got into this thing, maybe there was a chance that I could make the big time.
I had a newfound confidence that didn’t exist back in Tampa, so I called up Superstar Billy Graham.
“Dude, I think my arms are bigger than yours now. I just taped my biceps and they’re twenty-four inches!” When Superstar Billy Graham’s hit twenty-two inches in the mid-1970s they were considered the biggest guns in the world. Now all of a sudden mine were twenty-four inches around! I couldn’t touch my shoulders for like a year I was so bloated up.
Graham couldn’t believe his ears. “If you’re that big, and you really want to wrestle,” he said, “I’m gonna send you to Louie Tillet.”
Tillet was this French-Canadian guy who ran the Alabama wrestling territory, which covered Pensacola and Panama City—basically that whole northern Florida panhandle.
I was pumped. I was ready.
I asked Brutus if he wanted to come along. He didn’t know a thing about wrestling, but I promised to teach him everything I knew—and I wouldn’t torture him like I’d been tortured by the guys in Tampa. He already had the body and the size, and I figured wrestling would be a lot more fun with a partner in crime along for the ride.
He was 100 percent in, and so was I. So we packed up my customized gold Dodge van that I’d bought from Whitey. I said good-bye to Cocoa Beach, and I drove off to Alabama.
It was the start of a whole new adventure.