More Than Just Hardcore (13 page)

Today someone asks me about wrestling, and I’ll say, “It’s entertainment,” but that’s about it. I’ll take the conversation somewhere else, because the more I talk, the more I’m afraid I’ll be destroying their fun and emotional investment in watching it.

Whether I like to admit it or not, I am something of a cartoon character from years of appearing on television as a wrestler. I’m not talking about the guy I go and buy feed from, or the waitress who brings me my eggs benedict. I’m talking about the fan. To that fan, I am not a guy who buys feed, or orders eggs benedict. I am the person that fan sees on TV, and I have to remember that. It’s pretty hard for some people to understand, even in this day and age, that maintaining even a fraction of that sense of mystery is the key to our business. The wrestlers have to have a mystique about them. The fan has to wonder, “Is this guy really the guy I see on TV?”

Now I’m not saying that the heel, even back then, needed to be the world’s shittiest person to everyone he met, all day long. But he didn’t need to expose himself completely and destroy his facade, either.

Just a few weeks after Junior lost the world’s championship to Harley Race, he and I lost something much more precious.

My father had a cookout and a get-together with a bunch of the guys at his ranch.

During the evening, my father began to talk about shooting and its virtues with Les Thornton and a few others. This was nothing new—I had seen these discussions between my dad and Larry Hennig, Harley Race and too many others to count. These guys would always get into some kind of debate. It was just something they did when they got together.

Eventually, someone said, “OK, move the furniture, and let’s wrestle.”

The deal this night was Les challenging my dad, saying, “Bet you can’t hold me in a front facelock.”

My dad put the hold on, and Les struggled to free himself, but ended up passing out after a few minutes.

My dad let go and sat on a bench in the kitchen next to me. He looked at me and said, “Not bad for an old man, huh?”

A few moments later, it was very late, and everyone had gone, when my father walked out onto the patio and found my wife, Vicki.

“Get Dunk and Terry,” he said. “I think I’m having a heart attack.”

We took him to the Canyon Clinic, a small hospital that was the closest one to the ranch, but all they had was this old EKG machine that would take 30 minutes even to get going. At the time, Canyon only had two doctors. They had to call the doctors at home to get them to come in. They told my dad, “You’ve had a massive heart attack. Just roll with it, and we’re going to get you to Amarillo in an ambulance.”

The ambulance took another 20 minutes.

The whole thing took us about an hour and a half from the time he told us he was having a heart attack to the time we pulled into the bigger hospital in Amarillo.

But by the time we pulled in, he was already gone.

We were on our way to the hospital, and my father asked how long until we got there.

I asked the ambulance driver, who said, “Five minutes.” Dad looked at us and said, “I’m going. I’m not going to make it,” just as calm as could be.

The thing that haunts me is wondering, if we’d just gone to Amarillo first, would we have been all right? Would my dad have lived through it?

My dad was only 54 when he passed on. Hell, I’m past 60, and I’ve done a lot of living between 54 and 60.

After my dad died, I had anxiety attacks, thinking I was having heart problems. Six months after his death, I was coming back from a show in New Mexico when I started feeling flush. I went to the next hospital I got to, and my blood pressure was sky-high. I had just scared myself into it because of what happened to my father.

A little later we were in El Paso, and Junior and I had just finished a tag match. We got to the locker room and I sat down and said, “Junior, I’m having a heart attack. I don’t want to move real fast, but get me to a hospital.”

Junior said, “My God. OK,” and he got me in the car.

We buzzed down to the hospital and I sat down in the emergency room. There must have been 20 people in there, and I sat down while Junior went to talk to a nurse about me.

He came back over and said they would be over in a minute, but someone in the waiting room screamed.

“Terry!”

Junior kept trying to tell me what was going on, but… “TERRY FUNK!”

I looked over, and coming my way was a guy who must have been waiting to see a doctor. Obviously, he was a wrestling fan.

“I can’t believe it! Terry Funk! How the hell are you doing? I want to shake your hand! How’s it going, Terry? HONEY! Come over here! It’s Terry Funk! You got some paper, honey?”

“Just a Kleenex,” she said.

“Terry, would you sign this for me?”

I just tried to stay calm as I signed the autograph.

“Well, how are you? Here you go. Hope you enjoy it. Thanks for stopping

by.”

All the while, I was thinking, “Please, pal, have a little courtesy. Please, God, I don’t want to die like this.”

I should have blown my nose on the damn thing!

The doctors told me I had been causing myself anxiety and had been pumping up my own heartbeat. It’s pretty amazing what the mind can do.

––—

Eddie Graham and my father had one of the strangest relationships. They loved each other, but it was strange. Every once in a while they’d just get into a damn fistfight.

I’ll never forget, one time we were in Florida, at my grandfather’s house, and Eddie pulled up in his big, beautiful boat. He climbed out, and he and my father were walking together. All of the sudden, out of nowhere, Eddie hauled off and hit my father, and they went after it.

But as many times as they kicked the shit out of each other, and there were many times—a little later—they’d be on the phone talking with each other.

I think it went all the way back to Eddie’s days in Amarillo, when he teamed with Art Nelson. I loved Art, Eddie’s partner, but Art was sure capable of needling and instigating.

Art would tell him, “You shouldn’t take that,” after Eddie’d had a disagreement with my father, and the next thing you know, there was a fight in the locker room. They’d wind up underneath the dressing room table, just beating the shit out of each other.

But when my father passed away, the first guys who called, the first guys who came around and offered their support, were Bob Geigel and Eddie. We were having to deal with Japan, and titles, and who was going to get what in the territory, but they were there to talk us through.

Twelve years later, when I got a call that Eddie had killed himself, I was stunned. Since then I heard a lot of stories about what happened, and I just don’t know what to believe. I know what I’d like to believe, that he was having financial problems and had an insurance policy on himself that would pay off for his family.

I don’t know if that’s true. I might be so far wrong that it’s not even funny. I never asked his son, Mike, about it, although I’ve had the desire to, and I believe Mike would probably tell me if I asked. I just never have felt like it was enough of my business to ask. That’s a pretty damn personal thing, so I’ll just take the one that I think is true, because it’s a nice one.

One time my brother and I were in an airplane being flown by Eddie, when business was just sky high, and when business is sky high, expenses get sky high. Junior said, “Eddie, what are you gonna do when the business goes down?”

That’s just something that we all have to face in this business, because it does run in cycles, but when things are good, it’s easy to get full of yourself.

Eddie looked at us and said, “It’s not going to go down.”

Being a realist is hard, at times.

Junior and I grieved a lot after our father died, but we were also filled with an obsession to show we could carry on the business and do well. It was an obsession to the point that I eliminated my family time and became entirely business-oriented, day in and day out. We did it and were very successful.

But there was a cost. I got so obsessed with keeping the family business from going down the tubes, and so obsessed with making it better than ever, that I was neglecting my family at home, and Vicki eventually filed for divorce just a few months after my dad died.

I was devastated. That reality was the hardest thing I’ve ever had to swallow. I didn’t want her leaving, but she was going, by God. She’d had enough of that isolation. I don’t think I could have salvaged things at that point if I’d offered to give up the business entirely. And as soon as it hit me, I knew what a terrible mistake I’d made by isolating myself like I had.

Junior and I, along with Uncle Herman, had expanded into Colorado Springs, Pueblo and a few other towns. It seemed like it kept on getting larger, and we would have continued to do so if the national situation had not changed the way it did.

I also got more experience dealing with wrestlers as an owner, and I found I wasn’t exactly one of the boys anymore. I was now on the other side.

One time I went over a finish with Bob Roop, and he wasn’t thrilled with it.

“They said this is what you need to do,” I told him.

He said, “Terry, will you do me one favor? Tell me who ‘they’ are.”

I said, “Well, uh … uh … that’s me, Bob.”

But it wasn’t long before I couldn’t handle being in Amarillo, with Vicki and me apart, so I went to Florida in 1974.

Dick Slater did me a great favor when I moved down to Florida to get away from all of it. I couldn’t sleep at night. I was a complete mental and physical wreck, and weighed 195 pounds.

I called Bill Watts, the booker in Florida at the time, and told him I wanted to come in and work. He said, “Hell, yeah! Come on down!” He was expecting Terry Funk to walk through the door. Instead, here came this skinny, 195-pounder, looking like death warmed over.

I lived with Slater while I was there, for several months of insanity. One time, we decided to try to help the promotion by getting some front-page publicity. Our plan was to drive to the middle of the Sunshine Skyway Bridge, leave a note in the rental car and then leave the car there, as if I had jumped off the bridge. Then we went home and I stayed in the bathtub for about four hours. Once I was good and wrinkled, we drove out to the beach and I laid down at the edge of the coast, as if I’d washed up onto shore.

Hell, nobody came to my rescue! I laid there for three or four hours and just got up, went back home and forgot about it.

The vote over who would succeed Jack Brisco as world champion, held in Summer 1975, was a tough one for NWA promoters. It came down to Harley Race and me. My brother fought hard for me, and it got him a lot of heat.

Sam Muchnick had been president of the NWA for years but retired from it in 1975,1 think because he saw some possible legal trouble coming, in terms of us being an alliance of promoters. They had withstood an antitrust investigation years before, but Sam was very smart about watching out for problems, and he took himself out of that position.

I think another major part of it was that he saw the alliance falling apart, which it sure did after he stepped down.

Fritz Von Erich, in one of his first major acts as NWA president, had to break the tie from the vote of members, because half wanted me, and half wanted Harley.

Fritz said, “By God, I didn’t want it to come down to this, but I’m gonna vote for Terry.”

And that decision really caused that guy a lot of heat, too, because Fritz was the only one whose vote was public. All the rest voted their own way with secret ballots. I was grateful to Fritz, because I knew this was a great opportunity.

I also knew it was now my job to make stars in each territory I visited. For anyone, including myself, who would seriously say to another boy in this business, “I am the world champion,” I would think, “Are you out of your goddamned mind? They made you the world champion!”

The guys, the other wrestlers, make someone the world champion, and the world champion exists to make the guys seem like world-beaters. Gene Kiniski was good about that, but Lou Thesz wasn’t.

I have great admiration for Lou, who held the title through most of the 1950s, and for a few years before and after that decade. But he was a very self-centered champion, one who didn’t take into consideration the time and effort that some of his challengers and the other guys on those cards had put into making certain guys the top stars of the areas. If he didn’t like someone, or didn’t think they should be in there, he’d chill them in the ring, which he was certainly capable of doing, because he had legitimate skills.

He wrestled Baron Michele Leone in California in 1952. Now Leone wasn’t a legitimate wrestler, but by God he could draw some unbelievable houses. Lou ate him alive, and Leone never was the same again as an attraction.

He did the same thing to Bull Curry in Houston, and to my friend Ricky Romero in El Paso. That was one thing I never have understood. He wasn’t helping the territories he visited, and that was the champion’s main job. To me, that meant that as great a wrestler he was, Lou was not a great champion.

One of my biggest gripes about the wrestling business has always been when a guy would stiff another guy in the ring, not giving them anything and making them look bad, and the other guy didn’t even realize it until it was too late. What does that prove? It just sours the other guy, and it’s a horrible way to treat a guy. Promoters would sometimes tell a guy to stiff his opponent, telling them something like, “Don’t give that guy much in the ring.”

Well, what the hell kind of fair deal is that? Why not just tell me if we have a problem? Even if the other guy said beforehand, “I’m going to try to kick your ass,” that was fine with me. But don’t stiff me in a work. That is bullshit.

Baba did that to me once, in October 1986, when Riki Choshu came to All Japan. I felt that Choshu was just off. I was trying to perform and do my best for the match, but I was being shortchanged and didn’t even know it. You do the best you can, but if you’re in a situation like that, nothing you do looks good.