Sex, Lies, and Headlocks (3 page)

In the 1960s, wrestling moved from its old home on broadcast television to the local scene. Independent stations and network affiliates paid nominally for wrestling, if at all; they held their noses and put it on as cheap late-night filler. But promoters quickly realized that even if they gave their shows away for free, they could still make a handsome profit. They used their shows as infomercials, acquainting fans with their stars first, then selling tickets to the local arena shows where the real money was to be made.

One of the savviest exploiters of the arrangement was Vincent James McMahon, who controlled much of professional wrestling’s activities in the Northeast from his office in Washington, D.C. McMahon understood that a pro wrestling match, properly executed, was like a beautiful dance that told a story. But to adapt to the cultural confines of television, he wanted to tell that story more intimately and quickly. Like most promoters, he’d pledged loyalty to the National Wrestling Alliance for the first dozen years of its existence. But by the early sixties, he was joining a growing minority that believed the pendulum had swung back to favoring regional champs. The East Coast crowd that bought his tickets loved colorful pulp performers like the blond-haired villain Dr. Jerry Graham and an Olympic-style weight lifter from Pittsburgh named Bruno Sammartino. McMahon’s personal favorite was an ex-police officer from New Jersey who traded in his name (Herman “Dutch” Rohde) and uniform for bleached-blond hair and the stage name Buddy Rogers.

Also known as the Nature Boy, Rogers played a central role in the founding of the NWA. On the July day in 1948 when the Midwest bosses met in Waterloo to form their cartel, Al Haft had agreed to loan Rogers to Muchnick, and it was Rogers who accounted for Muchnick’s first sold-out show. But even the soft-spoken Muchnick had trouble putting up with Rogers, who started believing the world of make-believe in which he lived was real and refused to lose matches or take orders about whom he should wrestle. Over time, Rogers drifted away from St. Louis and toward the brighter lights of New York, where control of his bookings passed to the company run by McMahon. By late 1962, Rogers was the champion of the NWA, but McMahon was making noises about yanking him out of the group to start a breakaway faction. Seeing that he was on the wrong end of a power play, Muchnick decided to make a preemptive move and strip Rogers of his title. In a curious realignment of old adversaries, Muchnick called on forty-seven-year-old Lou Thesz to defeat the Nature Boy in the ring.

Thesz was happy to come out of retirement for the job, if only because he thought McMahon was poisoning the business with a new breed of acrobatic heavyweights. Asked about another one of them, Argentina Rocca, he remarked, “Blessing him in the jockstrap was the Lord’s way of compensating for not giving him any brains.”
¹
The trick to making the match was getting Rogers to show up. Fortunately the NWA’s bylaws required champs to post bonds for just such contingencies. Muchnick was straight with Rogers: If he didn’t lose to Thesz in Toronto on January 24, 1963, he could count on having his personal $25,000 bond donated to charity.

Rogers lost the world title that evening and, just like Muchnick predicted, was pulled from the NWA by McMahon shortly afterward. Severing the relationship finally and completely, McMahon formed the World Wide Wrestling Federation in May 1963 with Rogers as its standard-bearer. (To explain how he suddenly showed up with the belt, a story was concocted about Rogers winning a phantom tournament in, of all places, Rio de Janeiro.)

Astoundingly, Rogers only wore the belt for two weeks, after which the word went out that he’d suffered a heart attack and could no longer perform.
²
On May 17, 1963, he walked into the ring at Madison Square Garden for forty-eight seconds—long enough to submit to a few halfhearted moves and a bear hug from Bruno Sammartino.

Sammartino would hold the WWWF title for eight years. And by the end of the 1970s (when the company’s name was changed to the simpler World Wrestling Federation), he’d helped McMahon turn it into one of only two legitimate rivals to the NWA.

THE NWA’S
other rival was the American Wrestling Association, which was run by a Minnesotan by the name of Verne Gagne.

Though he was fifty-eight in December of 1983, Gagne could still look in the mirror and see the body of one of the most decorated college athletes of the 1940s—a University of Minnesota letterman in football who went to the 1948 Olympics as a star wrestler. In the 1950s, he found his way onto the DuMont Network’s wrestling show and with the looks of a young Rock Hudson became a sensation. By February 1957, his main event match at New York’s Madison Square Garden was as big as the Ziegfeld Follies. It nearly caused a riot on Seventh Avenue among the five thousand fans who’d been turned away and waited in the frigid cold for a glimpse of him.

In 1960, Gagne used his celebrity to acquire the Minneapolis Boxing and Wrestling Club and headline weekly matches there under the banner of the American Wrestling Association (AWA). In a pioneering move, he filmed each match and mailed the reels to any television station that wanted to air them. Gagne wasn’t paid for the tapes; instead, he tailored each one for a specific market with custom ads hawking the shows he planned to hold there months in advance. Twenty years after he’d filmed his first match, Gagne had headlined enough bouts and sold enough tickets to move into an eight-thousand-square-foot building in downtown Minneapolis with a state-of-the-art television studio that tailored reels for the 128 stations he supplied.

In mid-December 1983, the reel he’d just sent out included a commercial featuring Terry Bollea, who was better known to his audience as Hulk Hogan, telling fans to buy tickets to a tour he was going to headline in a few weeks.

Gagne first became aware of Bollea in the mid-seventies, after he’d been discovered playing guitar in a Tampa nightclub and given the stage name Sterling Golden. Bollea was a six-foot-five, gentle giant of a man with doe eyes, a beach-bum tan, twenty-two-inch arms, and a comic book cleft chin. The first person to give him a job was Gagne’s good friend and the man who controlled all of Florida’s wrestling, Eddie Graham. Upon seeing Bollea for the first time, Graham took two steps back and said under his breath, “Jesus Christ, he’s huge.”

In Florida, Bollea wrestled in high school gyms and tiny VFW halls for twenty bucks a match under the name Terry “the Hulk” Boulder. He was so green that he had to learn how to bounce off the steel cable ropes. Sometimes he’d get tangled in them; sometimes he’d fall right through them to the arena floor below. But with each night he spent on the road, he got a chance to study the older wrestlers and watch how they told tales with their bodies. When a veteran showman got hit, he didn’t just fall down. He’d flail his limbs like his heart had received a fifty-volt shock, selling his suffering so that when he finally rose the fans believed he was a man filled with fury and not just a guy who took pratfalls three hundred nights a year.

Bollea learned enough moves in Florida to move to Memphis, a city so rabid about wrestling that on Saturday mornings, seven of ten televisions were tuned to the NBC affiliate that aired an hour of matches. He stayed on as a minor character there for six months, then received an invitation from Vincent James McMahon to work for the WWWF. McMahon bought Bollea his first thousand-dollar sequined cape and a pair of boots with lifts in them so he could lie about his height and call him the Incredible Hulk. For Bollea, it was the next step in his schooling. He learned how to grab a rival’s ankles and yank them up so that his opponent got twisted into a backward crescent—a move known as the
Boston crab
. He watched how his elders locked their legs around him and flipped him like a fish (the
flying head scissors)
. He saw that each move had variants, like dialects of a language. As far as storytelling goes, it was like learning adjectives.

But in the summer of 1981, Bollea was beginning to get stale in New York so he moved once again, this time to Minneapolis and a trial run with Gagne’s AWA. He also began using the ring name Hulk Hogan.

Wrestlers come in two stripes:
talkers
and
workers
. Workers are the ring technicians who keep the action fast-paced and believable. The opposite of a good worker is a
stiff
—someone who needs to be helped, or carried, by a better-trained, better-conditioned worker. When Gagne first laid eyes on Hogan, he could see he was still a stiff. His reactions were a half-second late and his fists or elbows often missed their target, forcing his ring partners to work twice as hard as usual to sustain the illusion that they were wrestling. Gagne doubted that he could make Hogan a better worker. But he was sure he could make him a better talker. Like an acting coach, he started drilling Hogan in
cutting promos
(delivering his lines), teaching him to be more animated. “How come you never show off those muscles?” he chided one day. After that, Hogan started flexing and preening.

What put him over the top was a small cameo he’d snared in the movie
Rocky
III. Though Hogan got the part while working in New York, the film debuted in May 1982, while he was working for Gagne, and made him an even bigger star for the AWA. Gagne spliced a clip of the cameo into his TV show every time Hogan wrestled. As audiences started responding, Hogan refined his act, racing into the ring, striking a cartoon pose and cupping his ear, waiting for the crowds to roar at him. When they did, he’d point into the dark as if he’d heard each clap and saw the face of each one of the clappers. In 1982, Hogan helped Gagne sell out every arena show that he staged, from St. Louis to San Francisco.

But, to Hogan’s increasing dismay, Gagne made sure that the AWA heavyweight title eluded him. Because Gagne had worn the belt for the better part of twenty years, he believed it should go to a rock-solid athlete cut from the same cloth as he was, not a showy ex-rock musician. That was why he kept it on an aging former University of Oklahoma football player named Nick Bockwinkel. By early 1983, however, it had become evident to Gagne that the fans who were fueling the sellouts were tired of seeing Hogan lose to a man twenty years his senior. So he ordered a series of
screw-job
finishes—matches with a bait-and-switch result. The fans would see Hogan pin Bockwinkel and win the title, then find out the next week that the denouement had been reversed on some technicality. Gagne may have thought the solution was crafty, but he ordered so many screw-job finishes over the next year that his ticket buyers began to expect that they’d never get to see Hogan win the title. In April 1983, they nearly rioted at a heavily hyped Super Sunday show in St. Paul when he beat Bockwinkel in the main event, only to have the call reversed. After several more months, Hogan began to believe he wouldn’t get the strap, either.

On December 15, 1983, Gagne was opening his mail when he came across a telegram from Hogan. As he read its one line, he was sure it had to be a joke. “I’m not coming back” is what it said.

Gagne sank back in his chair and let out a long, slow whistle. Then he looked at the return address and started to feel better. It was from Florida. Gagne knew for a fact that Bollea was appearing in Japan, making some spare change as Hulk Hogan. Someone, he decided, was pulling his leg.

Just to make sure, Gagne called Hogan’s hotel room in Tokyo. No answer. Then he dialed his friend Eddie Graham in Florida. The telegram was probably one of Graham’s famous pranks. When he heard Graham’s answering machine, he chuckled and said, “Great prank, Eddie.”

As Gagne studied the telegram some more, he knew it couldn’t possibly be real. How could Hogan leave? In the last week alone, he’d cleared $17,000. But then Graham called back to say he had nothing to do with the telegram. Another week went by with Hogan ducking Gagne’s calls. Then a second wire came from the same Florida address with the same four words: ”I’m not coming back.”

This time, a pit opened in Gagne’s stomach as he thought back to a conversation he had months earlier with the son of Vincent McMahon. The third-generation promoter, who everyone simply called Vinnie, had recently bought out his father and wanted to know if Gagne was having similar retirement thoughts. If so, Vinnie wanted Gagne to know he’d be eager to buy the AWA. Gagne didn’t know much about Vinnie but respected his father enough to invite the younger man to Minneapolis to hear what he had to say. When they met, Gagne observed that young Vinnie McMahon was a lot slicker than his father. He kept his hair in a pompadour and wore custom-tailored, neon-colored suits. What transfixed Gagne most, though, were his eyes. Their irises looked like the nubs of hollow-point bullets.

The first meeting broke up cordially, and when Vinnie called back six weeks later to ask for another, Gagne assumed he’d take their talks to the next level. To his irritation, when Vinnie flew back out to Minneapolis, he asked a number of questions about how the AWA was run and about its stake in an ownership group that had invested in Muchnick’s St. Louis territory. But he never named a price. It was, Gagne decided, all a colossal waste of his time. After a long day, he drove his guest back to the airport and wondered aloud if they would soon start to negotiate in earnest.