Controversy Creates Cash (24 page)

The one thing I liked about school when I was very young was learning about other cultures. I still remember the first time I heard about Marco Polo and the Silk Road trade route. Those things were fascinating. I would drift off in class, fantasizing about faraway places. As an adult, traveling and experiencing different things remained part of my nature.

So when I got that phone call and the opportunity to go to a place that is off-limits to Americans, I jumped at it. I said, “Absolutely, no problem.”

I didn’t discuss it with anyone. Didn’t ask for permission. Didn’t think about the fact that, as an American, I was prohibited from going to North Korea and spending money there.

I also just assumed that a lot of the guys would feel the way I felt.

Well, that came back to bite me in the ass. It turned out to be more difficult than I expected to get the wrestlers to come along. Hogan played with his Fu Manchu a minute, looked down at the floor, then back at me. “Hmm, brother. Don’t think I can make that one.” Ric Flair didn’t think it was a good idea, actually—but to his credit, he agreed to go along. Hawk, Animal, Chris Benoit, Scott Norton, and a couple of other guys agreed. We put together a pretty good team.

Best of all, Muhammad Ali agreed to come as well.

Permission? Who Needs Permission?

So how do you get State Department permission to visit a country that’s an international pariah and that’s officially at war with the United States?

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The short answer is: You don’t. You just do it.

The State Department wouldn’t really know about our trip until we were there. We weren’t going to fly directly to North Korea from the States; there was no way to do that. We would go to Tokyo, perform with New Japan, then get on a plane and go with them to North Korea. By the time the news reached the United States, we’d probably be back in Japan, if not home.

I went over to CNN and told some people I knew what I was thinking about. “What’s the worst thing that will happen if the government finds out?”

They said, “Well, they might detain you. They might question you for a few days. They might hold you. They might fine you.” I said, “Okay, am I going to go to jail?” If I was going to go to jail, I might have reconsidered. Maybe.

But if it was just going to be a pain in the ass, I really wanted to go.

They said, “Nah, it’s not really likely you’ll go to jail.” So I gathered the troops, and off we went.

Psychological Warfare

We did the show in Tokyo with New Japan, then jumped on a North Korean military transport. It’s a pretty short jaunt to North Korea from Japan, but nonetheless, we were on a military transport.

It just changes the way you feel about shit from the get-go.

As we were getting ready to land, I looked out the window. The landscape absolutely amazed me. It was barren of life. It was a desolate desert. I live in the desert, but the North Korean desert looks nothing like the desert I know. I can’t describe how desolate it was.

I thought to myself,
My God, how does anybody live here?

The people who met us were superficially friendly. They were very direct and professional. But I realized that in their minds, it was still 1951. They were still at war with the rest of the world. It was evident in everything we saw when we stepped off the plane.

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CONTROVERSY CREATES CASH

The drab architecture, the way they looked at foreigners, everything.

The first thing they did was separate us into pairs. Sonny Onoo was with me, and we got paired up. We were assigned an interpreter who was actually a member of the North Korean secret police. She was supposed to stick to us the entire time we were there.

She asked us for our passports, which were immediately confis-cated when we stepped into the airport. Passports are about as use-less as tits on a boar hog in a place like North Korea, but taking them away let you know they were in control, not you.

Leave Our Women Alone

We got into cars and drove from the airport into downtown Pyongyang. Along the way we had to stop and pay homage to the dictator’s father, Kim Il Sung, who had died the previous year. We were each given a flower to lay at the bottom of a giant statue of him in the center of the city.

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Masa Saito is to my left.

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That was weird enough, but what made it unnerving were all the North Korean cameras filming us. They were old-style cameras, the sort that haven’t been used anywhere outside North Korea since, oh, 1930. They were filming this for propaganda purposes.

I’m thinking,
This is pretty fucked up.

We got back into our cars and were on the way to the hotel. The interpreter turned around and said, “I must tell you. We have rules in North Korea. This is not America. You must leave our women alone.” I said, “Excuse me?”

“This is not America. In North Korea, you must leave our women alone.”

“No problem. I’ll be happy to do that.” We stopped at another monument, which looked like the Arc de Triomphe. Again, the newsreel cameras rolled. Our interpreter told us this was a war memorial that was put up to honor the tens of thousands of North Koreans who were incinerated by the Americans during the war—according to her, 52,000 in one night of bombing. I didn’t buy it, but that wasn’t the issue.

I didn’t know what sort of reaction she was trying to get from me. I was aware of the cameras, and I thought to myself, the way I react is either going to make this trip interesting and positive, or interesting and negative.

I didn’t want to appear sympathetic, but at the same time I didn’t want to antagonize the North Koreans. For one of the few times in my life, I thought about how to react. I acknowledged what she said but kept my face as blank as possible. She asked questions about a particular bombing raid, whether I was aware of it. I said no, and just cut my answers to her questions very, very short. I didn’t want my answers being edited in such a way that they could be used to somehow glorify the regime.

It was uncomfortable, but finally it was over. We went to our hotel, staying there for the rest of the night.

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A Run of My Life

At the time I was running five to seven miles a day. I liked to run early in the morning, before I had breakfast.

The next morning I got up early, got dressed, and trotted out the back door of the hotel for my run. It was about 6 A.M., right before Pyongyang came to life. I had on these bright red sweatpants and a bright yellow sweatshirt and a black hat.

Pyongyang has enormously wide streets, even though there are almost no cars in the country. The streets are wide because they’re designed for aircrafts if the airports are bombed. In the morning, starting about 6:30 or 6:45, they filled with North Koreans, all wearing their dark blue or gray suits, walking to work. These people were all really little, their growth stunted by the famines that had plagued the country for a decade or more by that time. I didn’t see anyone over five-five the whole time I was there, and they were very frail and gray; so many of them looked close to death.

I was five-eleven and two hundred pounds. I looked like King freaking Kong to these people. And not only was I a westerner—

probably the first and only one many of them saw in person in their lives—I was dressed in strange, bright red and yellow clothes. You cannot imagine the horror on these people’s faces. They parted like the Red Sea as I ran through downtown Pyongyang.

I saw things I’d only read about up until then. Massive murals honoring the Communist Party workers were painted on the build-ings. On the street corners, schoolkids gathered to sing nationalistic hymns honoring the state and Kim Jong-Il before going to school.

It was great until I got back to the hotel.

My Korean minder was fucking livid. She never imagined that I would get up at six in the morning and go for a run. She made it clear from that point forward that that would never happen again.

Nonetheless, it was one of the coolest experiences I’ve ever had in my life.

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Never a Bad Word

Having never experienced a Communist country, and especially one still stuck in the 1950s, I didn’t know what to expect. I anticipated our rooms would be bugged and that kind of shit, but I had no idea of the extent to which it was true.

Scott Norton found out.

Now Scott is a great guy. He has this powerful, deep baritone voice that shakes the walls when he talks. He’s about six-three, six-four, weighs three or four hundred pounds. Powerful guy. WCW

fans will remember him wrestling with Ice Train as the Fire & Ice tag team around this time.

But Scott hates traveling. I think he’d rather take an ice pick to the rib cage than get on a plane. He can’t stand being on buses because he gets claustrophobic. He’s in the wrong business, because in our business, you have to travel a lot.

Anyway, soon after we got to Korea, Scott went to take a bath.

The bathtub separated from the wall. Well, that started shit. He got on the phone—how he figured out how to use it is beyond me, since no one else could. He called his wife and bitched about everything: the room, the food, the secret police, North Korea in general.

He mf’d these people all night long.

Clearly, there was someone listening in who could understand English.

When Scott came back to his hotel room the next day, the sheets were stripped off his bed and the room was turned upside down. No one would clean it or go near his room for the rest of the trip.

We were real careful with what we said and did after that.

One night we had dinner with some of the dignitaries, and were escorted out to watch a military parade. It looked like the films of the Soviet Union in the 1950s. At one point, someone whispered in my ear that the country’s dictator, Kim Jong Il, was standing near us.

I wanted to turn around and look. But I thought,
You know
what? This is one wacky cracker.
There were news stories about Kim 186

CONTROVERSY CREATES CASH

Jong Il at that time, detailing his tastes for young European ac-tresses. They would make the mistake of coming over to “visit” and become semi-permanent “guests” of the state. I decided I’d just sit there and mind my own business.

The Wrestling

The wrestling in North Korea was amazing. The crowds were tremendous. The first night we had something like 170,000 people, and the next night 180,000. To be in a stadium with that many people was just unbelievable. I sat in a VIP dignitary section, and even from there, the ring looked like a postage stamp.

North Korean schoolkids put on an incredible show with ban-ners before the main event, making it look like a giant dove was flying in a circle through the stadium. There were thousands and thousands of kids involved in the show, making different designs, from birds to flowers. Very impressive.

Then came the wrestling. I sat there thinking, These people have no idea who the Americans are. They can’t possibly know who Ric Flair is, who the Road Warriors are, who the Steiners are. They don’t have television. But they clap when they’re supposed to. And they seem to be having a good time.

I wondered what they could possibly be thinking when they saw Ric Flair come out in his flowered, sequined robe as the
2001 Space
Odyssey
theme blared through the speakers. I just kind of sat back and enjoyed it all.

Ali

I developed a pretty good friendship with Muhammad Ali on this trip. We didn’t really get into any trouble for the trip, but I have to say, I would have been willing to go to jail just for that opportunity.

Muhammad Ali has a difficult time speaking because he suffers from Parkinson’s syndrome, but his mind and his sense of humor PRIME TIME

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are very sharp. On this trip, Muhammad told me that much of the

“loudmouth Cassius Clay” that people came to know in the 1960s was due to the fact that as a young man, he used to go to the wrestling matches in Louisville and was fascinated by Gorgeous George. Muhammad emulated some of Gorgeous George’s character because he saw how well it worked. Muhammad is a big wrestling fan and understood what it was all about.

Muhammad Ali is one of the very few people I’ve ever wanted to meet or get to know. I’m not really drawn to celebrities, despite what people think. I would have liked to have met Ronald Reagan, I would have liked to have met John Wayne, I would have liked to have met Abraham Lincoln. But other than that, I can’t think of a lot of people who have really interested me—with the exception of Muhammad Ali.

I’ve always been a huge fan of Muhammad. As I’ve gotten older, I’ve come to understand what he stood for and the sacrifices he made during the 1960s and ’70s. In many ways he’s an unsung hero in American history, and I’m proud to have had a chance to spend time with him.

A year or so later, shortly after the 1996 Olympics, we met again while I was with my wife and kids in Japan. Muhammad asked me what I thought about him lighting the Olympic torch. I started to tell Muhammad that I thought it was a great moment. He stopped me in mid-sentence and asked me if I thought he embarrassed himself because of his hand tremor. I got tears in my eyes as I told him how excited I was while watching, and how proud I was for him.