Countdown To Lockdown (34 page)

I once talked to Dennis Knight (WCW’s Tex Slazenger, WWE’s Mideon — one of my favorite guys in the business) about saving some money, putting a little away each week, paying his taxes on time, funding his retirement. A few days later, he came up to me, saying my talk had changed his life. “So you started saving?” I said.

“Well, I’m going to … right after I buy Barry’s bike.” Like they say, you can lead a horse to water … but you can’t make him drink.

Retirement can be especially tough on a wrestler, even if it’s not a true retirement, but just a retirement from the big time. Life can be tough on a guy who goes from being an action figure on the shelf next to Spider-Man to being unemployed in a day’s time. If a guy has a name, he can make some money on the independent circuit, but that’s a tough row to hoe, and fame can be fleeting. The Mickey Rourke movie
The Wrestler
did an incredible job of showing the pitfalls of a career in steep decline — a subject I got a little closer to than I’d planned when reviewing the film for a respected website, Slate.com. A writer from
Sports Illustrated
who met me at the media screening pretty much depicted me in his article as a real-life Randy “the Ram” Robinson (“Finding dignity in retirement can be difficult,” the
SI
piece said of me) because I had the audacity to appear as Santa Claus later that night at the Twisted Sister holiday show. The writer later claimed he didn’t know that I was doing the show for free, that I was a good friend of lead singer Dee Snider, or that I was a huge Santa fanatic.

Here’s the big question, not only for that writer, but for the retired
wrestlers as well as the fans: what exactly is a dignified retirement? What job would have been sufficient for that writer … or for our wrestling fans? What if I really had been being paid to be Santa … for just one show, or as a full-time job? Would that really be undignified? Or would it be a pretty cool job for anyone, be they a former wrestler or not? Putting smiles on kids’ faces — undignified? Not to me.

I’m not saying that there haven’t been moments where I’ve wrestled with the dignity, or the lack thereof, that certain situations have presented. For every college lecture at an MIT or a Notre Dame that I’ve been fortunate to give, there’s been a handful of minor-league baseball mascots to clothesline, or that occasional personal appearance that the world forgot to attend. But no way am I pleading guilty in the case of the Twisted Sister Santa.

How about being a chef at a restaurant? Justin Credible (former ECW champion) does just that at an Olive Garden, and gets taunted by fans because of it. For doing something he enjoys, that he trained for, that he wanted to do. I don’t want to single out wrestling fans as being particularly cruel, especially after having heard the worst that baseball and football fans have to offer. But some of our fans who read the Internet sites, who are familiar with some of the inside sheets, assume that their knowledge is some kind of license to be hurtful or insensitive or mean.

What exactly is an acceptable postwrestling job? Governor? Yes, we’ve had one of those. A member of the Japanese diet (equivalent of a U.S. senator)? We’ve had a couple of those. A
New York Times
number one best-selling author? Yes, that sounds dignified — unless, of course, that author is wearing a Santa Claus suit. Look, there is no real answer to the question, but to this wrestler, at least, any job done with pride is a dignified job. I recently did a comedy show in Worcester, Massachusetts, that only sixteen people showed up for. Sixteen! I know, because I counted them. I guess I could have seen it as an undignified experience, but I did my very best to entertain the few who were on hand. I left with a definite feeling of accomplishment,
because I knew I’d taken pride in the work I’d done, despite the small crowd.

And if you never hit the big time, and don’t have occasion to save a lot of money — so what? Have fun anyway; just be reasonable with your goals. Give yourself a realistic timeline for success and stick to it. I gave myself until I was twenty-six to start making a decent living, and hope I would have been brave enough to push the fantasy world of pro wrestling aside if that time had arrived and I was still living week to week. Some of the happiest wrestlers I know are guys who realized their time was up and entered the real world full-time, while still playing superhero a couple of weekends a month. They’re not waiting every day for that phone to ring, or that e-mail to arrive, or that text to come, or whatever method guys hope and pray their break will come by these days. For your sake, I hope it does. But it’s always best to have a Plan B in life.

I sometimes look back on my adventures in the world of pro wrestling the way Dorothy described her journey in
The Wizard of Oz
— some of it was horrible, but most of it was beautiful. Even though I agree partially with her sentiment that “there’s no place like home,” I wonder how long Dorothy herself would have felt that way. Would she really have been content to confine herself to a mundane existence on a Kansas farm? Maybe for a while. But something tells me that after that while, Dorothy would have started yearning for another journey over the rainbow.

Pro wrestling, even on its smallest scale, is about as close to that journey as I can imagine. Good guys, bad guys, costumes, fakers, treachery, joy, heartbreak, beauty, friendship. Even in my early days — the ten-dollar payoffs, the nights sleeping in the car — there was no experience that could even come close, even after encountering more than a few men who seemed to lack brains and/or hearts. I know how lucky I am that I never truly had to leave it; that I can jump between that “no place like home” feeling and that yellow brick road any time I want.

Most wrestlers don’t have that luxury. For many, the transition from fictional battles with in-ring foes to real-life battles with grocery bills and mortgage payments is a difficult one. For some, it’s heartbreaking and unbearable, especially when maintaining the belief (however right or wrong) that the business didn’t treat them right. The baggage one accumulates along the way — bad habits, addictions, long-term injuries (including repetitive concussions) — can make that transition feel almost impossible. Depression is frequent — and more than a few of the men on that list of wrestlers who died too young decided that no life at all was better than the one they had remaining.

I wish I had a simple solution to all of the challenges the pro-wrestling business faces. Or all of the challenges that confront every wrestler — past, present, and future. I can’t say for sure how I would have reacted, or how life would have worked out for me, if a couple of important people hadn’t seen
something
in me, or if a couple of lucky breaks hadn’t worked out my way. But I hope I would have had the wisdom and sense to leave the business better in some way than I found it. Stone Cold Steve Austin caught some flak when he was rumored to have said something along the lines of “Stop dying; you’re making the business look bad” at a WWE talent meeting a few years ago — but I think there’s something to that sentiment. There are all kinds of possible
excuses
but no legitimate
reasons
for the staggering list of deaths I’ve tried to address. We’ve all got to realize that as horrible as it can sometimes be, and as beautiful as it often is, this wrestling business of ours is not worth dying over.

There you go — thousands of words of advice from a guy with a history of head injuries. I don’t expect anything I’ve written to have too much of an effect on anyone, but in the words of Gerald Brisco, “If one person listened, it would be worth it.”

Substantial wrestling stuff.

Remember another scene in
The Wizard of Oz
— where Dorothy is making her way to the Emerald City and comes to that fork in the yellow brick road? Faced with no real answer, and with her entire trip to see the Wizard in great jeopardy, Dorothy is fortunate indeed to have a scarecrow come to life to not only help her reach a decision, but treat her to an elaborately choreographed song and a dance routine as well.

Well, about twenty-five years ago, I was at a similar crossroads—although mine was metaphorical—concerning the decision to partake in substances that might just make me look and feel better and perform at a higher level. I was driving a former top wrestling star to an independent show in the New York area, and the star asked me if I’d ever considered taking steroids.

“I’ve thought about that,” I said. “But I heard they were bad for you.” At the time I was six foot four, about 230 pounds, and working out hard with very little to show for it.

The wrestler smiled. “Son, all drugs are made to help you, if you use them correctly.”

I specifically remember him mentioning the drug Anavar as something that might be good for me, and I gave the matter a great deal of thought before ultimately deciding to take another route at that great crossroads of life.

My route turned out to be the right one for me, although getting to the finish line meant encountering obstacles along the way; barbed wire, thumbtacks, fire, steel chairs, a two-man kayak (handed to me for use as a weapon at the ECW Arena). Fortunately, there weren’t too many people on my path, so I stood out a little, and I even managed to pick up some valuable skills—ring psychology, public speaking, a certain likability—along the way.

So many of those guys who took the other path looked alike—muscular, handsome, tanned, toned, shaved, rocking the mullet—that standing out with a completely different look among that crowd turned out to be a good thing.

Yes, I took a slightly different path to wrestling stardom, which was ultimately the right decision for me. But that doesn’t mean it would have been the right decision for everybody. Over the years, when asked about steroids, I’ve tried hard not to frame the issue as a moral one. I’ve never really referred to anyone as a cheater, as Congress seems fond of doing—nor have I seen it as a decidedly medical one, especially because I would be hard-pressed to point to my body of work and offer it up as a safe alternative to steroids. I would guess that most doctors, given just a cursory look at a three-minute Mick Foley career-highlights video, would reach the same conclusion.

A couple of years ago, I voluntarily responded to a letter from Congressman Henry Waxman, who was looking at holding hearings concerning the use of anabolic steroids in professional wrestling. I knew that Waxman’s phone lines were most likely not lighting up with the voluntary calls of the wrestling community, but felt like I might have something to contribute to the proceedings.

I told Waxman’s aides that I had never been offered, given, nor told to take anabolic steroids, nor had I felt any pressure to take any drug
of any kind. I knew there was some use of steroids in the business, but I didn’t think it was as widespread as had been occasionally reported, and I hadn’t actually seen a wrestler take steroids in close to twenty years. I acknowledged that I probably wouldn’t be privy to much of the talks or behavior regarding steroid use, as I was never really in the loop as far as all of that training and nutritional stuff went.

But I think the most important information I contributed to the congressional process was my belief that wrestlers had developed a deep mistrust of medical science as it pertained to the findings and studies of performance-enhancing substances.

I told them of my fairly extensive reading in the mid-1980s on the subject, and how so much of the science claimed that steroids didn’t actually work, that the supposed increases in size were merely due to increased water retention. Increases in strength were said to be minimal or psychological. A quick look around any decent gym or any independent wrestling show revealed these findings to be ludicrous. Guys who got on the gas got bigger and stronger, usually quicker. Guys who didn’t … didn’t.

Of course, there were the health warnings—liver damage, testicular atrophication, etc.—but to many of the wrestlers, these medical science guys were like the witnesses at a trial who have been caught in a lie; once a single
part
of the testimony is declared invalid, the
whole
story is invalid. As far as most of the wrestlers were concerned, these so-called experts had no validity whatsoever.

As I said earlier, wrestlers don’t tend to do all that well when it comes to belief in their own mortality. Many of them decided they could live with a little back acne—the rest of those threats could be dealt with at a later time.

Of course, some of those threats were real, and I have no doubt that the long-term abuse of anabolic steroids has been a contributory factor to some of those wrestling deaths I wrote of earlier. I wish guys could have been given all the facts, but in a sense, so many of them were finding out the facts as they went, more or less human guinea pigs in
their own experiments—and they were reaching different conclusions than the experts were.