Dusty: Reflections of Wrestling's American Dream (19 page)

I don’t think any announcer stands up to him. We used to say Gordon was the best and he was the king, but JR is the best man to get if I was going
to get someone to call a world’s title match and everybody was equal, age-wise, at the same time, Jim Ross would be my chosen guy to go to war with.

So I had nine bosses when I went back to being the corporate cowboy, and each of them were bosses who came from the other floor that knew nothing about the industry.

Kip Frye was probably my favorite, as I understand he’s become a millionaire out in Los Angeles in the video business, but at the time he was well … an unusual choice.

They got rid of Herd. Bill Watts blew into town with both six guns blazing and they got rid of him, and I think Ole Anderson was there one time earlier, and then there was Bill Bush, who was an income tax guy who was running our business, who made J.J. Dillon and Gary Juster his big buddies … and if I was running the Montana stuff, I would’ve put all three of them shoveling shit out there during that point in time. There was also Bob Dhue who ran the Omni. He’d book the Omni for us like, “Hello, I’d like to book the Omni,” and they’d say, “Okay, sure!” That’s what he did. But getting back to Kip Frye, they went over to the 12 floor on other side of the complex, the north tower where all the big wigs with Turner were, and Jack Petrick, I believe, one of the big lieutenants for Turner all of those years— respected by Ted because he knew how to delegate and what he had to do in his own frame, but another person who knew nothing of the wrestling business—they’re passing a room and Jack says, “Hey what’s your name?” As he looks in this room, Kip Frye is putting videotapes in sleeves to ship out. “Are you interested in wrestling?”

“Yeah, sure.”

“Okay, you’re the president of WCW. Get your shit together and go over to the office.” And they brought him over. “Ladies and gentlemen, I would like to introduce the new president of WCW, Kip Frye.” That’s exactly how Kip Frye became the president of WCW.

The first thing he did was change the show that had been the legendary cornerstone of TBS at 6:05 p.m. for forever. Jim Ross hated it, and the only reason I went along with Kip Frye was because Ross hated it so bad … he made it
WCW Saturday Night
, like the Saturday night show and half of the two hours was a talk-show format with Jim Ross interviewing people like the group Alabama or whoever would be there, nothing to do with wrestling whatsoever. He had a vision and went on to make that happen, but he was out of place, he didn’t know, and that’s the kind of people who were being
hired. It was boss after boss after boss, and you never knew where the head of this corporate jackass was as you always got to talk to the ass.

“Jack Petrick was looking for someone to come in to run WCW. Dusty was the booker when they called me to come in to talk. The Braves were in the World Series, so I brought Jeff with me for the meeting. Jack took Jeff and me to the ball game. Dusty was sitting in the same section, but up in the cheap seats. Every time I’d come back from the restroom or concession stands, Dusty would be in Jack’s ear. After talking throughout the game about wrestling, I told Jack that his wrestling company would fail unless he made radical changes in management conditions. I also told him that his best bet was to keep Dusty Rhodes. Of course Dusty thought I was coming in to take his job. He didn’t realize that I wanted his boss’ job, so he wore a trail out to Jack’s ear. When I left before the game ended, I stopped and whispered in his ear, ‘Dusty, you’re the only person alive that has a chance to make this go. God bless you.’ I then kissed him on the cheek. Dusty thought I gave him the Mafia ‘Kiss of Death.’”

—J
ERRY
J
ARRETT

It goes back to why Vince McMahon is so successful, and that is because even though they are a publicly traded company, it’s still a family-run business. When their business is down like it is right now as I write this, they go back home and on Sundays they sit down and they think about their business. This is our livelihood. How do we make this business work? It’s like Vince stepping out into other things like bodybuilding, falling on his ass … XFL, falling on his ass … but he had a vision and he went ahead and did it even though he was out of his element. He thought he could make football players into wrestlers as far as marketing was concerned.

WCW kind of went like that. There were some down times and good times, and it was hard work, but somebody was always trying to screw somebody else and the biggest problem was they went to the contract system to where Hogan was making more money than Greg Maddux. That’s a for instance. And they looked at it like that. It’s a team over here; Hogan’s making more money than Greg Maddux. They spent a lot of money—not on Hogan because he was well worth the price of admission to anything he ever did—but a lot of guys went through that company, got their money and
there was nothing put back into the company, and the business started to change.

Although he really wasn’t a part of it anymore during that time, Turner would always ask about wrestling. He knew when it was doing well and when it wasn’t. The story of the things that happened there … the intrigue of what went on daily I think needs to be a book on its own as it would be an amazing read to uncover all the bodies that are buried there.

C
HAPTER
10

W
hile many people will remember my time at Jim Crockett Promotions or World Championship Wrestling as being perhaps my most successful in the business, in between my several stops there, I always returned to Florida—my home away from home—because I knew I could make a living there. After all, the Sunshine State was where I had some of my biggest runs with men like Harley Race, Terry Funk, and Kevin Sullivan.

There was also a time in between my WCW stops that I sucked up my pride, got a little humbled, and went to work for VKM’s “Evil Empire,” wearing those damn polka dots.

I know this keeps coming up over and over, but the “business is business” statement that Eddie Graham first taught me is not only a statement that rings true in so many aspects of the wrestling business, but really in life, too. Like in other jobs, you often have to put your personal feelings aside for the sake of business. You don’t have to like someone to do business with them— you just have to respect them for their abilities. It’s kind of like the family member who you love, but you just don’t like.

At one point I went back to Florida and joined this group called the PWF, Pro Wrestling Federation. I had just finished one of my runs with WCW and it was right before the polka dot era. While I of course wanted the PWF to be successful, in the back of my mind I always looked at it and my other brief stops back in Florida like they were a hiatus between the movies I made; with the movie scripts being my big wrestling creations. The fact of the matter is by the time I got there the company was already in deep financial debt and none of the partners—Mike Graham, Steve Keirn, or
Gordon Solie—really had any serious money to reinvest back into the company, and that really disenchanted me with the whole thing.

I brought a friend of mine by the name of Randy Roberts in with me who had a strong business background in casino management with Caesar’s Tahoe and corporate startups; with the hope that we could turn Florida back around. But we just couldn’t do it. We didn’t fail for lack of trying, however. We ran the office and television right back out of the old CWF office at 106 North Albany in Tampa, home of the famous and sometimes infamous Sportatorium. We were on the air all over the state —Tampa, Jacksonville, Miami, Orlando—and we ran the towns weekly like we did in the heyday, trying to recapture the old lightning in a bottle. Everybody involved busted their ass to make that venture work, but the bolt never struck.

“One thing about Dusty that everyone would probably agree with me is he is an extremely creative person. He has a great imagination. He has a great perceptual view of things and their outcomes and he has great vision because of that … and he also took that to a business standpoint and he would recommend something if it looked like it was going to be a good business deal or not. Along with that creativity, from a business standpoint, he also had a very keen awareness of what was good business, what would work well and what wouldn’t work well.”

—R
ANDY
R
OBERTS
, F
ORMER
B
USINESS
P
ARTNER

At one point I really believe Vince was scared of what we were trying to do because he thought we had big money behind us and that we were going to break out with something really special. He even sent Bobby Heenan up to the office one day to snoop around.

“Hey, I was just in town and wanted to know how you are doing. …”

I like Bobby a lot, but in all the times he’d come to Tampa, it was the only time he came by to see how we were doing. It was definitely one of those sniff around things, and Vince would do that to me like I was stupid. I only told Bobby what I wanted him to hear, though, knowing he would go back to Vince and repeat what I had said. Not a knock on Bobby, as he knew where his bread was buttered, but it was really like a big chess game between me and Vince, and I kept my king and queen well hidden.

That’s when the next movie script came in for me to go back to work for Vince, but without thinking I said, “No.” He even said he would pay me for
the territory and I said it wasn’t worth it, but again I wasn’t thinking. It was actually worth more money than he was offering. Looking back on the offer, I should have taken it. I was an idiot.

“Dusty has a passion for the business and an obsession to be successful. ‘The Dream’ always treated me respectfully and fairly and I don’t recall ever having a harsh word with him even though we did not always agree on creative direction. What can you expect? He’s a Longhorn and I’m a Sooner.”

—J
IM
R
OSS

But I eventually left Florida when we couldn’t make the PWF work, went to New York and for a year and a half “The American Dream” was put on hold as “The Common Man,” Dusty Rhodes, took center stage in my life.

Vince always had his own vision of things, and if you look at his company and the characterizations of people throughout the years, you’d see that he had such a great marketing group that they figured out before anyone else that they could make more money per night on marketing T-shirts and dolls and yellow fingers than they could make at the box office, which on some summer nights they proved.

So in his mind everybody had to have a place, and I couldn’t be “The American Dream,” Dusty Rhodes, because he didn’t think of that characterization, and he was like me in the sense that if he didn’t think of it, he would change it; which was why I was very, very surprised that he used
The Great American Bash
in 2004, which actually really pissed me off because that was one of my creations along with
Starrcade
,
The Crockett Cup
and others. These were my shows. I created them before the pay-per-view era, and if you look at it this way, they were my movies, and I don’t like my movies to be butchered or fucked with. You don’t take a movie classic like
Psycho
from a master like Alfred Hitchcock and colorize it. Okay so he bought all of those creations of mine when he bought WCW, but he didn’t even send me any money for it and he should have, because it’s like me being a songwriter and selling a song for $50 because I really needed the money at the time and all of a sudden you sell about a hundred million records … so it pisses me off. He could’ve been good about it and thrown me two or three hundred grand and I would have been happy. I would have kept quiet about it, but he didn’t, so now it’s in the book.

So anyway, getting back on track here, if he didn’t think of it, you didn’t exist, even though your new character might be just like your old persona.

Really, I shouldn’t have been surprised that he would do that, because all of those other guys who had had gotten there before me like the Funks and Harley, their histories were cast aside, too. For God’s sake, Vince turned Dory Funk Jr. into “Hoss Funk” and created a third Funk brother named “Jimmy Jack” who was actually former Florida champion Jesse Barr in a fucking Lone Ranger mask. What the fuck were they thinking there? So it stood to reason that if they would do that to those guys, “The American Dream” wasn’t going to see the light of day in the “Evil Empire.”

But when Vince had Bruce Pritchard produce a series of mini-videos for TV to show me working in different jobs like a coal miner in Pittsburgh and being “The Common Man,” all that kept going through my mind was this is “The American Dream” with a new name. I realized this was all designed to prove to the world that he could take a guy who was the biggest star in the country, and just make him into whatever he wanted to.

Although we were good friends and were the same age, growing up together in the business with our dreams being similar in many ways, knowing how talented I was, this was going to be his way of saying, “I run the show.” But being like I am, he didn’t realize how strong I really was with the public.

So there I was doing these videos like being a plumber, which in a way was a tribute to my dad, and being a meat cutter, which I thought was a cute skit. But the pizza delivery guy was done because Jim Herd, over at WCW, was hired from a pizza company as I explained previously, so that was a rib on him.