Have a Nice Day (9 page)

“Hey Mick,” one of them said. “Do you have that movie you guys made?”

“Well yeah, I do,” I had to admit.

“Can you put it in?” he asked me next.

I started to stutter and stammer, but was soon overcome by shouts of encouragement that convinced me to have an impromptu screening. But I wasn’t about to lose these impressionable young Foley fans with bad dialogue and acting, so I wisely fast-forwarded to the Dude’s first entrance, knowing that our music video would provide quality entertainment.

When the Dude appeared on the screen, the high school kids actually cheered. The sound was up loud so that the room of students could all hear, and I guess the noise must have attracted more kids, because a stream of them started flocking over to the television set. By the time the music video began there were, without exaggeration, a hundred high school athletes around me, and to every one of them I was the man. At least at that moment I was. It may be the Jack Foley Gymnasium now, but in March 1985, I owned the place.

The Dude was on the screen throwing fakelooking chops. They were cheering. The Dude was in a living room brawl with Ishmala-more cheers. And when the Dude opened up a can of whoop-ass and took the World Wrestling Federation gold-forget about it-the place went crazy. I looked around, and I saw these high school kids, most of whom I didn’t even know, cheering for a guy with a wig and long underwear. Then, out of the corner of my eye, I spotted Tommy Dee, and he had a smile from ear to ear. All of a sudden, I wasn’t just a college punk with a pipe dream of being a wrestler. I’m pretty good about reading people’s faces, and his was an easy one-1 read, “I’ve just discovered a star.”

Next, I fast-forwarded to the wrestling scene, and the partisan Ward Melville crowd shouted their approval. They cheered when the Dude was on the attack, exploded when he flew off the roof, and howled with laughter as the violated Dude ran off through the woods. I looked at Tommy Dee, and his huge smile told me that he had really dug the backyard match. Either that, or he just thought the idea of me being bent over and banged in the butt was funny. Regardless, Tommy approached me a little while later and asked if I would like to start working on his ring crew. “I run about four shows a month,” he said in his thick New York accent. “If we get the ring set up in time, I’ll get one of the veterans to work with ya in the ring.”

I was overjoyed. I met and had photos taken with many of the stars, including Sergeant Slaughter, Larry Zbyszko, Bob Backlund, and Rick Martel. In the background of my Backlund photo, there is a gawky nineteen-year-old who would turn out to be Paul E. Dangerously. My dad and I had a great dinner at Mario’s in East Setauket after the show. We talked about the show, which had sold out the 2,500-seat Ward Melville gym, and about the chance that I might one day step inside the squared circle. I was foolish enough to believe that every Tommy Dee show would draw a sellout, and that every crowd I worked for would cheer my every move. The world of pro wrestling was about to teach me some hard lessons.

It was September before Tommy Dee ran shows again, as he never ran during the summer. For years, Tommy had promoted shows for the World Wrestling Federation, but struck out on his own when the Federation’s national expansion made small Federation shows in the New York area pretty much a thing of the past. So now Tommy booked whoever he could, and sometimes it drew, and … sometimes it didn’t.

My first Tommy Dee show was a memorable experience. I began the day by leaving Cortland at 4 A.M. and driving to “the big yellow storage building” in the middle of Brooklyn-a horrible yellow landmark in a horrible part of the city. I guess I should point out that even though I grew up on Long Island, and watched shows in Madison Square Garden, I actually can’t stand the city. Especially Brooklyn except for the pizza. I met Tommy at Big Yellow and was told my assignment for the day. I had to go up to the eighth floor of the building, take the ring out of storage, load it into a truck, drive the truck to a high school in Staten Island, set up the ring, tear it down when the night was over, drive it back to Big Yellow, unload it, load it into the freight elevator, unload it at the top, and load it into storage. I then drove the five hours back to school. I had left Cortland at 4 A.M. and returned twenty-six hours later and $25 richer, before expenses. I will always be grateful for that day, however, because it was the day I met Dominic DeNucci.

I hadn’t had a chance to train with DeNucci, who was the “veteran” that Tommy had lined up for me, because the ring hadn’t been set up in time. But a week later, in a church in Brooklyn, with the ring set up, my mind longing for sleep, and my body weary, I stepped inside the ring for the first time. I had seen Dominic wrestle as a kid and had seen him defend the tag titles on two different occasions. He spoke on TV with a heavy Italian accent, and I soon learned that the accent, like much of wrestling itself, was no act.

“So, you wannabe a wrestler?” DeNucci sarcastically asked. That turned out to be a common question as he tested my will many times in the coming months. “I tella you what,” he offered. “I’lla step into the corner, and I wanta you to givea me a forearm.”

Wow, this was going to be easy. I had seen forearms thrown a thousand times, and I knew just what to do. “Are you ready?” I asked.

“Come on kid, show me whata you got,” came the reply.

“Okay,” I warned him, and reared back with my right arm, while simultaneously lifting my left foot. Stomp! My foot came down in perfect synchronization with my forearm, and made a huge noise. It was good, and I knew it. There were a couple of other wrestlers watching this training session, and I knew that they knew it was good.

Apparently DeNucci didn’t know that I knew that they knew it was good, and told me a piece of advice that I will never forget. Actually, he told me quite a few things that I would never forget. “Kid, don’t think that this is alia bullshit like you see on TV.” This was a definite downer. I really thought that this whole thing would be easy after the Ward Melville show, and now I was about to find out differently. “This is how you throw a forearm,” he declared, and then reared back with his massive arm and thrunk, delivered a huge blow across my upper chest. I felt like my breastbone was going to cave in. “So you wannabe a wrestler,” he sneered, as he proceeded to pummel me with five more consecutive smashes that left me longing for John Alt’s lectures.

“If only I could be back there taking tests with my dictionary,” I thought, as I tried to recover from my lesson in respect. I heard a lot of things going on in that ring in those few moments. I heard DeNucci laughing, I heard myself gasping, and I heard the sickening thud of a fifty-year-old man’s bare forearm across my Tshirted flesh. I did not, however, hear one foot stomping.

“That, my boy,” said a proud DeNucci, “is howa ya throw a forearm.”

I knew right then that I had learned a valuable lesson. I looked at DeNucci, and I knew that he knew that I knew I had learned a valuable lesson. I looked up at the small group of wrestlers and I knew that they knew that Dominic knew that I knew I had just learned a valuable lesson.

Looking back at the Brooklyn forearm incident, I really wish that I had made my blow count a little more. It was the last offensive move I would get in for four months.

By the middle of December, I had set up the ring for Tommy Dee about a dozen times, earned $300, but unfortunately had been in the ring only four times. It wasn’t DeNucci’s fault-he was more than willing to throw me around and twist my body in ways that nature never intended. I just wasn’t physically able to set up the ring in time to fit in our training. In those four sessions, however, I had begun to learn one thing-how to bump. Or as armchair wrestling experts around the country would say-“1 knew how to land.”

Bumping is, without a doubt, the most valuable thing a wrestler can learn. Without it, a career would be awfully short, as the injuries would pile up in a hurry. I guess it’s no secret that the trick in landing is to try to disperse the fall over as great an area of the body as possible. I’ve heard for years that I don’t feel pain, which is ridiculous, but I do believe that I was blessed with a perfect body for bumping-wide back, wide hips, and a wide flat ass. As a result, I don’t look all that good in a tight pair of jeans, but I can absorb unbelievable punishment. I also believe that the human body can adapt to the physical grind we go through. In the same way that a body isn’t made to run a marathon, but instead is trained to do it, I believe that my body has been trained to take punishment. Francois Petit, a master in shiatsu massage, who has performed over 50,000 shiatsu massages, swears that my body is the strangest that he’s ever worked. “Meek, Meek,” he always says in his French pronunciation of Mick, “your spine is like that of a crock-o-dile-it’s unbelievable, Meek!”

Dominic was not an easy guy to impress, and when he was impressed, he wasn’t real big on compliments. I guess that’s why it meant so much to me when he finally started praising me. Don’t get me wrong, it wasn’t like he was cold-hearted, he was just more likely to say, “It wasa not bad” about something that had gone well. I did find out, however, that he’d been impressed with my ability to get back up after taking a backdrop. “I give that kid from New York ten backdrop, and he musta have a ball this big [his hands showing the size of a grapefruit] because he kept getting up,” I later heard he had said about our first training sessions.

After the marathon backdrop session, Dominic talked to me alone in the dressing room, and I guess for the first time realized not only how much this wrestling thing meant to me, but also that I may have possessed the testicular fortitude to see it through. “I traina some boys in Pittsburgh,” he informed me, adding, “If you really wanna to learn maybe you should come there.”

I was flattered, but thought that DeNucci’s “school” might pose a problem. “I appreciate that, Dominic,” I replied, “but I really don’t have much money to pay you.”

DeNucci nodded in understanding and quickly told me, “You come to Pittsburgh, and we can work something out.” He then gave me the single best piece of advice I ever received in wrestling, and maybe in life in general. “Don’t think you gonna make a living doing this bullshit.” I nodded blankly and listened intently as he offered up his only stipulation: “You a college boy, you stay in school or else I don’t train you.” Over the years, I have passed this along to every hopeful wrestler I have ever encountered. The chances for success in this strange business are so slim that a college education is absolutely essential.

So, in the beginning of 1986, I headed to the Pittsburgh suburbs of Freedom, Pennsylvania, for the first of about seventy trips. If I’d known that Pittsburgh was 400 miles from Cortland, I might very well have declined Dominic’s offer. However, by the time my dad handed me the Triple-A Trip-Tik, I had already committed. I will freely admit to being scared as hell about my first trip to Freedom. I had driven down the day before and stayed at the $16-a-night Admiral Perry Motor Lodge, which is now a Toyota dealership, at the point where Interstate 80 intersects with Interstate 79. I had absolutely no offensive moves in my repertoire (unlike the list of four I have been using for the last three years), no confidence, and $100 to my name. As I said earlier, however, I had learned how to bump. And as with most things, I learned by practice, practice, and more practice.

I might have had only four training sessions under my belt, but I’d been doing my homework in a very strange way. Every night, I would drive my car, which by this point was the ‘78 Ford Fairmont that I’d inherited from my mother, to a park about a mile away and commence to bumping. It might not have been a cold concrete floor, but it sure as hell was a hard grass floor, which tended to get real hard in the Cortland winter, which stretched from November into April. I would set up an obstacle of some sort, usually a garbage can, and would practice diving over it and landing on my back over and over, until my wind was gone and my flat ass was sore. Then I’d catch my breath and bump some more, until landing on my back became second nature. To this day, I defy anyone to find footage of me putting an elbow or a hand out to break my fall. I really don’t think such footage exists.

One night, I heard voices coming from the bushes. It was John (from now on called Jake) and Steve, and they were somewhat baffled by what they’d seen. “What the hell are ya doing, you weirdo,” Steve interrogated me.

“I’m just working on my falls,” I said, somewhat embarrassed, as I didn’t really want my new endeavor to be publicized.

“You,” Steve flatly stated, “are a weirdo.” Steve had taken to calling me a “weirdo” more often, ever since I showed up at his parents’ house too tired to drive after a Tommy Dee show and asked his poor mother if I could rest there for a couple of hours.

Steve and Jake were great guys, but I didn’t sense a great deal of support from them on the subject of wrestling, so from that point on, for the next eight months, I didn’t talk about wrestling anymore. I didn’t even tell them about DeNucci’s school, and I instead explained my weekend absences with a weak story about a girlfriend in Pittsburgh.

I walked into DeNucci’s school in Freedom and meekly met the other trainees. The school was actually in the gym of the old Freedom elementary school, which had been abandoned. It had no heat in the winter, and as I would find out, no air conditioning in the summer. What it did have, however, was Dominic DeNucci and four hungry students who wanted to learn. It was with great interest and great trepidation (believe it or not, one of Steve Austin’s favorite words) that I met my fellow trainees-Dave Klebanski, Kurt Kaufman, Troy Martin, and John Pamphilles.

Klebanski was a mountain of a man about six feet tall and 320 pounds, with a huge chest, a huge head, and a horribly bushy hairstyle to cover it. Deep down, he was like a big kid, whose voice would get real high when he complained, and whose business choices would ground what should have been a promising career. Not the least of his problems was his friendship with David Sammartino, whose own odd business choices grounded his own promising career.