Hitman My Real Life in the Cartoon World (20 page)

This business is all about trust, and you can’t trust him.” Davey went back to Tom and told him I said he shouldn’t do it. When they both came to me, I reluctantly told them it was up to them. Davey looked back and forth between us. Finally he said to Tom, “You won’t hurt me, right?”

I watched them from the back wall by the dressingroom door. They were fantastic together. Davey, also taught by Ted Betley, had already picked up a lot of Tom’s moves, and they were bursting into beautiful English-style routines, leaping and diving over and under each other until Dynamite stopped Davey cold with a stiff knee in the gut. He tossed Davey out of the ring, ran him into the wall not ten feet away from me, reached into his trunks and pulled out wrestling’s newest novelty item, a scalpel blade. When Davey rightfully panicked, Tom grabbed him in a choke hold, and with Davey fighting and squirming to get away, he drove the blade into Davey’s head, cutting him to the bone.

Davey jerked to one side and the blade sliced halfway around the top of his skull! It looked like someone poured a bucket of thick red paint over his head. I was certain that without immediate medical attention, he’d bleed to death. I dashed over and threw Davey’s arm over my shoulder, first running with him and then carrying him the short distance to Pasqua Hospital. The familiar doctor hurried to stitch him up, asking in a disgusted tone how it happened. Davey started telling him about brass knucks, but I cut him off with the truth. “The wrestler he worked with took a razor blade and tried to cut the top of his head off.”

In the van on the way home, Tom and Davey sat together drinking beer. “You shouldna fookin’

moved, Bax!” Tom said.

“Sorry, Tom.”

The simple truth is, Tom got away with a lot because he was good for business.

Stu was the longest still-active member of the NWA, having signed up back in 1948, but nevertheless at the end of May that year, he got a call from the organization informing him that their newly crowned champion, Dusty Rhodes, couldn’t be spared for Stu’s annual Stampede show. Needless to say, Stu was disappointed; he’d always got the champion before. But he put in a call to Verne Gagne and booked the AWA World Champ, Nick Bockwinkle, instead.

Schultz should have been the one to take on Bockwinkle, but he argued that it made no sense for him to lose all his heat to a champion from another territory who’d basically beat him and leave. So Stu, Ross and I decided I’d get to work with Bockwinkle instead. This was fine with me, as it was a childhood dream come true for me to work with the World Champion on the big Stampede supercard.

In the weeks leading up to my big match with Bockwinkle, I was filled with nervous anticipation. On the night, with no parking on the Stampede grounds, I simply walked over to the venue from home with Julie, Michelle and Wilk. I’d come in late from the previous night’s road trip, having celebrated my twenty-fourth birthday in the van, with nobody making any fuss. I’d had to be up by 5:30 a.m. to be in the Stampede Parade, where I sat between Bruce and Keith, along with Owen and Georgia, in an open convertible waving at people lining the streets on an unusually hot morning. Most of the day was taken up with media events, where my father proudly introduced me and announced that I’d be taking on the World Champion.

By the time I’d carried my bag and Stu’s famous black-and-red ring robe up the steep steps of Scotsman’s Hill, the temperature had soared well into the nineties. I stood at the top soaked in sweat and smiling at the view of Stampede Park as a rush of memories came back to me. The whole carnival scene of swirling neon took on a magical feeling as I told myself it was time to live a dream. I had a lot on my mind as I descended the steps toward the pass gate. At the bottom, suddenly Julie was really upset with me, she said, because I was walking too far ahead of her. I was thinking, Please, not now.

Before I knew it, she’d pulled off her promise ring, thrown it past me and stormed off, Michelle behind her. Wilk and I looked at each other dumbfounded as I scanned the area trying to find the ring. I knew Julie would later be upset with herself for acting this way; she always was. With people wandering all around me, I took note of the precise area. I’d have to look for the ring after the show.

The dressing room reeked of bullshit from some of the finest beef in the world—and I don’t mean the wrestlers. The big Brahma bulls were stabled in the same building as us for the Stampede.

Heinrich Kaiser, a German promoter, was there scouting new talent to work for him in September.

Stuffy and autocratic with neatly trimmed silver hair and thick tortoiseshell glasses, Kaiser sported the biggest diamond ring I’ve ever seen.

Tom was talking over his title match with Keith. Davey Boy looked like he was ready to burst into tears, crushed to find that he was wrestling a pal of Bruce’s whom Bruce had dubbed Mandingo The Wildman of Borneo; he was barely a wrestler at all and came into the ring devouring raw beef kidneys. Bruce chatted with Jochem, a friend he’d met in Hanover. Six feet tall and wiry with long, dark hair and a squared-off beard, Jochem bore a distinct resemblance to a Civil War general. His profession was no less colorful—he was a homicide detective who happened to be a big wrestling fan. He had a deceptively friendly and unimposing face, which, I suspected, came in handy for a cop.

Jochem was on vacation, but Bruce was about to put him to work.

Since Sandy’s departure, Bruce had become obsessed with trying to recreate another heel ref. It didn’t matter to him that Jochem had no ring experience whatsoever. He called him Jergin Himmler, and just like that the eager and willing fan was now a heel referee.

I smiled on seeing the midgets again. Sky Low Low, now sixty-five, was surely the greatest midget wrestler of all time. He stood thigh-high as I shook his hand, his stubby fingers like tiny sausages.

Sky’s face was that of a baby combined with an old man; he looked exactly like he did when I was a kid. When I was about five years old, my dad stopped on the way to the matches to pick the midgets up at the Royal Hotel. They climbed into the backseat of the big limo, where Dean and I were sitting.

I asked an ugly guy called Little Irish Jackie whether he wanted to wrestle me. He quickly clamped his short fat fingers on my knee really hard, and I cried out. Dean slipped on a friendly headlock, which only got Irish Jackie madder. Jamaica Kid, a black midget, nudged me with his knee to try Jackie one more time, while Sky Low Low and Little Beaver laughed their heads off.

Lou Thesz, six-time NWA World Champ, was standing talking to Nick Bockwinkle. Thesz was sixty-five too and looked great, though his black hair was thinning and his cauliflower ears were the size of doorknobs. He was the special guest ref for the World title match. Bockwinkle, more than twenty years older than I was, looked smooth and athletic just lacing his boots up.

I sat down with him to give him the outline of the match. We’d basically do a sixty-minute draw, or broadway, with Foley sneaking out in the dying seconds and ringing the bell with his steeltipped cane, costing me the World title. The next week Nick and I would come back for a rematch with a ninety-minute time limit. Nick said fine.

The crowd was surprisingly vocal considering the suffocating heat, and the fact that there had been eleven matches ahead of us. I was more than grateful for the thunderous ovation they gave me when I came out wearing my father’s robe.

I’d given him the outline, but as a bona fide World Champ, Nick called the match. A champion never allowed a greenhorn to take control. To a champion, the belt was more than real. With his reputation at stake, he needed to always be braced to protect and defend it at all times during a match, whatever the cost. Things can happen. Wrestling legend had it that Bruno Sammartino tossed Buddy Rogers over his shoulder in an upside down bear hug only to have them ring the bell on Rogers, screwing him out of the title. Of course, Bruno always professed that Rogers was in on it, but even to this day, I’m not sure.

After fifty-eight minutes I was sunk in deep with an abdominal stretch, with no chance that Nick could reach the ropes. Every fan was standing, and it didn’t hit them at first when J.R. rang the bell, ending the match. When J.R. entered the ring, Thesz peeled off his striped ref’s shirt, knocking J.R.

on his ass with a nice elbow smash for the easy pop.

In the dressing room I dripped a huge puddle of sweat, praying I’d have enough energy to do it all again the next night in Edmonton.

Julie was there with Wilk to walk me home. Who could figure her out? I was too tired to be mad and just wanted to go home. When we got to where she’d thrown the ring away, she frantically clawed through the grass. I was amazed to see a glint in the grass and nonchalantly bent to pick the ring up.

I actually wasn’t sure what I wanted to do with it, and didn’t mention that I’d found it. But Julie was so depressed on the rest of the way home I finally handed it back to her.

I made the drive up to Edmonton the next day with Davey Boy and went another full hour in the ring with Bockwinkle.

Lou Thesz asked whether he could ride back with us, and we had a long and fascinating talk. He told me that the business was a total shoot until about 1925. At a time when Jack Dempsey was knocking everyone out in a couple of rounds and Babe Ruth was smashing the home run record in baseball, the average World title match often lasted five or six hours and ended in a stalemate. Ed Strangler Lewis, Thesz’s mentor, was impossible to beat, so he eventually worked a title loss just to pump some new blood into the business and make a nice payoff—and that was when it had all changed.

Lou told me that every wrestler on a card in those days knew how to wrestle. The difference in the business was that the wrestlers always had respect for each other based on their actual wrestling ability and toughness, but nowadays the fans, promoters and too many of the wrestlers didn’t even care about that. By the time we hit Calgary at around four in the morning, I was toast yet totally full of excitement. Then a car was coming at us, hard. In order to avert a broadside collision, I slammed on the brakes, missing the other car by inches. By the time we pulled up to a red light, there were six guys drunkenly sneering at us.

Davey called out, “Where’d you fooking learn to drive?”

That was all it took. In seconds Davey and I were out of the car teaching these drunks a lesson. As we sped away afterwards, I felt a thump under the back left tire and hoped I hadn’t driven over somebody’s leg.

I apologized to Lou, but he wouldn’t hear it. Instead he told me he was sorry for not helping us.

“Sorry, boys. These days I fight with my head, not my fists.”

Throughout the rest of the summer of 1981, I had some fantastic bloody brawls with Schultz, who was kind enough to take me under his wing and teach me all he could about heel psychology. Schultz would barely stagger back to the dressing room, his blond hair streaked red, clutching the belt in victory, leaving me standing in the ring, having lost yet again—with every fan in the building believing I was the rightful champion. I was over strong thanks to Schultz.

Mr. Shimma wanted me in Japan again, with Dynamite, for six weeks starting the next January. And Kaiser, the German promoter, was so impressed with my matches with Bockwinkle that he booked me, Big Jim Neidhart and Adrian Street, a five-foot-six, stocky, bleached-blond wrestler who worked a fag gimmick with his valet-girlfriend Linda, to work a sixty-day tournament in the fall for U.S.$1,000

per week. Tom told me he was going to head home to England in November and said he’d call Max Crabtree, the U.K. promoter, and book us there after Germany; the money wasn’t great in England, but we could bring Julie and Michelle with us.

As the summer of 1981 came to a close, I recall a bunch of us working out in Stu’s basement after the usual Sunday booking meeting. Jim was dripping with sweat. Tom and Davey were lifting really heavy now. Tom could easily bench press 450 pounds, and “little Davey,” who was spotting him, wasn’t little anymore. With the help of steroids he’d gained twenty-five pounds in a few months and was now more than two hundred pounds.

Stu brought Karl Moffat down to the basement, a bald-headed biker who’d jumped out of the crowd to attack Adrian Street at one of the matches a while back. Stu reminded me of an old lion bringing a rabbit to his cubs to practice on. Karl wanted to break in to the business. Stu left to take a phone call and Jim eagerly clamped Moffat in a headlock, rolled up against the wall and nearly pulled his screaming head right off his shoulders.

After we’d had our fun, Karl crawled out of there, and I remember thinking on that particular afternoon, we were all happy. There were decent crowds that gave the illusion that business was good despite the fact that the overhead was so high there was no profit. Still, there was a sense that things would get better. Bruce had what he always wanted: control of the book. Everyone was paired off. Tom was in love. Diana was head over heels for Davey. Even Jim and Ellie were close. As for me, I was about to see the world, with Julie by my side.

Julie and I flew to Hanover along with Jim, Ellie, and ten-month-old baby Jenny in October. Jochem, the steely homicide detective with the big heart, met us when we landed. He’d fallen in love with Canada, Stampede Wrestling and the Hart family and he had gone to great lengths to make arrangements to look after us. He set the Neidharts up in the apartment of a police informant who’d had some trouble with the law and was now stuck in a Hungarian jail cell. Julie and I would stay with Jochem, his wife, Heidi, and their three-year-old son, Dennis. As Jochem drove us down cobblestone streets on the way to their apartment, he proudly pointed out stoic cathedrals and beautifully restored buildings. I was surprised to learn that much of Hanover had been destroyed during the Second World War; the unforgettable evidence of artillery was engraved in pockmarked viaducts. As we passed the soccer stadium, there were posters up promoting everything from rock concerts to wrestling. Jochem pointed out the Schutzenplatz, where a huge circus tent was erected. Tucked neatly in the rear were several small trailers where some of the wrestlers lived. Out front, a billboard boldly announced, Catch Welt-Cup! Every night for the next six weeks we would work in that tent, and I was anxious to show the German fans what I could do.