My Life Outside the Ring (6 page)

Looking back on
that Christian Youth Ranch, it really helped lay the foundation of strength and resolve I would need to accomplish everything in my life—and certainly the foundation that helped get me through the rough times that were to come all these years later.

I remember the moment, maybe five or six weeks after I first started playing my guitar there, after listening to Rev. Lindstrom hammer away at the Bible, when I first raised my hand with the rest of the kids. It was pretty simple. I said to myself, “You know? I think Christ
did
die on the cross for our sins.”

So when I say I was “saved,” it wasn’t some big evangelical moment. It wasn’t some over-the-top thing. It wasn’t like I joined some sort of cult or something. It just meant that I accepted the basic tenet of Christianity.

I kept going to that Youth Ranch pretty much every week right through the rest of high school. And I kept those teachings in the back of my mind long after Port Tampa was disappearing in my rearview mirror—when Sundays were spent in the ring and not in some pew.

I kept in touch with Rev. Hank Lindstrom, too. We would call each other now and then. It was always good to hear his voice.

A Different Temple

If somebody asked me if I’d ever had a “religious experience” in my early years—one of those mind-blowing, life-altering, shake-your-whole-world moments of elation where you just want to raise your hands to the heavens and shout, “Thank you!”—the answer would be yes: the first time I sat in an arena and watched live wrestling.

Vic and I used to love to watch wrestling on TV.
Florida Championship Wrestling
was the bomb! Every Saturday morning.

There was no other wrestling on here in Tampa. There was no WWWF on TV at all. (Not many people remember that it was three
W
’s and an
F
when it first started—for World Wide Wrestling Federation. Later it became WWF, and then WWE.) There was no cable with Ted Turner and the WCW. Nothing.
Florida Championship Wrestling
was it, and we were addicted to it.

Back in the ’60s and early ’70s they had a wrestler called the Great Malenko (whose kid wound up working with Chris Benoit and Chris Jericho years later) and a great champion named Buddy Colt. There was Jos LeDuke, “the Canadian Freight Train.” Eventually Superstar Billy Graham was on there. And of course André the Giant was in and out.

But the guy that we really would watch every Saturday, and if he didn’t talk, or if he wasn’t on TV that week we’d be all pissed off, was a guy named Dusty Rhodes. “The Great American Dream, baby!” He was the first guy we ever heard trash-talk. This big, strong, powerful-looking dude with a white afro and this twangy voice, and he’d get that weird lisp going, “The man of the hour, man of the power, the man too sweet to beat! The American Dream, Dusty Rhodes!”

Dusty Rhodes was the be-all end-all. He beat
everybody
up. There was a promoter here named Eddie Graham, and his son Mike Graham was a wrestler who would eventually take over the business from him. I didn’t understand anything about the “business” back then, but what they would do, since Dusty Rhodes was like their Hulk Hogan, their hero, is they would bring in bad guys to feed to him. Like Superstar Billy Graham or the Russian Bear, Ivan Koloff. These guys would show up down here and they were scary, these three-hundred-pound wrestlers out of New York.

I guess all the promoters were friends from wrestling together in the ’60s, so the WWWF up at Madison Square Garden would send out wrestlers as a favor to these other territories. One of the places that Vince McMahon Sr. used to love to send wrestlers was to Florida, so they could disappear for a while and the audience up north wouldn’t get bored with them. Then six months or a year later they’d come back to New York, and the fans would go nuts, you know?

As a kid I didn’t know any of that, and I didn’t care. All I knew was there was this cast of bad guys that would come through Florida trying to dethrone my hero, Dusty Rhodes. And he would beat every one of them with the Bionic Elbow. He’d be down and bloody, but no one could stop him. He’d get up and make the comeback with that elbow,
bang!
and then put the Figure Four on ’em, like the Ric Flair Figure Four Leg Lock—that was his finish.

We got so addicted to watching wrestling that we finally talked Vic’s dad and my dad into taking us down to the armory. I think we were about nine or ten years old the first time we went. I remember Vic’s dad got us really good seats, in the second or third row. We were right in the thick of the action.

The Fort Homer Hesterly Armory wasn’t a big building, and I remember there was a guardrail up on the top level. Sitting in the crowd, you could look up and see the wrestlers looking over that guardrail, watching what was happening in the ring. I thought it was so cool to be there and see what you could never see on camera.

On one side was the good guys’ dressing room, and on the other side was the bad guys’. Every once in a while a bad guy would come out and look over the rail, then he’d go in. Then a good guy would come out. You’d see them at that guardrail, and then they’d disappear. Even though there was this big set of stairs off to the side that came all the way down to the main floor, when it was time for their match, the wrestlers would disappear and then come out through the bottom of the arena for their big walk out to the ring.

I was just totally blown away watching wrestling live.

On that very first day we saw all of these matches, one after the other, and I was just ready to burst out of my seat I was so excited. Vic and I were just dying to see Dusty Rhodes. Then all of a sudden, the time for the main event hits, and Dory Funk Sr. comes fighting down the stairs with Dusty Rhodes!

There was blood everywhere before the match even started. It was the wildest thing I’d ever seen.

When Dusty finally climbs into the ring and the match really starts, instead of locking it up or doing arm drags or hip tosses or body slams, the bad guy just kicks him and starts beating on him. My hero got jumped by the bad guy! He’s down on the mat. We’re all standing up trying to see what happened, and he’s down in the fetal position getting his ass kicked.

This goes on for what seems like forever. Then all of a sudden Dusty gets free. The bad guy backs off for a second, and Dusty Rhodes rises up from the canvas. By now he’s just a crimson mess. His white hair’s filled with blood. He regroups and gets his strength back and out of nowhere hits a Bionic Elbow on his opponent, and the whole place explodes. It sounded like a cannon.
Boom!

Every time he’d do an elbow,
boom!
He’d throw it nice and slow so everybody could see it comin’, and when it hit the whole arena would go, “Oh!”

Once he was on his feet it was
boom! boom! boom! boom!

Ding-ding-ding-ding.

And it was over.

I was reeling! “Oh, man!” The whole match lasted about three minutes, and that was the main event. Not two seconds later Vic and I were begging our dads, “We gotta come back! We gotta come back!” It was unbelievable. And I got totally hooked.

Vic and I
went back with our dads probably three or four times a year from then on. Once I was in high school and got my license, I would sometimes skip school on Wednesdays to go watch them film wrestling at the Sportatorium on Albany. My mom would even write notes claiming I was out sick. She was real cool like that. Just like with music, my parents supported whatever I was into.

As much as I loved to watch wrestling, though, it was way too violent for me to even remotely consider doing myself. It never even crossed my mind. I mean, we used to mess around and fake-wrestle in high school. Me and my buddies would go outside in the parking lot during shop class and pretend to ram each other’s heads into a door, or fake bodyslam someone on the hood of one of our cars. We’d ham it up like we were really gettin’ hurt.

In reality, I had this weird John Lennon/Yoko Ono peace-and-love type attitude about fighting. Even if I was playing a gig and a bar brawl broke out, which happened all the time, I wouldn’t go anywhere near it. Maybe it was some kind of a knee-jerk reaction to seeing what happened to my brother Alan, but I just hated the thought of participating in anything violent at all.

So despite my passion for it, it would take years—and one very big revelation—before I’d even think about getting into wrestling myself.

Chapter 3

Working Out

One day during junior year,
this friend of mine I’d known since elementary school, Scott Thornton, asked me if I could give him a ride to the gym. His car had broken down, and I had nothing better to do, so I said, “Sure.”

I drove him to Hector’s Gym, downtown on Platt Street, and as he got out of the car Scott said, “Why don’t you come in?”

Now, I don’t know why I went into that place. I had no interest in lifting weights whatsoever. The last thing I wanted to do was hang around a bunch of muscle-heads. But as soon as I walked in that door, something real cool happened. Instead of all those weightlifter guys going, “Hey, what’s that fathead doing in here?” or giving me that kind of outsider treatment that I was used to getting everywhere I went, they welcomed me with open arms.

As soon as we walked in, this big hairy bear-looking guy with that perfectly V-shaped bodybuilding physique came over and said, “Hi there. Want to come in and work out with us?” My normal reaction would have been to come up with every excuse in the world not to do something like that. But this guy was so nice I thought,
What the hell
.

I don’t know what their deal was, but every guy in that place seemed to want to help me. They put me on the bench press and put up a bar with two 45-pound plates on it, which is 135 pounds, and they stayed right there to spot me and said, “Just try it out.” I didn’t know how to bench-press. I didn’t know anything. I did it like five or six times, though, and they said, “That’s pretty good. You look like you could be good at this!”

Brother, that’s all I needed.

With that little bit of encouragement, I knew that I could walk in that gym and feel safe. Hector’s wasn’t full of jocks or PE-Coach type guys going, “Hey, you fat piece of shit, what are
you
doin’ here?” like I expected.

If any of that negative shit happened, I’d have never gone back, but because they were nice to me, I said, “Okay. I’m gonna start workin’ out!” From that summer right through the whole last year of high school I found myself hitting Hector’s Gym at least twice a week.

It was a little disappointing at first. I expected results right away, and I’d look in the mirror and not much would change from week to week. Of course, later I would realize that big changes don’t happen to your body until you change everything and you’re real consistent—your diet, your attitude, everything. I did notice that I was getting stronger. My grip felt better, and instead of doing a few reps of 135 I got to the point where I could put up 225 pounds and take it off the bar without any help.

Since I wasn’t obsessed with going every day, it took about a year, I guess, before I noticed that I’d put some muscle on where the fat used to be.

It may not seem like much, but that little physical change filled a void in me. I started to feel better about myself. I’d take my shirt off at the beach. I still had that big head, and I was starting to go bald at eighteen or nineteen, but going to that gym was like a buffer. It helped give me the confidence to forget all that and actually talk to an attractive girl now and then.

Looking back on it now, that confidence, that buffer, that little extra-icing layer of safety, did a lot more than help me talk to girls. It gave me the extra push that would help me accomplish everything I wanted in life.

But back then, I couldn’t figure out what the hell that was.

Lost

If there was one thing I thought I knew for sure before I graduated from high school, it was this: I didn’t want to die a Port Tampa Death. That whole idea of staying in Port Tampa your whole life, working construction, working on the docks, roasting in the sun all day until they put you in a grave, just didn’t appeal to me.