Straight from the Hart (10 page)

Although I had a lot of fun doing the rock concerts and enjoying assorted misadventures out at the beach, I was chomping at the bit to get back into the ring. After several months of arduous rehabilitation, I was finally given medical clearance and was eagerly anticipating making a triumphant return.

On my first night back, I was booked to work against this career jobber named Thunderbolt Cannon who hadn’t won a match ever, I don’t think. Since it was my long awaited return to the ring and since I’d been one of the top faces before I went down, I, naturally, assumed I’d be going over, but before my match, my brother Keith — who had somehow climbed the corporate ladder to become the booker — informed me that he needed me to do the job (lose), because he was intending on giving Cannon a big heel push. Therefore he needed him to get his hand raised. I, initially, figured he must be kidding and that maybe this was a rib — kind of like something Terry Funk might have pulled; that, unfortunately, didn’t prove to be the case. Keith assured me he was dead serious, so my big return turned out to be anything but an auspicious one, with most of the fans almost stunned when I got beat by a guy like Cannon. I’m not sure what happened to the “big push” that Keith was planning on giving Cannon.

If I recall correctly, that was the only match he won that year and maybe in his
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whole career. It was one more than I’d win though, as Keith had me doing jobs, night in and night out, for the rest of the year.

I became kind of accustomed to the role of jobber — which is like being a pawn on a chessboard, being sacrificed for the kings, queens (of which, there were more than a few, especially in the WWF) and whatever else. Though I wasn’t getting my hand raised, I still took pride in being able to get the guys I was working with over. Quite often though, I’d find that the guys I was working with (and busting my ass to get over) had this notion that jobbers were little more than disposable objects — kind of like human punching bags — whose sole purpose was to get their asses kicked and make the stars look good. As such, they’d potato (stiff) you, drop you on your head, give you all kinds of dangerous bumps before finally beating you. Quite often, they were such marks for themselves that they seemed to think you were supposed to be thanking them for the honor of working with them. The whole charade was disheartening at times and later on, when I became a booker, I was always more than empathetic to the plight of the lowly jobber and went out of my way to make sure they were made to feel like integral parts of the team — the old “chain is only as strong as its weakest link” adage.

Near the end of 1975, I had a rude awakening, of sorts, when Keith had me booked to work a televised match against this pudgy little part-time referee named Rocket Moreau. Moreau bore an uncanny resemblance to the Pillsbury Doughboy. Even though I’d done jobs pretty regularly for the past year or so and had long since checked my ego at the door, Moreau was even lower on the totem pole than me — he’d never won a match in his life and, beyond that, was finishing up that night anyway and heading back to Ontario after the match.

When a guy is leaving, it’s customary for them to put someone over. As such, I had figured I’d be getting my hand raised, but lo and behold, Keith informed me that he wanted me to put the Rocket over. I went out and did the job, but after the match I got to thinking that if I was doing jobs in my hometown for part-time referees who were leaving the territory perhaps I should see the writing on the wall — that maybe my future didn’t lie on the yellow brick road (as Elton John put it) to wrestling stardom. I decided to hang up my tights, so to speak, and go back to university to complete my teaching practicum. After
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that, I only worked or went on the road when old buddies, like Terry Funk or Andre the Giant, came up for Stampede Week and other special occasions.

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The promotion itself seemed to be going in pretty much the same direction as my career and one of the main reasons was the uninspiring booking. I have no doubt that my brother Keith was trying hard and that he had the best interests of the business at heart, but he never seemed to quite grasp what booking was all about, or, as they say in the industry — he never seemed to “get it.” Booking, I came to find later on, is all about storytelling — coming up with compelling characters and scenarios and being able to gracefully extricate yourself from corners you’ve unintentionally painted yourself into. It’s very intuitive and instinctive, or, as Kenny Rogers once put it, it’s about knowing

“when to hold ’em” and “when to fold ’em.” Like the boy wonder, Eric Bischoff

— when he was running WCW into the ground — Keith never quite seemed to understand those things. The results attest to that.

When Keith first took the book in my dad’s promotion, he had this idea of making Stampede Wrestling into glorified amateur wrestling, with the emphasis on good sportsmanship and athleticism. On paper, it may have sounded noble, but it got over about as well as someone passing gas in a hot, crowded elevator.

Somebody probably should have told him that one of the main reasons why so few great amateur wrestlers have ever amounted to much as professional
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wrestlers is that in amateur it’s all about concealing your emotions — kind of like a poker player not showing his hand. It’s about never showing your opponents that you’re hurt, angry or whatever else. In pro wrestling though, it’s the complete opposite: one’s ability to project one’s emotions to the audience is what really enables a wrestler to get over.

After several months of unsuccessfully seeking to convert Stampede Wrestling fans into amateur wrestling aficionados, Keith had an abrupt change of heart

— and decided to bring in King Curtis, Mark Lewin, Big Bad John, Black Jack Slade, Abdullah the Butcher and associates — the reigning kings of hardcore at that time.

In a matter of weeks, the territory went from Sesame Street to Elm Street, and every nightmare there would be barbwire matches, cage matches, chain matches, no-holds-barred bloodbaths and a proliferation of violence and extremism that would have made Paul Heyman proud. Unfortunately, there never seemed to be any method to the madness, no justifying rationale — just gratuitous violence for the sake of gratuitous violence. Gates continued to be lousy — which is the road to ruin and something my esteemed colleagues in the WWE need to not lose sight of.

During the height of King Curtis’ and Lewin’s reign of terror, one of the few remaining redeeming elements of our promotion, Ed Whalen, got pissed off with all the blood and quit the show. That seemed to open my dad’s eyes and he finally showed Curtis, Lewin and friends the door, but by then things were in an abysmal state.

Keith then decided to go back to his glorified amateur wrestling format and gave the big push to this listless former amateur wrestler from Colorado named Larry Lane. Lane would become Stampede Wrestling’s equivalent to Bob Backlund. While Lane was a nice guy and busted his ass in order to get over, he never seemed to grasp what working was all about. Beyond that, he had about as much charisma as Al Gore or Dick Cheney. As a result, our gates, which had already been lousy, went even further into the toilet, which left the future of the whole promotion in increasing jeopardy.

With business in a tailspin, my dad — who usually let the bookers do their thing and didn’t interfere — stepped in and brought back a blast from the
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past, Dan Kroffat. Kroffat had quit wrestling a few years back, mostly due to an inability to get along with Keith and Lane. My dad then had our top heel, Killer Tim Brooks, who’d been working with Lane, drop our top singles title

— the North American strap — to Kroffat, who was given the big conquering hero returning push. Kroffat then beat several other top heels, at which point he was supposed to drop the strap back to Brooks, but he suddenly informed my dad that he was going back to selling cars and gave my dad the belt back without dropping it — which caused a furor among the boys, Lane and Brooks in particular.

Things came to a head that Friday night in the dressing room, with Lane and Keith tearing a strip off my dad about putting the strap on Kroffat in the first place. During the course of his tirade, Lane pulled a baseball bat out of his bag and began smashing the dry wall and mirrors to pieces. He cussed my dad out, in no uncertain terms — it was beyond disrespectful and unprofessional.

That seemed to be the last straw. A couple of weeks later, in July, it was suddenly announced that my dad had sold the promotion to these two small-timers from Edmonton named Bud and Ray Osborne. I’m not sure what the details of the deal were, other than they’d given my dad a down payment and would pay him the remainder of his money at the end of the year, at which time they would take over the promotion.

I was disappointed to see my dad sell, as it kind of marked the end of the dream, but to be honest, I’d been pretty much out of the business that past few years anyway, so my passion had eroded. Given the amount of money my dad had been losing and all the aggravation he’d incurred, I couldn’t really blame him.

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I’d been told that the Calgary Board of Education would be hiring in the new year, so I’d have to wait until then to start my teaching career. At the same time my girlfriend, Brenda, who was a national gymnastics champion had just left for a six month training stint in Russia, after which I figured we’d maybe settle down. Since I had nothing going on, I figured that this might be a good time for me to do some traveling, something I’d been wanting to do for years, but hadn’t gotten around to. One of the places I’d always wanted to visit was England, so I booked a ticket over there for the end of August and was planning on staying until Christmas.