The Road Warriors: Danger, Death, and the Rush of Wrestling (38 page)

It was frustrating to watch professional wrestling deteriorate into unrecognizable tripe. And still I pressed on to see if we could somehow fit into Vince’s new vision.

On March 23 at WrestleMania XIII in Chicago, we competed in a six-man Chicago Street Fight (no rules) with Ahmed Johnson against Farooq, Savio Vega, and Crush, who’d been completely repackaged since the Demolition days. In fact, it was Crush who ate the first Doomsday Device since our return.

In April we all went on tour to Kuwait City (one of the friendliest and pro-American places I could imagine). For whatever terrible reason, Hawk decided to get good and annihilated on booze and Somas. His eyes were rolling back in his head, and he looked like he could fall on his face at any second. This was all happening as we pulled into the sheik’s quarters, where we were all invited to stay as guests.

Oh no,
I thought.
This is not fucking good.

There we were—docked at the base of a plush red carpet that stretched all the way inside the palace, where there were huge marble columns and dozens of 15-foot-tall paintings featuring the sheik’s family—about to make an embarrassing international scene. One by one, we came walking off the plane waving and smiling in front of all the guards, and there was Hawk, being helped arm-in-arm by Henry and Phineas Godwinn, our chief rivals at the time.

As Hawk’s feet limply dragged across the carpet, Jerry Brisco looked ready to pop a gasket. Fifteen minutes later, as usual, Hawk was the life of the party again, as though nothing had happened. He was flying around from person to person with a drink in his hand and a cigar in his mouth. Brisco pulled him aside and seriously reamed him out.

Hawk was lucky to have kept his job, which of course meant
I
was lucky he kept his job. Isn’t being in a tag team fun? I’m pretty sure when the news got back to Vince he shook his head and thought we were hopeless.

When we came back home from overseas, we entered into feuds with the WWF Tag Team champions Owen Hart and Davey Boy and the Godwinns. We even had a match against the Godwinns in which six feet five Henry sustained a cracked vertebra in his neck after landing on his head during the Doomsday Device. The doctors told Henry he’d have to stay out for fifteen weeks. (He was back in eight.)

For the next few months, we looped around the entire United States and Canada plugging away toward our promised push to the titles and hoping for the best. Even though it was taxing as hell, I tried to look after Hawk as much as I could, but sometimes it wasn’t enough.

During a stop in Cincinnati on September 8, we were staying at the Drawbridge Hotel and were all down in the bar putting a few back. I’d kept my eye on Hawk all night long and saw he was about to hit the floor, so I helped him up to his room, put him to bed, and told him to stay put. Fifteen minutes later, someone pointed over to the foyer and steps leading down to the bar, and there was Hawk laid out in a crooked heap.

I ran over, picked him up, and once again took him upstairs. This time I put my hands on his shoulders and told him to stay put. “Mike, listen to me. You have to stay here. The security guys are getting pissed, and it’s not cool.”

He stared at me blankly. This time he did manage to stay put, but not without bringing the party to his own room. Brian Pillman told me that later that night he and Henry Godwinn and anyone else who happened to walk by Hawk’s room had a wild time. It turned out to be at Hawk’s expense far more than he would’ve ever bargained for.

The next day on the plane, Hawk was in a shitty mood. “I lost my fucking jewelry, or someone stole it. I don’t fucking know.”

See, he had a really expensive gold watch and a $4,000 gold nugget bracelet with
Hawk
imprinted on it in diamonds. Whenever Hawk partied, he would hide his jewelry to protect it from being lost or stolen.

Well, I guess when he woke up in the morning with no recollection of the night before, he tore the room apart in a panic trying to find his jewelry. In the end, defeated and without his prized bracelet and watch, Hawk had to leave and catch our flight. I have a feeling that somewhere behind a ceiling tile in his old room at the Drawbridge is a very expensive Hawk bracelet.

In October we had one of the craziest and most memorable months of our entire careers beginning in Minneapolis on the fourth at the Saint Paul Civic Center. The day started out great with me bringing Joey, James, and a bunch of their friends to the show hours before the match so they could look around and maybe meet some of the guys. They wound up getting the thrill of their lives.

We were there early in the day, when the only people around the arena were security guards and the tech crew. The ring was set up, so I let the boys get in there and bump around. I was standing way up on the entrance ramp watching when I heard someone call my name.

“Hey, Joe, hit that button right there.” It was Stone Cold. He was telling me to press the button if I really wanted to freak the boys out.

The next thing you know, Joey, James, and their friends heard the familiar sound of glass breaking followed by Austin’s music as the man himself stormed down to the ring for some action. The boys didn’t know what to do. James was a really brave little boy, though, never moving an inch when Austin charged in and delivered a perfect Stone Cold Stunner on him. When he got in there, they jumped all over him and he went with it. It was hilarious.

As much fun as the show was later that night, the biggest shock of the year came early the next morning when we were told Brian Pillman was found dead. Brian was another guy who’d lived a tough and troubled life with drugs and alcohol and struggled to keep basic composure.

I remember when Ken “The World’s Most Dangerous Man” Shamrock had first come into the company a few months earlier and had no clue about the levels of excess going on all around him. We’d all been at Denny’s near the Philadelphia airport after one of Ken’s first shows, and he couldn’t understand why Brian was facedown in his cereal.

“What’s wrong with this guy?” he asked. “Is he always like this?”

Pillman died at only thirty-five years old.

I’VE ALWAYS APPRECIATED THE RESPECT THE FANS HAVE GIVEN ME. 1999.

18

OUR CONTINUING JOURNEY INTO THE UNKNOWN

Two days after Brian Pillman’s death, we were in Topeka for an episode of
Raw
(which was dedicated to Brian). It looked as if things were finally on the upswing.

“You guys are going over the Godwinns tonight for the belts,” Vince said. “You deserve it.”

Was there fine print on his forehead? I thought maybe I was in the twilight zone or something. Twenty minutes later, though, when Hawk pinned Phineas for the WWF titles, I knew I was right where we should’ve been all along: on top.

It lasted all of six weeks. We dropped the championships to another faction of DX, the New Age Outlaws. Badass Billy Gunn and “The Road Dogg” Jesse James were also the latest part of Vince’s answer to the NWO, which meant we were in for a few months of humiliation and losses the likes of which I never knew possible. We lost more matches in the first few months of 1998 than we did in the entire fifteen years prior. When Hawk came up positive for whatever (just pick one substance) at the end of February, we sat out for thirty days while Vince and his team of creative writers literally planned the rest of our miserable fate in the WWF.

When we came back, we were immediately subjected to a gimmick overhaul into the LOD 2000, which included Hawk and me growing out our hair into regular flattops, completely changing our shoulder pads and intro music, wearing ridiculous airbrushed motorcycle helmets, and getting a little piece of eye candy named Sunny as our new female manager.

Sunny was great, and the fans loved her for her undeniable charisma and sizzle, but man, I remember thinking,
What the hell happened to the Road Warriors?
We were getting further and further away from our roots, which was the worst thing that could’ve happened to us.

Well,
almost
the worst. By June, Sunny started getting phased out of the LOD 2000 picture in favor of adding a third member to the team. Now things were completely out of control, and I hated every second of it.

Adding Darren Drozdov (Droz) to the dynamic of Hawk and Animal was like saying, “The Road Warriors need help. They can’t cut it on their own.” The truth, which bothered me most of all, was Vince’s message to me that Hawk’s unreliability had to be dealt with any way he saw fit.

But he wasn’t finished yet. “Animal,” Vince said to me during a creative meeting, “I’m thinking about going very dark with the Legion of Doom. I want you to personally take on an angle where you’re staggering around drunk and high on TV, constantly causing the LOD to blow winning opportunities in the ring.” So that was Vince’s plan: to play off our real-life situation.

I felt the same as I had when Jack Lanza said Hawk would take a Doomsday in Japan against Hogan and Tenryu. “Absolutely not,” I said. “I’m not touching anything like that. It’s a terrible business decision for us.”

The echo from my voice didn’t even silence when Hawk spoke right up. “I’ll do it. I don’t give a fuck.”

Vince smiled. “That’s the spirit, Mike. I like a team player.”

The irony of it all made me sick. Now Hawk was given an open excuse to justify his substance issues.

“I have to do it for the gimmick, Animal.”

Great.
Just great
.

Week after week, Hawk would come out and either fall off of the stage, stumble off of the walking ramp, trip through the ropes, or lose his balance on the top rope. On a good night, he’d do all four. And what no one realizes is that Hawk wasn’t merely working his new story line. He really was blasted all of those times. It was method acting at its drunken best.

The whole angle came to an embarrassing climax when a drunk and frustrated Hawk pretended to fall off the top of the 25-foot-tall Titantron video screen during
Raw
as I pleaded with him to be careful from the stage below. And that was it.

Shortly afterward, life imitated art, as Hawk gave his very last dirty urine in the WWF. We were told there was nothing left for us creatively and were sent home.

So there we were, excused from our duties with the WWF. Honestly, that whole second run in the company left a terrible taste in my mouth (and I’m not talking about the Godwinns’ slop). Although I was still collecting a guaranteed check, it wasn’t as much as I would’ve made with the now monthly PPV schedule. Everyone always got kickbacks from those shows, especially Wrestle-Mania, when you could always count on an extra big payday.

As far as my relationship with Mike at the time, it was pretty nonexistent. There’s no question I was frustrated beyond belief when my career with Mike kept stalling out due to his lifestyle decisions. We rarely spoke, but when we did it was short, sweet, and usually about business. Truth was, I’d never give up on our partnership as the Road Warriors. We were brothers in paint and had been through way too much to just smother it out and go our separate ways. Hawk and Animal were bigger than Mike and Joe. Whether or not we wanted to acknowledge it, our alter egos had taken on lives of their own since we’d created them back in ’83.

By the spring of ’99, I started becoming aware that everywhere I went, people were referring to the Road Warriors as legends and the greatest tag team of all time. When you hear stuff like that, it’s easy to get embarrassed and quickly shrug it off with a “Thank you very much,” but at the heart of the wrestling business, money aside, gaining the respect of your fans and peers is what it’s all about. That was around the time it really hit me how amazing of a run Mike and I had and were still on.

We had also been around long enough that we had to face our own share of tragedies. I got a call from a friend on April 20 that Rick Rude had died in the middle of the night in his hotel room due to drug-related heart failure. Rude and I, along with Mike and Barry, had started out together all those years before in Eddie Sharkey’s crappy basement ring with no clue what the hell we were getting ourselves into. We were bonded for life by that experience.

In that time, the four of us saw the very best and the very worst of the professional wrestling business, and not one of us was ever completely immune to the dark elements of it all. It was no secret that Rude had partied hard and, in a lot of ways, was actually very much like Mike, except that he had a wife and three kids at home. Richard Rood, known to the world as Ravishing Rick Rude, was only forty years old.

About a month later, on May 23, the entire world was shocked when Owen Hart fell 78 feet from the ceiling of the Kemper Arena to his death during a WWF PPV in Kansas City. I was sitting at home when James came running in saying something horrible had just happened during the show, which he was watching downstairs.

“Dad, Owen Hart just died on TV. Come quick.”

What?
I couldn’t believe it. I ran down and watched as Jim Ross and Jerry Lawler confirmed what James had said. It made me sick to my stomach thinking about it. Owen, in his sparsely used Blue Blazer gimmick, had this big entrance to the ring where he would drop from the rafters strapped into a small harness and cable, which he’d always told everyone how much he hated.