boy, and I liked it.
Five weeks in, I knew that I was going to be a lifer. Just like my father expected, all that anger I had worked so hard to subdue came rushing back to the surface. I was already acquiring the mind-set that would allow me to kill. I wouldn’t have necessarily liked some of the things that the Marine Corps would have made me do, but I would have been good at it. They could have dropped me in a swamp in some third world country, and I would have done my best to kill everyone in that swamp. I might not have made it out alive, but I would have died with honor. That’s what my father had worried about. He knew me better than anyone, better than I knew myself sometimes. He understood the way I thought, the strange code that I lived by. He knew that the Marine Corps would turn me into a professional killer, and he was right.
Fortunately I didn’t have the option of taking that road. Six weeks into my training, the Navy discovered that I had broken my neck in high school. I had given that bit of news to my recruiting officer, and he hadn’t cared. Apparently, the Navy did. They wanted me out, but the Marine Corps didn’t want to kick me out. Here they had this young soldier who was strong, could fight like a banshee, and was down for whatever they threw his way. It became quite a little battle to decide my fate. The Navy called my father to come down and pick me up, but he ended up staying in San Diego for two weeks because neither side was willing to budge. Eventually, however, the Navy won.
I was so devastated when I heard the news that I actually got a little teary-eyed. Some of my drill sergeants saw this, and they got in my face. As a kid, I had gotten teary-eyed often when someone got in my face, and I learned that the only way to keep my eyes from spilling over was to start throwing punches. And it worked wonders—the moment my first punch landed, my eyes would instantly dry. That was part of the reason why I’d gotten into so many fights. I hadn’t had to worry about that in a long, long time, but now I found myself in a little bit of a pickle. I wasn’t about to let my sergeants see me cry, so I only had one option. I went crazy. I started by flipping over a desk, and then I went after everyone in the room. My drill sergeants had seen what I could do with a pugil stick, and none of them wanted to find out what I could do with my fists. They all went running out of the barracks and that was the end of my military career.
I was back to square one. I had no money, no job, and no direction. I began fighting in the nightclubs, on the street, anywhere. If someone was picking on someone I was with or someone I even vaguely knew, I would always get in the middle and be the first one to throw a blow. It didn’t matter if that someone wanted to settle his own matters, I beat him to the punch. If a fight was going to happen, I wanted to be the one in the thick of battle. It was a temporary release for my pent-up frustrations, but I knew that if I kept it up, it was only a matter of time before I found myself locked behind bars. I needed to find a direction, and I needed to find it quick.
Not long after I got out of the military, I remember sitting next to the fireplace in my father’s home, my head sunk down into my hands. My father was talking to me, trying to cheer me up, but I was pretty down in the dumps. Then he said seven words that struck a cord. He said, “You ought to be a professional wrestler.”
I lifted my head out of my hands, thought about it.
“I don’t know, pop, professional wrestling is fake.”
My father took offense to that. It’s not what I said, but rather how I said it. He’d been watching men fly from the top ropes since he was a kid. Back in the fifties, most households only had one television. My father, Bob, used to flip to the station that had pro wrestling. His father would then flip to a different channel, calling pro wrestling stupid and fake. My father would then flip the channel back, putting up a fight. He knew it was fake then, and he knew it was fake now. But that didn’t stop him from loving the hell out of it.
I hadn’t watched much professional wrestling at that point, and the little I had seen didn’t seem all that appealing. But when my father told me how much money a professional wrestler could make, my ears perked up real quick. We got to talking about the sport, and by the end of our conversation I decided to give it a whirl. After all, how hard could fake wrestling be? If it could put some change in my pockets, I was all for it.
My father did some research and learned that “Mad Dog” Buzz Sawyer had a school down in Sacramento, which was just a couple-hour drive from our house in Susanville. I learned that Sawyer had been a big-time wrestler back when Rick Flare was really young. In 1982, he took fourth place in PWI’s “Most Hated” Poll, and in 1983 he was beat out only by Roddy Piper and Hulk Hogan in the “Inspirational Wrestler of the Year” Poll. So my father was pretty jazzed about the opportunity for me to learn from him. I didn’t expect much, and I expected even less when I walked through the doors of his school. There wasn’t a big fancy ring like you see on TV, just a bunch of grungy mats spread out on the floor. There were no punching bags or weight-lifting equipment or jump ropes. I wasn’t quite sure what a pro-wrestling gym should be equipped with, but whatever that was, this gym certainly didn’t have it.
Then I met Buzz Sawyer the man, and things started to perk up a little bit. He was a big guy, pushing upwards of 260 pounds, and I learned that he was a NCAA champion at the time, which meant that he could also do the real wrestling. So after a little talking, my father paid the $250 tryout fee, and Buzz and I climbed onto the mats. I was expecting that he would grab me in some sort of headlock and then grunt and groan as if he were really putting it on. Then we would switch rolls and I would get to see how well I could grunt and groan. That didn’t happen. What did happen was Buzz came at me with power and speed, trying to put the hurt on young Kenneth. As I have already mentioned, I hadn’t seen much professional wrestling, but I had seen enough to know this certainly wasn’t it. Buzz wanted to wrestle for real, which suited me just fine.
At the time I had no idea that Buzz had a scam going on, and that I was intended to be the next victim of this scam. I guess he’d advertised his school all over the place, seeking out men young and old who’d always dreamed of learning how to fly off the top ropes from a real-deal guy like Buzz. I don’t know what Buzz promised them when they called for further information, but he managed to get a lot of guys to show up. He’d collect their $250 nonrefundable tryout free at the door and then send them onto the grungy mats he had thrown down on the floor. Instead of showing them classic wrestling moves, Buzz twisted and wrenched on their limbs for the next thirty minutes straight. He slapped on holds that you would never ever see in a professional wrestling match, holds that caused a great deal of pain. By the time he was through, the guys who had come with such high hopes wanted nothing more to do with professional wrestling. They walked out the door without the slightest complaint about their $250 and were never seen again.
When I climbed onto the mats with good old Buzz, he thought I was just another one of those guys. But a few minutes after we put our paws on each other, he realized I wasn’t. I hadn’t wrestled since high school, and I only weighed 215 pounds or so, but I made Buzz pay. If what we had been doing was actually professional wrestling, then I think Buzz would have thrown in the towel right then and there. I worked him over pretty damn good.
His scam had come back to bite him in the ass, but being the man that he was, he wasn’t about to give it up. He let me keep my $250, and he said that I had passed the tryout and was now a part of his school. I knew something fishy was going on, but I just thought that was the way the business worked. You had to prove that you were tough before anyone was going to hand over any secrets. So I came back the following week.
This time, however, I wasn’t alone. There were several other guys lined up around the mats, all with $250 in their hands. Buzz collected their money, and then he told them to climb onto the mats with me to get their introduction to the world of professional wrestling. If they could pass the tryout, then they were in.
I hadn’t learned a single professional wrestling move, so I did what I knew how to do, which was wrestle for real. The first guy I went up against weighed nearly 270
