With all the other candidates standing around watching, I shot for his legs, took him to the ground, and bloodied his nose with a solid cross-face. Then I let him back up and shot in again, throwing in another cross-face and causing more blood to spill. After working this big, burly football player over for ten minutes, all the other guys standing around watching approached Buzz and asked for their money back. Buzz, puffing out his barrel chest, kindly informed them that there were no refunds. They could climb onto the mat with me and attempt to pass the tryout or they could scuttle their butts straight out the door. They all scuttled their butts straight out the door.
At the end of the day, Buzz told me that I had done a great job, that we would begin my professional wrestling education as soon as he got his school off the ground. Then he handed me fifty bucks and told me to come back the following week.
I came back the following week, and then the week after that. I don’t know how Buzz did it, but each week there was a new group of men lined up around the grungy mats on the floor with $250 in their hands. They all had to fill out a questionnaire before they were allowed inside, and if they were going through college, working in nightclubs, or just scraping by, I would beat them up. But if they had good jobs or Buzz knew they had money tucked away, they would be taken on as “students.” I remember this one guy came in who had his own plumbing company, and Buzz convinced him to cough up a big chunk of cash up front to get him into the business. Eventually the guy started wondering why he wasn’t learning any moves or getting his career off the ground as promised, so Buzz brought him over to Japan to do a match with him. A couple minutes into the match, however, Buzz did a power bomb with him off the top rope and broke the guy’s neck.
After nearly a year helping line Buzz’s pocketbook, my father realized Buzz had no plans of coaching me on professional wrestling. I hadn’t yet stepped into a ring, and other than a few hammerlocks, I hadn’t learned a single professional wrestling hold. Although I still hadn’t the slightest clue what professional wrestling was all about, I had it set in my mind that I was going to be a professional wrestler.
While my father did some more research to find me a legitimate school, I lived up the Reno nightlife. Sometime during this partying spree I learned that the wrestling trials for the 1988 Olympics were coming to town, and I signed up. Then I forgot about it. A few weeks later I was coming home from the bars with a friend of mine, Lance Hill, and I remembered that the trials were that day. The sun was just coming up. Both of us were still drunk, and neither one of us had slept. We didn’t feel like calling it a night yet, so we headed over to the gymnasium to see how I could fare against the world’s best wrestlers after an all-night drinking binge.
A half hour later I was sitting on the wrestling mats with a bunch of other young men who had trained all their life for this moment. They had spent years bleeding, sweating, and pouring out their hearts every day during training just to get a shot at the Olympics. You could see the determination in their eyes as they taped their broken fingers and stretched their limbs in preparation for battle. And here I was, sitting off in a corner trying to conceal my booze breath and focus my vision. I had no idea it was going to be so serious. If I had, I might have taken the time to do a little research. I might have even discovered that freestyle wrestling, which is what they did in the Olympics, was nothing like high school wrestling, which was all I knew. I thought wrestling was wrestling.
I learned that that wasn’t the case when I climbed onto the mats with a muscle-bound kid from Syracuse, New York. We started going at it, and then all of a sudden he starts racking up points in three-increment blocks for doing these silly little turns. The more points that he racked up, the angrier I got. Eventually I realized that there was no way I was going to beat this kid on points, not with this lame scoring system they had in place, so I flipped him over to his back and pinned him. One, two, three—you’re out.
I walked off the mats still grumbling about the rules, but I decided to hang around and see if I could take it all the way. Not understanding how to score points, however, did me in. The coach came over to me before I left and gave me some words of encouragement. He said that if I’d trained in freestyle wrestling, as all the other boys had, I would have gone to the Olympics. He suggested that I get the training that I needed, and then come back in four years. I might have followed his suggestion if I hadn’t already made up my mind to do an entirely different kind of wrestling.
Not long after the trials, my father told me that he had discovered a legitimate school out in North Carolina run by Nelson Royal and Gene Anderson, two legitimate wrestlers. Both of us were excited, but we also knew it would require some pretty big sacrifices. I had married the previous year, and my son Ryan was on the way. My father would have to sell his home. But after getting together and talking about it, it sounded like the best move to make, even though everything about it was so uncertain. Just a few months before we were supposed to leave, I got an invitation from the San Diego Chargers to come down and try out for the team, but my sights were already locked. The family was headed to North Carolina.
| 2 | Off the Ropes |
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THERE WAS ANOTHER TRYOUT AWAITING ME IN North Carolina, but this one was legitimate. And I smoked it. Nelson Royal had the group of us young hopefuls start off with an hour of push-ups, sit-ups, and sprints. Then he tossed us into the ring one by one to see how we faired against the four burly professional wrestlers that had turned up. They had us doing amateur wrestling, so I was OK. Actually, I was better than OK. I worked them over just like I had worked over Buzz Sawyer. Out of the entire group, I was the only one to pass the tryout and get admitted to the school.
At the end of the day, my father forked over an ungodly amount, something like six thousand dollars, and I began my schooling in the art of professional wrestling. While the family was getting acquainted with our new home in Mooresville, North Carolina, I was learning how to fly off the top ropes and slap on submission holds that looked like they hurt but didn’t. I had been told that it usually took anywhere between fifteen months and two years to complete the training, but professional wrestling came natural to me, as had both football and amateur wrestling. I was able to anticipate my opponent’s moves, and I’d had enough of a background in real fighting to make the holds look real. Within four months, I had completed my training and was ready to hit the road.
As it turned out, I hit the sky instead. Only days after receiving my professional wrestling diploma, I found myself on a plane headed for the Land of the Rising Sun to do a thirty-day tour for Old Japan, Japan’s number one professional wrestling organization at the time. It was a rough thirty days. First off, I was as green as could be, wrestling some experienced veterans—Dug Vernus, Danny Crawford, the Can-Am Connection boys. Their professional wrestling was a lot faster than I was used to. I had a hard time figuring out their movement, and I couldn’t seem to remember the spots. I quickly got lost in the shuffle and fell behind, so I had to spend several hours in the ring before each match just to get myself prepared.
And when it came time to wrestle in front of the crowd, I kept feeling like I was blowing it. The only professional wrestling I had seen was in the United States, and the crowd always went nuts. Even when the matches were absolutely horrible, the crowd went nuts. When I stepped into the ring in Japan, you could hear a pin drop. Every once in a while you would get an “Ooooo” or an “Aaaaa” out of them, but for the most part, silence. It wasn’t until I had been there for a while that I realized that they weren’t any more silent for my matches than they were for everyone else’s. That’s just how they were. They were trying to show respect, and once I learned that, I loved them for it.
I didn’t, however, love their cuisine. Even though sushi is one of my favorite things to eat now, it made me gag back then. I was on a constant search for a steak house, and when I finally found one—it was called Roberto’s Steak House—I discovered that a steak
