Then, after kicking me several hundred times, they decided to go for the grand finale. They dragged my body out the front door and tried dumping me over the balcony. The commotion had awakened some of the other wrestlers staying in the hotel, and when they saw that the Nasty Boys were trying to dump my limp body three stories onto the cement parking lot, they quickly intervened. A few minutes later, an ambulance arrived and carted me away.
It took several months to heal, and in that time my hatred for the Nasty Boys grew. I had no intentions of letting this matter fly by the wayside. It wasn’t one of those times where the protagonist of the story comes to some earth-shattering revelation while lying in bed, learns a valuable lesson about life, and then finds peace with everything that happened. No, I was most definitely going to get revenge. I knew it was only a matter of time before I ran into the Nasty Boys again, and then we would settle our differences ourselves. No cops, no lawyers. Just the three of us.
And when I got that revenge, which you will learn about soon enough, it was just as sweet as I had imagined it.
| 3 | Land of the Rising Sun |
 |
ONCE MY BROKEN BONES HEALED UP, I WASTED little time getting back into the ring. Not long after my return, Dean Malenko, a wrestler known as “The Man with a Thousand Holds,” approached me at one of the shows. I had done some wrestling with his brother, Joe Malenko, over in Japan. Dean and I started talking, and I learned that he was going to be in town for a couple of months, so I invited him to stay at my house so he wouldn’t have to rent an apartment. He had spent a considerable amount of time wrestling over in Japan, and one afternoon he pulls out a videotape of the matches going on over there in the Union of Wrestling Forces (UWF). I didn’t have the best time while I was over in Japan, so I hadn’t paid much attention to their wrestling organizations after I left. This videotape, however, completely blew me away. It didn’t look like they were wrestling; it looked like they were fighting. The match that I found particularly intriguing was Masakatsu Funaki vs. Minoru Suzuki, two famous Japanese professional wrestlers. It was strictly a submission wrestling match, no kicks or punches allowed, but these guys were going at it. It was super fast paced. They were shooting for each other’s legs, dumping each other on their backs, and wrenching on each other’s limbs with submission holds. Everything they did was technical and precise. I thought it was real—and, in many ways, it was real. They were using real techniques that could cause pain, but they weren’t locking them down. It was a “work,” which meant that it was fake, but it looked a whole lot like a “shoot,” which was a real fight.
By the time the match was over, I was speechless. It was just like the first time I saw a football game—I knew that was what I wanted to do, and I also knew that I would be good at it.
Dean and I kept in touch when he went back home to Florida. I even flew down there a couple of times to do some matches with him. Then one day he gives me a call and tells me that Masami “Sammy” Saranaka, the man who did the majority of the recruiting for the UWF, was coming to town to visit his father, who was a big time wrestler from the 1970s. Dean had talked it over with Saranaka, and they had arranged a little tryout for me down in Florida to see if I had what it took to compete in the UWF.
Tryouts have always been my strong suit, and this time was no different. They threw a bunch of guys into the ring with me, and I beat them with my strength and wrestling ability. I didn’t know any submissions at that point; I just shot for their legs, dumped them to the ground, and then manhandled them. I wasn’t as technical as they were, but I was in such good shape they couldn’t touch me. I passed the tryout with flying colors.
I might have been a decent professional wrestler at that point, but when it came to submission wrestling, I was still green. To get the preliminary training that I needed, I spent the next two months flying back and forth between North Carolina and Florida. I’d train for a couple of days, absorb as much as I could, and then fly back home. I definitely felt like I was starting to get a grasp on some of the different holds and locks, but submission wrestling is not something that you can master in a couple of months, especially if you only train a couple of times a week. I would have liked another couple of months to get a handle on all the basic positions, but as it turned out, I had another tryout waiting for me over in Japan. So, still as green as can be, I found myself on a plane headed back to the Land of the Rising Sun.
The moment I stepped into the UWF dojo in Tokyo, I knew this was going to be like no tryout I had gone through before. The place was spotless, as clean as a whistle, but you could still smell the sweat and blood that had spilled in the joint over the years. I was nervous, but in a good way. I was eager to show them that I had what it took. I realized that for the first time in a long time, someone might actually push me past my physical and mental limits, and that excited me.
The first guy they had me grapple had the title of “young boy,” which meant that he was still in training. He was a tough kid, but he was no match for my strength. We went for a half hour straight, and I handled him. Then they stuck me with another young boy, Takaku Fuke. He wasn’t as tough a fighter back then as he is now, but he was still tough. We went for a half hour straight, and I handled him.
I wasn’t gassed out, but I was pretty damn tired. An hour straight of hard grappling is no walk in the park, let me tell you. So I’m sitting there, trying to catch my breath, and then Minoru Suzuki, one of the men that I had seen do incredible things on Dean’s videotape, pulled me down onto the mats. We went for a half hour straight, and he handled the hell out of me. I got caught in arm bars, chokes, heel hooks—I got caught in submissions I didn’t even know existed. And when Suzuki was done with me, I had to go another half hour with Funaki, the other amazing submission wrestler I had seen in the videotape. He’d catch me in a hold, I’d struggle to free myself, and then he’d apply pressure until I writhed in pain and tapped my hand in submission.
The upper body holds weren’t that bad because I could use my strength to muscle out of a lot of them. But the leg locks killed me. I had no idea how to defend against them. In today’s MMA competition, most people know how to escape leg locks, but back then they were the craftiest submission out there. When I got caught in one, I had two choices—tap or get my leg broken. It made a powerful impression on me, and that’s the reason why I became such a leg tactician. In all the brawls I had been in throughout my life, never once had I thought about attacking my opponent’s legs or looking out for my opponent trying to attack mine. I figured most people were like that, and it left them vulnerable. It didn’t matter how big or strong or fast they were; if I could isolate one of their legs, I could win the fight.
By the time Suzuki and Funaki were through with me, there was no question about it—I had got-ten my ass handed to me. Other than having a phone slammed into the back of my head, it was the first time I had gotten beat up since I was a kid. If the tryout had been in the United States, in my backyard, I would have found some way to beat them down. But I was in their backyard, and they were there to help me. I didn’t take the loss as a blow to my ego, I took it for what it was—a way for them to see what I was made of. And the only way for someone to know what you are made of, truly made of, is to break you down to the point where you can no longer stand, no longer fight, and yet you do.
I had done that, and after two hours of hell, they told me that I was in.
My education began the very next day at ten o’clock in the morning. We went for a run, lifted some weights, and then dove into hard grappling. At noon we all sat down and ate a dish called Chuckle, which was a mixture of rice, beef, and vegetables, from a massive pot. While digesting, we watched videotapes of matches and broke down the moves. A couple of the guys spoke a few words of English, but there was never small talk. If they said anything at all, it concerned training. Then, when our food had settled, we got off our butts
