My Life Outside the Ring (10 page)

So I get in the locker room. It’s total silence. No one says a word to me. I get suited up and tie up my new boots, and I go out to wrestle Brian Blair. Now, I knew Brian. He was a friend of mine. He was an amateur wrestler in high school, so he knew a lot more real wrestling moves than I did. What I didn’t know was that Brian was under orders to do a twenty-minute “Broadway”—to keep the match going for twenty minutes as basically a time filler that would end in a draw.

No one told
me
that, of course. All anyone told me, right before I hit that ring, was that I was supposed to go out there and win. It was yet another rib.

So off we go.
Ding-ding-ding-ding
. I’m out there trying to pin him, trying to hold his shoulder, and he keeps kicking out. We’re fighting. I mean, we’re really beating the shit out of each other. I thought I was supposed to win this thing, and he was just following his orders to not get beat.

Brian didn’t think it was too funny, but I noticed at one point during the match that all the wrestlers were standing out by the dressing rooms watching us. They weren’t supposed to do that. The bad guys and good guys weren’t supposed to be seen together at all. Looking back on it, it must’ve been like the biggest joke to them.

After twenty minutes of this brutal battle, finally I hear
ding-ding-ding-ding-ding.

I’m exhausted. I’m all bruised up. And instead of basking in the moment of finishing my first match in this arena full of people, I’m only thinking about one thing:
Now I’ve gotta go back in the dressing room and fight for my fucking life.

On the way back from the ring, I was so worried and so upset, there were tears in my eyes. I don’t think any of the guys saw it, but I was a wreck. I’d thrown everything in my life away for this dream of wrestling. My music career was gone now. I was so fixated on making this thing work, and
this
was what I’d gotten myself into? I was shaking, practically bawling, thinking,
I don’t want to be a wrestler anymore
.

I felt like a loser. An outsider. The twelve-year-old fat kid. I was weak, I felt sick, I just wanted to get out of there. I was so scared and so messed up, it was all I could do to gird myself and get ready to face my fate as I pushed through the doors and stepped into the locker room—

Where all of the wrestlers were waiting with beers in their hands. “Congratulations! You made it!”

What the hell?
They were cheering for me.

The rib was over. The whole thing had been a big goof at my expense.

They patted me on the back and shook my hand. Someone handed me a beer. They were all so happy that I made it through the match, and everybody was talking about what a good fight I’d given Brian.

Hazing is pretty common in fraternities. I guess it’s pretty common in the military, too. I had no idea it was a rite of passage in the wrestling world. In fact, maybe it wasn’t all that common. Maybe I was just an unlucky stiff who was too naive for the other wrestlers to pass up.

I was completely dazed. I didn’t understand it. I didn’t understand why they would do something like that. It’s still so weird to think about. Even now, it still upsets me.

But there in that locker room on that August night, for the first time in this whole crazy endeavor that I’d devoted my life to for more than a year now, the other wrestlers stopped treating me like some dumb-ass kid.

For a moment at least, they treated me like one of their own.

Chapter 5

Backing Away

Sometimes you’ve gotta be careful
what you wish for. I was so focused on getting into this Florida wrestling circuit, so focused on not letting Matsuda beat me down, so focused on being accepted, that I didn’t look at the bigger picture.

I still had blinders on.

After that first match, I expected I’d be able to make a living at this thing. Everybody else—like Brian Blair and Paul Orndorff—was wrestling six nights a week, rotating from West Palm to Tampa to Miami to Jacksonville to Sarasota. Me? I was only getting two bookings: Wednesday in Miami, which is a five-hour drive each way, and Monday in Tallahassee, which is a five-and-a-half-hour drive each way. And I was always the one who had to drive. All of the other wrestlers would pile into my van and drink beer, and then sleep on the way home.

This went on for like three or four months. I was barely making any money. More than that, it started to feel like some kind of a rib again—like I was being taken advantage of.

Finally I mentioned this to my friend Charlie Lay, the old guy at the front desk at the Sportatorium, and he looked at me and said something I must’ve been just too deaf to hear until that moment. “Kid, don’t you get it? They don’t want you around here.”

I knew he was right. We all know that feeling, when you hear something you know is the truth but it’s something you’ve been dreading and just didn’t want to hear. It knocks you in the stomach. And I mean, I had been fighting that truth from day one. Day one.

Even though I’d had my first match, and the matches after that all went really well—I was getting real good in the ring and starting to find ways to really pump up the crowd—and even though I survived Matsuda’s training, and even though I’d suffered through that hazing or whatever you want to call that shit they put me through, I was never gonna escape that stigma of being a mark. These Florida wrestlers were always going to treat me like some kid who didn’t deserve to be there.

With one last flicker of hope, I met with Matsuda and Jack and Jerry Brisco—people I thought were real friends by that point—to ask about wrestling six nights a week. The solution they came up with was to transfer me to another territory up in Kansas City.

That was that.

No offense to Kansas City, but I wasn’t about to be banished off to Hicksville. And I sure wasn’t going to sit there and be humiliated any more than I already had been for the last year and a half.

So that was the end. Three, four months into my professional wrestling career, I walked away. I was done.

I called a guy named Whitey Bridges over in Cocoa Beach. He owned a place called the Anchor Club that was part of the rock ’n’ roll circuit I used to be in. He was this really built, forty-year-old blond-haired guy who loved to party and always had lots of girls around. I’m not sure why I called him. Maybe I thought I’d go visit him, hang out for a while, blow off some steam while I tried to figure out what the heck I was going to do next. Maybe I just wanted to say hi and see how he was doing. Anyway, when I mentioned that the wrestling thing wasn’t really working out, much to my surprise Whitey made me an offer.

“Why don’t you come over here and help run my club?”

Done deal, brother. I was gone. Cocoa Beach, here I come!

Not only did I help him run the Anchor Club, but we decided to go into business together and open up a gym.

Everything fell into place real easy, like it was meant to be. In a matter of weeks we unlocked the doors to Whitey and Terry’s Olympic Gym—right near the beach, in the middle of town.

Splitting my time between the two places was a lot, and I decided I needed someone I could really trust to work the door of the club and handle the money. Since I hardly knew anybody else in Cocoa Beach, I wound up calling my buddy from Port Tampa, Ed Leslie.

Ed’s a bit younger than me, but I went to school with his older sister and always liked the guy. We just hit it off. He wasn’t into wrestling at that point, but still he was big enough and had the kind of build that I thought he could easily handle any situation at the door. In case you’ve forgotten, Ed became better known later in life as Brutus “the Barber” Beefcake.

Over the course of that year, Brutus and I got real serious about two things: working that club and working out in that gym. I mean, I got crazy focused on building my body. Whether it was some kind of a reaction to the whole wrestling fiasco or not, I made up my mind that I was going to get as big as I possibly could.

I had a pretty good starting point—I was already in fantastic shape—but even with the muscle base I’d built, and how fit I was from those Matsuda workouts, and the God-given gift of my natural size, there was no way I could achieve that over-the-top, thick, massive golden god look I was after without help.

The help I needed came in two forms: needles and pills.

When ’Roids Were the Rage

By the late 1970s, steroids were everywhere—and I’m not just talking about the wrestling world. You could walk into almost any gym or locker room in this country and find steroids if you had your eyes open. It was a different era. They were legal. Doctors would pretty much hand you a prescription for whatever you wanted—all you had to do was ask. There wouldn’t be a federal ban on steroids until the end of the following decade.

In Cocoa Beach, in 1978, I didn’t even have to go looking for them. Instead, steroids found me. They just walked right in through the front door of Whitey and Terry’s Olympic Gym.

A couple of local weightlifters came through to check out the facility, and before I knew it they were talking like traveling salesmen. “Hey, man, why don’t you take Dynabol? You won’t believe the results! Just try it and see. And if you really want to see some bulk, you should take this and take that.” There was no indication that this stuff could hurt you—or kill you—and anyone who used the stuff was the best spokesperson possible because they all looked great! Brutus and I were sold, right then and there, and when we got into it, we got into it heavy.

We found pretty quickly that it was all about finding the right cocktail that worked for you, and once you hit the correct combo, the results were fast and furious. There was always a base of testosterone—it could be 1 cc, maybe more. You just went by feel. Then there was “Deca,” Deca-Durabolin, an oil-based steroid, and you’d take that once or twice a week. Then there were pills, like Anavar and the aforementioned Dynabol, which I know now is actually very toxic—it’s like an androgen that makes you hold fluid. All steroids are stressful on your internal organs. But I was young and invincible, you know? I took pills every day and shot up about every third day. The results were incredible, so I just kept going.

In just a couple of months I was seeing that sort of Greek god swell I envisioned.

There was no limit to the amount of steroids we could do. And as much as we wanted, the local weightlifter-dealers could provide. If you wanted to buy a hundred pills, you could; and if you wanted to buy ten thousand pills, you could. The way we understood it—whether this was true or not—if you had a prescription from your doctor, then you were covered because they weren’t illegal. Even if you got caught with a thousand bottles from a drug dealer, as long as you had that prescription for that substance in your bag, you were okay.

A local doctor there who was friends with Whitey was kind enough to write down whatever we wanted, so we’d be street legal. Then once we had his prescription for, let’s say, one bottle of testosterone, we’d run right out and buy fifty bottles from one of those dealers down the street.

The thing is, I didn’t have any second thoughts about pumping my body full of this stuff because everybody said steroids were safe. I guess it’s kinda like in the 1950s when everybody said smoking cigarettes was safe. Hell, some people even said smoking was good for you, right? In the ’70s, everyone just upped the ante a little. They went around saying it was perfectly safe to smoke pot, and it certainly wasn’t gonna kill you to snort some cocaine, and in locker-room circles it was just a given that shooting steroids was safe, too.

It was also sort of a social thing. When you took steroids, you were just like every other muscle-head in the gym. And if you didn’t? It was almost like, “Why are you wasting your time in here?”

The convenience and availability just pushed it over the top. Why make an appointment and waste all that time at a doctor’s office to get one bottle when I can buy ten bottles of what I want right now, and do it for three dollars a bottle? I remember testosterone was like ten dollars a bottle and had ten shots in it. There was just so much of it, everywhere, it actually made you feel “in place” as opposed to “out of place” to take steroids. Before long, everybody in the gym was doing it, everybody who worked at the bar was doing it, and you could look at the way the top athletes looked and know that they were all doing it, too.

So it wasn’t considered a reckless thing. In fact, that whole year I spent in Cocoa Beach was anything but reckless.