Have a Nice Day (44 page)

Despite the hard work and solitude, I was proud of my efforts in Japan. Tarzan Goto had jumped ship from the rival FMW, and his addition helped fuel an IWA resurgence. IWA had announced plans for a King of the Death Match tournament for the beginning of August in the 40,000-seat Kawasaki Stadium. The idea had seemed ludicrous at first, but with me, Funk, Goto, the Headhunters, and Nakamaki leading the way, the IWA had become the hottest small promotion in Japan.

Colette was working steadily-nothing big yet, but enough to make it worthwhile. Dewey was adjusting well to Dad’s long absence, and Noelle’s little personality was really starting to bloom. I remember when she was only weeks old, I said to Colette, “I bet she’s going to have her own little personality,” which was a nice way of saying, “We really don’t have a very good-looking child.” We thought that we were going to have a very plain-looking daughter with a very serious personality, for Noelle seldom smiled as a baby. At about that time in Long Island, however, she began to really blossom, and the beauty of her tiny face is now matched only by the beauty of her little ways.

I was able to drive to most of the ECW shows, which was a big help, and I’d often drive my buddy Mikey home with me, where he’d sleep on our bed in the basement, before I’d drop him off in the morning. One day I had Colette and the kids with me as we returned Mikey to his home, and we saw a mother cat frolicking with her kittens.

“Aren’t those kitties nice?” I asked my son, who nodded in agreement. “Can you say that, buddy?” I asked, knowing that like most kids, Dewey had trouble with certain letters.

“Nice titties,” Dewey yelled out, prompting an unsuspecting Mikey to spit milk all over our dashboard.

My hard work was paying off-1 had been gone from WCW for almost a year, and although I hadn’t made nearly as much money as I had with the big company, I had actually saved more of it. I didn’t need anybody, I could make my own schedule, and I loved it.

I pulled into the ECW arena in August of 1995, a few hours late, as I had become lost on the way to the building. I had been to the damn place over a dozen times, but its whereabouts always seemed to elude me. I had Colette and the kids with me, as we were planning on going to Pennsylvania Dutch country afterward. Paul E. ran up to me in desperation. “Cactus,” he gasped, “I’ve got a big angle, and it will change the course of your career and maybe even your life. You don’t have to do it, and you can think about it for a long time.”

“What is it, Paul?” The mad scientist was sweating, and was looking older than his thirty years.

“Cactus-I want to turn you heel.”

This was indeed a career-altering decision that could very well change the course of my life. I thought about it deeply-for about three seconds. “Okay,” I said, “let’s do it.”

I was scheduled to take part in an eight-man tag team match. On one side would be Raven and three of the Dudley Boys. The Dudley Boys had started out as a takeoff on the Hanson Brothers, who had appeared in the Paul Newman hockey movie Slapshot. The movie was dated, but the Hansons were timeless. Their taped-up black eyeglasses, overalls, and long greasy hair lent a comedic look that was countered by an aggressive style. In time, the Dudley clan would grow to include an American Indian, a black guy, and Sign Guy Dudley, who should not be confused with the original sign guy-a strange fan who sat first row ringside, and held up a vast arsenal of original signs. The original sign guy had once held up a sign that said “Cane Dewey,” a thought that was supposed to be humorous, but had made Colette sick to her stomach upon hearing of it. Our team consisted of Cactus Jack, Pitbulls 1 and 2, and Tommy Dreamer. Tommy was a personal project of Paul E.’s who was willing to do anything for the acceptance of the fans. He had once been a laughingstock of the company, as no matter what body part he sacrificed, the fans continued to shower him with ridicule. The hardcore ECW fans had despised him partly because he was a good-looking young man, and partly because of his ridiculous ring attire that included green suspenders. Eventually his determination, Paul E.’s ingenuity, and other talented wrestlers got him over to the point where he was at least respected if not completely loved. The fans’ chants to him of “He’s hardcore, he’s hardcore,” seemed at least partially in jest, but nonetheless he seemed poised on the brink of stardom and needed just a little something extra to push him completely over. I was it.

The match was well received by the 1,000-plus in attendance at the bingo hall. Tommy was in the midst of a nearly year-long feud with Raven that had seen Tommy on the receiving end of unbelievable punishment, but no clean victories. This was the night he finally had his chance. The ring had emptied, and Tommy had planted Raven with a DDT. The referee moved in for the count, but it was broken up at two by a big Cactus Jack cowboy boot to the head. (My gear bag had been stolen months earlier, including my leopard-skin Cactus boots, and I had been too cheap to replace them.) I lifted the baffled Dreamer off the floor, and caught him quickly with a double arm DDT on a chair. I pulled Raven overtop of him, and once again, Dreamer was denied.

I left the ring to the open-jawed response of the crowd. Some of the best work of my career was about to begin. I left the auditorium of the ECW arena for the tranquility of the Amish farmlands. After a few days of relaxation and shoo fly pie, I flew to Tokyo for a ten-day tour that would culminate in the longest day of my life.

August 18, 1995. We had been on the road for eight days and had traveled via the Japanese bullet train into the wee hours of the morning. We were awakened after about five hours’ sleep, and took the two-hour bus trip from the Ikebukuru section of Tokyo into Yokohama. I stepped off the bus in front of the dilapidated baseball stadium, and knew right away that I was going to be in trouble. It was only ten in the morning, but the temperature was already over ninety. The humidity was almost unbearable.

I walked into the stadium, where they had three rings set up in the infield part of the stadium. The day would be filled with a variety of inhuman gimmick matches, and the three-ring setup would ensure speedy transitions between matches. Without them, we would have been there until September. I looked at the brackets for the King of the Death Match tournament. I would be facing Terry Gordy in the opening round in a barbed wire bat, 10,000 thumbtack match. The thumbtacks would be placed in two shallow boxes and the object was simple-get your opponent in the box, in an attempt to get the pin. If I were victorious in the opening match (which I had reason to believe I would be), I would take on the winner of Nakamaki-Ono contest in a barbed wire board, bed of nails match. Pretty self-explanatory. Then, on to the grand finale, the coup de grace, the big daddy of them all. The no rope, barbed wire board, C4 explosive, exploding ring death match.

I don’t mind telling you that the concept scared me a little bit. I was okay with everything up until the C4, and then had some questions. The C4 was rigged to four of the barbed wire boards, and would be detonated upon impact. I had seen exploding rings in Japanese videos before, and they were a sight to be seen. At the ten-minute mark of the match, a cannonlike concussion would go off on all four sides of the ring. The concussions were ear-splitting in volume, and threw unbelievable firepower into the sky. I had been told by the Funker, who had survived one of these things, that if you lie on the canvas, you’d be okay, but that it was hotter than hell and hard to breathe for a few minutes, until the smoke cleared.

Victor Quinones summoned me to the outfield, where the demolitions expert was about to give us a C4 demonstration. I stood there looking at the barbed wire board, which had two explosives attached to each end of the six-foot plywood. Funk, Nakamaki, Leatherface, and I gathered around, and the expert flicked a switch. BABOOM! It was the loudest thing I’d ever heard in my life. Scariest too. I was the first to speak up. “No way,” I gasped, “that thing will kill us.” Nakamaki and Leatherface agreed.

Then the wizened, grizzled Funker spoke up, and with thirty years of experience aiding his judgment, said, “No, no, that looks fine, but I think we need two more right in the middle-then it will be great.”

“Terry,” I said, with more than a little desperation in my voice, “you’ve got to be kidding-there will be nowhere to land. How can we land if there will be explosives all over the damn thing?” \

Terry thought about it, and smiled his Terry smile. “No, no Cactus-it’ll be fine. Trust me!” I did, and later wished I hadn’t.

At one o’clock, we hit the gimmick table for a two-hour selling session. I had been coming to Japan only seven months, but in that time the Japanese yen had lost a great deal of its value. I sold my shirts for 2,000 yen, but that amount brought in only $16 U.S., whereas in January, the same shirt yielded $24 U.S. I knew that I was in for a torturous tournament, but dammit, I’m a salesman, not a wrestler. I was positioned with the Headhunters at the table by the rear entrance. While the Japanese boys sat under a veranda by the main entrance, the gai-jins sweated it out in the hot sun. Sales were brisk for this big event, and I left the table at bell time as a hotter, sweatier, but somewhat richer man.

I readied myself for the Gordy match. Terry Gordy had at one time been one of the ten best wrestlers in the world. He had been celebrated as a member of the original Freebirds, and had been a legend in All Japan wrestling before an accident put him in a coma for several days. When he reemerged, he was never quite the same.

Terry had attempted his comeback a short while later, but it was painful to watch. The vicious, aggressive Gordy was gone, and in his place stood a confused, sluggish man. His punches and kicks, which had at one point been his calling card, now looked particularly weak. One of my saddest memories was of Terry at an independent show in Chattanooga, Tennessee, where at intermission, he took to the ring for Polaroids. Only two or three fans bothered to pose with one of wrestling’s true greats, and my heart went out to him. Even sadder, Terry didn’t take that as a cue to leave, and instead stood inside the empty ring for several minutes-smiling his sad Muppet smile.

To his credit, however, Terry had trained intensely after his injury. He was actually in better physical condition than he was in his prime, and as the months went by, some of the mental fog seemed to lift. There were brief periods in matches where he looked like the Gordy of old. Unlike the U.S., where a wrestler is seemingly forgotten overnight, the Japanese had a deep sense of tradition, and Terry’s name was still valuable. Knowing this, Mr. Asano had hired him for the tournament, the ramifications of which, apparently, Terry was unaware of.

A week earlier, the IWA had held a press conference to hype the tournament, which had gained surprisingly strong fan support. When asked about his first-round match, Terry referred to an excellent bout that we had wrestled for the Global Wrestling Federation in the summer of 1991. “Jack, I dropped you on your head once, and I can do it again.”

I was given a chance to respond and yelled, “That was different, Gordy. Tell me what you’re going to do when you step into that ring at Kawasaki Stadium and see those 10,000 thumbtacks? I’m going to turn your ass into the world’s largest pin cushion.”

Terry’s eyes seemed to grow as wide as saucers, and after the press conference, he approached me. “Bro,” he said in his deep, sad, basset hound voice, “I didn’t know anything about no thumbtacks.”

I approached this match very seriously for a couple of reasons. I wanted to have a great match to set the tone for the show, but just as importantly, I wanted to honor and preserve Terry’s reputation. I was really concerned about the weakness of Terry’s punches and told him so. “Terry,” I said “I want this match to look good, and I think maybe to play it safe, you should just hit me your hardest out there.”

“Are you sure, bro?” he wanted to know.

“Yeah, Terry, I am.”

Terry looked at me sadly, and I could tell the words that followed were difficult for him to say. “Bro, just help me out there.”

I came out of the dugout to the strains of a song by the band Megadeth. The Japanese had a great knack for picking cool entrance music and this was no different. I could feel the hot sun beating down on me as I looked at the crowd, which was pretty damn impressive. Thirty thousand fans had turned out to see the little company that could. Gordy was then announced, and we lined up on opposite sides of field, about thirty yards from the ring, as the announcer counted us down in English. Ten, nine, eight-! was nervous as hell. Seven, six, five-my heart was pounding, but I knew that I was ready. Four, three, two-Gordy jumped the gun, and by the time my big ass got into the ring, he was waiting with the barbed wire bat. I fed him my back, and he took full advantage. I took two hard hits and bailed out to the floor, where Gordy followed. “Go ahead, Terry, hit me,” I yelled. Whatever fears I’d had about his punches disappeared immediately. BAM, I felt the smack of fist against skull. BAM. BAM. BAM. BAM. I finally turned and staggered away. I reached for my head, and felt the sticky warmth of my own blood. Without even meaning to, Terry had busted my eyebrow open. He hadn’t let me down. I could almost hear Harley grumbling all the way from Kansas City. As a matter of fact, the cover photo of the Raw issue titled “Blood, Guts, and Mick Foley” was taken right after these punches were thrown.

I rolled into the ring, and the Terry Gordy of old followed me in. He whipped me into the turnbuckle, and followed me in with a brutal clothesline. When I ran, I stepped into the shallow box, and the sole of one of my cowboy boots filled with thumbtacks. Another whip, another clothesline, and I went down, next to the box, with my face actually turned to its side on top of the tiny gold tacks. Gordy gave me a stiff boot to the other side of my face, and I could feel the push pins sinking into my flesh. “Uhwahh.” I staggered to my feet and did my best slow, stumbling watusi, so that every fan could take a good look. The response was incredible-like a feeling of disgust and enjoyment at the same time. It seemed kind of like when the great white shark is dragging Quint into its mouth in the movie Jaws; painful to watch but fun nonetheless. I guess it was kind of like watching the Mean Street Posse in action, except for the fun part.