Читать книгу Beyond the Lion's Den - Ken Shamrock - Страница 9

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Off the Ropes

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 cost forty dollars. I didn’t get a whole lot of money for food, so I had to ration out the steaks. A lot of the guys who had spent some time wrestling in Japan had gotten used to the food. While they were slurping down gooey fish and slimy things you couldn’t even identify, I was twiddling my thumbs and salivating in anticipation of my next streak, which always seemed to be three days away.

Getting from one arena to the next also wasn’t easy. We had twelve big wrestlers packed onto a very small bus. We’d drive four hours to our destination, shuffle off the bus, head into the arena to wrestle, and then head back to a hotel that had no resemblance to the kind of hotels I was used to. They were the size of a matchbox. Every time I tried to roll over in bed, I’d end up falling out and banging my head on the toilet. The only time I didn’t fall out of bed and bang my head on the toilet was in a hotel that didn’t have toilets in the room. They only had one bathroom per floor, and it can be a pretty gruesome sight heading into a shower after eleven other professional wrestlers have already gotten their wash on.

Needless to say, I didn’t take to Japan that first time I went over. A part of it had to do with the fact that I was uncomfortable because I was still so green, feeling like I wasn’t pulling my weight in the ring. A part of it had to do with the fact that I wasn’t yet accustomed to life on the road. But it’s amazing how a little time and experience can change a man. Now Japan is one of my favorite places in the world, full of colorful people and places. My first time over there, I guess I was just so consumed with trying to find my niche that it was hard to truly open my eyes to all that was going on around me.

When I stepped off the plane in Charlotte, North Carolina, I was happy to see my family. I was also eager to start wrestling in the good old U.S. of A. I had gotten all the kinks in my game straightened out over in Japan, and, thanks to Gene Anderson and Nelson Royal, I had gotten a gig with the South Atlantic Professional Wrestling Association (SAPW) on the East Coast. So, my father and I hit the road.

We traveled to Winston-Salem, Wilkesboro, Columbia, Atlanta, and a dozen other cities in the southeast. Sometimes I’d perform in front of fifty people in a high school gym or a veteran’s war memorial building. Other times I would entertain hundreds of people in the Winston-Salem Coliseum or the Memorial Coliseum in Charlotte. And then sometimes the show got canceled because only seven spectators turned up. The only thing constant was the money—no matter how big the show, I usually only made enough to pay for the gas back home. Technically we were in a rough spot, but that’s not where our heads were. We had moved east to fulfill a dream, and now we were living it. There was no doubt in my mind that as long as I stuck with it, I would make it to the top.

And besides, I had never seen my father so happy. Every Friday and Saturday night we would be on the road, heading to some new destination. One of his favorite things in this world is to drive, so he would stay up all night behind the wheel while I napped in the passenger’s seat. And when we got to an event, my father would jump into the mix and help the promoters set up the ring. He’d work his way around the crowd, find someone interesting, and have an hour-long conversation about professional wrestling. He was truly in the height of his glory, living out a fantasy he’d had since his childhood. Both of us were having a blast.

It wasn’t long until I started seeing the same faces in different towns, and I realized that people were actually making a two-or three-hour drive just to see me perform. The fans made me feel accomplished; they made me feel like I was actually going someplace. I wouldn’t have turned my back on a single one of them, but it did start getting a little hard for my family. At that time, many of the fans were convinced that professional wrestling was real. They bought every line and gimmick hook-line-and-sinker. If I did or said something that they didn’t agree with, they opened up the phone book. They all knew that I wrestled out of Charlotte, and with there only being one Shamrock in the Charlotte phone book, it didn’t take them long to find my number. Then they’d called me up to give me a piece of their mind. My wife usually answered the phone.

It didn’t take long before my family got tired of the angry phone calls, so I stopped using my real name and started going by Vince Tortelli. I don’t recall how the name came about, but I kept it because people thought it fit my Italian look. The name change didn’t affect my popularity in the slightest. I was drawing larger crowds at every show, performing in cities further away each week. But despite my accomplishments in the ring, professional wrestling still wasn’t paying the bills.

With my father doing a majority of the bread earning working at a local group home, I started scouring the city for illegal prizefights. I was surprised by how many I could find. I fought in the backrooms of bars and in vacant parking lots. Seldom did I walk away with more than fifty bucks in my pocket, but every little bit counted.

Just as money started to really get tight, I heard about a Toughman competition they were having in Statesville, which was close to our home. Ever since I had won the money at the Redding Toughman contest, I had been keeping my eye out for them. There had been a couple of shows on the East Coast, but most of them had been a six-or seven-hour drive away from where we lived, and we didn’t want to waste the money on gas. But now that they had one in Statesville, I wasn’t going to pass up on the opportunity to make some easy money. And for the most part it was easy money. I blew through the competitors and took home close to a thousand dollars. That was more money than I made in several months doing professional wrestling, so when I heard that they were having another contest in Hickory, which was also close to our home, I went down there and entered it.

The purse for the winner of this tournament was $2,500. I went through my first two competitors with ease, but when I stepped into the finals the following day, I found myself up against a guy with over fifty armature fights. Seconds into the first round, he stepped forward and hit me with a six-or seven-punch combination. At that point, I still hadn’t learned any boxing skills. I knew enough about the sweet science, however, to realize that if I tried to get fancy, I would probably end up lying on the canvas with the whites of my eyes showing. So I did what came naturally—I started to brawl. I powered into him and hit him with these big sledgehammer fists. At one point, I even pushed him out of the ring. It was a tough back-and-forth battle, but in the end my street fighting experience put me over the top and dropped $2,500 in my pocket.

Before I could skip out to the parking lot, the promoter caught up to me. I knew something had been a little fishy in that last fight, and he confirmed my suspicions.

“Man,” he said, shaking his head, “you just beat my ringer.”

Most promoters were not in the habit of sharing the fact that they had a ringer in their tournament, but I could tell this guy was busted up over having lost $2,500. If the promoter’s ringer had won, the promoter would have only had to pay him what they’d agreed upon ahead of time, which, from the look on his face, was a lot less than $2,500. I figured that the only reason the promoter told me about the ringer was that he wanted me to become the new ringer. I wasn’t interested, not after doing a year of Buzz Sawyer’s dirty work, so I turned and walked away.

That decision came back to haunt me. I was getting the idea that I was pretty good at this Toughman thing, so whenever a tournament came around, I started to rely on the money before stepping into the ring. And it was a lot of money to count on. In my last competition, I had made more money in one night that I did in a year wrestling on the road. Well, I heard that they were having a tournament up in Charlotte for all the guys who had already won an event. It was sort of like the Ultimate Ultimate would be—everyone wanted to know who the toughest Toughman fighter was. I had already won two events, so I naturally thought that they would let me compete. I was wrong. They banned me from the event, and when I asked them why they had banned me, they said it was because I was too tough. Right then I knew what had happened. They had found another ringer, and this time they wanted to be sure that I didn’t go in there and beat him.

I didn’t spend too much time worrying about it because things were starting to happen for me in the world of professional wrestling. My name, Vince Tortelli, was starting to get around, and I got a chance to do a couple of house shows in Salem, Massachusetts, for the World Wrestling Federation (WWF). It was a pretty big deal. Most professional wrestlers wait years and years for such an opportunity. Some wait all of their life. So it was something that I took very seriously. I trained hard in preparation, determined to prove that I had what it took to entertain the masses.

And I think I did that in my first couple of matches. I was paired up with Barry Horowitz, a great worker who had been around a long, long time. He understood that professional wrestling was more than just a bunch of random moves and then a finish. He knew how to build a story around a match, create drama that the fans could identify with, and that’s exactly what we did. I walked away from our bouts feeling accomplished and satisfied. I felt like I had done a good job, and that’s all that really mattered to me because whether I got into the WWF or not was not something I could control.

Then they asked me back, and I got excited. I had passed the first stage of the tryout, and this was the second stage. I didn’t know how many stages there were, but I didn’t care. My goal was to reach the top, and I was currently taking the steps needed to get there. But instead of paring me up with Horowitz, who had made me look so damn good during my debut, they paired me up with Tom McGee. They called him “Mega Man,” but I had no idea why. He wasn’t Mega in anything he did. It’s not that he didn’t have any moves. He had plenty of moves. He just didn’t want or know how to string those moves together in a way that would build up the match. It’s not like you had to be a brain surgeon to be able to do that. He could have come out and socked me in the face, kicked me in the gut, and then picked me up and slammed me to the ground. While I rolled around in agony, he could have caught me in a painful hold and twisted my head. I would have kicked my feet, convulsed my body. Then, just before the ref pounded his hand for the third time on the canvas, I would have escaped. That would have built the match a little, got the fans riled up, but instead it was, “Hey, let’s just do these moves and we’re done.” He just wanted to go spot after spot after spot, and then “boom,” the finish.

I did two matches with him, and both of them turned out absolutely horrible. I remember coming backstage after our second bout completely depressed. I was still relatively green, still trying to get a foothold in the business, and I thought the lack of build had been my fault. While I was sulking, one of the Anderson brothers came up and tapped on my shoulder.

“Don’t worry about it,” he said. “It wasn’t you. That guy has a horrible match with everybody.”

It made me feel a little better, but it didn’t do any wonders for getting me into the WWF. After that last show with Mega Man, I didn’t hear back from them, so I continued wrestling for the SAPW on the East Coast. I figured if I made a big enough impact on the smaller circuits, then it was only a matter of time before the WWF gave me another chance.

I started to get to know more people and make more friends in the business. Every time one of those friends came through town on their circuit, my pop and I would put him up for a couple of nights so he didn’t have to stay in a hotel. Professional wrestlers are generally not the kind of men who like to sit around watching television, so we would go out and get some drinks. The problem was we almost always had someone over, so I was going out and getting drinks more often than my family or I liked. It was only a matter of time before I got into some kind of trouble.

As it turned out, that trouble started over a girl.

I was sitting up at the bar of a local dive with a friend of mine who wrestled on some of the smaller circuits. He and his girlfriend were in town for a few days, and naturally I had taken them out for a couple of drinks to show them some fun. As we were sitting there, the Nasty Boys came sauntering in. They were wrestling for the WWF at the time, and I guess they thought that gave them special privileges because the blond one, I believe his name is Knobs, came up to the bar and grabbed the chest of my buddy’s girlfriend.

She got mad, of course. I could tell my buddy wanted to come to her rescue, but he wasn’t much of a fighter. Besides, the Nasty Boys were with the WWF, and my buddy was desperately trying to get into the WWF. He didn’t want to stir up any unnecessary waves, so he let her handle it. And she seemed to be doing a pretty good job of it, too.

But then Knobs reached forward and pinched her chest again. My buddy spun around on his bar stool, but he managed to keep his cool. He said only three words—“Dude, come on.”

Back in the day I probably would have already been throwing punches, but I was trying to get away from stepping into the middle of every fight that happened. I had children now, and the last thing I needed was another lawsuit for hurting someone in public. I tried my hardest just to stay in my seat and drink my drink, but the moment Knobs laid his hands on my friend, all that anger and rage came bubbling back up to the surface.

“You know what,” I said to Knobs, standing up, “You better back up.”

I was still hoping that there would be some sort of peaceful resolution. I knew the Nasty Boys weren’t going to say they were sorry and buy my friend’s girlfriend a drink, but I was hoping they’d fire off a few nasty words and then skip out the door.

That didn’t happen. What did happen was Knobs put his hand on my face and shoved me back. I think he saw the change in my facial expression the moment he did that because he didn’t wait around for a response. By the time I could get my weight moving in a forward direction, both of them were already headed for the door. I was so mad that I would probably have caught them even though they had a good head start, but the bouncers intercepted me halfway across the floor.

“Come on, Ken, chill, chill, chill.”

When they let go of me, both of the Nasty Boys were long gone. The smart thing would have been to let it go, but that’s not something I could do. I had learned at five years of age what mattered most in my life. It wasn’t looks or money or health. It was my pride. The Nasty Boys had picked a fight with us. They had disrespected my friend’s girlfriend, then my friend, and then they had disrespected me. If I didn’t settle the score, they would walk away thinking I was a chump, and I couldn’t have that. The only thought circling around in my mind was I’m not going to let this happen!

I knew the hotel the Nasty Boys were staying in, so after I said goodnight to my friend and his girlfriend, I headed over there. I banged on their door for a good five minutes, and when they wouldn’t open it, I kicked the door down. As I stormed into their room, I saw Knobs lying on the bed. He looked passed out, and I started kicking the side of the bed to wake him up to fight me.

“Get up!” I shouted.

I remember seeing Knobs stir on the bed, and then my world went black. When I woke up an hour or so later, I was lying in the back of an ambulance. I had a broken sternum, and my eye socket was caved in. I was in such bad shape that the paramedics thought they were going to lose me before they could get me to the hospital. I looked like someone had run me over with a tractor several dozen times.

While recovering in the hospital over the next couple of months, I learned what had happened that night. I guess when I was beating on their door, the Nasty Boys realized that there was no way they were going to be able to stop me from getting into their room, so they worked up a little scheme. Knobs lay down in bed and pretended to be passed out, and his partner in crime, Saggs, ripped the phone out of the wall and hid in the closet. Now, I don’t know what kind of hotel this was, but they didn’t have your run-of-the-mill phone. Instead of being constructed primarily out of plastic, this one was constructed primarily out of steel. As I was preoccupied with kicking the bed in an attempt to wake Knobs up, Saggs came up behind me with that god-awful phone. He swung it over his shoulder with all of his might, hitting me upside the head and knocking me out cold.

It was a scenario you might see acted out in the WWE on Monday Night Raw, and they carried it just as far. Once I was down, they started tap dancing on my face and ribs and legs with their steal-toed boots. 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.