“But you can’t do that in a lumberjack match,” Blair said, laughing in disbelief.
“Hey, it’s Herb’s show,” I said right back, “we can do anything.”
A few months later, I read of Herb’s passing in a wrestling newsletter. I called over Colette, who had gotten to know Herb pretty well, and began reading the article, but couldn’t get through it without laughing in spite of myself. Like his life, Herb Abrams’s death had been way over the top. Apparently someone had alerted the police to a disturbance in a high-rise office in Manhattan, and when they got there, they found women screaming in the hallway, and little Herb running around naked, bathed in baby oil, and swinging a baseball bat, with which he was destroying furniture. He was taken into custody and died shortly after from a massive heart attack.
Colette and I sat down and mourned Herb’s death by sharing stories of his life and laughing at what a character he had been. I think Herb would have liked it that way.
In March 1991, I headed to Japan for a one-month tour of Japan for All-Japan Wrestling, which was owned by legendary promoter and wrestler Giant Baba. Baba was one of those great mysteries I have never figured out, in that fans went absolutely nuts over his every move, most of which looked like they couldn’t break an egg. Still, Baba had run the successful promotion for decades and I was excited about my trip as I really felt like it might turn into a full-time job. All-Japan ran regular tours throughout the year, and some Americans, like Stan Hansen, worked them all, which added up to twenty-six weeks a year.
I had been a fan of Japanese wrestling for years, ever since seeing my first Tiger Mask-Dynamite Kid match at Brian Hildebrand’s house in 1986. I had since amassed a huge library of Japanese tapes, which I studied diligently for hours every day, in the basement apartment in Huntington that Colette and I had moved into a few months earlier.
I opened up a Thomas Harris book called Red Dragon as we took off from JFK and was just finished when the plane touched down in Narita Airport. I had trained hard for this match, both mentally and physically, and was ready to take on the Orient.
I did well in All-Japan-so well, in fact, that rumors started circulating about a twenty-week-a-year offer that was going to come my way. This was great. There would be no politics or Ole Anderson to shove me down, and I could feel fulfilled living out my wrestling fantasies 8,000 miles from home.
I ran into trouble at the end of my first week when I broke three ribs in a match with Jumbo Tsuruta, and even more when I broke Johnny Ace’s elbow at the end of week number two. I was attempting to suplex Ace (who was Shane Douglas’s fellow Dynamic Dude in WCW) backward off the top rope-a move that he intended to counter by turning it into a cross body block that would end up with Johnny on top of me as I bumped backward to the mat. Unfortunately, when I tucked my chin to my chest to protect myself, I also clamped Ace’s arm under my chin too, and he was unable to get free in time. When we hit, I heard him groan and I knew he was hurt and I knew I was screwed.
Johnny was Mrs. Baba’s favorite wrestler, which suddenly put me out of favor with her. Seeing as how many people felt she actually had more influence on the company than her husband, being out of favor with her was not a good place to be. I called Colette after the match and explained the injury. “That’s it, Mick,” she yelled enthusiastically, “you show them that they can’t push you around.” When I explained to her the ramifications of the injury, however, her enthusiasm quickly withered.
I later found out (years later) that I had other things working against me in Japan as well, none of which had to do with the quality of my matches, which had been high. I had come to Japan as a big fan of Bruiser Brody, who had run roughshod over not just the Japanese wrestlers, but their fans as well. The fans loved it; you could see them with huge smiles on their faces as they ran from Brody, as he threw punches at whoever was dumb enough to stick around. They didn’t sue over things like that in Japan, they considered it a compliment. I even watched in shock when we got off the bus at Korakuen Hall in Tokyo and saw one of the wrestlers punch a fan who got too close, right in the face. I was even more shocked to see the same fan bow down, while holding his face, and say, “Sank you, sank you very much.” This place was crazy, and even though I wasn’t into punching fans, I got prepared to play along.
Over the course of my first few weeks-the pre-Ace injury weeks-1 had made it a habit of diving into the crowd. I would charge a guy, and he would backdrop me into the fans. I would shoot another guy into the metal guard rail, and he’d reverse it and I’d end up flying backward into the crowd. It was as if all of Japan was my own personal mosh pit.
Unfortunately, however, fans were getting hurt-not just from me landing on them, but in their attempts to get out of the way of my 287 pounds as well. Just as unfortunately, the Japanese wrestling publications had taken to calling me “The American Onita,” in honor of a popular hardcore FMW (Frontier Martial Arts Wrestling) wrestler, and had taken to calling my matches “FMW style.” Apparently, this didn’t sit well with Baba, who considered the Onita-led FMW to be “garbage wrestling” and certainly didn’t enjoy the comparison. Eventually referee Joe Aguchi came to me and said sadly, “Jack-san [“san” in Japan is a sign of respect], Mr. Baba ask you please stop hurting fans.”
It wasn’t the last time that Aguchi came to me with a request from Baba, as a short while later he became the bearer of bad news again. “Jack-san,” poor old Joe again sadly began, “Mr. Baba wants you to maybe wear nicer clothes.”
“Didn’t he get it?” I thought as I looked at my sweats, suede fringe Indian boots, and red flannel. “It’s not the clothes, it’s me.” The rest of the guys, for the most part, wore loose athletic pants and tank tops or sweatshirts. If I was put in those same clothes, I would still look bad. Hell, years later, in the World Wrestling Federation, I wrestled in a tuxedo just because they knew how bad I would look in stylish clothes. In retrospect, I’m glad I didn’t figure all this out until later, because I would have had a miserable time. As it was, I wasn’t exactly having the time of my life, as I missed Colette terribly, to the point that I was writing her letters daily, which I later burned and buried so that I would never have to risk my children finding out just how lonely a guy their dad had been over in Japan.
At the end of two weeks, the Funk Brothers were flown in for the second part of the tour. Terry and his brother Dory had helped build the entire sport in Japan, and to this day are loved by the fans for their thirty-year history there. I was excited as hell to finally have a match with the Funker, whom I had remained in contact with since we both split from WCW. I loved Terry’s style, and during the course of my career have borrowed liberally from it, a fact that the Funker was honored by when I asked his permission to rip him off shamelessly. “Cactus Jack,” he had told me just a few months earlier, “you can take anything of mine you want because the old Funker is just about done.” Nine years later, at age fifty-four, he is doing somersaults off ten-foot balconies.
No matter what mannerisms I “borrowed,” I knew that I would never throw a punch like Terry’s, which was truly a thing of beauty. Many people, including me, considered the Funker’s big left hand to be the nicest punch in the business. A few minutes into the big match, Terry took me into the corner, and I saw him rear back with the big left. This was going to be great. Here it comes. Thwack. I felt like I did when I was eight and my mother came clean about Santa Claus. I had just learned the hidden “secret” of the great Funk left hand. It was so simple-l’d been a fool for not knowing the whole time. Terry Funk had just punched me as hard as he could in the forehead.
“No wonder that punch looks so good,” I later whined to Terry. “You hit me as hard as you could.”
“Oh, Cactus Jack,” Terry mumbled and laughed in his kindly old Uncle Terry way, which made it impossible to be angry with him, “all this time, you thought that I was just really good.”
I got to know Stan Hansen well in Japan, and in an odd way, he went on to play a major ro
le in my life. Stan was a true superstar in Japan, and he had been there so long that he was almost a part of the culture. He had been Brody’s partner for several years, and I think he kind of liked the little bit of Brody he saw in me. Hansen was known as the stiffest of all the American wrestlers, and his “lariat” or clothesline was a destructive force, partly because of the force he threw it with and partly because he could barely see without his glasses and had no idea where he was hitting guys with it.
Hansen was a legitimately tough guy, but like most tough guys, he didn’t feel the need to prove it, and he was actually a true gentleman outside the ring. Sensing that I was not a party guy, Stan kind of took me under his wing and began bringing me out with him so that I wouldn’t just sit for hours in my room, as he correctly guessed I would have. He was also a great family man who talked so much about his kids that I seriously began to think about having a little one of my own. Colette had talked to me about the idea before, but I had never felt ready for the responsibility. I walked out of Shakey’s “all you can eat” pizza restaurant one early afternoon and told Stan that I’d catch up with him later, as I had a phone call I needed to make. As Stan walked away, I dialed the United States, where it was about eleven o’clock at night. “Hello,” Colette sleepily answered, “who is it?”
“It’s me,” I said anxiously followed by, “Would you like to have a baby?”
When I came home, I was exhausted, sore, and at $1,500 a week for four weeks, about six grand richer. My ribs had bothered me for the entire trip, to the point that I had to wear a flak jacket afterward for several months. I had a trip to the Caribbean island of Aruba a few days later and brought Colette with me. It was there, with dedication, hard work, and relentless repetition, that we went about the arduous task of conceiving a child. I had been warned over the years by other wrestlers that I might be risking damage to my reproductive system by the constant pounding I was taking on the cold, hard, concrete floor. Because of the high-impact landings, they feared that I might not be able to have a child. In Aruba, I was determined to prove those experts wrong.
I had some tremendous matches as an independent, but will probably best be remembered during this time for the series of matches I had with Eddie Gilbert for Joel Goodhart in Philadelphia. Goodhart ran the Tri-State Wrestling Association, or TWA, which was the precursor of Extreme Championship Wrestling, or ECW. He believed in a hardcore, bloody style and had his own theory on what made a show successful. “Most groups’ first match doesn’t mean anything,” he was fond of saying, “but our guys are different. We want the first match to go all over the building so people can’t wait to see what’s next.”
Now this might sound like simple logic, but to me, it flies in the face of the scientifically proven “three ring circus” theory of wrestling, in that there is something for everyone. If you didn’t like the clowns, you would like the elephants, and so on and so forth. To me Joel’s shows were the circus equivalents of seeing a guy get shot out of a cannon thirty times. On small shows, in little high schools, Joel would force-feed this repetitious menu of violence for so long that most people looked like they would never want to attend wresting again upon leaving. ECW is often much the same way, but they have a much better assortment of characters to have some fun with.
As he was my most consistent booker, however, I was very thankful to Joel. His quarterly extravaganzas in the Philadelphia Civic Center were the biggest independent shows in the country. It was in these shows that my matches with Eddie took place. After seeing Eddie and me in action in late 1990, Joel booked us in a “falls count anywhere” match (pinfalls count anywhere in the building) a few months later. I considered that match to be the best of my career for two years, right until my match at Beach Blast in June 1992 took over the honors. On the heels of that, Goodhart asked me if I would be interested in doing a barbed wire match with Eddie.
In these days, until Japan raised the bar by taking down the ropes and stringing up wire in its place, barbed wire was simply strung up between the ropes. While it wasn’t as dangerous as the conditions I would later wrestle in, it still was no day at the beach, and I knew that considerable risk went along with it. I was very tentative about doing the match, unless it was done under the right conditions, and one of my conditions was that the match seem special by keeping it as the sole gimmick on the card. “I’ll do it,” I told Joel, “but only if we cut down on the blood in the other matches.”
I drove to Philadelphia with Colette, who by this time had already seen enough injury and punishment inflicted on me to be concerned about any match, let alone one with barbed wire involved. I was nervous, yet excited about the match, and I was getting dressed when I saw a preliminary wrestler walk by with a little trickle of blood on his forehead. “That’s odd,” I thought, but went back to getting ready. A minute later, another wrestler, another trickle. I started to become concerned. Next I saw another wrestler walk in who had not a trickle of the red stuff, but a whole face full of it. Now I was worried. Who was going to watch my gorefest with Eddie if all of Joel’s wrestling school guys were bleeding in the first match? I asked one of the guys with the trickle (let’s just call him trickle number one) what was going on.
“Oh, we were in the battle royal,” he said.
“So, why are you bleeding from a battle royal,” I wanted to know.
“It’s a last blood battle royal,” he quickly replied.
“Last blood?” I asked disbelievingly, even though I really knew the answer to my own question.
“Yeah,” trickle number two piped in, “the last guy not bleeding is the winner.”
Immediately I ran out and caught the last five minutes of one of the sorriest affairs I’d ever seen. Ten guys, some of whom had never had match before, were fighting in and around the ring. They were trying to poke, prod, gig, hit, and bust one another and themselves in an attempt to draw blood. So much for cutting down the blood in the other matches.
Eddie and I were forced to turn up the volume in our match even higher than we would have. As a result, the match was actually ruled a no-contest when I became so badly wrapped up in the barbed wire that I couldn’t get out. Normally a no-contest ruling would be a reason to riot in Philly, but because of the serious nature of the predicament I was in, the fans were respectful. Actually, they were pretty concerned. Even when Colette came out to check on me, I didn’t hear a single catcall, even though compassion was usually a dirty word to Goodhart’s fans.
In the ring, meanwhile, Eddie was doing a number on a couple of younger wrestlers, after piledriving the referee. After the match, the strangest occurrence took place as the referee was brought out on a gurney and placed into the ambulance. I was lying in the hall with several holes in me. Eddie had passed out from blood loss and exhaustion, and the referee was rushed to the emergency room for the simple reason that he was afraid to tell the EMT people that he was faking it.
Goodhart was excited about the match and all the media attention that he was receiving because of it. A few weeks after the barbed wire match, he told me of his master plan-a two-of-three-falls match with Gilbert and me, with each match being a gimmick match. Together we came up with the matches-a falls count anywhere, a stretcher match (the loser is the first one unable to get up), and a steel cage match.
To do all of these in one night would certainly be challenging, not to mention exhausting, and I embarked on a rather strenuous training program for the big night. I actually felt like I was in the best shape of my career as I pulled into the Civic Center. What followed were forty minutes of what Eddie Gilbert actually called the best matches in his life. Coming from Eddie that was high praise, as he was one of the most talented and hardest-working guys in the business before his untimely death three years later in Puerto Rico.
When I was given the chance to come back to WCW following the three-way match, Eddie was invited as well. As a matter of fact, we had the same starting date, but Eddie didn’t show. Part of the reason, Eddie explained o
n the phone, was that he didn’t want to tarnish the reputation of what he and I had accomplished. After leaving WCW under less than ideal circumstances a year and a half earlier, Eddie felt that he was going to be punished upon his return, and part of his punishment, as he saw it, was to be placed in situations where he could never live up to our reputation for great matches. How could we? In TWA, we had pulled out all the stops, and had engaged in what would more accurately be called wars, as opposed to matches. WCW would never allow that to happen, and Eddie refused to give anyone Gilbert vs. Cactus unless it was allowed to be done right.
We tried to resurrect our history after I left WCW in 1994, but could never quite get it done. I regret that. I also regret not wrestling on the first Eddie Gilbert Memorial Card right before I went to the World Wrestling Federation because I know it would have meant a lot to his brother Doug and his mom and dad. The best I can do is remember Eddie for what he was to me-a teacher, a mentor, and a friend.
Chapter 13
I had wrestled independently for the past fourteen months. In that time I had improved tremendously, gained valuable confidence, learned to work the mike, and had a much better idea of who I was in the ring and what I was trying to accomplish. Unfortunately, my bank account had not expanded at the same rate that my wrestling had, and with Colette two months pregnant, I decided to more actively pursue more gainful employment.
At the time, one of the promotions I was working for was Joe Pedecino’s Global Wrestling Federation, which was using my old stamping grounds of the Dallas Sportatorium as its base of operations. Supposedly Joe had a backer from Nigeria who had $10 million to invest in the promotion, but I’d been around too long and heard too many rumors and promises to believe anything I heard. So with nothing to lose I boarded a bus from New York to Baltimore to serve as the special guest on a wrestling trip to the Great American Bash. This had historically been one of WCW’s premier events, but WCW was in a state of disarray. Ric Flair had just left the company and “We want Flair” chants echoed throughout the arena. Both the show in Baltimore and the promotion seemed to lack direction. After the show I made my way backstage and said hello to some of the boys. I introduced myself to Magnum T. A., who was the assistant booker for the company. At one time, Magnum was a main event wrestler, a definite future world champion, whose career had been cut short due to a tragic car accident. Magnum didn’t exactly gush all over me-l guess he hadn’t been privy to my feud with David Sammartino-but he did offer some encouragement.