Controversy Creates Cash (3 page)

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CONTROVERSY CREATES CASH

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My brother Mark and one of his friends outside our house in Detroit.

My brother and I would practice the moves we saw on the living room floor. We got so we would script our fight scenes out and go through them in slow motion.

In those days, pro wrestling was divided into territories around the country. Every region had a different set of wrestlers, with their own “world champion.” There were several large regional promotions with their own stars. Each had its own “world champion.” But because this was the early sixties, before cable television, most viewers didn’t realize that. Nor did they know anything about what happened behind the scenes. Even though matches were now being televised, wrestling was still very close to its original roots as a carnival sideshow. Kayfabe, the private language used by those in the business, ruled the industry.

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The Working Life

I got my first job when I was six or seven, or maybe eight. An Italian couple owned a little grocery store named Lucy’s down the block from my house. I used to hang around there a lot, and one day the owners asked me to pick up the litter in the parking lot and around the store. When I was done, I got to reach into the cash register; whatever coins I could get in my hands in one try was what I was paid. Soon I graduated to sorting and stacking their returned bottles.

I’ve been working ever since.

School got tougher and tougher. From fifth grade or so, I was in at least one fight a day. I’d get into a fistfight on my way to school, and more often than not one on the way home. I rarely came out on top. I was kind of a scrawny kid and not very good with my fists, but that didn’t matter much. The older kids were always picking on the younger kids, bigger kids always beating on smaller. Violence was a way to entertain yourself in Detroit, and it escalated as I got older.

Kids brought weapons like lead pipes and knives to school. It was a small-time arms race.

Showdown for $7

The very last day I spent in Detroit, I purposely brought seven dollars to school. This was a time when thirty-five cents bought lunch, and having even that in your pocket was like walking with a sign around your neck volunteering for an ass-kicking.

But I said to myself, I’m going to have some fun today. I let everybody know I had seven dollars. By the time shop class came around toward the end of the day, there was a buzz going around:
Bischoff’s carrying money.

The thing about shop class was that the teacher always left early.

Always. We’d sit in the class listening to the end-of-the-day announcements, and he’d be gone.

As soon as the teacher left, a kid came in to confront me. He 14

CONTROVERSY CREATES CASH

hung with a tougher crowd, but he wasn’t much himself. I pulled a metal handle from one of the vises sitting in the shop area and creased the top of his head with it. Then the bell rang, and it was time to go home.

For about twelve hours, I was a legend in the school. Of course, if I’d had to go back the next day, his friends would have beaten the hell out of me. But I didn’t. We were off to Pittsburgh.

Moving Up

Pittsburgh

In 1968, when I was in eighth grade, my dad got a job opportunity in Pittsburgh. We packed up and moved to suburban Penn Hills, Pennsylvania. We thought we’d died and gone to heaven.

The development we lived in was more middle class, a definite step up from Detroit. Our house was twice as big as our old one. It had a finished basement where Mark, Lori and I could play. There were woods in the backyard where we could build tree forts and camp out at night, and a creek where we could catch crawfish. It was just amazing to see hills and mountains all around instead of city streets.

Saturday-morning wrestling was replaced with Saturday-night wrestling, but my brother Mark and I were still big fans. This was the first time I realized there were different “world champions” in every part of the country. Bruno Sammartino was the champion in Pittsburgh.

Sammartino began wrestling in 1959. During the 1960s, he was wrestling for what was then WWWF (now WWE), and already known as a wrestling legend. He was the shit at the time.

Besides his ability as a wrestler, Sammartino was a real and believable character. He was the workingman. Pittsburgh was a blue-collar town, with the steel mills and other industries. Sammartino

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Pittsburgh. “Born to be wild.”

really represented that, which was one of the reasons I think he was so popular.

He was also a local guy, and as it happened, he lived not too far away from our home. My friends and I used to cruise by his house on our bikes, hoping to maybe catch a glimpse of him. We never did, but we felt privileged just to live close by.

Wrestling

School in Penn Hills was very different than what I’d been used to in Detroit, and the only real fighting I did was as a wrestler. I believe I started out in the 126-pound weight class in junior high. I was an average wrestler, real average—not horrible, just real average. But I enjoyed it. I’d grown up fighting, and this was an organized way to do it.

I also continued to work. My neighbor, a guy named Bob Racioppi, hired me to do odd jobs and light construction around his 16

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home. He became kind of a big brother to me, doing things with me that my dad could no longer do, like hunting. He introduced me to martial arts, showing me some moves and whetting my appetite for karate. Then he got me my first job with a roofing company when I was fourteen.

I don’t know if you’re born with confidence, or if it’s generated by the way you’re brought up. Part of it for me, a big part, was the work ethic my father instilled in me. It lent itself to success. I’ve always felt a lot of confidence, and succeeded in what I set out to do by hard work. I give my father credit for that, and my mother credit for developing a desire to grow and not to settle for less.

Minneapolis & Wrestling

In 1970, when I was in tenth grade, my father got a new job in Minneapolis. I didn’t really want to leave Pittsburgh. I had great friends there and really felt at home. But it wasn’t up for a vote. It happened that the son of the real estate agent who sold us our home was the captain of the high school wrestling team and about my age. He introduced me to the coach and some of his teammates, and helped me fit in.

Wrestling quickly became one of the few things I really liked about school. I lettered when I was a junior, though I was never really a standout when it came to tournaments. I enjoyed it, and it was really where I made most of my friends. Besides wrestling on the school team, I joined a club that competed with others through-out the region.

Drugs

This was the late sixties and early seventies, when legend has it that everyone did drugs. But the facts are different. I was never into drugs myself, and neither were most of my friends.

One time I was tempted to try speed, the nickname for a partic-THROWING ROCKS

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ular kind of amphetamine. There was a girl I knew, a pretty popular girl, who experimented with Black Beauties in school. I saw her in the morning, and she could hardly stand still. Later on I saw her in the hallway, and blood was coming out of her mouth. She was so

“speedy,” she had literally chewed the inside of her mouth bloody.

That convinced me to pass on the whole damn idea.

As I got older, I experimented with pot like a lot of other people did. I never really enjoyed that much either. Sitting around staring at a television and laughing about stupid shit you couldn’t remember the next day just didn’t appeal to me.

What I did like was riding motorcycles. I started riding a minibike when I was about ten and graduated to motorcycles when I turned sixteen. My first bike was a Honda 160. I soon traded that in for a Honda Super Hawk. The Super Hawk was a milestone motorcycle of the early 1960s, with overhead cams and a 305cc engine that redlined at 9,200 rpms. I went through maybe a half dozen bikes, each one getting bigger and faster, until I got a Kawasaki 900.

At just over five hundred pounds, the bike could produce 82 horsepower. It was a rocket.

About the craziest thing I ever tried to do on a bike was jump the Kawasaki. Jumping dirt bikes is one thing; launching a heavy street bike like that is something else. On about the fourth or fifth attempt I crashed midair into the side of a garage next to my friend’s house. I tore the bike up pretty good. That was the end of my motorcycle jumping career.

Verne Gagne & the AWA

Verne Gagne’s
All-Star Wrestling Show
was big in the Minnesota area at the time, a must-watch for me every Saturday night at six.

A former marine and amateur college wrestler, Gagne had started wrestling professionally in 1948. He founded the American Wrestling Association in 1960, and within a few years built it into one of the country’s strongest promotions. Besides Minnesota, the 18

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AWA promoted wrestling in territories in the Midwest, Las Vegas, San Francisco, and a few other smaller cities and towns. Verne and his son Greg Gagne were among the featured wrestlers, with guys like Nick Bockwinkel and Chief Wahoo McDaniel, Larry “the Axe” Hennig, who had a head as big as a Corvair, Baron Von Raschke, and Ray “the Crippler” Stevens, among other stars.

I still remember enjoying a few of the big shows the AWA held in Minnesota. The promotion had an annual Thanksgiving show.

Watching wrestling was just the thing to do after sitting around the house stuffing your face all day.

Meeting the Man

I met Verne Gagne once or twice over the course of my high school wrestling career. Verne lived in a little town called Mound, Minnesota, which was just three miles down the road from where I lived.

Much like we did with Bruno Sammartino, we’d drive by Verne Gagne’s neighborhood and hope that we might see him by his house.

When I was a senior, my AAU freestyle wrestling team was selected to compete against a team from Sweden that was touring the United States. We needed to sell tickets and get the word out, but we had no money for advertising.

Verne supported amateur wrestling in a lot of ways, often using his show to help different amateur teams get publicity So I came up with the idea of calling him and maybe getting a plug on one of his wrestling shows. I called the AWA offices and talked to Wally Karbo. Karbo was the “face” of AWA, the guy who viewers at home saw promoting the event.

“Hey, I’m Eric Bischoff,” I told Karbo when the receptionist turned the call over to him. The words jetted out of my mouth.

“I’m with the Minnetonka wrestling team, we’re taking on Sweden, we need some support. Is there any way I can come on the air and do an interview and let people know when we’re wrestling, where we’re wrestling, and try and sell some tickets?” THROWING ROCKS

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“Sure, kid,” he said to my breathless surprise. “Come on down to the studio, and we’ll get you on the air.” I was ecstatic. I couldn’t believe it.

My buddies and I drove over to Channel 11 on Saturday morning. We were sitting outside the building, waiting for the appointed time to arrive, when we saw Greg Gagne and Jim Brunzell come walking in. They wrestled as the High Flyers, the World Tag Team Champions at AWA. Then we saw Wahoo McDaniel, then Ray Stevens, Larry Hennig—we saw all these stars in person.

It was amazing. And we knew we were going to be on the same show
they
were going to be on. For real.

We went inside, and they gave us a place to wait right in the studio itself, near the television cameras. Sure enough, out came Wally Karbo and an announcer by the name of Marty O’Neill. Marty had an old-time cigarette-and-Scotch-whisky voice, a rasp that told anyone listening that something exciting was going to happen
right
now
. He was about five feet nothing, sixty or seventy years old, and looked like an old-school carnival barker. Marty was the AWA’s