Controversy Creates Cash (4 page)

“stick man,” the guy who conducted all of the interviews.

The camera went on a few feet away, and Marty starts interviewing Wally Carbo. And Wally says,
“Yeah, Marty, we got a guy in
here we want to bring in, and he has something he wants to talk about.

His name’s Eric Bischoff. Eric, come on in here.”
So I went. I kind of looked into the camera and spilled out all this information. I was scared to death—but I was excited at the same time.

I don’t recall how we did in the match, but I’m sure we got our butts kicked. Europeans were much better at freestyle than we were. But that was my first appearance on television.

Working for a Living

I worked all through high school, in just about any job you can think of. I ran a Bobcat bulldozer, drove a dump truck, flipped pan-20

CONTROVERSY CREATES CASH

cakes, and even worked in an animal hospital cleaning up after the dogs, cats, monkeys—you name it, I cleaned up after it. I’d take whatever I could to make money part-time during school and full-time during the summer.

I really wasn’t that concerned with my studies. If it wasn’t for wrestling, I probably wouldn’t have stayed in high school at all.

Money interested me a lot more than academics. I wasn’t necessarily thinking clearly at the time, but school just wasn’t my thing.

In the spring of 1973, when I was a senior, I blew out my knee wrestling a kid by the name of Joe Boyer. Joe was real strong—farm strong. He had great upper-body strength and a low center of grav-ity which combined to make him hard to take down.

He and I locked up at the start of the match. I tried to do a lateral drop. He overpowered me, reversed the lateral drop, and mus-cled me over so hard that my upper body went in one direction and my right knee the other.

There was a loud pop and a snap. It wasn’t so much painful as eerie. My leg felt as if didn’t belong to me anymore.

My knee swelled up to the size of a small cantaloupe. To this day I don’t know exactly what I did, though over the years I’ve rein-jured it probably two or three dozen times. I’ve never had it operated on or even looked at. Knee surgery in the seventies wasn’t as advanced as it is today. Many of my friends at the time who had knee injuries and had surgery came out worse off than they were when they went in. I just said I’ll deal with it.

While I wrestled later that summer, my knee bothered me so much that I couldn’t work out regularly. That was pretty much the end of my amateur wrestling career.

Party School

In my senior year of high school, I suddenly realized all my friends were going off to college. I had never really planned on going to college, but when you’re seventeen or eighteen years old, and your THROWING ROCKS

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whole life has been your friends, and suddenly you realize they’re all going away, it dawns on you that you might want to go away with them.

One of my best friends from high school had decided he was going to St. Cloud State in St. Cloud, roughly an hour northwest of Minneapolis. I applied there, and for some reason—I have no idea why—they accepted me.

My friend and I shared a dorm room. I was only there for the parties and wasn’t really concerned about my studies. I did the bare minimum I had to do. Most of the time when I wasn’t partying, I worked for a freight company unloading freight cars full of lumber.

Not a fun job, but it kept me in beer and pizza.

I had a great time my freshman year, but I had to leave because I couldn’t afford it. I transferred to the University of Minnesota so I could live at home and regroup my finances.

Passions

My Own Boss

For a couple of years during high school, I worked for a landscape construction company. I ended up as a foreman of my own crew during the summer before college and was pretty good at building retaining walls and overseeing some of the larger commercial projects I was assigned to. By the time I was a sophomore in college, I decided to start my own landscaping firm. In the winter I plowed snow; during the summer I maintained lawns and did construction work. It wasn’t long before I was putting in a lot more time and effort into my business than into school. I went into a partnership with a friend of mine, and we ended up building a company that by 1975 or 1976 was one of the larger commercial landscape firms in the area. During our peak season we’d probably have thirty or forty employees, with eight trucks on the road. We got a contract with 22

CONTROVERSY CREATES CASH

the city of St. Paul to replace thousands and thousands of elm trees after Dutch elm disease hit the city, and that helped the company grow. Not long after, we were doing in excess of a million dollars a year in sales. Not bad for a couple of college kids.

More and more, college was just getting in the way. I was making more money than any three of my professors combined, and after a while it just didn’t make any sense to be going to college when I was building a business, so I officially dropped out.

By the way, that’s contrary to my “résumé” posted on a lot of Web sites. They claim I have a business degree, and studied radio and television in school. I never did any of that. I don’t even know where it came from. Someone says something in a chat room, and the next thing you know, it ends up on a Web page. It’s crazy.

I bought my first house at age twenty one, a block off the beach near Lake Minnetonka, a high-end suburb of Minneapolis. I bought a new car, had plenty of money, was living life. But as the business got bigger, I enjoyed it less and less. The pressure grew. My partner and I stopped getting along. I’ve always believed that if you’re not having fun doing what you’re doing, you shouldn’t do it. So I sold out my half of the company and took some time off.

I’d already found a new passion—martial arts.

Martial Arts

Somewhere around 1976, I enrolled in a martial arts class in tae kwan do, a Korean style of karate. My instructor was Gordon Franks, at the time the Professional Karate Association superlight champion of the world. He taught an American version of the traditional Korean fighting style that placed more emphasis on practical fighting.

I immediately fell in love with the sport. It was competitive, and something my knee would allow me to do. I really loved the contact. The school was known for being very aggressive and very physical. They prided themselves on the fact that their black belts were as tough as they could be.

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I pretty much dove into it and started competing in tournaments when I was still a gold belt, which is a beginner’s level. The only drawback with competing as a gold belt was that they didn’t let you kick or punch your opponent’s head. I liked kicking people in the head, so I didn’t get real enthusiastic about the tournament format until green belt.

As I progressed, I worked out five or six hours a day and competed in tournaments all over the country, especially in the Midwest. A group of us from the karate school traveled together. The fighting was good, and the partying was better.

Karate stars have groupies just like rock stars have groupies, and there was no shortage of hot girls at the tournaments—or the parties afterward. It was just a great time. You’d fight all day and party all night. But there was no prize money, and after a while competition became pretty expensive. In 1978 I took a job as an instructor at the school, but karate teachers and their assistants don’t make much money. I was probably earning about $600 a month and spending $400 on tournaments. Economically not the smartest thing I’ve ever done.

With Friends Like Me . . .

My matches have long since faded to a blur, except for the one I fought with a friend of mine named Randy Reid. Randy was one of the higher-rated black belts at the time. We became friends on the circuit, partying together. Once I made black belt, I knew it was inevitable that we’d meet. And we did, at a tournament down in Cedar Rapids, Iowa.

Randy was a lot faster than I was, but I hit a lot harder. Because of my knee injury, I’d had to reverse my fighting stance, putting my right leg forward and pivoting on my left. As a result of that, I became an unnatural southpaw. A lot of people were uncomfortable fighting me, for the same reason many right-handed boxers have trouble with a lefty.

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CONTROVERSY CREATES CASH

When the match started, Randy blew across the line right at me.

I caught him with a straight left that splattered his nose. I knew immediately that I had broken it.

Blood was everywhere.

They stopped the fight. He decided he wanted to continue.

Once they restarted the fight, the first thing I did was sweep his legs out from underneath him. He hit the floor on his back.

Randy went down, and he was right on the edge of the ring, almost out of bounds. I kind of looked at him over my shoulder and did a little “fade-away” that made him think I was going to let him get up. As he put his hands down to prop himself up, I spun and stomped on his broken nose.

Which
really
splattered it. I think I have a picture somewhere around the house of three or four judges with towels mopping blood up off the gymnasium floor. That was the end of the match. I lost due to “excessive contact” (which was better than winning a trophy, as far as I was concerned). Randy and I had beers and chased girls that night. He would have done the same to me.

I gave up martial arts around 1981, after competing as a black belt for a little more than a year. There was no money in it, and being a karate instructor was not something I aspired to do. It had been an important time of my life, but it was time to move on.

A Knack for Sales

I went to work as a salesman for a company named Blue Ribbon Foods. Blue Ribbon made and delivered bulk frozen food to individual homes. They would generate leads and turn them over to salesmen to close the deals.

Most of the work was in the early evening, leaving the bulk of my day free. I tried it initially because I didn’t want to work nine to five but still wanted to make a lot of money. Typically people who make a lot of money and don’t want to work a nine-to-five job are either really good salesmen or drug dealers. Drug dealing wasn’t a choice.

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The guy I worked for at Blue Ribbon was named Irv Mann. Irv was an old-school direct salesman. He was Jewish, and in fact I was probably one of the only non-Jews Irv hired up to that time. Not only that, but I was under the age of fifty. Most of the other guys were all over fifty, Jewish, and old-school direct sales guys. Why Irv took a chance on me, I don’t know.

Direct sales as a whole tends to use the hard-core, one-time sales closer. If you’ve ever watched the movie
Tin Men,
you’ll see what I mean. The movie really caught what direct sales was like back then: pretty aggressive, don’t take no for an answer.

Irv showed me how to structure a pitch and read a potential sale, how to overcome objections, when to close and when not to close. He really taught me a lot.

I worked at Blue Ribbon until 1982. I made quite a bit of money doing it. I probably closed 30 to 40 percent of my calls, which made me one of the better salespeople in the company.

Why was I good at sales? I don’t know, really. Perhaps I had the ability to communicate, or convey a certain amount of trust to the person I was “pitching.” I give a lot of credit to Irv Mann. He trained me well. Whatever the secret was, I’ve had decent success as a salesman my whole life.

While I was working for Blue Ribbon, I was approached by someone who suggested I might make a good male model.

A model?

It wasn’t exactly a career choice I had ever considered. I didn’t think much about the idea—until I found out that it was good money, and I’d only have to work during the day, leaving the evenings for my sales calls. I went down to a modeling agency, did a couple of different test shots, and within a few weeks started getting jobs for places like Target, which was based in Minneapolis. Modeling was a way to make extra money, and it paid pretty well.

It’s also how I met my wife, Loree.

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Romance

It wasn’t any of that love-at-first-sight stuff. In fact, I wasn’t really interested in a relationship at the time. But I
did
notice her instantly. She was hot—really hot. And this was in a room full of very attractive people. Little did I know this girl was going to become the love of my life and the mother of my children.

We hit it off right away. There was one stumbling block: Loree was not only a model, but part owner of an agency I was working with. And they had a “no fraternization” policy.

Yeah—right! I got her number, and we went out for drinks a week or two later. The relationship picked up pretty good steam from that point on, and pretty soon we were an item.

Loree had been modeling since she was four or five, and wanted to make a career of it. We knew if there was any future for either of us as models, it would be in Chicago or New York. We had some friends who’d moved to Chicago and really enjoyed it. We didn’t have anything holding us back, so we both decided to give it a whirl. We were both up for a change. We wanted an adventure. So we packed everything we owned into a 1970 pickup truck and moved to Chicago. It was in the winter, and it was cold and miserable and overcast, but we enjoyed every minute of it.

We found a studio apartment downtown. Loree got a job as a cocktail waitress at night so she could run around town and attempt to launch her modeling career during the day, and I got a job as a bartender and doorman down on Rush and Division Street in downtown Chicago so I could do the same thing. Doormen were bouncers, but they didn’t like to call them that on Rush Street.

Chicago was a cool town. We had a ball living there, but modeling is a very competitive business. After a year or so, we realized it wasn’t there for us.

Money got tight. Things got to the point just after Christmas that the power company shut off all the power to our apartment.

I was twenty-six, maybe closer to twenty-seven. I realized it was THROWING ROCKS