Dusty: Reflections of Wrestling's American Dream (17 page)

That just kind of gives you an idea of what went on and how things were done back then. They were done in secrecy and it was done where only a few people knew what was going on without any thought of who it was going to hurt or who it’s not going to hurt, and it was done only for “What’s it going to do for me.” Unfortunately, I think that goes without saying in any walk of life for any business.

Anyway, that’s what I thought of Vince Sr. and the respect that I had for him and the way he did his business.

Business is business.

C
HAPTER
9

W
hile Vince was on his crusade to capture the world of pro wrestling, we were busy trying to fight his “Evil Empire” from an office in Charlotte, North Carolina; an office that would eventually lose the battle due to mismanagement and miscommunication.

Since its demise, there have been people throughout the years who claim that I was solely responsible for the downfall of Jim Crockett Promotions. This issue needs to be laid to rest once and for all, because quite simply, that’s just bullshit.

I’ve often said that the Crockett era was the sweetest era and it could never be matched again. Mid-Atlantic Championship Wrestling was a special place in our history. The guys who worked there—Ric Flair, Arn Anderson, Tully Blanchard, Ronnie Garvin, Magnum T.A., Nikita Koloff and others— were all stars because of TBS … and because I was the guy in charge, like the captain of a ship. Before Eddie had died, I had a chance to make a tremendous amount of money running Jim Crockett Promotions.

Facts are facts. Wrestling-wise, I went in and ran his company the way I saw fit. I had already gained power before arriving there, as I explained earlier, even helping them book their territory while still in Florida. But once I got there, I garnered so much power that I was able to do, with just a word, things that were just unheard of; things that revolutionized our industry, like Starrcade, The Great American Bash, The Crockett Cup, Clash of the Champions and War Games, to name a few.

“‘The American Dream,’ Dusty Rhodes identified his physical liabilities and turned them into positives on his way to becoming one of the most famous wrestlers of any era. The son of a plumber from Austin, Texas, had a Texas-sized helping of charisma, passion and the overwhelming will to be the best in his chosen field. No athlete—and ‘The Dream’ was a very underrated athlete—in their prime better connected with the fans than Dusty Rhodes. Dusty gets a bad rap from some of his peers because of his in-ring prominence when he was the man in charge behind the curtain. But my guess is that not one of them would have positioned themselves any differently if given the opportunity. Dusty Rhodes is a Hall of Famer in my eyes.”

—J
IM
R
OSS

But while we were revolutionizing the industry, in the shadows of the greatest promotion in history was a guy named Dave Johnson, a bookkeeper … an accounting person … a tax guy … who oversaw all the books there.

To me the Crocketts were the North Carolina version of the Kennedys. They owned property. They owned baseball teams. They were a powerful southern family … phenomenal. And on the wrestling side, Jimmy Crockett paid unbelievably, but for a good reason.

The arena business was unmatched in our era. The amount of business we were doing was unheard of thanks to some of the most talented workers in the history of the business who busted their asses seven days a week and twice on Sunday. I was fortunate to be at the helm, steering the ship, and couldn’t have been more proud of our crew.

Right around that time, this thing the wrestlers called “the sheets” started coming out, and all of a sudden there was a guy who had never been in our business, with opinions about our business, who catered to a small group of fans. Over time that small group has swelled into many, many fans, but at that point for the first time the business started to be unwound a little bit, it started to be exposed a little bit, it started to become, “This is what I think. …” It was almost like a reviewer of a movie and while others let these “sheets” influence their actions, I would never let the opinion of people who were not in our business sway what I believed.

“Although I thought at the time Dusty could have helped some of us underneath guys make it to the next level or be more than just curtain jerkers, at least he gave me the opportunity to wrestle in order to make ends meet, and for that I was grateful. While some workers might be bitter at Dusty because they might feel he didn’t give them a shot, I’m not one of them. … I still regard him as a Superstar and one of the greatest creative minds in the business today. A lot of people owe him because he put money in their pocket. I think he takes a lot of undue criticism.”

—R
IKKI
N
ELSON
, W
RESTLER

Meanwhile, there came a time when we thought we were spending too much money on transportation to get the guys from one city to another and so we decided we needed to get some type of plane like any corporation doing a lot of travel would have.

But we didn’t just get one plane, we got two, and from that point forward we lived like rock stars. The jet was the elite plane of the two and it would go across the country to places like Los Angeles or wherever else it was needed to go. One thing we didn’t need to do was stop in Las Vegas. But Jimmy always wanted to stop there. So if we were on a California swing, we would base the tour out of Sin City, flying back and forth every day. Like I said, we lived like rock stars in an unbelievable era.

“When Dusty was the booker in Charlotte, I was there with Al Perez. As we were getting ready to get on one of the two planes, here comes Dusty driving up in his red Mercedes convertible. He started unloading a Haliburton, a Louis Vuitton and a Gucci bag to put on the plane. I looked at him and said, ‘Is all this necessary? Or are you really that busy?’”

—P
LAYBOY
G
ARY
H
ART

Even the parking lot at Jim Crockett Promotions looked like a parking lot for the rich and famous. It was an auto collector’s wet dream from Magnum’s Porsche to his white Harley to Flair’s Mercedes to my Mercedes to the different trucks … everybody had a new set of wheels. Arn Anderson, who like me came from humble beginnings where he hardly had anything in his life that he didn’t earn, was driving a new Mercedes.

“There was never a time that I wasn’t grateful for the opportunity to work for him. I’d call Dusty every Monday morning to thank him because that payday meant I could make my house payment. After a while he’d tell me, ‘I know you’re thankful, but you don’t have to call me every day to tell me.’”

—G
EORGE
S
OUTH
, W
RESTLER

All of this happened over a relatively quick period of time. Why? Because stars like Nickla Roberts, better known as Baby Doll, became bigger stars that would all of a sudden be in magazines like
The Wrestler
or
Pro Wrestling Illustrated.
What a phenomenal run it was, and that was my job, to make people into larger than life stars.

“You can’t disrespect anything about Dusty. I’m thankful that we were able to do something for the good of the company, him and me, year after year. He was in charge when the tidal wave came, and the one thing Dusty should know is in my opinion he grossly underestimated the ability of himself and some of us. We had the right players. If he would have played it a little differently, maybe the result would have been different.”

—T
ULLY
B
LANCHARD

My job was not to sit in there with Dave Johnson and tell Jimmy Crockett you’re five million dollars in debt. Like anybody in my position, I thought he would let us know if we could afford things or not financially. At the very least, he should have told the owner of the company. But Johnson waited one year to tell Jimmy. One fucking year … and back then Crockett knew five million dollars for a company as big as we were, was a big fucking hole to be in.

While he got a hell of a deal from Turner at that time, Jimmy Crockett came to me and said, “I want out of Charlotte. I want us to move this office”—a big beautiful office—”to Dallas.”
He
said that.

I said, “Okay, I’ll go with you,” because that’s home for me.

It was not me who said we needed to move our operations to Dallas. Deep down I really believe he wanted to get away from the family thing. So he made that decision. Every financial decision that was made, he made. When it came time that what we were doing wasn’t drawing as much and our business was down a little bit, the bills were bigger, because now we were sitting in Dallas while the office was still open in Charlotte.

Jimmy Crockett had a great vision of all this, but he was stuck with Mid-Atlantic Championship Wrestling people and their regional mentality. He had no young people. He didn’t have the people who just came out of Harvard or Yale who went to work for Vince, who were marketing geniuses. We missed so much on that. We were just in the arena wrestling business.
We had no yellow fingers. The company remained very small-minded, even though both of us remained very big minded.

So as far as I’m concerned, the fall of Jim Crockett Promotions was partly due to the way Jimmy handled the innerworkings of his family business and the way he financially mismanaged the office; we didn’t need the three secretaries who had been there forever.

The one guy I felt bad for during this time was Sandy Scott, who was very loyal to me once we got to know each other. He could tell me whether a house was going to do 50 or 60 grand by the advance, and he would come in and say to me, “You’re doing the right thing,” or “You’re doing the wrong thing” … he’s the only one who could talk to me like that, because I knew he knew what he was talking about and I really cared about what he thought; he became my confidant there. Even more than Jimmy, it made me feel good when we’d draw a house to where I told Sandy this would draw or this would happen.

There’s no denying that my mind was focused on running the 120 people—our family—in his company like a ball team, because that’s what it was like. Jimmy should have been concentrating on the other end, running the innerworkings of his company instead of driving down the road with me, drinking martinis and celebrating over big houses … because as big as the houses were, we were still going into the hole because of several moves that he had made outside of the industry.

Like I said, the move to Dallas was his idea without a doubt, and he knows it to this day. As I understand it, he’s still there with his family, he’s very happy there, and I’m glad for him.

But the Crocketts, as we knew them, kind of like how the Kennedys fell from grace, eventually came crumbling down like the burning of Crockett Park.

It was a St. Patrick’s Day weekend in 1985 and I remember Klondike Bill, who was our ring guy, coming in and telling Jimmy at a show in Greensboro that a call just came in from the office to say Crockett Park was burning. Crockett Park was the stadium in Charlotte that the family owned along with the Charlotte Orioles, the minor league affiliate to the Baltimore Orioles, who played there. We had just done a big house in Charlotte and we had hired a limousine to go to Greensboro … a limousine to go 60 fucking miles instead of driving to the town ourselves … to drive back before the main event went on.

It was like watching
Gone with the Wind
when Atlanta was burning. The sky was lit up. We could see it for miles driving back. We drove into the yellow taped-off section where you normally can’t even get in and the park was burning, smoldering. Jimmy opened the moon roof of the limousine and stood up. When he did, he looked like Napoleon looking out and over a battlefield as this wooden stadium was burning … and I jokingly said to Klondike Bill, “How much gas did you use on the park?” It was funny at the time, because obviously I didn’t mean it like that, but we had that feeling that we could do no wrong. Oddly enough, investigators later determined the cause of the three-alarm blaze was arson, and the fire was set by a small group of juveniles.

So when they talk about the fall of Jim Crockett Promotions, it definitely doesn’t lie on my shoulders, because all of the time that I was there, there was money and planes and booze, enough of everything to go around for everybody. Everybody had a new car. Everybody had a big bankroll. I take as much blame as anybody as far as the wrestling part of it, but we lost a lot of guys to the WWF, and despite that we kept fighting and fighting and we were on par with them for a long time.

But Magnum going down on the wrestling side cost a lot too, because I think he was that strong of a talent. He was the heir to the throne. He was the one who was chosen to lead us, and at the time Hogan was Vince’s choice as the two went head to head. I remember magazine covers with their pictures on them, the two fighters going head to head just like the two big companies were going against each other. When the Lord intervened and fate happened, the company went to shits; not just because of what happened to Magnum, but because of everything together that was going on at that time.