Dusty: Reflections of Wrestling's American Dream (18 page)

So I think the real downfall was in the everyday operation of the company, the innerworkings, by this same little crew of people that was running this huge business. But it was no longer, “Let’s go run Charleston, West Virginia, let’s run Hickory, North Carolina” … it was now “Let’s run the Forum in Los Angeles where the Lakers play, let’s run the Cow Palace in San Francisco.” We were in the big arenas all over the country, and that was my job. Even with that said, I really believe that if Jimmy hadn’t sold the company, we could have turned it around. I remember saying to him we could get the five million dollars back, but I think he really wanted to sell it at that point in time.

When we were in Dallas, Jimmy had given me a new Mercedes for doing the first million-dollar night for him, which back then was unheard of. That’s what he promised me and he got it for me. As the fall of the company happened, his sister Frances had the title and she had the car reclaimed. Because it was given to me by Jimmy and for what that car represented, I loved it so much, so before I let that happen, I paid the remaining portion of what was owed on it. I wasn’t going to let them take the Mercedes that Jimmy had given me; that I had earned.

He was powerful, being the president of the company and the guy in charge, but small thinking on their part was what cost them in the long run. They can take a look back and actually pinpoint what happened to the NWA, Jim Crockett Promotions, and it surely wasn’t Dusty Rhodes. Where do you put the blame? I don’t know, but it surely wasn’t me. My part was done. My part is documented history. It’s on tapes. It’s on videos. You can see my work all over the world. It’s on ideas that Vince even took, and that’s okay too, because I would take some ideas from him. I think Jimmy’s vision was huge, but mine was bigger. I created some unbelievable stuff that still holds up to this day. It was an amazing triumph for me.

“Dusty was a great leader and he instilled pride in the workers.”

—”M
AGNUM
T.A.” T
ERRY
A
LLEN

I was very hurt that Jimmy did not want to give a statement for this book if for no other reason than to help put this issue to rest. But I feel good about my era there and all the guys should be thankful that the Crockett era came along during that time, because there was nothing like it before and nothing like that will ever come again.

So that’s that. A great time in our business that belongs to history.

Then came the Turner era. And when people ask me about Turner, I tell them just what I think.

I loved them … Ike and Tina Turner were the hottest group I can remember, Jack, and she had the longest legs, it was unbelievable! When she would do that little jumping up and down thing where her legs are moving and shit … “
rollin’, rollin’, rollin’ on the river. …
” I loved them. I didn’t like Ike, but I loved Tina, man. Tina was so hot … Tina was during my era. When “The American Dream” was hot, she was hot. Tina was a hot black chick … Tina Turner, man. …

Okay, seriously, let’s talk about Turner—Ted Turner.

My history with Turner didn’t start when Crockett sold to him. We’d have to roll the clock back a bit, for as things heated up at Championship Wrestling from Florida, my career was also heating up. WTBS in Atlanta was cabled across the country, and as I explained earlier, I was its biggest star as I was in demand all over the country.

Ted Turner was a self-made man. He was very strong and powerful and made his business in the independent television industry when others were only thinking about it. He had a vision of doing it and he did it; a maker of dreams coming true. Success was at his hands, as he took no defeat lying down.

I say to this day that wrestling made TBS—Turner Broadcasting. Without a doubt, wrestling was one of the things, if not the single thing, that made his company nationally known. He could put around it all the blue and gray and civil war stories he wanted to make that didn’t draw any numbers, but he did them because he liked them and luckily he liked wrestling, realizing we also drew large numbers.

In the early days he was a great friend to the business. He used to come down to the old studio and watch us put it all together. He knew it had viewers tuning in, and many times we’d be on right before the Atlanta Braves games, a strong lead in to his team, which became “America’s Team.” He gave me the opportunity to be his first “Golden Boy” as I mentioned previously, and it was really cool … and I thought he was cool, because he was a nobullshit guy.

Only when America Online came in to buy Turner Broadcasting, and in the process WCW, did I see Ted kind of move down a little bit and not stand up. I don’t think he wanted to sell the company, but that doesn’t change the way I feel about him any. I was bitter because of the wrestling portion of it. Like I said, wrestling was used to build his empire and now it was being treated like the redheaded stepchild, the bastard division of the Turner family that nobody wanted to acknowledge.

Then Turner South came along, not Ted’s per se, but he was instrumental in getting it off the ground, and David Rudolph, a 26-year-old executive with Turner who came up with the idea of the new network in the shower one morning, was appointed as one of the youngest company presidents. And what did producer and director John Perry do the first thing off the bat? All in the mold of the original TBS, almost like Ted
saying, “Hey you want to get this off the ground?” … it was Atlanta Braves baseball,
The Andy Griffith Show
and a wrestling show starring “The American Dream,” Dusty Rhodes, called
WCW Classics.
It was the same formula, and the show that put Turner South on the cable map. Of course like they did through the early days, they dropped me when Vince came in and bought the wrestling company away from Turner, but the network continued to use me on different shows. So there it was, Turner South was created in Turner’s image and probably would have folded within a year if it hadn’t had been for wrestling … and of course being the egomaniac everybody believes me to be, if not for “The American Dream” Dusty Rhodes hosting the hottest show on the network.

But Ted was amazing. He not only had this vision … and I always considered myself having a vision of seeing things happen or doing things … not only did he have that, but he made it happen.

TBS, Gordon Solie, Dusty Rhodes, it was kind of like the Cosell-Ali thing that I mentioned earlier, and we were so hot around the country cable-wise, it was amazing. 6:05, every Saturday night … then as the years passed I became WCW’s executive producer. They called it “booker” back then—I think some still try to call the guys who do wrestling bookers—but there are no more bookers, because that term was used when a person in the business was booking a territory. The more appropriate term for the independent promotions today would be “match-maker” and if you’re heading up television, executive producer. Anyway, I became executive producer of everything that happened on the TV, and Turner gave me that opportunity. We did numbers for TBS.

Ted’s a man’s man. The one story I remember vividly is about going to his office. Jim Barnett set up a meeting with Ted and me at the old studio on Techwood Drive. I was so hot on his television and he had just had his photo on the cover of
Sports Illustrated.
I was going into the meeting with the man the media dubbed “Captain Courageous.”

I suppose being around all of those stars in New York for so long and having the discussions with Vince about movies and records, that I had this vision of doing television commercials, especially now with me being the hot commodity on cable that I was. This of course was before I got the Mellow Yellow gig, before it was fashionable for wrestlers to be in commercials, and I was thinking of something a little more elaborate than spots for the local car lot … “Hey, come on down to Yellow Bob’s and let’s buy a car.” The stuff
I do today with Bill Butler down in Warner Robbins and Macon, Georgia, I’ve been with him ten years, and he has other holdings all over the area, so it’s not just a mom and pop thing down there, but it is in a way, and that’s what makes it great. I’ve been with him a long time with Chrysler and all that, even though I drive a Ford.

Anyway, it was 2 p.m. and the receptionist said, “Mr. Turner will see you.”

As I walked up the stairs I couldn’t help but remember the Saturday mornings Ted would come sit with us as we got dressed for wrestling in the makeshift dressing room in the very lobby I was waiting in for my appointment.

Turner was sitting there behind the desk when I walked in, and for some reason I had worn a suit. I kind of looked like Willie Nelson in the suit, completely out of place. But I wore it because Barnett thought that was the way I should go in there.

Contrary to what people believe, I had suits. I owned suits. I got rid of them. I had $1,500 - $ 2,000 suits that I got rid of a few years ago and Michelle looked at me like I was crazy because I went to the closet and took them all out and went down to Goodwill and gave them away because I wear jeans and boots, or I go barefooted and I wear T-shirts with my belly sticking out. It does not matter, that’s the way I am. But I can dress up if I need to. This particular time, however, I wore this blue polyester suit I had made for me in Japan when I toured there with Dick Murdoch.

So Ted was sitting behind the desk. His baseball team was as about as bad as you can get by putting nine guys out on the field. He even became a coach that year for one game. They had a slugger named Bob Horner, and everybody would mistake him for me. If he went out to eat —this is how hot we were—they would call him Dusty Rhodes … their third baseman who hit four home runs in one game. And he said, “They [the Braves] don’t have any charisma. They can’t put people in the stands.”

I thought, “Winning puts them in the stands.” I didn’t want to say it to him at that point, because we got winners and losers, not business. So I said seats are 17 inches, now they’re a little bit wider, but I said you want to put an asshole every 17 inches, that’s the bottom line. And we agreed on that, so we knew where we were going.

But I went in there to ask him to get me commercials. Which I thought—this is how we were—I didn’t know how powerful he was. I
thought he did the marketing too. I wanted him to get me commercials and be my agent.

This is fucking Ted Turner, right?

So he looks at me and he said to me, of all people, “You ever been on the cover of
Sports Illustrated
?”

I said, “No, sir.” So, without even blinking an eye, I said, “Have you ever been on the cover of
Pro Wrestling Illustrated
?”

He said, “No.” Then he said, just like that, “Fuck, I’m looking for commercials. I want to do commercials. You’re in here wanting me to get you fucking commercials.”

So I kind of figured out what was going on at this point and there was nothing going to happen out of this conversation.

Ten, 15 years later he bought Jim Crockett Promotions, which at that time controlled the NWA, because really they were the only ones left aside from one or two other promoters. On the cover of
Pro Wrestling Illustrated
is a picture of Ted Turner. All this time had passed—that’s how I knew he was a no-bullshit guy because he remembers conversations—that’s what makes him good … he walked all the way across the atrium at CNN center, walked across it like a common fan with a wrestling magazine in his hand to stick it in my face.

In 2002, in
Sports Illustrated
, there was a picture and a quote and a paragraph on Dusty Rhodes, “The American Dream.” It was a Q&A session. I went to Tallahassee, Florida, looking for the motherfucker because I was going to show him this fucking picture. As luck would have it, two of his kids were on the plane with me. These days he’s down in Tallahassee and a lot of people don’t know that, so his kids say, “We’re going out to Dad’s, do you want to go?”

I said, “Take this
Sports Illustrated
and right at the appropriate time, show him this picture.”

It’s funny how things transpire. Visions different men have. … Turner is the greatest visionary of our lifetime. No one can compare to him. Without him we would have been shit as far as the wrestling industry in the South.

And I can always remember, “Hi, I’m Tommy Rich, and I’ll be in Carrollton tonight. …” and it would be packed. Ted Turner gave us that opportunity. I’ll always thank him for that.

But I wish he would have been my manager like I wanted him to be the day I walked into his office. Ted was a cool guy. He sold out, but I don’t think he sold out as much as the company’s board of directors sold out.

The only thing was Ted sent Bill Shaw in to be the president of WCW, a guy who did not know jack shit about wrestling. I believe he was in charge of human resources before coming to WCW. That’s almost as funny as Bill Bush. I liked Bill Shaw, and Eric Bischoff should kiss his ass every time he sees him, because Bill Shaw put Eric in power because he knew he couldn’t handle the job himself. But that’s the way Ted hired. He had somebody overseeing and regulating what we were doing.

The only thing I got hot at Turner about was that he sent Bill Shaw to oversee all of his land holdings and buffalo out west. Hell, that would have been a perfect job for me. All he had to do was give me a pick-up truck and a million a year like Bill Shaw was getting and send me out to fucking Montana and I’d have been gone, nobody’d even hear from me —it’d been cool.

So Shaw hired Eric, who was a visionary in his own right, and he turned WCW into something very special.

But before he hired Eric, there was Jim Herd, a marketing guy or something like that who came from Pizza Hut, who was the blooming idiot of corporate America. Now I know I said I wasn’t going to bury people who I feel have done me wrong or who I may not like personally, but this guy was never really in the wrestling business, so he is fair game. That said, he was the most untalented motherfucker in the history of the world, whether you were running pizza, whether you were running a road race, or whether you were running to the fucking bathroom. He had the least talent of any human being that I had ever been around in my life; he had no gamesmanship and no skills at all as far as employees went. I say that a lot, but I liked him outside of the business when he wasn’t drinking with Jim Ross after each day was over, where they would have their cocktails and Jim was pointing him on the floor because he knew how to play Herd like a fiddle. We know Jim’s pretty smart, and to this day JR is a cool guy as all he wanted was my job, and what’s wrong with that? He made no bones about it, and I respected him for that. Since then I think JR’s fallen from grace a little bit.