Comments that don't warrant a thread

[sek69]

I think most people who watched it were just happy to see him in the ring again after facing cancer and were willing to overlook his actual performance in light of him actually still being alive.

 

I don't think his subsequent matches were any better/worse than his return, it's just now people are starting to look at them more critically than "wow it's great to just see him".

[Loss]

Anyone else notice Dave's new fascination with the word "earmark"?

[tomk]

I don't know if he could have been Hogan since that was a once-in-a-lifetime thing, but a face Superstar could have done big business had Vince Sr believed in babyfaces that weren't bland and/or ethnic stereotypes.

 

Yeah shit like that... When did people start saying that kind of stuff?

[sek69]

I think since Vince Jr has shown he can make big stars out of people with an abundance of charisma and not much else, it's not a stretch to extrapolate that Superstar would have been the same way. I mean, he's pretty much the prototype of what VKM looks for in a Sports Entertainer.

[Al]

I think since Vince Jr has shown he can make big stars out of people with an abundance of charisma and not much else, it's not a stretch to extrapolate that Superstar would have been the same way. I mean, he's pretty much the prototype of what VKM looks for in a Sports Entertainer.

In fairness, that started long before Vince Jr. Look at Haystacks Calhoun. Bill Watts made the Junkyard Dog a huge star around 1980 or so.

 

The strange thing about this is that Backlund ran a pretty good string of sellouts at Madison Square Garden. It's hard to look back and come to the conclusion that Vince Sr. made the wrong choice.

[sek69]

Well yes, VKM wasn't the first guy to make something out of nothing (or not much) as a promoter, but Superstar is definitely the mold for the body type he's been looking for ever since.

[jdw]

Wrestling is a world of liars, lies and storiesstorytellers where Bs becomes accepted history overnight. It's alot easier to start a new myth than kill an old one.

Where did the Superstar Graham could have turned face and become Hogan five years earlier story start?

Is that something that started up with the Graham DVD set that WWE released?

Or was that a story circulated earlier?

 

Cause its become weirdly conventional wisdom at this point.

This started with Graham when he was watching Austin. He thought he could so the Stone Cold anti-hero gimmick and keep on drawing for years.

 

When people laughed about it being nonsensical, Dave ran out to backstop Superstar and that the Superstar Face Turn was something he'd heard from Billy going back ages, back to the time Dave interviewed him.

 

When it was pointed out to Dave that it wasn't in the interview, and that if it was something Billy mentioned at the time it almost certain would have been asked/re-asked at that interview, Dave didn't have a good answer and sort of wandered off for a while.

 

Billy's interview was kind of funny in that he said he made as much money not being champ, and then got out of the business because he was totally burned our after two years on top (along with all the dope). There was Zero indication in the interview that Billy thought he should have gone face, or that he could have sustained another year beyond 1978 since he was so burned out.

 

No doubt Billy has told himself so many times since then that he could have been Babyface Superstar like Hogan, and later Stone Cold Superstar, that he now believes it.

 

But it's another one of those Wrestling Stories where the facts don't add up very well.

 

A bit like the notion that Backlunds cards were more loaded up than Grahams.

 

May 16, 1977: Bruno

June 27, 1977: Bruno vs Billy, with Andre

August 1, 1977: Bruno vs Billy, with Andre

August 29, 1977: Bruno vs Patera death match, with Verne Gagne

September 26, 1977: Dusty vs Billy

October 24, 1977: Dusty vs Billy, with Mil Mascaras

November 21, 1977: Dusty and Mil

December 19, 1977: Mil vs Billy, with Dusty

January 23, 1978: Mil vs Billy, with Dusty

February 20, 1978: Billy vs Bob, with Dusty & Mil

 

He never worked a card as Champ that didn't have Bruno, Dusty, Andre or Mil on it. Six of 10 matches against Bruno, Dusty or Mil, a seventh against Bob when he was getting the big push.

 

But conventional wisdom that Billy didn't have any help on his cards. Just the biggest babyfaces of that era in the WWF all over his cards and as his opponents.

 

John

[jdw]

I don't know if he could have been Hogan since that was a once-in-a-lifetime thing, but a face Superstar could have done big business had Vince Sr believed in babyfaces that weren't bland and/or ethnic stereotypes.

 

Yeah shit like that... When did people start saying that kind of stuff?

 

Agreed.

 

Vince Sr *did* do big business. And if you watch Bruno, Pedro and Bob, they were extremely charsimatic in the era for playing to and connecting with those WWF/WWWF fans.

 

If you want bland, watch Larry Z as a babyface, or Tony Garea. Which isn't to say that they didn't try to play to the crowds, and at times connect. But Bruno, Pedro and Bob were all on another level.

 

Pedro matches drive me crazy. His selling is just horrid, largely looking for the quickest way to lay on the mat and get stomped. But I was watching one of the two Pedro vs Valentine matches from 1982 the other night, and damn if Pedro wasn't getting amazing heat for his comebacks and his playing to the crowd. He could put the crowd to sleep for a stretch with shitty selling, but when he cameback, started waving those fists around and looking/nodding out to the crowd with that "I want to kick the shit out of him... do you want me to kick the shit out of him?" look, the crowd went bonkers.

 

There was a certain WWF Face Style from Bruno to Pedro to Bruno to Bob to Hogan. You could see lesser workers like Putski taking bits of it, and it work with that goofy MSG crowd. It's the style they were brought up on, and they lapped the shit up.

 

If you watch in contrast some of Dibiase's less heated matches in the WWF, it's largely because Ted is in there working like Dory Jr: uncharismatic and not playing to the crowd enough.

 

Sometimes we tend to overlook charisma that we don't like. Goes right over our heads. I'm sure I'm as guilty of that as anyone.

 

John

[jdw]

Well yes, VKM wasn't the first guy to make something out of nothing (or not much) as a promoter, but Superstar is definitely the mold for the body type he's been looking for ever since.

He was.

 

But he was also a self admitted basket case by a point in 1978 due to the grind of being on the road and downing loads of dope. That was after just 18 months or so on top.

 

There really isn't any evidence that Graham wouldn't have fallen apart if he'd come along later and been Vince's anchor for expansion.

 

Say whatever we want about Hogan, but he *was* able to sustain the grind and the fast lane lifestyle from 1984 through well into the 90s. Set aside that Hogan wasn't "working every night". Vince had him making appearances other than just in the ring when his wrestling schedule slowed. Read up on actors talking about the grind of promotional tours launching movies. They tend to think it sucks more than actually making the movie.

 

If Graham melted down after 18 months of largely being on top in the WWWF *territory*, with increased touring in 1978 after he dropped the title... anyone think he would have held up doing it nationally?

 

Not likely. He wouldn't even have been able to do three years ontop in the WWF from 4/77 to 3/80: he burned out in half that time.

 

John

[jdw]

Sorry for going off on an old WWF rant there. I've been watching way too much of it lately. It's a bad sign when Gorilla is paired with Dick Graham on a tape from the Spectrum and you're missing Kal Rudman being there at the table. You've gone completely around the bend with that happened.

 

 

John

[S.L.L.]

Don't be sorry. That was actually pretty informative.

 

I always just assumed that Meltzer talking up Graham as a guy that could've been a huge star as a Hogan-esque babyface was just another extension of Dave's irrational hate boner for Backlund. I guess it still is, technically speaking, but that does throw a bit more light onto the situation.

 

Personally, I always just thought it was funny how Dave, because he hated Backlund's work so much, wanted to see him replaced with a charismatic, roided-up dude with a flamboyant personality and questionable in-ring skills...which is exactly what Vince Jr. eventually did, and Dave hated that guy just as much as he hated Backlund. And while my viewing of Graham's work is pretty limited, always got the impression that he was less skilled than Hogan. I guess the grass is always greener in the NWA.

[tomk]

Sorry for going off on an old WWF rant there.

 

John

No apologies needed. Wrestling myths are difficult to put to sleep and big drops like this are useful. I figure I will eventually steal this all the next time I read people talking about the “Graham could’ve turned baby and been Hogan pre-Hogan” talking point. And I assume other people will as well. It’s the internet so you will not be credited but still yeoman’s work.

 

Some timeline questions on development of myth:

 

When was the first Graham Dave interview you mentioned?

 

I remember the Graham thinks he could’ve been Austin thing. But don’t remember if that was 99 or later. Was the push back on that and the Dave defense and then push back on that something that happened on wrestlingclassics or is that something that happened over the phone or elsewhere? I remember the Graham claim and it being funny but don’t remember the Dave defense or the Hey Dave why wasn’t it mentioned…” conversations.

Links?

 

And the “Vince Jr wanted to turn Graham face in 78 to be Hogan” story addendum showed up approximately when?

[jdw]

Some timeline questions on development of myth:

 

When was the first Graham Dave interview you mentioned?

January 1992 if I recall correctly. I want to say the same issue as when he broke the news that Luger was jumping to the WWF. Long interview, at a time when Dave never did interviews in the WON. That was the are for Wade and Clark.

 

 

I remember the Graham thinks he could’ve been Austin thing. But don’t remember if that was 99 or later.

The Stone Cold Superstar would have been in the late 90s or early 00s. Don't have an exact date in mind.

 

 

Was the push back on that and the Dave defense and then push back on that something that happened on wrestlingclassics or is that something that happened over the phone or elsewhere? I remember the Graham claim and it being funny but don’t remember the Dave defense or the Hey Dave why wasn’t it mentioned…” conversations.

Links?

Some of the discussion may have been on Classics. I know it was a regular running joke on tOA, but Dave never posted there. So getting a timeline out of Dave was either Classics, or someone like Bix calling into WO Live like with the Jumbo stuff. Just don't recall.

 

And the “Vince Jr wanted to turn Graham face in 78 to be Hogan” story addendum showed up approximately when?

Some of this stuff may have come out in Dave's History Of The WWF Title piece which sort of just died out. The Superstar and Backlund sections were quite funny in the funny-bad way.

 

Graham's book also has lots of myth-making about going babyface, which doesn't at all line up with what he told Dave in 1992.

 

John

[tomk]

The Graham interview is available in the newsletter archive on the Observer website.

 

It's the January 10. 1991 issue:

 

DM: Is there any reason you went from being one of the top stars in the business and then dropped out?

 

BG: I was really burned out. After my run as champion and the year after, the traveling had burned me out. I didn't want to travel anymore and I wanted to stop.

 

DM: Was your attitude at the time that you were done with the business?

 

BG: Almost. I was thinking of quitting. I'd been the champion. I was tired of wrestling. I didn't want to wrestle too much. I wasn't having any physical problems but I was mentally burned out. I worked for Paul Boesch because he took care of me so good and paid so well. I was tired of being on the road.

 

...

 

BG: I couldn't sleep because of the sauce and then I became so addicted to the sedatives that they became the most important thing to take. I was still taking steroids but I wasn't even working out. I was so emaciated. People thought I had cancer. I had two overdoses. The first was in Washington, D.C. One morning at 9 a.m. I was on the phone with my wife and I'd just taken a handful of downers and I collapsed. I fell and was unconscious in the bathroom. I was wedged between the toilet and the door. My wife heard me fall and bang on the bathroom floor. She called the hotel staff and told them to rush into my room because and break the door down because I'd fallen. When they did, they couldn't unwedge me from the bathroom and they called the paramedics and the fire department and they took a hatchet and axed the door down and got me out of there. They took me to one hospital close by but they didn't have the facilities to handle that big of an overdose so they took me to the Baltimore Trauma Shock Unit where Reagan was taken when he caught the bullet. I was in there all day long and when I started coming to on the operating table I had all these tubes in me. I had so many drugs in me they thought I had tried to commit suicide. They asked what I was doing with seven valium in my system and six or seven codeine tablets and placadyl. I told them the codeine was for the pain, the placadyl was to help me sleep and the valium was from all the stress in wrestling. I had an answer for everything. They told me I had to spend the night with in the hospital. I told them there was no way I was spending the night because that night I was supposed to wrestle my last shot in Madison Square Garden and I didn't want to miss my last shot. I said if you don't take all these tubes out of me, I'll take them out myself because I've got to get out of this hospital because I've got to get New York and wrestle. They thought I was an idiot talking about wrestling when I had just come out of a coma. They made me sign this thing that said they weren't releasing me and that I was leaving on my own accord because I started ripping IV's out of my arms. They let me out of there. I caught a cab, went back to the motel room which looked like a hurricane hit it with all the wood everywhere and went to the Ramada in New York and worked the shot. In Springfield I overdosed but my wife was with me. Half the time my wife would flush everything down the toilet. I'd scream and yell at her and threaten to kill her if she did it again. I overdosed again on all this stuff and passed out on the floor with a hamburger in my mouth. They came up and gave me CPR and beat on me and cleaned out my throat, took me to the hospital and pumped my stomach. The drugs had a death grip on me

[jdw]

He's probably off a bit on the OD in Washingto. Possibly here [results from Graham's page]:

 

WWWF @ Baltimore, MD - Civic Center - October 21, 1978

Superstar Billy Graham defeated Tony Garea

 

Couple of nights later his last *big* match at MSG in that era:

 

WWWF @ New York City, NY - Madison Square Garden - October 23, 1978

Bruno Sammartino defeated Superstar Billy Graham when the referee stopped the match due to Graham bleeding from the face at 12:19

 

He works some of the big shows for the following month, with Bruno and Dusty regular opponents like:

 

WWWF @ Boston, MA - Boston Garden - November 4, 1978

Bruno Sammartino defeated Superstar Billy Graham via count-out after bloodying Graham on the floor; there was some confusion as to the result since no official announcement was raised

 

WWWF @ Landover, MD - Capital Centre - November 11, 1978 (matinee)

Superstar Billy Graham vs. Gorilla Monsoon

 

WWWF @ New Haven, CT - November 12, 1978

Ivan Putski vs. Superstar Billy Graham (Dino Bravo as guest referee)

 

WWWF @ Long Island, NY - Nassau Coliseum - November 17, 1978

Andre the Giant vs. Superstar Billy Graham

 

WWWF @ Philadelphia, PA - Spectrum - November 18, 1978

Dusty Rhodes defeated Superstar Billy Graham in a bullrope match via count-out at 8:13 after hitting Graham in the face with the cowbell attached to the rope; after the bout, Rhodes fought off an attack from Graham

 

That was his last big match.

 

He worked the MSG card two nights later, which was his last shot in that era at MSG:

 

WWWF @ New York City, NY - Madison Square Garden - November 20, 1978

Dino Bravo fought Superstar Billy Graham to a double disqualification

 

Not a big match.

 

The problem would be that months DC show was after MSG:

 

WWWF @ Baltimore, MD - Civic Center - November 25, 1978

 

Which he wasn't on. He didn't work another match with the WWF until the Kung Fu return.

 

He did miss this one that appeared to be booked:

 

WWWF @ Philadelphia, PA - Spectrum - December 16, 1978

Bruno Sammartino defeated George Steele (sub. for Superstar Billy Graham)

 

Which clearly was a big match. It's also quite a screw up since that's Bruno's "payback" match. Bruno didn't get a payback in Philly after the cage match loss earlier in the year, and of course hadn't won the title matches when Graham was champ. Graham got done with Backlund in Philly, then went right into a renewal of the feud with Dusty with Dusty's payback being the one listed above. Here was Bruno's turn, and he airballed it.

 

The MSG match was the last one.

 

Billy now likes to blame part of his dope use on being depressed about dropping the title and getting phased down. But here to the end of the year, he's in the thick of things. Matches with Backlund, Dusty, Bruno and Andre. And he still melted down and OD'd a couple of nights before a big match with Bruno in the Garden.

 

The notion that he could have been Hogan by turning face in February 1978 rather than the belt going on Bob is just stupid. The guy would have burned out just the same.

 

Which he in a sense points out himself:

 

DM: Is there any reason you went from being one of the top stars in the business and then dropped out?

 

BG: I was really burned out. After my run as champion and the year after, the traveling had burned me out. I didn't want to travel anymore and I wanted to stop.

 

DM: Was your attitude at the time that you were done with the business?

 

BG: Almost. I was thinking of quitting. I'd been the champion. I was tired of wrestling. I didn't want to wrestle too much. I wasn't having any physical problems but I was mentally burned out. I worked for Paul Boesch because he took care of me so good and paid so well. I was tired of being on the road.

Bingo.

 

BTW, I'm almost certain the real date of that issue is 1992. It would have been during the Steriod Story, which didn't get hot until late 1991 and early 1992. Billy talks in that interview about the stuff he did with Hogan if I recall correctly. Also look at other news in the issue... I'm sure it's 1992.

 

 

John

[shoe]

Here's the 1st interview from Jan 92. He did another in Feb.

 

 

 

 

INTERVIEW WITH SUPERSTAR BILLY GRAHAM

 

Most people who reach celebrity status are really two different people. One person is who they really are. The other is what they are publicized as being and what their public thinks they are. In this regard, Superstar Billy Graham is really no different from anyone who was at one time a celebrity in their field.

 

Pro wrestling wasn't on network television in the 1970s, but in many ways it was much more popular than it is today. There was no Hulk Hogan as a wrestler who was a household name nationally. But its biggest stars packed arenas throughout the country and drew big television ratings in local markets. With the exception of perhaps only Bruno Sammartino, Ric Flair and Dusty Rhodes, there was no wrestler of the 1970s with as much charisma as Superstar Billy Graham.

 

He may not have been idolized by millions. But he was idolized by many people in different parts of the country. Some of those who did became some of the most important people in the wrestling world. There was Vince McMahon Jr., a wrestling television announcer, whose father was running the Northeast-based World Wide Wrestling Federation. There was Terry Bollea, a skinny musician in Tampa who emulated Graham and became Hulk Hogan, and later Pinocchio. There was Jim Janos, a swimmer in Minneapolis who came back from Viet Nam and became Jesse "The Body" Ventura. To a much lesser extent, even myself, a wrestling fan in California who became a competitive bodybuilder and wound up doing a newsletter.

 

We all saw this flamboyant individual. A huge, muscular individual with particularly massive arms and a gift of gab. He exuded a narcissistic bodybuilder role as a heel. But he seemed to have enough of a sense of humor about the role that he became one of the rare major heels of that era with a tremendous fan following. We all knew about the steroids that went with the iron in building that physique, even back in the 70s. But those who look up to people usually see them as one-dimensional symbols representing all the things you want them to be. A winner. Invulnerable to the kind of pain that would stop a normal person. They don't suffer marital problems. They don't wake up with back pain. They don't become drug addicts. Their fans don't look at them as individuals and take into account that the steps that are taken to get to be idols can yield dangerous returns. How many people who idolized Muhammad Ali, the world's most popular athlete of the same era, worried for him in the latter stages of his career? He was past his prime and foolishly, in search of the last few paychecks, climbed into the ring to try and relive what he no longer was and wound up with savage beatings that will scar him for as long as he lives. They just saw a symbol and the fantasy of the media picture of a living myth. To the public, he wasn't a human being that was blessed with some unique athletic skills that were eroding away, as age does to every great athlete. He was a night of entertainment. A vision of fantasy. Those who idolized him, for the most part, cheered and urged him on when he made his last comeback. Some, but they were the minority, ever considered the repercussions. Those who idolized him are sad at what happened to him. But most probably don't give it much thought and will root for whomever the new hero is, whether it be Ray Leonard or Roberto Duran or George Foreman when they attempt to do the same thing.

 

The real Billy Graham was someone else. Wayne Coleman. A great high school athlete who made a wrong turn early in his life and it cost him a chance to be a world-class shot putter, discus thrower, or possibly even decathlete. A pro wrestler, who became one of the biggest stars in the world because of his secrets--his dedication, perhaps even obsession with weight training and bodybuilding and wanting to have the biggest muscular arms in the world, his natural charisma, his gift of gab, and the steroids that were needed for him to achieve the first part of the equation.

 

Billy Graham was in the main event of the first live wrestling match I ever saw, back in 1971 in San Jose. He was a heel, and was in a six-man tag team match teaming with Pat Patterson, now the Vice President in charge of talent with the World Wrestling Federation, and Paul DeMarco, who drifted out of wrestling shortly thereafter only to make a comeback more than 15 years later as a 50+ Russian working for Verne Gagne named Yuri Goryenko. Their opponents were Ray Stevens, generally considered the greatest worker of the 1960s who set attendance records in this area that Hulk Hogan has yet to touch, Peter Maivia, a 280-pound Samoan with a legitimate reputation as a savage street fighter who passed away many years ago from cancer, and Rocky Johnson, a former boxer who worked as a sparring partner for Ali and Foreman, a tremendously agile big man who could do a series of dropkicks and nip ups at his size that would make today's best fliers envious. It wasn't too long after that when a fan who was a hanger-on in a group of guys wanting to grow up to be wrestlers (most of whom did at one point wrestle professionally although the only name that may be familiar to some of you is Moondog Ed Moretti in Oregon) first told me about dianabol. He told me about a local guy who later worked as a jobber for a few years before returning home who used it to pump his arms up to 17 inches. The problem was, it could make you lose your hair. He told me that's why Billy Graham (who was only 27 at this time but almost completely bald) and Paul DeMarco had lost so much hair.

 

A few years later Billy Graham's physique changed from looking like a blown-up powerlifter to a huge bodybuilder, and he became a big hit in the AWA, and then everywhere else he appeared. Eventually he became WWWF champion. Shortly after losing it, he dropped out of the business. The rumor mill was buzzing. The most popular story was that all the steroids he took had given him cancer of the back. John Swenski, the local promoter in San Jose, even mentioned that in a story about the horrors of steroids in Art Rosenbaum's column in the San Francisco Chronicle ten years ago. Gorilla Monsoon, who at the time did a wrestling column in a now-defunct Philadelphia daily, actually reported his obituary at the age of 39 from cancer. Of course, it actually wasn't true (shortly after Monsoon's story came out, Graham called him up from Arizona and told him he was alive and fine and that he should print a retraction, but true to the form that would make him a classic announcer a decade later, Monsoon refused to print a retraction that would admit he made a mistake). In cruel irony, the false media reports turned out to be prophetic of the horrors that would face Graham not too many years in the future.

 

The stimulant effects of the steroids led him to downers, just so he could sleep. This nearly killed him at the same time the wrestling audiences flocked to see him as a returning kung-fu master. But he never even considered kicking the steroids. Without the steroids, he would become Wayne Coleman again and Superstar Billy Graham would have died. Not died because his heart stopped, but died because people would forget who he was.

 

So rather than die, he took the route to live. Of course, living as Superstar Billy Graham turned out to be the worst possible course of action for Wayne Coleman.

 

His crippling injuries and other medical problems have became well-known, particularly to wrestling fans and those who have become interested in studying long-term effects of abuse of anabolic steroids. Ironically, it was his body falling apart, joint degeneration that took him from a 6-foot-3 powerhouse to maybe a 5-foot-11 man who walks with the help of a cane, combined with his willingness to buck a system that wanted to keep him quiet on the subject, that have kept Superstar Billy Graham alive and well at the same time Wayne Coleman is quietly suffering.

 

When the steroid story broke in the national media over the summer with the trial of Dr. George Zahorian, many wrestlers talked privately. But few would talk publicly. The truth at the time wasn't pretty. Of those, few really had gone through the experiences of Superstar Billy Graham. The media clamored to talk with him. But because his attorneys were working on an impending lawsuit against Titan Sports, Zahorian and seven drug companies, which originally was to be filed this past August, he was told to keep quiet. According to a few sources, there were negotiations going on with Titan Sports for an out-of-court settlement, although other sources deny that. After turning down Entertainment Tonight, ESPN's Roy Firestone show and Inside Edition for interviews for their November stories, and the WWF got its puff piece rebuttal on Entertainment Tonight, Graham decided to defy his attorneys instructions and contacted Inside Edition. Graham promised them the first story, which meant he was declining all media requests until January 4. On that day, we spoke for several hours on a variety of subjects.

 

Superstar Billy Graham is now a lot of things to a lot of people. To some, he's an opportunist looking for publicity. To some, he's the most potentially dangerous man associated with the wrestling business. To some, he's a very gutsy individual willing to tell the truth about steroids in wrestling that the wrestling establishment desperately wants to go away. To some, he's a jealous ex-wrestler, who didn't save his money, and is trying for some reason to take down Hulk Hogan. To some, he's telling a story that a lot of wrestling fans don't don't want to hear, because by the time their Superstar Billy Graham's have to live out their lives as Wayne Coleman's, they'll have a new batch of Hulk Hogan's to entertain them for the next decade. To some, he's a former celebrity and wrestling superstar who knows first-hand better than almost anyone on this planet both the potential positive and negative effects, both physically and psychologically, that abuse of anabolic steroids can cause. And to some, maybe, he'll serve as a warning of what the results of ignoring the business' greatest problem will be when, maybe ten or 15 years down the line, or maybe a lot less, when today's Hulk Hogan's once again become Terry Bollea's, today's Lex Luger's become Larry Pfohl's, Paul Orndorff's cease to be Mr. Wonderful's and perhaps today's Steve Courson's become nothing but a name on a tombstone.

 

 

DM: Let's start before wrestling. What kind of background did you have, say in high school, in different sports, where you bounced around before you got started in wrestling?

 

BG: I was born and raised in Phoenix and went to school at North High. I excelled in track. As a freshman I set the state record in the shot put and the discus. Our Coach, Vern Wolfe, was probably the best high school track coach in the country. He went on to USC where he was the head track coach for quite a few years. At our school, we had the first high school athlete to pole vault 15 feet. Jim Brewer did 15-1 in 1960. We had Dallas Long who went to the Olympics in the shot put. We had Carl Johnstone who was the national high school champion in the discus and set a national high school record. I was a freshman when these people were juniors and seniors. When I was a sophomore, I set the sophomore state record in the shot and discus. I was about six or seven feet ahead of what Dallas Long was doing in the shot when he was a sophomore. My Coach was grooming me to set the national high school record in the shot and the discus. Also, I did the decathlon. I set the state record there as a freshman. I was looking ahead to the Olympics as a decathlete. So I had all these things to look forward to but when I hit my junior year, I fell in with the wrong guys. I was missing a lot of school and became ineligible. It all faded away.

 

DM: Do you remember your best marks?

 

BG: Then, I was doing 57, 58 feet as a freshman. Compared to records now it's minuscule. I think the freshman national record was 59 or 60 feet with a 12-pound shot. Discus, the national varsity record was 198 or so by Carl Johnstone when he was a junior and I was throwing in the low 180s as a freshman. I was zeroing in. Dallas Long set a national varsity record in shot put of 69-9, I think, around 1959 or 1960. I did the decathlon because I was interested in all the events. I played freshman football and basketball but our track coach was such a dedicated coach he said to me, "Listen, why don't you just excel and spend year-round training for track because I know you can go to the Olympics if you really concentrate." My sophomore year I concentrated on track, but my junior year I started falling apart and missing school. My senior year I was ineligible because of the missed school year before. I had a legitimate chance of setting varsity national shot put, discus and decathlon records.

 

DM: Do you ever think back about blowing your junior and senior year off?

 

BG: Oh yeah, I've got a lot of regrets. I was aiming for the Mexico City Olympics (1968). I was getting scholarship offers from a lot of colleges during my sophomore year and it was a shame. It was really a missed opportunity.

 

DM: In the 60s, what were you doing? Were you doing any sports? What kind of training were you doing?

 

BG: Out of high school in 1961 I didn't do any organized athletics. I did a lot of lifting. I was bodybuilding and weightlifting. I started bodybuilding in high school. I was influenced a lot by bodybuilding. I started powerlifting in the late 1960s. I never competed as a powerlifter because I tried pro football. In those days they were very strict that if you were a pro in one sport, you couldn't compete as an amateur in another. From 1967 to 1969 I tried out for the Houston Oilers and the Oakland Raiders and then went to play Canadian ball in Calgary and Montreal.

 

DM: Did you meet Stu Hart when you were playing football in Calgary or did that come later?

 

BG: I met Stu Hart because a friend of mine playing ball when we were with Calgary in 1969 was wrestling in the off-season for Stu Hart, Bob Lueck. He said, this is great, in the off-season you should wrestle. It's a lot of fun and you can pick up some extra bucks. He convinced me to try it. By the time I decided to try it was the winter of 1969 so I contacted Stu Hart. I left Phoenix and it was 75 degrees in December of 1969, beautiful. I drove for four straight days to Calgary and when I got there it was something like 60 degrees below zero. It was the first time in my life I'd ever been in cold weather being from the desert. All I owned were a few sweaters and windbreakers. I eventually caught bronchial pneumonia because it was so cold and I wasn't dressed properly. I remember everyone would pile into Stu Hart's old limo and he'd take all the boys in a big limo from Calgary to Edmonton when I was sick. I left my apartment with blankets all over me and laid down on the floor of the limo and just shivered and shook for 200 miles to Edmonton. I got there and the doctor told me, hey, you can't wrestle, you've got pneumonia. You've got a sky-high fever. I had to wrestle because I needed the money. It was like a $50 payoff. I had to wrestle. We worked out a deal where I wrestled for one minute and somebody interfered just so I could earn the $50. So that's how I started.

 

DM: Were you wrestling as Wayne Coleman there or Billy Graham?

 

BG: Wayne Coleman. I was in Stu Hart's basement, you know, in the Munsters house. It was surrealistic. It was freezing, way below zero. Stu Hart's kids running around in the snow, bare-footed and going crazy. Stu would always go to the market and bring these boxes and left-over fruit that was getting rotten and bring it to the basement for the kids. We'd rummage through the rotten bananas and I'd take sacks back to my apartment. Stu was a mark for me because I had 22-inch arms and was bench pressing close to 600 then. The only other man he'd ever seen bench press 500 then was Doug Hepburn (a famous Canadian strongman of the 1950s). I blew up 580 and he'd drool over my triceps. He sent me around the loop to arm wrestle marks. I was so strong and so sauced up and so psyched.

 

DM: So you first started the arm wrestling gimmick there?

 

BG: Exactly. I made the loop arm wrestling everyone for two weeks. The farmers would get pissed off and there were some pretty tough farmer boys there. I'd use all the gimmicks and techniques I knew plus being so psyched up from the sauce that these farmers didn't know what hit them and I'd blow them away. During those two weeks I'd spend the days in Stu Hart's basement. It was like the dungeon with nothing but a few mats on the floor and four gray walls and pipes. Stu Hart was down there and I didn't have a clue about wrestling. He never even smartened me up. He'd say, "Let me see your neck." I'd bend over and put my neck in between his arms and he'd twist my neck. He put me in all those grotesque holds. He never smartened me up and I thought once I got in the ring this is how it's going to be. Boy, this was serious. The first match I was supposed to get involved with was Angelo Mosca vs. Bob Lueck, both football players. Stu Hart got me out of the locker room about 30 feet from the ring. He told me, "I want you to go into the ring and attack Bob Lueck with Mosca." I said, "What?" I told him, "I can't go to the ring. The bell has already rung. The match has already started." So I didn't go. Stu Hart got so mad at me and dragged me back to the locker room and said, "What do you think you're doing? You're supposed to do what I tell you to." I didn't know what was going on because nobody had smartened me up. So the person who finally smartened me up was Abdullah the Butcher. I had really flashy clothes and he liked the clothes. I rode with him and he took me under his wing. He taught me about the business, the cutthroat things about the business. I didn't even know it was a work. Stu Hart was shooting with me in the basement. So I went from the basement shooting with Stu Hart to the ring with guys working and I was lost. I didn't know what was going on. It was hysterical. But I finally figured out what was going on. I got a terry-cloth bathrobe and had a lady stencil in a butterfly on the back. That was when Muhammad Ali was doing the "float like a butterfly, sting like a bee" stuff. I started doing the poetry on the interviews. Even arm-wrestling the mark farmers, I'd walk around the table and had natural charisma that I didn't even know about. Remember a guy called the Mighty Ursus, Jesse Ortega? He was huge. Probably 450 legit. He had this monstrous chest, his bone structure was so huge, legitimately it must have been 60 inches. Stu Hart was going to put me over Mighty Ursus and he wanted me to beat him with the Bruno Sammartino backbreaker. You know, the one he gave to Buddy Rogers with in that famous picture. I told Stu, "I don't know how to do this." So he showed me how to do it. We went through it in the locker room and Mighty Ursus, he bent over and I could barely get my arms around him. He had to have weighed 450. I was so strong I just bent over, grabbed him, wrapped my arms around him and threw him on my shoulder and it was alright. So we went out for the match and when it came time for the finish, I put my arms around him and I started to go up with him and he sat down, he flattened out. He double-crossed me because he didn't want to do the (submission) job on television. Somehow it ended up looking like a piledriver and the TV guy (Ed Whalen) covered it up. He rolled over and I pinned him. It was the first major double-cross of my career. Stu Hart was so pissed off because he knew what happened. I didn't even know what happened. I just figured that he slipped and then I slipped but Stu and all the boys knew that he sat down on me. Stu was pissed off and yelling at him because Stu loved me. The next thing Stu had me do was become Abdullah the Butcher's manager. You're going to talk for Abby since I could talk pretty well. It wasn't two weeks with me managing and wrestling that Butcher saw me getting real hot so Butcher said to me, "I'm going to switch you babyface right now. I'm going to shoot an angle with you. We'll have a big weightlifting contest. We'll have you supposedly try for a world record in the bench press in the middle of the ring and I'll dump all the weights on you." I told him, "You're crazy, man." The 600 pounds was a shoot. I wasn't going to let him dump any bench with 600 pounds over on me. The Butcher was just salivating because he saw money in it but we never did it. When you start with Stu Hart in Edmonton, Regina, Moose Head, Moose Jaw and all these places 500 miles in the arctic tundra and you come back to Calgary at 5 a.m. and you work that night, doing it every week with four or five guys in a car and everyone smoking but me. I was the only non-smoker and I had to stick my face in the crack in the window for 500 miles in below zero weather. Now that's paying your dues. What's that big thing they have every year?

 

DM: The Calgary Stampede?

 

BG: That was my first big show. I started copying the Butcher. I liked the way he took his bumps and went on the floor and threw the chairs. I took my first big bump on the table at ringside. My match was way before Butcher's and I got all the heat taking the big bump and broke the table and knocked over all the commentating equipment. I thought it was great. But Butcher came back all pissed off at me because I broke all the tables and there was nothing left for him to break. He said, "You left me nothing, Coleman, what do you think you're doing?" Nobody had even told me about blade jobs. I didn't even know how they were getting juice. One night I was watching the Butcher and I thought, "What is he doing?" It was like a machine. His right hand, bing, bing, bing and all of sudden there was all this blood. That smartened me up about the blade. Going to Stu Hart's house, you know, The Munsters house with the kids running wild in the snow was like a circus. Every story you ever heard out of there was true. Sailor Art Thomas was in Stu's basement. He broke in there. Stu was trying to stretch him but Sailor somehow reversed it and got Stu in a pretty good hold and was putting on the pressure on Stu and Stu said, "Wait a minute, there's a phone call for me." Stu never stretched him again. But I was so stupid. I let him stretch me and beat me up. I just thought this was the way it is. It was something you never forget. What's really sad is that I've never seen Stu Hart since then. I've spoken to him over the years off-and-on. I think it's sad that I went my entire career, I started my career with him, now more than 20 years later, my career is finished and I've never seen Stu Hart again. I think a lot of him. It bothers me. When I'm able, I'd like to visit him. It would be really neat.

 

DM: So after Calgary, then came Los Angeles, right?

 

BG: I met Dr. Jerry Graham. He was a Phoenix boy. I'd thrown him out of the bars in Phoenix when I was a bouncer before I was a wrestler. When I came back to Phoenix after six months in Calgary, I started bouncing again and I ran into Jerry Graham at the club I was bouncing at near Arizona State University. I knew he was a wrestler. I told him, "I'm in the business now." He said, "Why don't we go over to Los Angeles and start working for Mike LeBelle." It sounded good to me. Jerry Graham had a lot of heat on him with all the promoters but I didn't know this. He called Mike LeBelle and in the office was Fred Blassie, Gene LeBelle and Mr. Moto. He said, "I've got this guy with me, this big kid, we're gonna do a brother thing, you know, another brother." Mike LeBelle told him, "I'll think about it. But I'll call you." You know, don't call us, we'll call you. I picked up on this. I told him the only way we'll get in is to drive over to Los Angeles and walk in the office and say, "Here we are." So I got my first bleach job, got some Lady Clairol and he showed me how to bleach my hair. I thought Billy Graham sounded like a good name, like the evangelist. So I became Billy Graham. We drove over to Los Angeles and walked into the office. Mike LeBelle said, "I told you we'd call you!" I said, "But I thought it would be better if we came in person in case you wanted to use us." I was so impressive looking. I wasn't cut up then, but I was huge. My weight was 280, all sauced up, blown up like a big balloon. He said to Jerry, "Who is this guy, talking about me?" "Oh, he's been working for years," Jerry said, even though I'd only been working for about four months. Finally LeBelle said, "Okay, we'll give you a chance." But he said to me, "You are responsible for Jerry Graham." I said, "What do you mean, I'm responsible." He said, "The only way you guys are going to wrestle for me is if you take complete responsibility for Jerry Graham, and if Jerry Graham screws up, he's gone and you're gone with him." It wasn't really fair, but I wanted to work in Los Angeles. We started working as a tag team. It didn't take long. About a month later Jerry was drinking real heavy. One night, when I was booked in El Monte, he was supposed to be in San Diego and he didn't show up. His mother had died and he had to go home to Phoenix. He came back and he was so distraught because they were very close. He just got drunk and wound up in Hollywood and tore this strip joint apart and the police arrested him and took him to jail and booked him and they called Mike LeBelle. The next morning, they bailed him out and we're at the hotel and I got a message to be in Mike LeBelle's office the first thing the next morning. I didn't even know Jerry was in jail that night and saw him the next morning after he'd been bailed out and asked him what's going on. "Why do they want us to be in the office." He was playing dummy and said, "I don't know, let's find out." We go in the office and Mike LeBelle said, "You're both fired." I said, "For what?" He said, "Jerry was in jail last night, he missed his shot in San Diego, he got busted in Hollywood." I told him that I was in another town working, I couldn't have been responsible for Jerry Graham. I told him I can't be responsible for Jerry Graham. I wanted to stay and work. I told them that I didn't do anything wrong. They agreed. I guess they thought they might be able to make a little money with me which they eventually did. So they kept me and gave Jerry two weeks notice. That two weeks was really horrible because I had to drive him to every town. He would get drunk and piss on the floor board of my car. Pissed all over my car. We went to San Diego one night and had car trouble in San Clemente. We had to leave the car in San Clemente, take the bus to San Diego, work the shot, spend the night in San Clemente while they fixed my car. That night he got drunk in San Clemente, you know, Richard Nixon was living there then, and tore the hotel room apart, cops were coming, the FBI agents came and I was wondering what I was doing there. It was the longest two weeks of my life. I stayed and they gave me a little bit of a push. I ended up working a big arm wrestling angle. I was shooting with the marks there, too. I was so stupid. Some of these guys went to Petaluma (where they hold the world arm wrestling championships). They were shooters. One guy was second in the lightheavyweight class. I went on TV and challenged anyone. But this stuff was live on TV. I found out some of these guys were shooters. I put him down. He was a lightheavyweight and I was 290 and sauced to the max but it was tough. There was another guy who owned an iron mill who had a reputation of never being beaten in arm wrestling. He bet me $10,000 live on TV. I was stunned. They were supposed to be screening these guys but this guy got in. I told him that I didn't have $10,000. I beat the guy in a shoot on TV because I got the jump on him and in the middle of the ring on live television he threw the table at me so I grabbed a chair and I hit him in the back as hard as I could in a shoot. It looked like a great angle on TV but we weren't working and the guy wasn't a worker. We were setting it up for Fred Blassie. He was the hero here. Finally we did the deal. Blassie challenged me. Mike LeBelle didn't have the confidence in me to draw at the Olympic so we shot the angle for Northridge. Black Gordman & Goliath were there. So I've beaten all these guys and Blassie is putting my arm down. I'm putting Freddie Blassie over in arm wrestling. Gordman & Goliath hit the ring. They grabbed the ring bell and the hammer and they busted Blassie open and we triple-teamed him. That night I worked in Northridge with Blassie in the Blassie cage. They booked Gordman & Goliath with Blassie at the Olympic. So we sold Northridge out with the cage but Gordman & Goliath did the big angle and it did big business. Roy Shire caught wind of me and they would trade boys back-and-forth. He brought me up for one shot. He liked the way I looked and the guy I worked with was Earl Maynard, the Mr. Universe. I walked out there with my gimmicks and flexed and it popped in San Francisco. Shire talked with Mike LeBelle and told him he wanted me up there so they finished me in Los Angeles and I went to Frisco. I hooked up with Pat Patterson and that's when I started learning how to work by tag teaming with Pat and working against Ray Stevens. These guys became my idols. I became such a mark for Ray Stevens. Cyclone Negro became my all-time favorite. I tried to emulate him, but I couldn't, obviously. They put the world tag team belts on Pat and me. All the guys there would laugh at me because I was pretty green and they were teaching me how to work. That's where I really learned. Roy Shire told me that before and after your match you watch the entire card and you learn how to work, so that's what I did, from behind the curtain. That was my schooling. I'm glad I did. That's when I really learned how to work and what the business was all about.

 

DM: As far as the gift of gab, was that something you learned from Blassie?

 

BG: The promos were slow in coming, but after being around Fred Blassie, Ray Stevens and Pat Patterson, these guys were the best. In San Francisco, I was always teaming with Patterson and he was so good on interviews that he did almost all of the talking except for a few single matches with Ray Stevens for the U.S. belt where I had to do my own interviews. Watching and listening to Patterson really helped me. I really improved my interviews when I went to Minnesota. Stevens had left San Francisco for Minnesota. I went back to Los Angeles and Stevens got ahold of me in Los Angeles and talked me into coming to Minneapolis. I was thinking a lot about Roy Shire in San Francisco and how detailed he'd make the matches and the way he ran the business compared to the way it's done now. Now you never hear the word kayfabe. You never hear the carny talk. It doesn't exist anymore. Roy Shire was probably the best promoter in the country as far as making the business viewed in the most positive way. Just as an example, in 1971 I had a match with Ray Stevens for his United States belt at the Cow Palace. I worked with Pat Barrett on TV and evidently I had a bad match on TV. This was the last TV show before the Cow Palace show. Roy Shire chewed me out. He said, "You had such a horrible match on television that if the house falls at the Cow Palace, I'm going to fine you $1,000." That was half my paycheck. I think I picked up $2,000 on top. Sure enough, the house fell a little bit. It didn't fall much, but a little bit. So I got fined $1,000 and when were at the Cow Palace, and I don't know if this has ever happened anywhere else in wrestling but Roy Shire said we're going to work for a return match, however, I'm going to give you two guys two different finishes. If the match is the shits, you're going to go to a finish where I just got beat clean in the middle with no return. But if it's a good match, we'll use the other finish to build up the return. We went into the ring with two finishes to choose from. When we got into the ring and we started working, Ray Stevens said, "I don't give a shit. We're going use the return finish." We had a good match because Ray could have a good match with a punching bag. Shire's philosophy was that a wrestling match must contain three elements--one element was street fighting, one element would be scientific wrestling and one element would be high spots. If you didn't have all three elements in the match, then it wasn't a good match. He'd go out there and watch all the matches, well not necessarily guys like Stevens or Patterson, but my matches and guys of my level he'd watch. When you came back in, he'd chew you out and ask you why did you do this and why did you do that? And why did you do this when you could have done that? He'd complain if there weren't enough high spots. He wanted at least three or four high spots per match. There were all these rules, regulations and criteria for every match that he set down. I never saw anyone like that when I traveled around the country after I'd left there. I think he was a unique promoter. I know Eddie Graham had very highly detailed finishes but nobody was as strict in the whole package as Shire. If you were 15 minutes late to a town you were fined $25. The second time was a $50 fine and the third time was a $75 fine. He'd take us into the control room at the TV taping in Sacramento where we did the tapings and he'd go over word-for-word what he wanted you to say on the promos. He was a genius for the business. Well, I thought he was anyway. He'd give you word-for-word and point-for-point what he wanted you to cover. He almost expected you to do it verbatim. It was like going to school. It was a pain when you were going through it but it was a blessing in disguise because it gave you a lot of discipline and made you aware of a lot of different things. He made a lot of people better wrestlers. I don't think you'll ever see that ever again. Even in those days he was the exception.

 

DM: When you got on top, how much were the other promoters dictating to you or did they figure since you were on top, you're a star and you just went in there and flexed your arms?

 

BG: Once I established myself in San Francisco came my second run in Los Angeles. I got a pretty good push because I learned how to work. From there I went to Minneapolis. When I hit Minneapolis I'd already been through all these matches against Ray Stevens and teaming with Pat Patterson and done all these different finishes and high spots and I just walked in and got on television, hit the promos and with the body and the big arms and arm wrestling people on TV, I was over so strong. Verne Gagne wouldn't say, I want you to work such-and-such a way. Once that happened I never ran into a problem with Dusty or the Von Erichs in Texas. They just gave me a finish.

 

DM: Did you ever feel any resentment among any veteran wrestlers at this point because you were a young guy with three or four years of experience that was on top and you were taking steroids and maybe they were better wrestlers but they were in the second match?

 

BG: I didn't have that feeling at all in San Francisco. There were so many top people there and I was just mixed in with them. I just learned from them. When I got to Minneapolis and was over so strong, I could detect some jealousy from people. There was some resentment from Billy Robinson. He was in Calgary when I first started. He hated for some reason, weightlifters and football players. So here I was, I was both. He had hurt people in Calgary. We never worked with each other in Calgary because I was always on the bottom and a little bit in the middle and he was a main eventer. But in Minnesota, Robinson was in Minnesota and a main eventer and he still didn't like football players. When it came time to shoot the big arm wrestling angle, Verne Gagne was going to flip a coin to decide who was going to work the angle with me, Billy Robinson or Wahoo McDaniel. I told him that I didn't get along with Billy Robinson too well and I preferred to work with Wahoo. So we did. During this period I worked a main event against Billy Robinson in Minneapolis and he still had this left-over attitude from Calgary and I knew he'd hurt people. We had a match scheduled and I told him, "Look, I can't wrestle. I'm not a shooter and I know you're a shooter. I know if we get in there and you decide to shoot you can turn me into spaghetti." So I took out a blade and told him I'm taping this blade to my finger and I'm leaving a quarter-inch showing. I told him, "If you even attempt to hurt me or do hurt me, I'll cut you from one end of your body to the other and I'm taping it to my finger right now." He said, "Man, you've got the wrong idea." I taped it to my finger anyway but we went out there and had one of the best matches in the territory. I didn't even know he was in the ring he worked so light.

 

DM: Back in 1971, that's when you were training with all the big boys in Gold's Gym. Because when you were here (in San Francisco) you were a big guy, but with Verne, you looked like a bodybuilder and had the physique change.

 

BG: I hooked up with Arnold (Schwarzeneggar) in 1971. In 1972 when my daughter was born, the marks tore up my car in Long Beach the night before and Arnold took my daughter back from the hospital. I started training with him and got into the bodybuilding seriously and that's when my appearance started to change.

 

DM: Did you compete in bodybuilding before that?

 

BG: I competed in bodybuilding and won Teenage Mr. America in 1961.

 

DM: That was before the sauce, wasn't it?

 

BG: That was sauce-free. Nobody was using sauce at the teenage level. Actually that year they had an Eastern Division and Western Division in the Teenage Mr. America and Frank Zane (who later became Mr. Olympia three times) won the Eastern Division and I won the Western Division. In later years we became friends. I competed in Mr. Arizona and took second or third when I was still a teenager. I got away from it and got into the powerlifting in the late 60s and that's when I got real big and got into the business.

 

DM: The steroids were introduced to you in Arizona?

 

BG: In the late 60s.

 

DM: When you came into Calgary were there guys using it or was it your secret?

 

BG: I wasn't aware of anyone using them in Calgary. In San Francisco, guys would come through for the Battle Royal every January and I saw guys who were huge and I knew they were using sauce. I really didn't pay that much attention until I went to Minneapolis when Ivan Putski came in at 290. He was huge. And Ken Patera. The sauce really opened up. After meeting Arnold, I started working on the diet, the bodybuilding and the heavy sauce and that's when I changed my appearance.

 

DM: When you say heavy sauce in those days, how does that compare to heavy sauce these days? Would that be heavy sauce today, or light sauce or medium sauce?

 

BG: We're talking about light-to-medium by today's standards. In fact, Patera always took very little amount of sauce. He was one of those people who just responded. He took maybe three dianabol a day (five milligram tablets) when most of us were taking eight or ten a day. I was using the injectables also. It started changing in Minneapolis in 1973. I came into Minneapolis and I was instantly over. After all those interviews watching Blassie and Patterson, I added Superstar to the name because of the song "Jesus Christ, Superstar" and tagged that on. I really got into the show-biz part of it. I was really into my gimmicks. I had a new costume, different color boots, different color tights at each TV taping. I got over so strong I couldn't believe it. I shot the arm wrestling angle with Wahoo (McDaniel) and I busted him up and we did record business for that time. Every place we sold out, Winnipeg, Chicago, Minneapolis, we did the first sellout in the big building in Green Bay.

 

DM: How was the travel working that territory?

 

BG: We worked in Honolulu, that was the worst trip. Denver, Winnipeg, we'd fly and spend the night. That wasn't bad. Chicago, we'd fly and get a plane back at 12:30 so we were home at night. But there was a lot of long-distance driving. When I got over, every chance I had I flew because I didn't want to spend eight hours in a car.

 

DM: As compared with the others, were you more religious in your training and your diet?

 

BG: I didn't watch the diet as hard as I would later. I started watching it in 1974 and even more in 1976 when I was in Dan Lurie's Pro Mr. America contest and finished fifth or sixth and won best arms. At the time I gave Verne my notice because I was tired of living in the snow in Minneapolis. I didn't want to live there and I told him I wanted to move to Dallas. I ended up still working with Verne but living in Dallas and paying my own trans. I was making pretty good money so I didn't care. I just wasn't going to live below zero all winter long. I moved to Dallas, but still wrestled for Verne. It didn't take long for that to wear out. About that time, Vince (McMahon, Sr.) got his eyes on me. That's when I got really serious into the bodybuilding. I worked the Dallas territory a little when I was living there. In August, 1975 I went to Vince for the first time.

 

DM: How was that territory as compared with the other ones?

 

BG: I liked it. It was just the Northeast. There was quite a bit of driving involved. I met my future wife and brought her on the road with me and we got married. I kept Valerie on the road with me. We traveled together. I lived at the Ramada Inn on 48th and 8th in Manhattan and if I had to make a shot by plane she'd stay there.

 

DM: How was the money comparing the WWF with Verne at that time?

 

BG: Verne paid well, very well as a matter of fact. But the money was bigger in the WWWF. My championship year (1977) I made close to $200,000 and in those days that was big money. I think I was making $80,000 to $90,000 with Verne, which was huge for those days. The year after (1978) I made almost $200,000 that year. As champion you were supposed to get eight percent (of the gate) of the small towns and five percent of the big clubs. I never ever received that. I mean never, but that didn't matter because it was still big money. When I first went there in 1975-76, I teamed with Ivan Koloff and Ernie Ladd was there. Ernie Ladd, Ivan Koloff and myself went to Vince Sr. and told him that no matter what town we worked, no matter where we were on the card, we'd get main event payoffs because we were main event wrestlers. If Ernie was main event but I was semifinal, I still demanded main event payoffs. It was only because of Ernie Ladd threatening discrimination, the old man (Vince Sr.) wasn't going to mess with him so he did it. We got away with something there that was very unusual.

 

DM: It was like a power play.

 

BG: And it worked. When did the plane go down with Ric Flair?

 

DM: I think it was 1975 or 1976.

 

BG: They (Jim Crockett) brought me in to replace Ric Flair for about a month and Crockett paid great money. I made super money on those shows. I went back to Vince and got a couple of short payoffs from the old man. I confronted him at the Spectrum and showed him my book. I said, "I just did these shots for Crockett, he paid me $600 in this town, $1,000 in this town and my last Spectrum pay off was $600 and I was making that in a little town in the Carolinas." My next paycheck he made up for all of it. He said, "Billy, I'm sorry, it must have been an oversight." The Old Man was very nice, a super gentleman with a lot of class. Other than being shortchanged a few times I had a lot of respect for him.

 

DM: You worked with Bruno right before he got hurt when Stan Hansen and Bruiser Brody were in?

 

BG: That's when Hansen dropped him. I got over there so strong because I was so cut-up because I had just entered the Mr. America contest and was in super shape and ripped with the gimmick and the color and the people loved it. That's when Brody and Hansen were in. I worked with Bruno before he got hurt. I was with Hansen in a motel room in Maine after he dropped Bruno. Hansen was scared to death and we called Bruno and Bruno was very much a gentleman about it. Obviously he was upset since he broke his neck. It was a great territory. Being champion I flew everywhere and trans was paid first class. My future wife was with me and we loved traveling and it was fun.

 

DM: Even back then the WWWF was a big man territory. Did you notice a lot of guys on sauce? You were doing real well and all cut-up. Were people asking you training advice, steroids advice?

 

BG: The guys weren't that inquisitive then. But it was a big man's territory with Koloff at about 280, Gorilla Monsoon and Bruno, Brody, Stan Hansen. It wasn't that open. Everyone knew I was taking sauce and other guys were taking sauce. I was really into dieting and everyone knew that. That set me apart. But I was the first big man who was really cut up.

 

DM: But it wasn't discussed a lot.

 

BG: It was done. A lot of guys did it. Putski was there then and started getting cut-up then. But nobody talked about it then.

 

DM: As far as the attitude of the wrestlers in regards to wrestling and bodybuilding between the 70s and 80, how drastic did you see the change?

 

BG: There was a huge difference. In the mid-80s you had your Orndorffs, Hercules, The Hulk of course. It was a different atmosphere. Roids, Roids, Roids. Everyone was on them. Everyone. All the guys cared about was getting bigger and more cut-up, and then bigger and more cut up.

 

DM: Can you come up with a specific reason or time frame for all that?

 

BG: It was gradual from the late 70s the trend started switching because the sauce was prevalent. It was readily available from Dr. Zahorian starting in 1977 and everyone was getting whatever they wanted from him. But the trend was to look like a bodybuilder, maybe I helped the trend start. In the 80s they started pushing the bodybuilding but I can't put my finger on the explosion. But in the early-to-mid 80s there was a massive change. It was gradual, then an explosion. The big boys were being pushed. John Studd came through and he wanted to be as big as Andre. Everybody wanted to be big. Then they all wanted to be more cut-up. I think Orndorff was a big influence. When did he come in?

 

DM: I'd say the end of 1983, right at the same time as Hulk.

 

BG: From 1980-82, I was pretty much out. When Orndorff came, it probably motivated a lot of people because he looked sensational.

 

DM: As far as dosages comparing the mid-80s to the 70s, did you notice a time where the guys were saying it's okay to use a lot more?

 

BG: It was the early 80s. It was the influence of powerlifters. That era the powerlifters were taking tremendous amounts of sauce in the early 80s and the megadoses became popular. All of a sudden you threw all the rules and guidelines out the window. Sauce, Sauce, Sauce, especially among the wrestlers. We were on the road. We had no regularity. There was the strain of traveling. You worked out at a different gym every day. You had jetlag. It was hard to diet on the road. I think we took more than anyone else. We wouldn't have had to take so much if we had more of a regular schedule.

 

DM: When was the World's Strongest Man thing?

 

BG: That was in 1980.

 

DM: Where you out of wrestling then?

 

BG: I left New York and moved to Phoenix but I worked some shots for Paul Boesch in Houston. I shaved my head in December of 1978 and entered the strongman contest.

 

DM: Is there any reason you went from being one of the top stars in the business and then dropped out?

 

BG: I was really burned out. After my run as champion and the year after, the traveling had burned me out. I didn't want to travel anymore and I wanted to stop.

 

DM: Was your attitude at the time that you were done with the business?

 

BG: Almost. I was thinking of quitting. I'd been the champion. I was tired of wrestling. I didn't want to wrestle too much. I wasn't having any physical problems but I was mentally burned out. I worked for Paul Boesch because he took care of me so good and paid so well. I was tired of being on the road.

 

DM: Did you keep up with the training?

 

BG: The strongman contest came up in 1980. I was talked into entering. I bulked up to 325 pounds. That's when I started using the heavy sauce to gain all the weight and strength.

 

DM: How did your name come up since you weren't a world-class lifter at the time? Were they looking for a wrestler?

 

BG: Bruce Wilhelm (the U.S. best Olympic weightlifter at the time) was a friend of mine and people involved with the show talked me into doing it. There were only ten people asked to be in it. There were certainly a lot of people around who were much stronger than me. Wasn't Patera in it?

 

DM: I think Patera was in it one year, Putski was in it one year and Jerry Blackwell was in it one year.

 

BG: Blackwell was sent in as a rib. It's sad. I liked Jerry Blackwell a lot. I went to Kuwait with him. When I found out about the rib sending him in I wasn't too pleased with it. But doing that strongman stuff wasn't no rib. That was dangerous stuff. That would be a great gimmick now. That World's Strongest Man contest would get over now.

 

DM: They're doing them in Europe now. Tom Magee, Bill Kazmaier, the guy who just died in Raleigh, O.D. Wilson, were all doing it?

 

BG: I heard about him. So much sauce and high blood pressure.

 

DM: How did your testimony in the Zahorian trial come about?

 

BG: It was ironic. My lawyers were working on putting their case together. Chuck Klein, one of the people in the firm was friends with Theodore Smith (the prosecuting attorney in the Zahorian case). Smith's father was a judge and Klein worked under his father quite a bit. The initial hook-up came when I was talking to Brian Blair one day before the trial and I was trying to find out what was happening with Zahorian. I told him the reason I was trying to find out was because I might have a malpractice lawsuit against Zahorian. Blair told me something and my lawyer called Blair's lawyer and Blair's lawyer somehow made the connection with Theodore Smith. Chuck Klein called Smith and told him about our potential civil suit against Zahorian and we would be more than happy to cooperate in the criminal case if I had anything substantial to contribute. Smith called me and asked me what I knew and I told him on the phone and he told me they wanted to use me as a rebuttal witness.

 

DM: You were out of wrestling for a while. You came back in 1982 and at the end of that run, were you hurt because physically there was a difference?

 

BG: In that second run with Backlund I had begun to take so many drugs from Zahorian that I became so addicted to downers, uppers and steroids by the handful. I wasn't even working out because I was so addicted to the sedatives, pain pills and valium. Zahorian was like a monster. He would offer you great deals on bottles of 1,000 sleeping pills and he didn't care about you as a human being. When I went to Florida and I was trying to clean myself up from all these drugs, he called me in Florida and said he could get me a great deal on bottles of 1,000 Adavan. I told him I was trying to clean myself out and he got irate, like I had insulted him. He hung up the phone because I was trying to get clean. During that run I almost died because I had two overdoses. I became so addicted because of the accessibility. There were so many drugs involved among the boys then that it was overwhelming.

 

DM: Were you taking the sedatives because of the pain from the bumps or because of trouble sleeping because of the steroids?

 

BG: I couldn't sleep because of the sauce and then I became so addicted to the sedatives that they became the most important thing to take. I was still taking steroids but I wasn't even working out. I was so emaciated. People thought I had cancer. I had two overdoses. The first was in Washington, D.C. One morning at 9 a.m. I was on the phone with my wife and I'd just taken a handful of downers and I collapsed. I fell and was unconscious in the bathroom. I was wedged between the toilet and the door. My wife heard me fall and bang on the bathroom floor. She called the hotel staff and told them to rush into my room because and break the door down because I'd fallen. When they did, they couldn't unwedge me from the bathroom and they called the paramedics and the fire department and they took a hatchet and axed the door down and got me out of there. They took me to one hospital close by but they didn't have the facilities to handle that big of an overdose so they took me to the Baltimore Trauma Shock Unit where Reagan was taken when he caught the bullet. I was in there all day long and when I started coming to on the operating table I had all these tubes in me. I had so many drugs in me they thought I had tried to commit suicide. They asked what I was doing with seven valium in my system and six or seven codeine tablets and placadyl. I told them the codeine was for the pain, the placadyl was to help me sleep and the valium was from all the stress in wrestling. I had an answer for everything. They told me I had to spend the night with in the hospital. I told them there was no way I was spending the night because that night I was supposed to wrestle my last shot in Madison Square Garden and I didn't want to miss my last shot. I said if you don't take all these tubes out of me, I'll take them out myself because I've got to get out of this hospital because I've got to get New York and wrestle. They thought I was an idiot talking about wrestling when I had just come out of a coma. They made me sign this thing that said they weren't releasing me and that I was leaving on my own accord because I started ripping IV's out of my arms. They let me out of there. I caught a cab, went back to the motel room which looked like a hurricane hit it with all the wood everywhere and went to the Ramada in New York and worked the shot. In Springfield I overdosed but my wife was with me. Half the time my wife would flush everything down the toilet. I'd scream and yell at her and threaten to kill her if she did it again. I overdosed again on all this stuff and passed out on the floor with a hamburger in my mouth. They came up and gave me CPR and beat on me and cleaned out my throat, took me to the hospital and pumped my stomach. The drugs had a death grip on me and Zahorian was the supplier.

 

DM: How did the recovery period go?

 

BG: On the way back to Arizona I was still taking a lot of drugs. At the time there was getting to be a bit of heat on the boys from the New Jersey Highway Patrol. We would avoid going from New York to Philadelphia on the Jersey Turnpike. They were after us there because they had word that we were carrying a lot of drugs and they were watching for us. I went about 200 miles out of my way to avoid the Jersey Turnpike because the trunk of my car was filled with steroids. When I got to Arizona I had another big seizure because I was trying to cut down on the drugs but I was cutting down too fast. I had a massive seizure about 100 miles out of Phoenix. When I got to Phoenix I went to a rehab center there and got them cleaned out of me. But then I started taking the heavy sauce again. But it was a nightmare.

 

DM: Did you go to work for Crockett then?

 

BG: Actually I went to Florida and was working for Dusty before he went to Charlotte. I stayed there when Kevin Sullivan was booking. Kevin Sullivan and I worked together and shot a bunch of angles. From there I went to Charlotte.

 

DM: Looking back, when did the physical effects of the steroids started coming on?

 

BG: In 1984 I started getting a little hitch in my hip. I thought it was a tendon problem. I worked a year in Charlotte and my hip was bothering me. I thought it was a tendon injury that wouldn't heal. I went to Florida and it was bothering me pretty bad. I wouldn't go to the doctor because I was afraid of what he'd say. I got myself in real good shape and in the summer of 1986 I went up to Vince and called him and said I'm ready to come back in. I went back up to talk to him in his office in Stamford. I was in real good shape. I'd gotten cut up but my hip was killing me. We did some promos and he brought me back in and the first night in Baltimore I worked with Bob Bradley. Prior to that I had taken two huge cortisone shots in the hip from a doctor in Los Angeles to calm it down. But the hip was gone and it was the most excruciating pain in my life. I told Vince that my hip was gone. He said we should get it fixed and work it as a wrestling angle. He said he'd pay for it and I'd pay him back when I started working again. I had the operation and made the comeback.

 

DM: At the time were you aware that was from the steroids?

 

BG: I just thought it was wear-and-tear from wrestling. When I had the operation the doctor told me I had avascular necrosis. I said, "Fix it, I need a new hip. I'm going back in the ring." He told me, "You're stupid, you're crazy. I shouldn't even be fixing your hip with an attitude like that." I said wrestling is hot, there's money for me to make and I didn't want to hear anything.

 

DM: At that time there was no talk of avascular necrosis being a potential side effect from steroids, Right?

 

BG: At that time, the doctors were beginning to suspect and had suspicions but nothing was confirmed. I wasn't told point-blank that steroids had done this. They began at that time having suspicions that steroids cause avascular necrosis. I was never told at that time.

 

DM: When was the first you heard of it?

 

BG: When the ankle went in 1990 and I had the operation in February. The doctor told me I had avascular necrosis of the ankle. I told him that's the same thing I had with my hip. He said he felt strongly that steroids had caused it. My ankle doctor then confirmed it. I asked if steroids could have done it with my hip. I went back to my hip doctor and by that time they had gotten more information and he agreed that it was steroids that caused my hip to go out, also.

 

DM: After you had the ankle done, what was the motivating factor to go on Entertainment Tonight?

 

BG: The motivating factor was I was laying there in the hospital. My ankle was fused. The bone was dead. They had to take bone out of my shin and my other hip. My leg was shortened by an inch. My left ankle also needs an operation but I'm going to try and live with it. Here I am with a hip that's gone and an ankle that's fused. These are tremendous traumatic injuries. I was talking to my wife and I thought we should tell the world about the steroids and my problems and maybe it could save some people a lot of pain. I knew I'd never wrestle again and thought maybe I could do some good and prevent severe damage to other people and save some people from going through a lot of misery. So I picked up the phone three days after the operation at St. Joseph Hospital here in Burbank. It's right next to NBC studios. Fred Rogan is the NBC guy here in Los Angeles. The next day was the Friday Night NBC Prime Time special where Buster Douglas did the guest referee deal. I wasn't even aware of that Friday Night special until the day I was laying there and I called up Fred Rogan and told him, "Well, the real story is not Buster Douglas being the special referee in Detroit. The real story is a former WWWF champion laying in this hospital room with steroid complications with a hip taken out and an ankle fused." His crew was there in 15 minutes. They did the interview and aired it that night. Jeff Hoffman, who produced the piece won the Sports News Story of the year award for that story that he did. The story went on Friday night and first thing Monday morning Entertainment Tonight called and they did the story. The only motivation was maybe I could save some people because I realized the dire straights I was in.

 

DM: How did people in wrestling react after the piece?

 

BG: I wasn't in touch with very many wrestlers. It's a very cold business as far as people maintaining friendships. I was always kind of a loner anyway although I had some good friends in (John) Studd and Jesse (Ventura). I thought at the time that Terry (Bollea) was a good friend of mine but I never heard from him again. I found out later talking to Brian Blair when Herb Abrams was promoting, Steve Strong and I went to see one of the shows and when I walked in, Blair was laughing and said, "Superstar's here, hide the steroids." He giggled and we all laughed. But I could tell there was an underlying ill feeling, although nobody said it to my face. But it surfaced that the boys felt I shouldn't have gone public, especially with the 90 percent figure. On the NBC piece, I said that I had injected wrestlers and other wrestlers had injected me but I used no names. But I did let it be known that we had given each other shots in locker rooms. At the time I felt I needed to get this message out and I didn't care what happened. I had no idea about a lawsuit at this time. I just wanted to tell the story because it's a horrible story. But I did get a lot of heat.

 

DM: What led you to get off steroids in 1989 and what did you go through in getting off?

 

BG: In April of 1989 is when I finally got off. At the time my ankles were so bad I could hardly walk, let alone train. I was in so much pain. One time I was at a pool and my wife saw my ankles from behind and my whole ankle was lopsided like a grapefruit. I was walking horribly and in tremendous pain. I went to the doctor and he said it was the worst ankle he'd ever seen in his life since World War II. He was a doctor in Italy during World War II and said he'd never seen an ankle this bad except for people who had stepped on grenades on the battlefield. He said we have to operate. We have to pull the dead bone out and put new bone in. He said it was from steroids. I'd never heard of anyone else having this injury. I just got off the steroids. I was hurting so bad I couldn't even train so what was I doing taking them anyway. I went off cold turkey which you should never do and I went through a tremendous amount of depression. I was always in pain from my ankles. My body was fading away. I was out of work. That made me more depressed. I constantly wanted to start taking steroids again. I had a total loss of appetite. I had a total loss of motivation to train. A total loss of sexual desire and sexual function because my system had been synthetically driven for all those years. All the boys that are doing sauce, even tapering off and cycling down they're heading for depression, loss of appetite, major unhappiness because their body won't look like it did. They won't have that euphoric feeling anymore because steroids do make you feel invincible. All of a sudden you feel flat. Steroids are anti-inflammatory so all of a sudden my joints started to hurt. All the joints were aching. I wasn't even training. A lot of people when they go off the sauce their tendons rupture. The constant barrage of steroids in your system weakens the tendons after a while. I have a ruptured tendon in my left wrist, a ruptured tendon in my left brachialis (bicep). When you're on the sauce you feel stronger than you are and you're lifting heavier weight that you're meant to do that it's ripping out the tendons. When you go off the sauce they dry up on you and you're a mess. Even today, I've been training as regularly as I can. But it's so depressing to be in the gym training and not getting the pump and the size back and not having the strength I used to have and not having the aggressiveness and the recuperative powers. I'm in there thinking what am I doing in the gym? My pulling power is fairly decent put the pushing power is gone. My left rotator cuff is completely torn which they think may be steroid related because of the degeneration of the tendons. The long head of my left bicep tendon is torn.

 

DM: Have you had any kidney or liver problems?

 

BG: I've had real heavy liver enzyme counts. The SGPT and SGOT counts were in the 300 to 600 range when normal is 75 to 80. I was passing blood in my urine for a while. This was after my hip surgery when I was making my comeback when I really went heavy on the sauce and that's when I started passing blood in my urine. I wanted to get so big for my comeback. The reason I was wrestling past my prime is because steroids told me I could. The steroids told me I could wrestle forever.

 

DM: When did you first meet The Hulk, was it in 1975 or 1976?

 

BG: I first met the Hulk in Tampa in late 1976. He was a tall, skinny kid, all bones, but he had huge bones, playing in a rock and roll band. He would sit in the seventh or eighth row at the Tampa Armory every Tuesday night. His head was so big and he was so tall that he was a head above everyone else's head. He was a major mark for me. There was a little night club in Tampa where we all hang around and he'd come down and he wanted to get in the business but Eddie Graham didn't want him in and he cried the blues to me. That's when he made the first inquiries about steroids, how much sauce I was taking, what I was taking. Steve Strong and I worked him and told him we weren't on sauce. I had a 22-inch arm and he knew we were working him. The next thing I know, I saw him a year or two later and he's 320 or 325 which was at least an 80 to 90 pound gain. I saw him in Atlanta one time and he came to my hotel room. Vince Sr. wanted him real bad in New York and (Jim) Barnett wanted him in Atlanta. He was asking my advice and I told him to go to New York because it's a big-man territory and you could make more money up there. We started confiding in each other. He told me later, which is common, in the hips when you get the scar tissue build-up from all the injections that after the first year of non-stop shots that he got scar tissue build-up. I have it too but it's subsided quite a bit now. Everybody who does a lot of sauce gets them. (Lyle) Alzado said he got his cut out. They operated on him and took grapefruit sized scar tissue out of his hip. That's from repeated injections of needles that gives you that scar tissue. He told me he had tennis-ball sized scar tissue on his hips and he didn't know what it was until somebody told him it was scar tissue from the needles. From day one he watched me in the ring and wanted to be me, literally. When he developed his style, he took the whole gimmick.

 

DM: Jesse (Ventura) did too.

 

BG: Jesse did it to a T. Verne Gagne called me one day that there's a guy here in Minneapolis that can do Billy Graham better than you can do Billy Graham. He was talking about Jesse. I thought it was a real compliment for people to try and emulate me. With the Hulk, the posing and the world's biggest pythons gimmick was a complete clone. We were very close. In a lot of those charter flights we confided in each other and talked about sauce and different things. Even back before that, in 1982 in Minnesota, I was there for a short run and (David) Shults was there and so was Patera. We took quite a few charter flights instead of driving. We had a lot of discussions on those charter flights about sauce. That's when Hulk told me, "Don't ever start taking cocaine. Don't touch cocaine. Cocaine is almost impossible to get off of." He was giving me advice on not touching the stuff. We talked about sauce and how we never had time to cycle off because we were always on television so we always had to stay on and our bodies built up a resistance to it. We kept going with heavier doses. Then our receptor cells got overloaded and it wasn't working anymore so you pump more into you and we've had all these conversations. The times when I did inject Terry was in 1987. I can only remember three times very clearly, in the Pontiac Silverdome, in the Kiel Auditorium in St. Louis and in the Cow Palace in San Francisco I remember distinctively.

 

DM: Of your contemporaries, the bodybuilders and powerlifters from the late 60s and early 70s, are you aware of the ones in your age bracket that were doing heavy sauce, do you notice a lot of them regretting it?

 

BG: I haven't stayed in contact with that many. A few powerlifters that are my age are experiencing joint problems. A lot of them have torn their tendons, pecs and biceps and a lot of them have had permanent liver damage that never came back all the way. My liver damage has come back almost all the way. Some of the ones I've kept track with definitely feel the years of heavy sauce was a mistake. There were four powerlifters who have suffered avascular necrosis of the hips and sued the pharmaceutical companies and settled out of court for a substantial amount of money. They were all long-term users of anabolic steroids. Some long-term users get it and some don't.

 

DM: Even in the 1970s there was medical literature on the dangers of steroids. Were you ever concerned?

 

BG: We thought the literature in the bottles and packages was from studies done on rats that were given maybe 100 times the regular doses and it was astronomical amounts that were given to these animals that these things would certainly never happen to us. Lo and behold, years down the road we were taking 100 times the regular dose. We always had the attitude that it wasn't going to happen to us. We didn't know too many people with problems. But even then there were guys with liver problems but we didn't think it would happen to us.

 

DM: What was the point, was it the Arsenio Hall show or was it before when you decided to talk about The Hulk?

 

BG: It was the Arsenio Hall piece. When I went public with my story in 1990 I mentioned I had injected wrestlers but I mentioned no names. I was constantly besieged by people in the media after that asking about The Hulk. I always said he has to speak for himself. I wasn't going to mention his name until he went on Arsenio Hall. It was like he was committing blasphemy on that show. I had no animosity towards him. I was mad when he got bumped from the trial. How can this man get these strings pulled when Reagan couldn't get out of a subpoena in the Oliver North case? The Hulk got pulled when the common wrestlers like Blair and Spivey had to take the fall and this guy was just as guilty as the rest of us. He got out of it which I had a problem with. I knew it was because of his merchandising and it wore on me. When he did the Arsenio Hall show, that was the final straw.

 

DM: If you were in Vince McMahon's shoes, what would you do?

 

BG: I've never thought about that question but it hits me real hard. Since we know the loopholes in testing, if I was Vince McMahon and I was serious about getting these people off sauce I'd give an educational seminar and I'd show my operation in graphic detail and show peoples' liver with cysts all over them and show hearts enlarged like Steve Courson's and tell the wrestlers that this is the price that many of you will pay if you continue. You can't talk ethics to the wrestlers because of their psychological addictions. The only thing I could suggest is showing them graphic medical problems and educate them about people like myself. Tell them that the doctors say it was from steroids. But even still, they still won't believe it.

 

DM: Zahorian was not the only supplier to the wrestlers. We've talked about guys coming in the locker rooms, other doctors. How prevalent was Zahorian in the mid-80s?

 

BG: Zahorian was always the mainstream supplier. But the boys had a basic objection to him because of his high prices. They were always fishing around for better deals. That's when they started bringing guys into the arenas and making contacts. The problem then became a full one-third of the sauce was bogus. People would complain they'd been on juice for three weeks and nothing would happen. The counterfeit stuff became a problem. I didn't think Zahorian's prices were that much higher. Zahorian used to tell me that even though his prices were higher you knew you were getting steroids right from the manufacturer.

 

DM: Were a lot of guys having the sleeping problems on the sauce?

 

BG: Yes, it makes you very restless. You can't sleep and it makes you go to downers. It's almost like having insomnia. You always have to take sleeping pills or drink alcohol to wind you down. When the steroids are in you, you're aggressive, you're hyper, you can train on them better. It acts like speed in effect. DM: Were you pretty much on for years at a time or did you occasionally take a break?

 

BG: I was on year-around. If I did go off for a short period of time it was unintentional. A lot of guys said they were cycling down but they were still taking a maintenance dose so they never got off it even when they were cycling. Everybody stayed on. One guy was always ribbed because he stayed on and he never even worked out, which shows you the peer pressure to take it.

 

DM: Even some people today who will acknowledge steroids having side effects will say it's a necessary evil of the business. After all, taking bumps for ten years isn't particularly good for you, either.

 

BG: Bumps don't cause liver cancer, prostate cancer or bone joint degeneration although some joints can go because of bumps. But they aren't all going to go at once. Ten years of bumps don't cause psychological addiction or psychological problems or infertility.

 

DM: Do you think there will be a change with the boys or with the management?

 

BG: Right up front, nobody cares about WCW. They don't get the publicity. The WWF boys are in a dilemma. Vince McMahon may be in for some rough waters. It's a very complex problem. The boys want to continue to take sauce. I'd love to take sauce today but I know the side effects. It's a hard nut to crack. It's not an easy solution. I think if Vince McMahon instituted the testing and instituted serious penalties, I don't know if the 40 guys who right now say they're going to stick together and keep taking sauce and say they're willing to get fired are really willing to get fired.

 

DM: Let's say it's right now 1991 but you only know what you knew in 1985. You're joints aren't hurting yet. Let's say you're 37, 38 or 40, towards the end but you're still there and a key guy. The Zahorian trial came and the guy in charge wasn't Vince and you believed the guy in charge was sincere. He said we're cleaning this up because it'll threaten my business. If our merchandisers drop us we're all up shit creek. We're going to clean this thing up. What would you do?

 

DM: The first thing I'd do is try and learn to beat a test. If I got caught, I'd see what the consequences are. If they were serious, I'd look to the alternative which is WCW. I'd weigh my status and drawing power and look at the other group and say Ted Turner's paying these guys six-figures. They may be drawing no people but I can still make a few hundred grand and still take sauce and look the way I want to look and feel the way I want to feel. But if everyone would do that, you'd have too many people for WCW to handle. I'd also look at Japan. The Road Warriors can go to Japan and make a ton of money so I'd look at the alternatives. If I had to stay, you'd have to get off if the guy really wanted to make the program work. But the guy in charge would have to institute some heavy-duty therapy and wean everyone off it and follow-up on it constantly.

 

DM: Are you frustrated or surprised that since the trial and all the publicity that nobody has truthfully addressed the issue? We've had the deception all the way through and people in suits playing the damage control game rather than realistically being honest with the public.

 

BG: It's heartbreaking, really. But it doesn't surprise me that they aren't dealing honestly with this thing. All they've been concerned with is damage control. They aren't concerned with anyone's health or well being. All they're concerned about is the immediate dollar and how we can get this guy through another run and draw money. They're figuring out how to beat the p.r. problem. It's very sad but it's the nature of pro wrestling. Pro wrestling has always been a work. It's always been devious. It's always been corrupt. Just about every promoter I've ever known was a liar and would lie about payoffs and grosses and it's just the nature of the business.

 

DM: As far as WCW, where they're isolated from the heat pretty much, were you surprised by their inaction?

 

BG: No, because there's no public focus on them. They can back-door this one. The WWF is taking all the heat. Half the guys who come to the WWF from WCW are taking a pay cut but they want to get the status of his (McMahon's) television exposure. Guys are taking paycuts and there are no guarantees (in WWF) but there's the status of being in the WWF because that's all that exists. I hear kids talking about WCW but they talk like they don't even matter.

 

DM: The thing that we know is that the WWF knew before anyone that there was going to be heat. Pat Patterson warned Zahorian back in 1989 that there was heat but they didn't do anything to clean it up before the trial hit the headlines.

 

BG: They were locked into it. The steroids were too integral a part of their business. If The Hulk were to come out now and say that he lied and made a mistake it would be far better for him today before 20/20 and before 60 Minutes and before Donahue when we talk there for an hour and Shults lays out these letters from people who had bought steroids. If the WWF still won't comment, people will think for sure they're hiding. What will the public think if they won't take a seat next to me and Shults on the Donahue show and defend the company and you know (Steve) Planamenta won't get near that?

 

*********

[Death From Above]

That interview was one hell of a read. Thanks for posting the whole thing. The stuff about his early career is fascinating too. I find it hard wrapping my head around sending a guy out there that you've trained (or I guess in the case of Stu Hart, some guy you beat the shit out of in your basement a lot), and he hasn't even been smartened up to the business being a work yet. So he has to find it out from Abby. Wrestling really is the wackiest business of all.

 

DM: If you were in Vince McMahon's shoes, what would you do?

 

BG: I've never thought about that question but it hits me real hard. Since we know the loopholes in testing, if I was Vince McMahon and I was serious about getting these people off sauce I'd give an educational seminar and I'd show my operation in graphic detail and show peoples' liver with cysts all over them and show hearts enlarged like Steve Courson's and tell the wrestlers that this is the price that many of you will pay if you continue. You can't talk ethics to the wrestlers because of their psychological addictions. The only thing I could suggest is showing them graphic medical problems and educate them about people like myself. Tell them that the doctors say it was from steroids. But even still, they still won't believe it.

Sad, but pretty fucking accurate.

[Strummer]

um I hate to post this here but what the fuck is happening at TSM? Is it a lame April fools day joke or is it really the end? (mercy killing?)

[Indikator]

http://forums.thesmartmarks.com/index.php?showtopic=94663

 

No clue, I've tuned out years ago. Who is even left from the old days?

[Boondocks Kernoodle]

I hate to bring the B.S. from that board over here, but since you want to know:

 

Mike, the owner/admin over there, sold half the board to a poster called Leena, who has literally spent nearly half a decade trolling, flaming, stealing accounts, and generally screwing with everyone at TSM. So that led to a bunch of people leaving the board in protest, then the Leena deal fell through and it's basically been anarchy over there for the past couple of days.

 

So yeah, message boards, huh?

[Jingus]

I somehow Forrest Gumped my way into essentially being in charge of that board. Dammit, I never asked for this job!

 

Hey Loss... just saying, with the increasingly unpredictable way Mike has been acting recently, you might want to have a Plan B in the back of your mind just in case for whatever reason you needed a different server.

[Resident Evil]

I hate to bring the B.S. from that board over here, but since you want to know:

 

Mike, the owner/admin over there, sold half the board to a poster called Leena, who has literally spent nearly half a decade trolling, flaming, stealing accounts, and generally screwing with everyone at TSM. So that led to a bunch of people leaving the board in protest, then the Leena deal fell through and it's basically been anarchy over there for the past couple of days.

 

So yeah, message boards, huh?

You go girl. I should've bought some with her.

[sek69]

I hate to bring the B.S. from that board over here, but since you want to know:

 

Mike, the owner/admin over there, sold half the board to a poster called Leena, who has literally spent nearly half a decade trolling, flaming, stealing accounts, and generally screwing with everyone at TSM. So that led to a bunch of people leaving the board in protest, then the Leena deal fell through and it's basically been anarchy over there for the past couple of days.

 

So yeah, message boards, huh?

 

Oh man, Leena. I vaguely remember her at the end of my time there. She was the ultimate "I'm a female posting on a male oriented board, pay attention to me" type.

 

 

Then again, except for a select few (most of whom ended up on places like here anyway) that board was mostly full of shitheads. It is a descendant of Scooter's old playground after all.

[Boondocks Kernoodle]

Is it just me or is this board kind of dead? We have Mania tonight, a new ROH champion, the Hall of Fame yesterday and none of that has been discussed at all. Maybe it's just not an exciting time to be a wrestling fan.

[CodySave]

Is it just me or is this board kind of dead? We have Mania tonight, a new ROH champion, the Hall of Fame yesterday and none of that has been discussed at all. Maybe it's just not an exciting time to be a wrestling fan.

I've noticed this too - not just here, but at the Death Valley Driver board. Hell, even the Wrestling Observer site had nothing up about the Hall of Fame inductions last night - I had to actually venture to PWInsider, which I never visit, just to read a recap of each induction.

 

I'm shocked there isn't a HOF thread on either board or even a catch-all Wrestlemania thread on the DVD board.

 

It certainly took more doing this year to find people to watch Mania with, but now that I'm only chipping in $10 to watch with friends instead of $50 to watch the show on my own, I'm actually looking forward to it today for...well, the first time since they've been building Mania. Which is a far cry from last year, where I gladly shelled out $50 and felt I got my money's worth for a awesome show. This year, I wasn't even going to watch it if I had to pay more than $15.

 

But, yeah, even in a down period I agree there's tons going on but not much discussion. I mean, besides the ROH shows, there's a ridiculous amount of fanfests/small indy shows in Houston this weekend that I've heard nothing about.