Free More Than Just Hardcore by Terry Funk Page A

Thornton.”
    I thought and thought and finally said, “Yes! Yes, I know who that goofball is! He stole that car! Yes, I remember!”
    Well, Billy Bob was apparently directing, too, so that was the last I heard of that project.
    Later I played a small role in another movie he was working on, Friday Night Lights, and we were on the set together. He looked at me, and I looked at him, and we both acted like we didn’t know each other.
    Amarillo was also where I encountered a really good tag team—Kurt and Karl Von Brauner. Karl was a very smart guy and became a spray pilot after retiring. Kurt was a very dedicated professional. He was working for us when he got word one night that his mother had passed away in Germany. He went ahead and worked right on through it, fulfilling all his shots before going back there. It wasn’t easy on him.
    Kurt Von Brauner was the man who taught my brother how to use the forearm. Kurt could throw a forearm check better than anyone back then.
    The Von Brauners proved to be more than teachers, though. They were also barbers, at least in one angle we did where they cut my hair off to build up a feud with them against Junior and me.
    Back then it took five weeks for the tapes of the shows to make it to all the towns in the territory, in what we called “bicycling the tape” around. This meant I had to cut all my hair off for five weeks, so the people who saw the tape of the haircut show last would get to see a bald Terry the next time I wrestled there. Of course, the people in the first towns where the show aired got to wondering, “Damn, isn’t his hair ever going to grow back?”
    I also remember Ray Stevens and Pat Patterson coming in and just doing fantastic. Pat wrestled in Amarillo as “Lord” Patrick Patterson, and I had some great matches with him. Ray Stevens was one of the greatest characters I ever met in wrestling. Ray and I did rodeo together for a while in the early 1980s. One night we were driving back from a rodeo show, and we would always shoot the shit.
    This night I guess we ran out of bullshit, and we got quiet in the car. I thought for a minute and then said, “Ray, what would you do if you had a million dollars?”
    He said, as honest and truthful as he could be, “I’d play a whole lot harder.” And he meant that.
    I don’t know how many times I was in a bar with Ray Stevens, and he’d ask me to borrow $50 or $100. Once I gave it to him, he’d set it on the table and buy drinks for everyone sitting at the table. He didn’t care if it was his best friend or Joe Blow. He’d buy drinks until that $50 or $100 was gone, and he always paid me back.
    Ray was an unbelievable worker. He could do anything.
    One of our top heel teams was the combination of Black Gordman and Goliath. They came to us for a few periods after making their names on the West Coast. They were probably the ones who spearheaded the movement of Mexican wrestlers coming into the United States and being successful. When they were here, they were introduced as being from Mexico, but when they were in Los Angeles, they made the ring announcer say they were from “not Mexico, but New Mexico,” and all those Hispanic fans would go nuts.
    There’s something I think a lot of guys don’t realize about that generation of wrestlers—they could really wrestle. We have better athletes in wrestling than we’ve ever had, but we had more wrestlers back then. Heck, when I first got in the business, having amateur skills was almost a prerequisite. At least 50 percent of the guys then had some kind of background in amateur wrestling.
    It was also an era when guys designed their own personas, and most of the time they could pull it off. I think that has its plusses. A guy knows who he wants to be and what he can play better than anybody else.
    While I learned a lot about wrestling from the pros I worked with, I was also about to have a whole new learning experience on my hands. In 1967, Vicki gave birth to our