FFTHEWINNER

Someone once asked me if wrestling was fake. I said, "Look around this gym. Everyone here has a different personality, but they all act the same. That’s fake. Wrestling gives us the opportunity to be who we really are."

When we got into wrestling, we became a part of the wrestling world. The guys lived their personas outside the ring and away from the arenas. We really became the characters we portrayed on TV and lived those characters 24 hours a day. I became Tony Atlas. When I started in the business, George Scott told me "You will turn into your own personality." That was so true. I didn’t have to think about it. I just became who I really was. Johnny Valentine believed he was Johnny Valentine. Richard Fliehr became Ric Flair. When you saw Richard Fliehr in the ring, he was Ric Flair. When you saw Richard Fliehr on the street, he was Ric Flair. The wrestlers today go back to their hotel room and play on their computers, but in our day, we would go out and party with the fans after a show. Flair would walk into a bar and pick up the tab for everybody. He was the same Nature Boy in the outside world that he was on TV.When a wrestler throws himself into the business,their true personalities always come to the surface. You can try to be somebody you’re not,but you can only pretend so long.. If you get enough exposure, the people will eventually see through you, so it’s important for you to portray what you really are.Steve Borden was Sting. He made the transformation. With Blackjack Mulligan, what you saw is what you got. Gene and Ole Anderson weren’t related, but if you looked at them and watched their mannerisms, you would have thought they were. Ole was the same guy you heard on TV promos. If you ever met him in person, you couldn’t tell the difference.Khosrow Vaziri became the Iron Sheik. He was so weird, but that’s the way the sheiks in his country acted. He knew how they acted, so that’s what he did. none of us shed our characters when we went out into the "real" world. We were wrestlers from the moment we got out of bed until we went to sleep. We lost ourselves in our characters and we became that character. You can’t fake that. It was either in you or it wasn’t. I can’t make you something you’re not, no matter how much prompting I do. If it’s not there, it’s not there.I was born Tony White, but when I became Tony Atlas, I forgot about Tony White. Even today,when I sign legal documents, I write Tony Atlas. I even tend to get into character when I’m at home. When I do, my wife says, "The next time you come home, leave Tony Atlas in the ring!".Most of the good heels acted the same way outside the ring that they did on the inside. Bill White was one of the tough guys, and he was a bully outside the ring as well."

Perhaps the most blatant example of staying in character took place one night when Tommy Rich and I had some girls in our hotel room. a particular masked man didn’t usually fool around,but he must have been horny that night because he walked in and asked, "Is it okay if a mysterious,masked man joins you?"Eyeing the naked girl on one of our beds, he quickly pulled off his clothes and jumped on top of her … still wearing his mask. There aren’t many things which can shock a wrestler because we’ve seen and done just about everything, but we were all pretty well speechless during the event. Two minutes later, he was finished. He stood up, and with his mask still in place, he got dressed and walked out. It was so casual, as if he had just stopped by to say hello. Still thunderstruck,Tommy and I looked back and forth at each other,until we finally broke out into loud, raucous laughter. We laughed about that every day for weeks.

I’ll leave out the name of my friend in this story so I don’t embarrass him, but while we were in Guatemala on a wrestling trip, we got horny, so we went out to look for prostitutes. As we were walking up the main street, we saw a young girl with an old woman. As we walked up, the old woman said,"Girl, five dollars."That was a bargain in any country, and the young girl was a beauty, so I pulled a five-dollar bill from my wallet and gave it to her. The girl took me by the hand and led me to something that looked like a shed made out of tin. If I didn’t know better,I would have thought a child had put it together. It was little more than four poles stuck into the ground with pieces of tin forming the four sides. To get inside, we had to squat and duckwalk through a small hole cut into the tin. On the ground in the center of the shed, there was a campfire, and trash was strewn everywhere. There was no running water,either. Once we were inside, the girl squatted over a pail of water, washed herself with a washcloth, and threw the wash cloth back into the pail.Yes, I know what you’re thinking, which is strange, because I can’t even imagine what I could have been thinking. That was absolutely filthy and disgusting. However, us young bucks didn’t always do our thinking with the brain in our big head. We just did whatever it took to satisfy those youthful urges that so often overran our sanity.While I was having sex with the girl, I could hear my friend outside, pleading with the old woman,"Do you have one for me?"The woman said, "No, only one daughter."He said, "But I want some, too!"I began to laugh because my friend sounded so desperate. I think the old woman sensed it, too,because she left. When she came back, she was leading a goat on a leash. "Two dollars for goat,"she said.I couldn’t keep going because I was laughing so hard, so I went out and gave the woman a $20bill. That didn’t satisfy her, though. She stayed close behind us, following my friend with the goat. He was fast-walking and trying to get away from her. My friend begged me to not tell the boys that story.

There is a story about my El Dorado car that Bill Howard likes to tell every time he gets an opportunity. One night, Bill and Klondike Bill played a joke on a policeman. I had just bought the El Dorado. I was driving back to Atlanta from Rome, Georgia. It was one of the first times I had driven at night on curvy roads. A car coming towards me was in the proper lane, but the roads were so curvy that it looked like the headlights were headed directly towards me on my side of the road, so I swerved to avoid him and drove off the side of the road into a ditch. We didn’t have cellphones back then. The boys used CB radios, but I didn’t have one, so I had to get out of the car and walk to the nearest town.After I left, Bill Howard and Klondike drove by. When they saw my car in the ditch, they turned around and parked on the shoulder of the road. A few minutes later, a county sheriff arrived on the scene. He looked just like Sheriff Buford T.Justice, Jackie Gleason’s character in the movie Smokey and the Bandit. He was the epitome of the stereotypical fat, redneck, southern sheriff. He was the type of guy the movies would have you believe were fictional characters. In reality,however, those characters were probably based on real-life people.The sheriff got out of his car and asked Bill where the driver of the car was. Now, you have to remember what the attitude of white southerners was towards blacks in the 1970s. They thought we were all freshly imported from the deepest, darkest recesses of the jungles of Africa. Bill Howard said "Well, you know, those damn coons always climb trees. He may be in a tree." The sheriff went down into the woods and looked up into the trees When I got back to the scene of the accident with a tow truck, Bill Howard was standing on the side of the road. He looked excited and said, "Tony,Tony! You’ve gotta play along with us. Go get up in that tree.""Get up in the tree? For what?"When Bill explained the story, I did exactly what he told me to do. Sure enough, the sheriff eventually discovered me in the tree. When he did,he began to yell, "Here he is! Here he is,boys! Hey, you! Get down out of that tree. Come down here before I sic the dogs on ya!"It was funny, but I remember thinking, "I hope he don’t get so excited that he shoots me."Bill and Klondike were both on the ground,laughing. Bill Howard had tears in his eyes from laughing so hard. They finally walked over to the sheriff and said, "Don’t worry about him,sheriff. We’ll take care of him. He’s our boy." The tow truck pulled my car out of the ditch. There was a big dent in the door where the car ran up against the tree, but it was drivable. We laughed about that for a long time. That sheriff was so funny, and the look on his face was something you just had to see to believe. He was so proud that he had found me. It was probably the biggest thing he ever did. He was just a "good ol’boy." He kept pulling up his pants, sticking out his chest, and strutting around like a rooster. I wish everybody could have heard him. "I’ve got‘im! I’ve got ‘im! Come on down, boy!"