Brian Pillman Brian Pillman
Last updated 21 April 2015
October, 2006
There are a lot of weird coincidences this week that bring back the memory of Brian Pillman.
Pillman, a major 90s star, passed away in a Bloomington, MN, hotel room on October 5, 1997, the day of a PPV show in St. Louis, at the age of 35, from a heart attack. He had wrestled the night before in St. Paul. As you'll note by the date, this week is the 9th anniversary of the date. Coincidentally, the WWE this past week released a DVD called "The Loose Cannon," on his life, showing many of his highlight matches, although with the Eric Bischoff book and Mr. McMahon DVD, the company is not promoting it. And most eerie is, the more you think about it, the more you realize that in so many ways, the wrestler who currently has most of the same attributes, Kurt Angle, is the most talked about wrestler in the business today.
The WWE's DVD is one of the better ones the company has put out. Besides wife Melanie, sisters Angie and Linda, mentor and father-figure Kim Wood (the long-time strength coach of the Cincinnati Bengals) a few childhood friends, the DVD contains some very frank comments from Steve Austin, who has always called Pillman his best friend ever in wrestling, Jim Ross, Eric Bischoff, Paul Heyman, Road Warrior Animal and Chris Benoit (who started his career with Pillman in Stampede Wrestling). The documentary theme of the DVD is basically a video version of the October 13, 1997, issue of this publication (no acknowledgment of it at the end, but that's to be expected, for the same reasons that Bruce Prichard was on the DVD and have people like Mark Madden, Bruce Hart and myself, all of whom I'm told his friends said needed to be on it, were not spoken with, but in the end they involved far more friends and more people out of the WWE than any DVD project I've seen). Because of that, when it comes to historical accuracy, as far as dates, times, places and angles (with the exception of the actual day of his death being one day off, the same mistake in that issue of the Observer, written by me two days later in my own state of shock), it is the best major DVD on any star the company has put out. The B.S. factor evident in most WWE DVD's is a non- issue, since most of the people who carried the DVD were either out of the business, and it appeared this project was low enough on the radar that with one exception, the political aspect of the spin was non- existent. It was clearly an attempt to put as happy a face as you possibly could to a story that simply can't have a happy ending. But there was no faking reality, most notably at the end, showing Brian's children, in particularly daughter Brittany and son Flyin Brian Jr., who today sadly admit they have no memories of their father.
It's really a shame, because there are very few people in this industry that I have as many memories of than Brian Pillman. He had a depth of understanding of the business of pro wrestling that only the top few percent of those in the industry had. Part of it is that he was very smart, was a tremendous reader, and had great awareness of his environment and the world, even at the end when he was falling apart. And of all those memories I have of Pillman, the most vivid involved Brittany, then 8, and Brian Jr., then 4, at his wake. There was just about nobody around, as it had ended. The two children, having absolutely no real understanding of what was going on, as they were being summoned to leave, Brittany ran to the casket and told Brian Jr. that "We have to say goodbye to Daddy." They ran, just like little kids playing. Brittany stuck her head in the casket and kissed him. Even though he remembers none of it now, Brian Jr., who was very much Brian's pride and joy as his only son, by that time did understand who his dad was, as he'd climb tables and counters and jump off, saying, "Look, I'm Flyin Brian." The positive of the DVD is they do a pretty great job of getting across the athlete that Pillman was, a gutsy small kid from a working class section of Cincinnati, who overcame cancer and nearly dying twice as a child and growing up without a father, and was an absolutely ridiculous athletic overachiever. In that sense you really see all sorts of comparisons with Angle, in particular with athletic heart and drive, and obsession with proving coaches and naysayers wrong when the "too small" tag was shoved in their respective faces. Quite frankly, they did a far better job of getting across Pillman's positive real-life traits than any wrestling promotion ever did when he was alive and getting his career- long half-assed pushes. We used to joke that throughout the history of wrestling, many guys who played college football but weren't even stars, and weren't even necessarily good workers, got big pushes because of the idea it made them credible athletes. But here he was, a genuine college All-American and NFL player, the only NFL player in pro wrestling (until Steve McMichael and Kevin Greene came to WCW) at the time, a good worker and a good promo, and his real-life athletic background was almost never pushed. The problem was he was small, and a pretty boy. The idea that this little guy, maybe 195-200 pounds off steroids, was a defensive lineman who was so good, he was often double and sometimes triple-teamed by offensive lineman twice his size and still set school records for sacks and tackles, was an All-American and played in the NFL, didn't make any sense for this white meat babyface little cut bodybuilder looking guy. Once, when a lead announcer, and I'm not sure if it was Ross or Tony Schiavone, but he was working with Jesse Ventura, brought up Pillman as an All-American middle guard, Ventura started laughing on the air, like this was the most preposterous wrestling lie/exaggeration ever delivered and he wasn't about to sell for it.
The truth was, as a kid, Pillman's best sport was ice hockey. As a 15-year-old, he was playing on men's teams. But there was no Ice Hockey in Ohio high school sports, so he concentrated on football. As a junior at Norwood High School, he was 5-7 and 147 pounds, and routinely blew by the 200-pound offensive linemen. At that size, he was a two-way starter on both the offensive and defensive line. As a senior, he was listed at 180 pounds, but that figure was probably exaggerated. He led the city in tackles and sacks, and started the pattern that pretty much told the story of his athletic career. He was the only member of the All-City team in 1979 not to get a college scholarship offer, because the idea of a 180-pound defensive lineman playing college football was patently ludicrous.
He walked on at Miami of Ohio. While the coaches pegged him as far too small to play college football, his attitude was off the charts. As a freshman, he was on the seventh team, used as cannon fodder, but performed so well the coaches told him if he worked this hard in practice, by the time he was a senior, there was a chance he could get a jersey and make the traveling team. With the right attitude, he could have been like the character in the movie "Rudy." Maybe as a senior if there was a blow out, he could get in on a live play. By the 4th game of the season, he had moved up to second team, and newspaper stories at the time wrote he was a better player than the starter, but the coaches couldn't pull the trigger on him because of his size.
By the time he was a sophomore, listed at 195 pounds, he was starting nose tackle and considered one of the stars best players on the team. He lifted weights but was not super cut or anything. Most likely it was at this point he discovered steroids, as he became best friends with a local contest winning bodybuilder.
He came back as a junior, at 5-8 nd 225 pounds, with a 425 pound bench press and 600 pound squat. As a junior, he was Division I-AA first team All-American middle guard, described in local newspapers as having the "physique of the Incredible Hulk." As a senior, he was named Mid American Conference Defensive Player of the Year, led the conference in both sacks and tackles, setting school records in both categories. He was a second team AP All-American, behind William "Refrigerator" Perry. Like in high school, he was the only 1983 first or second team All-American football player who wasn't drafted by the NFL, as he was far too short, even to be converted to linebacker in the pros.
He signed as a free agent with the Cincinnati Bengals. He was expected to be an early cut, as he started basically on the list of guys who were to be worked until they were broken or quit, but he survived that phase and did well in practice and preseason games. He was in the running for the final roster spot, and after a spectacular play on the final preseason game at Riverfront Stadium, made the team. He played special teams in 1984. He got a lot of local publicity for defying the odds, and was considered one of the physically and mentally toughest players on the team. Because he was a little guy, playing as a wedge buster, how hard he practiced and overcoming size and childhood cancer, he became, among the players, one of the most popular members of the team. That year, the players voted the winner of the Ed Block courage award. In 1985, he went to the Buffalo Bills, where he was made it until the final cut. The staff had decided he had made the team, but an assistant coach found his steroids in his room. The NFL didn't do any testing in those days, and it wasn't like steroid use was unusual, but the coaches felt he was a little guy all juiced up and it swayed the decision against him. In 1986, he signed on with the Calgary Stampeders of the Canadian Football League, but broke his ankle in the third game of the season and never played again.
Pillman wasn't a big wrestling fan growing up, but remembered seeing The Sheik on television as a kid. He never really channeled it until the Flyin' Brian days were over, and he tried to think back and recall how this mystical guy had everyone frightened, drew such incredible heat, and packed houses. Wood, who had become a father figure to him when he was with the Bengals, signed him up with an Observer subscription while he was still playing football, feeling that his look and personality were tailor-made for wrestling. It was pure luck that he was in Calgary when his football career ended. Wood loaned him the money to be trained by the Harts, who at the time were starting a crew of young wrestlers that were bound for superstardom. Among those in the territory breaking during those years were Benoit, Owen Hart, Hiroshi Hase, Jushin Liger, Kensuke Sasaki, Shinya Hashimoto and Phil LaFleur (Phil LaFon/Dan Kroffat). A few years earlier you could add Bret Hart, Jim Neidhart, Dynamite Kid, Cobra, Bad News Allen and Davey Boy Smith to that list.
After a short period of training, he was billed as a player on the Stampeders there as a guest, who was attacked by the local heel group, the Karachi Vice. He vowed to wrestle the next week, and bring the Stampeders with him. On November 5, 1986, in the main event at the Pavilion, with numerous Stampeders cheering him on, Pillman & Owen Hart & Keith Hart beat Makhan Singh & Gama Singh & Vladimir Krupov. Soon, Bruce Hart took him as his regular partner, and as "Bad Company," they became the area's top babyface tag team for most of 1987 (when he was voted Rookie of the Year) and 1988.
Stampede Wrestling was a crazy territory, and he lived a wild life, between the women, the drugs and the crazy ribs he would play, and at times got played, such as the night he had a hot date and they told him after his show he was booked in the town to do a "Say No to Drugs" speech. He was then dropped off at an old folks convalescent home to give his speech.
He was tight with the Hart family, who treated him like family, but in doing so, that made him a lot of enemies. Brick Bronsky was a 270- pound bodybuilder who was probably the strongest guy in the territory at the time. Bronsky corroborated the story of when he was told to sucker punch Pillman and knocked Pillman to the deck. Pillman, who probably wasn't more than 200 pounds at the time, got up and tore him to shreds, but suffered a torn triceps in the melee. But Pillman saw it as his wake- up call that it was time to get out of Calgary.
He contacted Jim Ross, who was on the WCW booking committee. A deal was set up where he would team with Dennis Condrey as a Midnight Express member, managed by Paul E. Dangerously, to feud with Jim Cornette's Express, of Bobby Eaton & Stan Lane. However, before he could start, George Scott was hired as booker. Scott, credited by many in the 70s for booking the Mid Atlantic territory from being just another regional to being the best territory in the country, and then booked WWF during the early years of its national expansion before losing his position after losing a power play with Hulk Hogan. By 1989, Scott had been out of the business only a few years, but it was enough that time had passed him by. Even though he'd been a star in Calgary for more than two years, Scott had never heard of him, and didn't want to bring in a wrestler he had never heard of. It was his second false start on the U.S. scene. A few years earlier, Heyman and Eddie Gilbert booked him into Continental Championship Wrestling (the Alabama territory), and he gave notice at Stampede and was about to come down. Gilbert and Heyman ended up falling out with owner David Woods, and both were fired, and Pillman's job was gone.
When Scott was let go, Pillman's name resurfaced, but this time the plan was to use him as a babyface. He was a mid-carder, who would win most of the time, but lose clean when matched with the stars. A February, 1990, singles match against world champion Ric Flair drew the largest audience ever to watch a match on WCW Saturday Night, a show that lasted in one form or another, about 28 years. Flair, sensing they had something in Pillman, asked to lose the match, or at least lose via DQ, which at the time would have made Pillman an instant major star. But the rest of the booking committee argued that Flair had a main event title defense with Lex Luger a week or two later, and they didn't want the top issue confused. Flair, as the heel in the PPV main event, had to go over. The DVD showed enough clips that you end up with the conclusion that this guy was a hell of a performer, and by that I mean outside the ring.
Inside the ring, he was a good flier young and did develop into a very good worker for his time, and his work ethic was closer to the wrestlers of a few years ago when business was hot, as compared to the wrestlers of his own time. On big shows, he was always out to steal the show, even though most of the time he was in prelims. His greatest big show singles match ever, where he beat Jushin Liger to win the WCW light heavyweight title, was the opener on the February 29, 1992, SuperBrawl show in Milwaukee and was a landmark match in U.S. wrestling at the time. If anything, from the clips, you end up questioning how the promoters of the time didn't go all the way with him. But it was a different time. Eddy Guerrero and Chris Benoit were both better wrestlers than he was, and neither of them could even get a job in WCW, and at the time would have been laughed right out of WWF, if not by the fans, definitely by management, because of their size.
Prichard, who was used to kind of explain the background of what was going on (and missed many key points in doing so, on purpose because some things they clearly didn't want to talk about, basically the nature of the conning in the industry and how Pillman many times outplayed the puppeteers), aptly noted that it was a big man's business. That theme was used to talk about the flying moves that he did in the ring, a lot of springboard moves and such that nobody was doing at the time. But they all missed the point that in wrestling, like with football, no matter how good he was, in the end, at the top level, he was unable to overcome the size handicap.
That was the motivation for the "Loose Cannon" persona. The weakness of the documentary, and again, the documentary is really good overall, is the lack of understanding of that persona. Actually, they completely missed the boat on it, as far as even a cursory understanding of why. My feeling is the two subjects that they knew, and in both cases didn't want to address, were drugs, both street drugs and steroids as they did address pain killers, and the entire mentality and creation of the character. The people who do know tell me that with the exception of Kim Wood, who formulated the entire character on his kitchen table with Pillman, and perhaps his wife, Bruce Hart and maybe Terry Funk, I probably understood it the best, because when I figured it out (and in the beginning, when it was formulated, Wood told Pillman to work everyone and avoid me, because I will figure it out and resent him for trying to play me, and for several weeks I never heard from him), I was just about the only person let in on it, and not at first.
Ironically, now that he's been dead for so long, Wood told me that he explained the entire character, the reason why, how it was formulated, and the goals, on camera for the DVD. None of it made the documentary. Instead, you had people like Teddy Long who were speculating, and Eric Bischoff, vaguely noting that he's not sure if he was in on it or he was one of the people being conned.
I can understand the avoidance of the subject of the drugs, or some of Pillman's other extracurricular activities, such as his almost legendary womanizing. On that subject, the joke used to be that when you read the letters about sexual escapades in "Penthouse Forum," you always question whether they were made up or real. The answer is, they are real, and Brian Pillman wrote most of the letters based on personal experience. Dustin Runnels (Goldust), who was feuding with Pillman at the time of his death, and noted that he doing hated the angle, since it was based on the reality that Pillman had dated Terri Boatwright (Terri Runnels) before they got married, and Pillman claimed their daughter, Dakota, was their love child. Runnels claimed his wife dumped Pillman for him in real life, although I don't know how accurate that story is, although the part about Dakota was made up. In hindsight, putting a young girl in that position is kind of awkward and I can see where Runnels had problems, but in the end, it shows the power of the business because he still went along with it. In another long forgotten story, back in the late 80s in Calgary, Pillman found a woman, Theresa Hays, and brought her to Stampede Wrestling to do an angle where she was Theresa Pillman, his sister, for some heels to abuse and lead to a grudge match. Many years later, Hays got back in wrestling using the name Beulah McGillicutty in ECW. When he was on the road nailing someone well known, he at least once, if not more, would call Mark Madden's phone and have him listen in and make sure he got the woman talking, I guess in case he needed a witness if people didn't believe the story. In college, when he was the school's football star, he was something of a cult hero on campus. Among those who idolized him was a freshman on the wrestling team named Mark Coleman, for an incident where it was known that Pillman had sex with a woman who was hanging upside down from a pull-up bar wearing gravity boots (old school exercise equipment).
But for all the stories about Pillman and women, his luck wasn't always the best. Before getting married, he had a long-time girlfriend from before wrestling named Rochelle. She was from Cincinnati but lived with him in Atlanta during his WCW days. Once, while he was on the road wrestling, somebody broke into their house and viciously stabbed her, which left her with some mental issues. And she was crazy to begin with. Brittany was from this relationship. Rochelle had major drug problems, and Pillman was hardly a choir boy. It turned into, after they broke up, a year-long nightmare of a custody battle, with vicious accusations going back-and-forth on both sides, with both sides accusing the other of drugs, and Rochelle making up things far worse, right down to insane accusations of sexual abuse. The pressure did a real number on Pillman during the battle, but it only got worse when it was over.
By that point, Brian had gotten married for the only time in his life. He actually was looking through a Penthouse magazine and saw a photo spread of the future Melanie Pillman, using whatever stage name she was going by, and told friends that he was going to marry this woman, who at this point he had never met. As it turned out, he found her, and after a whirlwind romance, Pillman proposed to her at the Grand Canyon. The funny part of the story was, she knew wrestling, as she dated Jim Hellwig during the period he was on top in WWF. After that, she thought all wrestlers were insane and never wanted to date another wrestler. Pillman hated Hellwig, particularly when Hellwig would call his wife up and make fun of her for having to settle for a "little man." I remember him telling me at the time how he had just gotten married a few days earlier, out of nowhere, and how happy he was, and it happened so quickly that I had first assumed it was Rochelle.
In 1994, while the custody fight was at its ugliest, Rochelle was one day supposed to pick up Brittany, but never showed up. Nobody, not her friends, nor her family, knew her whereabouts. After a few days, it was feared she was dead, and everyone fingered Brian to be the lead suspect. Brian was drinking heavily at this point, and scared to death. While nothing broke in the press, he was expecting she was going to turn up dead, and since he was a local celebrity, and a national wrestling star, that he was about to become the white O.J. Simpson (this happened just a few months after the Nicole Simpson murder).
Trying to clear himself, and totally wasted at the time, he went to the worst section of Cincinnati, carried a photo of Rochelle, who by this time had a major crack cocaine problem, and went to all the street corner drug dealers trying to find information. As he was there, the police came by, recognized him immediately since he had been a sports star in the city since high school. As they approached, they believe they saw him swallow something. He was arrested, and it made press, that he was in a bad part of town and arrested on drug charges. Quite frankly, if he had not been so popular among the higher-ups in WCW, he very likely could have been fired as well. However, when he proved he had a prescription for the pain pills found on him, he plea bargained down to drunk driving. He was still under suspicion in Rochelle's disappearance for several more weeks, although never formally charged. The stress on him was unimaginable, and while it was claimed his real problems started with his humvee wreck in 1996, it was really at this point when things started to change.
Eventually, Rochelle was found in Florida a few weeks later, when police pulled over a car with her and some men. Her disappearance out of nowhere, probably clinched her losing the custody fight. Due to her own drug issues becoming obvious in the custody hearing, and losing custody of Brittany, Rochelle was so messed up she wanted to kill herself. Her plan was to shoot herself while on the phone with Brian. In her messed up mind, that would be her final revenge, to leave him with the guilt for the rest of his life. But when she made the decision to end her life, Brian was on the road. Instead, she talked, at length, with Melanie, who kept trying to talk her out of it. After a long conversation, Melanie thought she had succeeded in talking her out of it, and got off the phone. Rochelle then called up her mother, and while on the phone with her, blew her brains out.
Brian was devastated in so many ways. He felt guilty because he blamed himself for her doing what she did. He felt guilty because he was on the road that night and Rochelle's mother, who Brian loved, ended up on the phone as her daughter shot herself. He felt, if nothing else, if he had been home and on the phone, it would have spared her mother, as well as his wife, at least some of the mental anguish. Worse, her friends and family all blamed him, because of the belief it was losing the nasty child custody fight, that caused her to lash out in the only way she could come up with.
His career at this point was also going nowhere. After the break-up of the Hollywood Blondes, a tag team name he came up with for he and Steve Austin, and a team that by all rights should have gone down as the best tag team of the 90s, by late 1993, his career was floundering. While in the early part of the 90s, he could be counted on regularly to have one of the best matches on any show he was booked on, no small feat considering some of the names on the WCW roster, now he was rarely on the PPV shows or "Clash of Champions." He had a bad back, that made training difficult and limited him in the ring. He was up to 220, but this wasn't good weight, as he was getting a beer belly from drinking and lack of training, and noted that he still looked presentable in the ring because "I can hide behind my tan." In those days, the popular aerobic equipment wasn't the treadmill or the stationary bike, but the Stairmaster, and his body wasn't made for it. His back was destroyed when he tried to use it, not that the taking bumps and all the years of contract sports were probably more to blame.
Worse, at 33, because he really was one of the real students of the world wide wrestling business, as opposed to just someone who saw whatever wrestling was on his television when he was home, he thought he knew the future. He had known for some time, really for two years, that the business was changing and his days of "Flyin Brian" were about to end because he watched and studied AAA wrestling. Long before they ever stepped foot in a mainstream U.S. promotion, he believed that Eddy Guerrero, Art Barr and Rey Misterio Jr. were going to be the future of the business, and in watching them, he recognized his own physical limitations. He was in total awe of the talent of Guerrero and Misterio Jr. in particular, and while he had overcome the size odds to make it in sports since he was a teenager, he saw those two performing in the ring at a level he could never reach.
Earlier than all but a few mainstream American wrestlers, he knew Misterio Jr. was the one who would change wrestling, and make his flying style obsolete. Only a few people in the U.S. understood that change was inevitable, but Pillman saw it in more depth, because he also believed he was going to be the victim, as opposed to the benefactor. He'd still be too small to be pushed with the top guys, but no longer a good enough high flier to stand out. His four-year contract was coming due in 1996, and he was making $225,000 per year as a base salary, plus bonuses based on dates worked, which in those days was far more than a prelim guy that didn't even work the big shows should have been getting. He'd survived a 1992 showdown with Bill Watts over the contract. Pillman was WCW's first light heavyweight champion as having great matches on every PPV show when Watts came aboard. Watts' role was to slash expenses and lessen the company debt. The two contracts Watts thought immediately were out of line were Pillman and Dangerously. Pillman, in his mind was making far too much for a junior heavyweight guy, who he saw as too small to headline. Dangerously, who he felt was talented, was making far too much for a manager.
Watts gave Pillman the choice. He'd cut him to $156,000, more in line with what a wrestler of his level at that time was making, and push him. Or he could keep his contract, and he'd not only lose the title, but lose every match from that point forward. Everyone in the company, particularly the headliners and management, told Pillman to play ball with Watts. But to him, this was a showdown and Watts was the 6-4, 300- pound guy on the offensive line laughing at him in college. He refused, joking to everyone he was quite willing to become the highest paid job guy in wrestling history.
He did get a strong run in 1993, more by accident than anything. Watts was gone, and he was put together with Steve Austin as a heel tag team. They weren't put together to get over, and Austin was furious as what he believed was being lowered, since he had been a singles champion and Pillman was a guy largely going nowhere. But the two became best friends. Pillman came up with idea after idea and was captain of the team, as he studied tapes of the best old tag teams he could find, came up with "the terrible towel" as a gimmick, and the name The Hollywood Blondes, taken after a 70s tag team of Buddy Roberts & Jerry Brown. While people remember the team as one of the best of the 90s, and they should have been, in actuality, they were together only a few months. That was enough to win tag team of the year for 1993, and become one of the most remembered duos of the entire decade. Dusty Rhodes took credit for putting them together, and while he may have been booker at the time, they were not put together to be stars. But the tag team division was weak, and they became the heel opponents for champs Ricky Steamboat & Shane Douglas, and eventually won the titles. They did a long build for a June 16, 1993, "Clash of the Champions" in Norfolk. Ric Flair had returned to WCW after leaving WWF, and there was a long build for his first match. Pillman & Austin had been mocking him, doing some brilliant comedy segments, including a spoof on Flair's "Flair for the Gold" interview segment, called "A Flair for the Old," where Pillman came out in a wig and pretended to be Flair at 80. Flair & Anderson won the match in two straight falls, the second via DQ, so the title didn't change hands. The idea was to start a main event program.
But far more important, the bout did a 2.6 rating, the lowest in Clash history. Flair was the greatest ratings draw in company history, in his first match back in two years, and a near record number was expected. Austin said the powers that be didn't want them over, and cut them off when they got over. In actuality, when that rating came in after all the build-up for Flair's return live in prime time, particularly since tapes of three year old Flair matches had drawn bigger numbers in bad time slots, the Blondes were the scapegoats. Even though they were a great team both in and out of the ring, and had just scratched the surface after being together barely six months, it was deemed they were entertaining, but couldn't draw money. The rest of the program with Flair & Anderson was immediately nixed. The decision was made to put Austin in the U.S. title picture with Col. Rob Parker (Robert Fuller) as manager, after he would turn on Pillman to end the team. Austin was a strong technician in the ring, but it was thought he couldn't cut a main event promo. Pillman, well, he would lose his feud with Austin, making him back to being a babyface, and there were no plans for him after that. He was being jobbed out again, and he knew, at best, he was going to get his money cut back, and at worst they wouldn't offer him a new deal. At the time, he was considered to small to work WWF, and while he could have gone to ECW in an instant, as Paul Heyman always felt he was underutilized, there was no money there.
While Brian & Melanie were as opposite of "The Brady Bunch" as you could imagine, the pro wrestling wildman outside the ring and stripper, they each brought two children into the relationship. Brian was raising a second daughter, born to another woman. The whole "Loose Cannon" was built on the premise that he needed to become an extreme character that would be the talk of the wrestling world. He caught a break as the company decided to, for the 50th time, recreate the Four Horsemen. At one point it was Pillman was the fourth guy, to go along with Ric Flair, Arn Anderson and Sting. They turned on Sting and went heel, and eventually picked up Chris Benoit. His bizarre character was already getting over, and the idea was he was out of control and would turn on Flair & Anderson, forming a group, anchored by him and Benoit, called The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, to feud with a new Four Horsemen group headed by Flair & Anderson. At one point, while wearing his Horsemen T-shirt, he single-handedly apprehended a guy holding a lady hostage at the Residence Inn in Orlando.
Things were going well enough by that point that he was in no danger of losing his job, and he didn't have to be Flyin Brian, but he felt his body giving out and didn't know how many years he had left. By this point, with the birth of Brian Jr., he had five children to support and an almost mansion like home in the Cincinnati suburbs of Walton, KY. I don't know if the term jealousy, envy or disdain would be the right term, but one or all of those words described Pillman's feelings about Lex Luger. When Pillman was breaking into WCW, Luger was a superstar in the business. Even though every attempt to make Luger into a franchise player had backfired, Pillman never forgot how Luger would laugh at Pillman before shows when Pillman would practice new moves in the ring, something the "stars" in those days wouldn't be caught dead doing. Luger would rub it in, joking he knew five moves and made double what Pillman did studying all those tapes and trying to learn new things. But whether Luger ever truly connected or not, he always received huge money and was always a main event player, because that was the game in that era and he had the prototypical look. Whether Pillman's matches got over or not, he was too small to headline in the minds of the decision-makers.
It drove him crazy, because he had a great physique as well, and the big guys weren't drawing, and many were having crappy matches on top, and still get a free pass on top. Once, he nearly had a showdown with Sid Vicious, who was almost a foot taller and close to 100 pounds heavier. Their heat started in 1991, regarding a match at the Meadowlands. There was no question who was going to win, nor any problems over it, even though Pillman was far better in every aspect except stature. Vicious gave Pillman virtually no offense in the match, squashing him. While Pillman wasn't a main eventer, he was a big enough star that nobody should have squashed him. They had words before the match, as Vicious told him it wouldn't be credible for him to sell because of the size difference, and Pillman told him that when he played in the NFL, he knocked people Vicious' size on their ass and that was real. But visually, Vicious was right at the time, as in the ring, the size difference made it look ridiculous.
A few years later, after Vicious went to the WWF, he was in an Atlanta bar that Pillman and some of the other wrestlers were at, and they had words, as Vicious came in bragging about how much money he was making and how he was drawing money on top, although at that moment he was down with a torn triceps. He made mention that nobody else there can draw money, which was that buzz word that caused Pillman to blow up, and Mike Graham, who was even smaller than Pillman but had been a star in Florida in his day, was probably even madder, feeling disrespected. Vicious left the bar, and came in with, of all things, a squeegee you'd use on the windshield of a car as a weapon to confront Pillman. Graham then took the squeegee away, and Vicious noted he was injured, and it wasn't worth reaggravating the injury. He left the bar.
By 1995, he felt that in WCW, and at this point it was the Hogan era, you got pushed based on the size of your contract because they had to justify the deal. He was looking for a $450,000 or more deal, which he believed was Luger level money, and that if he got it, politically, he'd be treated as a star. And at that point, he'd have been lucky to get any more than a third of that.
His new character was based on being unpredictable to everyone, at all times, based on the idea that before his death, Bruiser Brody always had promoters and wrestlers on edge because he could be unpredictable and violent. But in doing so, Brody made himself one of the highest paid wrestlers of his era and everyone bought his gimmick as the wildest tough guy. Road Warrior Hawk was another person he took the character from, in that in his heyday, he played his character all the time and people were genuinely afraid of him. Brian was too small to make people fear him, even though he was a tough little guy, so his goal was to get people on edge, where they wouldn't know what to make of him, and he'd steal the spotlight and be noticed. As he was formulating his character, the only two people in wrestling he consulted with and let in on it, largely for ideas, were Bruce Hart, his original trainer and tag team partner when he broke in with Stampede Wrestling and one of his best friends, and Terry Funk, because of the belief that Funk had seen it all, everywhere, and knew everything that did and didn't work. He would play a reactionary right wing nut on the popular Cincinnati talk show hosted by Bill Cunningham (who appeared on the DVD). His best idea, in his mind, was one Wood refused to help him with. He wanted to run onto the field during the 1996 Super Bowl game and chain himself to the goal posts. Wood told him that if he got Pillman tickets to the game and it was traced to him, he'd likely be fired.
The original plan was to involve only Eric Bischoff. One idea was to have scenarios backstage, in front of only the wrestlers, where Pillman would act like he was out of line and Bischoff would get mad. Several situations occurred in this direction. At first, nobody even thought it was a work, because Pillman was getting on everyone's nerves by this point with his weird behavior. Unfortunately, because it worked at first, it became the mantra of Bischoff and later the WCW company's fascination with "working the boys." In the end, it wound up as a pathetic overdone trend that never made them money and created extensive mistrust in the organization and destroyed the credibility of management.
It was supposed to culminate in a fight between the two. Pillman was even willing to let Bischoff, who used to brag about his being a kickboxer, get the better of it, thinking it would boost Bischoff's ego, and Bischoff would be more willing to give him a better contract. Instead, Bischoff insisted booker Kevin Sullivan also get involved and be let in on it. The first major worked altercation, with the attempt to fool the wrestlers was when Sullivan went after Pillman's eye in the ring on Nitro, and the announcers were not clued in. It probably would have worked better as being believable if Sullivan didn't cut a promo on it the next week on television and talk about the incident to build a match on PPV. At that point, it was clear to me what it was, yet because the act was being pulled on the wrestlers, even when explained, at that point most still believed it was real. To this day, even though it really has all come out, many had the opinion Teddy Long had on the DVD, saying that management wanted you to believe they were in on it, but he didn't think they really were.
Of course, the irony was the plan was to work Bischoff and Sullivan in the end. On February 11, 1996, in St. Petersburg, they booked a "respect" match, similar to an "I Quit" match, with Pillman vs. Sullivan. The loser would have to say "I respect you." Pillman took a few shots, sarcastically said the famous line, "I respect you, booker man (Sullivan was the booker at the time, and the term booker was never used on television in those days)," and walked out of the ring, out of the building, and out of the promotion. Everyone was scrambling because the match didn't go "as scripted," and there was a panic backstage. On the DVD, it was talked about like this incident was not staged by Arn Anderson, who in fact, was not clued in. As this was going on, in the middle of the chaos, Glenn Gilberti (Disco Inferno), said, "My God, they're working the boys."
As Bischoff and Sullivan figured, the angle was to end there. Pillman would be "fired," and sent to ECW. While everyone knows, thanks to the "Rise and Fall of ECW" and bankruptcy documents, about WWF helping pay some ECW bills, it was a very well kept secret that WCW had a financial involvement in ECW at that time. Pillman knew because Steve Karel, Heyman's right-hand man, had tipped off Wood, who he knew from the bodybuilding/exercise machine business (Wood at the time was co-owner and designed the Hammer Strength equipment). Plus, Pillman knew he could do whatever he wanted in ECW, far from the restraints he was under in WCW. Whether all this was going to get him "Luger money," was still very questionable, because even though Pillman had become the single most talked about character within wrestling, he had that tag of having never drawn money, and being "too small" to headline橥., get headliner money. But Pillman noted that not everyone was buying the angle and the people in the office would know he was still employed by WCW while being in ECW, which would make public the secret relationship and kill the angle they were working.
So Pillman talked Bischoff into taking the work even farther. Bischoff had WCW give Pillman a real-life termination notice. On paper, he was fired. Ultimately, the office people would know, and tell the wrestlers, and that would "prove" to the wrestlers it was not a work. Of course, in the grand scheme of things, none of this had anything to do with manipulating the fans and actually drawing money. By this point I knew the goal, but never in a million years did I think he'd be able to pull it off. The key was, with the termination notice, the deal was he would get paid his salary under the table somehow by WCW the entire time he was gone, probably as part of a backdoor deal with ECW, which was part of the con with Bischoff. Pillman worked out the entire angle with both Bischoff and Heyman himself, but Bischoff did have to approve the deal. The con on Bischoff was Pillman's contract was expiring in a few months, so while being paid, he was free to negotiate with WWF, or even sign with WWF, right in the middle of a competitive wrestling war. He was negotiating with McMahon, showing him the termination notice. Bischoff and Sullivan were furious, telling him he knew full well the termination notice was a work on everyone, but because the people who wrote it up weren't in on it, it was written as if it was legal and binding, and he claimed it was.
Pillman working on ECW was important because when he made his surprise return to WCW, doing whatever angle it was, it would have credibility that he was uncontrollable. That actually, as a storyline, did make sense long-term, because he would spend months on ECW television, ripping WCW, and building his return, but since nobody knew the relationship, they'd believe his ripping WCW was a shoot. His hatred for Bischoff, Sullivan and the WCW organization would have a higher level of reality toward it, because he "really" did lose his job, proving the actions at the end in WCW were "real." They had to be, since he was appearing with WCW's arch-enemy, ECW, for months.
Pillman made a few appearances on ECW television, doing some incredibly clever stuff and vignettes way ahead of their time, including wrestling a giant pencil ("pencil" being the business term for booker) in somebody's living room and acting like he was unemployed and working as a cook in a restaurant. The funny thing is, all this stuff talked about never drew any company a dime, but it sort of ushered in a new era with promoters. The old school promoters lived and died based on how business was. At this point, you saw promoters, Bischoff and Heyman in particular, as McMahon always had his eye on the bottom line until he got so rich after the Austin era that it didn't matter, really booking more for something else. Ego. The idea of doing things people talked about. It was the beginning, probably with this angle, of booking for "the net is talking about it" mentality more than the actual box office. Perhaps this was part of the mentality that fueled the greatest boom period in the history of the business, but more likely, based on historical results of all the stuff that was tried and went nowhere with the casual fans, that was just a coincidence.
Still, WCW was desperate for ratings. At this point, the Raw vs. Nitro feud was pretty much even, as Nitro hadn't gone two hours, the NWO hadn't been formed nor had the Luchadores with the new style hit WCW which started the pull away in the race. Even though he wasn't supposed to come back for six months, WCW ordered Pillman back on Nitro a few weeks later. Bischoff and Sullivan understood enough not to ruin their angle, so the idea was for him to show up in the audience at a Nitro and cause a disturbance in the audience. He'd only be acknowledged in passing and the cameras would accidentally show him, then pan away from him. It was only to be a split second. He also made a sign, plugging a 900 number to call to find out about him, which for a few weeks did big business. Hulk Hogan saw the reaction he got, and well, this was Hulk Hogan. The main event on the March 24, 1996, Uncensored PPV in Tupelo, MS, was going to be Hogan & Randy Savage vs. eight heels in a triple decker cage match. Hogan saw that Pillman was over, and even though he was supposed to be fired, Hogan knew better, and told management he wanted Pillman as one of his opponents, of course, to beat.
Pillman's raspy voice was a result of cancerous polyps on his vocal cords. He first got them at the age of two, and on two different occasions, once at the age of two, the other at the age of four, came close to death when his heart stopped due to complications. He survived 31 throat surgeries before the age of five, and every few years, the polyps would start growing back and he'd need surgery to scrape them off. When he got buzzed that Hogan wanted him in that match, he scheduled a surgery. The surgery was real and at some point over the next few months he was going to need it, but this was a surgery to avoid Hogan burying him, and his feeling was, just wrestling a match in WCW, let alone a PPV main event and being a ping pong ball for Hogan, would kill his gimmick. But in actuality, he stressed to me that he knew that match was going to be "near the top of every list of the worst matches in the history of the industry." But WCW kind of ruined the gimmick anyway, even after he told them he was having surgery and his doctor sent a note that he wouldn't be recovered on time. The truth is, if it was a match he wanted to do, he'd have been in the ring. If anything, the match lived down to Pillman's expectations, and was among the worst PPV matches in wrestling history. A year or so later, when he was in WWF, he worked on an infected ankle and hooked up to an IV, he ripped out the IV, left the hospital against doctor's orders, did a match, and went back to the hospital after to get hooked back up. WCW killed its angle, as it often did, advertising the "fired" Pillman in the main event on television and even as late as the live pre-game show, and was pressuring him until hours before show time to come to Tupelo.
Of all the Pillman incidents, only one was truly unplanned. During a match on January 23, 1996, in Las Vegas, when Pillman beat Guerrero in a 5:50 match that wasn't nearly what you'd think it would have been, at a Clash of the Champions, Pillman decided on the spur of the moment he was going to pull Heenan's jacket off. Heenan freaked out, because he didn't know what was happening and was afraid Pillman was going to hurt his bad neck. He swore right on the air, and walked off.
Even though Wood told the interviewers for the tape the entire story of how the gimmick was established, all of the most interesting stuff didn't make the air. My feeling is twofold. First, I think they didn't want it known that someone completely outside of wrestling had come up with the most talked about gimmick at the time in wrestling. And second, a key aspect of the gimmick is that Pillman completely outworked Bischoff, which was okay, but in many ways, at least for a time even had McMahon not knowing what was and wasn't real. In WWF, Vince McMahon can never, not for a moment, be out of complete control of every situation.
Actually, McMahon was leery of Pillman. They met in Las Vegas, the day after the Guerrero match. McMahon and Jim Ross were together at the NATPE convention representing WWF, and WCW used to do shows in Vegas in conjunction with the convention. In those days, all the major movers and shakers in the TV industry were there. As you can imagine, security was tight at those things as far as being able to get in. The funny part of the story is it was my badge that got Pillman in. I was leaving when I saw Brian in front of the doors, signing autographs, and showing some WCW wrestlers with him publicity photos of Melanie under her stage name. None of them were able to get in. Since I was leaving, I gave him my badge. He did tell me he didn't go so far as to display the name on the badge when he went to see McMahon and Ross. But he was in character, all the time, went up to Vince and hugged him, and made Vince uneasy, getting photos of the two of them together. Vince thought he was nuts, and didn't want anything to do with him, thinking that at least some of those crazy stories were real. And he was right. But Pillman gave Ross a wink to let him know "it's all a work."
Still, in a story I never heard, Joey Styles noted that one night when they were doing production for the ECW television show at the home of the mother of producer Charlie Brezene, that Pillman took a shit on the floor of the living room for no reason. He said that soured him on the whole Pillman gimmick.
Eventually, both Ross and Jim Cornette went to bat for Pillman, and McMahon turned around on him, and started seriously negotiating for him. McMahon offered Pillman a guaranteed money contract, something he'd only done for a few people. It wasn't so much Pillman was so valuable he was breaking his conventions on the business, but he had just lost Kevin Nash and Scott Hall because he wouldn't give them a guaranteed money deal, and was looking for a measure of retribution.
One thing not made clear in the documentary, for obvious reasons, is that Pillman never wanted to go to WWF. The idea was always to use WWF for leverage to get the "Luger" contract in WCW. To be honest, I don't know how much most knew about that, and even if they did, that wasn't going to be broached on a company DVD.
In fact, the two of us used to argue the subject, because I strongly felt he needed to go to WWF. Hulk Hogan was going to be the main star in WCW, and even if he would work with Pillman, he'd never work competitively with him. Plus, Hogan had his clique that he was going to keep on top, and besides them, Sting, Luger, Kevin Nash, Scott Hall and Savage were all guaranteed top spots. Sure, he and Benoit could feud with Flair & Anderson and probably have good-to-great matches (physically Brian, even before the humvee wreck, was having severe back problems and couldn't perform at the level he had a few years earlier, but as a team with Benoit against those two, it would be a piece of cake). But they'd never be allowed to work on top. But Pillman felt WCW would, in the end, offer the best money deal, because he figured Bischoff and Sullivan wouldn't want to lose the character they thought they had created. As badly as he wanted the shot on top to prove his gimmick could draw money (during the period he was "fired," he desperately wanted to work Mexico as an American heel, for almost no money, because in his own mind, he needed to prove that he could draw money). He was almost 34, his body was breaking down, and he saw his next contract as his last chance to really make money in wrestling. My argument was that he wanted to work on top, and even though there were no guarantees of as much money, a top spot in WWF was going to end up paying as well as I suspected WCW would go, plus WWF at the time was building around Shawn Michaels, and had no challengers at the time who could match Pillman's personality. They had just lost Hall & Nash, and Bret Hart was leaving after Wrestlemania to try his hand at acting. Austin was a mid-carder going nowhere and not even yet on the map. Guys like Owen Hart, Hunter Hearst Helmsley, Davey Boy Smith and Jeff Jarrett couldn't match his charisma and ability to get over at that time. It was basically he and Vader looking at the time like potential opponents for Michaels if he believed they'd give him the chance.
Bischoff low-balled Pillman in the early negotiations. But when he realized McMahon was making a serious play and offering guaranteed money (believed to be around a $250,000 to $300,000 downside, with the potential of more if he could work on top桮d McMahon had only offered guaranteed money to a handful of wrestlers in history at this point), Bischoff upped his offer to somewhere in the $400,000 range. He had worked the system, and everyone in the system, and got an offer nearly double what he had been making. But he was already morphing into his character in a bad way.
He was constantly wired. Footage of him from that period in late 1995 and early 1996 has him almost looking like a junkie, all strung out and very skinny. He would stay up all night, spending hours on the phone, playing his character and basically becoming his character. While the whole idea was to save money from his last few years in the business, while this was all going on, he spent $85,000 on a humvee. Within weeks, on April 15, 1996, after binging and not sleeping for several days, he fell asleep at the wheel. He humvee went off the road, he got thrown 40 feet into a field, where he was found, laying in a pool of his own blood. He [sic] face was so swollen that his friends who visited him in the hospital didn't recognize him. He needed his face reconstructed, and they had to take bone from his hip to reconstruct his ankle.
By this point, half the people in wrestling thought this was his latest angle, even though it got extensive local media coverage. I'd also seen the police reports, talked to people who saw him in the hospital, and was updated by his wife daily, and still, I was being told that this was just his best orchestrated charade. Kevin Sullivan swore to everyone in WCW that he knew, saying the facial reconstruction was because he was going to WWF and it was an angle where he'd go in looking exactly like Michaels. Sullivan claimed the ankle surgery was just to fix the bad ankle he'd had from football.
Pillman went into deep depression. He had the wrestling world by the balls and was about to sign a contract, most likely with WCW, and he was laying in a hospital bed and the doctors told him the ankle damage was so bad he would never wrestle again. He blamed himself for crashing his car and ruining everything he worked for, plus now he thought his career was over as well. The first thing he did was lie, to everyone, including me. He said as bad off as he was, the doctors said he would be able to wrestle and after healing, his ankle would be at 100%. He even said since it had been damaged for a decade, that it would actually be stronger after the surgery than it had been. To his shock, both McMahon and Bischoff were still after him, and he was downplaying the long-term effects to both of them. In the end, McMahon got him, because Bischoff, not fully trusting whether Pillman really was going to make a full recovery, offered more money, but wouldn't eliminate the standard 90-day termination cycle in the multi-year contract. When Bischoff wouldn't budge on the point, that was the difference maker. Creative and how he expected to be used played no part in the ultimate decision. It was only about insuring he'd have a job for the term of the contract if he couldn't perform in the ring.
By this point, in the summer of 1996, WWF rushed the Pillman signing onto television in a failed attempt to close the ratings gap. Pillman was traveling while he should have been rehabbing, appearing on WWF television in various roles while they waited for him to be able to wrestle. In doing so, his ankle didn't heal properly. In September, he was told he had damaged it to the point all the work in the first surgery was for naught, and he'd need a second operation, where they'd have to re-break and re-set the ankle.
In storyline form, this was set up when Austin turned on him and stuck the ankle in a chair and stomped on the chair. This reconstructive surgery saw surgeons fuse his ankle into a walking position. Just a few days after the surgery, Pillman came up with the infamous gun angle. Pillman was recuperating at home, while Austin vowed to go to his house and beat up his crippled former friend. WWF was moving the time slot of Raw up one hour and decided to do a shock angle to establish the slot. As Austin got past bodyguards and broke into the house, Pillman pulled a gun on him. A gun blast went off and the satellite transmission went out. They teased showing how things turned out until the end of the show. WWF by this point was way behind in the ratings, and Pillman & Austin were like little kids on Tuesday, waiting for the Monday numbers to come in, thinking this angle was going to beat Nitro and end the streak, or at least close the gap. Pillman wanted every bit of info in every demographic. Both he and Austin were both highly disappointed as the angle actually flopped in the ratings. People were switching to Nitro when it was going on in every demographic except older women. Worse, the USA Network was so mad Vince McMahon had to go on television and apologize for it, and they've never done an angle involving a gun shot on Raw since.
Pillman was kept home for a while to heal, and later brought back as the co-host of "Shotgun Saturday Night," a late night syndicated project with the idea of presenting a more risque version of wrestling from a night club setting that quickly died.
Finally, in the spring of 1997, he returned as an active wrestler, after roughly a year off. He did not have to come back. He should never have come back. He felt guilty that he was collecting a big weekly paycheck for being a wrestler, and in his mind, he had not contributed enough to earn the money he was getting. It was a self-imposed guilt trip that got him back in the ring before he should have. But the reality was, any comeback would have been too soon.
His acting ability by this point was great, but in the ring, he was very limited. But what he didn't let on, to anyone, was he was in ridiculous pain. You had a guy who could not even get through airports without pain pills, going out and working matches every night. Worse, you had a guy who took more pride than most in his ability to have good matches, and while he was involved in a few, even as bad off as he was, most of the time he was just taking shortcuts to get through a match. His indoctrination to the world of pro wrestling was the Stampede Wrestling style, watching New Japan videotapes and hours of Ric Flair interviews and matches. To him, what he was doing was not what he thought pro wrestling was supposed to be, although he loved what he was doing outside the ring, some of which was breaking new ground .
Still, he was a participant in the year's top WWF angle, the Hart Foundation vs. Steve Austin and assorted other babyfaces. Stu Hart was like a father figure to Pillman, and he always kept in contact with him via phone long after he had left the Stampede territory. On the DVD, Jim Ross said that Lou Thesz's book "Hooker," became Pillman's bible. Pillman was consumed by the book, and really did memorize every bit of information in the book, but also it was his belief that Thesz was largely full of shit. He would call up old-time wrestlers to try and check on every story, and Stu was his favorite, since Stu, while often oblivious to what was going on, had total recall of the 30s, 40s and 50s. When Thesz stated that Stu Hart wasn't really a tough guy or a great wrestler (Hart was a Canadian national champion in freestyle wrestling and would have competed in the 1940 Olympics, and possibly the 1944 Games, if they weren't canceled due to World War II), that he was great at demonstrating holds but couldn't actually get real wrestlers into those holds, Pillman took it as if the credibility of his own father was being questioned. He called Thesz up and argued with him, saying he'd seen Stu in action and that Stu was the real deal. From all the stories he heard, and the photos of a young Stu Hart who was a national champion in wrestling and a pro football player, Stu was one of Brian's heroes. He'd talk endlessly about Stu. "Look at photos of Stu Hart in the 40s. He didn't even lift weights. Stu was a stud."
He wanted to say Thesz was a fraud as a wrestler, but since Stu vouched for Thesz was the real deal (categorizing him as not the very best, which he considered people like George Gordienko and maybe a few others like Rube Wright, Karl Gotch and Luther Lindsay, but Thesz was in their league in Stu's mind, or at worst, right below them), he accepted that much.
Pillman by this point thought he could only be a crazy heel, to the point he didn't accept that eventually he was going to be a babyface, whether he liked it or not. So he was put into a grouping with Bret Hart, Jim Neidhart, Davey Boy Smith and Owen Hart. The fact Bret Hart personally picked him was basically saying he really was a member of the Hart family. Very early in the run, they had a match in Canada, and were cheered. Not only that, but Bret worked like a babyface. Brian called me that night and complained Bret was compromising the angle, and that Bret told him that night his idea is they were heels in the United States, but at the same time, babyfaces in Canada and Europe. Brian thought it was completely stupid, feeling Bret's ego about not wanting to be booed in Canada was going to ruin the angle. But he very quickly realized he misread it.
The greatest night of his career was July 6, 1997. The WWF was producing a less than two hour "In Your House" PPV from the Saddledome in Calgary. The main event was the Hart Foundation facing usual babyfaces Austin & Goldust & Ken Shamrock & The Road Warriors. It was supposed to be a throwaway show, but instead was probably one of the greatest PPV shows in wrestling history. He called after it was over, admitting he completely misread the landscape, absolutely loved being a babyface in Canada, and said nothing he had ever done in the business, the matches with Liger or Flair, the turning on Sting, compared to that night.
But that was one of the few bright spots of an otherwise rapid decline. Pillman became almost like a man possessed by the devil in the movies and slowly losing grip, where his stage character was taking over楶en at home. Melanie would get mad as he'd be "The Loose Cannon" at home when no cameras were around and it was only them and the children. Wood refused to see him or talk to him the last few months of his life because he was playing the character the two of them had created at his house. One day Pillman came over to his house, and he noted fresh needle marks in his arm and a swollen forearm. Wood told him to get out of his house, and not come back. He had several good friends in the WWF at the time, as he was part of the Hart Foundation, the company's top heel group, and friends like Mick Foley and Austin who he had known from WCW were becoming superstars at the time. But most were having nothing to do with him. His behavior was the talk of the wrestlers, who were trying to figure out a way to confront him on it, fearing the worst. Before his death, about the only connection Wood had was through Karel, who in mid- September of 1997 gave Wood the message that "Paul Heyman told me to let you know your buddy is on some Mexican quaaludes and isn't going to last more than a few more weeks."
That wasn't the only time he said it. A few weeks earlier, when Heyman was talking to Shane Douglas about the "November to Remember" PPV on November 30, 1997, in Pittsburgh, Douglas suggested Pillman to be his opponent. They had started a feud in 1996, but because Pillman had the wreck, he never wrestled a match in ECW. Heyman wouldn't consider it, telling Douglas,"Brian isn't going to be alive by then."
I was still in regular contact with him, and half the time, he was still brilliant when it came to business, but the other half, he was scary, in the way you knew this wasn't going to have a happy ending. And it wasn't as if I wasn't hearing about what Heyman was telling others. Company officials were getting extremely worried about his behavior. He wrecked three rental cars, two on the same weekend. Wrestlers who liked him were steering clear of him and afraid to travel with him. Once, while on an airplane, he was on one of those old airplane telephones shouting and cursing loudly out of control at his wife. Jim Ross started counseling him, sometimes several times a week. Around Labor Day, Ross ordered him to take a drug test. He went nuts, admitting he was taking pain pills, just like everyone else in the company, because he believed it was impossible to be a pro wrestler without them. He was vehement about being picked on, particularly because it was by Ross, who in his deluded mind, he saw as a close friend who betrayed him. He insisted he was doing nothing nobody else wasn't doing, and claimed Shawn Michaels, one of the company's biggest stars, was worse off than he was, but was politically untouchable for some reason. He said he had never gone on television so loaded he couldn't perform, noting another top star had done so twice in recent weeks, with impunity. He lashed out at Ross, called me and told me they would find nothing in the test but the same pain killers everyone else was taking, and said he wanted to quit and go back to WCW. In fact, when the test came back, it only showed prescription pain killers and a small amount of Decadurabolin (an anabolic steroid) in his system.
I tried to talk him out of quitting, but he kept saying how others guys would pass out after shows and their face would fall into their food, yet he's the one and only person singled out for drug tests. With the benefit of hindsight, Pillman should never have been allowed to wrestle again. At the time, I didn't know if WWF could save him, and despite all the wrestlers who had died that I knew, none of whom were as scary at the end, I never fully acknowledged that he could die. When Vince McMahon made the announcement during the pre-game show at the Bad Blood PPV, that was the first I heard. It was the only time watching wrestling that I ever went into shock. But I knew something bad was inevitable. I did think WCW was the wrong place for him to be at that time because he would be walking into a political minefield and I didn't think anyone there was going to intercede if he had problems. WWF had far less talent so he was guaranteed TV time, even though he couldn't work much. In WCW, the fact he had turned into such a great out-of-the-ring performer was going to work against him because that company had become all about the top guys burying anyone threatening. Plus, there was a wrestling war going on and I didn't believe WWF would let him out of his contract, even if they were afraid of him, and have him show up on Nitro. And by asking for a release, which he did, he would be burying himself politically.
On the DVD, Eric Bischoff revealed Pillman had called him and wanted to come back. He had told me he was going to call Bischoff and I was trying to talk him out of it, but once he made his mind up, that was how it was. Melanie wanted him to go to rehab because she was worried about the level of pain medication he was taking. His response was to buy a T-shirt and wear it around the house that read, "Rehab is for quitters." He blamed WWF for ruining his marriage and started going off that when the company is ruining your marriage and your life, you have to get out of the company. He asked for his release, and at the time there was an open slot in the Four Horsemen that he figured he could slide into.
He and his wife had further problems. Melanie was pregnant, which I actually didn't know until the day of his death. I knew things were going really bad between them. He never told me that he knew she was pregnant. She told me she had never told him as things had been bad and she had just found out herself. In hindsight, based on one conversation when he was on a rant maybe two weeks before his death, I believe he may have known. I also believed he questioned whether the baby was his. Other friends of his after his death told me that was what he had believed at the time. She filed for divorce after he wrote a letter to his children, calling his wife some graphic words that young children shouldn't hear. She got a restraining order against him. He violated that, and had to spend four straight Saturday mornings in a court-mandated Anger Management Class, which meant he had to be taken off all the Friday night house shows. Still, in the last week or so before his death, they did make up and played softball together that week. He was in so much pain that when he got a hit, he couldn't run the bases.
On October 3, 1997, he missed the house show in Winnipeg due to his mandatory classes. The next night he worked at the St. Paul Civic Center against Goldust. Pillman was sleeping on the floor in the dressing room during the show. He had a few drinks after the matches, was described as being tipsy, when he went into his hotel room at about 10:45 p.m., called his wife and left a message.
October 5, 1997, in St. Louis, was the Badd Blood PPV. He was scheduled in a mid-card match with Goldust, and their angle with he [sic] and Terri Runnels was scheduled to take an even darker turn after the match. The angle took advantage of his greatest strengths at the time, his acting ability and ability to play a convincing real-life psychotic character with new cartoon aspects. Between the PPV show, and the next two television tapings, the storyline was to wind up with Marlena, also called Terri, leaving Goldust for Pillman and entering into a kinky and bizarre sexual relationship. Neither Pillman nor Bret Hart were there in the afternoon. Hart had a reputation for always being late and was a big enough star he could get away with it. The feeling was Pillman was probably with him. Hart showed up, and told everyone that he hadn't seen Pillman.
At 1:09 p.m. Central time that day, he was found dead on his bed at the Budget-tel Motel. There were several bottles of pills, muscle relaxes [sic] and pain killers, all in prescription cannisters, mostly prescribed by Dr. Joel Hackett of Indianapolis, who was years later brought up on charges for his prescription writing to pro wrestlers. Only a few months later, Louis Mucciolo (Louie Spicolli) died in his sleep at home with several bottles of pills prescribed by Hackett in his room. They were not the only wrestlers to die with a large amount of pain pills prescribed by Hackett.
Police came to the Pillman house and told Melanie the news. She fainted, and Brittany, whose mother had committed suicide, shrieked like an animal that had just been stabbed. The WWF got the word, and Vince McMahon felt it was his duty to go on the pre-game show and make the announcement. To most people, that PPV was a total blur. None of the matches were particularly good except one. Michaels was somehow was able to ignore what happened and had what was at the time an off-the-charts Hell in a Cell match with Undertaker in what was really a one man show. Probably nobody else on the show was really thinking about their matches.
The WWF wasn't as polished, if that's the word, about handling of the death. They had all the wrestlers come out at the beginning of Raw the next night and play a ten bell salute. Much of the show was built up for an interview with Melanie Pillman. Whatever the design or intentions were, on that night, it came off as the tackiest ratings ploy in history, with the constant hyping of the interview. It was not the tribute show, with the out-of-character interviews and devoid of angles and promotions that the company has sadly mastered doing with experience. She wanted to go on, largely because she wanted the wives of every WWF wrestler to get her message not to ignore if their husbands were using heavy levels of painkillers, because she knew how rampant it was. In hindsight, the unscripted interview was terribly uncomfortable to viewers, both due to the hype, the clumsiness of her conversation with McMahon and the fact it was too soon probably for either because of the shock she was going through to have this discussion on television.
Two days after Pillman died, WWF's General Counsel sent letters out to several doctors well known for dispensing pills and steroids to wrestlers, telling them they were no longer welcome in their dressing rooms. Hackett was among them. Hackett, who was African-American, tried to make a racial case out of it. The WWF wrote to the doctors telling them dispensing of medication to wrestlers should only be performed through an individual appointment at the physician's office in a traditional doctor/patient relationship. They later singled Hackett out, and told all talent to avoid him, fearing the feds were going to go after him because of his prescriptions associated with several wrestler deaths. They feared he would become the next Dr. George Zahorian. But since he had developed a reputation for being a handy man with the prescription pad, several WWF stars were regularly getting stuff from him. In fact, the week after Spicolli died, in what was an amazingly short-sighted move, some of the top WCW stars flew Hackett in to the Cow Palace, where they had a PPV, so they had a guy right there.
In trying to make it as nice as possible, Ross said he believes he died of a broken heart, because he could no longer perform the way he wanted to. Ross said it wasn't an overdose, and had nothing to do with steroids. It cited his family history of his father also dying relatively young. Like Brian's children, Brian had no recollections whatsoever of his father. His father died at 50, when Brian was only a few months old, of a heart attack. He was going to work one day, missed his stop, stepped out of the train at the next stop, and collapsed. Brian's mother raised him and two older daughters as a single parent working as waitress. Nevertheless, Brian's death certificate did list cocaine as a contributing cause of death, and the unusually enlarged heart and damaged left ventricle found were remarkably similar to so many wrestling deaths that would take place over the next eight years.
Steroids were a funny issue with him. He used them in college and pro football. He was very learned on the subject, hated them, got all the muscle tears that a little guy bulked up on them would get playing football and even had other health problems from them. But still, because his natural bodyweight was maybe 195-200 pounds clean, and probably closer to 180 if he'd never used steroids at all, he used them on-and-off during most of his wrestling career. His wife believed the heart attack was caused by Growth Hormone, which he had been getting from Dr. Edmund Chen in Palm Springs until just before his death, when he stopped, due to the cost. ESPN's "Outside the Lines," in doing a story on Pillman and other wrestling deaths, had Melanie Pillman state it was Hulk Hogan who connected the two. Hogan never publicly responded to the piece, but privately denied knowing the doctor or having any idea where the story came from. The reporter, when airing Pillman's claim, said on the air that another wrestler they talked with confirmed the story.
The WWF paid Melanie for three months based on Brian's downside guarantee after his death and later put out a special magazine on his life to benefit his family. At another point maybe a year or so later, after she called Vince and feared for losing her house, Vince McMahon wrote her a $10,000 check. Brian had tried to get life insurance about a year or two before his death. It was before the wreck, and there must have been something amiss when he was examined, because he was only allowed to buy $135,000 worth of insurance. Unlike the wrestling funerals in recent years where many wrestlers attend, aside from area independent wrestlers, nobody came to Brian's funeral except Joey Maggs, Bruce Hart and Bischoff (Vince McMahon and Ross attended his wake). Still, he was so popular that the biggest independent wrestling show annually over the next few years was the Brian Pillman Memorial show held in Cincinnati. In the middle of a national wrestling war, ECW, WCW and WWF all sent talent to appear on the same stage. Before long, the show was a full day and night's worth of matches, because so many wrestlers, both big names and small, wanted to be on the show. Many of the biggest names in the business attended those shows, including Flair and Austin, which routinely raised $35,000 or more for the family. Eddie Guerrero, Chris Benoit, Dean Malenko, Konnan and Rey Mysterio came virtually every year. The year Austin showed up, he wrote a personal $20,000 check. Another year, Kevin Nash showed up, got drunk, pledged he would write a $20,000 check if Missy Hyatt, who came to every show, would take off her top. Hyatt noted the audience was filled with young children and seemed mad it was even suggested. Nash agreed at the show to write the check anyway, but he sobered up and changed his mind. On the 2000 show, William Regal, who nearly lost his life, let alone his career, due to his own drug issues, was down and out and literally saved his career in a spectacular match with Benoit.
Melanie remarried very shortly after Brian died. At the last Pillman show, there was a distinct negative vibe, partially because she brought her husband to the show and even though they had at that point been married for a few years, many of the wrestlers started questioning why they were doing this. When Les Thatcher, who organized the shows every year, told Melanie there wouldn't be another one, because he simply didn't have the time with a new job he had gotten as a WWF trainer, she was furious, and it turned into an ugly exchange, leaving bitter feelings on both sides. In the end, she lost the house.
The true tragedy of all the wrestling deaths is not that fans are deprived of seeing great wrestlers who should have performed on the big stage longer. Wrestling is an assembly line business, and there is always somebody new to fill the spot and except for the most ardent fans, most of these people become vague faded memories. The tragedy is the families they left behind. Their lives aren't of the assembly line variety, and there is no replacing the missing part. And if the children left behind are young enough, they don't even get the benefit of the vague faded memories.