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to me!
    Canada was a real experience, but I was glad when the two Dorys patched things up and we got to come back home. Not long after, my dad ended up as part-owner of the territory. Doc Sarpolis, a booker and promoter, had come in and bought the Amarillo territory in 1956 from Dory Detton for $75,000, which was a tremendous amount of money.
    Sarpolis then offered my father a chance to buy in, and so Dory Funk Sr. became part-owner of the Amarillo wrestling promotion.
    Nineteen fifty-six was also the year I met the love of my life. Vicki and I had gone to different elementary schools in Canyon, but were in the same middle school together. I always thought she was pretty great, but we were really just friends until high school, when we started dating.
    On a couple of nights, this very rules-oriented father of mine would spend his nights wrestling under no rules in a Texas Death Match. I think my father invented the Death Match. I never heard of anyone doing them before he did. These were violent matches where there were no disqualifications and no countouts. In fact, even pinfalls didn’t count. If one wrestler pinned the other, there was a 30-second rest period, followed by a referee’s 10 count. The match only ended when one man could not answer that last count.
    One of the most successful feuds in Amarillo in the early 1960s was when my father battled “Iron” Mike DiBiase for the right to be called “King of the Death Match.” Their first death match went about 30 falls, well over the three-hour mark, without a winner. They called a curfew at 1 a.m., and they both went for hardways (where wrestlers are truly busted open, usually from punches to the head) in the match, so they both had to go the hospital to get stitched up afterward. That’s just the way things were done for believability and to make things intense, which helped the business. You opened the sports page the day after a guy went hardway, and there was his picture, with a head looking like a melon. What would you think about the believability of what that guy was doing?
    A lot of times they’d do a hardway if they had a bunch of smartasses in the front rows, yelling, “It’s all bullshit!”
    We’d go right out in front of them and let them see someone getting punched right in the face. It would keep them wondering if it was real or not. I’ve done hardways on other guys before, and I’ve had them done to me.
    Both my dad and Mike had black eyes and busted mouths after the match, and naturally, after getting out of the hospital with his stitches, my dad was exhausted.
    Over the next few months my father wrestled DiBiase just a few times, usually in tag matches, to build interest in the rematch.
    The amazing thing was they came back a year after that first death match and did a rematch for the anniversary. The entire card was the Texas Death match and a standby match—only four people on the card. It sold out. I don’t want to be one of these old-timers saying everything “in my day” was a sellout, but they really did have people lined up outside trying to get in to see this and getting turned away.
     
    And the standby match didn’t even go! They just had two guys dressed in their gear, just standing by like they were ready to go. Hell, they knew they weren’t going on, so they weren’t really even standing by, and they still got a payoff! Now, that’s a hell of a deal!
    My father won the Texas Death rematch with DiBiase, but that one also went long—more than 90 minutes.
    My father also wrestled the original Gorgeous George. George Wagner was the original, bleached, flamboyant pretty-boy wrestler, and they wrestled in Dick Bivens Stadium in Amarillo. The match drew 7,000 people, which was more than 10 percent of the number of people living in the area at the time.
    Even though we were based in Amarillo now, my father still wrestled outside the area occasionally. He was never the biggest wrestler, but he was a tough guy, and people knew