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it. In the late 1950s, there was a wrestling war between Houston promoter Morris Sigel and Ed McLemore, from the Dallas area. They would line their cards with shooters to protect themselves, because you never knew in that situation if someone from the opposition would come in and challenge your guys some night to make your wrestlers look like fools. Morris brought in my father, Rikki Starr and Ray Gunkel as his shooters, and those guys could damn well shoot. At that time, Dad was making $500 a week, which was huge money in those days.
    Another one of my father’s big feuds was with Frankie Hill Murdoch. They wrestled each other 32 times in 1948. The majority of them were singles matches, and every time Funk and Murdoch were matched up the building was full.
    Later I got to be good friends with Frankie’s stepson, Dick Murdoch. We played when we were kids. He always was a little asshole like I was, and we both ended up following in our fathers’ footsteps as wrestlers.
    We would sit around in the arena while our fathers waited to get paid. It took an hour or so, because they had to count the house and figure it all up. We’d go around the arena and collect cups. Once we got around 50 cups all stacked up, we’d set them down one at a time and stomp them on the floor to make them pop.
    I learned a lot more about payoffs later. Here’s what the honest cut of the gate was supposed to be—10 percent came off the top for booking fees, then the rest was to be split, 45 percent to the promoter, 45 percent to the boys. All the promotional expenses were supposed to come out of the promoter’s half, and the boys would split the other 45 percent, based on the promoter’s discretion in regard to where on the card each guy wrestled.
    I started wrestling amateur-style at Boys’ Ranch when I was five years old. My father brought a lot of the great pros to the Ranch to show the kids on the wrestling teams some techniques and pointers. Back then, almost all the pros could really wrestle.

CHAPTER 3
West Texas State: Running with the Outlaws
    When I graduated high school, I was very small for my age—155 pounds. I got a tryout down at Cisco Junior College, and that summer I had a big growth spurt and shot up to 185 pounds. There were no steroids then, either.
    I made the junior college team and just kept growing. I weighed 225 and played linebacker and guard down there. When I transferred to West Texas, I was at about 240 pounds. I was just late in maturing. West Texas was where I wanted to go because it was close to home. Junior, my brother, had just finished up there, and the football team had gone to the Sun Bowl where they beat the University of Ohio. I had been wrestling amateur but gave it up my sophomore year in high school. I still practiced my wrestling skills at home. I worked out in our garage, which had been transformed into a wrestling gym, with guys like my father, brother, Bob Geigel, Verne Gagne, Dick Hutton, Joe Scarpella and Lou Thesz, to name a few.
    My relationship with Vicki also picked up a lot of steam during my college years. We had gone to the junior and senior proms together in high school, and I’d been in love with her right from the very first date with her.
    I focused on football in college. Joe Kerbel was the coach, and he was a great coach, but he was also absolutely nuts. He’d come right out there and kick you right in the butt. He had been a sergeant in the Marines and was probably one of the toughest men in coaching. He had a hell of a program there—we were a bunch of outlaws.
    And a bunch of those outlaws became big names in the wrestling business.
    Frank Goodish, who later gained fame in wrestling as Bruiser Brody, had some go-rounds with Kerbel when he went to West Texas State. Brody was an asshole! He was on the third team—not because of ability, but because he had come to West Texas State after getting kicked out of Iowa State University. Another outlaw.
    We used to go to the bar on 16th