Ultimate Warrior Interview: His Diet, Logo and Warrior's World

FSM: You’ve recently been a major talking point of the new WWE videogame. Is it nice to have the Ultimate Warrior character represented in such a big way?
Warrior: My life is so busy that it’s not something I really sit around and consider all that much, you know? I’ve been doing licensing deals with videogame companies going back to Acclaim Entertainment (2004’s Showdown: Legends Of Wrestling) and I love doing it. It’s absolutely awesome that the character of The Ultimate Warrior captured a place in people’s hearts and minds all those years ago, in such a special, unique way. It brings back good memories - both for me and for the fans.

You made a deal with 2K Games for this videogame. How did contact with WWE and Vince McMahon then occur?
WWE put out their [Self Destruction Of The Ultimate Warrior] DVD back in 2005. In the last couple of years, however, there’s really been a change in attitude at the company. A couple of WrestleMania shows ago, I noticed that it seemed to be okay that more and more of the guys would say in interviews and press junkets that they were big fans of The Ultimate Warrior back when they were kids. Even people who had said derogatory things in the DVD - notably Triple-H - have spoken highly of the legacy of the character. I think this made 2K [Games] more comfortable about using me in the game. They were aware, like everyone, that there was a certain negative tone that WWE used when talking about me. Once that changed, they felt that they were able to really promote the Warrior character as a part of their game.
To go back to your first question, this is why there’s been the response that there has been; everything just came together at the same time.

It would be easy to think that someone who became such a star as yourself had it easy in the business, but in the beginning, you didn’t. What were some of the main hardships you faced in the early days?
The main one would just be the misconception that we were going to be instant millionaires! (laughs)
I was going to school in Atlanta, Georgia at the time, studying to be a chiropractor. I was very heavily into bodybuilding; in fact, the original founders of Gold’s Gym - back when there was only one Gold’s Gym, not a bunch of them all over the world - invited me out to come and train on Venice Beach. Every year they would look around at the bodybuilding scene and pick a couple of guys they thought had the potential to make it as professionals, then they would invite those guys out to California to compete in contests. I was one of the guys they contacted. I didn’t win, but I fared well enough that I got some interest from professional wrestling.
I had already met a lot of wrestlers, because we used to train in the same gyms. I got hooked up with a couple of guys, including Steve Borden (Sting), and we got about 10 hours of training. It wasn’t smartened-up training, either. It was with a wrestler by the name of Red Bastien, who died last year. He had a ring set up outside, and he would get a good laugh out of watching us beat the shit out of each other. He never told us anything about how to work. We were so green. Then the money we had been promised to cover our training failed to materialise. It was very, very, very difficult. We were eating tuna fish out of a can for meals, man, and an apple was a treat.

What kept you going?
For a long time you didn’t make more money than would just cover your food, your basic bills, and your gas money to get up and down the road, but I loved it. The buildings we worked in were much smaller than the WWF ones, of course, but there was an incredible charge you would get every night just from going out there - the thrill of learning to pull something off that you’d never done before. Then there was learning how to calm down, and listen to the crowd.
It was sort of like a carrot in front of a horse - there was always something to reach for. I liked working out; I liked using my body to be physically explosive.

What happened to your team with Sting, since you used to wrestle as The Blade Runners?
Eventually Steve and I split ways. Steve liked being told what to do more than I did. I was more of a loner, and didn’t like being around people who were really aggressive about telling other people what to do. I went off and started doing the Dingo Warrior character.

What was it like to work in Dallas? We’ve spoken to many people who’ve told us that the territory was wild, and that the Von Erichs were treated like gods.
The Sportatorium carried a special significance to wrestling fans - it was like there was something in the walls. A lot of great characters came through there, and I met Rick Rude and Percy Pringle (Paul Bearer) for the first time in Dallas.
I was a big, healthy All-American–looking kid, but they brought me in as a heel. I had a flat-top haircut, and it was during that time that I started to let it grow out. But the week before I started, Kerry had his accident - a motorcycle wreck where he lost his foot.
The Von Erichs had a reputation for working stiff. If you were in the ring with Kerry Von Erich, it was like a shoot - like being in a real streetfight. You were just trying to survive. The condition of Kerry’s body was incredible - he was like a fucking gorilla. Later on, when he came to the WWF, we used to travel together.
I’ll tell you man, the Von Erichs were as popular as anything Vince was doing at the time. They were doing national advertising campaigns for Pizza Hut and everything. At the same time, it was like the Wild West, but that’s what made it great.

You were scheduled to work for New Japan after Dallas, before you eventually signed with the WWF instead. What made you choose New York over Japan?
Going to Japan wasn’t unusual at the time. A lot of the top guys in the territories would get deals where they would go and do tours of Japan several times a year. I was working on setting something up when I was contacted by George Scott, who worked with Vince McMahon at the time. He was going to leave the WWF and retire down to Florida, and he was asked to come in and take over the book in Dallas, just for a little while.
When George left, I got a call from Pat Patterson. He wanted to know what a “Dingo Warrior” was. I had to be honest with him and say I didn’t know, but I must have done something right, as he told me they were running a show nearby, and wanted to know if I’d bring my gear and come and get in the ring. I said that I would. I remember Koko B. Ware, Randy [Savage], King Kong Bundy, and a lot of the top guys were on the show, but I’d been working that particular town once every three or four weeks, so the fans knew me, and were loyal to the Dingo Warrior character. When I came out for my match, which I think was with José Estrada Sr, I got an incredible pop. A few days later, I got a call asking me if I wanted to go on the road with WWF, full-time. It wasn’t a difficult choice to make.

We’ve heard a lot about the road schedule in the WWF, and Roddy Piper was extremely forthright that many guys needed artificial help just to get through it. How tough did you find the schedule, personally?
It was between 43 and 67 days straight, sometimes. The office would send me a stack of tickets, and I’d be on the road for all that time. They would give you a little advance on your money every night, maybe $100 so you could get a hotel room.
I didn’t get much sleep during that time; we would finish the show at night and I’d go straight to the gym, where I would have paid the owner to keep it open for me. I always had to get my training in. I’d finish at about two in the morning, get back to the hotel, do my sit-ups, get up at five and catch my flight to the next town. It was tough, sure, but I thrived on that. I was worn out like everyone was, but I made a promise to myself not to let anyone see it.

Your promos remain very famous, and Steve Austin wrote in a recent FSM column that they were a perfect fit for the character. Where did the inspiration for the promos come from?
The first thing to say is that back then it was really up to the talent to decide what to do in their promos. There was no such thing as a creative writing staff; there was no babysitting or hand-holding when you came in as a developmental talent. The Undertaker is really the first wrestler who came in as a character they created, rather than it being one that he came up with himself. Of course, he’s super-talented, so he got it over, no problem.
The short answer about the Warrior promos is that they were an extension of my personality. I was an intense, explosive guy who liked being big and muscular and powerful. I saw it as the modern version of a warrior, gladiator, barbarian kind of character.
I remember one of the first promos I cut as The Ultimate Warrior. It was at the War Memorial Coliseum in either Syracuse or Rochester, where we were doing a TV taping. They had these makeshift interview rooms, and sometimes these were just in curtained-off parts of the dressing room. All of the talent was there - and a bunch of job boys as well, because that’s how they used to do the TV tapings back then - and I was just launching into my promo. Everyone dropped what they were doing. It was almost like you could hear a pin drop. I walked out afterwards, and everyone was just staring at me.
I knew the direction I needed to go in with my character at that point. After that, it was just a matter of constant creating; I kept journals, and I used to write down ideas and keywords all the time. Later on, a lot of it came together in conversations with guys like Randy [Savage], who was really creative. It became very clear to me that fans responded to emotion.

That emotion seemed to extend to what you did in the ring, too.
Absolutely, man. When I did my match with Randy at WrestleMania VII, it was just different to what other people were doing. It was telling a story, and fans were okay with it, because they were so captivated - they got caught up in the story that was being told.
Some of the older guys had a problem with it, though, because they didn’t get it. I remember the first time I shook the ropes during a match, there were three or four veterans waiting for me when I got backstage. They pulled me off to a corner and said, “You’re not going to have a career in this business if you keep shaking those ropes and doing all that goofy stuff.” I just followed my instincts as best I could. The only person whose opinion really mattered to me was Vince. He was funny: he never praised or supported what you were doing, but he also never said not to do something. He wanted you to have confidence in it yourself.

You’ve mentioned Randy Savage. It sounds like you shared a lot of chemistry.
We were equal in our focus and our intensity. We both knew that being at full intensity all the time was the way to make it in the WWF. Would it work at IBM? No, but it worked there. And it was appreciated not in the words you were given, but in the opportunities you were offered.
One of the things I learnt from Randy was how to present yourself away from the ring. Vince liked the guys to be their characters all the time. I had street clothes I wore when I was on tour, with big custom-made boots with The Ultimate Warrior logo on them. I bought clothes to accentuate my size and my physique. I got some of that from Randy.

Speaking of opportunities, your WrestleMania VI match with Hulk Hogan is iconic, and one of the great spectacles in wrestling history. You’ve spoken elsewhere about being very goal-orientated, and Pat Patterson has told the story of you becoming very emotional in the locker-room after the match. Did you feel a tremendous sense of accomplishment?
Fuck yeah, man. I’d only been there for two years at that time.
If everyone at [WWE] was honest about it, they’d say they want to work as a top talent, that they want to make the most money, and be one of the best. It just felt like everything had come together at once.
I didn’t really bother myself with the finish of the match; Vince and Hulk went back and forth on the finish a number of different times in the months leading up to WrestleMania, trying to fuck with me to see whether it would mess with my head. I just tried to stay focused on making my character work, and ensuring that we would have a great match.

Much has been made of Hogan trying to get the spotlight from you by handing you the belt, and looking so forlorn when leaving the ring that night. Are people reading too much into this?
All the stuff about Hulk saying he had a psychological plot in mind, and how he looked at the people after the match to get more sympathy - that’s just a bunch of junk. I was young in the business - I wasn’t cynical about it yet - but it meant a lot to have that win over Hulk. Every WrestleMania up until that point followed the same formula: one of Hulk’s buddies would stab him in the back out of jealousy. They couldn’t do that with me. People tell me that they were selling as much merchandise for The Ultimate Warrior as they were for Hogan. For them to take a chance on me over Hogan - an established ticket-seller - felt like one hell of a fucking achievement.

You wrestled talented guys in the summer of 1990, like Curt Hennig and Rick Rude, but with no pay-per-view match with Randy Savage, for example, it seemed like the belt was taken from you before you could really get a major title feud going. Did you feel that there was a lot more you could have achieved with your title run?
I don’t know, man. All these stories that have been made up about The Ultimate Warrior not being a money-maker, not drawing as the champion... Even on the [Self Destruction Of The Ultimate Warrior] DVD, when they’re being at their most negative, Vince admits that I sold tickets.
At the time, Vince got a lot of his ideas from the front page of the newspaper. There was the Gulf War going on, and he saw it as a way to accomplish different things [by having Sergeant Slaughter turn traitor and take on Hulk Hogan]. You don’t get to have a belt like that if you’re not okay giving it back.
After they told me to drop it to Slaughter, I really didn’t think, “Man, I could have done more with that.” I know a lot of guys do, but they come from the old school. You’ve got to remember that when I started in the business, veterans would corner the new guys and tell them not to do any jobs. I didn’t buy it; if you let the promotion make you a loser by carrying yourself as a loser, then you do earn that reputation, but I wouldn’t let that happen. My attitude was that my character was bigger than the goddamn belt.
And I didn’t like getting stopped at customs by airport security because I was carrying it. Everyone thought I was being disrespectful; no, it was concentrating on what I could be without having to have the belt.

This may seem a very bizarre question, but in 1990, what led you to appearing in Phil Collins’ Two Hearts music video?
The company was just evolving, trying different ways to get wrestling out to the mainstream. I don’t know how it came about. I guess someone from [Phil Collins’] camp was a wrestling fan, and reached out. I was just told that he was doing a music video and that it would be fun. I was the guy they were championing at the time, and we just went into a studio and did it.


You had a famous programme with The Undertaker in 1991, including the “airtight coffin” angle. Anyone who’s a little claustrophobic certainly wouldn’t have envied you being locked in that box. Was that challenging in any way?
Mark had been there for a while, behind the scenes. I was the first guy that got to work with him.
I know some people get claustrophobic, but I never have been. Whenever anyone asks me about that angle, I tell them that lying in that coffin was the most rest I’d had for quite a while (laughs). I was so busy at that time, running from one thing to another, that it wasn’t like I was just sitting in the locker-room preparing for that one moment. I don’t remember thinking it was frightening, or a bad omen that I was allowing myself to be put inside a casket.

The WWE version of the story was that you refused to go to the ring at SummerSlam 1991 unless you had Vince’s agreement on a huge new contract, but we have heard that your requirements were put to Vince many months before that. What exactly happened?
The short answer is that when you worked a pay-per-view, you got your pay-day five or six months later. They would take the money that they made from the pay-per-view, put it in the bank, and wait until they had accumulated enough interest that they could pay the guys off that without taking away anything from the principle.
The whole argument between myself and Vince came about because of a disagreement about what our match meant to WrestleMania VII. Everyone knew what was going to happen in Hogan’s match; they knew the Gulf War was coming to an end, and that everything that could be squeezed out of the Slaughter angle had been done already. But with me and Randy - especially as it was a retirement match - people really didn’t know who was going to win.
Me and Vince had civil, mature discussions about this; we went for some long walks, and he talked about me being a part of the WWF family forever, even beyond the stage of performing in the ring. Eventually, I put [my side of it in writing] in front of him, and there’s documentation that shows that I had this all sorted before SummerSlam.
Their story was that my contract demands were a total surprise. I’ve even heard people talking about how Slaughter and Hogan were going to take me in a room and break my arms and legs to teach me the old-school way. That’s just a flat-out lie. At SummerSlam I went out, had my match, came back through the curtain, and there was an agent waiting to tell me that Vince wanted to see me. I went to Vince, and he gave me a letter proposing a couple of new contract provisions, thinking I was going to drop to my knees, thankful to have a job. And I didn’t. I took my bag, left and went home. And that’s where I stayed until Vince tracked me down to talk.

There was a drug testing policy in place in 1992 that’s always been said to have been very stringent. What were your impressions on those changes, as compared to your first run?
At the beginning, there was just a general mention in your contract about “stuff” - with no details of steroids, other kinds of drugs, recreational or whatever. Before I got there, it was crazy; it was guys who had been in the business 30 years, with a very fixed idea of how things worked. The stories are easy to find about drug use and drinking.
When I came back in 1992, I had a sit-down with Vince in a locker-room in Saskatchewan, Canada, where we were doing a television taping. The plan was that they were going to put the strap on me again. Vince told me that he needed to take a different direction with the business. He openly told me that he might spend some time in jail. He said, “Before I do, I’ve got to re-educate my ticket-buying public about the B-team guys.” And that’s exactly what he did. If you go back and look at the timing, that’s when he first did something with Bret.

You were scheduled to team with Randy at that year’s Survivor Series, but appeared to be removed from the card hastily. It was alleged in the press that you and Davey Boy Smith had been using Human Growth Hormone, for which WWE could not test. What is the truth behind this?
The drug testing details changed three or four or five times... Vince eventually decided that he just wanted to get rid of all the cartoonish characters altogether, which included me. Hulk was already pretty much gone at the time, because he was off doing movies. It was just a bunch of nonsense. Many of the guys were using steroids back then; guys that didn’t even have good bodies would use them just to keep up with the road travel and the night life.
But the next time I came back to the WWF, in 1996, I had a special five-page agreement drafted, with Linda’s involvement, since I told Vince I wouldn’t come back under a generic contract. One page had an entire paragraph about my testosterone levels, which were naturally higher than other people’s. I didn’t want him to use that against me again if we started butting heads.

You signed with WCW in 1998. Many people have been vocal about what a mess the company was at the time. What was your experience of WCW?
Bischoff and Hogan basically used Ted Turner’s money to write a big cheque for me to come back, so Hogan could feel good about having a match where he beat me. And I know you might say, “Really?” like that’s hard to believe, but you have to decide for yourself what kind of ego you’ve seen come off Hogan for all these years, in terms of the stories he’s told and the games he plays. It was a short-term contract, and I thought the idea was to do something with it. The greatest money-making opportunity was for me to do something with Hogan.
The first 15 minutes I was there it seemed like the springboard for something that could be awesome, and then they shit all over it. Everyone says that the ratings fell when I came on screen, but look at the numbers and you’ll see that they kept going up for that segment.
You can’t make something a success on your own, but I tried. When I used to come up and leave through the trap door, I’d stay under there until the building was totally empty. I always got on with the ring crew guys - the guys who drove the trucks, the grunts - better than I did the wrestlers. They came up to me after shows, and would say “That was awesome!” But I never heard from Bischoff or Hogan.
Three or four days into my second week there, I called Hogan, and he just went on and on about how I had insulted him, that it didn’t mean anything to beat him any more, blah-blah-blah. I couldn’t even get Bischoff on the phone. He was up in Wyoming learning to fly planes from his cabin. He’d only show up to TV maybe an hour before we went on air.
Was it a mistake to go there? Probably, but I’ve never been afraid to go somewhere where people are looking to stick a knife in your back. I was never so full of myself that I couldn’t be gracious or humble to other people who I felt were doing great work. In the end, I had a six-month contract, and they booked my match with Hogan at the four-month mark. They didn’t do anything with me for the remainder of the time. They paid me a lot of money just to sit at home.

With this apparent understanding between you and WWE, it’s almost difficult to think that you wouldn’t appear on Raw at some stage. Would you be open to a special appearance?
To go back to the beginning of the interview, it’s just not something I sit around and consider. I don’t really follow wrestling today all that closely - it’s not a big part of my life anymore. The first time I watched it in years was when I sat down with my kids - who are 12 and 10 - on the 20th anniversary of my WrestleMania match with Hogan.
It’s strange: they’ve got classmates whose parents were huge fans of mine back when they were kids. One of the things I’m asked is whether I miss the limelight and the celebrity. It’s great in terms of all the stuff that comes with it, but it’s not the thing that ever drove me. You mentioned earlier that I’m a goal-oriented person, and I am. And when I got out of the business, I thought about other goals I had for my life.

With that said, please tell us a little about your art.
I’ve always been a creative person and, as I said, I don’t like following orders. I discovered art in recent years, and have been developing my skills since then. I do a bunch of different things, from oil paintings to making weapons. I also read and study history. I like learning about the lives of people who have done incredible things, different to the rest of the herd.
A lot of people ask about what happened to the wrestlers I worked with, and a lot of them are no longer around. My thoughts were always that it’s not about what happens to the inside of their body - although that stuff definitely catches up to them - but it’s more to do with what happens to their minds. After wrestling, a lot of people just don’t have anything to focus their energy and creativity on.

At the same time, you still look like you take your training seriously.
I’ve been doing it since I was 12 years old. It makes your life better; it makes me feel better about myself, and it makes my kids feel better about me being their father. As you get older, it only gets more important. There are so many things working against you when you reach a certain age.
If there’s one thing I’ve learned from my time in wrestling, it’s that you’ve got to fight back. Keep pushing yourself. Stay healthy, stay mean, stay hungry. Every day should be a new challenge.