Larry: I didn’t even bother with them. One of the key people I talked to was Little Victor, Victor Quinones. It’s funny, we had not talked even though we had known of each other back in the mid-‘80s. Brody would tell me or him that I can trust this guy here, I can trust this guy there. I really wonder if he (Victor) sensed something because his life was spinning out of control. As you know, he passed away in 2006 after I talked to him. He wanted to talk so badly about Gonzalez and he was laughing about Gonzalez because at that time Gonzalez was working for him in the Puerto Rican wrestling war. It was a controversial issue from Little Victor’s point of view. He was struggling to keep the promotion alive and there were 40 guys who wrestled for him whose family depended on that income so that is why he had taken Jose Gonzalez. But he had told me, that Jose don’t talk, he goes his own way, he won’t talk. I can understand that some would say you could have tried harder but I though that would have been a waste of time. A lot of what happened at the trial spoke for itself.
And Barbara’s position of what happened to her and going through that whole Puerto Rico ordeal was just…I can’t praise her courage enough for trying to remember going through all of that. It was very hard for her. She got it down, she read it one time and it was so hard for her that she could never read it again. Until we did the final proof during the book producing process, and I would guess I read over a dozen proofs over a period this time, she couldn’t read the Puerto Rico thing until the very end. She said that she really thought she had put part of it behind her but it was so hard to read. So I praise her for putting down what she could. She admitted that she knew she missed some things because of all the shock involved, where she blacked out some things that are buried deep within her brain that she will never remember.
Eric: Moving off the topic of the book and into some more recent news, everyone is talking about the steroids, the deaths, and the recreation drug use. I was wondering from your view as a promoter, when did you start seeing this stuff enter the business and when did you start seeing it become a problem?
Larry: I started to see it in the early ‘80s. We were so naïve in St. Louis. I didn’t realize “Superstar” Graham was taking something and he worked for us in ’78-‘79. I saw it a little bit with Kerry Von Erich and speaking to him later, he picked up a lot of it from the track & field world when he went to the University of Houston and he started taking things there. I certainly saw it after St. Louis folded in 1983 and I went to work for Vince McMahon and the World Wrestling Federation. By then I learned a lot about it.
Brody had helped teach me a lot about it because Brody himself had done steroids. I guess it was early in ’79, and Barbara talks about this in the book, in those days nobody knew what steroids could do to you. They didn’t know the downside, they pretty much knew only the upside that they make you bigger and stronger and you had maybe a few physical problems with them. In Brody’s case, they made him sick a lot. He came home from Japan and then had a few weeks where he was sick like a dog on the road. He got back home to San Antonio, Texas, and put himself in the hospital. He wanted to be checked from top to bottom. He thought he had picked up a parasite in Japan. That should make your brain tingle because if you remember Jason Giambi a few years ago, when the steroid thing started with him a few years ago, he claimed he had gotten a parasite in Japan. Hmm. Well, that’s what Brody thought at first. But then the more he thought about it, he knew something was wrong, and he stopped the steroids cold turkey. At the time he was weighing about 320 pounds. Once he got off, he was around 290. The funny part is, nobody knew the difference. He was such a dynamic performer, that with his presence and athleticism, I don’t remember anyone saying anything about the weight he lost.
In the Brody book, there is a picture of Brody with Jimmy Snuka (pg. 167) outside the ring in Japan. It would have been taken in the mid-‘80s, after Jimmy had worked for the World Wrestling Federation. You look at that picture and you have Brody looking like a lean tight end from the NFL and you see Jimmy Snuka looking blown-up like a balloon. Want to see steroids and non-steroids? Boy, there it is right in that picture.
It’s funny that in doing the book, and this wasn’t done intentionally because it was written before the thing with Benoit and all this current controversy about steroids, so many things that Brody talked about are pertinent today. One of the things being the steroids. Another one of the things being as how promoters look at you like a piece of meat. They’re going to use you until you’re no good and then they are going to get another piece of meat.
Talking about how wrestling is, whoever has TV determines what wrestling is. If Vince McMahon has all the TV then he tells you what wrestling is. The young kids coming up, they think that that is all wrestling is. They don’t even realize that there are other versions of it that can be very exciting. They think that athletes should look like blown-up cartoon characters.
