It gets tougher and tougher now to get out of bed in the morning.
Hell, I used to jump out of bed. Then I rolled out. Now, I crawl out...
I know why I did it, but when I'd get up the next morning and I couldn't walk, sometimes I'd think, 'What the hell am I doing?'
I don't need any enhancing drugs. Wrestling is my drug. It's what I love.
I grew up in the backseat of a car. I didn't want to be a cowboy. I wanted to wrestle. I went to college and played football. I was with the Kansas City Chiefs. But I had an opportunity to wrestle. And it's been the love of my life.
It's the dressing room, the trip, that moment ... It's an addiction.
My knees have been operated on four times. I don't know how many stitches. I had a broken sacrum [lower back] where I couldn't sit down. On the airplane, I had to get on my knees and kneel down in my seat, leaning over the back side of it. But I just kept wrestling.
I have no regrets.
Hardcore to me is getting out there and busting your ass, going 110%. Hardcore is giving everything you've got whether there are 50 or 50,000 people paying money to watch you.
Many times in ECW or over in Japan, you're doing things in the ring that you know are going to take their toll ... but you do them anyway.
You'd see a guy like Dynamite Kid wrestle. He's just been out there killing himself in a match and he'd come back to the dressing room with a bump the size of a grapefruit on his back. He'd just smile and say, "How was my match?"
The greatest thing is to do your job so well that someone wants to kill you.
What could be more wonderful? People who have done terrible things to me and wanted me to charge them - well I wouldn't. I mean, do I want to put someone in jail because I convinced him or her that I needed to die? I did it to them. That's how I look at it and that may be sick but it's also beautiful.
In Puerto Rico there'd be riots where I'd have to fight my way to the back...San Antonio, the Dallas/South Houston area. I loved the era of the riots. It was absurd. They would have to stop the matches because too many people would be hitting the ring.
The riots were a form of flattery. In Kentucky I can remember when they took forty guns off of people coming to the show. I've had guns pulled on me and knives too.
Corpus Christi is where I got stuck with a knife in the neck. Fortunately, it wasn't that big a blade. It went all the way into the hilt and I thought it was a dart or something, so I left it in. When I got to the back and saw it was a knife my eyes got as big as saucers when I realized what it was and that someone had tried to kill me!
I think some people would say what I do is stupid and maybe it is. But I have a real love for this business and for the people and I want to make them hate me more than they've ever hated me before and that's really important to me.
I can't think of anyone who I haven't wrestled, I've wrestled them all. I can go back all the way back to Lou Thesz.
I was up in the WWF and I was wrestling the Rock and I said to him, 'That's pretty unusual...' And he said, 'What's that?' I said, 'I've wrestled the kid, his father AND his grandfather...’
Money-wise, in my best year I probably made over half a million dollars - and that was in '85 with Vince and the NBC run. I also did very well in Japan.
I never liked contracts.
But you see I was never one of the guys who wanted to wrestle every night and I think that's why I've lasted so long, I've kind of picked my spots where many other wrestlers haven't. The Japan situation was a great thing for several years. I'd go over three to five tours a year, make my money and go home.
Like with Vince and the WCW, I never liked being obligated to any one promoter and I'm sure if someone else was in my shoes that they'd be a lot wealthier. But I'm of a different era, a different time.
You have to consider what wealth is.
Wealth to me is having a decent family, a couple of kids and living a pretty good life.
Even before my father started wrestling, it was pure.
Now...it's pure ‘entertainment’. You have to create an interest in yourself. But how do you do that if you don't have TV or pay-per-view? You have to create the best match you can, but all you have is word of mouth. You have to have a tremendous athletic match or you have to do a double flip off the top rope and disappear up your ass.
I've got a tremendous amount of pride in what I do.
I want to be remembered as a good man. I hope everybody can say, 'I got my money's worth when Terry Funk wrestled...
Sources: Slam! Sports interviews by C. Gramlich, T. Baines, Wrestling's Glory Days facebook page)
