Goldberg

Once, not too long ago. Bill Goldberg was a 275-pound lineman for the Atlanta Falcons. Then a torn abdominal muscle ended his less than stellar football career. He ran into professional wrestlers Sting and Lex Luger during a workout at their Atlanta gyms. After discussing the idea with his family, and nearly signing with the World Wrestling Federation, Goldberg joined WCW in September 1995. His road to champion status started at the notorious WCW training facility, the Power Plant, that December.

I didn't know what to expect when I walked into that run-down building, because gathered there were some of the strangest-looking guys I had ever seen. If these people were on a football field, it would have been like a scene from The Longest Yard. They looked like a bunch of misfits. And they just weren't my type of guys. It wasn't my scene. All you had to do was look into their eyes to tell who was going to make it and who wasn't. Fear has a funny way of distinguishing itself, and you can't hide it at the dreaded Power Plant.

It was situated near downtown Atlanta, an hour's drive from my house, and I made that drive five days a week, seemingly forever. I was miserable for months, and the one thing I could always count on was a painful ride home. The head trainer there was a guy by the name of Dewayne Bruce, a.k.a. Sarge, and he was a stern, authoritative, overbearing, short little son of a bitch who packed a lot of punch. He was reminiscent of an Army drill sergeant, and he put guys through hell. I knew, walking into the Power Plant, there were a lot of unknowns. But the one thing I expected to find was a guy like Sarge. As a football player, I'd been up against some of the toughest, meanest and strongest guys in sports, and I swore to myself that no wrestler or trainer--nor any man, for that matter--was going to make me quit. No matter how tough it was, I went through everything with a smile on my face.

Looking back, the physical part amounted to only about 50 percent of the training, and the rest was character development and what to do in the ring. Once they weeded out the people who couldn't handle the workout, they started to teach us how to become professional wrestlers. There were a lot of guys in different stages of their training, and the ones who had been in the class for a while would demonstrate the moves. Every time a guy made it past the tryout stage, they would add him to the class, and he went along at his own pace until he was plucked out and used in a "dark match"--a match performed in front of a live audience at a TV taping. And therein would lie the beginning of his career. Some of the guys were in the class for a year before they got that opportunity. In most cases, they were paid little, but they stuck with it because they wanted to fulfill their dream of becoming a professional wrestler.

You had to practice hitting the ropes repeatedly, and if your ribs weren't cracked, it sure felt like they were. Running up against the ropes is brutal because they are made of steel cables. I do it all the time now, and I am conditioned to it, but back then it was foreign to me, and I fought through it every step of the way. Your back would hurt like hell from doing bumps on the mat and from guys dropping you the wrong way. You'd get dropped on your head and hit full-on because, after all, these guys didn't know the right way to do the moves yet. The guys who could do them and make them look graceful earned my respect because they were a lot harder to do than I thought they would be.

The first thing that you were taught was the lockup, and from there you learned the basic holds. You learned how to go to a headlock, and then you learned how to work a guy's arm. Next you learned the basic moves: the snap mayor or snapmare or something like that (I don't know how to spell it or use it), the body slam, the fireman's carry and the arm drag. The first submission hold that Sarge taught me was the cobra clutch, and the only time I ever used it was in the finish with Sid Vicious in our match in Toronto. What's a (continued on page 150) Goldberg (continued from page 114) cobra clutch? Well, it could be the way you grasp a deadly snake or that left pedal in one of Carroll Shelby's sports cars, but in wrestling it's a submission hold. I'm not exactly an expert on wrestling holds. I know the basics, no question, because you have to have a basic understanding of what you're doing in the ring. But as far as someone's finishing moves and knowing them by name, well, I know how to get out of them, and that's enough for me.

After you learn the basic holds, you learn combinations of moves so that you have an understanding of how to create some kind of flow in the ring. They teach you how to do a match in segments and spots, which are series of moves. Then you put each series of moves together in a logical order. You have a heel (bad guy), a baby face (good guy), a time limit and a story. When you determine how long you want to take to tell the story, you can figure out your spots. There is a strategy to the match, and you try to combine spots to keep the fans on the edge of their seats. The goal is to take them up and down like a roller coaster.

There are also nonverbal signs that are used in the ring. One well-known example is the iggy. The iggy is a common term in the wrestling world for reversing a move. Just squeeze your opponent's arm, and he takes over. But you have to be careful, because if you squeeze his arm the wrong way, he may want to make you his tag team partner.

They destroyed a lot of people at the Power Plant. All sorts of people walked in the front door thinking they could make it as a wrestler, but what they didn't realize was that minutes later, many of them would be exiting the same door with shattered dreams. The trainers would ride these guys mercilessly, and it appeared that their objective was to take the guy's $3000 fee, or whatever they charged, and see how quickly they could get them to quit. If a guy left in five minutes, he would lose his money, his pride and generally his chow.

When a new group would try out, we would observe and try to guess who would quit first. It was sadistic, the way we watched those guys go through hell and cheered for the first guy to fail. I knew I had an advantage because in football I had been through years of people trying to tear me down. This was no new challenge for me, but it broke a lot of other people right before my eyes. Once a month, CNN or Extra or E would film the carnage for all the world to see, and the camera caught a lot of guys running out the door screaming and crying.

Not everyone who wrestles for WCW has to go through the Power Plant. There are other wrestling schools, and there are guys from other federations who usually get a tryout during dark matches. Obviously, guys like Dennis Rodman and Karl Malone don't go through the Power Plant, and, fortunately, as a professional athlete, I was brought in under different circumstances, too. What I had to do wasn't nearly as tough as what the normal try-out victims are put through, and for that I'll always be thankful. But I still had to do hundreds of free squats and diamond push-ups, and we did a lot of running from ring to ring.

No offense to Sarge or anyone else who taught me, but to this day. I don't think I have the ability to put together a logical match. My knowledge of wrestling is limited, and my knowledge of setting up a match is even more limited. I do what I have to do in the ring, and I feel as though I've done a good enough job to provide some decent entertainment for the fans. My idea of an exciting match is to step between the ropes, endure a certain amount of punishment, shake it off and run somebody over.

Different people have different ways to plan a match, and a lot of the experienced guys can go into the ring with no plan at all. They just talk to you during the match, and they tell you exactly what they're going to do in very short ways. Two guys who have wrestled each other a lot can get in the ring without having talked in the back, and maybe say six or seven words in the ring and have a great match. They just feed off each other until they get lost or finish the match. I get lost a lot. People think I am having a great match when in reality I'm being carried the whole time, and the other guy is making me look good.

The more I wrestled, the more I learned, and I quickly discovered the importance of the referee. The ref is like a field general in the ring. He points you in the right direction, tells you how much time is left in the match or if you're going to a commercial, and he'll relay an important message from one wrestler to another, like "Where are you going for a beer after the match?"

The referees have to be good actors to pretend to control a match that has meaningless rules. These guys are a different breed. They may be the brunt of a lot of our jokes, but the truth is we couldn't do it without them.

A referee can screw up a match, too. He can make you look like a fool. He can be in the wrong place at the wrong time. He can be watching when you come into the ring with a chair he's not supposed to see. The moment he sees you is when the match should be a disqualification, and when it isn't, it makes you look bad and makes him look bad.

With three months of hard training at the Power Plant under his belt, Goldberg began wrestling dark matches. As his popularity increased, he wrestled on Nitro, cable TV events and finally pay-per-view, the ultimate showcase for professional wrestling. Goldberg's winning streak climbed to 175, and he won both the U.S. and the world heavy-weight titles.

I went from Hugh Morrus to the Barbarian to God knows who. I went through guys, and I developed a reputation for beating them with only a couple of moves. For the first eight months I never did an interview. I created intrigue by doing things that people hadn't done before--by providing a simple combination they hadn't seen. In its infancy, my success, like any wrestler's, was dictated by the crowd.

It doesn't matter who's more popular, or who's winning or losing. You're only as good as the guy you beat. If you go out and beat the shit out of a guy in 10 seconds, before he throws a punch, that only shows that you can beat him before he gets to you. An adversary that does not dish out some punishment is no adversary at all.

Of course, the decision to win or lose was out of my hands. The bookers are the ones that come up with the match, and they decided the winner and loser, the story line. And the way it's going to be done. They're the ones who, if necessary, talk the wrestlers into fulfilling their obligation to WCW.

For instance, I was sitting with my buddy Terry in my living room watching Thunder when J.J. Dillon came out and said that he had an important announcement to make. "We're going to have a title match Monday night, and it's going to be Hollywood Hogan against Goldberg," he announced. I was surprised, to say the least. It was supposed to be a dark match on Nitro, to get people to go to the Georgia Dome. My first thought was, OK, thanks for telling me, guys. I see how this is going to be. There is nothing like being (concluded on page 229) Goldberg (continued from page 150) unprepared, so I flipped out from the time I heard the announcement to the time I showed up at the Georgia Dome on Monday. I was nervous being in my home state, where I played football and went to school, and I'm sure there were a lot of people there who wanted to see how ridiculous I was going to look. They wanted me to fail--at least in my mind they did. In my life, I've probably tried harder not to fail than I've tried to succeed. In wrestling, I wanted to prove everyone wrong instead of proving myself right. I wanted to be able to say, "I told you so."

I was still undefeated, and I was real nervous because I was wrestling Hogan. Win, lose or draw, it was Hogan, the guy who made wrestling a household name. If it weren't for him, I wouldn't have had the opportunities I've had. He paved the way for guys like me to go mainstream and be taken more seriously. I learned a lot about the business by talking to him and by watching him--how he deals with people, with the wrestlers, with the crowd. Now I was going to watch him from inside the ring!

I showed up for the match and Hogan attempted to calm me down. He told me to relax and to leave it all up to him. What an honor it was to be in the ring with the man who made wrestling what it is today. There was a stipulation that in order to face Hogan, I first had to beat Scott Hall. Scott and I concentrated on trying to have a good match. But Scott is Scott, and sometimes it's difficult to communicate with him. Unfortunately, we got to a certain point in the match and I got lost. I just went blank. He was lying on his back, and he accused me of not wanting to run the spot. That's not what happened--I just totally forgot. I was young and green and it was unfortunate. But somehow we finished the match. I beat him and I was tired--exhausted physically and mentally. But this was only the beginning.

There were 41,000 in the arena and I was more than excited. I remember Hogan saying, "Just follow me out there, kid." As I heard Michael Buffer, the most recognizable voice in ring sports today, I got chills up and down my spine. I was nervous as shit. The next thing I knew, I was walking to the ring in awe of my surroundings. It was surreal. We locked up, and people went crazy. It was like the Super Bowl, and everyone was cheering for me because I had home-field advantage. Halfway through the match, he put me in a front facelock. That's not usually a lethal move--unless your opponent is covered in Icy Hot. It got all over my face and my eyes and I could barely see for the rest of the match. It burned the hell out of my eyes. If you watch the tape, you can tell something was wrong.

In the end, I was hesitant to spear Hogan because I didn't want to hurt him. My goal when I'm wrestling is to make things look realistic but also to keep the other guy safe at all times. With Hogan, it felt like I had my whole career in my hands. I was a little more careful with him than with anyone else. In the end, I jackhammered him and got the pin. I was handed the belt, and I raised both of those belts up. Man, that was awesome--it was the best moment in my wrestling career, if not my life. It was pretty damn cool, and I can't compare it to anything. That feeling is one of the things that keep me going. On July 6, 1998, I became the WCW heavyweight champion of the world!

Six months later, I had the worst birthday of my life. I was going to lose my match and the heavyweight belt to Kevin Nash at the Starrcade pay-per-view in Washington, D.C. Needless to say, it seemed strange to me that just a week or two after he obtained the job of booker, Kevin became the guy who "finally" beat me. I sustained my first loss at the hands of him and Scott Hall.

I was uncomfortable with the whole thing. I tried not to read anything into it, but it was hard not to. I showed up, did my job and listened to 1500 or so people give their opinions. But ultimately I listened to my boss, Eric Bischoff, even though I thought he was being swayed by a number of people. My responsibility is to do what my boss tells me to do. So I went out there, got zapped by Scott Hall and powerbombed by Nash and lost the match.

After you ride a roller coaster that's been going up for a year and a half, and you reach the pinnacle and then dive straight down with no gradual decline, it's a little disorienting. At that point I didn't know how to take losing. It was foreign to me, but realistically, it was work. My loss didn't mean I'd done anything wrong, it was just part of the entertainment. Anyway, the next night on Nitro, Hogan poked Nash in the chest with his finger, Nash took a dive and Hogan walked off with the belt.

I don't care if I get pinned by Tiny Tim or the Elephant Boy. It wouldn't bother me if I were asked to lose a match to anybody, if I thought it was in the best interests of the show and it was realistic.

I am very competitive, but wrestling isn't about winning or losing; it's about entertaining. This attitude is contrary to the philosophy that was force-fed to me in sports, but in wrestling, losing to someone doesn't compromise your integrity or your worth as a man. If the Elephant Boy were a good wrestler, I'd be losing to a good wrestler, not to mention a human oddity.

The referee will relay an important message, like "Where are you going for a beer after the match?"

He put me in a front facelock, not usually a lethal move--unless your opponent is covered in Icy Hot.

Go inside the ring with Goldberg at Playboy.com/current.