~BEFORE HE WAS THE UNDERTAKER-FROM TEXES RED TO MEAN MARK-BY BRIAN SOLOMON~
All great legacies start with hunble beginnings. Michael Jordan was cut from his high shcool basketball team. Clint Eastwood made his first appearance as a goofy lab assistant in the 1955 B-movie "Revenge of the Creature." And, who can forget Tom Hanks, now America's most celebrated actor, appearing in drag each week on "Bosom Buddies?"
The same thing usually holds true in sports-entertainment. Very few competitors get the opportunity to break in with a mjor league organization and a good as gold persona. Most Superstars past and present spend years in virtual obscurity before getting the slightest whiff of the big time. This was the case even for Undertaker, the longest running WWE healiner since Andre the Giant.
~BREAKING IN~
Years before he was known as Underaker, Mark Callaway was a student and basketball standout at Texas Wesleyan University. Little more then a year into his college career, he started training in sports-entertainment.
"I was getting a lot of inquiries about playing pro basketball in Europe. I was getting a lot of advice telling me to put on some size so that I'd be able to cope with the physical style of ball they played over there, and I started training at a health club which, coincidentally, had an employee who was trying to break into wrestling. He tried to talk me into going with him to wrestling camp. I wasn't really interested because I was set on playing basketball, but the more I thought about it, the more intrigued I became. The reality of it was that even if I went overseas to play basketball, I'd probably only have two or three good years. So, finally, one day, he and I started training for a career in this business."
Unfortunately, this led him to one of the worst experiences of his life. He enlisted in a wrestling school run by Buzz Sawyer, a mainstay in Fritz Von Erich's Dallas-based World Class Championship Wrestling (WCCW). At this time, Callaway was unaware of Sawyer's shady history and reputation, but that changed. After taking over $2500 in fees from the naive rookie, Sawyer skipped town, leaving Callaway financialy strapped, forcing him to borrow money from his brother to get by.
"A wrestler by the name of Lynn Denton--who wrestled under the name of the Grappler--turned us on to Buzz Sawyer. So, I scrounged up a bit of money, and the next thing I knew, I was in Sawyer's wrestling camp. Many of the wrestlers in the World Class area trained at the same gym, and that was our door into it."
"I remember the first day we showed up at Buzz's house. I pretty much knew we were in trouble right from the start. It must have been 9:00 or 10:00 A.M. when I knocked on the door. After knocking for what seemed like forever, Buzz opened the door and he was butt-ass naked. It was not a pretty site."
"He looked at us like he had no idea what we were doing there. Perry Jackson, who I'm still friends with, was staying at Buzz's house, and Buzz woke him up and told him to go outside and run us, to work on our conditioning. This went on for about two hours before Buzz came out."
"This went on three tiems a week; every time we got there, we asked Buzz, 'Are we going to work out in the ring?' He told us that they needed to fix the ring and some other excuses. He was just oging to keep doing this until he ran us all of."
"Eventually, we showed up one day and the house was empty; Buzz was gone. I guess he had moved on to a new territory or something. But, for some reason, he left his dogs and had to come back and get them. That's how I got even with him; I stole his two big rottweilers just on principle."
"I learned a valuble lesson from Buzz Sawyer, one that I remember stil to this day. Back then, this business was very screwy and there were a lot of people trying to take advantage of you. There were a lot of people going out of their way not to help you. It's very different than how it is today."
Callaway never forgot being swindled and promised himself that one day he would find the man who had conned him and make him pay. In 1990, he finally got his chance to confront Sawyer when they were both in the old WCW, but he was unable to exact his own brand of revenge as Sawyer soon passed away.
Callaway made his wrestling debut in the summer of 1984 with World Class. It began strictly as a part-time career, as he was still a full time student. A forward on his school's basketball team. He won no favors with his coach, who was quite displeased at having a star player wrestling during the season.
"I'd go down to the office and sit there, hoping that somebody would notice me and talk to me. For months, the only one who would speak to me was the referee Bronco Labitch. Finally, one day, Fritz Von Erich walked in and thought that I reminded him of one of his sons, and I convinced him to give me a shot."
The disapproval of his coach may have been part of the reason Callaway debuted under a mask and called himself "Texas Red." He had his first match with the late, great Bruiser Brody in the Dallas Sportatorium, World Class' modest-yet fabled-home arena. His manager on that first night was none other then Percival Pringle III, who would later re-team with Callaway in WWE as Paul Bearer.
"Bruiser Brody taught me a valuable lesson, I was a little full of myself. Here I was 19 and a little bigger then Brody. I was big and strong, but Bruiser Brody's a legendary tough guy. I tied up with him and tried to push him around, but he set me straight pretty quick. He let me know what my status was in the pecking order. He did what he was supposed to do and what he should have donek, but to his credit, he spoke up for me and said that WCCW should keep me and let go of some other guys. As it turned out, they didn't keep me, but when Bruiser Brody showed interest in me and thought I had potential, it really motivated me to keep going and achieve big things."
When Callaway's coach asked him to quit wrestling, he made a fateful decision. Choosing wrestling over basketball, he left the team and dropped out of school. He continued competing part time in World Class while taking a job as a bouncer to help support himself.
With the national expansion of WWE, World Class soon went out of business. In 1986, it was purchased by Jerry Jarrett's Memphis-based Championship Wrestling Association (CWA) and became World Class Wrestling Association (WCWA). Callaway remained on in a part time capacity as Texas Red. In June 1987, he and former WWE strongmen Ted Arcidi made it to the finals of a tournament for the vacant Texas Tag Team Championship, where they lost to the team of Tony Atlas and Skip Young.
~EARLY YEARS~
By 1988, Callaway was wrestling on a more full time basis. In preparation, he recieved training from one of the most famous masked wrestlers of all time. "The Spoiler" Don Jardine. It was Jardine who taught him to walk the top rope, a maneuver he continues to use today, much to his fans' delight.
"The next real territory I wrestled in was South Africa. I was 20 years old, and I spent four months over there. Steve Simpson was a World Class regular; his father Sammy Cohen ran the promotion in South Africa. He saw me and asked if I wanted to there. It was a job, and it was what I wanted to be doing, so I said sure."
"I remember one of my first nights there; I was in Durban, and we worked in this outdoor tennis stadium and the people there were just crazy. The audience was mostly Pakistani and Indian. Their hero was a guy by the name of Tiger Jeet Singh. I busted him up the first time we wrestled, and he was bleeding pretty good. The fans actually rushed the ring, picked him up and carried him back to the dressing room on their shoulders, and the rest of the thousands of people there rioted and threw bottles at me. They surrounded the ring and wouldn't let me leave."
"I spent over an hour in the ring after the match. Finally, I had to fight my way back to the dressing room. Once I made it there, I spent an hour and half there before it was safe to leave. It was one heck of a ride. I left basketball to get rocks and bottles thrown at me in South Africa."
"When I went over there, I weighed 315. When I left, I was 270. I got sick, had a few injuries, and didn't really eat much. I was there for four months and I only wrestled 23 times. So, I didn't make any more than enough to survive and get home. When I got back, I still couldn't get booked, so it was back to the bars busting heads, doing whatever I had to do to survive until the next booking came along. I never stopped looking."
At this point, Callaway hit the independent circuit, looking to gain more experience in hopes of taking his career to the next level. He ditched the mask and adopted perhaps his most unlikely persona, The Commando, a character in the Sgt. Slaughter/Cpl. Kirschner mold. Clad in Marine fatigues and beret, he played to the crowd with chants of "USA! USA! USA!" During this period, he spent much of his time in now-defunct Central Illinois Wrestling (CIW).
Callaway enjoyed his first big push when he arrived in Memphis in early 1989. The CWA was now the Untied States Wrestling Association (USWA), and the massive red-haired Texan shot to the top of the card as a monster heel known as the Master of Pain. During this time, he was managed by "Dirty" Dutch Mantell. (He also managed for a breif period by Downtown Bruno, who would later perform in WWE under the same name. Harvey Whippleman.)
At the Mid-South Coliseum on April 1, 1989, as the Master of Pain, Callaway captured his first championship by defeating Jerry "the king" Lawler for the newly created USWA Unified Heavyweight title. He lost the title back to Lawler at the end of the month, but had to demonstrate himself capable of filling a main event role. Shortly before leaving Memphis, he went from heel to babyface by turning on his manager Ronnie Gossett.
Perhaps to avoid burning out the hot Master of Pain persona, Callaway was sent to the USWA's Texas promotion, back to his old World Class stomping grounds. Once again donning the mask, he came in this time with Gen. Skandor Akbar as his manager and called himself The Punisher. In October he won the USWA Texas Heavyweight Championship from Eric Embry on a forfeiture. After a two week reign, he was bested for the title by the late Kerry Von Erich, the Shining star of the ill-fated Von Erich family.
