Post by Stu-E Price on Jul 28, 2007 8:22:24 GMT -5
HORRIBLE HAPPENINGS
In 1978, when I was in grade ten I had my first crush and it was on The Dynamite Kid. I thought he was so much better than any boy at my school. He wrestled hurt. He wrestled with bad knees. Whether there were 15 or 1,500 people in the crowd, he wrestled his heart out every match. I had no interest in anybody my age because they didn't measure up to Dynamite.
But that all changed in 1981 when I met the Dynamite Kid's cousin Davey Boy Smith. He wasn't much older than I and seemed to have all the qualities Dynamite had. I decided he was the person that I wanted to be with.
My friend Alison and I used to go over to the apartment building where the Dynamite Kid lived and eat lunch in the stairway. We could smell cigarette smoke coming from his apartment and I was sort of horrified. I really did live a sheltered life. I could not believe that phenomenal athlete that he was, could be a chain-smoker. I grew up detesting cigarette smoking, as did everyone in our family except my brother Wayne.
Dynamite, or Tom as we called him, turned out to be a sadistic, masochistic bastard. He started using steroids big time because he was always trying to stay big and his skin eventually became infested with boils. One time as I watched, he sliced boils right off his arms with a razor. He couldn't be bothered squeezing them and he didn't want to look at them.
Tom's dad, Bill Billington and Davey's mom, Joyce Smith were brother and sister. Both Tom's parents were alcoholics. Tom's mother, Edna, was constantly beaten by her father so she married Bill to escape her family. But Bill's mother Nellie used to say her daughter-in-law jumped from the frying pan into the fire because Bill was even rougher with her. He learned to beat his wife from his father Joe. Tom and Davey's grandfather Joe Billington frequently thumped their grandmother Nellie.
Joyce and Bill had an older brother named Eric Billington who eventually became a professional boxer. Eric used to stick up for Nellie and got into several fistfights with his father while trying to protect her. He and Joe would nearly kill each other. Finally Eric moved all the way from England to Edmonton just to get away from it.
Joe eventually died of lung cancer. He sucked back 90 hand-rolled cigarettes every day, one after another after another.
The family tried to make some money in a lawsuit by saying he died because he fell down the stairs getting some money for one of his grandchildren to go to the ice cream truck outside. They claimed the fall caused cancer in his hip. But it was soon uncovered that he had been a chain smoker since he was ten years old. In addition, he worked in a coal mine and spent the rest of his time in a pub.
It's no wonder that Tom, the spawn of this severely dysfunctional family eventually became such an evil man. When his ex-wife Michelle told me about the following incident involving his best friend's daughter, I was disgusted, offended and scared.
After Tom married Michelle, the sister of Bret's wife Julie, they hung out with John Foley, a wrestler who used to work for my dad. John was a Liverpudlian. Fans would jeer at him and shout that he must be from "Cesspool, England." When John finished wrestling he became a manager. He was always a "heel," a tough guy.
John had thick red hair, a broken nose, cauliflower ears and watery blue eyes. Tom considered John his best friend. Their kinship began as a result of being the only two British blokes in the middle of all these Canadians. My brother Bruce changed John's name to John Rex, but when the television show Dallas became such a hit, Tom suggested he shorten it to JR and he did.
To become more detestable in the ring, JR wore an army helmet, dyed his moustache black and shaped it like Hitler's. Part of JR's gimmick was to ask, "Would you like to come to a party? Ha! You're not invited anyway!"
When they got into the suds, John used to sing his favorite song, "My Sonny Boy," to Tom. Tom was so fond of John he began insisting people call him Sonny.
JR Foley was always first in line for his paycheck Friday mornings at our house. He would wait patiently for hours on one of my mom's Chippendale dining chairs as Mom and Dad finished up the payroll. One morning after JR had waited for what seemed an eternity, I watched my brother Owen emerge from the kitchen bearing a crystal bowl full of pebble shaped cat treats called Sea Nips. "Ellie made 'em," he said, chewing vigorously on a concealed carrot.
JR grabbed a handful. "Don't mind if I do."
Before moving to Canada, John had lost a son in a car accident and used that as an excuse to drink. His second marriage was to a sweet little lady named Vera Lynn who still resides in Calgary. She was an accountant for Woolworth's and, because she was honest and good with numbers, she used to do the income tax returns for a lot of wrestlers. But John drank away everything they had.
John and Vera Lynn had a daughter Michelle who was in a car accident when she was about 20. When this happened, John thought his prayers were answered. Certainly a big insurance settlement would be in the cards. But she wasn't as seriously injured as he had hoped. He dragged her over to Tom's begging for his assistance.
"Tommy, I need yer 'elp." He was drunk and sobbing. "I need yer 'elp," he blubbered. "My Michelle was in a car accident and we thought we was gonna get some money from the car accident for 'er injuries, but they says that the x-rays don't show anythin'. They says there's nothing wrong with 'er."
So John Foley asked Tom to break his daughter's legs, and Tom did. With poor Michelle's permission, they trussed her up to the bed just like Kathy Bates did to James Caan in the Stephen King movie, "Misery." They gagged her with a towel, so she'd have something to bite on. Then Tom whacked at her kneecaps with a mallet. John was crying and Tom's wife Michelle was crying, and John's daughter Michelle Foley was crying and Tom broke her legs right at the kneecaps. The insurance company awarded her twenty thousand dollars, but she could never walk right after that. I hear she is quite heavy now and her knees are turned in almost like those Barbie dolls with the bendable knees. John Foley ended up dying of cancer. This story came out after Tom's wife Michelle Billington was rid of Tom. She was too afraid to go to the police at the time. Tom used to beat her up. He used to click a gun in her ear and whisper, "It's gonna be loaded one of these times."
Michelle Billington and her sister Julie have had to reinvent themselves. They are the products of a really horrible childhood. They lived in foster homes because the whole family was split up when their mom and dad were found unfit to parent.
Julie and Michelle Smadu were from Weyburn, Saskatchewan. A French-Canadian family raised Julie. When she grew up, she got a job working security at the wrestling matches. That's where she met Bret. They fell in love and moved into a little house in Ramsey, a run-down area behind the Stampede grounds. Michelle and Tom lived in a four-plex nearby which they shared with my brother Wayne and his girlfriend Sandra.
Michelle got very thin because she was always worried about Tom. After Davey and I were married, she would call us up in the middle of the night and say, "Tom's got a gun and I'm afraid he's gonna use it this time. Can you come over here?"
Davey and I would drive over there and wonder, "What's going to happen? Is one of us going end up dead? We've just left our kids alone. They are sound asleep 45 minutes away at our house in Springbank. Now we are on our way to save Michelle from Tom who's drunk and got a loaded gun. What are we doing here? Maybe we should call the police."
But we'd rush over there, and Tom would greet us with a smile, "Hey Dave, how are you? Nothin's wrong. Michelle's just nuts again."
When Michelle decided to leave Tom for the first time, it was due to an incident that took place just before Christmas 1985. Tom and Davey were a tag team in the WWF and Tom was getting into the coke. Who got him into the coke? Hermish Austin, along with Ben Bassarab. They were selling Tom coke, and he was getting pretty hooked on it. Combined with all the steroids he was on, he was a time bomb waiting to explode.
Michelle and Sandra, my brother Wayne's girlfriend, were best friends. Tom threw a cocaine party for them and spiked their drinks with sedatives and they were rendered unconscious. Tom then proceeded to have his fun with Michelle. A little later she began to come to and she told me she witnessed Tom raping Sandra who was still completely senseless.
Michelle waited until Christmas. She spent a lot of their money on really nice Christmas presents. She gave everyone she liked cashmere scarves and $50 earrings. Then without a word, she loaded her children in the car and drove to Regina. Michelle never told anybody except Julie why she was leaving Tom. So tongues started wagging when she left.
"What's the matter with her? He's got all that money and she has nice clothes and she came from Weyburn, which is "Nowhere, Saskatchewan.' The poor guy, he's one of the hardest working wrestlers you could ever meet."
Bret and Julie threw their full support behind Michelle every time she left him and gave her the nerve to finally hand Tom a one-way ticket back to England after he declared bankruptcy. She told him to get the hell out and she kept the kids. She got the house and heartache, but he left and he's never been back. Now Michelle's a teacher and she's gotten on with her life. She has remarried a younger man and is the mother of twins. I'm really happy for her. She's one example of how somebody can turn her life around.
Tom on the other hand is a bitter, broken man resigned to a life of oblivion. According to London's News Of The World, January 2, 1994, Tom blames Davey for "leaving him in the lurch when he was forced to quit the ring after breaking his back." The article goes on to say that Tom "now sleeps on the floor of a one-bedroom flat which has no carpets and is riddled with dry rot." The last I heard, Tom is in a wheelchair and is so incapacitated he urinates in a tin can that he keeps by his side.
In 1978, when I was in grade ten I had my first crush and it was on The Dynamite Kid. I thought he was so much better than any boy at my school. He wrestled hurt. He wrestled with bad knees. Whether there were 15 or 1,500 people in the crowd, he wrestled his heart out every match. I had no interest in anybody my age because they didn't measure up to Dynamite.
But that all changed in 1981 when I met the Dynamite Kid's cousin Davey Boy Smith. He wasn't much older than I and seemed to have all the qualities Dynamite had. I decided he was the person that I wanted to be with.
My friend Alison and I used to go over to the apartment building where the Dynamite Kid lived and eat lunch in the stairway. We could smell cigarette smoke coming from his apartment and I was sort of horrified. I really did live a sheltered life. I could not believe that phenomenal athlete that he was, could be a chain-smoker. I grew up detesting cigarette smoking, as did everyone in our family except my brother Wayne.
Dynamite, or Tom as we called him, turned out to be a sadistic, masochistic bastard. He started using steroids big time because he was always trying to stay big and his skin eventually became infested with boils. One time as I watched, he sliced boils right off his arms with a razor. He couldn't be bothered squeezing them and he didn't want to look at them.
Tom's dad, Bill Billington and Davey's mom, Joyce Smith were brother and sister. Both Tom's parents were alcoholics. Tom's mother, Edna, was constantly beaten by her father so she married Bill to escape her family. But Bill's mother Nellie used to say her daughter-in-law jumped from the frying pan into the fire because Bill was even rougher with her. He learned to beat his wife from his father Joe. Tom and Davey's grandfather Joe Billington frequently thumped their grandmother Nellie.
Joyce and Bill had an older brother named Eric Billington who eventually became a professional boxer. Eric used to stick up for Nellie and got into several fistfights with his father while trying to protect her. He and Joe would nearly kill each other. Finally Eric moved all the way from England to Edmonton just to get away from it.
Joe eventually died of lung cancer. He sucked back 90 hand-rolled cigarettes every day, one after another after another.
The family tried to make some money in a lawsuit by saying he died because he fell down the stairs getting some money for one of his grandchildren to go to the ice cream truck outside. They claimed the fall caused cancer in his hip. But it was soon uncovered that he had been a chain smoker since he was ten years old. In addition, he worked in a coal mine and spent the rest of his time in a pub.
It's no wonder that Tom, the spawn of this severely dysfunctional family eventually became such an evil man. When his ex-wife Michelle told me about the following incident involving his best friend's daughter, I was disgusted, offended and scared.
After Tom married Michelle, the sister of Bret's wife Julie, they hung out with John Foley, a wrestler who used to work for my dad. John was a Liverpudlian. Fans would jeer at him and shout that he must be from "Cesspool, England." When John finished wrestling he became a manager. He was always a "heel," a tough guy.
John had thick red hair, a broken nose, cauliflower ears and watery blue eyes. Tom considered John his best friend. Their kinship began as a result of being the only two British blokes in the middle of all these Canadians. My brother Bruce changed John's name to John Rex, but when the television show Dallas became such a hit, Tom suggested he shorten it to JR and he did.
To become more detestable in the ring, JR wore an army helmet, dyed his moustache black and shaped it like Hitler's. Part of JR's gimmick was to ask, "Would you like to come to a party? Ha! You're not invited anyway!"
When they got into the suds, John used to sing his favorite song, "My Sonny Boy," to Tom. Tom was so fond of John he began insisting people call him Sonny.
JR Foley was always first in line for his paycheck Friday mornings at our house. He would wait patiently for hours on one of my mom's Chippendale dining chairs as Mom and Dad finished up the payroll. One morning after JR had waited for what seemed an eternity, I watched my brother Owen emerge from the kitchen bearing a crystal bowl full of pebble shaped cat treats called Sea Nips. "Ellie made 'em," he said, chewing vigorously on a concealed carrot.
JR grabbed a handful. "Don't mind if I do."
Before moving to Canada, John had lost a son in a car accident and used that as an excuse to drink. His second marriage was to a sweet little lady named Vera Lynn who still resides in Calgary. She was an accountant for Woolworth's and, because she was honest and good with numbers, she used to do the income tax returns for a lot of wrestlers. But John drank away everything they had.
John and Vera Lynn had a daughter Michelle who was in a car accident when she was about 20. When this happened, John thought his prayers were answered. Certainly a big insurance settlement would be in the cards. But she wasn't as seriously injured as he had hoped. He dragged her over to Tom's begging for his assistance.
"Tommy, I need yer 'elp." He was drunk and sobbing. "I need yer 'elp," he blubbered. "My Michelle was in a car accident and we thought we was gonna get some money from the car accident for 'er injuries, but they says that the x-rays don't show anythin'. They says there's nothing wrong with 'er."
So John Foley asked Tom to break his daughter's legs, and Tom did. With poor Michelle's permission, they trussed her up to the bed just like Kathy Bates did to James Caan in the Stephen King movie, "Misery." They gagged her with a towel, so she'd have something to bite on. Then Tom whacked at her kneecaps with a mallet. John was crying and Tom's wife Michelle was crying, and John's daughter Michelle Foley was crying and Tom broke her legs right at the kneecaps. The insurance company awarded her twenty thousand dollars, but she could never walk right after that. I hear she is quite heavy now and her knees are turned in almost like those Barbie dolls with the bendable knees. John Foley ended up dying of cancer. This story came out after Tom's wife Michelle Billington was rid of Tom. She was too afraid to go to the police at the time. Tom used to beat her up. He used to click a gun in her ear and whisper, "It's gonna be loaded one of these times."
Michelle Billington and her sister Julie have had to reinvent themselves. They are the products of a really horrible childhood. They lived in foster homes because the whole family was split up when their mom and dad were found unfit to parent.
Julie and Michelle Smadu were from Weyburn, Saskatchewan. A French-Canadian family raised Julie. When she grew up, she got a job working security at the wrestling matches. That's where she met Bret. They fell in love and moved into a little house in Ramsey, a run-down area behind the Stampede grounds. Michelle and Tom lived in a four-plex nearby which they shared with my brother Wayne and his girlfriend Sandra.
Michelle got very thin because she was always worried about Tom. After Davey and I were married, she would call us up in the middle of the night and say, "Tom's got a gun and I'm afraid he's gonna use it this time. Can you come over here?"
Davey and I would drive over there and wonder, "What's going to happen? Is one of us going end up dead? We've just left our kids alone. They are sound asleep 45 minutes away at our house in Springbank. Now we are on our way to save Michelle from Tom who's drunk and got a loaded gun. What are we doing here? Maybe we should call the police."
But we'd rush over there, and Tom would greet us with a smile, "Hey Dave, how are you? Nothin's wrong. Michelle's just nuts again."
When Michelle decided to leave Tom for the first time, it was due to an incident that took place just before Christmas 1985. Tom and Davey were a tag team in the WWF and Tom was getting into the coke. Who got him into the coke? Hermish Austin, along with Ben Bassarab. They were selling Tom coke, and he was getting pretty hooked on it. Combined with all the steroids he was on, he was a time bomb waiting to explode.
Michelle and Sandra, my brother Wayne's girlfriend, were best friends. Tom threw a cocaine party for them and spiked their drinks with sedatives and they were rendered unconscious. Tom then proceeded to have his fun with Michelle. A little later she began to come to and she told me she witnessed Tom raping Sandra who was still completely senseless.
Michelle waited until Christmas. She spent a lot of their money on really nice Christmas presents. She gave everyone she liked cashmere scarves and $50 earrings. Then without a word, she loaded her children in the car and drove to Regina. Michelle never told anybody except Julie why she was leaving Tom. So tongues started wagging when she left.
"What's the matter with her? He's got all that money and she has nice clothes and she came from Weyburn, which is "Nowhere, Saskatchewan.' The poor guy, he's one of the hardest working wrestlers you could ever meet."
Bret and Julie threw their full support behind Michelle every time she left him and gave her the nerve to finally hand Tom a one-way ticket back to England after he declared bankruptcy. She told him to get the hell out and she kept the kids. She got the house and heartache, but he left and he's never been back. Now Michelle's a teacher and she's gotten on with her life. She has remarried a younger man and is the mother of twins. I'm really happy for her. She's one example of how somebody can turn her life around.
Tom on the other hand is a bitter, broken man resigned to a life of oblivion. According to London's News Of The World, January 2, 1994, Tom blames Davey for "leaving him in the lurch when he was forced to quit the ring after breaking his back." The article goes on to say that Tom "now sleeps on the floor of a one-bedroom flat which has no carpets and is riddled with dry rot." The last I heard, Tom is in a wheelchair and is so incapacitated he urinates in a tin can that he keeps by his side.