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aren’t around, and he needs a place to live.”
    My dad would say, “All right. Bring him out.”
    The boys were anywhere from six to 18 years old.
    Dad would work at the ranch all day and then occasionally wrestle at night.
    As a child, I thought Dad was out there fighting for his life. Even though I knew that they knew each other, I never once questioned that their matches were real. I truly believed. I would go to the arena and bawl every Thursday night, terribly upset, the way my kids would years later, when they saw me getting beaten up. And I had fight after fight at school, defending it all my young life.
    One time, a kid told me my dad was a phony, so I asked him what his dad did.
    “He’s a doctor.”
    “Well,” I said, “what does he do? Give people sugar pills? I bet your daddy gives them sugar pills. He’s not a real doctor.”
    Sometimes, that kind of response was sufficient. If it wasn’t, we’d get down to business.
    But I’m very glad it was presented to me that way. It made me respect my profession much more. It made me have a lot of admiration for the guys who were in it, and it impressed on me that it was not easy. It never has been easy, and I kept that with me. Over my career, there was just a handful who I smartened up to the business. Once you enter into the profession, you’re in the fraternity.
    When I was 14 or 15 years old, my father smartened me up. I don’t think believing in it for so long did me any psychological damage. I think his waiting so long to smarten me up helped me to appreciate what a special thing it was to be smartened up in that day and age.
    After he told me what the truth was, I continued to defend it as a shoot, because I understood it was necessary to present it as a shoot, especially in this area and at that time, because of the small populations of the areas and the number of performances they had to do. If it wasn’t looked at as a shoot, they wouldn’t be doing much business. Wrestling wasn’t the circus coming to town—it was a weekly pastime.
    I first saw how seriously my dad took protecting the business when I was five years old. We were on our way home from the matches and stopped off at Joe Bernarski’s, a steakhouse in Amarillo belonging to and named after an old-time wrestler. I was sitting at one of the tables with my brother, who was nine. My parents were at another table, sitting and talking to some other people.
    This man came over from another table and sat down next to me. “So,” he said, “you’re Dory Funk’s son.”
    “Yes, sir.”
    Then he started asking me questions about wrestling—questions he really shouldn’t have been asking me. He should’ve been asking my father.
    Finally, he said, “Come on, you can tell me about this wrestling and how it all works. It must be all fake, right?”
    My brother got up, got my father and told him what this guy was saying, and that was one of the first times I remember seeing someone truly get the shit beaten out of them.
    A few years later, we owned a public swimming pool called Gem Lake Swimming Pool, and my father had mats on the roof so some of the guys could work out up there. One day, my father and Bob Geigel (a tough wrestler from Kansas City) were working out up there, and I mean truly working out, truly wrestling. While they were up there, this guy came onto the roof with them and said, “Hey, I think I can do that! Isn’t all this wrestling phony?”
    My dad said, “Is that right?”
    My dad untangled himself from Geigel and beat the shit out of the guy. The guy took off running and jumped off the roof. He was trying to catch onto a tree that was about 20 feet from the building, but he missed. I think he ended up OK, but he spent a little time in the hospital.
    When I got into wrestling years later, I took very seriously the idea of protecting the business, and I had a number of confrontations over that very thing. None of these confrontations ever started with me deciding I just