Flashback 8.07.04 - Terry Funk Promo

“Art of a Promo” II

----Terry talks about Lawler putting out his eye. Fans of Memphis Wrestling remember the empty arena match and everyone believed that Lawler had put Funk’s eye out. I can still remember Funk with a bandage over his eye screaming on the interviews and his brother Dory Funk Jr being sent it to get Lawler. Even though Funk was a heel at the time, the fans never thought Lawler should have put the man’s eye out and Funk uses those feelings to make himself a huge babyface. Funk talks here about remembering promos…

“People remember good promos. On his radio show Rush Limbaugh mentions Terry Funk on occasion. Why?? Hell, he doesn’t ever talk about wrestling. But he listened to me in the past and remembered me cutting a promo where I was out with a gun, looking for Jose Lothario at the city dump. I ended up shooting at what I said was a rat, and claimed I’d gotten him! That brought up the questions, was I saying Jose was a rat, or did I think all Mexicans were rats?”

“For most my career, we had an assortment of people watching wrestling, from true believers to people watching for an entertaining show, and we want to open up that whole audience and grab up what we could. That was what I tried to do with cleverness of my promos, but it had to be with a grain of truth. Building up to my August 28 match with Lawler, I took our famous 1981 empty-arena match, where he took a wooden chair to my eye for the finish, added in a real-life tragedy at home and made what I think was a very solid promo.”

----This kind of stuff is missing on Memphis Wrestlng. They have an angle that ended with Lawler piledriving Kevin White on the concrete floor. It will be three months before they actually come back to do regular tapings [if they ever do]. White could do a series of interview where he talks about sitting at home for three months thinking about what Lawler had done to him. They even could go to White’s house and show how he has not even been able to do anything because his injury. They could have Garry and Sue Young running around doing everything for him. This would be a real feud with a real reason for revenge.