Dusty Rhodes gives his Hard Times speech.
One of the most popular professional wrestlers of all time has died at the age of 69. His real name was Virgil Runnels, but his wrestling name was Dusty Rhodes, a Texas plumber’s son who became known as the American Dream.
He wasn’t much of a ring performer compared to, say, the acrobatic masked wrestlers of Mexican fame. He had bleached blond hair and the body that, to borrow a phrase, looked like a burlap bag full of doorknobs. His signature move in the ring was the “million-dollar” elbow, which he pounded on the bloody foreheads of wrestlers such as Ric Flair, Terry Funk, Tully Blanchard, and countless others.
But as the television sport evolved, talking became as important as fighting. Dusty Rhodes was the rap master of them all. In promotional interviews at ringside, he would lisp, drawl, and rant his way through story lines and family feuds, exalting his working-class values and castigating villains (known as heels in the business) as no-good, low-down, egg-suckin’ dawgs.
His most famous soliloquy (I call it that without irony) has become known as the “Hard Times” promo and is worth watching as he performed it.
I don’t know to what extent such speeches were written, memorized, or improvised. But this one is so-good it deserves an X-ray reading all its own. Here is an excerpt:
“I don’t have to say a whole lot more about the way I feel about Ric Flair; no respect, no honor. There is no honor amongst thieves in the first place.
“He put hard times on Dusty Rhodes and his family. You don’t know what hard times are, daddy. Hard times are when the textile workers around this country are out of work, they got 4 or 5 kids and can’t pay their wages, can’t buy their food. Hard times are when the auto workers are out of work and they tell ’em to go home. And hard times are when a man has worked at a job for thirty years, thirty years, and they give him a watch, kick him in the butt and say “hey a computer took your place, daddy”, that’s hard times! That’s hard times! And Ric Flair you put hard times on this country by takin’ Dusty Rhodes out, that’s hard times.
“And we all had hard times together, and, I admit, I don’t look like the athlete of the day supposed to look. My belly’s just a lil’ big, my heiny’s a lil’ big, but brother, I am bad. And they know I’m bad.
“There were two bad people…. One was John Wayne and he’s dead brother, and the other’s right here.”
It’s good enough on the page, but even better to hear him deliver it in a style of oral composition that suggests the influence of Southern preachers and the bravado of a young Cassius Clay, who admits getting his rap from the famous blond wrestler of an earlier generation, Gorgeous George.
For the record, Dusty repeats the phrase “hard times” ten times in this excerpt. That rhetorical drumbeat can work in both print and speech. And look at the progression: It begins with the personal hard times that the heel Ric Flair, who prides himself on his affluent ways, gave Rhodes and his family by injuring him. It moves to the hard times of iconic working class figures: the textile worker, the autoworker, the laid off long-timer replaced by a computer. (Three is the magic number in writing – always standing for the whole – especially in oratory.) Then the hard times expands to the whole country, all of us devastated by the injury to our hero.
Notice how self-exaltation is balance with self-deprecation. No, Dusty Rhodes, is not what a pretty, steroid-juiced, muscle-bound athlete is supposed to look like. His working-class fans will identify with an athlete whose belly and heiny are just a little big. But enough humility, folks, there are only two “bad” men, and one of them is John Wayne, and he’s dead. And now, sadly, so is the other, Dusty Rhodes.
The rap language of Dusty Rhodes is repetitious, but not redundant, and that makes all the difference. Repetition craves variation. To make my point, I’ll use a passage from a Noble Prize author, Toni Morrison (Please don’t hate me because I am versatile enough to understand both Dusty Rhodes and Toni Morrison.)
“Outdoors, we knew, was the real terror of life. The threat of being outdoors surfaced frequently in those days. Every possibility of excess was curtailed with it. If somebody used too much coal, he could end up outdoors. People could gamble themselves outdoors, drink themselves outdoors. Sometimes mothers put their sons outdoors, and when that happened, regardless of what the son had done, all sympathy was with him. He was outdoors, and his own flesh had done it. To be put outdoors by a landlord was one thing – unfortunate, but an aspect of life over which you had no control, since you could not control your income, But to be slack enough to put oneself outdoors, or heartless enough to put one’s own kin outdoors – that was criminal.”
The word “outdoors” appears 11 times in this paragraph of 138 words. It appears 11 times in ten sentences. It appears in every sentence except the third. It appears in different locations: at the beginning of a sentence, at the end, and in the middle. Purposeful repetition links the parts together, for both Morrison and Rhodes.
The British novelist David Lodge once argued that for the writer there was no category of language that was out of bounds. The eager writer could draw lessons from high and low, from literature and philosophy, but also from the sides of cereal boxes, gang slang, or the lingo of the locker room.
So Dusty Rhodes, I thank you personally for your contribution to my language learning, for your oratory and your storytelling. Without you, at least for a while, your fans will fall on hard times.
Correction: We referred to Ric Flair as Rick Flair. This has been corrected.
