Wrestling with the Recession: Kevin Nash and Ricky Morton Wage Class Warfare

Three years. That's not a big gap at all, in the scheme of things. The three years that separate wrestlers Ricky Morton and Kevin Nash mean they grew up watching the same TV shows, the same movies, listening to the same music.

The same cultural zeitgeist shaped both men. But despite this close proximity in age, the two wrestlers might as well be from different planets. It's the differences between them that have led to this—a pay-per-view main event from AWE this weekend that has some fans wondering, almost 30 years after Vince McMahon revealed that wrestling wasn't on the up and up, whether the match is going to be a shoot or a work.

The animosity is real. The root, as in all great conflicts, is money.

Morton is an iconic figure in the business. His specialty was sympathy. Writhing in pain, his spiky blond mullet often covered in blood, Morton plucked the heart strings of teenage girls nationwide. That was his contribution to the industry, what wrestler Dutch Mantell called "the blowjobs."

When girls came to the wrestling matches, guys came to the wrestling matches. And girls came to see Morton and his silent partner Robert Gibson, together dubbed the "Rock-n-Roll Express." Now 55, Morton is still working the independent circuit, as many as four nights a week.

"I still depend on wrestling for a living," Morton told me in a recent interview. "I'm a single parent and I still have four kids at home. When all you know is wrestling, it's hard. I still depend on this. And I know what I'm doing in this 'rassling business. I do independent shows and I don't break records. I don't draw 10,000 fans anymore. But I can go to an independent show that draws 25 people and turn that into 300 people a week."

The teenage girls aren't there anymore, at least not in the droves that used to mob him before and after every match. What is there, in the National Guard armories and high school gyms, is a living, if a meager one. The man who once packed arenas throughout the South thinks he deserves better. Calling from outside a skating rink in Tennessee, Morton seemed emotional thinking about the blood price he had paid to a sport that had forgotten him.

"I sacrificed a lot for this business," Morton said, audibly affected while thinking about it. "And they just threw us away. I didn't want anybody's top spot. I just wanted a job. Hell, I'd have put the ring up. I'd referee. Wrestling is all I know and they threw me away like a piece of trash."

The main target of Morton's frustration with wrestling as an industry has been Nash. As Diesel, the 6'11" former University of Tennessee center was Vince McMahon's champion in the mid-1990s. Under his own name, and part of the groundbreaking New World Order, he helped make wrestling destination television for a generation of fans during the Monday Night Wars.

Nash winked at the camera, always acknowledging wrestling's inherent absurdities, never taking anything too seriously. That was his on-camera persona, at least. It wasn't all smiles in the back, where the real game is played. He battled for power behind the scenes as viciously as anyone in the industry's history, winning more often than not.

"Everyone wants to call wrestling 'the business,'" Nash told me from the set of Steven Soderbergh's upcoming movie Magic Mike, in which he plays a past-his-prime male stripper named Tarzan. "Why don't you treat it like a business? I don't care if you're running a diner, if you're running a car wash or a wrestling company. It's all business."

As an industry power broker, Nash was part of the creative team that helped drive Time Warner's World Championship Wrestling out of business in 2001. Sure there was a bigger picture—Time Warner's merger with AOL, the collapse of the technology bubble and a changing landscape at Turner television. But to Morton, it's as simple as this: Nash helped ruin wrestling. And in a 2001 interview with RF Video, he let loose an expletive-ridden tirade that would eventually become a YouTube favorite. 

"Kevin Nash thinks he knows everything about this business," Morton ranted. "And don't know sh*t. Brother couldn't draw you flies in a sh*t factory. I'm telling you the f*cking truth. He's lucky to be in this business...the biggest year we ever had was $120,000. This mother f*cker made $40,000 every two weeks....what the f*ck has he done? What has he proved? Back then we got paid on how many asses we put in the seats, not whose ass we kissed. That's what I'm trying to say to you. I don't give a f*ck whether he likes it or not."

Nash, for his part, seems perplexed by the whole thing.

"I really just tried to scour my brain to figure out why this guy had so much animosity toward me. I still really don't know what I did to him," Nash said. "I think (money) is a lot of it. These guys like Ricky Morton look at it like they were better all-around wrestlers than I was. Maybe he was a better wrestler. I might have been a better entertainer. I was definitely more physically imposing.

"It's gone on my whole life, this David and Goliath syndrome that a lot of these smaller guys always have. They think the only reason I've ever had any success in my career is because of my physical size. And you know what? If that's the case, so be it. I really don't care. Because I have that size. Do they want me to apologize because I'm a big guy and was successful? If you hate me for that, I think you should hate God also."

Maybe it's because of how personal the feud has gotten, maybe he's a born conservative—but Nash doesn't feel much for Morton. Several matches a week is a hard grind for a man in his fifties. But it wasn't the inevitable end for Morton and other wrestling stars from the '80s still living on the fringes of a business that is questionable even under the brightest lights. Nash was there at the tail end of the 1980s, when wrestler's lived extravagantly and the party culture was out of control.

In the end, you're responsible, Nash said, for your own income.

"All this business owes you is the opportunity," Nash said. "You better realize quickly that you're an independent contractor. They aren't taking taxes, so you have to account for that. You better incorporate. If you don't know anything about finances, you better get a financial adviser.

"And you better start putting money away. Thirty percent, and if you can't do that, at least try to put 15 percent in savings. Because you don't have a benefits plan or anything like that. You have to put more money away than the average guy, because your career can be very short. You've got to be diversified."

Known as "Big Sexy" in his heyday, Nash parlayed his size and charisma into million-dollar checks. But like many in these tumultuous economic times, things are rough. Investment properties that were his retirement nest egg are suddenly appraised for hundreds of thousands of dollars less than he bought them for.

Investments in the market essentially broke even over the decade. Today, while trying to sell me on investing in silver ("Buy three ounces of silver a week. Not many guys can afford an ounce of gold at $1,680. But they can afford $31.80 for an ounce of silver."), Nash is quick to point out that his problems aren't the biggest deal in the scheme of things.

"I realize that 99.8 percent of people are a lot less fortunate than I am," he said. "With the economy the way it is, everyone is taking their lumps. And I'm sorry, Ricky, but you're concerned about wrestling? I'm more worried about the dismantling of the global financial system.

"There are a lot of things more important on this planet right now. When was the last time you saw a picture from Japan on the cleanup of the tsunami? When was the last time you heard an update on Haiti? On Chile? All these human catastrophes and they're news blips. They throw it up on the news for one or two nights and then they're on to the next catastrophe.

"With all that going on, I'm sorry, Ricky, that I can't wrap my head around the fact that you didn't save your money in 1988. If I've got to bitch slap you Saturday in Virginia and teach you a lesson and while doing it, give you some wisdom about what's going on on this planet, I'll do it.

"But what is your problem, dude? Wake up. Too many wrestlers in general stand too close to 'wrestling world.' Stand back about 15 feet and look at the whole picture. You're looking at a corner of it. Stand back and look again—'Oh, it's a Monet!'"

In the end, it's the perfect professional wrestling feud for our times—class warfare, played out in the ring. Morton worked hard over the years, making his employers rich while he says they schemed to cheat him out of the profits owed him and his co-workers who together built an industry worth a billion dollars. Nash represents corporate greed, his insistence on treating the sport like a job and negotiating for the best deal possible rankling those who see wrestling as a religion.

Yes, Nash got rich—but at what cost to the business? His stewardship of the industry recalls the worst of the banking crisis—the company struggling to stay alive while Nash and his cohorts collected an increasingly larger piece of the pie.

"People ask me 'are you crazy?' I shot a shoot interview on Kevin Nash 12 or 13 years ago," Morton said. "And everything I said in that interview I meant. Robert and I paved the path for them to make more in one week than I made in a year in this business.

"These guys made more in a quarter of a year than I made in 35 years in this business," Morton continued, his voice suddenly serious. "And it's not about me being a frustrated old wrestler. This guy took WCW, a thing Robert and I built,  and put it hundreds of millions in the hole. These brain surgeons like (former WCW President) Eric Bischoff thinking they knew everything about this business. And they didn't know nothing.

"I said all of this stuff about Kevin Nash to get his attention. After all these years it's coming out. Kevin Nash is seven-foot tall. Am I going to lie to myself and the people and say that I know I'm going to beat him? This isn't about the wrestling business. This is something I've got to do. I've got to stand up for myself.

"It's not about winning and losing. It's about letting him know, letting these people in the business know, I do know what I'm doing. I'm 55 years old and in better shape than I've ever been. I can still do anything. I can still do an hour. I'm going to stand up for what I believe in. It don't matter. He can knock every tooth out of my head, and he's capable of doing that. But when I go in the ring that night, I'm serious. I'm giving everything that I've got to stand up for what I am."

While Morton puts on a show he hopes the wrestling world is watching, Nash will be in an interesting position. He's the known commodity. He can make or break Morton's return to prime time on a whim. At barely 200 pounds, there's not much Morton can do to stop him. While the match won't likely turn into a real fight, the subtext will be Nash's willingness to make Morton look like a star.

"Of all the people to hate, don't call out the biggest guy in the room," Nash said. "That ain't real bright. I think Jim Croce wrote a song about that.

"He should have picked out one of the guys who have already passed away. Instead, he's decided to put his anger and frustration into me. And after Saturday night, he's going to be even more angry and frustrated...He's just going to get pounded.

"It's not my job to make him look good," Nash continued with a belly laugh. "I'm not that talented. When I hit him at the opening of the match and he goes down, that will be that part of the business that makes people ask 'Is this real?' Yeah, that left hook at the beginning—that was as real as it gets."

Nash and Morton are part of a pay-per-view extravaganza from Awesome Wrestling Entertainment called "Night of the Legends." Broadcasting live on Oct. 15 from Fishersville, Va., the event also includes old-school icons like Terry Funk, "Hacksaw" Jim Duggan, Diamond Dallas Page and Tommy Dreamer.

Jonathan Snowden is the author of Total MMA and The MMA Encyclopedia. His first book about professional wrestling, Shooters, will be released by ECW Press in 2012.