Our ratings were getting better and we had drawn level with WCW again, but Vince was always looking for ways to stay ahead in the ongoing Monday Night War. They decided to take 16 of the guys who weren’t doing anything and put them in a tough-man tournament. They were going to have us go out there, on a live-TV wrestling show, and fight for real in an attempt to get some ratings. It was also an attempt to get a wrestler by the name of “Dr. Death” Steve Williams over. Jim Ross, who was in charge of talent, had been lobbying to bring his buddy Steve in for a long time but Creative didn’t know how to do it. Steve had wrestled in Japan for the majority of his career and had a reputation as a genuine badass, so they figured they would introduce him in the Brawl for All, he’d walk through everybody, and boom, they’d have a credible guy they could leapfrog over everybody else to put up against Austin in the main events. Everybody backstage thought it was a bunch of bullshyt. J.R. was shoving Steve down everybody’s throats, saying he was going to destroy everybody. Nobody had a problem with Steve before, but J.R. was putting him over so often that the boys resented him and hoped he’d get knocked out.
They got together their group of 16 mid-card wrestlers who they figured were the tough guys. They put Bart in the tournament but I wasn’t included. They didn’t think that Sparky Plugg could fight. That pissed me off. Obviously, they didn’t know that Ol’ Sparky was a tough motherfukker!
Most of the people they had in there were pretty tough. Some of them talked a good fight but couldn’t back it up. Tiger Ali Singh had been bragging that he was a shoot fighter and a bare-knuckle champion and could do this and that, but when it came to it, he chickened out and said he wouldn’t do it. They needed a replacement and Bradshaw told Bruce Prichard, who was one of the guys in charge of organizing the whole thing, “Bob may not look like anything much but he’ll surprise you. . . .” Bruce gave me a call to ask if I wanted in. I said, “Hell yeah, I don’t know why you didn’t ask me in the first place!” I was pretty excited because I figured I could make some decent money and I’d have a chance to show them how tough I actually was.
They explained the rules to us. Three rounds, one minute a round. We would get points for takedowns and knockdowns. A knockout would end it. We were told the winner would get $100,000 and that each time we fought, we would get five grand whether we won or lost. Sure, I thought — they’re not going to pay us $5,000 each match for doing this! But they genuinely did.
As soon as Steve Blackman found out he was in the tournament, he started training for it. He was dead serious about hurting people, planning to take people’s knees out to win that hundred grand. In the meeting when the rules were explained, they told us that it was anything goes. Steve said, “So that means that if I want to take somebody’s knee out with a kick, I can do it, right?” Right about then they decided they needed to make some rules. I think they got worried that Steve might kill people and you know what? He probably could have. There is nobody more dangerous than Steve Blackman, period. He knows every element of the fighting game; he’s strong, he’s smart, he’s lightning quick — he’s a well-rounded fighter. Unfortunately for him but fortunately for the rest of us, Steve hurt himself training against a 300 pound guy who rolled on Steve’s leg and blew out his knee. If that hadn’t happened, Steve would have won the whole thing, hands down.
My first match turned out to be against my tag partner, Bart Gunn. Because Bart and I were riding together, we had a chance to talk before the fight. We agreed that whatever happened, happened. I knew that Bart used to do tough-man contests too, so I had my work cut out for me. Even though he’d never wrestled a bear, he was 6'5" and 260 pounds and I was 6'1" and about 220. That’s a heck of a size difference but I wasn’t about to back down from anybody. We went out there and laid into each other. It was brutal. He hit me so fukking hard, I ended up on the other side of the ring. I have no idea how I got there but he didn’t knock me out. We went all three rounds and the judges gave the points win to Bart. It turned out to be one of the best fights in the tournament. We were still friends afterwards — we’d cleaned each other’s clocks pretty good but neither of us was mad at the other. He told me, “I hit you with some good shots — it shocked me when you didn’t go down.” I had a black eye for a solid week after that fight but he never knocked me out. I got my five grand and I opened a lot of eyes in the back by showing that I was tougher than anybody had given me credit for.
Someone who wasn’t as tough as they thought was J.R.’s boy, Steve Williams. I saw him fighting Pierre Ouellette in his first round match and he didn’t look good. They were just swinging at each other and Steve barely survived. He didn’t knock out Pierre, so it went to points and it was so clear they had gimmicked the score so it looked like Steve had dominated. I thought, “They’re going to fix the whole thing and make it a work.” I knew that if they didn’t, Steve wasn’t going to win.
Even so, Steve was up against Bart in the second round and I knew for sure Bart was going to knock him out. I’d just fought the guy and felt his punches. Steve was in trouble and he didn’t know it. Earlier, when Bart and I were driving to a show, I told him, “You know they want Steve to win — you’re fixing to throw a wrench in their whole plan.” Bart said, “Yep, I’m going to knock him out.” Later during the same journey, Bart decided to call Bruce Prichard to say, “Get ready to make that check out to me because I’m going to knock J.R.’s boy out.” Bruce said, “That’s great, man — if you do, you do.” Bart knew Bruce wasn’t taking him seriously. He said, “You think I’m kidding? I promise you, I’m going to knock him out . . .”
The night of the fight came. We were in Anaheim at the Arrowhead Pond and the TV monitor backstage was sold out. You could not get near that monitor; there was no room to move. Nobody knew what was going to happen. Steve and Bart started fighting — it was pretty even, punch for punch. I was counting the takedowns and it became clear that they weren’t going to do it legit. Steve and Bart were even but the scoring onscreen had Steve with more takedowns. In the second round, Steve started gassing. Bart was outpunching him, staying on him and taking him down. Bart owned Steve in the second round but the scorecards came up and they still had Steve ahead. All the boys in the back were getting pissed. The third round was just like the second — Bart was kicking Steve’s ass but we all knew that he was going to lose unless he knocked Steve out. With the fight nearly over, Steve was still in there and then, out of nowhere, Bart nailed him with a left hand and Steve just fukking dropped. Everybody in the back popped huge. The 60 or so people watching the monitor blew the roof off that place.
Terry Funk actually got upset with that because he felt the boys were disrespecting Steve, who is considered a god in wrestling, especially in Japan, but nobody popped because they hated Steve or wanted to see him hurt. They popped because they knew the judges had been fukking with the scorecards and the wrong man would have won. The feeling was, “fukk you, you’re not going to screw Bart out of this.” There was no disrespect meant to Steve, just hostility towards the office for sending us all out there, telling us the whole thing was a shoot, and then trying to fix the outcome to suit their plans.
If I ever wanted any proof that I was right on this one, I got it that night. I was getting changed near the trainers’ area. They had dragged Steve from the ring to the back and were checking him over. Steve’s jaw was dislocated and his hamstring was torn. I heard Steve say to the guys who were working on him, “I don’t know what they’re going to do now . . . they already paid me the money to win this thing.” Jim Ross was absolutely furious. For weeks, he’d been telling everybody that Steve was going to walk all over the competition, and now I had found out they’d paid him the prize money before he’d even won the tournament. I couldn’t believe it.
Bart was up against the Godfather next. Godfather was a big, tough motherfukker but I knew Bart would take him. I was watching the fight backstage and ’Taker was there, sitting in a chair in front of the monitor. A lot of people were watching again and I said out loud, “This is gonna be interesting.” ’Taker turned around, looked at me, and said, “That’s your boy, isn’t it?”
I said, “You’re damn right it is.”
He said, “Fifty bucks?”
We shook on it.
Bart gets teamed with Bob Holly 
and eventually released, all bc he KO'd Dr. Death 
when Butterbean gave Bart that knockout.
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