The quest defined Dusty. As a wrestler and a booker — the backstage figure who creates story lines — Dusty’s long and varied résumé is pretty much incomparable. But by dint of nomenclature, perhaps his most lasting stamp on the industry is the Dusty Finish, an often misunderstood tactic for ending matches. The Platonic ideal of the Dusty Finish occurred at Starrcade 1985, which I wrote about a
couple of years back:
At Starrcade 1985, the NWA’s premier event, Dusty Rhodes notched a long-awaited title win against Ric Flair. They had fought at Starrcade the year before, only to have the match stopped by special referee Joe Frazier because of a nasty cut Dusty had suffered. But 1985 would be different — sort of. Rhodes fought valiantly, even though after the referee was accidentally knocked out, Flair’s buddies Ole and Arn Anderson came in to help subdue Rhodes. Miraculously, Dusty sprung a surprise pin on Flair and won, with a replacement ref performing the three count. The crowd went wild. Rhodes celebrated in the ring and in the back with the locker room good guys. But it was not to be. When the original ref came to his senses, he insisted that he had seen the Andersons interfere, and so, since his decision took primacy, the pinfall win was changed retroactively to a disqualification win, which meant that Flair retained his belt on a technicality.
Rhodes didn’t invent the switch finish — it had been around since the earliest days of staged matches. And sure, the ending can be used to excess. (Rhodes and Flair performed a Dusty Finish as early as a Mid-Atlantic championship match at an untelevised show in Richmond, Virginia, in 1976.) But in the hands of Rhodes, it was a thing of beauty. If Dusty the booker relied too much on screwy finishes, it was because he underestimated how uncommon Dusty the wrestler was. It worked because we wanted so badly for Dusty to win, and because on some level we believed it wasn’t possible. It worked because Dusty’s appeal was about the quest rather than the destination. It worked because the fans related so closely to Dusty: The trajectory of his career was an endless flat, always a notch beneath the ultimate goal. It reminded many fans of their own lives.
Rhodes won his first world title from Harley Race on August 21, 1979. It was the “largest crowd ever jammed [into the] Fort Homer W. Hesterly Armory in Tampa,” announcer Gordon Solie claimed. Race, an eight-time champ and fellow all-time great, understood what made his opponent special. “Dusty … had probably as big a heart as far as being able to do what he loved to do as well as about anybody around,”
he said. “I’ve had several-hour Broadways
1 with Dusty Rhodes, and nobody looking at him would think he could ever go an hour.” Which is exactly the point. Dusty transcended the sport in a way his forebears never had. After he won in 1979, fans stormed the ring to join the celebration. “Dusty Rhodes,” the triumphant champion said of himself, “the plumber’s son who has dreamed a dream and lived a dream, has made that dream come true. You cannot pay tribute to your people no better.”
WWE
There have been many wrestlers who spoke of themselves in the third person. For most, it signifies egotism and vanity. For Dusty, somehow, it was a mark of humility, like he couldn’t quite believe he was the person who had made it this far. He held the title for five days.
Dusty reclaimed the belt from Race on June 21, 1981, and held it for three months before transitioning the belt to Ric Flair, Race’s real replacement atop the hierarchy. Dusty feuded with Flair and his Four Horsemen on and off for another decade, but only once claimed the title from him, for a single week in the summer of 1986. But titles always took a backseat to the real things Dusty was fighting for: revenge for the time
they broke his arm, revenge for the time they broke his leg, revenge for when they
stole his woman. He attacked them with a baseball bat when they sucker punched his injured best friend, and he got suspended for 120 days.
Thankfully, a portly, masked buddy of Rhodes called the Midnight Rider was there to take up the battle for him. Of course, the Midnight Rider was Dusty in disguise (as was Uvalde Slim when Dusty used the same gimmick in Florida years before), but none of the governors of the NWA cared to notice. In story line terms, it was because they loved Dusty just as much as fans did. In a larger sense, though, the Rider’s mask was like Dusty’s use of third person. That feeling of being removed from reality is what made his interminable quest possible. He once spoke of a story he’d tell his daughter about a “
cold-blooded sausage maker” who would chase young pigs to butcher them, only for Dusty to come in and save them. In the last retelling, though, when Dusty faced off against Horseman Tully Blanchard, Dusty himself became the cold-blooded sausage maker. He had to become the character in the bedtime story to get revenge and he had to put on the mask to stay alive, just like he had to bleach his hair and put on briefs to achieve his dream. His career — his life — was a parable.
♦♦♦
WWE
In 1988, Dusty got fired from WCW (the national promotion that the Crockett territory had evolved into) when, as booker, he approved a
bloody melee against the wishes of executives at Turner, WCW’s parent company. Dusty then
turned up in the WWF in black tights with yellow polka dots, dancing alongside his valet, Sapphire — a woman who deliberately evoked the “Common Man” gimmick that WWF had assigned Dusty. The polka dots are too often discussed — they were silly, but Dusty overcame them — but here is where the WWF really misunderstood Rhodes: The company too often oversimplifies characters and dumbs them down for a nonexistent lowest common denominator. Sure, they called him the “American Dream” in the chorus of his theme song, but they misunderstood what that meant. To fans, Dusty was a common man and a god at the same time. Both were simultaneously true. The WWF portrayed him as merely common, when in fact he transcended that characterization every time he stepped into the ring.
The closest they came to understanding this was in a series of vignettes that teased his debut with scenes of Dusty working blue-collar jobs: a trash collector, a
butcher, a
gas station attendant, and (naturally) a plumber. Each bit ended with the disembodied voice of a female client saying “Hey, aren’t you … ?”
He was. That dichotomy defined Dusty’s career. One of his most famous lines went: “I’ve wined and dined with kings and queens, and I’ve slept in the alley eating pork and beans.”
Success wasn’t a straight line for Dusty. He got the girl then lost her. He reached the pinnacle of the NWA and then got reintroduced to the bottom in the WWF. He won the title and lost it and won it again and lost it and won it again and lost it. But the story of Dusty Rhodes — the point of the Dusty Finish — wasn’t failure. It was aspiration. It was the quest for — yeah, I’ll say it — the American Dream. Dusty was a symbol, and through him, we all tasted the dream.
Because we’ve all been in that figurative alley eating pork and beans. Only Dusty made it to dinner with royalty. Or,
as he put it when he and his old partner dikk Slater reunited in 1985 to take on the dastardly Koloff family:
“We’re tired of monkeyin’ around. We’re not eating bananas now, we’re on steak and potatoes.”