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Michael Hegstrand grew up
with Joseph Laurinaitis together in Minnesota
before a move split them up from attending school
together. After graduating high school, the two
ran into each other at a local gym and renewed their
friendship. Both were avid bodybuilders and they
earned money bouncing out rowdy patrons at nearby biker
bars. Their passion for bodybuilding and their
fondness for a good scrap leading them to consider
careers as professional wrestlers. Both men
attended former wrestler Ed Sharkey's school where they
learned the basics of professional wrestling. They
each embarked on careers as singles wrestlers
with Laurinaitis wrestling as the "The Road
Warrior" before he formed a team with
Hegstrand.
After
one of his wrestlers got into legal trouble, World
Championship Wrestling from Georgia (WCWG) booker Ole
Anderson had to quickly throw together a tag team.
He chose Hegstrand and Laurinaitis to form his team and
christened them Hawk and Animal, the Road
Warriors. Prior to their teaming, Anderson had
toyed with the idea of pairing them against each other
on separate teams.
After changing their look from that of bikers to
characters from Mel Gibson’s post apocalyptic action
film "The Road Warrior", Hawk and Animal quickly became the top team
in Georgia. With the help of
former wrestler “Precious” Paul Ellering (the Warriors’
behind the scenes as well as on camera manager), Hawk
and Animal soon began to capitalize on their increasing
popularity.
With the Road
Warriors as his centerpiece, Ellering assembled a heel
stable known as the Legion of Doom. The Legion of
Doom comprised Jake "the Snake" Roberts, King Kong
Bundy, the Road Warriors, and the Spoiler. The
Road Warriors won their first tag team championship in
WCWG when they won a tournament to become the National
Tag Team Champions. The Road Warriors first title
loss was to the team of Buzz and Brett Sawyer but they
regained the belts after Buzz Sawyer was fired.
Over time, the Legion of Doom lost most of its members
and the Warriors eventually ended up feuding with King
Kong Bundy and the Masked Superstar over the National
Tag Team titles. After the Masked Superstar left
Georgia, another tournament was held and the Warriors
defeated the Junkyard Dog and Sweet Brown Sugar in the
finals to win the National Tag Team titles a third
time. After dropping the titles to Ron Garvin and
Jerry Oates, Hawk and Animal left for the American
Wrestling Association (AWA).
The Road Warriors entered the business right
before Vince McMahon Jr’s national expansion of WWF
sparked a boom in the wrestling industry. The Warriors
couldn’t have picked a better time to have started
wrestling as McMahon’s war with the AWA and the NWA made
for lucrative contracts for wrestlers who could
draw. Verne
Gagne was delighted to sign the Warriors after having
lost Hulk Hogan and others to the WWF. The Warriors were eager
to sign with the AWA, especially when they saw that the
Georgia territory was fading financially.
For Hawk and Animal, this was their chance to
work with many of the wrestlers they had grown up
idolizing such as Dick the Bruiser, the Crusher, and
Baron Von Raschke.
The hero worship was mixed with the reality of
the Warriors seeing their heroes’ overshadowed by the
Warriors.
While the Warriors were supposed to play heels,
they were often cheered by fans who appreciated their
brutal style, cool look and entrance music (Black
Sabbath’s "Iron Man") which contrasted sharply with the
AWA’s roster of babyfaces who looked old (Crusher, Dick
the Bruiser, and Verne Gagne) and were anything but hip
(the Crusher and Dick the Bruiser’s entrance theme
was "The Beer Barrel
Polka"
It didn’t take the Warriors’ long to win the AWA
Tag Team titles from Von Raschke and the Crusher. Their popularity
continued to soar as they tore through all
competitors. The Road Warriors
battled the top teams in the AWA as well as in Memphis'
Championship Wrestling Association (CWA). Hawk and
Animal withstood the challenges of Jerry Lawler &
Austin Idol, the Fabulous Ones, "King Kong"
Bundy & "Ravishing" Rick Rude, and
Larry & Curt Hennig, Some
of the teams in the AWA resented the Road Warriors'
quick success there. Part of the
resentment was due to the Road Warriors not selling for
other teams.
This lessened a bit after Larry Hennig and
Crusher Blackwell worked a match against the Road
Warriors where they refused to sell a move. Given the
toughness of Blackwell and Hennig, there was nothing
Animal and Hawk could do. The Road Warriors faced
some of their toughest competition when they feuded with
the Fabulous Freebirds. During a match at
Superclash, the Freebirds defeated the Warriors for the
tag team titles but the decision was later reversed by
Verne Gagne. After holding the tag team titles for
over a year, the Road Warriors were upset by the team of
Jimmy Garvin and "Mr. Electricity" Steve Regal.
After
the Warriors defied the orders of
promoter Verne Gagne to do a job to the Fabulous Ones
they felt that they began exploring other options. Given their
success in the industry, it didn’t take long for them to
find work.
By now,
the Warriors had become wrestling’s equivalent of free
agents, working in Japan and for
the NWA.
Jim Crockett Promotions’ "World Championship
Wrestling"(WCW) quickly signed the Road Warriors,
putting them into a promotion with their top team of
Nikita Koloff and Ivan Koloff. This was a dream
match for the fans as the Koloffs were unquestionably
the toughest team in WCW and the Road Warriors seemed
like natural opponents. Although the
Warriors wrestled in the same brutal power-based style
they had employed as heels, fans cheered them wildly
against the much hated Koloffs. The battles between the
Road Warriors and the Koloffs was brutal. At one
point, Paul Ellering sustained a neck injury at the
hands of the Koloffs and the Road Warriors injured the
Koloffs' partner Krusher Krushchev.
The
Road Warriors ability as a tag team was once again
acknowledged when they went on to win the first annual
Jim Crockett Sr. Memorial Cup. Twenty four tag
teams competed for the $1,000,000.00 prize. The
Road Warriors defeated Wahoo McDaniels and Mark
Youngblood and the Midnight Express before advancing to
the finals where they defeated Magnum T.A. and Ronnie
Garvin for the tournament win.
After feuding with the Koloffs, Hawk and Animal
battled with the other top heel teams in WCW such as the
Four Horsemen and the Midnight Express (including
the famous scaffold match at Starcade where Hawk
wrestled with a broken leg atop a 30 feet scaffold and
Jim Cornette blew out both of his knees after falling
off the scaffold). Despite their best
efforts, the Road Warriors were unable to win the
National Wrestling Alliance (NWA) World Tag Team
titles. The Road Warriors felt that they had
softened in WCW and decided to go back to their violent
roots. During a match against the NWA World Tag
Team champions, the Midnight Express, the Warriors
annihilated "Beautiful" Bobby Eaton outside the ring,
creating a 2 on 1 situation between the Warriors and
Eaton's partner "Sweet" Stan Lane. The
Warriors’ tactics paid off as they defeated the Midnight
Express for the World Tag Team
titles. After
winning the titles, the Road Warriors cemented their
heel turn when they brutalized Dusty Rhodes, co-holder
of the NWA World Six Man Tag Team championship.
The Warriors nearly took out Rhodes' eye after stabbing
him with one of their spikes from their shoulder
pads.
The Road Warriors' heel
turn did not last long however and they eventually
dropped the tag team titles to the Varsity Club (Rick
Steiner and Steve Williams). In addition to the
Road Warriors, WCW boasted some of the toughest tag
teams in the world such as the Steiner Brothers, Doom
(Ron Simmons and Butch Reed), and the SST (Samoan Swat
Team of Samoan Savage and Fatu). The Road Warriors
once again proved their dominance when they won an Iron
Man Tournament at Starcade '89 against the Doom, the
Steiner Brothers, and the SST
After growing tired of the direction WCW was
taking when Jim Herd took it over, the Warriors moved to
the one national promotion they had never wrestled in,
the WWF.
Hawk and Animal debuted in the WWF as "The Legion of
Doom" (a name that Vince McMahon could own since Hawk
and Animal owned the Road Warriors name) The Road
Warriors immediately began feuding with
Demolition. (a Road Warriors
copycat team the WWF created after the Warriors didn’t
sign with them and one that gained a good deal of
popularity on their own), After establishing an
unbeaten record in the WWF, the Road Warriors challenged
the Nasty Boys for the WWF Tag Team titles. At
SummerSlam, Hawk and Animal battled the Nasty Boys in a
tough no-disqualification, no-countout match.
Despite the Nasty Boys fighting with every weapon at
their disposal, the Warriors went on to win the WWF Tag
Team titles. The Road Warriors faced some of
the top teams in the WWF including the Hart Foundation,
Money Inc. and the Nasty Boys. As his personal problems
worsened, Hawk quit the WWF without notice,
leaving Animal to wrestle on his own. Animal blew out
his back in match with the Beverly Brothers which
sidelined him for quite a while. Meanwhile, Hawk
formed a new team in Japan with
Kensuski Sasaki (known as the Power Warrior) without
consulting Animal.
This led to feelings of betrayal on Animal’s part
putting both men odds for years.
Eventually, Animal was cleared to wrestle, and he
and Hawk reconciled. During the
beginning of the Monday Night War , they showed up on WCW’s "Monday Night
Nitro".
However after being promised the
2nd biggest contract in WCW by Eric Bischoff
(a claim Bischoff denies was ever made), they returned
to the WWF as LOD 2000, a team managed by Sunny.
Former
manager Paul Ellering returned only to turn on his
former team for a feud with his new team the Disciples
of the Apocalypse.
Concerned that Hawk might walk out on them
again, the WWF added newcomer Droz as a member of the
Legion of Doom. In a
storyline that hit close to home, the WWE showed
Hawk struggling with “personal demons” which led to Droz
replacing Hawk as Animal’s tag team partner. The
storyline ended abruptly though and the Road Warriors
disappeared from the WWF again.
Hawk
eventually conquered his personal demons after
converting to Christianity. Those who knew him
were amazed at the peace Hawk had found and the change
in his lifestyle. Hawk and Animal decided to make
another run and the WWE gave them a tryout match against
RVD and Kane. Unfortunately before anything could
materialize, Hawk died suddenly from a heart attack,
ending any chances of a Road Warriors run in the WWE.
Shortly after Hawk's passing, The Dudley Boys
dedicated a match to their hero Hawk by performing the
Doomsday Device at the end of one of their
matches.
In July 2005, Animal returned to action by
agreeing to team up with Heidenreich to take on the
Smackdown Tag Team Champions MNM. At the 2005 Great American Bash
in Buffalo, New York, Animal and Heidenreich defeated
MNM for the tag titles. Animal dedicated his win
to Hawk.
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