[Autobahn]

THE WWE -- AND LINDA MCMAHON'S RELATIONSHIP WITH THE WRESTLERS

In the conversation, Murdoch is neither an advocate or an apologist for World Wrestling Entertainment, his once and, likely, future employer.

"What no one wants to understand is that no one forced me and Lance to come to that company, no one forced us to work the shows. The only thing we ever asked out of Johnny Ace was more work. And he'll tell you that for a fact. We didn't ask for more money. We didn't ask for better airplane rides, better cars. We asked for more dates, we wanted more dates, work us as much as we could, because we wanted everybody to know that we were willing to put in the time, were willing to put in the effort, to be the stars that we know we could have been. And I still can be, and he could have been. There was never at one time anybody telling us, 'You need to get back in here, Lance, or you're going to lose a job.' You feel obligated. You're talking about guys, number one, Lance and I loved the business, but we also look back at the fact that the guys before us worked 10 times more than we did, had it harder than we did, got hurt more than we did, and they still made it. We wanted to do it the hard way, not bitching, pissing and moaning. Go out there and work your butt off. If you get hurt, suck it up and go out there and man up as much as you can. Don't do anything to ruin your career. But with Lance, part of him thought he could go on and he did. Just the fact of the matter is that he was using pain medication to cover that up."


With former WWE CEO Linda McMahon running in the race to be a U.S. Senator from Connecticut this fall, Cade's death at such a young age has been used as fuel by her opponents, including an old colleague of Cade's -- Chris Nowinski.

"Oh, please, let me make a comment -- and you can quote me on this. Okay, I understand that there's people in this business that want to protect or defend this business. He is one of those individuals that really only knows about a tenth of what he's talking about," Murdoch began.

"To be personally honest with you, Lance thought Chris Nowinski -- I'm trying to be respectful, I don't want to sound like a backwards redneck -- but he didn't have the highest opinion of Chris Nowinski. We're talking about a guy who milked a concussion for three or four years, and was getting a paycheck. It's really hard for guys who are going out there, busting their hind ends every single night to have great matches and to have that guy talk to you like he's on the same level as you.

"Yes, Chris, congratulations, you did do something that I will never do, and that's go to Harvard and graduate. But that does not make you a wrestler and that certainly doesn't make you a fan of pro wrestling. Lance didn't talk to him about his demons with addictions. And the times that he did spend with him, it was in developmental and they weren't tagged up very often."

Murdoch does his best to pull in his venom. "I don't want to sound like an idiot on this, and I don't want to bury Chris Nowinski. But the thing is, he needs to be more honest in trying, in my opinion, he's speaking up to try to get his name out there because of Linda McMahon."

Cade's father, Harley McNaught, was also in the news, protesting Linda McMahon's assertion that she had only met Cade on a couple of occasions. His tag team partner agrees with Cade's father that they did meet Linda McMahon on many occasions, but that hardly meant that she knew them.

"When we met Linda, we were sitting there hanging out. Linda knew us by our first name, but I guarantee you, she couldn't tell you our last names. You have to look at the fact that that's her job, and the McMahons are very good at their jobs."

"When we did talk, it was very vague conversation. 'Are you boys healthy?' 'Yes, ma'am.' It was like talking to your aunt that you only see once a year, because her job was at the office, it was in Connecticut. Unless she came to the TVs, we didn't see her. Now I understand, I'm not denouncing what Harley McNaught said. What I am saying is that there are other ways to look at it. I think Harley was just brokenhearted, and I think when Linda said she might have met [Lance] once or twice, he felt disrespected, knowing that she had met him more than once or twice. But you have to please understand that those encounters weren't anything in my opinion memorable. Does that make any sense? She did but didn't have a direct influence on our career, you know what I'm saying? When it came to wrestling, I wasn't calling Linda, when it came to my character, I wasn't calling Linda. When it came to my money, I wasn't calling Linda. And neither was Lance. It was literally, 'Hi, how are you? It's a pleasure to meet you.' A very vague interaction."

The wrestling business cannot be solely blamed for Cade's death, said Murdoch.

"I think ultimately, at the end of the day, is that Lance was a man and he made his own personal decisions. But if you look back at the way things went in certain situations we were in, like when he hurt his shoulder when Bob Holly threw him over the top rope, dislocated his shoulder. He took six weeks off. It wasn't because WWE asked him to come back early. It was because he wanted to come back. It was because, in this business, okay, you want to be number one. If you want to keep your spot, you have to keep working it, you have to be there for it. It's not WWE, it's not any one company. It's just like in any other wrestling company. If you want your spot, you've got to be there to keep it. If you're not there, there's somebody waiting right there behind you that is willing to make sure that you look as bad as possible to get that spot."

In his last interview, Cade admitted that he came back earlier than he should have.

"He got to a point where he was taking pain pills to cover up his pain, not to continue, but to cover up," said Murdoch. "Lance would tell you himself that he didn't want anyone to know that it was as bad as it was. He didn't want to lose his spot. When he had an opportunity to have surgery, he chose not to, because he didn't want to lose his spot. It wasn't that Johnny Ace was coming up to us, it wasn't that Vince was coming up to us, it wasn't even Linda coming up, there wasn't anybody coming up to us going, 'Trevor, if Lance doesn't show up in the next couple of weeks, we're going to have to put you on the shelf and you have to sit home.' It wasn't that at all. The fact of the matter is that we've got to make money, and you need to work as much as you possibly can to make as much money as you can, because you never know when the train is going to stop. You never know, for no reason, you're going to get called on July 3rd, and they're going to tell you that they have nothing for you, and they're going to execute their 90-day clause."

Having given his friend's death a lot of thought, Murdoch chooses to dwell on some of the positive memories.

"This Earth was a better place when he was on it, and the wrestling business, the locker room, was better when he was in it, this business was better for him to be in it. He wasn't a fan when Stone Cold Steve Austin came out flipping people off; he was a fan from the time he could open up his eyes and he watched his first wrestling match. He loved the business, man.


"And every time you went out there, if you were wrestling with him, or hell, when you were tagging with him, your boots had better have been laced up tight because that 280-pound gorilla was a perfectionist. He didn't care if it was five minutes, two minutes, 15 or 20, he wanted to make sure that when we went out there, everything, we were working for the number one company in the world, and he felt like everybody should be on point, everybody should have been the best. When you didn't step up to that, he had no problem letting you know that.

"The thing is, Lance gave you the time to get better. Lance understood that not everybody got to be lucky enough to be trained by Shawn Michaels. I'm not throwing his name around, Shawn's good at what he does, Shawn's the best at what he does, to be absolutely honest with you. And if you were lucky enough to get trained by him, wouldn't you take it? I got trained by Harley Race, one of the toughest men in his time. Hell, one of the toughest men today if you met him, if you hung out with him. Not everybody was lucky enough to be in the spot that Lance and I were in, and we understood that.

"The only thing we didn't understand was when you're given the opportunity to get better, and you're given a place to go and learn, and get better, if you didn't take that advantage, after a while, Lance and I started going into business for ourselves and did what we had to do to make sure the match was great. If you couldn't keep up, if you didn't want to put the effort in, if you didn't love it the way we did, well then we did what we had to do to make sure the match was as good as it could be."

With their decidedly old-school attitudes towards putting in time and not letting anything hold them back, Cade and Murdoch earned the respect of the agents and other veterans in the locker room -- something that Murdoch said was important to them.

When things didn't go their way, they didn't vent publicly; they had each other.

"Him and I could go and get into the car or get back to the hotel, and him and I could tell each other, 'Jesus Christ, this sucks.' It was never, we never had to complain to anybody because we had each other as buddies, as friends, to say at least I'm not doing this by myself. And that was something I will always value," Murdoch said. "As a man, as a friend, I will always be missing Lance. That I know that it's something I will never have with anybody else again, that is going to be the one thing that I'm going to miss more than anything, is that my buddy, no matter what, has got my back."

In conclusion, Murdoch's life is greater for having Cade a part of it, and far emptier now that he is gone.

"He's one of the few men in this world that I can say I love. And I'm not scared to tell anybody that I loved that man as a brother, as a friend, as an uncle, as an individual. He was good people. He loved his kids, he loved his wife. No matter what turmoil was there, he loved his mother, his father and his sister. He loved this business."