Mike Furnas, the younger brother of Doug Furnas, who followed his brother into football, powerlifting and even pro wrestling for a spell, has a lifetime worth of stories about his brother.
Perhaps the most fitting was when he called Doug up recently and told him that Northeastern Oklahoma A&M, the junior college they both went to that the brothers led to winning the football national championship in 1980 was going to induct them together into the school Hall of Fame in June.
“I called him and told him, and he told me, `Thank you for letting me ride in on your coattails all those years.’
“Of course, it was really the opposite,” said Mike Furnas.
Doug Furnas was quiet, intelligent, in many ways completely different from almost anyone who ever had long-term success in pro wrestling. In a world where it’s all about self-promotion, flashiness and bragging, he wanted none of that. In his mind, pro wrestling was the extension of his athletic career that was founded on being the ultimate team player. He was the quiet guy who trained harder and was more disciplined than anyone else on the team. In doing so, became a team leader, and those who followed became just a little better because of it.
Mike noted that when he played with his brother at the University of Tennessee, being one of only two brother combinations ever to be starters on the same team in the school’s history, that from the start of spring practice until January, after the bowl game, he wouldn’t touch alcohol.
“That wasn’t easy, because you know how wild college football players could be,” he recalled. “But Doug never drank. But at the same time, he never looked down on anyone who did.”
That attitude would serve him well in pro wrestling, particularly in the early 90s in All Japan Pro Wrestling. Like in football, where he was mostly an I-formation blocking fullback, known for a bruising style and being good in short yardage situations, Furnas was a great player on an all-star team.
While Doug Furnas & Dan Kroffat were written up in Japan this past month as one of the greatest tag teams in that country’s history, they rarely worked main events, and never were on top on the big shows at Budokan Hall. They usually worked in the middle, usually defending or challenging for the All-Asia tag team titles. The belts, which date back to 1955, are the single oldest still existing championship in that country. In holding the titles five times between 1989 and 1994, no team in the history of those belts held them as many times. The only other foreign tag team to ever hold major promotion titles five times were their contemporaries, Terry Gordy & Steve Williams. The only teams in Japanese history to have held more major tag team titles in Japan are two native teams, Giant Baba & Jumbo Tsuruta in the 70s and 80s, and Toshiaki Kawada & Akira Taue in the 90s.
In wrestling, Furnas & Kroffat, or Furnas & Phil Lafon, Kroffat’s real name, are remembered together. The two couldn’t have been more different. Most great American teams in Japan were long-time friends, like Gordy & Williams, Dick the Bruiser & The Crusher, Bruiser Brody & Stan Hansen, The Road Warriors, or brothers like The Funks or The Steiners.
But in this case, they were just two guys on a tour. Kroffat was a great worker, breaking in with Stampede Wrestling and that hard athletic style that transferred well to Japan. But he didn’t have the kind of size they wanted in their foreign headliners, so it made sense to put him in a mid-card tag team. It was a spot in the promotion really made famous years earlier by The British Bulldogs, Dynamite Kid & Davey Boy Smith, who were usually kept in the middle, working with the younger Japanese wrestlers doing highly athletic matches that often stole the show. It was only in the big year-end tag team tournaments that they would work with headliners. Other teams came along, like the Malenko Brothers, in a similar role. Promoter Giant Baba saw Furnas, a powerhouse who could do incredible athletic moves, and figured he would make a good partner for Kroffat.
“I didn’t even know who he was when Baba put us together,” said Lafon, who even this past week didn’t want to talk much about the person his career was also synonymous with. “We all have our different ways of grieving. All I can say is that I loved Doug very much and I will miss him.”
“They complimented each other perfectly,” said Martha Furnas, Doug’s second wife, a Vice President at Geigo Insurance. The two married in 1995 after they met in 1988 when both competed as powerlifters. “They each had something that the other didn’t have, which together made them both better.”
But even with their differences in lifestyle, the two became best friends. Once the team was established, Lafon left the business end to Furnas, who booked the two together between Japan tours, most notably a strong headline run for the UWA in Mexico, where they twice held the world tag team titles. The two started there as a masked team, although the name the Can-Am Express, the same name the team used in Japan, was a giveaway as to who they were. They worked with most of the country’s top teams of that era, particularly Silver King & El Texano, Los Cowboys. Furnas also put together the deal where they would come in as a tandem to WWF.
Furnas handled the business, and Lafon took care of everything that happened inside the ring. Outside the ring, they didn’t socialize that much. Lafon was like most of the wrestlers in Japan, enjoying the nightlife that being a genuine celebrity in Japan afforded you. Furnas was completely different.
Furnas was legendary among the wrestlers of that generation for what he didn’t do. He was as strict as anyone about what he ate. He never drank. Among the people really inside of Japanese wrestling, they would tell the stories about Furnas coming to Japan with his suitcase filled with cans of tuna.
“We’d go to Costco before every tour and pack the luggage with as many cans of tuna as would fit,” Martha Furnas laughed.
The reputation was that Furnas was smart with his money, because eating in Japan could be expensive. And while he was always thinking business, Martha Furnas said it was more about how strict he was about eating than the money.
“He thought he could never get the right type of food in Japan on the road,” she remembered. “It wasn’t so much the money. He’d eat rice, and then put yogurt on his tuna in the morning for breakfast if you can believe that. He was a Medallion traveler with Delta so the weight of his luggage wasn’t an issue.”
She noted for all the talk about how he was not going out at night and saving money, when he was in his hotel room, he was always calling home.
“We’d talk on the phone all night. We had thousand dollar monthly phone bills, so whatever he was saving by not going out, he was spending on the phone.”
But because of that reputation, those in Japan were shocked when the news broke.
“I hate to say it, but when you hear about guys like Mike (Hawk), Terry Gordy, Bam Bam Bigelow, Curt Hennig, you would accept the news right away,” said one Japanese insider from that period. “But for Doug, all the people around the business, even the ones who didn’t know him, everyone knew that he was a very straight serious athlete.”
That early 90s period is remembered in many different and conflicting ways with the benefit of hindsight. The promotion was as hot as nearly any promotion in history at its peak. Its centerpiece were the final shows of most of the tours, held at Budokan Hall. While old-timers sometimes like to talk about pro wrestling in their day and give the impression that every show was a sellout and every match was a shoot, from June 8, 1990, the night that Mitsuharu Misawa pinned Jumbo Tsuruta in what turned out to be a legendary match which came about 500 people shy of a sellout, until the streak ended in early March of 1996, every All Japan show held in the city of Tokyo sold out. The string of more than 200 consecutive sellouts in the same major city is believed to be unprecedented in the history of pro wrestling anywhere.
Furnas & Kroffat were the guys who helped pave the way for the superstars who ended up carrying the company during its glory period. They were the key opponents for people like Toshiaki Kawada, Mitsuharu Misawa, Jun Akiyama and Kenta Kobashi when they were on the rise. The program that put them on the map was in 1989 and 1990 with the Can-Am Express vs. The Foot Loose, Kawada & the late Samson Fuyuki. They also regularly put over Tiger Mask, with various partner, before he unmasked as Misawa, and worked with Kobashi all the time until Kobashi had risen to full-time main event status.
At times, Budokan Hall was such a hot ticket that when they would put tickets on sale for the next show, just among those in the building, they would almost all get in line to buy tickets, for themselves and their friends. The 16,000 seats would sellout to the tune of as much as $1 million from only those fans in the arena that night. The matches were physically hard. They were some of the greatest matches ever held, but the physical toll was terrible.
The promotion was filled with young deaths and destroyed bodies. Few from that era, like Stan Hansen, Johnny Ace (John Laurinaitis) and Dory Funk Jr. got out relatively unscathed, although likely all feel the repercussions of those matches.
Many passed away, some legends who were there all the time, others who passed through. They died of various reasons, some directly related to wrestling or drug use, and others due to unlucky genetics, from Giant Baba, Jumbo Tsuruta, Misawa, Gary Albright, Big Bubba Rogers, Terry Gordy, Steve Williams, Davey Boy Smith and Steve Doll. Many of the rest were left with crippling injuries and replaced body parts, like Lafon, Danny Spivey, Kenta Kobashi and Dynamite Kid. Many others had to battle severe pain killer addiction problems.
Furnas’ problems later in life could at best be only partially attributed to wrestling. His father battled heart issues in his 40s. Furnas suffered serious injuries in two very bad car accidents. He played a bruising style of football from third grade until his early 20s. Between football and pro wrestling, particularly the All Japan style, likely suffered countless concussions, and he had the mentality that he would likely never tell anyone about them and keep going. It wasn’t until much later in life that he understood the repercussions.
There were enough that it was very important to him that if something happened to him that he could donate his brain to the Sports Legacy Institute. It was heartbreaking that the brain wasn’t preserved well enough after death due to the time lag from when he died until when his housekeeper discovered him where it could happen. He also lifted ridiculously heavy weights, the toll of which had to take its toll on his joints, that couldn’t have been helped by all the football and wrestling.
Since retiring from wrestling in 2000, he had one hip replaced, one knee replaced, and both shoulders replaced. He made remarkable recoveries from all of them, so quickly that his doctors were amazed. He never complained, and only his closest friends were aware of any of this. To show the extent he internalized and tried to keep his health issues private, in 2005, when he decided that as a way to battle Parkinson’s Disease, he was going to become an avid bicycle rider, he went in for a check-up and stress test.
He failed the test, due to 80 percent blockage in one of his arteries. He told nobody, not even his wife. He scheduled a surgery when she was on a business trip to Washington, DC, so she wouldn’t worry, or perhaps even find out. She might not have except after his heart surgery that included an angioplasty and having a stent put in his heart, he wanted to go home and feed his dogs. When they wouldn’t release him due to risk of bleeding, the usually quiet and mild-mannered former superman of the iron world insisted on leaving. It was only then that his wife was contacted and found out about it.
But even after all those surgeries, and battling Parkinson’s Disease, he became an avid bike rider, often going 80 to 100 miles a day. Even until the end, when the Parkinson’s medication was taking such a toll on him that he would be throwing up for several days after treatment, once he’d recover, he’d get up in the morning and ride all day.
Mike Furnas remembers one day around 2000 when he came to visit his brother in San Diego and instead of going to the gym in the morning, something they did religiously, he took him out to breakfast at a local restaurant. In the discussion, he said he was retiring from wrestling, and talked about opening up a group home for teenagers who had problems. He didn’t want to be the guy who stayed too far past his prime as his athletic skills were waning. He walked away, and never looked back. With the exception of some contact with a few friends like Jody Simon (Joe Malenko), who he shared a lot of non-wrestling interests with, he kept in contact with almost nobody from wrestling. But quietly, and from afar, he felt every tragedy.
“The last time I was at his house in Tucson, on the desk in his office was a piece of paper,” remembered Mike Furnas. “I went to look at it, and he told me not to because it would only get me sad. It was a list of his friends in wrestling that had already passed away.”
Martha Furnas remembered that he felt a closeness to all the wrestlers who passed away that he knew, and noted that he had saved as a keepsake Terry Gordy’s Delta luggage tags.
“Every time he heard of someone he knew passing it broke his heart,” said Martha Furnas. “You know about the mortality rate of wrestlers.”
Dwight Douglas Furnas was born December 11, 1959, growing up as the fourth of five children of Wayne and Mary Furnas on a farm in Commerce, OK. Mike was born 16 months later. In the early 60s, Commerce, population less than 2,500, was as famous as any small town in the United States because it was where America’s golden boy sports idol of that period, Mickey Mantle of the New York Yankees, grew up.
In fact, Wayne and Mary Furnas went to Commerce High when Mantle was the school’s star athlete. Mary knew him well, sometimes covering for him.
Mike’s oldest memories of he and his brother playing together on the farm include his father calling them in to watch the black and white television set and seeing Mantle at the plate. Although several of Doug’s friends couldn’t remember Doug, a man of few words, ever bring up Mantle’s name, Mike said when they were kids he was their inspiration.
“We’d see him and knew that if he came from Commerce and made it big, then there was no limit to what we could do,” he said.
Doug was always athletic and competitive, and while those who competed alongside him marveled at his mental strength and discipline, Mike noted there was a lot of help in the genetics. Their grandfather, legend had it, was the toughest guy in the area. As far as the people in the area were concerned, they would tell you he was the toughest guy in the country.
Mike remembers racing bicycles with him at a young age, and if by some chance he could keep up or was about to go ahead, Doug wasn’t adverse to reaching out and shoving his bicycle over. He hated losing that much. But when he got older, that changed and he developed a sense of fair play.
On the farm, his father set up goal posts and Doug as a young kid started kicking soccer style field goals, and by high school could consistently nail them 40 and 50 yards. He was actually a better kicker than he was a running back. As a senior he was considered the best high school place kicker in the state. He was also a champion bullrider. But it was the work on the farm that set the foundation for his success in sports. Mike noted that even when they did three-a-day practices in football, it was nothing that tough for them because of how hard they were used to working at home.
He was the team’s star running back and kicker as a sophomore in high school. After the season, at 16 when he and Jodi Thompson, his girlfriend at the time, and later his first wife, were in the bed of a truck with his parents driving back from a rodeo event Tulsa, when they got a serious accident that saw him break both of his legs, and his back, rupture his spleen as well as hit his head hard.
He was in the hospital and throwing up red. Mike remembered that he immediately recognized it was blood being thrown up, since the two of them spilled each others’ blood regularly while roughhousing. They found out he had ruptured his spleen as well, and had they not realized it, he could have died, but they removed the spleen. He was told that he may never walk again, but it was clear very quickly that wasn’t going to be the case. He was also told in no uncertain terms that he would never play football again.
“He was a tough kid,” said one of his best friends, Ed Coan, considered by many to be the greatest powerlifter who ever lived. “How are you going to tell a kid that you can’t run or jump again? No matter what, he’s going to try and do it. A lot of doctors don’t know what the fuck they are talking about. You don’t know what the human spirit will let you do, and usually athletes are the ones ahead of the game anyway.”
Even though it was 1976, Mike vividly recalls his brother coming back, first walking with metal braces. He got rid of them and the crutches quickly. One leg healed faster than the other. He dumped the crutch and at home, and even at school, when the bad leg wouldn’t let him walk, instead of using a crutch, he would hop on his good leg. He missed a year of school. Not only did he come back to play football, but he also competed in the long jump and high jump in track. It was that jumping ability that was really his in-ring trademark as a pro wrestler, most notably his high dropkick where he would nail the opponent high in the head, make contact and flip over in the air and land on his feet. It was among the best dropkicks, and perhaps the most amazing, because of the spin and landing, in pro wrestling history.
By the time he was a senior, he was an All-state football player, who led Oklahoma to a 14-6 win over Texas in the annual Oil Bowl game in Wichita Falls, TX, where the high school all-stars of each state played. Furnas kicked two field goals in the game. High school football is huge in that part of the country and that got him media attention throughout both states.
It was at that point he had to make a few decisions about sports. In what would turn out to be the pattern of his life, he made the decisions and never looked back. The first was that he had to make a choice after high school, of either bullriding, where he was considered good enough to have a professional career, or football. He chose football and was able to make a complete break from bullriding. But in football, he caught more college attention as a place kicker than as a running back. He insisted on being a complete player, and didn’t think just being a place kicker constituted that. So he stayed in the area, going to Northeastern Oklahoma A&M, a junior college in nearby Miami, OK, as a running back. Mike was an All-American guard in 1980, when the brothers led the team to an undefeated national championship season. They were recruited together by Doug Matthews, now a Knoxville media personality but then an assistant coach at the University of Tennessee.
Mike remembered once when his brothers’ pro wrestling jumping ability was used on the gridiron, in a short yardage situation. Instead of his usual run right at the defensive player style and punish them when they tried to tackle him, he took off and leap frogged over a pile of humanity, with absolutely no concept of how he would land, other than he was going to pick up the yardage.
Because of his powerlifting exploits, when he was in college, he was known as the strongest man in college football. During football season, he would train to maintain, and once the season was over, he would into his heavy lifting mode.
During the spring of his senior year, on March 26, 1983, in the collegiate national championship meet held in College Station, TX, he set collegiate records in the 242-pound weight class in the squat (881.75 pounds), the deadlift (768 pounds) and overall total (2,074.75 pounds). He also led the University of Tennessee team to the national team championship. His three records haven’t been broken in the ensuing 29 years.
“He was way ahead of his time,” said Coan. “He was extremely regimented in his training and set up his own routines.”
Powerlifting was his next obsession, and he mentally left football behind after a hamstring injury ended his stint with the Denver Broncos in 1983 without him playing in a regular season game. After that, he geared himself completely to powerlifting, building his gigantic thighs with his heavy squats. He actually did try football one last time in 1984, going to camp with the Memphis Showboats of the USFL with his brother, a short-lived league that tried to compete with the NFL.
But by that time his legs were so huge that when he would sprint in football, the hamstring injury would come back. He really had mentally left football behind after being cut by the Broncos, and may have been doing it as much to have one final fling being on the same team with his brother. But his brother, who went on to play pro football in Europe for a number of years, said he was grateful that the two had one last hurrah as a tag team in pro wrestling in Smoky Mountain Wrestling and some other places between Doug’s Japan tours.
He learned from the injuries, and in his pro wrestling days, would concentrate on stretching, to the point he could do the splits, and he rarely had those injuries come back.
“He had so much muscle that he had an imbalance and when he’d run all out, the hamstring would pull,” remembered Mike, about that 1984 period when they were in the Showboats camp together.
“He stretched an hour a day,” said Martha Furnas. He made sure he was limber. It was the only way to prevent injuries.”
Coan noted that Furnas was unique among powerlifters in many ways, besides the obvious all-around athletic ability. He was as mentally driven and disciplined as anyone. During his competitive career, he coached himself, which was almost unheard of for the world-class powerlifter.
“His technical aspect was flawless,” said Coan. “And I’ve never seen anybody with that athletic ability at that bodyweight.”
A little known fact about his career is that he was allergic to chalk. Layers of his skin would come off in training if he used it. That hurt him in particular in his dead lift. Because of that he couldn’t train it like his bench press and squat. Within the powerlifting world there were stories about how the guy was so strong he didn’t even train his deadlift much, but it was more that he couldn’t than he didn’t as part of a unique training regiment.
He was known for his muscular 35-inch thighs, a product of his world record level squatting ability. Coan noted that Furnas’ leg workout consisted of nothing but squats, going extremely heavy each workout in sets where he would eventually escalate weight and do five, three and one rep, and then finish with three sets of five.
“His philosophy was that if you could do more leg exercises after your squat workout, that just meant you didn’t train your squats hard enough,” said Coan.
Coan remembered in 1985, the two competed in a national championship meet in Honolulu. Furnas had a shoulder injury and hadn’t trained in six weeks. He showed up, and set world records in both the squat (942 pounds at that time) and overall total.
He tried one World’s Strongest Man contest in Canada in 1986, but didn’t like it, recognizing that lifting heavy unbalanced things had a significant injury risk potential, and never did another one.
Although to this day Furnas is considered an all-time legend as a powerlifter, he only competed at the national level for five years, from 1983 to 1987. Professional wrestling and the opportunity to make money took him away from the sport at 27, with 29 world records to his credit.
Coan noted that he had the capability of doing considerably more.
“I was there when he squatted 986 pounds (his personal competition best although he did more than 1,000 pounds in the gym) ,” Coan said. “He did it like it was nothing. He never didn’t complete a lift. If he missed a lift, it was always due to a technical issue, not being unable to do it. He usually did his lifts in perfect form and looked like he could go heavier. I’d ask him why he didn’t go heavier and he’d say, `I didn’t have to that day.’”
Furnas instead would in each meet, try to gradually break the world record he had set the meet before. He was winding down his powerlifting career and already pro wrestling regularly in the Eastern Tennessee and Alabama territory when he entered the national championships held on June 28, 1987, in Bloomington, MN. He did a 980 pound squat, a 600 pound bench press and an 823 deadlift for a 2,403 pound total, setting two more world records, for the squat and the total.
Coan estimated that had he continued in the sport, he’d have worked his way up to a 1,050 pound squat, a 640 pound bench press and an 840 pound deadlift, only because of his allergy to chalk limited his training and progression. A total of 2,530 in that era would have set a world record for any weight class. Under the same set of circumstances, in drug tested meets (which is not to say drug-free, because Furnas was open about the steroid use in drug tested powerlifting meets, joking in 1992 when Vince McMahon hired Dr. Mauro DiPasquale to head their drug testing program that it was the same DiPasquale that he and the top powerlifters would go to for advice on beating the sport’s drug testing) with the same type of equipment, and rules, that total would have been, to this day, either the first or second highest of all-time. For a comparison, in the 275-pound weight class in 2011, the winning national championship total was 2,039 pounds, less than he was doing after ten weeks of training after football season ended while a senior in college.
There are modern suits that can add 200 or more pounds to your bench and squats that are part of some anything goes non-drug tested meets, where some modern numbers are significantly higher.
Coan noted that Furnas maintained a bodybuilder’s upper body, along with legs that proportionately looked like they were twice the size they should have been, rare for a world champion powerlifter.
“But for a guy who could bench press 600 pounds, he had the smallest arms.”
Mike Furnas noted that the mentality that made him not want to be just a place kicker in football extended when he moved into pro wrestling.
“He didn’t want to be that guy who would flip his long hair and kiss his biceps,” Mike Furnas noted. “He wanted to be the guy who, with nothing but his athletic ability, would do things in the ring that you couldn’t believe.”
Furnas, because he was a local legend in Knoxville from football and powerlifting, was a genuine drawing card in the city. But he really didn’t have the attributes that would have made him a major star outside of Japan. He was far too quiet on interviews and too soft-spoken. Plus, he wanted to let his athletic ability do his talking, which is not the right mentality for an American pro wrestler.
Still, he was well liked and after he made his name in Japan, was brought into WCW between tours in 1990, on the recommendation of Kevin Sullivan, who helped start his career. Jim Herd learned of his background and brought up if he could set a world record in the squat and do 1,000 pounds. Furnas, who had dropped weight for agility in wrestling, said he thought he could do it but would have to do a few months of training to get there, which would be difficult with the Japan tours. Herd may have been thinking he wanted to do it right away as a way to get him over, but due to timing issues, nothing ever materialized on it past the conversation.
Eventually had to make the decision between WCW and All Japan, and chose the latter. He remained in contact with Sullivan through the Japan years, but WCW would never offer him the kind of money he was making in Japan, let alone the kind of money he made with 24 weeks off to live in San Diego.
A story that epitomizes Japanese wrestling came in the 1994 Champion Carnival tournament. Furnas had a singles match with Misawa in a main event about a week into the tour. During the match, Furnas pulled out his Frankensteiner from a standing position out of nowhere, and in taking the bump, Misawa landed right on his head. They quickly went to the finish, with Misawa winning, of course, as Furnas was never booked in a way where he was going to beat Misawa in a single or a tag match the way booking was done in that era.
It was then announced the next day that Misawa suffered a severe neck injury and would be out the rest of the tour. Furnas was depressed. It was one thing to joke about his dropkick knocking out a tooth of one of his best friends, Joe Malenko, but giving a guy a serious neck injury was something different. Plus, when he got to the building that night, he got a stern lecture from Stan Hansen, about being sloppy, about how Misawa is the company’s biggest star, biggest draw and by injuring him he hurt the company that enabled him to make such a good living. He felt as low as he ever had in his career, and then one of the young Japanese wrestlers came to the American locker room and said that Misawa wanted to see him.
Now he was really scared. He came to the dressing room where Misawa was sitting in a chair, his neck in a brace, his usual stoic face but seemingly immobile and in great pain. It was like he was a bad dog who had gone to the bathroom in the house and now he was getting his nose rubbed in it. Misawa made a motion with his hands, and all the Japanese wrestlers left the room, so there was only the two of them. Misawa got up from his chair, smiled, took off his neck brace, walked around like nothing was wrong, and told Furnas it was all a work.
Giant Baba had Rubik’s Cube booked that year’s Champion Carnival tournament for Kawada to win it for the first time, beating Steve Williams in the finals. Because Misawa was the top guy and shouldn’t lose, except maybe once to a key guy and they probably didn’t want to pull the trigger on Kawada or Williams being the guy yet, the only way they could make it work was for Misawa to be injured early in the tour and forfeit all the rest of his matches.
Misawa then put the neck brace back on, sat back in his chair, told Furnas he could leave, and to let everyone else know it was okay to go in the room.
The weight of the world was lifted off his shoulders. He went back into the American locker room, where Hansen continued to brow beat him, telling him how he hoped he’d learned his lesson. This time, Furnas protested back, telling Hansen what happened when he went over there, that Misawa is fine and it’s all a work. Hansen shot back, “Not only did you hurt the top star, but now you’re making up some story and lying about it.”
By 1996, that Camelot period of All Japan Pro Wrestling was showing creaks. Budokan Hall shows still did well, but it wasn’t always sold out, let alone sold out by the end of the previous card. The spot shows were down from the peak of a few years earlier. At the end of 1994, Furnas & Kroffat vacated the All-Asia tag team championship, with the idea that they had moved past that title and would be contenders for the world tag team titles and work as main eventers. Baba told them that for their years of being the great team players, they deserved and were going to get a higher spot.
And it never happened, and resulted in the bitterness that saw them leave the promotion and sign with WWF.
Furnas would speak in short sentences with me that would say a lot. As far as his boss, Furnas would always say, “Baba’s word is good.” It’s why for years, he never considered leaving despite having built up a big name and having interest from other groups. He would say it was the best place in wrestling to work and the best person to work for. In 1996, when he started talking seriously to Jim Ross at WWF, as well as to WCW, he talked of the promises made more than a year earlier, and not kept, and said, “For the first time, Baba’s word wasn’t good.”
The problem was that for six years, Furnas & Kroffat had worked the middle, with their roles being to put over the rising stars, and have hot matches with them. They’d work some back-and-forth programs with the smaller Americans who could go. As much as they deserved for their efforts a shot at the top, from a business standpoint, it just wasn’t going to work. They had been there too long, and had lost to far too many people. The perception of the fans was too strong as to what level they were. Fans knew they were a great team, but had taken them for granted and weren’t going to now buy them in programs with the main eventers. In hindsight, one Japanese insider blamed the fans, saying it was a perception that couldn’t at that stage be broken. It was a lesson, and Furnas thought it was just time to go.
Their style and mentality was more suited for Japan. Once, while doing commentary during a Furnas & Lafon vs. Owen Hart & Davey Boy Smith match, Vince McMahon talked about how Smith, who was a powerful guy but not nearly in Furnas’ league, was the strongest guy in the match. But how would he know better? It wasn’t like Furnas would be the guy who would tell anyone about his world records. In WWF, he’d quietly listen as guys bragged about how much they could bench, never saying a word.
He was frustrated in WWF, but was a model employee and never complained about it, and more just joked about it. The only time I can ever call him being mad, and he was furious, was the night of the 1997 Survivor Series.
Furnas was probably the second or third wrestler who called me that night from Montreal, and possibly the maddest, but for different reasons than everyone else.
He called me and said, “You don’t understand what happened,” and I said, “I saw it, I’ve heard it, I know what happened. They double-crossed Bret on the finish” And he shot back, “No you don’t, you don’t understand what happened. You don’t have a clue.”
He was mad about Bret Hart being double-crossed, the utter chaos and distrust that was going through the locker room. But he was more focused on Blade Hart, Bret’s young son, who he saw crying in the corner in tears. His concern wasn’t the wrestlers, and it certainly wasn’t the fans. It was about a father humiliated for, in his mind, no good reason, right in front of his son, and a conspiracy of a number of people in the company to do it who never even thought for a second about anything but themselves, and that they did it with no qualms. He explained that scene, in vivid detail, such that to this day I have it etched in my mind, even though I never actually saw it.
Lafon was having knee problems by the time they hit WWF, although they had good matches in both WWF and ECW early on. Furnas wasn’t the same in the ring after the 1997 auto accident where he broke his back and his shoulder. When the decision was made to drop the Hart Foundation or Team Canada, where Furnas & Lafon were to get in a group led by Owen Hart after Bret Hart left the promotion, WWF had no real ideas for them. Paul Heyman wanted to use them because his audience was aware of their success in Japan, and WWF sent them to ECW as part of their working relationship. But WWF eventually released them. Lafon went back to Canada. Furnas worked a short period as a singles wrestler in ECW but knew it wasn’t clicking and that it was time to move on.
“We brought Doug and his tag team partner, Phil Lafon, to WWE in 1996 and they never disappointed with their work ethic or professionalism,” wrote Jim Ross, who put the deal together, shortly after his death.
“Doug was a soft spoken, highly intelligent man who was battling Parkinson’s Disease. I’ve been around many great athletes in my career, but I can’t recall seeing anyone with more of a combination or strength, speed and agility as Doug Furnas. His powerlifting numbers were off the charts. His dropkicks were pieces of art. And his speed was amazing for someone as thickly muscled, especially his freakish quadriceps.”
Mike recalled that when Doug would come back to Commerce and visit the family, even with all his success, he did just as he always did as a kid, and would get up early and work all day on the farm. Another time when he returned home, he caught up with an old friend who had cancer and chemotherapy had caused her to lose all her hair. To show support, Furnas shaved his head on the spot.
After wrestling, Furnas at first went into social work, at a center for abused girls and boys in San Diego. He had no care about salary, just wanted to get started in the job as soon as possible, feeling this was the next stage of his life.
He also invested in the bull breeding business.
Lance Hickman, who hired him for the job, felt limited in what they could do and Furnas asked him what it would take for them to start their own group home. Hickman told him it would take $100,000 cash to get started. Furnas wrote the check and they started a group home out of his house in La Jolla, CA, an expensive San Diego suburb, where he and his wife lived. Martha ended up being transferred to Tucson, so Doug would work with the children during the week, and have employees take care of them and the house on weekends when he’d go to Arizona. But he had to give up on the business because he was told he had to remove all stress in dealing with the Parkinson’s disease when he was diagnosed in 2004. He lived full-time in Tucson, which also had some of the best doctors when it came to treatment of the disease.
The funeral of the second most famous person to ever come out of Commerce, OK, was held on 3/10 at the Commerce High School Gym, not far from the statue of Mickey Mantle.
“It couldn’t have gone any better,” said Martha Furnas. “He had friends that came from all different parts of his life. Jody Simon (former wrestler Joe Malenko),a lot of friends from Knoxville, coach (Phil) Fulmer (his position coach who later became a well known head coach and is now a national television announcer), coach Doug Mathews. It was great, wonderful.”
“Everyone sat around and told old stories until it was really late. Everyone in town had the same stories. All they talked about was how intensely loyal he was to his friends and his work ethic.”
DOUG FURNAS CAREER TITLE HISTORY
ALL JAPAN ALL-ASIA TAG TEAM: w/Dan Kroffat def. Toshiaki Kawada & Samson Fuyuki June 5, 1989 Tokyo; lost to Toshiaki Kawada & Samson Fuyuki October 20, 1989 Nagoya; w/Dan Kroffat def. Toshiaki Kawada & Samson Fuyuki March 2, 1990 Nagoya; lost to Tiger Mask (Mitsuharu Misawa) & Kenta Kobashi April 9, 1990 Okayama; def. Dynamite Kid & Johnny Smith April 20, 1991 Tokyo; lost to Kenta Kobashi & Johnny Ace (John Laurinaitis) July 8, 1991 Osaka; def. Billy Black & Joel Deaton July 26, 1991 Matsudo; lost to Kenta Kobashi & Tsuyoshi Kikuchi May 25, 1992 Sendai; def. The Eagle (Jackie Fulton/George Hines) & The Patriot (Del Wilkes) September 9, 1993 Saitama; Vacated titles December 5, 1994 to concentrate on winning World tag team titles
UWA WORLD TAG TEAM: w/Dan Kroffat def. Silver King & El Texano June 28, 1992 Naucalpan; lost to Los Villanos IV & V November 8, 1992 Naucalpan; w/Dan Kroffat def. Los Villanos IV & V March 2, 1993 Naucalpan; lost to Los Villanos IV & V April 1993
ECW WORLD TAG TEAM: w/Phil Lafon (Dan Kroffat) def. Tracy Smothers & Little Guido December 5, 1997 Waltham, MA; lost to Lance Storm & Chris Candido December 6, 1997 Philadelphia
NWA USA HEAVYWEIGHT: def. Bill Dundee in tournament final July 4, 1988 Knoxville; lost to Mongolian Stomper July 21, 1988 Knoxville
NWA TENNESSEE HEAVYWEIGHT: def. Tony Anthony in tournament final July 17, 1987 Knoxville; lost to Buddy Landel March 19, 1988 Knoxville
