The Bushwhackers tore the roof off of a few buildings, even a stadium that didn’t have one.
Luke and Butch, collectively known as The Bushwhackers, recently announced they were officially reuniting and plan on touring the world to give back to their fans. The Bushwhackers recently spoke with WrestleZone Managing Editor Bill Pritchard about what finally brought them back together and reminisced about some of their favorite memories in their collective careers.
Luke: “You mentioned Ricky Steamboat before, we wrestled him in 1980. Jay Youngblood and Ricky Steamboat and we can say, ‘Oh those guys were magic in the ring.’ God rest Jay, he died in ‘82 or ‘83 but him and Steamboat, one of the best. And of course Blackjack Mulligan and Dusty Rhodes, we wrestled against those two, and those two in Texas. So we’ve wrestled against, going back, we’ve wrestled a lot of names from that NWA era.”
They were known as “The Sheepherders” prior to joining WWF, a very violent tag team and a contrast to the fun-loving duo fans saw in the 90s. Luke picked a famed match against the Fantastics for his pre-WWF match choice, while Butch looked back on the electric atmosphere inside Wembley Stadium for their opening match at SummerSlam in 1992.
Luke: 1986, the Crockett Cup in the New Orleans Superdome, the Crockett Cup, 1986, the New Orleans Superdome, Sheepherders against the Fantastics.
Butch: Definitely, the favorite WWE match was at Wembley Stadium, SummerSlam [1992] in London, [with] 96,000-plus people jammed into Wembley Stadium. The biggest crowd they’ve ever had because they had ringside so that gave them extra people as well, you see. And we opened up the show and it was a six-man tag, and Vince says ‘I’m opening up the show with you guys and Hacksaw Jim Duggan. I want you to blow this roof off,’ even though there’s no roof. So there’s Luke, myself, the Bushwackers, Hacksaw Jim Duggan, against the Nasty Boys and Jacques Rougeau, The Mountie. And so when the music goes on and they said, and from New Zealand, with a combined weight blah blah blah, Luke and Butch, the Bushwhackers, and when we started pumping the arms and then Duggan’s coming out and Duggan’s coming out behind us with the flag and the 4×2, the noise was absolutely deafening.
“There was 96,000 people waving their arms up and down, up and down. Nearly 200,000 arms, if you want to count that way. And then with Duggan there as well, they got louder and louder. Then we all got into the ring. When we got into the ring, we couldn’t even hear each other talk, that was a waste of time. So Duggan put his head down. we have Duggan a double head rub, Bushwhacker style. Luke and I put our heads down, Duggan gave us a head rub, a hand each on our heads. Then we we pointed to one rope. We all marched, including Hacksaw Jim Duggan. We all marched Bushwhacker style to the edge of the rope. And I went “Woahhh!” And Luke went, “Yeahhh!” And then Jim Duggan, he goes “Hoooo.” We did that from corner to corner to corner, from rope to rope to rope. We coulda still been doing that now.”
“I’ve never heard noise like that in all my life because of the volume and the atmosphere. They managed to maintain most of that noise throughout that whole SummerSlam. Because we’d set it off at such a high velocity and Hacksaw was really, he was the single, the Bushwhackers were the tag, he was a bit out there, a bit crazy, a bit off the wall and they had the same or similar love for Hacksaw as they had for us. So it was absolutely fantastic, and we were always great mates and we’ve been great mates ever since. But that made our hairs go up on our arms. That was just incredible. Words can never really say how we actually felt from being out there that particular night. Absolutely amazing.”
Check out the full-length match against The Fantastics below:
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