EDITOR’S NOTE: The Toughest Man In the World was on the CBS Late Movie on February 25 and September 14, 1988.

Mr. T’s first starring made-for-TV movie role has him playing, well, himself. Or Bruise Brubaker, a tough and scowling secret softy nightclub bouncer who is in charge of a neighborhood center. He’s a Vietnam vet, he has a mohawk to honor his roots, and he’s illiterate. And he’s gonna help kids, fool!

As he’s helping kids, he’s also trying to keep Billy (John P. Navin Jr.) from being part of the crime that rules the streets. He gets Tanker Weams (Tom Milanovich) to show up at the center but also screws up and promises everyone will be a winner in a fake charity giveaway, so he has no idea how to keep working people, kind of like Mr. T’s buddy Hulk Hogan and no, I won’t let death stop me from sharing stories of the Hulkster’s lies when they’re as funny as him being in Metallica or not getting the Foreman Grill deal because he missed one phone call.

Mr. T is a little like the Hulkster. Born Laurence Tureaud, he grew up in a family with twelve kids in Chicago, calling himself Mr. T so no one would call him boy. A city wrestling champion, he went to Prairie View A&M University on a scholarship but was kicked out in the first year. Then, he was in the army and tried out for the Green Bay Packers before inventing himself as he bounced at Dingbats Discotheque. He claimed that he was in more than 200 fights and that his chains were from the people he beat in fistfights. This turned into being a bodyguard for Steve McQueen, Michael Jackson, LeVar Burton, Diana Ross, Muhammad Ali, Joe Frazier and Leon Spinks — to Wiki name just a few — as well as whispered assassination and runaway tracking deals.

Then, ABC aired two of the World’s Toughest Bouncer contests, with Mr. T bloodying huge Tongan fighter Tutefano Tufi and defeating someone in the second in under a minute after saying, “I just feel sorry for the guy who I have to box. I just feel real sorry for him.” Sylvester Stallone saw this, cast him as Clubber Lang, and the rest was history.

After a role in Penitentiary 2, he was on The A-Team, had a cartoon, a cereal, was in D.C. Cab and even had a motivational video, Be Somebody… or Be Somebody’s Fool! Also: an action figure that told you to always respect your mother and a rap album, Mr. T’s Commandments. Also, he became a wrestler, backing up the Hulkster, and this is where it gets funny. Despite being in all those toughman fights, T was freaked out about the idea that his image would be destroyed by a wrestler going off script. Maybe the rumor that Bruiser Brody was getting paid big money to hurt him — this would have never happened, Brody knew that at some point in his career, he would work for McMahon — got to him. He kept no-showing almost until the day of the event.

An aside. A few weeks before Mania, Mr. T and Hogan were on the USA Network show Hot Properties. According to Remind Magazine, “After some encouragement from Mr. T, Hogan agreed to demonstrate a chokehold on host Richard Beltzer, but ended up applying too much pressure and rendering him temporarily unconscious. Belzer recovered quickly enough to send the show to a commercial break, but he officially filed a $5 million lawsuit against both guests in 1987. The case was settled quietly in 1990.”

They also hosted Saturday Night Live the night before the show, a last-moment replacement for Steve Landesberg.

Roddy Piper, Bob Orton and Paul Orndorff, Mr. T’s opponents at Mania, may not have liked this outsider and made him nervous, but they knew where their money was coming from. That’s why the stories — Hogan wrote that “security at Madison Square Garden resisted letting Mr. T’s entourage into the building the day of the show. He was distraught by the confrontation and declared that he would just leave. The Hulkster, however, took credit for finding the actor and talking him down, getting him to see through the planned main event attraction. Paul Roma claimed that he even no-showed a few years later, as Mr. T was to manage the Young Stallions — started.

OK, another aside. Wrestlers are notoriously full of shit. There’s no way a big payday guy like Mr T was going to be with enhancement talent like the Young Stallions. And Hogan’s book isn’t non-fiction.

Then again, comedian Chris Burns once said, “I can – again, inside baseball – tell you Piper was not a fan of Hulk Hogan, moreso, Mr. T. I mean, rest in peace, Roddy, I don’t think he’d have a problem with me telling this story. He legitimately was going to kill Mr. T. I’m not kidding around. He said, he thought, “You know what? If I just back suplex him and arch it a certain way, he lands on his neck, they can’t tell me that I did it on purpose.” Piper had that thought several times, and then was like, “I’m not gonna mess up WrestleMania like that.”

Roddy Piper, also a wrestler, was probably full of shit a lot of times.

Anyways, back to Mr. T in a TV movie.

He falls for Leslie (Lynne Moody), beats gangsters and ends up knocking everyone out, including running through a wall like he’s on Takeshi’s Castle. It’s as stupid as you want it to be, and I wanted it to be really stupid.

This was directed by Dick Lowry. Yes, the same man who made Smokey and the Bandit 3. It was written by Vincent Bono, Dick Guttman and, of all people, Hammer writer Jimmy Sangster. How did that happen?

You can watch this on YouTube.