A Lion's Tale: Around the World in Spandex (30 page)

Fred considered himself to be a mastermind and came up with the idea for us to go to Japan as Sudden Impact. He insisted that the team name was as important as the team itself and was convinced that his name was money in the bank. Lance and I disagreed and thought as a Canadian team the name Northern Lights was a better fit. Fred wouldn’t hear of it, as he was convinced that Sudden Impact was the handle that was gonna make us all rich!

I guess it was better than the Dirty Harrys...

Fred’s other genius idea was to have Sudden Impact wear tights made of fabric that would change colors as we wrestled. I’d never heard of such a magical textile; perhaps Fred was planning on purchasing this mystical fabric from Willy Wonka. But even if an Oompa Loompa was growing the fabric from a Shazbot tree wouldn’t the concept of color-changing tights fit the Northern Lights gimmick much better?

The amazing material never materialized, but our Japanese tour did. Fred had us sign contracts supposedly sent from Japan which were pockmarked with white-out and printing errors. In hindsight, it’s obvious he’d doctored an old contract and passed it off to us as a new one, the same way he fabricated the WCW contract for Big Titan.

He also promised us work visas and then changed his mind and said we didn’t need them. Instead he gave us his friend Ricky Fuji’s address in Tokyo and told us if we were hassled at immigration to say we were on vacation and staying at Ricky’s place. (Sounds like the name of a sitcom.)

The actual flight concerned me too. I didn’t understand how an airplane could stay up in the sky for that long and I was afraid I was going to freak out en route. Unfortunately, since I couldn’t take a steamship to the Orient I had no other choice.

When I picked Lance up on my way to the airport, he was wearing a collared shirt and tie for no apparent reason. When I asked him why, he replied, “Well, we’re going to Japan, so I thought I should wear a tie.” Naturally.

He was already annoyed at me because I was late in picking him up. But that pretty much defined our relationship...I was late and he wore a tie.

FMW was still a fledgling company and didn’t have a lot of money so they bought us the cheapest plane tickets possible. Therefore we had to fly three hours south to Los Angeles in order to connect and fly the three hours back north on our way to Narita, Tokyo’s airport.

When we boarded the plane to L.A., I saw that the Edmonton Oilers were also on our flight—sitting in coach with the rest of us peasants. Mark Messier, Jari Kurri, Bill Ranford, most of the guys who’d eliminated my beloved Winnipeg Jets from the Stanley Cup Playoffs only a year earlier were all there.

I knew that the guy who sat beside me used to play for the Oilers but I couldn’t remember his name. It was driving me nuts, so when he got up to go to the bathroom I bent over to examine his carry-on bag stuffed under the seat. I fumbled around until I found the name tag and a cold chill ran up my spine when I saw whose bag it was. Then a warm squirt ran down my undies when a pissed-off deep voice from over my shoulder said, “Get your fucking hands off my bag.”

I slowly looked up and faced Dave Semenko, one of the toughest goons in NHL history. Cementhead’s sole reason for employment with the Oilers was to annihilate anybody who came even the slightest bit close to Wayne Gretzky.

And now he wanted to annihilate me.

I sat in silence, speechless and quivering in the face of death.

Semenko leaned into my face with the power of 1,000 knockouts behind him...and his coffee breath almost made me knockout 1,001.

“Don’t touch my stuff, asshole.”

When I began to retort he cut me off and said, “Don’t even think of talking to me for the rest of the flight either.”

I stared at my suddenly quite interesting shoelaces for the rest of the trip and survived the flight to L.A. unscathed. I passed the time by reading my Japanese-English dictionary and making note of all the phrases and words I was going to use when we landed.

So Lance and I arrived in Narita with no work visa, no idea who we were supposed to be meeting, no address for the company that had brought us over, and less than $200 (Canadian) between us. After making it through customs trouble-free (once again without having to utilize the Force), we were met by Ito, the FMW referee. He spoke English, but it didn’t matter to me, as I was practically fluent in Japanese after my in-flight crash course.

The dictionary said that
Konnichi-Wa
meant “Good Afternoon.” I’d had problems trying to discern the correct pronunciation on the plane, but I figured it out and when Ito introduced himself, I practically shouted into his face, “Kone-Ikki-way!”

He looked at me with a confused smile, so I said it again. “Kone-Ikki-way!”

He explained that the proper pronounciation was
Ko-Ni-Chi-Wah
, so after five minutes in the country I’d already established myself as a patronizing, stereotypical, sanctimonious tourist, who said Good Afternoon at six o’clock at night and mispronounced it to boot. I was the bizarro Long Duck Dong.

The drive from Narita to Tokyo was supposed to take two hours but took nearly four because of the bumper-to-bumper traffic. The rain pouring out of the sky made the Tokyo cityscape seem futuristic and straight out of
Blade Runner
: sleek modern skyscrapers with giant flashing neon signs illuminating highways stacked on top of other highways.

We checked into the tiny Tokyo GREEN Hotel, which strangely had a BLUE logo. My room was the size of a walk-in closet, but it was my first free hotel room and it was amazing. I put on the kimono and slippers that were provided by the hotel and sashayed across the room like I was the Last Samurai.

I didn’t want to waste a minute of sightseeing time, so I met Lance and Ito in the lobby and we hit the streets looking for sake and ninjas. We found neither, as all of the restaurants and shops were closed even though it was only nine at night. Finally we found a convenience store named Lawson’s Station. I was starving and some 7-Eleven style food, maybe a bean burrito and a Slurpee, sounded appetizing.

Lawson’s Station offered neither. What Lawson’s did have were such delicacies as corn sandwiches, kumquats, packs of peas in a pod, boxes of chocolate on a stick called Pocky, and shrink-wrapped squid. They had everything...except for something I could eat.

I settled on a can of Pocari Sweat (the all-time worst name for a sports drink) and a box of fried chicken pieces. I bit into the fatty piece of chicken and it was so spicy it burned the shit out of my mouth. The Pocari Sweat tasted like lime-flavored water and was no help in getting the fire out of mouth, so I bought a little plastic bottle of milk, downed it in one gulp, and barfed. It was soy milk or goat’s milk or mother’s milk, something other than cow’s milk and it tasted like piss.

I thought I was going to come to Japan and experience screaming fans and ancient temples. Instead I stood in front of a convenience store puking my guts out in the pouring rain. I could have just spent the night drinking in Calgary and achieved the same results without having to take a sixteen-hour flight.

We finally found a KFC and I was overjoyed. But when I bit into my chicken breast, I discovered a tiny brain behind the wing. I’m talking an actual gray matter brain with lines and ridges. I showed it to the manager and he and his employees huddled in a serious meeting before offering me a new piece.

I’d had enough and asked Ito where McDonald’s was. He stared at me in confusion until he finally figured out what I wanted.

“Ohhh you mean MAKUDONALDO!”

That was the name of the famous burger restaurant that featured the red-haired clown mascot Donaldo MakuDonaldo. I ordered a potato bacon pie and a Teriyaki McRib and shut my mouth.

The next morning, with the remains of the soy milk and Pocky still gurgling in my innards, the whole crew met in the lobby of the hotel and boarded the official FMW bus. That’s when I met Ricky Fuji, Fred’s illustrious connection to Japan. Unlike Fred he was friendly and down-to-earth. He also had waist-length hair and a strong desire to be Canadian.

“I love Canada man. It’s my favorite place, eh. I wish I could live in Canada.”

From then on we called him by his new Canadian name, Ricky McKenzie.

He constantly bombarded me with a bunch of oh-so-Japanese-style questions, in that they made sense but really didn’t.

“You like rock ’n’ roll sex music?”

“You like Richie Sambora’s hat?”

“Do you know any hockey players’ wives?”

“Do you like jeans?”

“How many pairs of sunglasses do you have?”

Ricky also sported one of the biggest fanny packs I’d ever seen. The fanny pack was a wrestler’s fashion staple in the ’90s, and my neon green pack was no slouch, but Ricky’s pack covered half his torso. He’d look through it for a pack of cigarettes, a pair of chopsticks, a monkey wrench. I’m not kidding about the monkey wrench, by the way.

Once again the power of music was universal and because he liked heavy metal as much as I did, we became instant friends. One night he took me to see a band called the Privates play at a small club. I was amused at how polite the Japanese rock fans were. They didn’t make much noise and just watched, clapping politely when the song ended. I soon learned it was the same way with Japanese wrestling crowds.

When we arrived at the arena in Kanagawa for the first night of the tour, Lance took a look at the list of the evening’s matches taped to the wall and his face dropped.

“This is terrible.”

“What’s wrong?”

“We’re not on. It’s our first night in and we’re not even on the show.”

I looked at the card and sure enough the names Chris Jericho and Lance Storm weren’t on the list. But the names Clise and Runce were—and that was us.

Like Cher, no last names were necessary. It was just CLISE and RUNCE. Clise was a bad phonetic translation of my name with the R sound not being pronounced the same way in Japanese, but I’d been called worse. I was once listed on an ad in the
Calgary Sun
as Chris Cherrykoo.

I also noticed that Clise and Runce were written across from Onita’s name, which meant that we were in the main event of the show. Excited by the huge opportunity we suited up in our fancy new multicolored Sgt. Pepper ring jackets with green and black Rockers rip-off tights, both made by Lenny St. Clair’s mom.

I threw a few warm-up kicks and said the same prayer that I said before every match. I was almost ready to rock.

I had one more task before the match, and when I went to drop the kids off at the pool I was agog (great word) when I saw the toilets in the bathroom.

They were nothing more than porcelain-covered holes in the ground, and the idea was to squat a few inches above the “toilet” and let it rip. To me, the bathroom is supposed to be a sanctuary, but there’s nothing relaxing about straining your legs in a crouch while trying to get the job done.

After a while I became smart enough to look for a handicap stall, or a Western Toilet. The Western Toilet didn’t feature cowboy hats or lassos, just a good old North American dumper. So did the handicap stall and they both featured a diagram on the wall of a stick man sitting on a stick toilet, showing people how to use it.

If you don’t know how to use a toilet...

I got the job done and hit the ring for the main event of Sudden Impact and Mark Starr vs. Onita, Sambo Asako, and Ueda, a kickboxer who wore boxing gloves during the whole match.

Lance and I made our big entrance by vaulting up to the top rope and back-flipping into the center of the ring. I remembered asking Shawn Michaels back in Winnipeg how to do a back flip and him telling me to get up there and just do it. I’d practiced back-flipping a few times in Calgary but this was the first official voyage. So I got up there and just did it, flipping backward with so much force that I over-rotated and landed on my ass. It was a complete embarrassment, made even worse by the platoon of magazine photographers who captured me falling on my posterior for posterity and the sour look on Lance T.’s face.

I got over my embarrassment when Onita got into the ring. It was a sobering experience to be standing across the ring from the boss of the company and one of the biggest stars in all of Japan.

Atsushi Onita had started FMW after becoming unhappy wrestling for All Japan, when he rallied a few sponsors and formed his own company. FMW was the first company to promote such delicate displays as electrified barbed-wire matches and exploding-ring death matches.

Onita’s build was fairly dumpy and he wasn’t much of a wrestler, but he had unbelievable charisma and personality. After his matches the fans would storm the ringside area as he doused himself in water while grabbing the microphone. He would then cut a long promo, bursting into tears every time. He became famous for his crying and the fans cried along with him, because he proclaimed himself to be a warrior for the people, with his tears signifying his fighting spirit.

People bought his shtick hook, line, and sinker and chanted O-NI-TA! while Joan Jett’s version of “Wild Thing” blared throughout the arena. He ended up becoming a cultural phenomenon and a senator in the Japanese Diet. Not bad for a marginal wrestler with only one move.

Once the match started, I got stuck working mostly with Ueda the kickboxer. He didn’t seem like he had any interest in being there and didn’t seem to have any interest in pulling his punches and kicks either. He was basically kicking the shit out of me. But one of the rules of FMW was that there were no rules, so I thought, “Fuck this guy,” rolled to the floor, and got a chair. It was Shane Croft in Calgary Part 2—The Return.