A Lion's Tale: Around the World in Spandex (31 page)

When I brought the chair back in the ring, he made the mistake of turning his back on the pretty boy. When he turned around, I hit that sumbitch in the head as hard as I could. He dropped like a sack filled with more potatoes (stiff shots) than he’d hit me with earlier. He could’ve killed me in a real fight, but just like in my encounter with Bruiser Bedlam, my attitude was if I’m going down I’m taking someone with me.

Much like in Mexico, the Japanese were notorious for taking liberties with the foreigners. If you fired back by taking a few liberties of your own, you earned their respect and it was pure business after that. The rest of the match went fine and Onita ended up pinning Mark Starr. He hadn’t pinned one of Sudden Impact because he wanted to see what we had to offer. It must not have been enough because we didn’t work with him again for the rest of the tour.

I knew that pro wrestling (or Puro-Resu as they call it) was big in Japan, but I didn’t realize just how big until I got there. There were over a dozen different companies operating on an island the size of Montana. Clips of the matches ran nightly on TV, while results from the previous night’s matches were listed in the national newspapers next to the baseball scores.

There were two wrestling-heavy newspapers,
Tokyo Sports
and
The Weekly Fight
, as well as two glossy first-class magazines that featured some of the best sports photography I’d ever seen. They were called
Weekly Gong
and
Weekly Pro Wrestling
, which everyone called
Baseball Magazine
because it was published by a baseball magazine company. Got that?

There was something that made perfect sense about calling a wrestling magazine
Baseball Magazine
in Japan. After all, this was the home of television shows named
Heavy Metal L-Game
and
Space Runaway Ideon
and baseball teams called the Nippon Ham Fighters and the Hiroshima Carp. The majority of the Japanese media and high-school-educated people could speak just enough English to where it made just enough sense to not make sense. I call it Japanglish.

It was a thrill to see a full-page color spread in the magazines of Sudden Impact’s debut in Japan. The pictures were amazing action shots of the unique moves that we were doing and the text called us Canada’s Steiner Brothers. That was high praise, as the Steiners were two of the biggest gaijin (foreign) stars in Japan and a great team.

After an unimpressive debut in FMW (the Curse lives on), Sudden Impact worked mostly in the first half of the future shows. But that really wasn’t a surprise, as our technical style didn’t fit in with the barbed-wire, bombs, and bloodbaths mind-set of Onita. We stood out in FMW, but not necessarily in the best of ways.

Most of the shows had between 1,000 and 3,000 fans in attendance and even though they were the largest crowds I’d worked in front of, I was surprised at the fans’ lack of reaction. It was just like the Privates’ concert that Ricky had taken me to—the fans watched politely and didn’t say a word for most of the match.

I’d be dismantling my opponent’s arm with an impressive array of holds and submissions while crickets chirped in the audience.

“Do I suck? Why is nobody saying anything?”

Then I’d do an acrobatic move or a simple amateur wrestling takedown and the fans would explode with an OOOOOOHHHHH! Then they would go quiet again.

I realized that the fans weren’t bored, but were merely watching intently. They understood the moves and the reversals of moves and appreciated the craft of the business. They respected the art of wrestling, and since there wasn’t much of it in FMW, they appreciated our work.

A majority of the fans wore nice clothes or suits and it seemed like going to the matches was a prestigious event, like going to the opera. They really paid attention to the story and intensity of the performances. When the match built to the end, the secret was to incorporate a bunch of false finishes (“2 counts” as Wallass and I had called them), to which the fans would count along, “One, Tuuuu, OOOOOOOOOHHHH!” Then they would give a round of quick applause and silence themselves again. When a match really got cooking, the buzz would pick up until the crowd was screaming and clapping along with every move. It took a while to get used to it but once I did, I got addicted to the unique reactions and began to custom-build my matches in order to get the maximum reactions out of the fans.

CHAPTER 31

THE DOM DELUISE OF WRESTLING

I
t seemed to me that Japan as a country had Americanized itself as much as possible. But walking around Tokyo was like traveling through a funhouse where everything inside was slightly warped.

There were MakuDonaldo’s and Domino’s everywhere but the Japanese versions had a weird taste. People walked the crowded streets in sixty degree weather wearing expensive downhill skiing suits as a status symbol. Guys would dye their hair blond to stand out but would end up with a creepy burnt orange hue instead.

I wanted to ingratiate myself to the Japanese people as much as possible so I informed anybody that would listen that I was a huge fan of the Japanese metal band Loudness. But while Loudness was cool to me, they’d seen better days in their home country. Proclaiming my loyalty to Loudness was like going to the States and saying I was a huge Dokken fan.

But I figured everyone would be impressed by the fact that I had all of their records and knew the singer’s name was Minoru Niihara. Finally I was told to step out of the 1980s and get into the 1990s scene and was turned on to Japan’s biggest rock band, X.

They had sold out the Tokyo Dome for a reason—they were amazing. My Clive Davis of Winnipeg tendencies resurfaced and I made it my mission to spread the X gospel to all of my metal friends back home.

It was a pleasant surprise to find out how big the metal scene was in Japan. Grunge was taking over America and slowly killing hard rock, but in the Orient I could spend hours at Shinjuku Tower Records checking out all of the new metal releases.

I also discovered that the Japanese versions of CDs from all of the biggest bands included bonus tracks, stickers, and other special treats that you couldn’t get anywhere else. The CD booklets contained exclusive pictures, lyrics, and liner notes written by the bands and translated into Japanese. Fourteen years later, it was a thrill for me to handwrite the liner notes for the Japanese pressing of Fozzy’s
All That Remains
.

While I spent hundreds of dollars on CDs, I also spent hundreds of dollars when Ricky took Lance and I to a place known as a lobby bar. It was basically a fancy lounge with the gimmick of being waited on head to toe by beautiful Filipinas. No gaijin were allowed in without a Japanese chaperon but once we got inside, the girls showered me with back massages, poured my drinks, and fed me like I was Jerichus Caesar. Then we danced the night away (I wore my neon green fanny pack the entire time) to the most annoying Japanese pop music I’d ever heard. But the girls could move and they even taught me the Lambada (that’s the Forbidden Dance!). They treated me like I was King Stud, but just when I thought I was about to have my Pocky played with, the girls escorted us to the door and bid us konbawa. Instead of receiving a happy ending, I received a bill for $500.

Turns out it was the girls’ job to hang out and flirt with the customers, while pouring as much whiskey as possible. They got a commission on each $250 bottle that we drank. For that type of cash, they could’ve at least given us Caviar.

In the BTWF days, Wallass and I had read a list of Japanese wrestlers in a magazine and had seen the name Tarzan Goto. How could you be Japanese and have the name Tarzan? From then on the mere mention of the mighty Tarzan elicited gales of laughter. Lo and behold when I arrived in FMW, who was the number two man behind Onita? Tarzan Muthafuckin Goto!

He was a short, fat, stocky beast with no front teeth and a face only your mum could love. He also had no problem beating up fans if the opportunity presented itself—like when someone clapped him on the back as he walked to the ring.

When a foolhardy fan did just that, Tarzan promptly punched the sorry bastard in the face. Then Goto chased the guy through the stands, grabbed him, and threw him out of the building. In the States if you even look in a fan’s general direction, you can be sued. In Japan to be attacked and beaten by your favorite wrestler was a badge of honor, something to brag about to your friends.

But I’m sure to be decked by a guy named Tarzan Goto was a lot more credible than getting the crap kicked out of you by el Pandita. That’s right, I said el Pandita. That’s Spanish for Little Panda and English for Worst Gimmick Ever.

Asian people are fascinated with pandas and the Pandita gimmick was intended to exploit that obsession to the fullest. This clown’s ring costume was a full-body Panda suit; lovable cotton ball tail included. He would skip to the ring, handing out candy to the fans before jumping into the ring and holding his arms out as if to say, “I’m cute and lovable!” During the match, you would have to sell Pandita’s terrible-looking offense unless you could grab his tail. That would cause the lovable creature to run around in circles chasing it.

It got worse and his crowd-pleasing big move belongs in the Shit Hall of Fame. Pandita would knock his opponent out of the ring and hit the opposite ropes like he was going to do a dive through the ropes onto the floor. Instead of flying through the ropes, he would jump up and land horizontally in a Playgirl pose with his legs spread open and his chin on his fist like a cute little panda bear. The crowd would go “OOOOOOHHHHH!” and I would wonder what the hell was going on. Guys would butcher each other with barbed-wire baseball bats and in the next match out came the Dom DeLuise of wrestling.

FMW was a smaller company with a will-work-for-food mentality and a lot of the shows were held in outdoor parking lots with makeshift fences erected around them. There were no dressing rooms for us, which meant we had to change on the bus. It also meant that there were no bathrooms or showers and after the matches we’d have to endure a three-hour bus ride covered in dirt, sweat, and blood. It looked like the Spirit of ’76 when the crew checked into the hotel and more than once I saw the desk clerk run into the back room to hide from us.

Even though we had separate hotel rooms, Lance and I spent so much time together that we started to get on each other’s nerves over the smallest of things.

“You smack your lips when you eat.”

“You walk funny.”

“Your white boots are pissing me off.”

The tension culminated in a dressing room scuffle in Aichi that led to us rolling around on the floor like a couple of eight-year-olds. But when it was time to make the donuts and get the job done, we always worked hard together in the ring. We’d been through so much since training in the bowling alley that we had become like brothers. Sometimes brothers gotta hug, sometimes brothers gotta fight.

But everything came full circle for us when we arrived at the Hakata Star Lanes in Fukuoka...another bowling alley. We’d traveled thousands of miles around the world just to end up in the same combination bowling alley/wrestling venue that we’d started in, in Calgary.

The main event at the Star Lane was a street fight battle royal. I must’ve missed the memo and I didn’t have anything that you could actually wear in a street fight. So while everybody else was wearing jeans, sleeveless T-shirts, weightlifting belts, and cowboy boots, I ended up wearing zebra-striped Zubaz gym shorts tied up with a shoelace and my floppy black wrestling boots from the Calgary cobbler, the most unintimidating street fight outfit in wrestling history. Throw in my canary blond fried hair and you know I was the epitome of TOUGH. It was no surprise that I was the first one thrown out of the ring.

But it had been a good night and I was feeling cocky. So I decided to go and speak to Onita—something we were specifically told not to do.

“How’s it going eh?”

“Okay.”

“I really wanted to say thanks for having us on the tour.”

“Okay.”

“Are you having a good tour?”

“Okay.”

“You’ve got cool ring music.”

“Okay.”

He was looking at me like I was nuts for breaking the no-talking-to-the-almighty rule. I thought I might have pissed him off with my faux pas, because Ito later told me never to speak to Onita directly again. Yet on the last show of the tour, he told us we were beating the top FMW tag team of Horace Boulder and the Gladiator (or as the Japanese called him, the Grajiator).

I took it as a sign that they had enjoyed our work and were excited about Sudden Impact’s future. But when we went to get our payoffs for the tour, instead of receiving the princely sum of $800 a week that Fred’s homemade contract had promised, we were only paid $600 a week.

It was bullshit and I was pissed. Granted we were rookies with no name value but we’d still worked our asses off and earned every penny we were promised. We’d impressed the other wrestlers in the company enough that the rookies were stealing our high-flying moves and claiming them as their own. We’d introduced top rope dives to the floor and Frankensteiners to the company and the different dimension we brought to FMW made it a more well-rounded company. Sudden Impact brought to the hardcore FMW what Eddy Guerrero and Chris Benoit brought to the hardcore ECW years later.