A Lion's Tale: Around the World in Spandex (6 page)

As the college year began, my dad played in a celebrity hockey game at the Arena. I decided to check it out and was killing time downtown before the game when I walked past this big dude, wearing a white-tasseled leather jacket. And I knew only one guy that wore a white-tasseled leather jacket, because he wore it on every episode of Saturday Night’s Main Event: Jesse “The Body” Ventura.

I sidled up next to him and began talking. It turned out that he was in town to play in the celebrity hockey game. The Body was the Shits at hockey but after the game, there was an after-party, so with my friends Gouge and Fellowes, we crashed it. I zeroed in on Jesse and for the next two hours I never left his side, talking about wrestling, movies, and his lack of hockey-playing abilities. He was the coolest, most informative guy and he gave me some great advice about being in the wrestling business:

1. If you want to be a wrestler, you have to be prepared to live every day in pain.

2. If you want to be a wrestler, you need to make sure you have something to fall back on when it ends.

3. If you want to be a wrestler, you have to remember it’s not what you earn, it’s what you save.

I told him about my plans to attend the Hart Brothers Camp and he laughed and said “Watch out for Stu Hart, he’s crazy. I’ve heard the tapes from the Dungeon where he literally tortures guys. But the toughest wrestlers in the world come from Calgary and if you can make it there, you can make it anywhere.”

He told me a story about filming
Predator
with Arnold Schwarzenegger. Jesse would figure out what time Arnold worked out in the morning, get there five minutes earlier, and put water on his face so when Arnold got to the gym he would see Jesse “sweating” and already training. Then he would work out and not leave until after Arnold did. Governor Schwarzenegger never knew when Governor Ventura started or stopped training—and it drove him nuts to think that the Body trained harder than he did.

I wrote an article about my meeting with Jesse for the college paper and got a good response. So when the National Wrestling Alliance came to Winnipeg for the first time, I was able to get an interview with Jim Cornette, who was one of the great heel (bad guy) managers of all time. Jim gave me an awesome interview explaining the angles he was involved in and the business itself. It wasn’t the last time Jim Cornette would explain the wrestling business to me.

After my stories got good reviews from the college crowd, I decided to see if I could get a gig at one of the major newspapers in the city. The AWA was launching a comeback, so I contacted the
Winnipeg Free Press
to see who was covering the show. I figured they had a whole team. It was surprising to me when they said nobody was. So I bought my own ticket, submitted the story, got paid fifty beans and the next day I got my first noncollege byline. I became the wrestling reporter for the
Winnipeg Free Press
.

I’d also landed a job as a cameraman at a public access UHF station that featured such programs as
Math for Hindus
. I literally fell asleep filming this laugh riot and the camera kept dipping toward the floor, which I’m sure frustrated math-loving Hindus across the province.

The
Free Press
promoted me to be its low, low, low-end sports reporter so I got to cover swim meets, CFL fashion shows, and an actual Tiddlywinks tournament. Seriously. That’s when I decided that instead of writing about other people, I wanted to be the guy who was being written about.

In the summer of 1989, my dad got invited to Calgary to play in a charity golf tournament. We both thought it would be a good idea to visit the Hart camp, so I went with him.

The camp was in the little town of Okotoks, about forty minutes outside Calgary. It took a few minutes to find the school, because it was inside a garage behind a Petro Canada gas station. I thought to myself, “This is the Hart Brothers Camp? What happened to Stu Hart’s basement? What happened to the Dungeon?”

But I was instantly taken by the dingy place with the dirt floor. Keith Hart (one of Stu’s sons who I’d seen on Stampede TV) was in there, the ring was set up, and there were some weights lying around. There were Stampede Wrestling posters on the wall of Brian Pillman, Bruce Hart, Chris Benoit, and Owen Hart and I knew it was only a matter of time before my picture would be beside theirs. I’d worn a tight muscle shirt, jeans, and cowboy boots so I would look as big and as tall as possible. After speaking with Keith for a few minutes, I flipped the fuck out when he asked me to go into the ring. Once inside, he asked me to take a fall onto my back. I did and Keith claimed to be quite impressed. I was stoked but I couldn’t believe I had to wait a whole other year before I could train for real.

Later that summer, local promoter Bob Holliday decided to start his own company, the Keystone Wrestling Alliance. He organized a tour of northern Manitoba Indian reservations and he hired me to be part of the ring crew along with Caveman Broda, a short, weird little guy with a crazy beard who coincidentally looked like a caveman. Broda was famous for going into supermarkets while on the road and denting canned foods on the metal shelves, ripping off the labels, and then demanding discounts for the damaged goods. He usually got the discounts, but was left with a duffel bag filled with unlabeled, dented tins of food. He never knew exactly what he was going to eat and constantly talked about “surprising” himself for dinner.

Broda was just one of a motley crew of wrestlers that had been assembled for the tour, including Man Mountain Mike (although since he’d lost about 175 of his 400 pounds, he was more like Man Mountain Stretchmark), a one-handed guy named the Iron Duke, and a big black dude named Catfish Charlie, who ended up being my roommate. But the big star of the tour was my old hero, Baron Von Raschke. Imagine my surprise when I found out that in reality he was really a mild-mannered schoolteacher with a Minnesota accent named Jim Raschke! Once the tour began it was my job not only to set up the ring, but to take ring jackets, sell programs, help with the luggage, and get coffee. I was also in charge of wrangling girls back to the hotel, but I was horrible at it. I didn’t have a lot to work with considering that most of the wrestlers looked like orcs.

The tour started in Riverton, Manitoba, and I invited a girl I had a crush on to come to the show. Soon after she arrived, the ring broke. I tried to fix it while the match continued by crawling under the ring and holding it up with my feet. I’d bragged to this girl how I was coming to Riverton with this big wrestling company and here I was on my back attempting to hold up the damn ring with my feet, while Jim Raschke the schoolteacher stomped around above me, threatening to administer the Claw to his fat opponent in front of fifty people. She left early.

As the new kid on the block (Wahlberg represent, yo!), some of the boys targeted me for the age-old wrestling tradition of ribbing. Ribbing is a form of initiation where you are made fun of incessantly and constantly. The guys called me Prettyfer and would say things like, “Why don’t you give us a kiss, Prettyfer?” For seasoned veterans it’s nothing to get upset about, but for an eighteen-year-old rookie it was the ultimate insult. They kept pushing me until I got so pissed off that I began plotting my revenge.

Fortunately for me, Catfish Charlie was a great guy. He was a journeyman wrestler who never made it to the big time, but he took a liking to me and filled me in on the wrestling business. When I complained to him about the dudes calling me Prettyfer, he sat me down and said, “You know what? If you’re going to be in this business, you need to learn a few things.”

Charlie sensed that I was dead-serious about becoming a wrestler and he also realized that I had no clue about how it really worked. He explained that in the wrestling business there was a tradition of weeding out the guys who didn’t belong and weren’t tough enough to make it. If the guy being made fun of got upset, the heat was turned up until he snapped. He continued and explained that wrestlers weren’t really fighting each other during a match but were working together to put on a show. I wasn’t stupid and at this point he was simply confirming my suspicions. But I was in for a real shock when he answered my next question.

“Yeah, I guess I see what you mean about the lesser guys, but the champions are really the best, right? I mean, they really win their matches.”

He looked me dead in the eye and said, “No, the champions are just like everyone else. They win when they’re told to win and lose when they’re told to lose.”

That was a hard one for me to fathom. The idea that when Hulk Hogan won a title it was actually given to him by the promoter didn’t compute. I was crestfallen. He explained that there really weren’t good guys or bad guys, just guys playing the parts that the promoter decided on. The way that Wallass and I had put together the BTWF was the way the business actually worked. I couldn’t believe how smart we’d been, yet how inadvertently stupid we’d been at the same time not to realize it sooner.

Shortly after my talk with Catfish Charlie, I was setting up the ring with Broda. “I hear you want to be a wrestler? Do you want me to show you how it’s done?”

This was what I’d been waiting for and I said yes instantly.

Broda picked me up before I knew what was going on and body-slammed me. Surprisingly the slam didn’t kill me and as I applauded myself for not crying, I looked up from the mat and saw him climbing to the top rope wearing these ridiculous black rubber boots that he always wore. He must’ve seen the worried look on my face as he looked down because he said, “The most important thing in wrestling is trust. Either you trust me, or you don’t. And if you don’t trust me, go home now.”

This was the moment of truth. The time to put up or shut up...shit or get off the pot...a penny saved is a penny earned...well you get the idea.

I could get up and leave my dreams on the mat to get crushed by the Caveman or I could stay down and leave my skull on the mat to get crushed by the Caveman. Either way the result would end my wrestling career for good. I thought about closing my eyes but before I could, Broda jumped off the top rope. I saw his crazy hair swaying to and fro. I saw his rubber boots flopping in the air. And I saw his knee start small and slowly grow bigger until it enveloped my whole field of vision like Godzilla’s foot. At the last parsec I closed my eyes and awaited Jesus to take me home. Except he didn’t. Even though I’d never heard of Caveman Broda and had never seen him wrestle, he had just given me a textbook knee drop from the top rope and I hadn’t felt a thing.

Using Broda as an example, I started gaining confidence that I could learn the art of pro wrestling and make a go out of it. My confidence was boosted even further because, Catfish Charlie aside, I looked more like a wrestler than most of the other miscreants on the tour. On top of that, some of the BTWF matches that Wallass and I had in the Westwood Collegiate gym were better executed and more convincing than the ones these guys were having.

Besides the Baron, none of these guys had any kind of unique personalities or interesting gimmicks that would capture the fans’ imaginations. I had already begun thinking about the gimmicks that I could use when I started wrestling. My first idea was to be a Christian wrestler named Christian Chris Irvine, who would stand up for what’s right and be a role model for all. I would throw Bibles into the crowd on my way to the ring and would wear yellow and black tights just like the biggest Christian metal band Stryper did. Granted it wasn’t exactly the Undertaker, but it was a hell of a lot better than Prettyfer.

I also studied the Baron’s matches. He was the most popular wrestler on the tour and the only guy that truly understood how to involve the crowd and get them into a match. He couldn’t do anything athletic in the ring, but it didn’t matter because he was able to manipulate the fans’ emotions almost at will. It was the biggest lesson I learned in the Keystone Wrestling Alliance: You have to connect with the audience.

With my apprenticeship complete it was time to learn many more important lessons as a student in the Hart Brothers Pro Wrestling Camp.

PART TWO GALGARY

CHAPTER 5

THE OBVIOUS TRANSITION FROM ARCHERY TO WRESTLING

I
n January of 1989, six months before I was planning to leave for Calgary, Stampede Wrestling went out of business. It was a huge blow for me and I was terrified that the Hart Brothers Camp was going to close too. My fears were somewhat alleviated when a story appeared announcing that the Canadian National Wrestling Alliance was planning to pick up right where Stampede had left off. I was relieved that there was still going to be a wrestling company in Calgary and that the school was still going to be operating. But the relief was bittersweet because my goal was to be a
Stampede
wrestler, not a CNWA wrestler.