A Lion's Tale: Around the World in Spandex

by Chris Jericho

  When I started high school, I had the attitude and look of a rocker, including a sweet mullet that I made worse by using a crimping iron to straighten the back. It fried my hair and earned me the nickname Steel Wool. But I also played hockey and was an all-star water polo goalie, the master of the egg beater (don’t ask), so I had a lot of jock friends too. I had the same combination of athleticism and creativity that had originally attracted me to wrestling.

  Meanwhile, wrestling was becoming a bigger part of my life. I missed the original WrestleMania, the WWF’s version of the Super Bowl, but when it was time for WrestleMania 2 I took the bus down to the Winnipeg Arena and watched the show on closed circuit television, the archaic version of PPV. You paid for a ticket, which gave you the privilege of going to the Arena to watch the damn thing on a giant out-of-focus movie screen.

  The glitz and excitement that surrounded WrestleMania took wrestling to a different level for me and I realized that the business was a hell of a lot bigger than what I saw in the Winnipeg Arena every month. I started to dream that maybe someday I could become a wrestler. The problem was that most of the guys in the WWF were huge and I was not. Another friend, Dave Fellowes, was also incredibly into wrestling and we had this crazy idea: Maybe if we hung out together at the Arena in muscle shirts, the British Bulldogs would see our muscularity and decide to take us under their wing and train us to be the Winnipeg Bulldogs. Of course they could just as easily have taken us to the basement, put ball gags in our mouths, and given us to the Gimp, but we’ll never know now will we?

  In 1986, Winnipeg started getting broadcasts of Stampede Wrestling out of Calgary. This new company looked cheap and was broadcast out of a livestock field house but the wrestling was off the charts. It was fast, hard-hitting, action-packed, and completely ahead of its time. It was a melting pot of styles, exciting to watch, and I realized that the WWF wasn’t the only game in town.

  There were a couple of other wrestling shows on the tube as well, and I watched them all. We had the local WFWA based out of Winnipeg, the UWF based out of Oklahoma, and the IWA based out of Montreal. The IWA featured all these guys with thick French accents who could hardly speak English and the show was even cheaper-looking than Stampede. But they had some great characters. There was a guy called Floyd Creachman who managed the Man of 1,000 Holds, Leo Burke. Creachman was doing an interview and said that Burke was the Man of 1,002 Holds, to which the interviewer butted in, “But I thought he was the Man of 1,000 Holds?” Creachman deadpanned, “He learned two more.” That to me was the greatest line ever—a line so good I ripped it off a decade later.

  Then came the day when my life’s path became written in stone. I was watching my weekly dose of Stampede Wrestling when a music video of Bryan Adams’s “Hearts on Fire” began to air. But instead of featuring clips of a pockmarked, greasy-haired rock star, the video featured clips of a blond-haired, solidly built wrestler performing the most mind-blowing, acrobatic moves I had ever seen...and I was completely blown away. The video continued and I watched in total astonishment as this guy who couldn’t have been more than five years older than me executed moonsaults, back flips off the top rope, back flips off other wrestlers’ backs, and the grand finale where he grabbed a guy’s hand, leaped straight to the top rope, sat down on the top rope and flipped onto his feet, only to throw the other wrestler halfway across the ring! I was always more into the high-flying guys in the WWF like the British Bulldogs and Randy Savage, but they didn’t have anybody there who could do this type of stuff. When the video ended, the name that appeared on the screen was Owen Hart, and he instantly became my new hero. He was the youngest son of the promoter of Stampede, Stu Hart, and the brother of another one of my WWF faves, Bret “The Hitman” Hart. When I saw Owen do his thing, I was struck by a feeling of desire so strong that it might as well have been a bolt of lightning sent straight from the heavens above. I didn’t just want to be a wrestler... I had to be a wrestler.

  Owen wasn’t 6 foot 8 and 300 pounds like most of the wrestlers in the WWF seemed to be. He was my height and had the kind of muscle that I could have if I trained hard and ate right. Plus, Calgary was in my universe. It was a city I’d been to and seen with my own eyes. It wasn’t like the faraway places where the WWF toured, places I couldn’t just get on a bus and visit. I decided that somehow, someway, I was going to go to Calgary and have Owen Hart teach me how to wrestle.

  All my friends and I could think about was wrestling, and during class we drew pictures called Classic Wrestling Moments. I drew a picture of Owen and me holding the Stampede tag team championships and Wallass drew a picture of King Bundy dropping an elbow on the midget Little Beaver, during WrestleMania 3. Fellowes drew a picture of Roddy Piper destroying Adorable Adrian Adonis’s Flower Shop talk show set (Adonis had gone from being a tough biker to a sissy). I drew another picture of Andre the Giant pinning Hulk Hogan, while a corrupt referee counted to three, which was inspired by the craziest wrestling angle we’d ever seen.

  It was one of the most important matches ever in wrestling: Hogan vs. Andre the Giant for the WWF title on prime-time TV. I had a job at a deli and that night I had to work so I was going to have to miss the show. I told Wallass with a tear in my eye, “I have to miss the Hulkster’s match, so as soon as it’s over, you have to come straight here, do not pass Go, do not collect $200 (Canadian), and tell me what happened!” A few hours later, Wallass staggered breathlessly into the deli. “Oh my God, man! Oh my God! There were two referees!” He stuttered and stammered, barely making any sense. “And one got plastic surgery to look like the other one . . . and he had money in his pocket . . . and Hogan lost the belt.”

  I stopped him right there in disbelief and shook my head. “What did you say?”

  “The Million Dollar Man paid off an evil look-alike referee to cheat,” Wallass continued, “…and…and…and…and Hogan lost the belt.”

  I felt my stomach drop. Hogan had been the champ since I became a fan of the WWF four years earlier. He had been the victim of the ultimate double cross, when the official of the match had been kidnapped and replaced by his evil paid-off twin brother who fast-counted the Hulkster’s shoulders to the mat, causing him to lose the World Wrestling Federation heavyweight championship to Andre the Giant! Then Andre turned around and, in his words, sold “the World World Wrestling tag team title” to his boss, the Million Dollar Man, Ted DiBiase. You couldn’t write stuff this good!

  Finally it sunk in that Hogan had lost the title. I was devastated and it was just about the worst night of my life. I felt like, “Hogan lost. What are we going to do? Where are we going to go? Who’s gonna save the free world from the evil commies now?”

  In order to boost our flagging spirits, Wallass and I had an idea. We began going to our high school gym every Wednesday night for what we called Wednesday Night’s Main Event. We simply told the gym teacher that we wanted to practice gymnastics and he allowed us to set up the PORTaPIT, which were gym mats that were bigger and thicker than mattresses. We spread them out over the hardwood floors and biggity bam, we had our own personal wrestling ring. After some brainstorming, the best name we could think of was the Big Time Wrestling Federation and biggity-biggety bam, the BTWF was in business baby!

  So we had our matches and we had a whole roster of guys who we’d pretend to be. They were either parodies of WWF characters like the Memphis Man or the Wild Warden or original characters like the BFG—the Big Fat Guy—or the Vid Kid. We’d spend hours in class putting together elaborate story lines and spend more hours having the matches themselves, which would always end with a cliff-hanger to lead us to the next week. Due to our fanatical watching and studying of the WWF TV shows we were able to figure out most of the moves...DDTs, suplexes, body slams, pile drivers, whatever. We could also both take back drops and land on our feet. Keep in mind that we were beating the crap out of each other on school property WITH the teacher’s permission...a highly sueable offense in today’s world, doncha think?

/>   The matches continued every Wednesday, finally building up to the biggest show in BTWF history...PummelMania. This show was to be the culmination of all the big feuds we’d been working on for months. One of the main feuds featured Sheriff Bobby Riggs (the corrupt Southern racist cop) against the Spirit Walker (an Indian mystic whose name we’d ripped off from a Cult song). They finished off their feud for the Intercity Title at PummelMania with what we called a Segregation Match. The ring had a line in the middle and you had to pin the guy on your own side of the ring for the fall to count. And of course, we did a big false finish where Sheriff Bobby Riggs pinned the Spirit Walker on the wrong side of the line, only to get rolled up by the wily Spirit Walker and lose the match. I still think that’s a hell of an idea for a match that could be used today...are you reading, Vince?

  The heavyweight champion of the BTWF was a character I played called the Eastern Crowbar. I have no idea why we gave him the name, why he was our big star, or why he spoke with a hybrid Schwarzenegger–Canadian Indian accent saying things like, “I’m Eastern Crowbar coming for to get you.” His big rival was the Galangoo Man, who hailed from a small island in the South Pacific and was rumored to be a cannibal. They feuded over the BTWF title, which was a very prestigious piece of hardware that we made out of cardboard. The big main event for PummelMania was a special Grotto Valley Death Match for the championship. I have no idea what a Grotto Valley Death Match was or how we thought of it. But it was an angry match, my friends, and it culminated with the Eastern Crowbar crawling up a twenty-foot (or six-foot) steel ladder on his way to certain victory. Just as the Crowster reached the top of the ladder and prepared to jump off onto the helpless Galangoo Man for the win, the gym door opened and the janitor walked in. Everyone called him Egypt because nobody could understand the gibberish he spewed out of his mouth, but it was easy to understand his intent as he started screaming at me, “Downnoo...Youga downnooa!” I tried to negotiate with Egypt by explaining that I just had to do this one move and then we would split. Egypt’s words were still muddled but were becoming more distinct, “No owne zing. Youga doooowwnnnnssss!” He then shambled over and stood over the Galangoo Man, which gave me no choice.

  I jumped off the ladder and kicked the son of a bitch in the face.

  Actually, I climbed down the ladder with my tail between my legs and the legendary PummelMania main event was declared a no contest.

  In the summer, we took the matches to my swimming pool where we organized a massive Intercity Title tournament, using the edge of the pool for...ummm....dives and splashes. We also published a BTWF magazine that featured articles on all the wrestlers in our company and had ads for such things as BTWF plum and coconut cookies. We created the BTWF Orchestra to record theme songs for the wrestlers and put together Suplex: The BTWF Wrestling Album, featuring all our guys singing songs.

  We were both pretty much raving schizos at this point.

  In the midst of all this imagination, I was hit with a cold shot of reality when my parents decided to get a divorce. My parents had been married twenty years, but over the last few years they had been unraveling at the seams. I used to lie in my bed and listen to them arguing, sometimes flat-out screaming and swearing at each other, just praying that they would stop so I could get to sleep with a clear conscience. About a year earlier, my parents had started sleeping in different rooms. They didn’t say anything regarding the reason why and they didn’t have to; it was obvious they were having MAJOR problems. It all came to a head one night when I forgot to put the milk back in the fridge and my mom just exploded on me. Things quickly spiraled out of control and my parents got into this monster fight. I jumped into the escape pod of my friend’s car and split and when I came back home, my dad was gone. A few days later he came back and my mom and dad sat me down and told me he was moving out. My dad was really upset, almost in tears, but my mom was very calm and matter-of-fact about it. I was furious that they made me sit there and be in the middle of the whole thing. Their contrasting emotions—him so sad, her so businesslike—just confused me even more and made me feel worse. As a result, instead of asking what the problems were about, I just clammed up and waited for it all to be over. My way of dealing with the situation was to just tune out. I just completely ignored the situation and totally committed myself to my friends, my music, and my wrestling. Their divorce also skyrocketed my desire to get out of the house, to escape from Winnipeg and to make something of myself. I still loved both of my parents but just because their lives were messed up didn’t mean I was going to mess up mine too. It was now clear what my life’s mission was...wrestler be thy name!

  CHAPTER 3

  BODY SLAMS, BISCUITS, AND BIBLES

  After my dad moved out, he got an apartment close to where my mom and I lived and made a concerted effort to remain a part of my life. This was really apparent when he started showing up at my church on Sundays. I had been going to church with my mom since I was a little kid but at some point we just stopped. As I got more and more into music, heavy metal in particular, one of the genres I dug the most was Christian metal. A lot of kids in school were into the satanic metal bands like Slayer and Venom and that made me even more curious about what it was like on the other side of the Cross. Bands like Stryper, Bride, and Barren Cross sounded cool, looked cool, and convinced me that you could be into Jesus and still be cool. Listening to those bands influenced me to go back to church and I started going by myself on Sundays. I took confirmation classes and I even became a Sunday school teacher at sixteen, with my long steel-wool hair, rumpled dress shirt, and all. The minister at St. Chad’s was an ex-hippie named Tony Harwood-Jones who was a very good guy and easy to relate to. He encouraged me to explore my relationship with God. His attitude about being a Christian was “it isn’t what you wear as long as you are there.” I never missed a Sunday at church after my parents split. When my dad first started showing up, he just came to hang out with me, but after a while he got more into it and came to hang out with Jesus too.

  We also made a point of spending time together at his office, which just so happened to be upstairs from a convenience store that rented WWF videotapes. So we rented the latest tape, ate some Kentucky Fried Chicken (well what did you think KFC stood for?), and watched wrestling. My relationship with my dad at that time was based on body slams, biscuits, and Bibles and we became closer as a result of the three.

  Now that I’d decided the course of my life, I knew I would have to get a whole lot bigger. I joined a gym, stuffed myself with protein (along with a sock), read every muscle magazine I could find, and ordered the Arnold Schwarzenegger EZ Curl Bar to “Get 21 inch arms just like Arnold.”

  One day while watching Stampede, my heart jumped out of my mouth when I saw an ad for the Hart Brothers Pro Wrestling Camp. This was my chance to be trained by Owen and the entire Hart family, including Stu Hart himself! I wrote to the address on the screen and a couple of weeks later when I opened the reply, I found out two things:

  1. I had to be eighteen to go to wrestling camp, and

  2. I should be about 225 pounds.

  The letter had been written by a guy named Ed Langley, who was the representative for the Hart Brothers Camp. His advice on weight gain was to eat beef, fish, liver, and to drink only milk... a direct violation of Koko B. Ware’s rule. He also advised me to lift weights for two and a half hours a day and run three miles a day. So I ate raw eggs and liver (trying not to barf) and lots of fish and beef. Every shift at work, I’d weigh myself on the deli scale to check my progress. I started at 175 and my grand plan was to be 235 pounds by the time I left for wrestling school.

  I’d decided on 235 as my target weight about a year earlier when I met Ricky the Dragon at an annual car show called the World of Wheels. The show featured fancy funny cars, soap opera stars, Playboy Playmates, and more importantly, a WWF wrestler! Of course I couldn’t give a shit about seeing Michael Knight from All My Children or meeting Miss March, Mary Jane Rottencrotch, I just wanted t
o meet my hero himself, Ricky “The Dragon” Steamboat! I met Wallass at the show and tried to decide what I was going to say to him, as we figured we’d have time to ask the Dragon one question. We got our tried-and-true picture system ready and when I reached the front of the line, my big question for Ricky was “How tall are you?” (Hours to think of an inquiry or a witty anecdote and “How tall are you?” was the best I could do. The trend continued.)

  Ricky replied that he was 5 foot 11 and when I asked him how much he weighed, just as he answered 235 pounds, Wallass snapped the picture. When I got the picture back we were both actually in the shot, even though Steamboat’s eyes were half closed and I looked like a complete tool with bad hair and my mouth wide open like a Muppet. Wallass’s photographic ineptitude had struck again.

  Steamboat was the same height as me but a whole lot bigger. From that moment on, working out became my second biggest hobby. My biggest hobby was my band.

  I started playing bass guitar when I was fourteen years old when my cousin lent me his Paul McCartney Hofner bass. I kinda knew my way around a guitar, after taking lessons when I was nine from a guy called Brad Roberts. Coincidentally, Brad would become internationally famous as the leader of the Crash Test Dummies, best known for the song “Mmm Mmm Mmm.” I knew they had really made it big when Weird Al Yankovic parodied the track.