When I entered junior high, I made the rock ’n’ roll decision to give up the guitar and take up the trombone instead. You could hold a gun to my head and ask me why I felt the need to be a member of the brass section but I still can’t come up with an answer. I’d like to tell you that there was a hot French horn player or that I was into Count Basie, but there wasn’t and I wasn’t. Trombone? Even being an oboe player was cooler.
My trombone phase not withstanding, I was getting more into heavy metal, especially when I noticed that all the girls I liked were wearing shirts of bands like Ozzy Osbourne, Iron Maiden, Judas Priest. I decided if I ever wanted to actually talk to a girl, I’d better figure out who these guys were, pronto. So I bought Blizzard of Ozz by Ozzy and it instantly corrupted me. The Beatles were great, but Ozzy had become the new sheriff in town.
I completely immersed myself into the metal scene and became the Clive Davis of my neighborhood by discovering Metallica, Anthrax, Raven, Saxon, Trouble, Nasty Savage, Megadeth. I’d go to the record store and look through the bins to check out album covers and the band pictures, buying the ones that I thought looked cool.
I was such a metaller that I created major controversy with my metal friends after an appearance I made on the local video program CitiVision. “Chris, do you like Bryan Adams?” the host inquired.
“Yeah, he’s okay,” I said, not caring that I really thought he sucked. I just wanted to be on TV.
But the second I said it, I knew I’d made a horrible mistake. To the Iron Maiden crowd in my school, admitting that Bryan Adams was “okay” was akin to treason...the ultimate sin! Any true metalhead should spit on the grave of Bryan Adams and flash his family their nutsacks. As a result of my miscue, I was subjected to the worst buggings I’d endured since I was seen crying after Spock died during Star Trek II—The Wrath of Khan. “You cried when Spock died! You like Bryan Adams!” Becoming a Mathlete seemed to be my fate, until I quickly did something to regain my street cred. I formed a band.
My friend since birth, Kevin Ahoff was a really good guitar player and we started jamming together. While most teenagers dabbling in guitar first learn songs like “Smoke on the Water” or “Iron Man,” the first song I ever learned on bass was a complex little ditty called “Revelation (Life or Death)” by Trouble. Then we recorded the obvious follow up to a Trouble song...the theme from Peter Gunn. I don’t get the connection either. But it was the first time I’d experienced the magic of playing a piece of music with another musician...and I was hooked.
When I started high school, the first band I was in was called Primitive Means (great name), which was like a punk version of Chicago; ten guys in the band with three or four guitarists and anybody who came over could join in. We’d write riffs and make up lyrics on the spot. Since nobody else wanted to sing, I decided to pull double duty. Warren the drummer’s nickname was Rocky and after a few weeks of messing around, only he, Kevin, and I were left, so we formed another, heavier band named Scimitar. We jammed for months every day after school in Rocky’s garage. When the popular hot chicks who lived down the street were walking home, we impressed and regaled them with our version of “You Really Got Me,” Van Halen style. We’d crank it up just as they walked by and play “Da Na Na Nah Na” 100 times in a row. They still wouldn’t give us the time of day in school, but for those 2 minutes and 45 seconds of rock stardom they were our groupies.
Scimitar rocked Westwood Collegiate for our entire high school run, mostly doing Iron Maiden and Metallica covers—pretty intense stuff for a bass player in a three-piece. When a citywide Battle of the Bands was announced we entered and were accepted. We played a cover of “Peace Sells...But Who’s Buying” by Megadeth and a glam/prog rock original called “City Nights.” For my stage outfit I made a pair of jeans with mirrors glued on the sides, cut the feet off a pair of socks for wrist bands, and drew a big, black ? on a T-shirt, which was my subtle way of questioning foreign policy against Aborigines...or something. When the battle began, our set got off to a rough start when Kevin stepped on his cord and pulled it out of his guitar. We had to restart “Peace Sells” from the beginning and I felt like we were fucked. But we pulled it together, the crowd responded, and we rocked to the second round!
In round two, we totally threw down, inspired by the kids in the crowd who were singing along to “City Nights.” I’d like to say that we won the battle and surpassed the Guess Who as the biggest Winnipeg band of all time, but I can’t. We ended up losing to a band called the Fourth Floor who did a kick-ass version of “Back in the USSR” by the Beatles. Beaten by my own favorite band! Even though we lost, it was still an amazing night. We were backstage in our own dressing room/closet playing in front of kids from all over the Peg who knew our song. Stepping onto the stage under the glow of the stage lights in front of what felt like 5,000 (50) screaming fans was the ultimate rush. I began to think that I could do that for a living.
The battle was filmed for a local TV show and we got one tape of it that we were supposed to share. We decided we’d take turns with it and when the tape got to my house, I watched it once and it ruled. The next morning, I went downstairs to watch it again, only to be mortified when I saw that my mom had accidentally taped over it with an episode of The Love Boat! Scimitar’s finest hour had been erased forever, replaced with Isaac serving mai-tais to Charo and Jonathan Winters.
The need to perform continued and I landed the role of lead villain Bill Sykes in our high school musical Oliver! I threw myself into the role by spray-painting my hair black, introducing an Indiana Jones–style bullwhip into Sykes’s repertoire, and practicing my English accent constantly. The play culminated with my big death scene as I plummeted off the back of the stage (landing on a BTWF regulation-sized PORTaPIT), causing the entire crowd to erupt in glee. I felt like Eugene Levy in Waiting for Guffman, when he looks at the camera and says, “I have to perform, I must entertain.”
My résumé continued to grow as my group of buds and I became the masters of the Air Band. Air Band was a lip-synching competition where a group would get up on stage and pantomime a song—and we were the best in the city. Instead of doing one song straight through by one band, we took two songs from two different bands and put them together. “Wake Me Up Before You Go Go” by Wham! was combined with the heaviest metal song we could find, “Damage Inc.” by Metallica. We called ourselves the Wham Bangers and the crowd yawned as they saw another group of guys dressed in black leather and studs, miming the opening of the Metallica song. But their yawns turned to looks of confusion, as right when it was about to explode, you heard “Jitterbug,” and Wham! kicked in. Then balloons and confetti fell on the stage as a pair of hot preppy girls came out and started dancing. Then—boom—it’s back into the super-fast guitar solo from Metallica. It was so original and entertaining that we won the city championship.
Not to be outdone, the next year we took the original country version of “Take This Job and Shove It” by Johnny Paycheck and combined it with the punk version by the Dead Kennedys. Then we had the Johnny Paycheck part sung by a little person named Gary Dyson. At our high school, we had more midgets than black people (two midgets, one African-Canadian) and we took advantage of that. We won again, took our prize money, and blew the entire wad on hookers and blow. Actually we got nothing as the cash was donated to the Student Council. When we won again the next year with a Village People dance extravaganza called the Village Inn Guys, we made sure to have the check written out to Chris Irvine Esquire. Then we blew it on hookers and blow.
CHAPTER 4
MATH FOR HINDUS
I was only seventeen when I graduated from high school, which meant I had to wait another year before I could go to wrestling school. When Wallass told me he was going to apply to Red River Community College to take a course called Creative Communications, I was intrigued. More importantly, CreeComm would give me something to do until I was old enough to go to wrestling school.
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 m
ean, 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.
A Lion's Tale: Around the World in Spandex Page 4