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
In 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.
But you can’t stop rock ’n’ roll and you couldn’t stop Christian Chris Irvine either. I steamrolled on and made my arrangements to attend the camp. The price for the eight-week session was a cool 2,000 bucks and I would have to fork out an additional four hundred bucks a month to stay at (according to Ed Langley) “Okotoks’ finest hotel,” the Willingdon. I planned to cover the costs with a $5,000 bond that my dad had cashed in for me. I made all of my reservations and six days after I graduated with honors from Red River Community College (I’m a freakin’ genius), I packed up all my belongings into the trunk of my ’76 Volare and left the nest. I was nineteen years old.
After kissing my crying mother goodbye, I pulled out of the driveway fully intending not to come back until I’d made it. As I drove away, I looked in the rearview mirror and waved goodbye to my mom as she began to walk back into the house. I would never see her walk again.
My ’76 Volare had a lot of character, which is the automobile equivalent of saying that a girl has a nice personality. The color was a mesh of bottle green and rust red and featured a standard transmission that had been modified so that reverse was where first gear would be, third gear was where reverse would be, etc. Sometimes when I tried to put the car into gear the tranny would jam and I would have to crawl underneath the car to pull the gears back into place. But the Volare was my baby and I’d used the 400 bucks I’d earned as the Keystone Wrestling ring boy to buy the chariot that was going to transport me to the land of the big bucks.
So I popped the new Ratt cassette into the stereo that had only one working channel and began the twelve-hour journey to Cowtown. I drove past Westwood Collegiate on my way out of town and saw the big sign on the front lawn that said HAVE GOOD SUMMER (no joke). I thought to myself, “Someday my name is going to be on that sign.” It took fifteen years, but eventually it was.
After almost falling asleep an hour into my drive, I put on some Iron Maiden and began to think about all of the negative feedback I’d received about my decision to follow my dream. One event in particular stuck in my head. When Tony, the minister at my church, announced to the congregation that I was leaving Winnipeg to become a wrestler, there was a ripple of noise in the crowd when they started to laugh. Not all-out belly laughter, but it was enough to really piss me off. Tony didn’t make the announcement to make fun of me, he did it because he was proud of me. But to the general public, leaving town to become a pro wrestler was akin to wanting to become a sword swallower or a mime (mimes rule!). I had been dealing with people telling me I was too small to wrestle for years but this was much worse. These people were supposed to be a support group for me and I’ll never forget the stabbing embarrassment or the white-hot anger that I felt when I heard their scattered laughter. I vowed to prove them wrong. I never, ever went back to that church again.
I drove all day, stopping eight hours later in Medicine Hat, Alberta, and rented a hotel room for the night—the first of thousands. I checked into the room and ordered a movie from the pay channel called Great Ballz of Fire. I didn’t realize until it started that it wasn’t the Dennis Quaid flick about Jerry Lee Lewis, but actually a porno spoof of it. In retrospect, it was probably the better film.
I found my way to Calgary using a yellow highlighted map that my dad had given me and followed the signs to Okotoks. About forty-five minutes later, I turned off the highway into a storybook Norman Rockwell town of 5,000. I was looking forward to staying in “Okotoks’s finest hotel”...until I finally saw it. It wasn’t a beautiful chalet or a quaint mountain inn, but a run-down, two-story, faded pink dive.
I went inside the bar and checked in with Zig (the oh-so-friendly owner), got my key, and tried to figure out how the hell I was going to lift my trunk up the stairs to the second-floor room. I pulled the trunk out of the...um...trunk and was dragging it toward the stairs when this guy with a crew cut, skinny legs, and a potbelly walked up to me and said, “Are you here for the Hart Brothers Camp?” Startled that my secret had been exposed, I nodded and asked the guy if he was there for the same reason.
“Yes I am. Let me help you with that trunk.”
Like the scene in Planes, Trains & Automobiles when Neal Page helps Del Griffith lug his trunk across the field, this guy with stick legs and a spare tire helped me carry my trunk up the steps. It was ironic that the first person I met in Okotoks ended up being one of the best friends I’d ever have in the wrestling business: Lance Storm.
I got all my stuff into the room and noticed that it had no phone, a TV with only three channels, and a bullet hole in the window...you know, just the basics. The Willingdon itself was a typical small-town hotel attached to a bar and a smelly old restaurant called the Tray, which I quickly renamed the Ashtray. But Ed Langley wasn’t lying, it was the finest hotel in town. It was also the only hotel in town and it was where the class of 1990 was staying. And what a class it was.
On the plus side there was Lance, whose last name at the time was Evers. I have no idea why I thought he had stick legs and a spare tire (maybe it was the muumuu he was wearing), because the guy was muscular and ripped. I had come into camp at a solid 195 pounds (falling forty pounds short of my Steamboat goal) but Lance looked like he had at least ten pounds of muscle on me. I had been worried about being the smallest guy in the camp and my heart sank when I saw how big he was. My heart resurfaced when a short little guy with huge chipmunk cheeks who looked like Andy Kaufman came out of his room and said with a big smile, “I’m Victor DeWilde. I guess we’re gonna become famous wrestlers together huh?” I smiled and took stock of this pixie, who looked like he weighed about 160 pounds soaking wet while holding a brick. Victor was a former archery champion who had decided to make the obvious transition from archery to pro wrestling. It only got worse from there as I met Wilf, who had
one eye pointing off to the right and one eye pointing off to the left, Dave, a sloppy-looking lumberjack, Edwin Barril, a 400-pound farmer shaped like—what else?—a barrel, and Deb, the only girl in the bunch, who had the IQ of a kumquat and a face to match.
After meeting all of these misfits, I thought to myself, “Thank God Lance is here.”
Lance and I were the only ones who even remotely looked like wrestlers. Hell, we were the only ones who looked like we’d ever seen the inside of a gym. Not only was I not the runt of the camp, muscle-wise I was the second biggest one in the group. Judging all these books by their nonathletic covers, Lance and I instantly gravitated toward each other. Later on he told me, “Until you got to the hotel, I was considering just packing up and moving back to Ontario. But when you came in, I was relieved to see that there was at least one other guy who was taking this camp as seriously as I was.” I felt the exact same way.
The look of my fellow students wasn’t the first indication that the camp wasn’t all it was cracked up to be. A few months earlier I had approached Bret Hart at Gold’s Gym before a match in Winnipeg and told him I was going to go train in Calgary at his brothers’ camp. He replied with great surprise, “I didn’t know the camp still existed.” I figured that all the Hart brothers talked about everything, so how could Bret not know about the camp?
I decided to do a little name dropping to refresh his memory.
“Oh, well, it starts in a few weeks and I’ve been talking with Ed Langley about it.”
Bret looked at me blankly and said, “I don’t know who that is.”
Maybe Bret Hart had forgotten who Ed was, but Ed was still the guy who wrote me the letter urging me to run three miles a day, work out in the gym for two and half hours, and eat all the fish, meat, and eggs I could. If that was his personal routine, he must be a badass motherfucker and I was stoked to meet him.
A buzz came over my fellow students when the word spread that Ed had arrived at the hotel. I held my breath, flexed my biceps, and waited for my new mentor to walk in. When a sixty-year-old-looking man wearing his hair parted to the side with thick glasses and a giant beer belly sauntered in, I stared in disbelief at the real Ed. It was like thinking you were having phone sex with Jessica Alba and finding out you’ve really been beatin’ it to Bea Arthur. No wonder Bret had never heard of him—who in the hell was this guy? I found out that when Stampede closed, Keith Hart had bought the rights to the school from his brother Bruce and hired Ed, a former Stampede referee, to run it.
Ed acted like he was the Grand Poobah of pro wrestling and throughout the course of the camp regaled us with stories about his career and his life. Maybe his name should’ve been Langley Gump, because according to him he’d done it all. He had:
• Wrestled as the masked Dr. X in the WWF...which of course couldn’t be proven since Dr. X wore a mask.
• Taught ballroom dancing as an Arthur Murray dance instructor.
• Been a Scout leader who’d removed the ruptured appendix of a kid who’d fallen out of a tree while hiking in the desolate Rocky Mountains...and then sewed him back together with fishing line.
• Been a pilot who’d landed a plane on a deserted section of highway when the left engine (Ed was very detailed) conked out.
• Been a stock car driver who would crash his car for fifty bucks and would roll it for an additional fifty.
• Been working in a New York meatpacking plant when a slab of meat fell on him leaving him paralyzed. He was despondent and pissed off until he met a surgeon in a bar who operated on him, enabling him to walk again.
• Been a landscaper in Saudi Arabia. (What exactly did he landscape...sand?)
Ed would spew out these nuggets at any time with no regard of how ricockulous they sounded or how far from the truth they appeared to be. He was also the only guy I’d ever met above the age of eighteen who lied about his age to be older. He claimed he was sixty-two, but one day Lance found his driver’s license and found out he was actually only fifty-two.
He lied about his age because when he got in the ring to wrestle, he wanted people to be amazed by the agility and stamina of this sixty-year-old man. He was the first bullshit artist I met in wrestling and he was far from the last. But the problem was, this bullshit artist was now in charge of my career.
CHAPTER 6
I WOULD’VE SIGNED AWAY MY UNIT
After moving from behind the gas station in Okotoks, the camp’s new location was inside the Silver Dollar Action Center in Calgary. The name of the place sounded promising, as action and dollars are always good and silver is a fun color. However when we pulled into the parking lot, the place wasn’t silver at all. The Silver Dollar Action Center was actually—PINK! What was the deal with all the pink buildings in this area anyway? The Pink Dollar Action Center was a combination bowling alley and bingo hall as well as the new home of the Hart Brothers Pro Wrestling Camp.
Ed had rented a large room in the back of the center and when we walked inside the first thing I noticed was the honest to goodness real wrestling ring set up in the middle. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Deb (who’d just butchered her hair when she’d attempted to “cut the roots out” of her dyed blond lid) gasp in amazement. It was like seeing the Taj Majal up close...an amazing, legendary structure. The room itself was just a big empty space that smelled of stale coffee, like a church gymnasium after a bake sale, with a low roof and a few mats scattered on the floor. There were bathrooms on each side where you could change and that, my friends, was about it. But there was an actual ring and that’s all that mattered!
We were absorbing the surroundings when Keith Hart walked through the door. My heart began pounding because this was an actual Hart brother from the actual Hart wrestling dynasty and he was here to teach us how to wrestle! Even though we’d met the year before when I was a mere civilian, since I had officially started my career Keith and I were now on the same level. I wondered if he would remember how impressed he was with my awesome tryout twelve months earlier and invite me out for a beer after class to exchange stories of the road. Or maybe he would take me under his wing and make me into an honorary Hart brother...
I was zapped out of dreamyland when Keith’s first words were, “I’ll need to get everybody’s money before we go any further.”
Then he passed out contracts for us to sign that stated we had to pay 10 percent of all future pro wrestling earnings to Hart Brothers Pro Wtestling. Yeah, it said Wtestling. But if we didn’t sign them, Keith said we couldn’t continue on, so I signed the contract even though it was under duress. There was never another mention of the 10 percent, but it didn’t matter anyway because I would’ve signed away my unit for the chance to wrestle. Quite frankly, some girls I knew might have thought I already had.
I don’t remember much of Keith’s introductory spiel because I was so in awe of the whole situation, but it was along the lines of, “There are no guarantees that you’re going to make it, but if you work hard and train hard maybe you will,” blah, blah, blah, that type of thing. Then he asked us if we had any questions and the Chris tradition of asking stupid questions upon first meeting continued when I blurted out, “How many matches have you had?” Keith got an annoyed look on his face and said he had no idea. How could he not know? And there was no real way to find out. If I wanted to know how many games Wayne Gretzky played in the NHL I could look it up in a record book, but there were no such record books around for wrestling. I decided right then and there that I was going to keep a list of every match I ever had and from my first match on October 2, 1990, against Lance, until my one thousand eight hundred and seventy-seventh match on August 22, 2005, against John Cena, I did.
Then Keith said, “I want everyone to get into the ring and we’ll go over a couple things.” I couldn’t believe Keith’s invitation. I’d never been in a wrestling ring as a professional and I wasn’t sure I was worthy. I slowly pulled myself onto the ring apron, stepped through the ropes, and stood on the hallowed ground. The
ring was solid and sturdy yet it bounced ever so slightly as each one of the students entered. Even though I hadn’t had one minute of training, the ring welcomed and embraced me like a new lover. It was where I belonged.
With all of us in the ring, Keith asked a couple of the guys to do a forward roll and showed another how to take a basic back bump to the mat. Then out of nowhere, he grabbed me and said, “Take a back drop, Gear Box.” I didn’t question him or his lame insult, but I was freakin’ out when he backed me to the ropes and pushed me off.
To just throw a novice off the ropes is dangerous; you have to teach one how to do it first. I had zero idea of how to hit the ropes, how to measure the distance of the ring in steps, or how fast to run. If I did, I wouldn’t have shelled out two large to come to the Pink Fucking Dollar in the first place! I found out quickly that the twine ropes, which were stretched tight and wrapped in tape, were very unforgiving. If you hit them properly, they sprung you back. If not, you hit them and stopped dead, receiving the equivalent of a baseball bat to the breadbasket and the bruises to match. I also had no idea how to do a proper and safe back bump, which is the most important factor to not getting hurt while wrestling. Learning how to bump is a long process, in which you start by lying on your back and hitting the canvas with your hands hundreds of times in a row. So when Keith threw me off the ropes for a back drop, it was both a dangerous and a bullshit move. I must have pissed him off when I asked him the question that he didn’t have the answer to in front of the class. Now he was getting his payback.
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