My stomach was a butterfly cage and my heart a floating bobber in my chest as we pulled up to the Moose Hall (which to me might as well have been Madison Square Garden), the venue where Jeric-History would be made. I walked through the banquet hall, past the ring, and up a flight of stairs into the dressing room. I read through the program, which to my chagrin still had me listed as Cowboy Chris Jericho from Casper, Wyoming. I guess being a cowboy in name only was much better than actually having to wear a bandolier and a Stetson.
I suited up in my spandex armor, laced up my EVIL black boots, and taped up my wrists just because everyone else was doing it. Ed had decided that Lance and I would do a ten-minute Broadway, and we’d been working on the match for weeks. Even though I had a good idea of what we were going to do, I started feeling nauseous and nervous as I heard the crowd filing into the hall.
The first match on the show was Como versus Brad Young. They worked together often and had a really good match.
After they were finished, the moment of truth arrived. I said a quick prayer as the strains of Poison’s “Unskinny Bop” played through the muffled banquet hall speakers. I took a final deep breath and walked out of the dressing room into the arena/room.
Thousands...hundreds...dozens of indifferent faces looked up the staircase at the canary-haired, bumblebee-looking wannabe with the maniacal black boots. There were around 100 fans in the place, which was a huge crowd for a Puppets show and for a teenager having his first match. Lance was already in the ring wearing a pink (there’s that color again) singlet, and Ed was our referee. The bell rung, we locked up, and suddenly Chris Irvine was possessed by CHRIS JERICHO.
The nervousness was gone, replaced with the confidence to entertain and succeed. I began wrestling the match just as I had been taught for the last three months. Lance and I worked solidly and believably, incorporating unique moves that no one else on the card was doing. After going through our routine for about five minutes, I noticed that there was actually a crowd watching us!
I had just dropped a knee on Lance’s arm when a kid in the crowd said, “Do it again!”
Surprised that someone was paying attention, I searched the crowd for my biggest fan. When I saw a kid smiling at me, I looked at him and said, “All right bud, this one’s for you!” and dropped another knee. Someone else yelled for me to do it again so I did. My shameless pandering started paying off as the fans clapped and cheered me on. I responded by clapping my hands in time, which the crowd copied in unison. I’d become the Pied Piper of Ponoka and the crowd ate up my every move.
The match ended after ten minutes and the crowd voiced their disapproval when it was announced as a draw. We shook hands and I walked out of the ring, high fiving all the kids and feeling like the King of the World. Lance was waiting for me in the dressing room and we exchanged hugs and babbled excitedly about our success, until we noticed the other guys staring at us. We’d been taught that one of the unwritten rules of wrestling was never to brag or argue about a match in public. So we went into the bathroom and Lance said excitedly, “You were like Hulk Hogan out there, man!” In retrospect, there were probably like ten people cheering, but it didn’t matter. The important thing was that our first match had gone off without a hitch and turned out pretty good. Lance still claims that it was the best match on the show.
Later on that night we also worked in a battle royal, which Lance won. It kind of bothered me that he got to win, but I took solace in the fact that I was the new Hulk Hogan, not him.
After the show, Puppets gave me a white envelope with JERICO written on it. The fact that he’d left out the H in my name was forgiven when I opened the envelope and pulled out a ten and a twenty. Thirty bucks! I used to make forty bucks a week for eight hours’ work at the deli and here I’d made almost the same for ten minutes’ work. I couldn’t believe how much money I’d just made for something that I loved to do.
I was an official working wrestler and it felt amazing.
CHAPTER 10
HOW TO DRINK LIKE A WRESTLER
My next match at the Moose Hall about a month later wasn’t quite as amazing. I was in a tag team match and was booked to suffer my first defeat. Nobody likes to lose when they first start out and I was no exception, but if I was told to lose to a turtle I would’ve done it. Instead I was involved in one of the dumbest finishes of all time. Both my partner and the referee went down and I was attacked by my two opponents, their manager, Benson Cyril, and their bodyguard, Big Titan. But the mighty Chris Jericho could not be beaten by four men, so they pulled out a bottle of ETHER. The idea was they would pour some on a cloth, hold it over my mouth, and pin me when I passed out. The kicker was they filled the bottle with rubbing alcohol. I was huffing and puffing after a brutally bad match, when Titan held the cloth soaked in rubbing alcohol over my face. I could see the little birdies circling around my head as my brain melted. They used the alcohol, they explained, so if the people in the front row smelled it, they would know it was real. Weren’t they supposed to be using ether? Does rubbing alcohol even smell like ether? I’m confused...
Meanwhile, later in the show Lance beat Bob Puppets to become the CWC champion in his first month of wrestling. Life just isn’t fair sometimes.
Our next match was the following week in a Quonset (look it up) in Strathmore, Alberta, another small town near Calgary. The promoter was a young guy named Fred Jung and he had booked Lance and me as a team named Sudden Impact. Fred’s show was a little more organized and show business gimmicky than Bob’s was, featuring guys with names like Luscious Bubbles, Earthquake Muldoon, and the Black Mamba. Also booked on the show in his debut was Dr. Love! Vic wore a pair of spandex tights with the sides of the legs cut out and replaced with mesh, which accentuated his chicken legs and made him look absolutely flabulous. He faced the Kaos Kid, Fred Jung, and I’ll give you two guesses who was booked to win.
Sudden Impact’s first match as a team was also our first abortion. In wrestling vernacular the term abortion means a shit match and, believe me, this match was a double helping of steaming shit.
First, the tape deck played my Poison tape backward and we had to walk to the ring to a loopy, psychedelic mishmash of spaceship noises. Then our opponents Steve Gillespie and the Goto Hills Savage himself, Ed Langley, led us through the most nonsensical match of my career, consisting of them beating us up and then beating us up some more. Oh yeah, I forgot to mention that they beat us up. Finally Ed told me to do a big comeback and just as I got started, he nailed me right in the plums. In camp we were taught that if you got hit with a nut shot you were done, so I played dead while he kept trying to stand me up. Then he said, “Get up! That wasn’t a nut shot...it was an inner thigh shot!”
A nut shot in wrestling IS an inner thigh shot. How was I supposed to tell the difference? Not to mention, how was a shot to the inside of my leg supposed to hurt me? How was I supposed to react? “Oww help me, my inner thigh is broke...”
The night of comedy didn’t end there. Lance, Victor, and I had volunteered to drive the ring back to Calgary and on our way we blew out a tire and got lost, which turned the ninety-minute journey into an eight-hour marathon. In the course of one week I had experienced the yin and the yang of the wrestling business.
Fred Jung was maybe twenty-two years old and looked like the love child of Jay Mohr and Sandy Duncan. He badly wanted to be a famous promoter and had two of the key skills required to succeed as one. He was a smooth talker and a convincing liar.
But Fred did have legitimate connections with a Japanese company named Frontier Martial Arts Wrestling. FMW was a new company that focused on the table-breaking, barbed-wire-using bloody style that would become known as Garbage Wrestling. Fred used his connection as blackmail by telling all of the local wrestlers that if you wanted to work in Japan, you weren’t allowed to work for anyone but him. That was all fine and dandy except for the fact that Fred didn’t run any shows. But getting the chance to wrestle in Japan was a big deal due to the pre
stige and respect shown toward the sport in the country. All the guys in Calgary wanted to go because the crowds were bigger, the style was more technical, and the money was better. Making it in Japan also wasn’t as contingent on size as it was in North America and smaller guys that could really wrestle had a better chance of becoming huge stars, like I’d heard Eddy Guerrero and Chris Benoit had done.
When Fred booked Big Titan in Japan his credibility went through the roof. But he was still hard to trust. He ran a crappy little wrestling show on Calgary cable access that he refused to let Sudden Impact wrestle on, because he claimed that Vince McMahon watched the tapes every week and would steal us away. In reality, he just didn’t want us to outshine the rest of his rotten roster.
The bullshit continued flowing like wine when he showed us a signed contract for Big Titan that he’d received from Ted Turner’s WCW. The contract was a typewritten piece of paper with a photocopied WCW logo on top, which he had obviously cut out of a magazine. It looked so bush-league but I kept my mouth shut and nodded approvingly because Titan had gone to Japan and I hadn’t. After six more months of putting up with Fred’s bullshit, I eventually got my chance. But I got tired of waiting for my turn and kept hustling for work in the meantime.
Lance was the first wrestling friend I met, but Bret Como was the first wrestling friend I met that I had a lot in common with. Bret had a laid-back attitude, long hair, and appreciation for heavy metal and we got along well and hung out frequently. Through him, I met Mike Lozanski, who I’d seen wrestling on TV in Winnipeg. Like the Puppetses and the Langleys, Mike was quite a talker but unlike them he was also a doer. To me he might as well have been Marco Polo, as he’d traveled to New Zealand, California, Mexico, and the Maritimes. With his friendly personality and award-winning smile, he’d made a lot of connections and it was through those contacts that I got booked for my first match outside Alberta.
When Mike told me that he could get me on a show in British Columbia, I asked him if he could get Lance booked too. Despite the rivalry between us, he was my partner and I didn’t want to leave him out. But Mike laughed and said, “You’re not going to be a tag team forever. You have to take the bookings when you can and there’s only one slot open on this show. Do you want it or not?”
I felt bad telling Lance but to my surprise he had no problem with it. He understood that you couldn’t be picky about bookings and gave me his blessing. So with an extra 100 bucks in my pocket that Jerry Palko insisted on giving me because I was broke, I packed my bag and left on my first wrestling road trip.
Como, Mike, and I began driving the fourteen hours to Vancouver. When I was a kid and we traveled long distances during family vacations, we’d stop for the night at eight and get a hotel room. Much to my chagrin, a wrestling road trip didn’t work that way. We left at 8 P.M. and drove all through the night, stopping at dawn when we arrived. I hated traveling at night because I couldn’t sleep sitting in the car. Now I can sleep underneath the hood but back then I needed my wittle beddie-weddie.
We drove through the mountains on winding roads with 300-foot drops on either side, watched diligently for deer, and arrived in the early morning. We stayed at the house of a seasoned vet named Tim Flowers, and over the next few days he taught me some very important lessons about the wrestling biz. More specifically, he taught me how to drink like a wrestler. He took us to a bar and bought rounds of drinks for everybody. When it came time for the second round, I still hadn’t finished my first one and that didn’t fly very well. In his world, you finished your drink as soon as you got it in preparation for the next one. It was also very important to have a drink in your hands at all times even if you weren’t drinking it, because if you did nobody bothered you. If you didn’t, you became a target.
I learned to keep my thumb on the top of the beer bottle at all times, because there were always guys around who thought it was funny to spike your drink with Halcion pills. After you fell asleep from them, you would be the recipient of a free eyebrow shaving and bonus Lloyd Christmas haircut. But I was a fast learner and I’m proud to say that after fifteen years of wrestling, I still have the same eyebrows I had when I was soiling my diapers.
Wrestling is a hierarchy and the guys on top dictate what to do to the guys on the bottom. There is no specific rulebook issued to rookies explaining wrestling etiquette, but you’d better figure out the rules quickly and pick them up fast or you’ll be weeded out. Rule number one is you have to drink with the boys. If you didn’t feel like drinking, you poured some water into a beer bottle and carried it around as if you were. As long as you were smart about it, nobody noticed or cared.
The match itself was in Agassiz, British Columbia, where the movie First Blood was filmed and “Sasquatch Crossing” signs were posted on the road. The promoter asked my opponent and me to do a ten-minute Broadway but my opponent was greener than I was and asked, “What do you mean, you want us to act it out?” The promoter sent the guy packing and I worked with Como instead for a cool twenty bucks.
Even though I was rolling in the dough from wrestling, I decided to supplement my income by becoming a stand-up comedian. I went to an open mike night at Yuk-Yuk’s comedy club and did a set based on what the golden topping on movie popcorn REALLY was. It turned out I was the only one in the club who thought that comparing golden topping with golden showers was hilarious.
After accepting that the world wasn’t ready for my comedic genius, I got a job working at a new family fitness center in Okotoks. I had been training in the Palkos’ barn like Stallone in Rocky IV, so the arrival of the new gym not only brought in extra cash but allowed me to again build muscle with weights, not haystacks.
The gym was also the perfect place to meet girls. It became the hot place for all the high school kids to hang out and the fact I was the muscular wrestler working the front desk made me the Fonz. Girls like the Fonz. After not meeting anyone all summer, I now had teenage girls flirting and hanging all over me. Being nineteen years old with a badass car (or just a bad one), I had become the proverbial magnet of the chicks. If you’ve ever seen the Three’s Company episode where Jack has three different dates at the same restaurant and has to run himself ragged so that none of them finds out about the other ones, you’ll get an idea of what I had to deal with. There was a certain hot tub room that was a favorite rendezvous spot of mine, and let me take this opportunity to say, Thank goodness for chlorine.
The girls may have dug me, but the local Popo did not. One John Cleese–looking, Inspector Clouseau–sounding cop in particular named Dan Powers was always looking for ways to mess with me. He pulled me over for going the speed limit (“It’s so suspicious”) and watched me buy lunch at the Petro Canada just to make sure “I wasn’t stealing anything.”
One evening, a few older ladies that I didn’t recognize came into the gym. I chatted for a few minutes with each of them and then they left. The next day, Powers called me at the Palkos’ and told me to come down to the station immediately. When I arrived, Cleese Clouseau proceeded to tell me that there’d been a rash of obscene phone calls in town and guess who he was accusing? He’d told the victims that I was the guilty party and sent them to the gym to speak with me to clarify it. The power of suggestion is a tremendous thing, my friends. If the Pope said you would burst into an order of onion rings if you read this book, would you have placed your filthy hands on this tome so quickly?
When he called Jerry Palko to check our phone bills, Jerry told him to either get a search warrant or leave us both alone. The lack of evidence soured Powers and that was the last time I ever had any problems with him or his mustache. I resumed making calls later that night.
CHAPTER 11
PROPER CRACK-BUYING ETIQUETTE
After the Powers debacle, I welcomed the opportunity to take another road trip. This time to Wichita, Kansas, of all places. Mike had established contact with a promoter named Christopher Love (no relation to the illustrious Dr. Love), who was starting up a promotion in the ce
ntral states. He’d gotten himself booked and had convinced Love to give Como and me shots as well. So the 1-2-3 Stooges got into Mike’s car and began the drive from Calgary to Wichita under standard wrestling driving rules of course.
Being the rookie, it was my job to drive all night and after a few hours I fell asleep at the wheel. I opened my eyes just in time to see the hood of the car nuzzling with the ass end of a four-wheel-drive. I slammed on the brakes and smelled the rubber burning as we skidded to a stop on the side of the highway. Once again I became John Candy in Planes, Trains & Automobiles, as the guys woke up and angrily asked if I was going to keep driving.
“Yes I will,” I said. “Yes I will.”
I’d like to mention that it’s very hard to drive when your pants are filled with dookie.
We stopped the next evening when we hit Denver. Instead of checking into a hotel or getting a decent meal, we went straight to Shotgun Willy’s.
The strip clubs I’d been to in Winnipeg were just glorified pubs with the occasional bored naked girl wandering around, but Shotgun Willy’s had scantily clad gorgeous goddesses everywhere. I promptly fell in love with a lovely lady who told me she was stripping simply to put herself through college. I admired her gumption and after my attempt to fund her entire higher education, she gave me her address (no e-mail in those days, kids). Mike and Bret laughed when I told them that this girl was different from the rest and I planned to keep in touch. They’d been through many towns and many strippers and knew that dancers were con artists just like we were. That’s why wrestlers and strippers are so attracted to each other; we’re both in the business of selling fantasy. But speaking from experience, it costs a whole lot more to buy what the strippers are selling.
A Lion's Tale: Around the World in Spandex Page 8