A Lion's Tale_ Around the World in Spandex - Chris Jericho [10]
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