A Lion's Tale_ Around the World in Spandex - Chris Jericho [100]
But everything came full circle for us when we arrived at the Hakata Star Lanes in Fukuoka...another bowling alley. We’d traveled thousands of miles around the world just to end up in the same combination bowling alley/wrestling venue that we’d started in, in Calgary.
The main event at the Star Lane was a street fight battle royal. I must’ve missed the memo and I didn’t have anything that you could actually wear in a street fight. So while everybody else was wearing jeans, sleeveless T-shirts, weightlifting belts, and cowboy boots, I ended up wearing zebra-striped Zubaz gym shorts tied up with a shoelace and my floppy black wrestling boots from the Calgary cobbler, the most unintimidating street fight outfit in wrestling history. Throw in my canary blond fried hair and you know I was the epitome of TOUGH. It was no surprise that I was the first one thrown out of the ring.
But it had been a good night and I was feeling cocky. So I decided to go and speak to Onita—something we were specifically told not to do.
“How’s it going eh?”
“Okay.”
“I really wanted to say thanks for having us on the tour.”
“Okay.”
“Are you having a good tour?”
“Okay.”
“You’ve got cool ring music.”
“Okay.”
He was looking at me like I was nuts for breaking the no-talking-to-the-almighty rule. I thought I might have pissed him off with my faux pas, because Ito later told me never to speak to Onita directly again. Yet on the last show of the tour, he told us we were beating the top FMW tag team of Horace Boulder and the Gladiator (or as the Japanese called him, the Grajiator).
I took it as a sign that they had enjoyed our work and were excited about Sudden Impact’s future. But when we went to get our payoffs for the tour, instead of receiving the princely sum of $800 a week that Fred’s homemade contract had promised, we were only paid $600 a week.
It was bullshit and I was pissed. Granted we were rookies with no name value but we’d still worked our asses off and earned every penny we were promised. We’d impressed the other wrestlers in the company enough that the rookies were stealing our high-flying moves and claiming them as their own. We’d introduced top rope dives to the floor and Frankensteiners to the company and the different dimension we brought to FMW made it a more well-rounded company. Sudden Impact brought to the hardcore FMW what Eddy Guerrero and Chris Benoit brought to the hardcore ECW years later.
When we asked Ito why we’d been shorted $200 a week, he told us the company would wire us the difference. I was still naive enough to think we would get it too. We never did; however, Onita was happy enough with my work to give me a bonus. An official FMW keychain.
On the plane back to Canada I tried to comprehend the strangeness I’d encountered. I’d gone to Japan expecting rice paddies and ninjas, but instead I found corn pizza and porno magazines featuring schoolgirls peeing on the beach. The sexual decadence prevalent in the country was a direct contrast to the bowing and honorable behavior that was expected. The dichotomy summed up the whole country. Nothing really made sense.
CHAPTER 32
PRAY FOR BLOOD
Even though I’d apparently pissed off Onita and we’d been stiffed on our pay, Ito informed us that the boss had really liked our work and was planning on bringing us back “five or six times” over the course of the next year. But it should’ve raised a red flag when the very next tour featured a tag team tournament and we weren’t invited. I still thought it was only a matter of time before we were brought back, but we waited month after month with no offer to return, while a conveyor belt of Fred’s Calgary wrestlers went over instead of us.
I was bitter at the whole situation but when my friend Lenny St. Claire got his chance to go, I was happy for him. FMW told him to think up a gimmick a few days before he left for his tour, so he took the mask off a football helmet and screwed a strap onto the back of it. Then he had his costume-making mom construct