A Lion's Tale_ Around the World in Spandex - Chris Jericho [109]
Actually a guy did bring his baby up to my room during my first tour of FMW. I don’t know how he found out my exact room, but he knocked on the door and asked to buy my pants for ten bucks.
When I passed, he asked to take a picture of me with his infant son. I did and when I returned the next year he showed up again. He made a point of getting a picture of me with his son every time I came to Japan.
In 2005, I was in Japan and I got a knock at the door of my hotel in Tokyo. It was the guy and his now teenage son. They’d brought a photo album that included pictures of me and his kid from almost every year of his life. It was both cool and creepy. I have no idea why he decided to document his child’s life with pictures of me. If I would’ve known I could’ve at least put on a growth chart costume.
I also have no idea why beer was sold out of vending machines on the street or why all the taxi drivers wore white gloves. Japan is a strange country. When it came to making sense of things in Japan, Lenny and I coined the term yasky.
Y ask Y.
A fan named Masa introduced himself to me one day and offered to clear up as much of the confusion as possible. Masa was the most dedicated wrestling fan I’ve ever met, so much so that he learned English SO HE COULD SPEAK TO WRESTLERS.
That’s commitment. I love Jet Li, but I wouldn’t learn Chinese just to be able to speak to the dude.
There were a lot of Japanese fans who considered hanging out with wrestlers to be a status symbol. They were known as sponsors and would pay for dinner, bestow lavish gifts, and give away hundreds of dollars in cash to the boys.
Right from the start, Masa made it very clear that he was a fan, nothing more. He said that he sponsored us by buying tickets to the hundreds of wrestling shows that he attended each year. He also made it very clear that he was there to help us with anything we might need. I took him up on his offer and we became good friends—he even attended my wedding. He had a giant photo album with pictures of almost every gaijin who ever toured Japan. If you’re a wrestler who’s been to Japan and your picture isn’t in Masa’s book, then you don’t mean shit.
CHAPTER 35
THE WHITE URKEL
WAR’s roster was a mixture of younger guys on their way up, like me, and legendary veterans at the tail end of their careers, like Bob Backlund.
Backlund had been the WWF champion in the late 1970s and early 1980s, but was now a nutcase. He wore a three-piece suit and a bow tie at all times even though we were in the middle of a horribly humid Japanese summer. One morning with the bus thermometer at 105 degrees, Backlund came on and beelined over to Tenryu, who was in shorts and a T-shirt.
“Mr. Tenryu, I’m sorry that I’m a little bit disheveled today but it’s a little warm this morning. I apologize for my appearance.” He had the top button of his dress shirt undone and his jacket over his shoulder. He was still wearing the vest.
During the long bus rides Bob never slept or relaxed because he was always reading or talking to somebody...or to himself.
He was in the midst of reading a thick book, when John Kronus of the Eliminators tag team asked him what he was doing.
“Just reading a book about Winston Churchill, one of the paramount orators of our time,” he replied to the simpleminded Kronus. “But then again, John, you probably don’t know what a ‘paramount orator’ is.”
“I don’t even know what a ‘Winston Churchill’ is,” John replied as Backlund looked away in disgust.
Bob looked like a maniacal Richie Cunningham and sounded like the white Urkel. I was sitting on the bus when I heard a mechanical voice behind me say, “Lugubrious: a melancholy state of mind.”
I turned around to see Demon Opie shoving a hand-sized computer into my face.
“Look what I’ve got, Christopher,” he said with a voice that resembled SpongeBob