A Lion's Tale_ Around the World in Spandex - Chris Jericho [15]
As the college year began, my dad played in a celebrity hockey game at the Arena. I decided to check it out and was killing time downtown before the game when I walked past this big dude, wearing a white-tasseled leather jacket. And I knew only one guy that wore a white-tasseled leather jacket, because he wore it on every episode of Saturday Night’s Main Event: Jesse “The Body” Ventura.
I sidled up next to him and began talking. It turned out that he was in town to play in the celebrity hockey game. The Body was the Shits at hockey but after the game, there was an after-party, so with my friends Gouge and Fellowes, we crashed it. I zeroed in on Jesse and for the next two hours I never left his side, talking about wrestling, movies, and his lack of hockey-playing abilities. He was the coolest, most informative guy and he gave me some great advice about being in the wrestling business:
1. If you want to be a wrestler, you have to be prepared to live every day in pain.
2. If you want to be a wrestler, you need to make sure you have something to fall back on when it ends.
3. If you want to be a wrestler, you have to remember it’s not what you earn, it’s what you save.
I told him about my plans to attend the Hart Brothers Camp and he laughed and said “Watch out for Stu Hart, he’s crazy. I’ve heard the tapes from the Dungeon where he literally tortures guys. But the toughest wrestlers in the world come from Calgary and if you can make it there, you can make it anywhere.”
He told me a story about filming Predator with Arnold Schwarzenegger. Jesse would figure out what time Arnold worked out in the morning, get there five minutes earlier, and put water on his face so when Arnold got to the gym he would see Jesse “sweating” and already training. Then he would work out and not leave until after Arnold did. Governor Schwarzenegger never knew when Governor Ventura started or stopped training—and it drove him nuts to think that the Body trained harder than he did.
I wrote an article about my meeting with Jesse for the college paper and got a good response. So when the National Wrestling Alliance came to Winnipeg for the first time, I was able to get an interview with Jim Cornette, who was one of the great heel (bad guy) managers of all time. Jim gave me an awesome interview explaining the angles he was involved in and the business itself. It wasn’t the last time Jim Cornette would explain the wrestling business to me.
After my stories got good reviews from the college crowd, I decided to see if I could get a gig at one of the major newspapers in the city. The AWA was launching a comeback, so I contacted the Winnipeg Free Press to see who was covering the show. I figured they had a whole team. It was surprising to me when they said nobody was. So I bought my own ticket, submitted the story, got paid fifty beans and the next day I got my first noncollege byline. I became the wrestling reporter for the Winnipeg Free Press.
I’d also landed a job as a cameraman at a public access UHF station that featured such programs as Math for Hindus. I literally fell asleep filming this laugh riot and the camera kept dipping toward the floor, which I’m sure frustrated math-loving Hindus across the province.
The Free Press promoted me to be its low, low, low-end sports reporter so I got to cover swim meets, CFL fashion shows, and an actual Tiddlywinks tournament. Seriously. That’s when I decided that instead of writing about other people, I wanted to be the guy who was being written about.
In the summer of 1989, my dad got invited to Calgary to play in a charity golf tournament. We both thought it would be a good idea to visit the Hart camp, so I went with him.
The camp was in the little town of Okotoks, about forty minutes outside Calgary. It took a few minutes to find the school, because it was inside a garage behind