A Lion's Tale_ Around the World in Spandex - Chris Jericho [16]
But I was instantly taken by the dingy place with the dirt floor. Keith Hart (one of Stu’s sons who I’d seen on Stampede TV) was in there, the ring was set up, and there were some weights lying around. There were Stampede Wrestling posters on the wall of Brian Pillman, Bruce Hart, Chris Benoit, and Owen Hart and I knew it was only a matter of time before my picture would be beside theirs. I’d worn a tight muscle shirt, jeans, and cowboy boots so I would look as big and as tall as possible. After speaking with Keith for a few minutes, I flipped the fuck out when he asked me to go into the ring. Once inside, he asked me to take a fall onto my back. I did and Keith claimed to be quite impressed. I was stoked but I couldn’t believe I had to wait a whole other year before I could train for real.
Later that summer, local promoter Bob Holliday decided to start his own company, the Keystone Wrestling Alliance. He organized a tour of northern Manitoba Indian reservations and he hired me to be part of the ring crew along with Caveman Broda, a short, weird little guy with a crazy beard who coincidentally looked like a caveman. Broda was famous for going into supermarkets while on the road and denting canned foods on the metal shelves, ripping off the labels, and then demanding discounts for the damaged goods. He usually got the discounts, but was left with a duffel bag filled with unlabeled, dented tins of food. He never knew exactly what he was going to eat and constantly talked about “surprising” himself for dinner.
Broda was just one of a motley crew of wrestlers that had been assembled for the tour, including Man Mountain Mike (although since he’d lost about 175 of his 400 pounds, he was more like Man Mountain Stretchmark), a one-handed guy named the Iron Duke, and a big black dude named Catfish Charlie, who ended up being my roommate. But the big star of the tour was my old hero, Baron Von Raschke. Imagine my surprise when I found out that in reality he was really a mild-mannered schoolteacher with a Minnesota accent named Jim Raschke! Once the tour began it was my job not only to set up the ring, but to take ring jackets, sell programs, help with the luggage, and get coffee. I was also in charge of wrangling girls back to the hotel, but I was horrible at it. I didn’t have a lot to work with considering that most of the wrestlers looked like orcs.
The tour started in Riverton, Manitoba, and I invited a girl I had a crush on to come to the show. Soon after she arrived, the ring broke. I tried to fix it while the match continued by crawling under the ring and holding it up with my feet. I’d bragged to this girl how I was coming to Riverton with this big wrestling company and here I was on my back attempting to hold up the damn ring with my feet, while Jim Raschke the schoolteacher stomped around above me, threatening to administer the Claw to his fat opponent in front of fifty people. She left early.
As the new kid on the block (Wahlberg represent, yo!), some of the boys targeted me for the age-old wrestling tradition of ribbing. Ribbing is a form of initiation where you are made fun of incessantly and constantly. The guys called me Prettyfer and would say things like, “Why don’t you give us a kiss, Prettyfer?” For seasoned veterans it’s nothing to get upset about, but for an eighteen-year-old rookie it was the ultimate insult. They kept pushing me until I got so pissed off that I began plotting my revenge.
Fortunately for me, Catfish Charlie was a great guy. He was a journeyman wrestler who never made it to the big time, but he took a liking to me and filled me in on the wrestling business. When I complained to him about the dudes calling me Prettyfer, he sat me down and said, “You know what? If you’re going to be in this business, you need to learn a few things.”
Charlie sensed that I was dead-serious about becoming a wrestler and he also realized that I had no clue about