A Lion's Tale_ Around the World in Spandex - Chris Jericho [19]
I drove all day, stopping eight hours later in Medicine Hat, Alberta, and rented a hotel room for the night—the first of thousands. I checked into the room and ordered a movie from the pay channel called Great Ballz of Fire. I didn’t realize until it started that it wasn’t the Dennis Quaid flick about Jerry Lee Lewis, but actually a porno spoof of it. In retrospect, it was probably the better film.
I found my way to Calgary using a yellow highlighted map that my dad had given me and followed the signs to Okotoks. About forty-five minutes later, I turned off the highway into a storybook Norman Rockwell town of 5,000. I was looking forward to staying in “Okotoks’s finest hotel”...until I finally saw it. It wasn’t a beautiful chalet or a quaint mountain inn, but a run-down, two-story, faded pink dive.
I went inside the bar and checked in with Zig (the oh-so-friendly owner), got my key, and tried to figure out how the hell I was going to lift my trunk up the stairs to the second-floor room. I pulled the trunk out of the...um...trunk and was dragging it toward the stairs when this guy with a crew cut, skinny legs, and a potbelly walked up to me and said, “Are you here for the Hart Brothers Camp?” Startled that my secret had been exposed, I nodded and asked the guy if he was there for the same reason.
“Yes I am. Let me help you with that trunk.”
Like the scene in Planes, Trains & Automobiles when Neal Page helps Del Griffith lug his trunk across the field, this guy with stick legs and a spare tire helped me carry my trunk up the steps. It was ironic that the first person I met in Okotoks ended up being one of the best friends I’d ever have in the wrestling business: Lance Storm.
I got all my stuff into the room and noticed that it had no phone, a TV with only three channels, and a bullet hole in the window...you know, just the basics. The Willingdon itself was a typical small-town hotel attached to a bar and a smelly old restaurant called the Tray, which I quickly renamed the Ashtray. But Ed Langley wasn’t lying, it was the finest hotel in town. It was also the only hotel in town and it was where the class of 1990 was staying. And what a class it was.
On the plus side there was Lance, whose last name at the time was Evers. I have no idea why I thought he had stick legs and a spare tire (maybe it was the muumuu he was wearing), because the guy was muscular and ripped. I had come into camp at a solid 195 pounds (falling forty pounds short of my Steamboat goal) but Lance looked like he had at least ten pounds of muscle on me. I had been worried about being the smallest guy in the camp and my heart sank when I saw how big he was. My heart resurfaced when a short little guy with huge chipmunk cheeks who looked like Andy Kaufman came out of his room and said with a big smile, “I’m Victor DeWilde. I guess we’re gonna become famous wrestlers together huh?” I smiled and took stock of this pixie, who looked like he weighed about 160 pounds soaking wet while holding a brick. Victor was a former archery champion who had decided to make the obvious transition from archery to pro wrestling. It only got worse from there as I met Wilf, who had one eye pointing off to the right and one eye pointing off to the left, Dave, a sloppy-looking lumberjack, Edwin Barril, a 400-pound farmer shaped like—what else?—a barrel, and Deb, the only girl in the bunch, who had the IQ of a kumquat and a face to match.
After meeting all of these misfits, I thought to myself, “Thank God Lance is here.”
Lance and I were the only ones who even remotely looked like wrestlers. Hell, we were the only ones who looked like we’d ever seen the inside of a gym. Not only was I not the runt of the camp, muscle-wise I was the second biggest one in the group. Judging all these books by their nonathletic covers, Lance and I instantly gravitated toward each other. Later on he told me, “Until you got to the hotel, I was considering just packing up and