A Lion's Tale_ Around the World in Spandex - Chris Jericho [20]
The look of my fellow students wasn’t the first indication that the camp wasn’t all it was cracked up to be. A few months earlier I had approached Bret Hart at Gold’s Gym before a match in Winnipeg and told him I was going to go train in Calgary at his brothers’ camp. He replied with great surprise, “I didn’t know the camp still existed.” I figured that all the Hart brothers talked about everything, so how could Bret not know about the camp?
I decided to do a little name dropping to refresh his memory.
“Oh, well, it starts in a few weeks and I’ve been talking with Ed Langley about it.”
Bret looked at me blankly and said, “I don’t know who that is.”
Maybe Bret Hart had forgotten who Ed was, but Ed was still the guy who wrote me the letter urging me to run three miles a day, work out in the gym for two and half hours, and eat all the fish, meat, and eggs I could. If that was his personal routine, he must be a badass motherfucker and I was stoked to meet him.
A buzz came over my fellow students when the word spread that Ed had arrived at the hotel. I held my breath, flexed my biceps, and waited for my new mentor to walk in. When a sixty-year-old-looking man wearing his hair parted to the side with thick glasses and a giant beer belly sauntered in, I stared in disbelief at the real Ed. It was like thinking you were having phone sex with Jessica Alba and finding out you’ve really been beatin’ it to Bea Arthur. No wonder Bret had never heard of him—who in the hell was this guy? I found out that when Stampede closed, Keith Hart had bought the rights to the school from his brother Bruce and hired Ed, a former Stampede referee, to run it.
Ed acted like he was the Grand Poobah of pro wrestling and throughout the course of the camp regaled us with stories about his career and his life. Maybe his name should’ve been Langley Gump, because according to him he’d done it all. He had:
• Wrestled as the masked Dr. X in the WWF...which of course couldn’t be proven since Dr. X wore a mask.
• Taught ballroom dancing as an Arthur Murray dance instructor.
• Been a Scout leader who’d removed the ruptured appendix of a kid who’d fallen out of a tree while hiking in the desolate Rocky Mountains...and then sewed him back together with fishing line.
• Been a pilot who’d landed a plane on a deserted section of highway when the left engine (Ed was very detailed) conked out.
• Been a stock car driver who would crash his car for fifty bucks and would roll it for an additional fifty.
• Been working in a New York meatpacking plant when a slab of meat fell on him leaving him paralyzed. He was despondent and pissed off until he met a surgeon in a bar who operated on him, enabling him to walk again.
• Been a landscaper in Saudi Arabia. (What exactly did he landscape...sand?)
Ed would spew out these nuggets at any time with no regard of how ricockulous they sounded or how far from the truth they appeared to be. He was also the only guy I’d ever met above the age of eighteen who lied about his age to be older. He claimed he was sixty-two, but one day Lance found his driver’s license and found out he was actually only fifty-two.
He lied about his age because when he got in the ring to wrestle, he wanted people to be amazed by the agility and stamina of this sixty-year-old man. He was the first bullshit artist I met in wrestling and he was far from the last. But the problem was, this bullshit artist was now in charge of my career.
CHAPTER 6
I WOULD’VE SIGNED AWAY MY UNIT
After moving from behind the gas station in Okotoks, the camp’s new location was inside the Silver Dollar Action Center in Calgary. The name of the place sounded promising, as action and dollars are always good and silver is a fun color. However when we pulled into the parking lot, the place wasn’t silver at all. The Silver Dollar Action Center was actually—PINK! What was the deal