• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 1605 0

tacky yet unrefined, boasted more ants than a family reunion, and employed a smelly maid who stunk up every room that she cleaned. On the first night of my stay I was sound asleep in my room, when all of a sudden the fire alarm started ringing. I awoke with a start, convinced that I was going to burn to death in Okotoks, the worst-named town ever. I hastily packed up all my stuff (bass guitar and bicycle included) and hauled everything down the stairs in record time. The rest of the Apple Dumpling Gang gathered in the parking lot and waited until Zig wandered outside and said with a smirk, “Don’t worry about the fire alarm. It goes off all the time for no reason.”

Five nights later it went off again and I figured if the shithole was on fire, I was gonna burn with it. I opened my door in time to see Lumberjack Dave rip the alarm out of the wall. I thought about asking him what would happen if an actual fire started, but I saw the look in his eye and the bullet hole scar on his stomach (matching the one in my window) and decided to catch some sleep instead. After all, I had a big day of getting the shit kicked out of me ahead.

The class trained from 6 to 10 P.M., five days a week for eight weeks. For the first two weeks all we did was stretching (not the Hart kind), running, and calisthenics. We did windsprints and then ran a mile both forward and backward. Ever run a mile backward? Give it a try, junior, it ain’t easy. Then we did standing hack squats, starting with twenty-five and increasing every day until we hit 500. Ever done 500 hack squats? I’ll personally come to your house, wash your windows, pleasure your dog, and make you a sandwich if you can. Okay, maybe I won’t wash your windows.

We’d follow up by doing bridges with only our heads and legs for support, starting with thirty-second increments and increasing them to five minutes. It was brutal and there were countless times I bridged until tears came out of my eyes and my muscles were begging to be released.

We went through a smorgasborg of stretching, including a pleasant exercise where Brad would put his hands on the inner side of one ankle and his feet on the inner side of my other ankle. He would slowly push them apart until my legs were totally straddled out beside me. From behind, Ed would then push my back toward the ground until I kissed the mat. It felt like I was being drawn and quartered and the tears flowed once again.

Every time the stretching mercifully ended I thought, “What does this have to do with wrestling?” The stretches had a lot to do with wrestling because they were designed to test our discipline and tenacity to see if we would be physically and mentally tough enough to make it. It was no surprise that most of my classmates didn’t.

After the second day, two of the fourteen students in our class dropped out. As the weeks progressed students continued disappearing like campers in a Jason movie; although being beheaded by a mutant in a goalie mask would’ve been less painful than the training we were enduring.

Dave the Lumberjack quit after two weeks, proving that even lumberjacks aren’t tough enough to be wrestlers. Archers on the other hand apparently were, because as goofy as he was, Victor DeWilde was doing fairly well in camp. Did the rigors of the quill properly prepare him for the rigors of the ring? Only Robin Hood knows for sure.

I wasn’t impressed with most of my classmates, but I was starting to respect Wilf. Even though he couldn’t see straight, he was working his ass off and never complained once about the shit kicking we were taking. Once when we were practicing sunset flips, he jumped over his opponent and landed straight on his bean, which made a sick, squishy sound when it drove into the mat. Everyone went silent as Wilf stumbled to the change room, complaining of heartburn. He came back a few minutes later and continued doing his drills as if nothing had happened. He was as tough as a three-dollar steak and he was driven by his goal of being a job guy (a guy who always loses) for the WWF. Later on, I heard that he accomplished