A Lion's Tale_ Around the World in Spandex - Chris Jericho [33]
A nut shot in wrestling IS an inner thigh shot. How was I supposed to tell the difference? Not to mention, how was a shot to the inside of my leg supposed to hurt me? How was I supposed to react? “Oww help me, my inner thigh is broke...”
The night of comedy didn’t end there. Lance, Victor, and I had volunteered to drive the ring back to Calgary and on our way we blew out a tire and got lost, which turned the ninety-minute journey into an eight-hour marathon. In the course of one week I had experienced the yin and the yang of the wrestling business.
Fred Jung was maybe twenty-two years old and looked like the love child of Jay Mohr and Sandy Duncan. He badly wanted to be a famous promoter and had two of the key skills required to succeed as one. He was a smooth talker and a convincing liar.
But Fred did have legitimate connections with a Japanese company named Frontier Martial Arts Wrestling. FMW was a new company that focused on the table-breaking, barbed-wire-using bloody style that would become known as Garbage Wrestling. Fred used his connection as blackmail by telling all of the local wrestlers that if you wanted to work in Japan, you weren’t allowed to work for anyone but him. That was all fine and dandy except for the fact that Fred didn’t run any shows. But getting the chance to wrestle in Japan was a big deal due to the prestige and respect shown toward the sport in the country. All the guys in Calgary wanted to go because the crowds were bigger, the style was more technical, and the money was better. Making it in Japan also wasn’t as contingent on size as it was in North America and smaller guys that could really wrestle had a better chance of becoming huge stars, like I’d heard Eddy Guerrero and Chris Benoit had done.
When Fred booked Big Titan in Japan his credibility went through the roof. But he was still hard to trust. He ran a crappy little wrestling show on Calgary cable access that he refused to let Sudden Impact wrestle on, because he claimed that Vince McMahon watched the tapes every week and would steal us away. In reality, he just didn’t want us to outshine the rest of his rotten roster.
The bullshit continued flowing like wine when he showed us a signed contract for Big Titan that he’d received from Ted Turner’s WCW. The contract was a typewritten piece of paper with a photocopied WCW logo on top, which he had obviously cut out of a magazine. It looked so bush-league but I kept my mouth shut and nodded approvingly because Titan had gone to Japan and I hadn’t. After six more months of putting up with Fred’s bullshit, I eventually got my chance. But I got tired of waiting for my turn and kept hustling for work in the meantime.
Lance was the first wrestling friend I met, but Bret Como was the first wrestling friend I met that I had a lot in common with. Bret had a laid-back attitude, long hair, and appreciation for heavy metal and we got along well and hung out frequently. Through him, I met Mike Lozanski, who I’d seen wrestling on TV in Winnipeg. Like the Puppetses and the Langleys, Mike was quite a talker but unlike them he was also a doer. To me he might as well have been Marco Polo, as he’d traveled to New Zealand, California, Mexico, and the Maritimes. With his friendly personality and award-winning smile, he’d made a lot of connections and it was through those contacts that I got booked for my first match outside Alberta.
When Mike told me that he could get me on a show in British Columbia, I asked him if he could get Lance booked too. Despite the rivalry between us, he was my partner and I didn