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I made quite an impact with my matches that night and due to my Calgary training I stood head and shoulders over most of the other wrestlers. Throw in the fact that the crowd was going bananas over me and for the first time since I started wrestling, I felt like a star.

A few days later I was cruising down the avenue feeling like a real hotshot and basking in the glow of my newfound celebrity. I was thinking about my next match when I drove past a bar called Georgie’s, a local tavern that my friends and I used to go to for beers. The sign on the marquee said FRIDAY NIGHT WRESTLING. It made me smile to think of the low-level sad sacks who would be wrestling at Georgie’s. I thought about checking out the show for a laugh, but remembered that I also had a match on Friday night. The slight touch of a moth fluttered in my stomach as I started to put two and two together.

I called Condello to find out where we were wrestling on Friday and, sure enough, we were booked in the Georgie Dome.

It felt terrible to come back to Winnipeg as the big cheese, wrestle a TV taping in the big venue, and then be reduced to working in my local pub. I was convinced that people would laugh at me for being such a nobody and working in a shithole like Georgie’s.

To make matters worse, the pub ring was the size of a king-size bed, which made it impossible to get pinned, because you could break the count by putting your foot on the ropes no matter where you were.

I had to change across the street and walk across the road in my yellow spandex, with cars honking and people laughing all the way. The match was abominable, climaxing when I jumped off the top rope and put my head right through the tile of the low ceiling. Dust and debris floated down onto my back as I pinned my foe, who of course had his foot on the rope. I made the decision right then that I would never wrestle in a bar again.

Due to my refusal to participate in all of the reindeer games, Bob Brown decided that he wanted to work with me for the rest of the tour to teach me a lesson. What he taught me was how not to have a wrestling match.

Working with Bob was brutal because he would always put himself over by beating all the younger guys, which hurt everyone involved. Except for the Bulldog.

Another problem in working with him was that he just wasn’t very good. He’d always boast about his ninety-minute matches with Ric Flair or how he tore the house down with Bruiser Brody in Japan. He bragged that he had trained Shawn Michaels, Marty Jannety, and Chris Benoit. I’m sure he worked with them and beat them, but he sure as hell didn’t train them. If he was alive today, he’d probably say that he trained me too.

What he did train me to do was to have excruciatingly boring matches revolving around headlocks and tackles. In any given one of our matches, he’d say, “Headlock, tackle, get the headlock again, tackle, get the headlock again.” I would work my way off the mat and do it, only to have the crowd chant, “Boring!” When the chants began, Bulldog would say, “We got them now kid, we got them!”

We got them wanting to poke their eyes out with a pointed stick maybe.

Whenever I approached him about spicing up our matches, he would get indignant and say, “You want to do all those high-flying moves that will never get you over, especially if you go to Japan.” Considering that Japan was famous for its high-flying style, his statement was equivalent to saying that Boston isn’t a big college town.

Then he decided that our matches were horrible because I was a drug addict. He walked around the dressing telling anyone who would listen, “That Jericho, he reminds me of Kerry Von Erich, he’s always fucked up.”

I wondered who the fucked-up one was sometimes while listening to him butcher the English language. He dispensed such pearls of wisdom as, “You should try beef tongue...it’s a delicatessen” or “Why would he say that? It’s a mute point.” He also had the horrible habit of paying the boys while completely stark-ass naked with his withered Walt Weatherbee clutched in one