A Lion's Tale_ Around the World in Spandex - Chris Jericho [6]
It was even easier for me to talk to a lower level guy named Koko B. Ware. Not only was he shorter than me but he also had the goofy gimmick of walking to the ring with his pet bird, Frankie. He barely ever won as it was but after I saw him wrestle in dress pants and dress shoes (his gear bag had been lost by the airline), his intimidation factor was lost to me forever. So anytime I had a question about wrestling, I just asked Koko.
“Hey Koko, I wanna gain weight. What’s the best way to do it?”
“You have to drink a lot of beer.”
Words to live by for aspiring athletes, street urchins, and chubby, parrot-packing grapplers. The conversation with Koko also started my tradition of asking wrestlers very stupid questions upon meeting them.
“Hey Koko, how do you plan on beating the Warlord? He’s so much bigger than you.”
“I’ll just try to duck and dip around him.” Also great advice...for dodgeball players.
When he proceeded to lose to the Warlord that night in like three minutes, I thought to myself with pure sincerity, “Damn, I guess dodging and ducking just didn’t pan out for him.”
The WWF had just released a record album (remember those?) called Piledriver which featured wrestlers, including Koko, singing. I brought my copy to the bar for Koko to sign, telling him that not only was he a great wrestler but a great singer as well. He looked at me quizzically as he signed, like even he didn’t believe my statement.
I befriended Craig Wallace, aka Wallass, in gym class when we discovered that we both knew how to do a DDT (hands down, the most popular wrestling move for fans from my generation). He was as fanatical about wrestling as I was and we devised a plan to get our pictures with the wrestlers. Since neither one of us had the guts to simply ask them, one of us would stand by a wall in the hotel while the other stood nearby with a camera. When a wrestler walked into the frame of the guy standing next to the wall, the camera guy would say the wrestler’s name. “Hey, One Man Gang!” “Hey Outback Jack!” or whatever. When the wrestler turned to look, the cameraman would snap a quick picture and shazam...instant personal portrait.
When I took pictures for Wallass, they always came out perfect. But whenever he took pictures for me, the wrestler wouldn’t be looking or there’d only be half of me in the shot. It happened so many times that when my picture of Wallass and Bushwhacker Luke was perfect and his picture of me and the Honky Tonk Man was butchered, we got into a fistfight.
The first time I ever got an inkling that wrestling might not be completely legit was when I saw Sika, half of the Wild Samoans, at the hotel. On television, he spoke no English and had a manager who did the talking for the team. I wanted to get his autograph but he was alone, so I approached him gingerly with pen and paper in hand and spoke slowly and simply. “Mr. Sika,” I said, pointing at the paper with my pen. “Autograph. Please. You sign. Here,” I explained while pantomiming signing motions with my pen.
He looked at the pen and paper in my hand and then looked straight in my eyes and said in perfect English…
“Fuck off, kid.”
I was shocked! I was agog! And not because he told me to fuck off. Oh no dear readers, I was shocked because I had discovered that Sika could actually speak English! “Oh my gosh! He speaks English! Did anybody else hear that?” I shouted to no one in particular. But alas, it was like seeing the head of the monster rising from the depths of Loch Ness with nobody else on the boat. I alone had discovered the savage Samoan’s secret.
The dissing continued when I saw the Dynamite Kid sitting in the bar, pecs bursting out of an open dress shirt, drinking beer. When