A Lion's Tale_ Around the World in Spandex - Chris Jericho [7]
My mission to be assaulted by a wrestler continued when Wallass and I decided to follow the Four Horsemen’s limousine in my mom’s car after we saw them buying beer at a vendor. After a thirty-minute cat-and-mouse session, they simply put the limo into reverse at a red light and began to chase us backward on and off the curb. We were desperately trying to escape, all the while envisioning the horrible fate that awaited should they catch us. Satisfied that their message had been delivered, they drove away laughing and taunting us all the way down the street. Tully Blanchard stuck his head out of the window and yelled, “You little fuckheads need to get girlfriends.” Girlfriends? I had no time for girlfriends...I was too busy obsessing about wrestling.
I was a model WWF fan, the perfect sheep that could be manipulated into liking or hating whoever the TV show told me to. I was a huge fan of all the good guys and I hated all the bad guys. Before each match, I made my way down through the crowd to boo them as they came to the ring. I antagonized the Honky Tonk Man so much once, that he said to me in his thick Southern accent, “Shut up, kid, or I’ll slap your face!” This time I was no timid amateur like I was when Fatwell threatened me. This time I challenged Honky Tonk to a fight. He just walked away and I’m lucky he didn’t stab me with his sideburns.
Even as I got older, I was a firm believer that wrestling was one hundred percent legit. There was no Internet back then giving away the secrets of the matches, no insider newsletters discussing every last detail about the business. Of course some people said it wasn’t real and there were moments—like my encounter with Sika—that made me wonder. But no one in my circle knew for sure. It was like Santa Claus. You believed in him because everyone told you to. It was that blind faith that made being a wrestling fan a truly magical experience. Sadly, the magic of those days is long gone and being a true wrestling fan in the year 2007 is an entirely different animal than being a true wrestling fan in the year 1987...and I’m not sure that’s a good thing.
CHAPTER 2
GROTTO VALLEY DEATH MATCH
People always asked me, “Are you going to be a hockey player like your dad?” The truth of the matter was even though I’d been playing hockey since I was four, I really wasn’t very good. Of course I was a hockey fanatic; there wasn’t much to do in Peg in the winter other than play hockey, drink beer, and fight, and at four years old I was too young to fight. I enjoyed playing sports but it was my creativity that really fueled me. I was a huge comic book collector (with Batman and Archie being my favorites) and a voracious reader with the Hardy Boys (the death-defying mystery-solving brothers not the death-defying acrobatic wrestling brothers) and Stephen King leading the way. I loved Star Wars (I waited in line for twelve hours to see the first showing of Return of the Jedi), James Bond, Star Trek (I sent away for a Chekov autograph), and horror movies. My addiction to horror probably started when I awoke one night with my parents searching through my hair, looking for a 666 on my head after they’d just seen The Omen. Each week I perused the TV Guide and circled the late night horror movies that I wanted to see. My mom allowed me to watch them, but I had to go to bed at my normal time of 10 P.M. and set my alarm to wake up at midnight if I wanted to check out Lon Chaney Jr. as the Wolfman or Boris Karloff in The Mummy. Oh the days before TIVO, my children… But along with wrestling it was rock ’n’ roll that really captured my imagination. I had every Beatles record by the time I was ten and read every book about them I could get my hands on by the time I was twelve. I was fascinated by their music, the details of their lives, how they shaped the entire destiny of pop culture. But in the early