A Lion's Tale_ Around the World in Spandex - Chris Jericho [72]
Yeah that’s right, referee ring music.
As soon as the first verse of Right Said Fred’s “I’m Too Sexy” hit, this skinny fifty-year-old man with a horse face jogged to the ring, as serious as a heart attack. I laughed my ass off the first time I saw him do it. I stopped laughing when he dropped down to his stomach during the match as I ran off the ropes, forcing me to jump over him to avoid tripping and crashing to the floor.
I confronted him afterward and asked, “Why the hell did you do that?”
“Well, I felt it added to the realism of the match, mate.”
“Interesting. Well here’s an idea...why don’t you add to the realism of the match by staying out of the way?”
Quick Rule: A good ref is one that you never notice is there. A bad ref is one that drops down in front of you when you’re running the ropes.
As enamored as Mal was with himself, he didn’t hold a peace pipe to Suni War Cloud. Suni was a French-Canadian Indian who spoke little English. When he got the night off, which was two or three times a week, Suni waltzed around bragging, “You guy workings again tonight. I not working but make same money!”
The truth was that he wasn’t working because he wasn’t very good. He was really bragging, “I’m getting paid so I don’t stink out the joint tonight.”
One night we went to the red-light district on the Reeperbahn. At the end of a dark alley there was a big gate and when you walked through it you entered what was basically a pornographic zoo. Behind full-length walls of glass stood some of the most beautiful (and ugliest) girls I’d ever seen. If a fine lad was so inclined, for the right price he could enter the goddess’s glass house and throw some sexual stones.
We walked by a spectacular blonde and Suni decided, “The blond one, she like me I can tell. How could she no like sexy Suni? I take off my shirt and show her what real mans is!”
He stripped off a shirt that was too small for a twelve-year-old and unleashed a pair of man boobs that would’ve made Fatwell jealous. He continued with a posing routine so red reels that it could’ve embarrassed Schwarzenegger into making a movie about male pregnancy.
Suni was like one of those guys at Lambeau Field in December with a painted stomach and no shirt. The pretty young thing watched his flabby pectorals bob to and fro, lit up a smoke, and pulled down the window shade.
Hamburg was a European Las Vegas that never shut down and offered anything and everything that a decadent heart could desire. And since it was also the city where the Beatles got their start over three decades earlier, I made it my mission to try to find the clubs where they played. Happily, I found that a few of them were still around. Sitting in the Kaiserkeller drinking cheap draft beer and watching a crappy German rock band play “Bad to the Bone” or smelling forty years of cigarette smoke ground into the walls of the Star Club was like being on hallowed ground. Hanging around in the same bars that John, Paul, and George had rocked decades ago was one of the high points of my trip. This was what life was all about—being paid to do something you loved while traveling the world to places that you heard about your whole life.
Since there were so many things to do and holes to crawl into on the Reeperbahn, being a Catcher didn’t have the same allure to the Hamburg locals that it did to the Mexicans. Most of the people in the city didn’t even realize that there was wrestling in the big tent downtown, since Rene refused to advertise. He figured the word of mouth from forty years of running shows would be enough. It wasn’t. Within a few years the tournament would shut down. But the one group of people that knew about the matches in Hamburg were the strippers. I single-handedly generated a lot of the advertising by hanging out regularly in the Cat Meow. As I learned in Denver, wrestlers and strippers easily connect with each other and I proved it by connecting