A Lion's Tale_ Around the World in Spandex - Chris Jericho [8]
In addition to my burgeoning interest in the Beatles, the Who, the Beach Boys, and Rick Dees (“Disco Duck,” which for some reason was my favorite song for a time), I was also a very creative kid. So much so, that my Auntie Joan, who was the dean of the University of Manitoba, used me as an example of a highly imaginative child when she gave lectures to teachers. I wrote my own songs, tried to teach myself how to play guitar, and made my own tape-recorded radio shows. I acted out battles, adventures, and odysseys for hours with the most impressive collection of Star Wars and Star Trek dolls this side of Mos Eisley. I was obsessed with Dungeons and Dragons and was convinced that the Loch Ness monster actually existed...I still am. I liked to draw my own comic book movies—which were basically just comic books done in movie storyboard fashion, complete with opening and closing credits. A lot of these movies starred the Mr. Rogers Band, a Beatles-influenced rock group that I’d created. I’d storyboard their movies, and draw their album covers and included every detail: the song titles, lyrics, credits, even clocking the song times. I’d cut a circle of black construction paper to represent the actual LP and slide it between the stapled front and back covers.
When I started high school, I had the attitude and look of a rocker, including a sweet mullet that I made worse by using a crimping iron to straighten the back. It fried my hair and earned me the nickname Steel Wool. But I also played hockey and was an all-star water polo goalie, the master of the egg beater (don’t ask), so I had a lot of jock friends too. I had the same combination of athleticism and creativity that had originally attracted me to wrestling.
Meanwhile, wrestling was becoming a bigger part of my life. I missed the original WrestleMania, the WWF’s version of the Super Bowl, but when it was time for WrestleMania 2 I took the bus down to the Winnipeg Arena and watched the show on closed circuit television, the archaic version of PPV. You paid for a ticket, which gave you the privilege of going to the Arena to watch the damn thing on a giant out-of-focus movie screen.
The glitz and excitement that surrounded WrestleMania took wrestling to a different level for me and I realized that the business was a hell of a lot bigger than what I saw in the Winnipeg Arena every month. I started to dream that maybe someday I could become a wrestler. The problem was that most of the guys in the WWF were huge and I was not. Another friend, Dave Fellowes, was also incredibly into wrestling and we had this crazy idea: Maybe if we hung out together at the Arena in muscle shirts, the British Bulldogs would see our muscularity and decide to take us under their wing and train us to be the Winnipeg Bulldogs. Of course they could just as easily have taken us to the basement, put ball gags in our mouths, and given us to the Gimp, but we’ll never know now will we?
In 1986, Winnipeg started getting broadcasts of Stampede Wrestling out of Calgary. This new company looked cheap and was broadcast out of a livestock field house but the wrestling was off the charts. It was fast, hard-hitting, action-packed, and completely ahead of its time. It was a melting pot of styles, exciting to watch, and I realized that the WWF wasn’t the only game in town.
There were a couple of other wrestling shows on the tube as well, and I watched them all. We had the local WFWA based out of Winnipeg, the UWF based out of Oklahoma, and the IWA based out of Montreal. The IWA featured all these guys with thick French accents who could hardly speak English and the show was even cheaper-looking