Don't Start the Revolution Without Me! - Jesse Ventura [14]
Now they are scrutinizing Mr. Ventura’s every pronouncement, assembling focus groups and even making pilgrimages to St. Paul, Minnesota’s capital, searching for clues to a mystery that confounds even the most savvy politicians: How does a candidate excite the electorate and galvanize new voters when the public does not seem to be paying attention to politics?”
—The New York Times, September 19, 1999
Now, leaving Minnesota, all the tumult and the shouting seemed almost like another lifetime. The State Capitol dome faded into the skyline as dusk descended over our camper. We were heading south, way south, on a new adventure whose outcome was equally uncertain, equally unpredictable.
CHAPTER 2
The Road to the Arena
“There can hardly have been a weirder sight in this country’s political history: Minnesota governor-elect Jesse ‘The Body’ Ventura standing before a whooping crowd at his 1999 inaugural ball, sporting a garish, tasseled jacket, biker’s headscarf, shades, and a psychedelic Jimi Hendrix T-shirt, a pyrotechnical display fizzing behind him. That night, Ventura paraded and pumped his fists as if his prize were not the leadership of the nation’s 32nd state but a WWF smackdown victory, his head thrown back, his enormous mouth bisecting his enormous face, in the midst of a warrior’s cry that would make Howard Dean’s notorious howl look like a lullaby.”
—Boston Phoenix, March 2004
When I taught at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government in 2004, I called my last class “Wrestling, Then Politics: The Perfect Preparation for Serving.” People thought it was a joke but, when the class was over, they realized it hit the nail right on the head. First of all, in wrestling you have to be able to ad-lib and think on your feet. In politics, you’ll have questions fired at you and situations where you can’t run to your handlers. You need to be able to come up with an answer that doesn’t destroy you, and you’re going to learn the hard way that some of them will. Wrestling taught me that, because no matter how much you talk over what you’re going to do in a match, anything that can go wrong usually will.
The second thing I told the students was about how you had to sell yourself as a wrestler. I had to convince people to pay their hard-earned dollars to see me get my butt kicked, because I was billed as a villain. Well, in politics, you have to sell yourself similarly to convince people to vote for you, allow you to take their tax dollars, and run their government.
In both wrestling and politics, you travel a lot—especially to small towns. Wrestling is the only pro sport that goes to those places. We call them spot shows. It lets you get the message right out to the people. Because so much of it is visual today, wrestling makes you learn how to be very comfortable in front of a television camera. In that way, too, it’s a great stepping-stone to politics.
Finally, the wrestler is often not in public the same person he is in private, and I think it’s the same with the politician. Was I really Jesse “The Body” Ventura, a guy who struts around with bleached blond hair, six earrings, and feather boas around his neck? Of course not. That’s a total creation. So was the politically fabricated life of Mark Foley, the now-disgraced Republican Congressman from Florida who railed against gay marriage at the same time he was writing lurid e-mails to page boys.
Interstate 35, where I maneuvered our camper straight south out of Minneapolis on a gray, cold winter’s evening, was the identical road I’d driven thirty years earlier to begin my wrestling career. Back then, I’d been sending out pictures to different promoters around the country. One day I got a call from Bob Geigel in Kansas City, which was then one of the twenty-six wrestling territories in the U.S. He said my trainer had told him I had great potential and did I want to come for a tryout? Terry and I had started dating, and we were already pretty crazy about each other. But how could I pass up this opportunity? I hopped into my old Chevy, carrying a couple