Don't Start the Revolution Without Me! - Jesse Ventura [15]
“I missed you so bad,” I recall, glancing over at Terry as she jots a few notes into her travel journal. “I remember when you came to visit me once, after I’d been in Kansas City for a couple months, you cried when you saw how I was living.”
“Well,” Terry says, not looking up, “you were staying in basically a flophouse.”
“Twenty-three dollars a week,” I marvel, and shake my head. “But I’d seen worse in the service. Didn’t bother me.”
Pro wrestling had heroes and villains, and I’d already decided I was going to be a “bad guy” like “Superstar” Billy Graham. That’s why I grew the blond mane, to look like a California beach bum. I knew people in the Midwest would hate that. In a sport where Gorgeous George, Gorilla Monsoon, and The Crusher were some of the big names, I knew that plain old Jim Janos wasn’t going to cut the mustard. I’d always liked the name Jesse, maybe because of Jesse James. I looked on a map of California and my eyes landed on a highway that ran north of L.A. called Ventura. Jesse Ventura, the Surfer. Now that had a ring to it.
Besides Kansas City, on this trip we’d be passing right through Wichita, Kansas, where I made my debut against a “good guy” called Omar Atlas. Beforehand, Bob Geigel called us together and sketched out the plan. If the match was going well, I was to pick Omar up and throw him over the top rope. In those days, that was cause for automatic disqualification. So I went strutting out there, bragging and making fun of Omar, climbing up on the ropes and insulting the crowd when they booed me. And when I tossed Omar at them, and he landed with a thud and came up, I paraded around while the people got what they came for: They hated my guts. I spent two months around Kansas City earning peanuts for my matches, between thirty-five and sixty-five dollars per night.
“I knew then that I wanted to spend the rest of my life with you,” I said, turning again to Terry. “But I was still your typical noncommittal bachelor. Remember what you told me over the phone?”
“I said, I ain’t leavin’ up here unless I get a bigger commitment than ‘come on down and live with me.’”
“And I said, ‘Well, I guess I’ll just have to say ‘Will you marry me?’ You started crying, and said yes.”
By the time we got married that summer of 1975, I was moving on to Oregon, where the money was a little better. I traveled to towns all over the state for the next two years, at one point wrestling for sixty-three consecutive nights. I put 128,000 miles on the first car I ever owned, a ’75 Mercury Cougar, and often I was carpooling! For a while I billed myself as The Great Ventura and wore a mask—“to hide my good looks”—so tearing it off became a new gimmick. I fought a “battle royal” one time, where the promoters told everybody that the winner would get $50,000. I won all right, and probably got a little over a hundred bucks for my trouble. That’s the un-glorious part of the sport.
Other wrestlers went out carousing after their matches, while I went back to my hotel room alone and called Terry. This was tough on both of us, until she moved up.
TERRY: In Oregon, we lived in an apartment way off the beaten path, alongside an unpaved road that had a strip mall with wooden sidewalks. We only had one car, I didn’t know anybody, and I often just sat in an apartment with our dog for three or four days. I got in trouble with Jesse when I ran up a hundred dollar phone bill calling my mom, because I was so lonely.
In 1978, when an announcer started referring to me as Jesse “The Body” and the nickname stuck, I joined one of the bigger leagues, the American Wrestling Association, and went home to Minnesota. That’s where Adrian “Golden Boy” Adonis and I first became an unpopular tag team. There’s an old saying in the world of wrestling: “They gotta hate ya before they can love ya.”
I’ve often referred to pro wrestling as “ballet with violence.” Yes, it’s staged, as far as who’s going to be the winner, but it’s not fake. It’s really an art form, and one that requires careful discipline. When