Hitman My Real Life in the Cartoon World (15 page)

The territory was slowly improving. Keith and I held on to the tag belts; Leo Burke, a respected veteran in his early thirties, was our North American Champion, and we’d turned our referee, Sandy Scott, into a great heel, which worked really well because the fans could be easily encouraged to hate a ref. Like a snide headmaster who relished his authority, Sandy was never wrong, even when he was. He never saw the obvious, yet he was a stickler for the slightest infraction. He’d level fines and threaten suspensions, pursing his lips and wagging his finger in your face. The fans grew to totally despise him. Was Sandy on the take, they’d speculate, or was he just a horse’s ass? Any reaction from the fans was a good reaction.

Then our two British wrestlers arrived. Steve Wright did have a repertoire of flips and rolls, but unfortunately he was no Dynamite.

Giant Haystacks was a hairy beast, grizzled and ruddy, a grump with a short fuse and a sharp wit.

He’d been gawked at his whole life, and he was sick of it. I changed his name to The Loch Ness Monster, and we started to build him. He didn’t do much in the ring, but he was hard to take off his feet, and when he laid out one of the Japanese wrestlers with a massive belly flop, the crowd gasped.

One of the cardinal rules for a booker is never to book yourself on top, but we needed someone to pit against Leo Burke for the North American belt: It was me or nobody. Leo was ruggedly handsome in a Burt Reynolds kind of way, and the grin on his face told me he was looking forward to working with me.

In our first match I listened to every word he said: Leo Burke was a wrestler who could elevate me from being a good worker to a great one. We went a full hour, and we both got a bit of a scare when I accidentally almost put him to sleep for real. Stu was all smiles when I came back to the dressing room. A sweat-drenched Leo gave me a happy hug and said, “Beautiful, it was beautiful.”

A couple of days before Valentine’s Day, I climbed into the van heading for Regina carrying a five-foot-tall Pink Panther, which I set on top of all the bags so it wouldn’t get dirty. The boys ribbed me about it all the way across the Prairies. Once the matches were on, Julie and I went out back. I’d wanted to give her a better gift, but she really loved it. At the end of the night when the van pulled away, I had a pang in my heart as she disappeared in my rearview mirror; waving good-bye, holding the big toy like a little girl.

The following Friday, in Calgary, I thought Leo was kidding when he said, “Get your second wind, kid.

The fans will never expect us to go an hour again.” At the fifty-two-minute mark the fans were standing on the seats cheering us on: the veteran and the youngster in a scientific struggle. The waltz was about over when I slipped on Ernie Ladd’s proverbial banana peel. Leo caught me out of nowhere in his finishing move, the sleeper. I slowly sank to my knees and faded into black. The drama was endearing to both the young fans and the old-timers. Harts didn’t lose, and when I did it gave me all the credibility in the world.

Meanwhile, Tom had injured his knee in Japan and had come home to heal. When he was working again, I naturally booked him against Steve Wright, thinking the fans would love it, though outside of the ring there was a noticeable coolness between them. Tom seemed more than a little nervous about working with him. Apparently, when Tom was a kid, Steve had made a steady habit of stretching and hurting him. I wasn’t sure if Tom was afraid that Steve would mop the floor with him or of what he would do to Steve if he tried. Maybe his biggest fear was of the disappointment that Ted Betley would feel either way. Regardless, we needed the match.

But it ended up being a disaster. For most of it, Steve hooked into Dynamite while he was on all fours; Tom looked bored and made no attempt to even fight back. It was easy to see the immense pleasure Steve took in hurting Tom. At one point, he applied a surfboard, a move that consisted of him standing on the back of Tom’s knees and hooking his legs, then grabbing Tom’s wrists, falling onto his own back and hoisting Tom up in an arch above him. Steve may just as well have taken a sledgehammer to Tom’s just-healed knee. Stu angrily approached the apron, pounding his hands on the mat, “I’m paying you to work, not to shoot, damn it!”

We’d been building Loch Ness into a monster heel. He’d had nothing but short, decisive wins and was now beating two wrestlers at a time in handicap matches. He was over with the fans, but not with the wrestlers. A couple of French Canadians griped that they didn’t want to work with him because he was too stiff, too clumsy and he smelled bad. I tried to reason with them, explaining that we were short on talent and we’d paid a lot to bring him in, but then had no choice but to tell them if they didn’t work with him, they could finish up. I gambled that a hard line would put an end to their complaints—we couldn’t afford to lose them either—and it did.

Loch Ness was stiff, and he did smell a bit ripe, but it didn’t make things any easier when he was constantly beaned with gum wrappers and bottle caps by the wrestlers seated behind him on the long rides. He’d sit there steaming mad, smoking his cigarettes right down to the filter; I felt like a school-bus driver hopelessly trying to keep the kiddies in line.

At one point Loch Ness finally snapped. “I’ll kick the shit out of the whole lot of you,” he threatened, and he turned, pointing his huge fat finger at everyone in the back row. The Cuban, who hadn’t done anything, quickly had his knife out and ordered the van to a stop. In the nick of time, Loch Ness apologized to The Cuban, and that was the end of it.

Then Big Jim came back, billed as the strongest lineman in the NFL. I had kept Loch Ness invincible—

until Jim knocked him flat on his ass with some football tackles. It blew the roof off the pavilion.

On the way to Regina, one night at the beginning of March, the wind was sharp as a knife, and the temperature had fallen to forty below. We sputtered to a stop in the middle of nowhere, with a frozen gas line.

I got out and stood in the cold, flagging down cars and trucks. As Wayne got a ride to a gas station to get some line deicer, I managed to find volunteers to take every wrestler into town but Loch Ness. I could see he was starting to panic, thinking I would leave him on his own to freeze to death. So I stayed, a captain going down with his ship; no heat, no light, waiting for rescue.

To take our minds off the cold, I told him a story about the world famous McGuire twins, more than seven hundred pounds each, who’d come up one Stampede week a few years back. As the story goes, it was a hot summer morning, just after sunrise, when the school bus my dad rented broke down. All the wrestlers climbed out, including the midgets, and pushed the bus down the highway while the driver popped the clutch trying to get the engine to catch. All except Billy and Benny McGuire, who, at their size, didn’t have the stamina for bus pushing. They were left standing at the side of the road with “Don’t worry, we’ll be back for you.”

The other wrestlers pushed the bus all the way to a truck stop five miles up the road and then went into the café for coffee while the mechanic sorted out the problem.

At that hour, the long-distance truckers were just coming off overnight hauls. One by one they pulled into the truck stop, shaking their heads: “You’re not going to believe what I saw back there on the road!” It must have been an eyeful to come upon this massive blob of humanity standing there in the heat, and then a quarter mile down the road, an identical blob!

My breath froze in the air as I said, “That’s one good thing, at least we don’t have to stand in the hot sun!” And Loch Ness laughed.

He said, “Bret, I just want you to know I appreciate how you stood up for me with those French lads.

I won’t forget it.”

Then a car pulled up and Wayne jumped out, and a few minutes later we took off through the snow, just in time to make the show.

That night, just before the van left Regina for the nine-hour drive to Billings, Julie gave me a kiss good-bye. Tom watched from the van window, and after we drove off, he asked, “What’s with that?”

I braced myself for the inevitable off-color remark, but when it didn’t come, I told him the truth: that Julie and I sort of hit it off. “I like her a lot, Tom.”

I was surprised to hear him say, “I know what you mean. I wish I could find a girl like that.”

In Billings, I’d be working with Harley Race, setting him up to defend his World Heavyweight title against Leo throughout the territory when we did the loop in the coming week. (Little did I know at the time that this would be the one and only time I’d ever wrestle for the NWA World Heavyweight title.) For some reason it was assumed I’d go an hour with him, but the question was whether I could, after a five-hundred-mile drive. When Harley and I locked eyes in the dressing room, I could see he was just as beat as I was.

“Don’t tell me we’re going for a fuckin’ hour?”

I smiled and said, “Harley, it’s whatever you want.” He wanted ten minutes, which was fine with me.

By Friday night of that circuit, the pavilion was completely sold out: everyone wanted to watch Harley successfully defend his title. Business had been steadily climbing. To capitalize on Loch Ness’s last two weeks, Keith and I dropped the tag straps to him and Dynamite. For the finish, Sandy Scott restrained Keith as Dynamite dove like a bird across the ring wearing a rugby helmet, no doubt filled with titanium steel, and crashed head-to-head with me. I lay there flat on the mat watching as Loch Ness collapsed on top of me like a house. Not being able to breathe, I felt a sense of panic, and the thought crossed my mind that this is what the French boys had been complaining about. After what seemed like an eternity Sandy dove down to the mat and counted one . . . two . . . three.

The next week the pavilion thundered as Keith and I battered Loch Ness with a barrage of lefts and rights until he flopped into his corner. I headed back to Dynamite in the far corner just as Loch Ness recovered enough to charge across the ring like a runaway train. Tom told me the exact second to move and Loch Ness squashed him like a grape. The crowd became unglued, Keith fell in on all fours behind Loch Ness and I delivered a nice high, drop kick to his chest. Loch Ness reeled, his arms flailing like giant windmills. I hit him with another drop kick and he toppled backwards over Keith, with me diving on top for the pin.

Afterwards, in the dressing room, it was all hugs and handshakes. Loch Ness had worked hard and had a huge grin on his face. Even Tom was pleased.

The next week, with Loch Ness and Wright gone, Stu had a cavalry of American wrestlers arriving, including Kasavubu, The Ugandan Giant. He suffered from diabetes and kidney disease, and every few days he needed to hook himself up to a dialysis machine. Sometimes he was very tired, but he kept it to himself and never complained. He would often relieve Wayne or me for a spell at the wheel, pop in a Marvin Gaye tape and sing softly in perfect harmony. When Kas was with us, he made a habit of looking after J.R. He couldn’t stop him from taking the odd nip, but he kept J.R. busy playing cribbage and diverted him with bad jokes, making sure he wasn’t quite so drunk every night come match time.

The spring snow was replaced by rain. One night, as the wipers kept time with a Motown beat, Wayne fell into a conversation with the midget wrestler Cowboy Lang. Cowboy could do great drop kicks and all the other moves just like the big guys, but midgets had always been slapstick. Cowboy said, “We were gonna do a title change, but we couldn’t find a promoter who would let us do it.” I asked him if there was a belt and he told me Little Tokyo had it in his bag. Wayne and Kas kidded him that maybe Stu would let them switch the title. Cowboy’s eyes grew wide when I agreed to actually take it up with Stu.

That Friday night as I drove to the pavilion, I thought about how happy Cowboy would be, winning that tiny World Midget Championship belt. I stopped and bought a couple of bottles of cheap champagne. When he won, all the boys charged into the ring and showered Cowboy with it. He cried during his interview with Ed Whalen, and he was so ecstatic that he poured champagne over his own head.

And there had to be at least one fan who went home thinking, Wow, the World Midget title changed hands tonight!

Each night I wrote out detailed accounts of every match in a small orange notebook; I thought it would be invaluable to be able to look up what worked, what didn’t and why and especially to keep a record to make sure I didn’t repeat the same outcomes every week. I was really beginning to understand how to structure a card. Never have two disqualifications back-to-back. Keep the broadways, or draws, to a minimum. Go easy on the gimmicks. Use juice only when necessary. Not too many low blows. Never let the fans guess the outcome. Keep it real. Book at least three weeks in advance. Above all, make sure nobody gets hurt for real.

The territory was now filled with a nice mix of old-timers and rookies who enjoyed bringing out the best in one another. Because there wasn’t much difference in pay between top and bottom, egos were kept in check, and the dressing room was pretty relaxed. I never asked anyone to do what I wouldn’t do myself. I worked hard every night and was honest and direct, and the wrestlers treated me the same.

There were pitfalls to booking, especially as the son of the promoter. People would often put down to ego moves that were really simply protecting Stu’s business.

It was Leo who came to me and told me I needed to take the North American Heavy-weight title from him, insisting it was in Stu’s best interest. The Edmonton fans were on the edge of their seats for the whole match. At the forty-minute mark, I had Leo in a headlock. He called for a reverse abdominal stretch and fired me hard into the ropes. As I came back at him, he threw his arm up to get around me, and elbowed me squarely at the base of my nose. I fell flat on the canvas and rolled slowly over on my stomach, blood flooding from both nostrils. Leo rolled me back and said, “Don’t move,” and dropped a knee into my face. The beauty of a really great pro like Leo was that all I felt was the faintest touch, and I sold the hell out of it. At the sight of blood in a babyface match, the crowd rallied behind me. Leo worked my nose for the rest of the match, but never once did he hurt me.