Rasslin'

      On June 17th, 1964 (brother Joe's 7th birthday) we were all living in Kenwood on 2301 Newton Av.  Huge house, with a den-sort of room on the first floor.  There we had a couch, a couple of comfy chairs, and our main TV.  It was the television that we had recently watched JFK's on.  On that afternoon I was channel surfing (we had 5 to surf through) and I landed on a channel (11?) that showed two grown men in tights wrestling in an elevated ring, surrounded by ropes.  There was a small audience of perhaps 40 people in the TV studio, loudly booing and cheering the men engaged in combat.  I was transfixed.  It took about eight minutes, including commercials, for one Eddie Sharkey (slicked back dark hair, like Tony Curtis) to defeat non-descript Kenny Jay (from Cleveland, OH) in two straight falls.  My life would never be the same.
     This was Verne Gagne's AWA wrestling.  Verne was the real deal, all-American football player and olympian, who had attended the University of Minnesota when my mom was there.  Verne was the WORLD'S Champion, which was so cool as he lived in Minneapolis, of all places.  He also advertised his own products on the wrestling show: Gerra-Speed (some sort of artificial stimulant) and Gerra-Lac (made you poop), as well as promoting his own light heavyweight boxer, Ron Marsh.  He had Ron spar a local boy each week on All Star Wrestling, while promoting Ron's next big fight at the Minneapolis Auditorium.  Sadly, Ron lost one of his first big fights to Ed 'Baker Boy' Hurley and was soon dropped by the champ, although Ron did go on to have a decent boxing career.  But I digress...
     Rasslin' featured some good guys (Verne, Wilbur Snyder, Moose Evans), some bad guys (Mad Dog Vachon, Harley Race, Larry Hennig) and a great many seemingly not very good guys (Kenny Yates, Gene Anderson, the afore mentioned Mr. Jay) who got their behinds kicked twice a week on TV.  There were also some guys, most notably the Crusher, who seemed to be a bad guy one week and a better guy the next week, depending on who he was fighting.  Very confusing to a nine year old.  The announcers would always be trying to get the audience to come down to the Auditorium to see the non-televised matches, which featured the guys who won on TV actually fighting each other (!)  One week we were told that the nastiest villain of all, Mad Dog Vachon, would be wrestling the Crusher himself!  The irresistible force v. the immovable object ... how could such a marvelous thing be possible?  A couple of weeks after that, Vachon did the impossible and defeated Minneapolis' own Verne Gagne for the WORLD'S championship!  Horrors!  Would Vachon take the title to Algeria?  Why wasn't this news on the front page of the newspaper?  What would President Johnson do to keep the title in the USA where it belonged?
    After patiently listen to me agonize over this for a week or two, one afternoon while we were watching a Twin's game on TV, my dad dropped the bombshell that "TV wrestling is fake".  "Baseball is fake!" I shot back, but my heart was broken.  No wonder the bouts on TV always managed to end in time for the commercials.  Arrugh!
     Of course, I remained a fan.  Bought all of the wrestling mags.  Discovered that there were quite a few world champions out there, but our local guys were still very much featured.  Still, these unknown (to me) champions such as Lou Thez, and Bruno Sammartino, all looked like they could break Mad Dog, or even bald ol' Verne, in half.  I still rarely missed a wrestling show on TV, and up until 8th grade would talk to my buddy John Mikelson on the phone when a particularly cool bout was on, usually two "winners" in a tag team match against another "winner" and Kenny Jay.  The lone winner would beat the crap out of the other two winners, tag in Kenny, who would get himself pinned within seconds.  Oh, well.
     Spent 9th grade in England and devoured their version of pro wrestling.  They had their OWN world champion, as well as various weight classes, like boxing, and they wrestled in rounds as well.  They had one particular bad guy named Mick McManus who never seemed to lose.  In fact, he only lost twice over a 20 plus year career, but Mr. McManus never had to fight Mad Dog Vachon.
     In high school I began to attend the matches in the Minneapolis Auditorium, and the St Paul Civic Center.  Usually went with my buddy Harold Shallman, who had lived on the east coast for awhile and was familiar with all of the out-of-town wrestlers that I had only read about in the magazines.  In later years I would attend with Kit Finley and John LeMoine.  We would loudly cheer Nick Bockwinkle, the bleach blond evil champion, and boo all of the namby-pamby "good guys".  Others in the audience thought we were nuts.  We were great fans of the pre-governor version of Jesse Ventura, cheering for him at body building contests as well as at the matches.  When Hulk Hogan came to town we booed the hell out of him, especially as Hulk's group eventually hired away the best of Verne's group, effectively ending the AWA.  My memories remain, however.  In fact, Kenny Jay recently sponsored a benefit show and John Mikelson came all the way up from Kansas to attend, and hopefully see me as well.  I was too ill to attend, but I will always appreciate the gesture.
     In 1981 I was about to finish the Master's Degree program in Criminal Justice Studies at the University of Minnesota.  I was two classes and one thesis shy of graduating when the program was re-trenched.  I was accepted into the Phd Program in History but immediately lost my funding as my mentor/professor was interested in the same gorgeous undergrad that I was, and I won, so he took away my teaching assistantship.  Boom.  Out of school, nothing to do. I decided I needed to become a professional wrestler.
     Eddie Sharkey had just opened a wrestling school.  For one thousand dollars, he would train you for six weeks and get you ready for a life of fame and fortune.  I was five foot ten and about 205 pounds, 26 years old, and was happy to bring in my check for $1000 so I could get trained.  The training center was in a crappy old gym in north Minneapolis.  Eddie Sharkey wasn't there, just two very short, extremely muscular guys who identified themselves as Eddie's assistants and would be running our first day of class.  They were happy to take my check, and to put myself and the five other students through four hours of complete torture.  I no longer remember how we began the class; sit ups and push ups I would guess.  We did spend at least 20 minutes doing wheel barrows, where one guy would hold your feet while you walked around the gym with your hands.  We did this until we all vomited.  Then we entered the ring.  Wrestling rings are very springy.  Ours was a nasty old boxing ring, and had no give whatsoever.  We were taught how to throw ourselves down on our backs, arms straight out at our sides to absorb the shock.  We did this until we vomited again.  Then we learned how to fall on our faces, nose slamming into the canvas.  We did this until we all had drawn blood.  Our instructors then showed us how to do pile drivers to each other, the most dangerous hold in wrestling, where we are driven head first into the mat.  Four hours of class.  I could barely drag myself back to the car.
     I received a call from one of my instructors the next morning.  All five of my fellow students had quit, because all five had ended up in the hospital, one with a broken collar bone.  All five of them were younger than me, bigger than me, and in better shape than me.  As for me, I was not in the hospital, but I couldn't walk.  Not one step.  My instructor promised to ease up if I came back to class, and that the first class had been so hard in order to "weed out the pussies".  They would be happy .. Mr. Sharkey would be happy... to help me finish my training.  I politely declined, hung up the phone, and immediately called the bank to stop payment on my check.  That fall I entered law school, becoming on of the few folks to have gone from a Masters program to a Doctorate Program to Pro Wrestling School to Law School within the space of six months.
     I should have stayed in wrestling school.  The next class was somewhat more successful, as Eddie Sharkey graduated the Road Warriors and Rick Rude.  I probably never would have made it as a wrestler without massive injections of steroids, but I'm sure I would have at least made a pretty good manager.  Wrestling was about to reach new heights in national popularity.  It would have been fun to have rode that wave for awhile.
     Got my two oldest kids interested in TV wrestling, and we would act out our own bouts on the living room floor.  Even have video of Zeke making a clean pin on his old man, after launching his four year old self off of the couch and landing SPLAT on my prostrate form, and then counting 1-2-3!  I have the upmost respect for the boys in the business.  The perfect combination of athletics and theatre.  No dad, it's NOT fake.  Just try it yourself once. It hurts, and the blood is real.  I failed as a lawyer.  As a wrestler, I could'a been a contender!  I could'a been champ!  I could'a been somebody ...