brutal honesty, they accepted his opinion because he was rarely wrong.
Ross at twelve got so upset over the booking of a Stampede week card that he got into a heated argument with Stu and ended up popping him square on the chin! Stu was stunned, but it turned out that Ross was right.
I made my official Stampede Wrestling debut in Calgary on September 1, 1978, and I was proud that the match with Mike York passed muster with Stu, who watched the whole thing nervously, probably because he was curious to see how bad it might be.
I spent most of that month with the skeleton crew on an old Greyhound bus Stu bought with money he could ill afford. The referee, Sandy Scott, was also the driver, a heavy-smoking Scot in his mid-forties who could pass as a much younger man. With his little red Afro, neatly trimmed beard and false teeth, Sandy resembled an elkhound.
Kasavubu liked to mellow us out on the night drives by getting us to sing the Temptations’ “Papa Was a Rolling Stone.” Norman Frederick Charles III was also a regular. He had been one of the Royal Kangaroos, a top tag team, but he’d had a falling out with his partner. Now in his late forties, he was thin and frail with bandy legs and a scruffy beard. We often joked about how he’d lost his ass in a card game because his outfit hung on him like a pair of old long johns, but he was the British Commonwealth Junior Heavyweight Champion nonetheless, having taken the belt from Dynamite just before Tom left for Germany, in an angle where Norman destroyed Tom’s knee.
Jimmy Rougeau was a stark contrast to our tired old North American Champion, Paddy Ryan. Paddy, like so many of Stu’s Calgary crew, was the last to know that the sun was setting on his career. I could see the light dim in his eyes when I gave him his finishes, and after he worked he’d sit redfaced and out of breath. It didn’t help that he weighed four hundred pounds and smoked like a chimney.
I soon got used to long drives, listening to music, singing, going from town to town, finding camaraderie in this strange mix of humanity. The bus would pull over in the middle of nowhere for a piss stop and that was a sight unto itself: Men of all different sizes and colors pissing at the side of the road while gazing up at the northern lights.
I worked my first program with Norman, who had been around long enough that he wasn’t keen on taking a lot of bumps. He knew plenty of short cuts, and he knew exactly how to settle me down and make me look good enough. On September 26, 1978, he pulled a chair up beside me in the dressing room in Regina, sipping coffee from a foam cup and smoking a cigarette. “Well, kid,” he said in his raspy Aussie accent, “looks like there might be a decent house coming in. Maybe this would be a good time to work a title change. What do you think about getting a little juice?”
Getting a little juice meant deliberately cutting my head with a razor blade. I felt butterflies in my stomach at the thought of it. As a referee I’d seen it done lots of times, close up; blading was practically a rite of passage in Puerto Rico. I told Norman I’d consider it, then went to check on the other matches, peeking out of a little hole in the wall, to give myself time to think. If I was going to make it to the top in wrestling, this moment was bound to come sooner or later. But that didn’t make it any easier. I wanted to believe that, in some pathetic way, this might help me get over and help my father at the same time.
The plan had been for Dynamite and Norman to pick up where they left off when Dynamite came back from Germany in December, but when I called Stu about all this, he liked the thought of me working title matches with Dynamite, rather than Norman. If I was going to cut myself, it was best to keep it near the hairline. I didn’t want to end up looking pocked and pitted like so many wrestlers. I found Norman and told him, “You better show me how to make a blade.”
He
Ross at twelve got so upset over the booking of a Stampede week card that he got into a heated argument with Stu and ended up popping him square on the chin! Stu was stunned, but it turned out that Ross was right.
I made my official Stampede Wrestling debut in Calgary on September 1, 1978, and I was proud that the match with Mike York passed muster with Stu, who watched the whole thing nervously, probably because he was curious to see how bad it might be.
I spent most of that month with the skeleton crew on an old Greyhound bus Stu bought with money he could ill afford. The referee, Sandy Scott, was also the driver, a heavy-smoking Scot in his mid-forties who could pass as a much younger man. With his little red Afro, neatly trimmed beard and false teeth, Sandy resembled an elkhound.
Kasavubu liked to mellow us out on the night drives by getting us to sing the Temptations’ “Papa Was a Rolling Stone.” Norman Frederick Charles III was also a regular. He had been one of the Royal Kangaroos, a top tag team, but he’d had a falling out with his partner. Now in his late forties, he was thin and frail with bandy legs and a scruffy beard. We often joked about how he’d lost his ass in a card game because his outfit hung on him like a pair of old long johns, but he was the British Commonwealth Junior Heavyweight Champion nonetheless, having taken the belt from Dynamite just before Tom left for Germany, in an angle where Norman destroyed Tom’s knee.
Jimmy Rougeau was a stark contrast to our tired old North American Champion, Paddy Ryan. Paddy, like so many of Stu’s Calgary crew, was the last to know that the sun was setting on his career. I could see the light dim in his eyes when I gave him his finishes, and after he worked he’d sit redfaced and out of breath. It didn’t help that he weighed four hundred pounds and smoked like a chimney.
I soon got used to long drives, listening to music, singing, going from town to town, finding camaraderie in this strange mix of humanity. The bus would pull over in the middle of nowhere for a piss stop and that was a sight unto itself: Men of all different sizes and colors pissing at the side of the road while gazing up at the northern lights.
I worked my first program with Norman, who had been around long enough that he wasn’t keen on taking a lot of bumps. He knew plenty of short cuts, and he knew exactly how to settle me down and make me look good enough. On September 26, 1978, he pulled a chair up beside me in the dressing room in Regina, sipping coffee from a foam cup and smoking a cigarette. “Well, kid,” he said in his raspy Aussie accent, “looks like there might be a decent house coming in. Maybe this would be a good time to work a title change. What do you think about getting a little juice?”
Getting a little juice meant deliberately cutting my head with a razor blade. I felt butterflies in my stomach at the thought of it. As a referee I’d seen it done lots of times, close up; blading was practically a rite of passage in Puerto Rico. I told Norman I’d consider it, then went to check on the other matches, peeking out of a little hole in the wall, to give myself time to think. If I was going to make it to the top in wrestling, this moment was bound to come sooner or later. But that didn’t make it any easier. I wanted to believe that, in some pathetic way, this might help me get over and help my father at the same time.
The plan had been for Dynamite and Norman to pick up where they left off when Dynamite came back from Germany in December, but when I called Stu about all this, he liked the thought of me working title matches with Dynamite, rather than Norman. If I was going to cut myself, it was best to keep it near the hairline. I didn’t want to end up looking pocked and pitted like so many wrestlers. I found Norman and told him, “You better show me how to make a blade.”
He
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