The Superstar

Confession time: when I was 14, I used to take the cushions off our couch, and I would "professionally wrestle" them.

I did this while wearing a set of navy blue sweats with a pair of pink swimming trunks over top. (The pink trunks were originally white, but had been washed in the wrong temperature with colors.)

I was attempting to look like this guy:

I think I ended up looking more like this guy:

Albeit, my bulge was more pronounced. ;)

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So why did I do this?

Was I acting out my inner rage?

I was never a tough guy. Outside of the occasional fights with my brother & and the controversial Chris Eisler/"I'm going to cut your hair in the parking lot of the Circle K" showdown of late '87 (Don't ask!) ... I never fought.

I'm sure being 130 pounds had something to do with it.

Not that I didn't have my share of run-ins.

I drew the ire of Shane Lorencz in gym class one day for some rough fouls during in a basketball game.

(I hated getting pushed around in gym class. Once pushed around, I immediately resorted to poor sportsmanship. Even as an adult. Ask the guy from Business "D" who suffered the wrath of my obviously wide slide during a SIAST softball tournament. I went by him with slide that half resembled a chorus girl performing for Bob Fosse. )

I remember another guy in my 9th grade class who wanted to fight me. I don't remember his name off the top of my head, or why he wanted to fight ... but I do remember that I waited for him outside after class, and he walked right by me like he forgot about it.

I think he realized it was a lose-lose situation: if he won, nobody would care; if he lost, he'd have the infamy of losing to Mr. 130 Pounds on his head. I also remember that he was a huge Huey Lewis fan - and a "Hip to Be Square/Doing It All For My Baby"-era Huey Lewis fan at that; so his toughness may have been in question as well.

I did have the occasional bouts with bullies. In Grade 9, my brother's friend Kim Fransen, a senior, once whipped me with a Twizzler so hard, that it left licorice shaped welts on my arm for days.

Another Grade 9 incident involved a guy by the name of Ed Begonia. Ed used to arm punch me, or push my stuff on the floor. One day I got pissed and shoved back. Ed stopped after that, I think in part, because he wasn't so much of bully as he just seemed like a guy who wanted friends, and just had a weird way of showing it. (Makes me sad thinking about it. Or maybe he was just an *sshole.)

Honestly, I believe that I dressed in stylish ring attire and performed such diverse moves as the "Dive Bomber" and "The Slap Jack" because I identified with wrestling.

Not the fighting and the violence.

No, I identified with the performing.

It was never "real" to me. It was an art form.

Laugh if you want, but pro-wrestling is ballet and physical comedy on the fly. It's co-ordinated but rarely choreographed. Wrestlers plan "high spots" like the finish and big moments in advance, but they also ebb and flow as the match occurs. (Imagine Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers making up a dance as it went along.)

I never doubted it that it was entertainment, but I also never doubted that it was athletic and took a certain skill level that no other "legitimate sport" has.

Wrestling goes in trends. It's hot topic one minute, and the next, it's blamed for all of society's ills.

I grew up watching Chris Benoit. He wrestled on the first live card I ever saw in Regina, at the Exhibition Auditorium. I remember after the show getting Owen Hart's autograph. He and Chris Benoit seemed not much taller than I did, and they both looked worlds away from the WWF.

When all the stuff about Benoit started last year, it did make me take a moment to review whether this was something I should be supporting. (I did the same thing when Owen Hart died.) The drugs, the constant physical damage and the real life violence seems too much to take at times. It can be vulgar, silly and offensively xenophobic. (Hilariously, at one point, Canadians were the bad guys.)

However, here's my theory. Sports, entertainment, literature and arts in general are one of the only areas in life where you can really express yourself. Not all of us can play a violin or paint the Sistine Chapel, so for some their theories on life are better expressed in somebody else's 3 minute pop song or in the joy of watching athletic ambition fulfilled.

I know that a lot of this sounded hooey-phooey psycho-babble from a douche-bag who dressed up in swim trunks and tight sweats as a teenager and delivered "The Hot Shot" to a sofa cushion, but I learned a lot from the behind the scenes and inner workings of the professional wrestling business.

I learned about the value of finding your own niche. Not everybody is 6 foot 4 and 250 pounds. Not everybody has an IQ of 180. Not everybody has a full head of hair. But to find out who you are and what your passions are and how you can make something of yourself is a prototype I've seen in hundreds of people who are living their dreams.

I learned about the value of putting everything you have into your art. I heard the stories of wrestler Dynamite Kid, who performed the same way at a community center in Red Deer, Alberta in 1978 that he did in front of a world wide pay-per-view audience almost ten years later. I spent seven years shooting and editing and treating everyday like a performance whether it was in Minot or for the national news.

I learned that nobody else is going to do it for you.

I learned that the gift of entertainment is a fabulous thing.

I learned that there's comedy in everything.

I learned hink that failure happens to everybody, and that you have to make your own second chances. I've read biographies of wrestlers who reached the top of the mountain, only to get pushed off. They started all over again, and climbed to even higher heights than they ever dreamed. Been there ... going to do that in the future.

I also learned that life is a career, and it's something that you have to work on.

Well, I gotta go. I think I'm going to take on my wife for the Heavyweight title.