A Lion's Tale: Around the World in Spandex Read Online Free PDF

remain a part of my life. This was really apparent when he started showing up at my church on Sundays. I had been going to church with my mom since I was a little kid but at some point we just stopped. As I got more and more into music, heavy metal in particular, one of the genres I dug the most was Christian metal. A lot of kids in school were into the satanic metal bands like Slayer and Venom and that made me even more curious about what it was like on the other side of the Cross. Bands like Stryper, Bride, and Barren Cross sounded cool, looked cool, and convinced me that you could be into Jesus and still
be
cool. Listening to those bands influenced me to go back to church and I started going by myself on Sundays. I took confirmation classes and I even became a Sunday school teacher at sixteen, with my long steel-wool hair, rumpled dress shirt, and all. The minister at St. Chad’s was an ex-hippie named Tony Harwood-Jones who was a very good guy and easy to relate to. He encouraged me to explore my relationship with God. His attitude about being a Christian was “it isn’t what you wear as long as you are there.” I never missed a Sunday at church after my parents split. When my dad first started showing up, he just came to hang out with me, but after a while he got more into it and came to hang out with Jesus too.
    We also made a point of spending time together at his office, which just so happened to be upstairs from a convenience store that rented WWF videotapes. So we rented the latest tape, ate some Kentucky Fried Chicken (well what
did
you think KFC stood for?), and watched wrestling. My relationship with my dad at that time was based on body slams, biscuits, and Bibles and we became closer as a result of the three.
     

     
    Now that I’d decided the course of my life, I knew I would have to get a whole lot bigger. I joined a gym, stuffed myself with protein (along with a sock), read every muscle magazine I could find, and ordered the Arnold Schwarzenegger EZ Curl Bar to “Get 21 inch arms just like Arnold.”
    One day while watching Stampede, my heart jumped out of my mouth when I saw an ad for the Hart Brothers Pro Wrestling Camp. This was my chance to be trained by Owen and the entire Hart family, including Stu Hart himself! I wrote to the address on the screen and a couple of weeks later when I opened the reply, I found out two things:
     
    1. I had to be eighteen to go to wrestling camp, and
    2. I should be about 225 pounds.
     
    The letter had been written by a guy named Ed Langley, who was the representative for the Hart Brothers Camp. His advice on weight gain was to eat beef, fish, liver, and to drink only milk... a direct violation of Koko B. Ware’s rule. He also advised me to lift weights for two and a half hours a day and run three miles a day. So I ate raw eggs and liver (trying not to barf) and lots of fish and beef. Every shift at work, I’d weigh myself on the deli scale to check my progress. I started at 175 and my grand plan was to be 235 pounds by the time I left for wrestling school.
    I’d decided on 235 as my target weight about a year earlier when I met Ricky the Dragon at an annual car show called the World of Wheels. The show featured fancy funny cars, soap opera stars, Playboy Playmates, and more importantly, a WWF wrestler! Of course I couldn’t give a shit about seeing Michael Knight from
All My Children
or meeting Miss March, Mary Jane Rottencrotch, I just wanted to meet my hero himself, Ricky “The Dragon” Steamboat! I met Wallass at the show and tried to decide what I was going to say to him, as we figured we’d have time to ask the Dragon one question. We got our tried-and-true picture system ready and when I reached the front of the line, my big question for Ricky was “How tall are you?” (Hours to think of an inquiry or a witty anecdote and “How tall are you?” was the best I could do. The trend continued.)
    Ricky replied that he was 5 foot 11 and when I asked him