Wrestling on the Road: Weather and Other Challenges
It has rained almost every day for about a month now in my town. Most days, really heavily. In fact, several streets in my town are closed because they're flooded and you can't get around. So it got me thinking about some weather conditions that I have dealt with over the years on the road wrestling.
As you can imagine, close to 30 years wrestling all over the world, I’ve seen a lot of bad weather. I’ve driven in blizzards where you couldn’t see past the hood ornament, where a 2-hour drive takes you 6 hours or more. I was stranded in Little Rock, Arkansas for a week because of an ice storm that shut down the region. No power, only generators. I’ve been on a ferry in the Sea of Japan during a monsoon. I thought I was dying that day for sure.
Traveling In Japan
The Kobe earthquake of 1995 killed over 6,000 people and destroyed like half of Japan. Thank God I wasn’t there for the quake. We had a 3-week tour right after though, about 2 weeks later. In Japan, the wrestlers travel on a tour bus. With WAR (Wrestling and Romance) on the bus, you always sit in the same seat. The Gaijin or American wrestlers sat in the front of the bus. Japanese young boys sat in the middle of the bus. The Japanese veteran wrestlers or stars sat in the back. The bus had a TV and VCR, and the American wrestlers would watch movies on the long rides. That was always a good bonding time for us. I remember one tour with Jon, Chris Jericho, and me singing along with the songs in Grease, dancing in the aisle, just being ridiculous. So the bus was never a bad time.
Traveling and Foreign Road Food
Well, back to the tour right after the earthquake, it was a different story. Most of the highways and major roads were destroyed. You couldn’t drive on them; they were all closed. I mean, they looked like a war zone, completely torn up. So for the next 21 days, we spent most of our time on the bus. A lot of days, almost 20 hours a day. In Tokyo and Osaka, it was always easy to get good food. In a lot of towns, the only place to get food was a convenience store.
Yakitori is chicken on skewers roasted over an open flame. It always came a little pink inside, which always made me worry about salmonella. You ate it anyway, and it tasted good compared to convenience store food. Some of the smaller towns and the northern towns, you could only get curry or raw squid or something nasty like that. Traveling to shows, we would all stop and eat on the highway at a rest stop. You could always get hamburger steak and sometimes real steak. I’m just not sure if it was always beef, but at least it was one decent meal a day. Due to all the highways being closed, that meant we weren't going to get that one good meal. So for that entire tour, getting food was hard.
Drinking On The Road
The office would stock the bus with plenty of beer. But no food. I’m not a drinker; all I wanted was food. Chris wanted food, but he wasn't as picky as me, so it was easier for him to find food that he would eat. Warlord wasn’t picky either, but he never had enough to eat. And he let everyone know. Jon, on the other hand, was very happy just drinking. Many nights we drove all night and had to sleep on the bus. It gets to be really uncomfortable after a couple of nights on the bus, and it gets so hard to sleep at all. To make it worse, Jon was a very loud, happy-go-lucky drunk. He would keep us all up all night. After a few days of this, we started planning to kill Jon if he didn’t shut up. We would all take Halcion, a sleeping pill we’d get in Mexico. Jon was so loud he’d keep us up anyway. After a couple of nights without sleep, we decided to drug Jon’s beer with a couple of Halcion. We couldn’t believe it didn’t affect Jon at all. So we put a few more in his next beer. Still no effect on him at all. So we drugged his 3rd and 4th beers, and nothing happened. He had enough Halcion in him to put an elephant to sleep. That night, all of us except Jon slept.
Craziest In-Ring Experience
I don’t remember the town. We had an afternoon show with about 10,000 people at the show. Jon and I were wrestling Jado and Gedo. They were part of the 6-man champion team. Warlord, Jon, and I would eventually beat them. Funaki was their partner. They were like his young boys. Every vet has a young boy or two. The young boys do all kinds of things for the vet. He, in return, helps them learn all the ins and outs about wrestling. It’s a big respect thing. American young wrestlers would never go for that. They think they're above it. So anyways, right in the middle of our match, I was in the ring, actually in the middle of a spot. All of a sudden, there's a major aftershock. 10,000 people, our opponents, and the ref all start running to the doorways, which is proper earthquake procedure. Jon and I just stood there looking at each other. It only lasted about 30 or 40 seconds, but it ended the show. We couldn’t believe we were actually in the middle of a match during an earthquake. I know it was just an aftershock, but when you're the one going through it, there’s no difference.
The Conclusion of The Tour
This tour finally reached the end. We were all on each other's nerves and needed a break from each other. We all sat at the airport going home and came to the conclusion, sure, the tour was hard. But we all were lucky we were going home. There was still a lot to get done before the Japanese people’s lives would go back to normal.
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