Pain And Passion (eBook)

Introduction When I was eleven years old, I wanted to be Dynamite Kid. Even when he was one of the bad guys, committing heinous acts against my other idol, Bret Hart, I secretly worshipped the tough, cocky Englishman who moved withthe agility of Spider-Man in the wrestling ring. In the early 1980s, I watched Stampede Wrestling religiously, glued to the TV every Saturday afternoon in the living room of my Saskatoon home. When the show was over, I'd snatch my little brother and re-enact the matches, with him as my crash test dummy. Poor kid. In the schoolyard, my friends and I played Stampede Wrestling at recess, pretending to be the stars of the Calgary-based promotion, imitating the down-home play-by-plays of announcer Ed Whalen as we hammered on each other. 'Off those ropes! Look out, Nellie! It's a malfunction at the junction!' I was the runt of my class then, neither good at nor particularly taken with most sports. Comic books were my passion, which never makes one the most popular kid in school. But where wrestling was concerned, I bonded with my classmates. All the boys were hooked on the wild brawls and zany theatre-meets-sports soap opera that the famed Hart family concocted each week. And pro wrestling was perfectly in keeping with my love of comic books. The Hart boys, Dynamite Kid, Davey Boy Smith - they were likesuperheroes come to life. Every so often, my dad and my grandpa took me to the Monday night matches too, when Stampede Wrestling came to the Saskatoon Arena. Grandpahad been watching wrestling since the 1950s and he was still a big fan. When things got too far out or bloody, Gramps would assure me the action was fake, though he didn't seem to believe that himself when he'd howl withindignation at the villains' wicked ways: 'That son-of-a-bitch is cheating!' For several generations on the Canadian Prairies, Stu Hart's Stampede Wrestling was an institution: a staple of the pop culture diet for hundreds of thousands of fans. But the show's influence was far more than just regional.In the late 1980s, it was broadcast across the country on TSN (The Sports Network). Over the decades, bootleg tapes of Stampede Wrestling were broadcast in up to thirty countries around the world. Some of the most famous wrestlers of all time emerged from the promotion, from Gene Kiniski and Superstar Billy Graham (Hulk Hogan's forefather) to Bret and Owen Hart, the British Bulldogs, and current superstar Chris Benoit. From its remote neck of the woods in Western Canada, Stampede Wrestling helped shape the wrestling world into the multimillion-dollar mega-industry it is today.