A friend of mine asked me if these Storytime segments were true stories, and it called to mind a conversation I had with my father many years ago, one I’ll never forget. “Dad, is wrestling real?”
“Of course it’s real, son. The guy who’s supposed to win always wins.”
“Aw Dad, c’mon…”
“Let me just say this….they all travel on the same bus.” I guess we do all travel on the same bus in one way or another, don’t we?
Dad used to take us to the wrestling. I was just a kid and and he was working long hours but he would get home dog tired and take me and a friend to the Gardens and it would be the Sheik vs Haystacks Calhoun or The Sheik vs Some Other Good Guy. The Sheik always had a foreign object hidden in his shoe, because he was a foreign guy and that was part of the weird passion play. The foreign guy uses dirty tricks. Well we went this one time to Varsity Stadium to see the Sheik take on the Champion. Of course there were several champions. Every company had their own champion. This guy was from Texas and his name was Dory Funk Jr.
Now The Sheik, he had a manager who wore a fez to emphasize that he was a foreign bad guy and this other cat Funk, he was Mr. All-American. The Sheik of course had foreign rituals. He had a prayer rug and he would lay it down and pray while his manager pranced back and forth berating the crowd and the opponent. So they’re doing their thing, and then Funk, he arrives on the scene and he’s wearing this big honkin’ champeenship belt and he jumps into the ring and the crowd goes wild. He pulls off his belt and runs across the ring and starts beating the Sheik about the head with it while the Sheik is praying, see. Americans have a few dirty tricks up their sleeve too. Fight fire with fire and all that jazz. Chicken blood is everywhere, and the Sheik is mumbling in his fake foreign language, and all this goes on until the both of them are disqualified.
Now everytime we went to one of these things, my father would fall asleep. And I don’t mean discreetly nod his head and have a little cat nap. No no no. He would lean his head back and start snoring up a storm. I’d elbow him. “Dad, dad, the Sheik has something in his boot.” “grraaaayaaaaa foreign object graagh” and he’d be back asleep, because he knew the drill. The Sheik always had something in his boot. There would be 15,000 fans there and everyone would see it except the referee was blind as a bat when it came to refereeing. And my father would snore through it all.
My old man claimed he once played poker with a bad guy wrestler named Nanjo Singh years before all this. Nanjo was apparently quite the poker player. Dad said he lived under the
And Nanjo, he would sneer and kick away the crutches and the kid would fall to the ground and the crowd would roar
ring at the gardens, had a little apartment there. I never really believed that but sometimes I imagined it was so. They had a shill who traveled around with the wrestlers. He was more or less the gopher but he showed some talent so they gave him a little work. His job was to be the handicapped kid who hobbles up to Nanjo before the bout, on crutches, and holds out an autograph book and a pen. And Nanjo, he would sneer and kick away the crutches and the kid would fall to the ground and the crowd would roar and then the good guy would appear and take on Nanjo.
When I think about my childhood days and going to the wrestling, what I see now is the incredible generosity of spirit my father had. Now I see he would have much rather had a double CC on ice and an evening nap in front of the television set, but instead, off we’d go to the gardens to see the Sheik doing the same schtick over and over again (with colourful variations….I recall the “Texas Cage Match” with Haystacks Calhoun in which both combatants were armed with hickory clubs and they wrestled in a steel cage).
Good days.
27th Street 