KJ
Selections
Wrestling
with Myths
Trevor Carolan (from KJ #72);
Illustration
by Gregory Myers
Fury
supplies the weapons.
– Virgil, The Aeneid
Staying
with friends a few weeks ago in Tokyo, I spoke with a Japanese literary
translator friend there about my life in Vancouver as an immigrant kid
during the fifties and early sixties. Oddly, as it turned out, professional
wrestling played a big part in both our boyhoods, East and West.
In British Columbia where I grew up, sports heroes were larger than
life. Every fall, the B.C. Lions football team ruled Vancouver. Through
the winter we faithfully followed Flying Phil Maloney and the Pacific
Coast League’s Canucks hockey squad on our Japanese Rocket Radios.
But year in, year out, pre-steroid professional wrestling was where
for 75 cents a kid and his best friend could see it all won and lost
in the ring every Friday night. There’s no describing our adulation
for a hero like Mr. Kleen, or our rage at Edmonton roughneck Gene Kiniski.
This stuff was real, we knew that in our bones. Every immigrant
knew it and the promoters ensured each ethnic group had a guy to cheer
for — Hungarian? Sandor Kovacs. German? Eric Froelich. Irish?
Terrible Tommy O’Toole and Roy McClarty. Latino? Hercules Cortez
the Strongman. Slavic? Killer Kowalski with his deadly ‘liver
claw’ hold. Viking Bob Morse, Chief Crazy Horse, Tex MacKenzie…Bad
guys, good guys, someone for everyone, and we saw them all. And as one
round of heroes faded, in came the wrestling midgets, the battling Amazons
led by the one and only Fabulous Moolah, or the fat guy, Haystack Calhoun
— all topped by the mysterious Masked Man, Mr. X.
For a kid forty-odd years ago it didn’t get any more real than
that.
Then Kinji Shibuya came to town. A short, sneaky ju-jitsu artist with
a sharp little goatee and barely enough English to outrage local wrestling
fans, overnight he became the most feared and hated star of the local
wrestling circuit, the incarnation of evil for us die-hard fans. The
War had only been over for ten or fifteen years and the Japanese were
still viewed with some suspicion. Even worse then that, Shibuya conquered
every white man before him. He also had the theatrics down-pat, pushing
every red-hot button in the showman’s repertoire. Within weeks,
it was the threat of him alone that could turn the Friday night father-and-son
faithful of the local Queens Park Arenex into a screaming army looking
for a saviour, a real Canadian to knock the sneer off Mr. Shibuya.
Gene Kiniski, “Canada’s Greatest Athlete” —
self-proclaimed — was long known as the dirtiest, raunchiest pre-Shibuya
cuss in the mayhem business. But when the Japanese terror had wiped
the floor with every good guy in local Christendom, by default it was
up to Kiniski, former terror of the meek, to take on the demon Shibuya
and whup him once and for all — preferably in each lower mainland
and Vancouver Island wrestling market. And when that show tired, suddenly
Mitsu Arakawa, Kinji’s Tokyo cousin, showed up in town to help
him clean up all over again with a campaign of unholy dirty-fighting
tag-team wars. At that crucial moment in Canadian sporting history there
was only one other body-basher ornery enough to join up with Kiniski
in turning back the Yellow Horde, and the promoters didn’t spare
the horses in bringing him in: Hard-Boiled Haggerty, Fightin’
Irishman extraordinaire and personal friend of The Kennedy
Family.
He had the proof. There on the Old Dutch Potato Chip-sponsored All-Star
Wrestling broadcast live from BCTV studios on Lougheed Highway, with
host Ron Morrier and men’s haberdashery advertiser Fred Asher
looking on, Hard-Boiled Haggerty with his missing teeth showed us all
a framed photo portrait of himself and the two beloved Kennedy brothers,
John Fitzgerald and Bobby Francis. It was like he’d been personally
blessed by the Pope.
You know the final outcome. But there I was in Tokyo, telling my friend
Kenzo that this is what it felt like back then. He understood too. In
Japan they’d had the same kind of deal, he said, only in reverse.
Maybe it was a blonde American giant who whupped every Japanese scrapper
until there was only one last honourable samurai, Rikidozan, who could
save the nation’s honour, what was left of it after the holocaust
of the war. It was ultimate combat all over again every time these guys
hauled themselves into the ring. Okay, so he was really Kim Sin-Nak,
a Zainichi from North Korea and not the Nagasaki hardrock every
kid idolized, only this time, the good guys won both sides of the Pacific.
Such dreams mythologies are built on. After all, our kids have to learn
that somehow the good guys really can win, as unlikely as that can often
sound these days. But then, as a wise old Dutchmen told me in Bali once,
“If you want to know what’s happening in the daily news,
read Plato.”
Trevor
Carolan began writing at age 17, filing dispatches from San Francisco's
Haight-Ashbury music scene. Widely published as journalist, poet and
anthologist, his 14 books include Giving Up Poetry, an account
of his studies with poet Allen Ginsberg; the award-winning memoir Return
To Stillness: Twenty Years With A Tai Chi Master, and The Pillowbook
of Dr. Jazz, an autobiographical fiction. Active in Pacific coast watershed
issues, he served as elected municipal councilor in North Vancouver,
and teaches English nearby at University of the Fraser Valley. His current
anthology Another Kind of Paradise: short stories from the New
Asia-Pacific is published by Cheng & Tsui.
Gregory
Myers lived in Japan (Kyoto and Tokyo) for fifteen years, is now based
in Sydney. More fine artwork here
Copyright
held by the author
Back to Selections
Subscriptions
