Free A Lion's Tale: Around the World in Spandex by Chris Jericho

other students slowing us down.
    I held an advantage over everyone at the start because I already knew how to do body slams and suplexes from my years of doing them in the BTWF. But Lance was a quick study and surpassed me quickly. While everybody else was still learning how to give simple arm drags, Lance and I were giving each other intricate moves like head scissors and Frankensteiners.
    Lance wasn’t only pushing me physically, but mentally as well. He was such a great athlete and it pissed me off when he outperformed me. If he could stand in the ring and jump straight up to the top rope, that meant I had to do it too. I was furious at myself when I tried and failed miserably. He could do a picture-perfect leg drop after the first day of camp and I still can’t do one to this day. Every time I tried, Lance would give me this smug little grin that made me want to knock his fucking block off. There was no doubt in anyone’s mind who the best student in the camp was and it drove me nuts.
    About a month into the camp my dad came to visit. He understood what it was like to leave everything behind to follow your dream because he had done the same thing at nineteen to play pro hockey. No matter how much flak I received for wanting to wrestle, I always knew that my dad stood behind me 100 percent. I don’t know what he thought when Ed and Brad stretched the shit out of my groin and hamstrings until I screamed, but he respected my decision all the same.
    After observing the session he said, “You sure are lucky that Lance is here.” He thought that we were the best two in the class by far, but then again he also loved Vic when he showed up wearing a stethoscope and a smock in his new gimmick of Dr. Love.
    I guess there’s no accounting for taste in my family.
    When we started working short matches with the other students, Lance and I shamelessly showed off. Lance decided that he would be an evil Russian (I guess he was looking to exploit the Cold War of 1990) and wore a black singlet with CCCP written on the straps. I sported a pair of gray gym shorts as we ran through our roster of Moves for the Advanced Student stolen from Shawn Michaels and Owen Hart. Meanwhile the rest of the guys still couldn’t take a hip toss.
    Ed worked a lot of matches with us too, and if you’ve ever heard the theory that some people are better teachers than performers, well, that was Ed. He would get in the ring as the Goto Hills Savage, dressed in a costume that included furry checkerboard boots and a matching furry vest that looked like they were made out of toilet seat covers. Whenever he did a move he would yell, “Hyaa!” Once when he hip-tossed Dr. Love, he said “Hyaa!” and his false teeth flew out. Nuff said.
    Hyaa!
    When we weren’t in class, Lance and I spent a lot of time watching videos in his room at the Willy since he’d brought a VCR and his extensive wrestling tape collection with him from Ontario. He was a big NWA fan and I really wasn’t, but I soon became quite familiar with the work of Ric Flair, Sting, and Lex Luger. Right away I noticed the major difference between the two companies. The NWA favored wrestling while the WWF favored showmanship. That’s also a good analogy of Lance and my respective career paths.
    As the camp neared completion, Ed and Brad gave a speech to the remaining survivors similar to the one Catfish Charlie gave me. They’d waited until they’d weeded out the pretenders to fill in the remaining blanks of how wrestling worked. I learned a new rule when Brad explained that in the ring it was up to the more experienced worker to control the flow of the match and to decide what was or wasn’t done. Some of the depleted Apple Dumpling Gang reacted to the speech with the same denial that I did when I learned that wrestling wasn’t a real contest.
    After the speech, Lance and I worked each other to a ten-minute Broadway (draw) and I overheard Deb say with a confused look on her face, “I thought