EPISODE 7 HART ATTACK

Hammerlock had tours across the UK every February. They were considered a big deal, because not only would you get to wrestle every night for a week straight, but these tours also included a huge star, usually someone who had once wrestled for WWE. On this particular tour, Andre had booked Jim “The Anvil” Neidhart—a former WWE tag-team champion and one half of the Hart Foundation. One of WWE’s greatest tag teams.

These tours didn’t pay anything except priceless experience, but Andre thought it would be a good idea to have a match that represented the new affiliate, NWA Ireland.

Paul and Fergal were tasked with hand selecting two people who consistently put on the best matches and, naturally, my natural of a brother was picked, along with another trainee by the name of Carl.

“Can I come?” I asked my brother.

“No,” he responded with zero hesitation.

“Please,” I begged.

“No.”

I can see why. I had literally hijacked his wrestling journey thus far—even down to him being saddled with me for his first match—but as you might see in this book, I am pretty good at finding my way into things.

I just wanted to learn and improve. To be immersed in the wrestling world and take every opportunity given. Even if those opportunities weren’t necessarily given to me. Really, I was just like Robin Hood. Stealing from the opportunity rich (Richy) to give to the opportunity poor (me). I tagged along like a nagging injury.

I even somehow wrangled my way onto the card and valeted for Fergal and Paul. Of course this time I took no offense to being a valet, knowing I was already pushing my luck being there. Plus, who knew when a bigger opportunity might pop up.

Turns out it wouldn’t be long. On the last day of the tour I got booked in a six-person tag-team match! I was scheduled to team up with Fergal and Paul, to take on the dastardly team of Danny Williams, Ciara Wilde, and Jim “The Anvil” Neidhart!!!!

At sixteen years old and with eight months of wrestling experience, I was going to be facing a WWE superstar. Only problem was, I didn’t know what the hell I was doing.

At the beginning of the match all three of us attacked Jim. In my haste, I kicked him square in the kneecap, sending his giant ham of a leg twisting in the wrong direction. Out of rightful fear of losing an ACL, he gave me a firm shove, scolding me in his thick American accent, “You don’t kick people like that!” with a voice that came from the very pit of his diaphragm.

All my excitement turned to mortification as I slunk back and rested by the ropes, hoping I wouldn’t mess anything else up or injure anyone else. My first real opportunity and I had nearly kneecapped the star of the show.

The match ended and I rushed shamefully to the back and awaited Jim to return so I could apologize profusely for nearly putting him in the hospital.

Thankfully, he had calmed down in the short walk from ring to curtain. As he came through, a massive pile of red flesh covered in sweat and hair, I timidly approached.

“Sir, I’m so sorry. I didn’t mean to hurt you.”

“Oh, honey,” he said in his sweetest dad voice. “That’s okay. Let me show you how you hit people.”

He took me to the side out of view of everyone.

“You see the leg doesn’t bend that way, so you’re better off hitting here—like this.”

Despite his colossal frame, he gave me a club to the back that felt like I was hit by a marshmallow.

My fear of him blacklisting me dissipated. Thank god, because this week had been a blast and I couldn’t wait to get at it again.

It was a turf war. A battle for dominance. Like Springfield versus Shelbyville in The Simpsons. We were the first school and promotion on the block. For someone else to come in and try to purloin our market was downright treachery.

We were NWA Ireland. The OG. The first.

They were Irish Whip Wrestling (IWW). The imposters. The frauds. The promotion for the Dublin bitches who didn’t have the balls to take the train down to Bray to learn how to become real professional wrestlers. And I hated them. I hated what they stood for. I hated their stupid name and everyone who wrestled for them.

Even worse, I hated that they were running their first show in my school hall! A crime akin to treason in most parts of the world. They may as well have walked up to my house, opened the windows and doors, and had every one of their “wrestlers” piss on the furniture.

And more than that, these frauds had the audacity to bring American and Canadian wrestlers over to promote their show as if they were a bigger deal than they were. (You leave Jim Neidhart out of this!)

Of course the perception in Ireland that anyone from America was somewhat of a big deal was alive and well in the early 2000s—still plugging away from the auld success of Bill Clinton where the fascination of all things USA was at a fever pitch. Canada, naturally, got the rub, ’cause who can even tell the difference?

In an act of sheer spite, masked in faux support, a band of us Springfield folk went to the show to check out our competition, ready to scoff at their shabby attempts to woo a crowd or slap on a proper wristlock.

We got there early to make sure we got the good seats, so they could hear us yell our overly enthusiastic cheers and mess with their heads. Were we genuine? Was this mockery? No one could accuse us for certain. But let there be no qualms about it. This was an infiltration.

The show started. The sleazy ring announcer came out looking like an evil circus master ready to announce his stars for the night.

Unfortunately for us, these fuckers actually had potential.

The first match of the night included a man named Joe Cabray, who had biceps akin to Hulk Hogan’s twenty-four-inch pythons. What was a kid like this doing in a promotion like that? Didn’t he want to come and train with the real wrestlers? The good wrestlers? The tough wrestlers?

Sure, some of our lads had some muscles. But some of their lads were mostly muscles, with heads popping out of their thick necks.

One such muscle-bound freak—six-three, so pale he was practically transparent, with hair as orange as a clementine—went by the name of Sheamus O’Shaunessy.

We scoffed at the pure Irishness of it. Like he was trying to get Vince McMahon’s attention all the way from this school hall with the two hundred people in attendance.

“Pffft. As if. Bet he can’t work for shit,” we sneered as if we were the authority on working, regular Dean Malenkos we thought we were.

We quickly shut up as we watched him club the ever-living shite out of some poor young fella. Knowing full well that if this Sheamus fella did stick to it, he would be snapped up by WWE in a heartbeat. What a sellout.

I also got to take a look at my direct competition. Much like I was the only female in NWA Ireland, they also had their token lady, a tiny, thick woman by the name of Alex Breslin. I detested her. It was primal. The audacity of her to compete in my town. I was the only girl wrestler in Ireland. This was my land. My kingdom. Who did she think she was? I was going to take her down here and now the only way I knew how. With fake kindness.

I cheered for her with everything in my body lest it be known that I was seething with jealousy.

She’ll never make it, I thought to myself. She doesn’t have the toughness.

This island wasn’t big enough for both of us. Only one of us could make it. And it sure as fuck wasn’t going to be her.

Their main event was their trainer Blake Norton—a “Canadian” Simon had brought in to try to take down our promotion (or at least that’s how we looked at it)—versus another Canadian superstar by the name of Scotty Mac. A jacked and tanned pretty boy who had more real-life charisma than any other human being I had ever seen in my life up until that point. As it turned out, Blake Norton wasn’t actually Canadian. He had just gone to train in Calgary for the guts of six weeks and came back with a Canadian accent. He was quickly exposed for not actually being as experienced as he had claimed once IWW began to run shows and established wrestlers uncovered how bad he was.

When the show was over, we stuck around to introduce ourselves as the competition we were. Clearly, our fake niceness was confused for real niceness, as Scotty even invited me to the after-party that night.

Sure, I’ll cavort with the enemy. Let this ignorant Canadian know the error of his ways. He’s just talent for hire. He doesn’t know that he could have, in fact, been wrestling for the greatest wrestling company in all of Ireland. You know, if we had money to pay him. Or anyone, in fact. But that didn’t matter. It was the principle!

But my principal interest was now in making a new Canadian friend—who would genuinely become a great friend over the next few years.

I sat in a brightly lit white locker room on a green bench. There was an overarching smell of sweat, mildew, and Lynx spray deodorant wafting around the concrete walls.

It had been two years since my first training session, and finally I was starting to feel like I knew what the hell I was doing.

My brother and I had just teamed up, playing the villains against a happy-go-lucky duo. And for the first time it didn’t feel like Richy was saddled with me. We were two equals, doing what we do well. The small Kildare crowd berated us and yelled insults. One old lady tried to hit me with her bag that allegedly concealed a brick. We were rocking.

Elbows on my knees, I looked down at my makeshift gear of neon-blue shorts, pink fishnets, and luminous pink tank top. I didn’t have the money or means to get proper gear made, so whatever obnoxious clothing I could find in thrift stores became my wrestling attire.

I looked up at my brother sitting across from me.

“This is what I want to do for the rest of my life. I want to make a career out of this.”

“So do it.”

“I will.”

This felt like destiny

I had denied that I wanted to make a living out of the sport since I began. It seemed like such an absurdly ambitious goal. That this unimpressive, unathletic girl from Ireland could actually earn money from wrestling. If WWE at the time was anything to go by, the odds were already stacked against me. But I wouldn’t know unless I tried.

At seventeen, I finally accepted that I was, indeed, a dreamer. I found something I was good at and I was getting better at by the week. I could change the game. I was the one to do it—I knew it in my heart of hearts.

I didn’t tell anyone except my brother. The fear of failure, being judged, having to listen to all the opinions on why I wouldn’t make it was far too great. My mom would have lost her shit. My dad would have been encouraging, but to quote the man himself, “If you talk too much about your dreams, they get lost in the wind.”

I had to make sure I made it. My dad was a dreamer who never did. None of his dreams ever came into being. I couldn’t be that. But maybe his dreams did just get lost in the wind.

Even in my own wrestling gym, I was surrounded by certain dreamers daily—the ones who talked about how they were going to be the biggest thing in wrestling. They were going to move to America and train with [“insert legend X” here]. But they would never so much as lift a dumbbell. When they wore a tank top, it looked like two noodles dangling out of the armholes.

No, sir. I had to be the dreamer who did.

I did go to college, but it was only to make my mom happy and get free access to a well-stocked gym. I had no interest in studying or making friends or anything that related to college life. I had already done my partying years earlier, and now I was fixated on delayed gratification—as opposed to the instant kind found at the bottom of a keg.

I couldn’t wait until the October school break. While everyone was excited to get their Halloween costumes sorted, I was busy looking for more wrestling costumes.

I was going back to tour in the UK.

Only I wasn’t tagging along this time: I had been invited.

I had shown enough promise, despite nearly taking out Jim Neidhart, that Andre even allowed me to stay at his house during the tour, with Paul and Fergal. Every day we would get up and train, drive to a new town or city, wrestle, and drive back to his home that night.

I had picked out the new, rather generic name of Rebecca Knox and was honing my skills as a heel, working every night in a mixed tag-team match in front of rambunctious crowds.

On the drives and in between shows, I was getting to know Fergal better. He had, in the space of a week, gone from mentor and trainer to friend.

We chatted about life and wrestling, and everything in between. We would go for walks and shop together. He was the perfect combination of thoughtful, insightful, passionate, creative, and hilarious, all wrapped up in a beautiful bundle with perfectly chiseled abs.

I know what you’re thinking. Sounds like you were falling for him, Becky? Noooooo, I wasn’t falling for him. Not me, not the wrestler formerly known as “Becky with the belly like a sack of potatoes.”

But there was a connection; surely there was a connection. Okay, maybe I was falling for him. But I buried it deep down in my soul and maybe secretly wrote “Becky ♥ Fergal” in a diary entry or two.

On the final night of the tour we had returned to Andre’s and were served up pizza as a postwrestling treat. I was never one to turn down pizza, but this was vegetable pizza. Who on earth orders vegetables on their pizza? Up until this point I had only ever had a plain cheese, or cheese and pepperoni, or on the odd occasion ham and pineapple when I was feeling spicy. But never vegetables. Why for all that is good and sacred would you ruin something so delicious by throwing a bunch of healthy crap on top of it?!

Anyway, while I picked mushrooms off my tasty cheese-bread, there was a knock on the door. Strange, I thought, considering it was now close to 3:00 am.

Andre opened the door to a stringy, disheveled man with long, black hair and a large hooknose. As the man moved shiftily into the living room he explained why he didn’t have Andre’s money.

Wait, what?! Money for what?! What’s going on here?! I asked silently with curiosity, though I dared not make a peep.

“What ’appened to your friend when he didn’t ’ave my money?” Andre asked, ominously calm.

He got an extension? I answered in my head, curiosity now turning to nervousness.

The hooknosed man mumbled something inaudible.

“I said, what ’appened to your friend?” Andre repeated himself, voice raised.

I stared wide-eyed at the congealed mushrooms I had picked off my pizza, now lying derelict in the grease-stained box. I feared that soon this man would meet a fate unbearably similar to that of the picked-off mushrooms.

“He got kneecapped, didn’t he?” Andre prompted helpfully.

Maybe “kneecapped” means something different in England. Maybe he got cute little hats to keep his knees warm.

Inner monologue aside, I instinctively grabbed Fergal’s arm to the right of me.

“Yeah… he did, didn’t he? Now, what’s stopping me from having these two boys ’ere ’old you down an’ I snap every one of ya fingas?”

Eh, morality? Conscience? Catholic guilt? The law? Dear Lord, let something stop you! My mind racing, I instinctively grabbed Paul’s arm to the left of me.

The hooknosed man was now visibly shaking. As was I, feeling like two tectonic plates had collided in the localized area of my seat cushion while I imagined the forthcoming wails and accompanying crunching of breaking bones. I was not ready to be an accessory to a crime.

Luckily, Andre granted this degenerate some grace and he had until Monday to come up with the money, and I do hope he came up with the money. But by then, I was safely home in Ireland.

The wrestling business had its ugly side too and I had unwittingly witnessed it firsthand. The message I took was keep your head down, focus on the love of the sport, and maybe avoid staying at the promoter’s house.