{"id":213,"date":"2014-03-11T02:58:51","date_gmt":"2014-03-11T02:58:51","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/slowsuburbandeath.com\/?p=213"},"modified":"2014-03-11T02:58:51","modified_gmt":"2014-03-11T02:58:51","slug":"gimme-that-big-time-wrestling","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/annapirhana.com\/?p=213","title":{"rendered":"Gimme that Big Time Wrestling"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><iframe loading=\"lazy\" title=\"Moondog Mayne 1978 San Francisco Promo\" width=\"500\" height=\"375\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/Bq2Tk1IyfJY?feature=oembed\" frameborder=\"0\" allow=\"accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture\" allowfullscreen><\/iframe><\/p>\n<p>On Saturdays, after Soul Train,\u00a0 the Children\u2019s Afternoon Film Festival and Girl Scouts consumed most my morning hour, my father would come home and watch Big Time Wrestling on Channel 2 (KTVU).\u00a0\u00a0 Hosted by Hank Renner, the guy with a nice Jerry Lee Lewis hairdo and some variation of a plaid sports coat, Big Time Wrestling was an hour-long show that featured three to four separate wrestling matches.<\/p>\n<p><!--more--><\/p>\n<p>The newer wrestlers or perennial ones struggling to make for themselves would always come first, followed by the up-and-coming, culminating in the big marquee names to close the show.\u00a0 Somewhere halfway through the show, Renner would advertise an upcoming bouts assisted by Miss Wrestling \u2013 always a larged chested woman wearing sequined Vegas show type clothes \u2013 who would flip pages of wrestler glossies, making sure that her breasts covered at least 1\/4 of each photo.\u00a0 Renner would work each show up, especially if it were a Battle Royal or a cage match.\u00a0 I recall one particular grand send up for an upcoming match featuring\u00a0 guest wrestler Andre the Giant in his pre-Princess Bride days, when the tall Frenchman was still a bad boy of the ring.\u00a0 Renner enjoyed 3-months worth of promos ,salivating during each description of the mighty Andre\u2019s exploits, until the fight was\u00a0 ultimately cancelled at the last minute.<\/p>\n<p>The home town acts were my father\u2019s main focus, and he would sit at the edge of our orange couch and punch the air as he watched each wrestling bout.\u00a0 He would yell at the television and cheer for the good guys, never once disputing decisions despite all the shenanigans that took place while the ref\u2019s back was turned. I never warmed up to wrestling, even though my father persuaded me to watch the show with the promise that we would later switch over to the Outer Limits or a Godzilla movie.\u00a0 He also tried to ingratiate me to both Kenji Shibuya and Mr. Fuji, two bad guy Japanese American wrestlers.\u00a0\u00a0 My father even told me that Kenji Shibuya was my uncle, a possibility that only frightened me as his wrestling style was confined to lots of screaming and broken English.<\/p>\n<p>Eventually, wrestling won me over with Renner\u2019s \u201ccandid\u201d interviews.\u00a0 While the good guys would speak strategy and of their contempt for enemy opponents, it was the bad guy antics that endeared me to wrestling.\u00a0 I loved Moon Dog Mayne of Crabtree, AK,\u00a0 a mildly plump wrestler with a wild mane of blonde hair, who began each match by braying at the moon.\u00a0 His interviews were a lively showcase that included slamming himself on the head with a steel chair and swallowing a goldfish on live television.\u00a0\u00a0 I also liked the 400+ pound Haystack Calhoun, who wore gigantic sized overalls and liked to fall like a ton of blubber bricks on top of a dazed opponents.\u00a0 Surely, there must have been death involved, I believed.\u00a0 I saw the bloody scalps and could almost feel the bone jarring impact of bone to steel pole slam as another wrestler succumbed to the most evil of wrestling moves.\u00a0 I could accept most of this, but\u00a0 I drew the line at any opponent that would remind me of WWII Germany, such as the Von Brauner twins and their manager, Gerhardt Kaiser.<\/p>\n<p>My father, however, hated the bad guys and would always question my tastes, as if no offspring of his could possibly have such bad taste.\u00a0\u00a0 His favorites were Pat Patterson, Peter Maivia, Pepper Martin, Ray Stevens and Rocky Johnson. I personally liked High Chief Peter Maivia, who would always stop each interview to speak to the Samoan audience in his native language.\u00a0 There was a reverence about Maivia, who never stooped to dirty tricks and was so proud of his heritage that he paraded around the ring in Samoan wear.\u00a0 He seemed to be the everyday wrestler, one who could easily be seen walking around Serramonte or Tanforan Shopping Center in flip flops and a pair of shorts.\u00a0 After growing up, I would later learn just how much Maivia and his interviews influenced a whole generation of native San Franciscans to speak in Samoan accents.\u00a0 I even had one guitar player from a local band break into a Peter Maivia imitation during a live radio interview I had with him on KUSF-FM.<\/p>\n<p>Wrestling would later become a world wide sensation, when larger-than-life personalities in spandexed\u00a0 pants, PEDs and big hair would dominate the sport. .\u00a0 I spent far too many disillusioned discussions with male classmates who swore that the bloodied Pat Patterson, carted off on a stretcher and holding onto dear life in full view of a TV audience, was eating breakfast the next morning at a local caf\u00e9.\u00a0 Someone else said that Kenji Shibuya was really some third generation Japanese American kid from the South Bay.\u00a0 The authenticity of wrestling had its death blow in high school when I saw real Greco-Roman wrestling, and found that there was true art and athleticism to a sport that must have felt itself cruelly lumped in with something akin to a Riverdance on steroids.<\/p>\n<p>My father, however, was a true believer. As he unwillingly wandered into his twilight years, an unfortunate victim of Mesothelioma, my father and I would go to the Cow Palace to watch live wrestling.\u00a0 We would sit close to the ring, and a smile would spread across his face as he cheered each bout.\u00a0 He was in his element, a man who lived to spend his Saturdays watching wrestling in front of the old television set, now determined to enjoy the real sweat, screaming and raw drama of wrestling.\u00a0 That is, until he witnessed first hand the outrageous decision by a ref who, while in a verbal sparring match with one wrestler from team, failed to see how the old tag-team-duo-beating-up-the-other-wrestler\u2019s-partner via taking turns administering the atomic elbows.<\/p>\n<p>My father was livid and inconsolable.\u00a0 He stood up, motioned that I should leave and we walked out of the Cow Palace before the final bout began.\u00a0 My father muttered a few curses and was determined to never watch the sport again, especially if cheating were involved.\u00a0\u00a0 It had never dawned on me that my father believed wrestling to be an entirely true and honest sport, for he was always quick to weed out and complain incessantly over suspicious calls.\u00a0 Incidents such as the bungled time clock at the1972 Munich Olympics basketball game between the USA and USSR grated on him.\u00a0 He was also hyper critical over the subjective decisions in boxing, especially during the Olympics, and was quick to blame the USSR for every unwarranted victory over an American.<\/p>\n<p>Somehow, it seemed to odd that my father could believe that wrestling was real.\u00a0 Not, at least, when the television had made it clear for so long that there was plenty of purposeful cheating designed to enrage a viewer.\u00a0 Instead, my father chose to get angry over other things, like wild antics in the ring and naughty interviews.\u00a0 In all things fatherly and masculine, there existed a bit of innocence in my father, and I did not want it to die.<\/p>\n<p>I knew then as I know now that perhaps wrestling should have been real.\u00a0 For once, I wished that all the colorful yellow pants, head bands, threats, screams and souplexes were real.\u00a0 It would have been nice for my father, who never watched wrestling after that night.\u00a0 For a man who discussed little of anything to me outside of sports, it just added to more long bouts of silence.<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align:center;\">(c)2014 Slow Suburban Death.\u00a0 All rights reserved<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>On Saturdays, after Soul Train,\u00a0 the Children\u2019s Afternoon Film Festival and Girl Scouts consumed most my morning hour, my father would come home and watch<\/p>\n<div class=\"more-link-wrapper\"><a class=\"more-link\" href=\"https:\/\/annapirhana.com\/?p=213\">Continue reading<span class=\"screen-reader-text\">Gimme that Big Time Wrestling<\/span><\/a><\/div>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[13,39,43],"tags":[75,215,265,291,342],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/annapirhana.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/213"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/annapirhana.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/annapirhana.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/annapirhana.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/annapirhana.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=213"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/annapirhana.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/213\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/annapirhana.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=213"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/annapirhana.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=213"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/annapirhana.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=213"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}