DOGS AND ORANGE GATORADE
I got this little studio apartment in Alexandria, Virginia, and started bouncing again.
And seeing Angie. As much as I possibly could, and that wasn’t nearly enough. Twenty-four/seven wouldn’t have been enough.
I didn’t really ask her to marry me. I gave her this half-assed, shitty proposal. I knew I wanted to marry her, spend my whole life with her, but I couldn’t bring myself to get down on my knee and do it right. We were talking one day and I just said, out of the blue, “What do you think about you and me getting married?”
She got really excited and said, “Don’t kid around. Don’t joke.”
I said I wasn’t kidding. I was nervous, you know, and not very good at sharing my emotions about something as important as that. Maybe I was worried she’d say no. I sure wasn’t kidding.
She said yes right away.
I think that might have been a Friday or a Saturday. We went and got married on a Monday. We just went to the courthouse in jeans. Angie bought us a pair of silver wedding rings. They were thin and simple, all we could afford. Mine didn’t even fit. When we got to the part in the ceremony where you put the ring on your spouse’s finger, she had to settle for jamming mine only halfway up.
We left the courtroom and went over to the motor vehicle department to get her license changed so her new name would appear on it. I think they weren’t supposed to do it right away for some reason. But the clerk felt so bad because Angie was so excited, so happy about being married, that she did it for us. That was the only wedding photo we had, Angie’s picture on her license. I still smile, thinking about that.
There was a hot dog stand down near the courthouse. So we got chili dogs and orange Gatorade. That was our wedding feast. On every anniversary, that’s what we would eat, chili dogs and orange Gatorade.
We were broke. We lived in a tiny apartment. We had no furniture to speak of. We had a bed and a TV, but nothing to put the TV on.
But man, were we in love.
WRESTLING
It was during the short time that I was up in Minneapolis that I became interested in pro wrestling in a serious way.
Sometime around then I started watching the shows, which I hadn’t really done since I was a kid. I loved DX, D-Generation X. I was a big fan of Shawn Michaels and the other guys in that stable. And Goldberg. I’ve always been partial to the big wrestlers, large guys who could just dominate an opponent. And then there was The Rock and Stone Cold Steve Austin. How could you not love those guys, especially Stone Cold? I just loved his fuck-you attitude. Little by little, watching all those guys, I started to think about what I might do if I were a wrestler.
Curt Hennig, whom I’d admired for a long time, and the original Animal, Joseph Laurinaitis, both used to train at the gym I worked out at, which was called The Gym, over in Plymouth, Minnesota. In fact, J. R. Bonus, the owner of the Powerhouse Gym—which was in Roseville, another suburb of Minneapolis—had wrestled for a short time in the American Wrestling Association, or AWA, which used to be based in Minneapolis and was one of the great old wrestling franchises in its day.
I mentioned Curt Hennig and his career earlier. As I said, injuries shortened his time with the company, but he was still working out and in good shape when I met him in the gym around 1997 or 1998.
Like Hennig, Laurinaitis was also originally from Minneapolis. He began wrestling as the Road Warrior in what was then Georgia Championship Wrestling back in 1982, but it wasn’t until the following year when he joined with Hawk—Michael Hegstrand—that he started getting some real heat in the profession as a member of the Road Warriors. At that point, Laurinaitis became known as Animal. He and Hawk wrestled in Japan and for the old NWA before coming over to World Wrestling Federation, as WWE was called at the time.
They would come into the gym and work out and
I got this little studio apartment in Alexandria, Virginia, and started bouncing again.
And seeing Angie. As much as I possibly could, and that wasn’t nearly enough. Twenty-four/seven wouldn’t have been enough.
I didn’t really ask her to marry me. I gave her this half-assed, shitty proposal. I knew I wanted to marry her, spend my whole life with her, but I couldn’t bring myself to get down on my knee and do it right. We were talking one day and I just said, out of the blue, “What do you think about you and me getting married?”
She got really excited and said, “Don’t kid around. Don’t joke.”
I said I wasn’t kidding. I was nervous, you know, and not very good at sharing my emotions about something as important as that. Maybe I was worried she’d say no. I sure wasn’t kidding.
She said yes right away.
I think that might have been a Friday or a Saturday. We went and got married on a Monday. We just went to the courthouse in jeans. Angie bought us a pair of silver wedding rings. They were thin and simple, all we could afford. Mine didn’t even fit. When we got to the part in the ceremony where you put the ring on your spouse’s finger, she had to settle for jamming mine only halfway up.
We left the courtroom and went over to the motor vehicle department to get her license changed so her new name would appear on it. I think they weren’t supposed to do it right away for some reason. But the clerk felt so bad because Angie was so excited, so happy about being married, that she did it for us. That was the only wedding photo we had, Angie’s picture on her license. I still smile, thinking about that.
There was a hot dog stand down near the courthouse. So we got chili dogs and orange Gatorade. That was our wedding feast. On every anniversary, that’s what we would eat, chili dogs and orange Gatorade.
We were broke. We lived in a tiny apartment. We had no furniture to speak of. We had a bed and a TV, but nothing to put the TV on.
But man, were we in love.
WRESTLING
It was during the short time that I was up in Minneapolis that I became interested in pro wrestling in a serious way.
Sometime around then I started watching the shows, which I hadn’t really done since I was a kid. I loved DX, D-Generation X. I was a big fan of Shawn Michaels and the other guys in that stable. And Goldberg. I’ve always been partial to the big wrestlers, large guys who could just dominate an opponent. And then there was The Rock and Stone Cold Steve Austin. How could you not love those guys, especially Stone Cold? I just loved his fuck-you attitude. Little by little, watching all those guys, I started to think about what I might do if I were a wrestler.
Curt Hennig, whom I’d admired for a long time, and the original Animal, Joseph Laurinaitis, both used to train at the gym I worked out at, which was called The Gym, over in Plymouth, Minnesota. In fact, J. R. Bonus, the owner of the Powerhouse Gym—which was in Roseville, another suburb of Minneapolis—had wrestled for a short time in the American Wrestling Association, or AWA, which used to be based in Minneapolis and was one of the great old wrestling franchises in its day.
I mentioned Curt Hennig and his career earlier. As I said, injuries shortened his time with the company, but he was still working out and in good shape when I met him in the gym around 1997 or 1998.
Like Hennig, Laurinaitis was also originally from Minneapolis. He began wrestling as the Road Warrior in what was then Georgia Championship Wrestling back in 1982, but it wasn’t until the following year when he joined with Hawk—Michael Hegstrand—that he started getting some real heat in the profession as a member of the Road Warriors. At that point, Laurinaitis became known as Animal. He and Hawk wrestled in Japan and for the old NWA before coming over to World Wrestling Federation, as WWE was called at the time.
They would come into the gym and work out and
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