I say Episode 1 because, not only does it sound official, this is the start of a new series of articles!  Entitled “Crazy Anecdotes”, I’ll be telling you, the reader, about some of the funniest stories that I guarantee you have never heard before in your life.

This hilarious story comes from Roddy Piper’s auto-biography from his early days as a wrestler in the 70′s, which was a very different time to what we know today! This book did contain profanity, which has in this article been replaced by asterisks. I’ll leave your imagination to fill in the blanks.

“All the training in the world couldn’t have prepared me for one memorable match in Fresno. Whenever I tell this story people think I’m being funny, but to be honest with you, I didn’t think it was funny then and I still don’t find it funny now.

Roy Scheiers, a promoter [owner of a wrestling company] on the San Francisco circuit, approached me about wrestling a bear. I can remember thinking to myself on the drive up to Fresno that I had never heard of this guy called “The Bear”, but I took the match anyway.

Well, the night arrives and I’m fashionably late as usual because I’m the star. (Well, in reality I’m not a star; there is no such thing. The only reason they call you a star is so they can butter you up and pay you less money.) When I finally get to the arena in Fresno, I walk in the locker room and there it was…standing on its hind legs, this huge, hairy creature with a bottle of whiskey between its paws and its just guzzling that thing. The monster finishes the pint, smashes the bottle on the floor, and then the trainer gives him a Coke and he dumps that into his mouth in one shot, too, and lets the bottle go crashing to the floor.

This is the first thing I see when I enter the dressing room…a f***ing drunk bear! In the car over to the match, I’m thinking I’m wrestling Bear Man, but now I’m face-to-face with this real live Kodiak bear!

I’m informed that the bear’s name is Victor – like I need to know its name to be able to identify him – and that he weighs around 650 pounds. The trainer came over to me and explained the rules of wrestling a bear. He told me that you don’t want to hit the bear, because he’s got those huge paws and he’ll swat you in the head and break your neck before you know what hit you. The good man also informed me that the beat’s laws had been taken out and his front teeth were missing, but then he told me not to get my finger near the back of his mouth because he’d bite it off. Then the trainer told me how to lock up [the regular position to start wrestling, arms touching each others shoulders face together] with the bear. H said that I’ve got to get up close with the beast, and once I’m close, the trainer will jab him in the ass with stick. This will make the bear stand on its hind legs, and now its my job to get up underneath him and get his paws on my shoulders and my hands on his shoulders. See, bears don’t like to stand, so I have to move quick in order to keep him up on his hind legs.

So I’m considering my options. Here I have a drunk bear named Victor who weighs more than three times my weight and wants to either bite off all my fingers off or break my neck when I get in the ring with him.  Just as I’m about to make my decision about whether or not to go through with this my good friend Jay comes up to me and slaps me in the ass like a football player does and, while laughing, tells me to ‘Go get ‘em kid!’ I figure he’s laughing because he knows how nervous I am to go wrestle this bear.

So I’m in the ring, the bell rings and the trainer jabs the drunk bear in the ass with the stick and I get up and lock up under the bear. To win a wrestling match, you’ve got to pin the guy’s shoulders to the mat for a three-count. When you lock up with a bear, you realise that a bear don’t got no shoulders, so how the hell are you gonna beat him? Bears are natural wrestlers. They know how to arm-drag you and go behind you.  This is exactly what the bear did to me. The next thing I know them down on the mat with about eight inches of bear snout up my ass, and for the life of me I can’t figure out why.  The people are laughing hysterically, but I fail to see the humour in this situation.  All those rules the trainer told me went right out the window. I clawed, beat, scratched, bit, and everything I could think of to do, and I still had bear up my ass. The people are now laughing so hard they’re crying and little do they know that this bear is killing me. I’m getting mauled here and I really think I’m gonna die. I give the high sign to the trainer and yell, ‘get this motherf***er off me!’ I was fighting for my life here.

Well, before I go any further, let me tell you why the bear loved my bum so much. It all goes back to the slap on the ass by my ‘good friend’ Jay. He was not showing support, he was actually putting a handful of honey on my tights, giving the bear reason to go after my sweet ass. The bear smelled the honey and he was having a feast on the sticky smorgasbord on my ass. He even got under my trunks and pulled them down. But when he ran out of honey, he wasn’t too happy. All that bear wanted to do was kill me.

The trainer finally ended up tranquillising the beast, but it took a while for the drug to kick in. It takes about two minutes, which feels like two days, and in the meantime the bear continued to kick the s**t out of me. I did everything I could to slow him down, but he just kept coming. Every time I turned around I was getting slapped back by the bear. Thankfully, the tranquilliser took effect and the bear passed out. I didn’t care that my trunks were down around my ankles, I was just glad to get out of there alive.

But the fun didn’t end there. As I was trying to pull my trunks up and get out of the ring, my foot caught on the ropes and I took a nosedive, and went down head first right on the concrete. I’m now lying there with my shorts down and ass exposed for all to see. Just another day in wrestling paradise.”

Crazy, huh? There’s more to come in Episode 2: Drinkin’ N’ Drivin! However, that episode does not involve good old Victor. Who by the way, there is some footage of wrestling that you can see below. This excerpt was from Roddy Piper’s “In The Pit With Piper” book and I encourage, if you enjoyed that, you check it out.

Thanks for reading, and don’t forget, there’s a Part 2 on the way!