I’ll fasten my pearly white teeth into Greg, I thought. But he had probably reckoned that he was doing me a favour; also this colossus was a client of his, after all. I decided to talk Daze out of my life, politely, of course.
‘Well,’ I bullshat, ‘the Spanish operation was more business-focused, I’ll grant you, but that really had more to do with my former partner. One of the reasons I came back to Scotland was to get back to basics; to get away from all the excitement and do the things I do best.
‘Quite frankly, I can think of a few thousand people who are better equipped than me to handle your problem.’
‘Oh yeah? Like who?’
‘Like the police for a start.’
Everett Davis sat forward on the sofa, which for the first time creaked quietly in protest. He jabbed our inlaid coffee table with a thick, baton-like finger; I’ll swear it bent a little. ‘Absolutely not,’ he rumbled. ‘This is not for the cops.’
‘Okay, then there are real detective agencies.’
‘All of which are staffed by ex-cops. I need discretion, Oz, and that’s why Greg sent me to you. He said you might not be no secret agent, but you’re very private.’
Now I didn’t know whether or not to feel slighted by my friend, as well as mad at him for putting me on the spot with this humongous geezer. Then I thought about all the day-today business he had given me over the years, and about the rest that would come in the future.
I decided to bend a little. ‘Fair enough, Everett,’ I said. ‘Tell me about it. . after you’ve promised me that you don’t expect me to do or cover up anything illegal.’
The big man smiled. ‘You got my word on that, man.’ He poured himself some more mineral water, then leaned back again on the sofa: more gently this time.
‘Let me give you some background on our industry, just for openers. Pro wrestling has been around in the US for decades-’
‘Here too,’ I interrupted. ‘When I was a very small kid, I remember this huge guy on television called Big Daddy…’
Everett nodded. ‘Yeah, his real name was Shirley Crabtree. He was wrestling in the UK. When he started to get old, your television stations just lost interest in the whole business. The sport was never such a one-man band in the States though. Back in the fifties and sixties, we had guys like Lou Thesz, Gorgeous George Zaharias, Fred Blassie, Antonino Rocca, Killer Kowalski, Gorilla Monsoon. .’ A look of reverence came into his eyes. For a second I thought the designer specs were going to mist over.
‘They were big stars, heroes, all of them. They could sell out Madison Square Garden, and they had a television following too. But they’re all legends now, and when they started to fade, so for a while did people’s interest. The game kept going though, and gradually new guys appeared, like Dory Funk Junior, Pat Patterson, Roddy Piper, Ric Flair, Bret Hart, Hogan. .’ He paused, as the awe returned. ‘. . and of course, Andre the Giant.’
I nodded. Even I’d heard of Andre the Giant.
‘The way it worked out, these guys carried things through its tough period, right up to the time when television began to expand, and cable took over in the States. Pro wrestling went with it, only it sort of repackaged itself, and called itself “sports entertainment”. Some of the promoters were afraid of that, since it was a tacit admission that not everything is spontaneous. But it works.
‘Now we build in story-lines, we have feuds between performers, factions even, we hype the whole thing up for the audiences and they love it. We ain’t just wrestlers any more; they call us. . hell, we call ourselves. . superstars. ’
The big man had my full attention now. ‘How did you get into the business?’ I asked him.
‘I wrestled at college; on the mat, for real. I was National Inter-Collegiate Champion two years running. At the start I boxed too. Might have made the Olympic team in Korea, but they found a weakness in my left eye. It meant I’d never have got a pro licence, anywhere, so I quit, and concentrated on the mat instead.’ He grinned. ‘Pity. I’d have made it as a fighter, and the money’s bigger.’
He poured himself some more water, emptying the bottle in the process. ‘Not that the dough’s bad in rasslin’, though. I went pro with what was then the second of the big organisations in the States, Wrestling World Wide. I was Triple W’s big new star, the start of their attack on the top dog in the business, Championship Wrestling Incorporated. I signed a three year contract for one and a half million dollars. Man, was I an innocent!’
‘Why?’ I asked him. ‘Could you have got more?’
He shook his head. ‘Not then. College wrestlers weren’t the only guys they were signing. Some ex-footballers used, and still use, sports entertainment as a way of extending their careers. No, that’s not what I meant. I was naive because I had no idea how the industry worked. I didn’t wrestle for four months after they signed me. They began by christening me Diamond. Then they had me play the part of a bodyguard to one of the established guys, watching his back when he was in the ring, beating up his opponents while he distracted the referee.
‘All that time I was in the gym, building my muscles and learning pro moves, the kind that just don’t feature in college wrestling.’ He made a huge, lightning fast sweeping move with his right arm. It made me wince. ‘The Lariat, like that. Then there was the fisherman’s suplex, DDT, bodyslam, piledriver; all that stuff. I was also learning how to control my hits and how to absorb: those are the core skills of sports entertainment.’
‘Why’s that?’
He looked at me as if he thought I was daft. I suppose I was. ‘Oz, I weigh three sixty-five pounds. I hit you properly, you dead. Jerry Gradi, the Behemoth, he weighs three eighty; he hits me and I don’t handle him properly, I’m out of it. Sports entertainment is all about knock down, drag out brawls. If we didn’t master those core skills, our matches would be over in a couple of minutes, and a lot of people would be crippled; some killed, maybe.’ He finished the water and glanced at me hopefully.
‘Milk?’ I ventured. He grinned. I went off to the kitchen and came back with a pint glass and a full two-litre container.
‘Anyhow,’ he continued eventually, an empty glass in his hand and a very thin milky moustache on his top lip, ‘eventually I got to take off the bodyguard suit and wrestle. That was when my boss told me that Diamond was a heel.’
‘A what?’
Everett laughed. ‘A heel; a bad guy. Trade terminology. There’s two sorts of pro wrestler; the heels are the villains, and the faces are the good guys. It’s so the marks. . they’re the fans. . know who to cheer for, and who to boo.’
‘And the good guys always win?’
‘Hell no! More often than not they get the shit kicked out of them. When Diamond came into the ring, he. . I. . carved my way through all the good guys. For a while, I was undefeated, and after six months they put me in a title match with the top man in the organisation, at one of the big feature events.’ He caught yet another puzzled look and explained.
‘That’s the way the industry works. They build up the feuds between performers, tag-teams and factions, then every so often, half a dozen times each year there’s a feature event where they all come to a head. In the States, they’re mostly pay-per-view, on cable, at thirty-five bucks per head. . that’s where the real dough is made these days.’ He switched back to his story.
‘So there I am, Diamond, this big menacing guy who’s cleaned up everything in his path, ready to take the title. Man, I really took it personally when they told me I’d have to job.’
‘Job?’ The guy’s terminology was as clear to me as Gaelic.
‘Lose, man,’ he said patiently. ‘There are the rasslers like I am today, who hardly ever get beat, other than by disqualification, then there are the rest, the majority, the journeymen, who do. In the business, they’re called jobbers. In practice a lot of them have all the skills, but they don’t have the personality, the looks or the articulacy you need to really hype up a feud.