We’ve tried not to deluge you with posts about our new book THE TERRITORIES, but I wanted to give you a taste of what it’s all about while our crowd-funding campaign was still open.
If you didn’t read Champion of the World by Chad Dundas, simply put, you missed the greatest wrestling novel ever written.
“A riveting novel about hardheaded men, tough women, and even tougher times in Prohibition America. It’s difficult to believe Chad Dundas’s CHAMPION OF THE WORLD is a debut novel—so fluid is it’s plot movement, so sure the narrative...slyly ambitious…one of the most wonderfully controlled displays of storytelling by a new author in recent memory. Besides the page-turning momentum and thrilling set pieces, Dundas’s novel has an almost sweet melancholy. So many of the characters are searching for redemption… When the betrayals, failures, and mishaps come, they’re surprising and at times brutal, as merciless in their own way as that greatest of culprits here, the slow slipping away of time.”—O Magazine
He’s brought that same energy to THE TERRITORIES in the form of “The Big Hoss”, a novella about beginnings and endings.
What follows, for your consideration, are Chapters One and Two.
Enjoy!
Think Happy Thoughts
Back when we still had the territories — and a man could still earn an honest living in professional wrestling. Sonny Da Silva had just taken over for his old man as the top boss out in New York, but nobody knew yet how big an asshole Sonny would turn out to be. We had Bucky Walters running Atlanta. Vic Valley in Minnesota. Fucking Hugo Schwartz controlled all of Texas. There were rules. Structure. A natural order to things. Not like today.
These days, I turn on the TV, I don’t even recognize it anymore.
I look in the mirror, I don’t recognize myself.
When I go in for my hip treatments, the nice-looking nurse with the barbed-wire tattoo gets me to hike down my pants so she can stick me with a needle the size of a No. 2 pencil. Just before she slides that big harpoon into my side, she always tells me: Think happy thoughts. Think about the best time you ever had in your life.
When I close my eyes, you know where my mind goes? Every time? Hand to God?
The summer of motherfucking ’83.
I was all of twenty-two, twenty-three at the time, and I spent that whole summer working tag matches with “Maniac” Mack Savage in Frontier States Wrestling. Baby Jay Chevalier ran the territory back then, and he worked us half to death making every high school gym and bingo hall between Billings and Calgary. Sold out the Mule Palace three nights running over Fourth of July Weekend.
What a time that was.
It was Baby Jay’s idea to put me and Mack together. I had been in the business about eighteen months. Green as goose shit but soaking it all up as fast as I could. Mack was on his way down from the big leagues for what turned out to be the last time. Of course, nobody knew that then. We all thought Peach State Wrestling or UWF would snap him back up, squeeze one last big run out of him. Meantime, Baby Jay figured he and I could give each other a rub. Mack was rehabbing from knee surgery but still headlining shows and pulling down main event money. He needed a partner who could handle most of the action in a twenty-minute match. Me? I needed somebody to take the new car smell off me, so to speak. On top of that, we both worked cowboy gimmicks, so Baby Jay thought it was a no-brainer
“What we have here is a symbiotic relationship,” he said during one of our first meetings. “You know what that means? Like the little fishes that clean the gills on the sharks?”
“More like I’m the fairy godmother,” Mack said, “and I gotta keep the princess alive until her foot gets big enough to fit the slipper.”
And that’s how everybody started calling me Princess.
Anyway, the Mule Palace.
Outdoor venue, right off the highway in Middle-of-Nowhere, Montana. We put twelve hundred people in the grandstand Friday, Saturday and Sunday. The main event each night was me and Mack against this heel tag team called The Great Depression. They were a couple of big dudes in overalls and newsboy caps. Kept their faces painted white, smeared eye-black down to the middle of their cheekbones. I was never sure what they were supposed to be — ghouls, maybe — but those guys were great fucking heels. People hated their guts.
The Mule Palace mostly hosted livestock auctions and rodeos, so it had no locker rooms. Baby Jay set up these big white pavilion tents for all the boys. He had one for the babyfaces, one for the heels and one for Mack Savage. Since I was Mack’s tag partner, I dressed out with him in his private tent. Baby Jay’s guys would bring food in for us, drinks, whatever we wanted. Knowing what I know now, that shit probably didn’t help my reputation with the rest of the boys, but back then I was too young and dumb to know any better.
That third night, the Sunday, the night we were going to have the blow-off with The Great Depression, I finally asked Mack what was up with his T-shirt. The first two nights he’d wrestled wearing a sleeveless black tee tucked into his trunks. The shirt said Panda-monium! across the chest in puffy white cursive writing.
“This?” he asked, looking down at the shirt like he’d just noticed he had it on. “Got it at the San Diego Zoo. Took the kids five years ago, maybe? Fuckers aren’t as big as you might think. Even the giant pandas. One-eighty, 200 pounds for the males.”
“That’s fascinating, Sav,” I said, “but what I mean is, why are you wearing it?”
I’d never seen him wrestle in a T-shirt before. For an old-timer, Mack still had a pretty great body. The boys used to call him “The Human Pharmacy,” because he had the best hook-ups on anabolics and recreationals. People said once upon a time, before he made his money, he used to sell a little coke on the side, too, but I never knew if that was true. People used to tell a lot of stories about Mack Savage. All I knew was, the old man was yoked. Perfect body fat percentage, perfect tan, incredible vascularity well into his fifties.
Mack put one foot up on the bench I was straddling and looked around to make sure we were alone in the tent. “Promise me you won’t breathe a word,” he said.
“Who am I going to tell?” I asked. “You’re the only one around here who doesn’t hate my guts.”
He sighed and bent to lace a boot, his face within whispering distance. “I’m off the gas,” he said.
That sat me up straight. “You’re off steroids?” I said. “What the hell for?”
He switched boots and grimaced. “Molly wants to have a baby,” he said. “We’ve tried everything.”
I’d been driving Mack Savage around Baby Jay’s territory for two and a half months by that time, so I’d already heard a lot about Molly, his new wife. They’d met in ’81, when Vic Valley booked Mack in his wrestler-versus-pro-football-player battle royale at the Rosemont Horizon. Turned out, Molly worked for the building manager. Or she was the daughter of the building manager. I forget. Anyway, it was a whirlwind sort of a deal, the two of them falling head-over-heels and getting hitched after dating just a few months. This baby thing was new information, though. Mack said he was pretty sure he’d made it clear to Molly before the wedding that he didn’t want any more kids. But fourteen months into their holy matrimony she had swerved him, going absolutely baby crazy.
“I raised mine already,” he told me, like I was the one he needed to convince. “My oldest is in junior college. You think I want to reset the clock now?”
I could see the bald crown of his head, monk-like, surrounded by tufts of bleached blond hair. For two solid decades, “Maniac” Mack Savage had been at the very top of the wrestling business — regional TV, closed-circuit, all that stuff — and he had three or four kids spread out over a handful of previous marriages. I knew there was alimony, child support, custody arrangements he had to abide. He told me it already ran him ragged keeping up with that stuff, but Molly wasn’t taking no for an answer. She was jealous of the other wives, Mack said, the ones with the kids. It was getting to the point where she wouldn’t leave him alone when he was home.
“I fucked up this time, Dally,” he said. “This chick is too young for me. I can’t take it. These old bones.”
I’d met Molly once before and didn’t think she seemed all that young, but I was no good at telling ages. Up to this point it seemed like she made Mack happy, and when Mack was happy, I was happy. The old guy had been good to me. It wasn’t like anybody else was going out of their way trying to get me over.
Mack always liked to talk before a match. It was nerves, I guess. He had a lot to teach me, so I tried to listen to everything he had to say, but all this baby stuff was like a foreign language. Fact was, I couldn’t have kids. My freshman year at Boise State, the doctor giving me my football physical diagnosed me with enlarged veins in my testes. A condition called varicoceles. I had to look it up in a medical book at the library and read it over and over until I had the term memorized. Basically, the doctor said it caused my sperm to mutate until they couldn’t swim right. There was surgery you could get, but I wasn’t thinking about that. I wasn’t interested in kids or a wife or anything else that could tie me down. All I cared about was wrestling.
I was six-foot-six, 275 pounds and strong as an ox. Only two things I was missing were experience and a better body. I still looked like an offensive lineman, with a little pooch of fat that bunched up over my trunks. I knew I had a ton to learn, but I was a good worker — everybody said so. I could go forty-five hard minutes with minimal rest holds. I could work strong, sell like a motherfucker and was willing to blade myself wide open in front of twenty farmers at the local Grange Hall if that’s how I was booked. Baby Jay saw something in me, which was why he paired me with Mack in the first place. It was an unpopular decision, I guess. Some of the other guys who had been in the business longer felt I hadn’t paid sufficient dues. They resented me for it and would rib me any chance they got. But Mack knew Baby Jay had an eye for talent. That’s why he consented to let me drive him.
“So, what are you gonna do?” I asked.
“What can I do?” he said. “Have another baby — if we can get something to stick.”
Mack told me Molly rode him raw every time he was home, but so far they’d had no luck. He couldn’t figure it out. Every time before, he’d knocked up his wives right away, two times on accident. So this didn’t make sense. Molly was the earth mother type — mood rings and astrology and all that shit — so she made Mack go to this weirdo, holistic fertility clinic to get checked out. He said a witch doctor had rubbed him down with essential oils and gave him a shitload of big horse pills to take. These were all-natural supplements made from exotic herbs and roots with names Mack couldn’t pronounce. The witch doctor guaranteed it would naturally boost his fertility, but Mack said the pills hadn’t done a damn thing and tasted so bad he stopped taking them before the first bottle ran out. Finally, he’d convinced Molly to let him see a real doctor, at a real hospital.
As he talked, Mack pulled the Frontier States Wrestling heavyweight title out of his duffle bag and draped it over the bench between us. Glistening gold plates bolted on sturdy black leather. A soaring eagle with the earth in its talons stamped in the center. Shiny brass snaps around the strap. Rumor was, Baby Jay made you put down a $10,000 deposit before he’d let you win the title, just to make sure nobody skipped town with the belt. He gave the money back — plus interest, so you made a nice little profit — when you agreed to drop the title to the next guy he picked out. The belt weighed twelve pounds and Mack complained about lugging it everywhere, but I wanted that thing more than anything in the world. Someday, after he got the call-up back to the big leagues, I knew I’d have my shot.
“Anyway, the new doc, the actual, medical PhD made me get off the ’roids,” he said. “So for now I’m wearing the shirt. Can’t have people seeing my little bitch titties.”
“Pop the top,” I said. “Show me.” He hoisted up the T-shirt and let me look at his flat bronze torso. “You look the same as ever.”
“I don’t feel the same,” he said. “I feel like the blueberry girl from Willy Wonka.”
“I don’t know who that is,” I said.
“Just wait,” he said. “Once you’re a broken-down old mule like ‘Maniac’ Mack Savage and you got a litter of babies running around, you’ll know every kid’s movie by heart.”
I clamped my mouth shut, because I hadn’t told him about my medical condition. My eyes moved to his duffel bag, where the green canvas dopp kit he used to haul his drugs around poked out like an abscessed tooth. “What’s gonna happen to your stash?” I asked.
He tucked his shirttail back into his trunks and snorted at me. That’s how obvious the look on my face must have been. Plucking the dopp kit out of the bag, he tossed it into my chest. “Knock yourself out, kid,” he said. “Maybe we can finally suck a little bit of the baby fat off of those abs.” Then he looked around, scratched his head. “Where’s my damn hat?” he asked.
“On top of my bag,” I said, “where it always is.”
The Blow Off
Mack had been using “Blackout” by Scorpions as his entrance music since it came out the year before. It was a strange choice for a guy who came to the ring wearing a ten-gallon hat and swinging a branding iron over his head, but people went ape shit for it. The song fit the rock ’n’ roll attitude of the “Maniac” Mack cowboy gimmick — with the way the guitar revved up at the beginning, to the crash of the first couple drum hits, to the way the whole crowd shouted “Blackout!” with the chorus. Everybody loved Scorpions.
Mack and I timed it so we came through the curtain just as the beat came in. It was always a kick to walk the aisle with him. Honestly, the feeling never fully left me. In all my years in the business after, I worked bigger rooms with bigger stars and drew bigger gates, but I never saw anybody more over than “Maniac” Mack Savage. His energy was pure joy. It filled the space as soon as the fans saw his face, plastered with his crazy, shit-eating grin. His eyes as big as saucers. You could have fifteen, twenty wrestlers on the card — big guys, small guys, heels, faces — it didn’t matter. Mack always sparkled. The people just naturally loved the guy, and he loved them back. Later on in my career, I tried to steal a little bit of that vibe, to tell the truth.
Our last night at the Mule Palace the place came absolutely unglued before the people even saw us. They were packed elbow-to-elbow in the grandstand, with a few hundred more sitting in folding chairs on the dirt floor around the ring. Just the sound of the music had them running to the rail. I led the way, clapping and throwing up hook-’em horns signs with my hands, but the crowd looked right through me. When Mack busted out from behind the curtain, that big black branding iron thrust in the air and trademark glint in his eyes, they popped so loud I imagine God in heaven heard the screams. My arms were long enough I could slap hands with folks on both sides of the aisle by walking down the middle. I smiled my friendly sidekick smile, my head bobbing a little to the music, chomping gum, looking confident but focused on the big fight.
The Great Depression was already in the ring, wearing the engineer-striped overalls they favored as their gear. One of them carried a chunky miner’s lantern in his fist. The other took sips from a jug of moonshine with three X’s printed across the front of it. Damn, I wish I could remember those guys’ names. One of them died, I’m pretty sure. In a car wreck? Maybe like ’87? Otherwise they would’ve made it. They were that good.
I had to wait for Mack to finish his walk before I could get in the ring. Otherwise, The Great Depression would jump me and lay into me with their lantern and jug. The whole ordeal took — swear to God — eight minutes. Enough time to play “Blackout” twice all the way through. Mack ran down one side of the aisle giving high-fives to everybody at the rail and turned around to do the same thing back down the other side. He made sure he touched everyone. Pointing and smiling. Reaching into the sea of hands like a politician working a rope line. When he got to ringside, he made two full trips around, letting everybody get close to him. All the while I stood on the ring steps with one hand on top of the corner post, doing my best to give The Great Depression the hairy eyeball. They glared back at me, the three of us all waiting like the only virgins at an orgy.
When he was finally ready, Mack dove headfirst under the bottom rope into the middle of the ring and jumped up swinging the branding iron around like a madman. The Great Depression bailed out onto the arena floor to avoid getting hit. One of them dropped his lantern on the way, and Mack kicked it out after them. I vaulted over the top rope, and then Mack and I stood back-to-back in the middle of the ring, me with my fists up and him holding the branding iron out like a fencing foil. The whole place going crazy for us. Well, going crazy for Mack. I should clarify: nobody gave a shit about me back then. Nobody even knew who I was.
Still, it was hard not to watch me out there. I was by far the biggest guy in the ring, and I could go. I mean, I could flat go. Before Baby Jay found me, I’d had maybe two dozen matches here and there, mostly working jobber stuff around the west coast. A couple matches for Danny Rich out in Portland. One hitch with NorCal Wrestling and Ray St. John in Oakland. I’d even made it out to Phoenix once, where Doc Slade had his boy Jimmy Ray tan my hide so bad during a strap match I swore I’d never go back. Trouble was, I was too damn big to be a good jobber. Enhancement talent, I guess Sonny Fucking Da Silva would call it now. Nobody wants to hire enhancement talent that makes their regular talent look puny by comparison. It was a dead end gig. I was getting frustrated, thinking about going back to school to finish my soc-crim degree, when Baby Jay saw me work a one-nighter for this little outlaw mud show in Colville, Washington and told me to move to Billings and work for him. Next thing I knew, I was on the Frontier States Wrestling payroll, driving for Mack Savage and working tag matches with him until his knee was well enough for him to go back to singles.
I couldn’t believe my luck. The FSW territory was a little out of the way, but Baby Jay was making it sing in those days, running everything from Spokane to Billings, Calgary to Cheyanne. His normal circuit included mostly little towns that didn’t get shit else for family entertainment, and he turned a nice profit doing it. Working for the guy was a sweet gig. I was surprised I landed it with such little experience. Baby Jay could be a condescending prick, but he was a good promoter. Of course, a few years after I left, he wound-up in a wheelchair, and things got pretty dark for him. Anyway, I never had many complaints. He drew good houses, paid you what he said he was going to pay you, and put the boys up in real hotel rooms — the Marriott or the Red Lion. None of the roadside motor lodge shit you got in some places. Plus, he even had a regional TV deal, which was considered pretty incredible at that time.
Only one thing pissed me off: Baby Jay had stuck me with this terrible good-guy gimmick. He called me “The Real Deal” Dallas Hostettler and made me wear plain blue trunks and cowboy boots with white swirls up the side. I had curly blonde hair and a mustache that wouldn’t fill all the way in. I told Baby Jay I wanted to be a bad guy, and he looked at me with his cross-my-heart brown eyes and touched me lightly on the ribs in a way that made me flinch.
“Good-looking kid like you?” he said. “Play the babyface. The girls will eat you up. There won’t be a dry seat in the house.”
He was right. The girls did eat me up. Problem was, girls made up less than twenty percent of Baby Jay’s crowd. The other eighty-plus percent were guys, and wrestling guys liked bad boys. Guys didn’t want to be like “Real Deal” Dallas Hostettler. They didn’t want to wear bland tights and boots with fucking sea swells on them. They wanted to slick their hair and roll cigarettes in the sleeves of their T-shirts like Marlon Brando in The Wild One. They wanted to wear black hats and have five o’clock shadow and chase people around with a branding iron like “Maniac” Mack Savage.
For now, I was putting up with being “The Real Deal,” the cowboy nobody cared about. I knew if I kept my mouth shut and learned everything I could, my time would come eventually — and there was nobody better to learn from than Mack.
The first night at the Mule Palace, the Friday, we’d lost to The Great Depression in a mix-up. We played it like this: Mack tried to hit one of the Great Depression guys — I think it was the one with the lazy eye — over the head with a folding chair while I held him from behind. At the last minute, the guy squirmed out, and Mack hit me with the chair on accident. Then, while he was standing there looking dumbfounded like, ‘Oh shit!’ the other Great Depression member — the one who always smelled like Vicks VapoRub — drop-kicked him over the top rope. The first guy rolled me up for the one-two-three, and the whole crowd started throwing shit into the ring.
It got people pissed enough to come back on Saturday hoping to see us get our revenge. We did — with Mack hitting his elbow-off-the-top-rope finisher on VapoRub. People ate it up. “Blackout” started blaring, and me and Mack jumped up on opposite turnbuckles and pumped our fists in the air. In the middle of all the madness, Baby Jay hit the ring in his three-piece suit, carrying a stopwatch, waving his arms to cut the music and stop the whole thing. Once it quieted down, he took the mic and announced that the twenty-minute time limit had expired just as Mack had pinned VapoRub — so our team hadn’t won after all. The match was declared a time-limit draw. People were livid. There’s nothing folks who paid good money to see a wrestling show hate more than a fucking draw.
Sunday night was going to be the blow off. Me and Mack versus The Great Depression for the third straight evening — this time in a no-holds-barred match. The place was already lathered by bell time for the main event. To start the match, I locked up with Lazy Eye in the middle of the ring, and we opened with a little chain wrestling. This was something I was still getting the hang of doing. Lazy had to carry me through it, but he was good enough to make it look like I was getting the best of him.
Afterward, we worked through the standard stages of a wrestling match: From the part where the heels started to build heat by hitting me with a low blow or grabbing the ropes for extra leverage, to a couple of false comebacks by me, to the heel’s cheating getting worse and worse until finally the big comeback, where Mack and I turned the tables on them for good. The formula worked like a charm, the older guys keeping things nice and simple for me, leading me by the hand right up to the big finishing sequence. Revving it up and up until the whole crowd was vibrating like a single, living animal, about ready to break through the ringside barriers. That’s how hot they were to see me and Mack finally give The Great Depression what they deserved.
The end of the match was set up to look just like the finish from the first one, with me bear-hugging Lazy Eye from behind while Mack wound up to crack the guy’s skull with a chair. All over again, Lazy Eye slipped away and bailed out of the ring just as Mack took a mighty cut with the chair. You could hear the whole crowd gasp. This time, though, I ducked out of the way, feeling the chair whoosh over my head. There was a tense moment where we both stared at each other. I pointed my finger in his face as if to say, “You better watch out!” The whole place was on edge, wondering if our alliance was about to implode.
Just then, VapoRub snuck up the ring steps and tried to club Mack from behind with his jug of spirits. I saw him and sprinted past Mack to knock VapoRub off the apron and onto the ground with an elbow smash. Mack turned and caught Lazy Eye also creeping into the ring and laid into him with the chair. The crowd whooped and counted every shot as the chair crashed down across the ghostly miner’s back. I waited until Mack was done and then, just as Lazy got to his feet, nailed him with my patented running lariat, putting him right back down in a heap.
Mack said something to me but I couldn’t hear him over the roar of the crowd. “What?” I shouted.
He came over and high-fived me. “Point at the corner,” he said without moving his lips.
I pointed across the ring at one of the turnbuckles, and the frenzy ratcheted up even higher. Mack threw his hands up and spun a tight circle, then climbed the ropes while I dragged Lazy Eye to the center of the canvas. He crouched up there like a big cat, milking it, before he stretched up to his full height and pointed both fingers in the air. When Mack jumped it was like the sky opened up. For a moment he was up there with the stars, airborne, before twisting his body in midair and coming down to lance his elbow across Lazy Eye’s sternum. I hadn’t even noticed how quiet the arena had gotten until the silence was shattered. The sudden boom of the crowd shook the ring. The ref slid in to count the pin, “Blackout” hit the speakers, and Mack and I hugged it out in the middle of everything. Standing in the eye of all that white-hot noise, it felt like we would both live forever and never grow old.
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