“Do I Look Like The Macho Man?”
My buddy Matt was the first friend I can ever remember having in life. Our moms would share babysitting duties and once we started morning kindergarten, Matt and I would go to this sweet old lady’s house for a few hours in the afternoon until our moms got off work. Some of my earliest memories in life are hanging out with Matt, playing Nintendo, watching television, and just generally goofing around in his parents’ basement. One time Matt asked me how far back I could remember (Matt’s always asking interesting questions like that), and I think I kind of blew his mind when I told him I could remember his basement before it had been remodeled back in the late-80s/early-90s. Matt’s brother Brian was five years older than us, so Matt and I really looked up to him and thought he was so mature and cool. Brian was a great athlete and, like a lot of kids from that era, was inspired by the heavily muscled cartoon super hero-esque physiques of pro wrestlers like the Warlord, Hercules, the Road Warriors, Ravishing Rick Rude, Leg Luger, Superstar Billy Graham, Hulk Hogan, and the Ultimate Warrior. Having gotten into sports and lifting weights at an early age, Brian was always in excellent shape (and still is, by the way). Brian and some of his friends were a huge influence in my desire to play sports and get bigger and stronger. They all played football, lifted weights, cussed and carried themselves like tough-asses. Pardon my crass language here, but where I grew up, if you didn’t play football, you were a pussy. It was as simple as that. Two of Brian’s friends were these twin brothers, Nick and Nate. They were the first real life guys I ever noticed with big traps and necks. I used to try to imagine what it would be like to go up against those brick shithouses on the football field. Fortunately, I never had to find out because they were graduated by the time I got to suit up for the Norway Knights.
One time when I was really little, Matt invited me to go out to his uncle’s lake cottage for a family gathering. They had a stationary walkout wooden dock that jutted out about twenty feet into the water, but they also had one of those floating rafts that’s anchored to the bottom of the lake and is buoyed by a couple rows of empty barrels. We had all kinds of fun out on the raft, playing “King of the Raft,” rocking the thing back and forth side to side, getting everybody crowded into one corner dipped down into the water as someone tried to climb up the steep slope to the high corner, and all kinds of other stuff that probably wasn’t even close to safe. Untold hours were spent in the afternoon sunshine climbing up the raft’s ladder and jumping off into the water below.
At one point, a battle royale ensued on the raft, and Brian managed to throw everybody else off and into the lake. Treading water and looking up at the raft, I saw Brian standing in all his glory, lit up by the cloudless summer sky and hitting a front double biceps pose.
“Do I look like the Macho Man?” Brian asked.
“Oh yeah, definitely,” we replied. What else could we say? Brian had just tossed us all off the raft like bags of garbage, and he was big and jacked compared to our scrawny little kid physiques.