This is the preface to an interview I tried to pull together with a Las Vegas wrestler I loved dearly back in the early days of his career at the storied and funky Ultimate Wrestling Federation. My written interviews are challenging–elsewhere in my projects I have tenured professors who are still struggling to get written interviews to me a year later–so it’s no surprise to me that as busy a man as Funnybone never got me his answers, which I do know he worked on. Funnybone is still a sought-after wrestler in and around Nevada, still combining hardcore, high-flyer, and technical wrestling fifteen years later, and is a dad of many. Bless him for trying to work with me. But I really want to share this thing I wrote to introduce the interview, my recollection of a powerful incident I wanted to ask him about. I hope someday I can be in the position to buy him dinner and ask him about it. Also, I wear his T-shirt in lieu of an evil eye necklace.
I was scared to talk to Funnybone back in the day. I only remember mustering the courage to speak with him once, when my friend Leann and I wanted to see how he was doing the week after a botch that led to him being hauled out of the ring with a rather shocking head injury. The manager of a visiting tag team, who I’m guessing had exceeded the recommended dosage of 5 Hour Energy by a respectable margin that night, grabbed the ring bell out of the blue and clonked Funnybone on the head. Head shots were still part of the standard badass repertoire in that era, so that wasn’t the shocking part. It was the recklessness of it—the guy’s hit was overly aggressive and sloppy, and it wasn’t the ring bell or its wood base that connected with Funnybone’s skull, but instead the strong metal bolt holding the two together. Funnybone didn’t take a bump, he fell hard: collapsing with a look of harsh confusion in his eyes as the blood gushed from his bolt wound. I’d cheered this guy taking heavy intentional abuse plenty of times, but this was one of those moments in which things had gone badly awry. Kayfabe was in anxious confusion all week as my friends and I debated the incident in our Yahoo group. Things were intense enough that I overcame my social anxiety and approached Funnybone in the parking lot after the next show to see how he was doing.
Funnybone was, well, fine. Unfazed. A little tired, maybe. But he was getting back on the horse pretty much immediately. He told us that they knew him well at the hospital, said they’d stitched him up as minimally as was required by law and sent him on his way after he the clonking with the bolt. This guy was truly hardcore and keeps at it years later, now a venerable ring veteran, still moonsaulting from heights like it’s just another day at work.
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