Right, Said Fred

by Andrew Flintoff

  After the gym, I’d sit on the beach for two or three hours. Every day I’d eat a fruit platter, because it was the cheapest thing on the menu, but it still cost about 30 quid. Then I’d go out and drink aimlessly in the evenings, and if I’d carried on like that I would have been skint. As it was, I was in a restaurant one night and both of my credit cards bounced. I looked around in a panic and saw the football manager Steve Bruce on another table. We had a mutual friend, so I went over and said, ‘All right, Steve, nice to meet you. I’m a big fan, so and so says hello.’ Then, after a while, I said, ‘Look, Steve, bit of a problem, I can’t pay my bill. Can you lend us a few quid?’ That was my life in Dubai, but it wasn’t really living.

  In television, everyone is looking for a hook. So you’ve got to put yourself out there and throw ideas at people, and if it all starts sounding like that scene from Alan Partridge, when he’s desperately pitching programme ideas to Tony Hayers, the fictional BBC commissioning editor – ‘Arm-wrestling with Chas and Dave? Inner-city Sumo? Monkey tennis?’ – that’s all right, because someone will bite eventually if they think your idea has legs.

  While I was sat on the beach, contemplating the fact that the grape I was eating probably cost £5 on its own, I thought about all the things that interested me, and settled on wrestling. When I was a kid, I’d watch WWE – WrestleMania, Royal Rumble – and even Big Daddy and Giant Haystacks of a Saturday afternoon on ITV. So I thought, ‘Why not have a go?’

  My original idea was to get trained up and fight The Undertaker at the Manchester Arena. I pitched my idea to my then management team, they thought it might work, we wrote up a treatment, presented it to Sky, and they loved it. Sky put me in touch with Vince McMahon, the boss of WWE, he gave it the thumbs-up and invited me over to train at the WWE’s performance centre in Tampa, where American wrestling wannabes try out for a place in the big time. All of a sudden it was no longer a daydream: this mad idea I came up with on a beach in Dubai was actually going to happen.

  To say I was a bit out of shape is an understatement. If I’m being completely honest, I’d completely let myself go. So I flew a trainer over to Dubai for six weeks (not a sentence I ever thought I’d write when I was a kid growing up on a council estate in Preston), got myself fit and bulked myself up, so that I thought I was massive. But no sooner had me and the missus arrived in Tampa, I thought that maybe this wasn’t the place for us. We were sat there waiting for our bags to come off, next to this big American fella, and he let out this almighty fart. I said to the missus, ‘Did you hear that?’

  She replied, ‘Yes, I did.’

  He did it again, so I said to him, ‘Mate, are you all right there?’ and he looked at me like I was daft, as if lifting your leg and letting rip in the middle of an airport was the most natural thing in the world. Not for the first time on that trip, I thought to myself, ‘These might not be my kind of people . . . ’

  The next morning, a car picks me up to take me to the wrestling school, and the missus decides she wants to come with me. We arrive at this unit, open the car door and this fella walks past who looks like he’s come straight from the cantina in Star Wars. He’s about six foot eight inches and 300 pounds of pure muscle, with a head on him the size of a basketball. This isn’t a case of wondering if he’s my kind of person, this is a case of wondering if he’s a person at all.

  My missus says to me, ‘Are you sure you’re all right with this?’

  I reply, ‘I’m fine, I’m fine.’

  I’m not fine at all, I am absolutely shitting myself.