by Chris Eaton
She received the Erica Harden Excellence in Teaching Award.
She held an executive position briefly with the American Nurses Association.
In her late-fifties, she even picked up the guitar again.
Then, after she retired in 2000 after thirty-two years, she and her husband took a trip to Washington State. They’d taken a short hike from the Illahee Park ranger station to the fishing dock on Puget Sound, intrigued by the half-dozen Vietnamese casting out at low tide. “What are we hoping for?” her husband asked jokingly, winded from the five-minute downhill trek. And one of the women, in a t-shirt that read Hockey is my life, showed him her overflowing bucket of squid.
“I only catch three,” laughed another elderly woman without taking her eyes from the water. “She the Squid Queen!”
“You can fish for squid?” He was amazed. He pushed his finger against the squid’s gelatinous shell. His eyes were like smoky forests. Or tropical storms. Clouded and wet.
“I eat whole thing. But my husband, he American. He no eat head. Only calamari.”
They watched the women fish for at least a half hour, under her husband’s assertion they’d see at least one catch. They’d walked past a state park information sign that said Puget Sound was home to the largest octopuses in the world, and so the potential for action was definitely there (“The age-old struggle between Vietnamese women and octopi,” he chuckled). Her husband sat down on the end of the ramp and fanned himself with his hat. He was sweating more than normally. They caught nothing. Every ten minutes, they’d also retrieve an empty crab trap from the bottom, completely unaware of the dozens of crab perched on the dock’s legs directly behind them, just below the surface of the water.
The next morning she called the ambulance when she couldn’t wake him. His blood pressure had risen to an astonishing level, and the doctors in Seattle were unsure of how to proceed. Coronary stents relieved some of the stress on his heart, and his blood pressure returned to normal for a few days. He was sitting up in bed and laughing (“Whoo, that was a close one!”). He was even deemed healthy enough to return to Salinas. But then another artery system gave up on him, this time closer to the brain, and they rushed him to Oakland where a circulatory specialist was flown in to help.
That’s where he died, and the plague began.
He began to think that he’d made all the wrong choices in life. How else could one explain it? From childhood’s hour, he felt, he dreamt, that he had not been as others were, that he was drawn, from every depth of good and ill, towards some mystery that he could not quite reach. Or rather, he had always thought he was being pulled towards some greater destiny, and in his mind’s eye, from that same hour of infancy, he had always imagined himself to be sure what that destiny was. He was going to be a famous musician. He had told his mother so. But then he often questioned it, often wondered what it might be like, if maybe he might have been happier, or even as content, if he weren’t so driven. He even quit on several occasions (the longest stretch, back when he left Strange Brew: nearly two years without even picking up his guitar; the shortest: one night while he was passed out on his bass player’s couch), but he was always lured back, like a fish on a line, whether by a North American tour, the chance to open for one of his idols, the offer to perform as part of the house band for Breakfast Television, an invitation to collaborate with a Baroque orchestra, or some form of guilt or obligation to one of his bandmates, who had given up a great job for this, always having his decisions made for him, by his art, an experience with which he imagined his hero, Hornet Cisa, must have been similarly well acquainted.
Hornet Cisa was one of the most popular and most decorated athletes in British history, winning championships both at home and internationally. He was on record as being the favourite athlete of Queen Elizabeth herself, not to mention Prime Minister Callaghan, and his matches against top challengers regularly drew upwards of eighteen million viewers. There was even talk of a children’s television show using Hornet Cisa as a character, until the events of the early-eighties changed everything, and he was basically forced to leave the country.
From Hornet (a.k.a. Shirley) Cisa’s childhood hour, he was obviously destined for greatness on the sporting field. His father, who would have made a name for himself in the sport of fell running if people in that sport did such things, took one look at the boy’s feet and declared him the second coming of Dixie Dean or Ten Goal Payne. His mother, meanwhile, was not a sportsman herself, and had always prayed for a girl to keep her company when her husband was off competing, so she named the boy Shirley anyway and signed him up for things like dance classes and gymnastics. This resulted in an educational tug-o-war that existed throughout Cisa’s youth, as his mother and father alternately signed him up for rugby, swimming, rowing, knitting, etc. For many years he excelled at all of them, threatening or even breaking records set by boys twice his age. To the horror of his father, however, his main love was gymnastics, to which his long, lean body was particularly adept.
Already a bit of a local celebrity at the age of ten, towering over the other boys in his under-12 leagues, Shirley Cisa’s path in life seemed set. Perhaps it was. Spotted by a scout named Ian Chevston-Darra, he became the youngest boy ever drafted by Tottenham Hotspur, and was whisked away from his parents to train with the team outside London. With Chevston-Darra also taking on the job of managing Cisa’s career, the boy was soon seen on the covers of all of the big national publications, usually in some sort of amusing combination of sports, like kicking a soccer ball while doing the rings, in the water pushing his rowing shell, or executing a vault over a real horse. It was generally felt that when he was old enough he might go to that year’s Olympics and take home multiple gold in multiple sports. Some people had bets on Mexico in ’68. Some even joked that the country could save money by just sending Cisa as the entire team.
Then, at the age of fourteen, he hit a growth spurt. At fifteen, he hit another one. By eighteen, it was generally accepted that he would keep growing forever. Without an ounce of fat on his body, he was becoming too heavy to ride a horse, too heavy to row, probably too heavy to swim. Tottenham’s coach, the Armenian T. C. Herosian, came to Chevston-Darra and suggested Cisa might now be too tall for the quick stops and starts of football. And although his tumbling floor routine was a gorgeous thing to behold, the British squad was afraid that he didn’t have the right body type to achieve top style points at an Olympic level any more, and they cut him with only a year to go until Mexico.
Naturally, this came as a blow to both Cisa and his manager, who by this time had quit his job with the Spurs to guide Shirley’s career full time. The Olympics had held the lucrative promise of multiple advertising and sponsorship deals, enough for them both to live comfortably for at least the next ten years with proper re-investment, probably longer. But nothing, as yet, had been signed. Trying to capitalize on his monstrous size, and desperate to regroup for the ’72 Games in Munich, Chevston-Darra started Cisa in a new sport called powerlifting. Similar to classical weightlifting, it involved the movement of heavier and heavier objects, but rather than jerking the dumbbell over one’s head, it involved shorter displays of strength, like the bench press and squats. And despite it being less regulated, and largely looked down upon by traditionalists and Eastern Bloc countries, it was gaining rapid popularity in the West, where the IOC hoped to increase viewership. They were interested in heroes, they told Cisa when he gave a display for them in Lausanne. But apparently not interested enough to include it in Munich, caving to Eastern pressure and rejecting a combined bid from Great Britain and the United States for its inclusion. In any case, Cisa would not have been able to compete, having torn his right pectoral muscle trying to bench 300 kg, which put an end to his powerlifting as well.
The only thing left for him after that was professional wrestling, which at the very least had started gaining audiences through a weekly television broadcast called World of Sport. And this was where Shirley Cisa wo
uld finally find his true fame, as The Hornet, in his trademark black-and-yellow-striped unitard, eventually holding both the regular British Wrestling Federation (BWF) and BWF Intercontinental Championship belts at the same time, as well as briefly sitting as the reigning champ of the American Wrestling Association (AWA) under the name Inert Chaos, leader of an elite team of international heels known as The Antihero Corps. His matches against top challengers like Bert Assirati, Rich A. “Horseface” Stone, Big Daddy and Giant Haystacks (who would also go on to fight in the American World Championship Wrestling [WCW]) were some of the biggest sporting events of the seventies, hands down. His move to the U.S. was noted by North American fans as one of the main causes of the brief resurgence of the AWA. But his wrestling career ended abruptly on April 9, 1986, the day he made the move that also destroyed the career of the young Sean Hicort.
***
Of course, he nearly ended his own career about a year-and-a-half into it. Due to his size (finally settling in at six-foot-nine with a 72-inch chest and 27-inch biceps), the British Federation had set him up from the beginning as a bruiser and a loser. To witness the fall of something so huge and magnificent: it could have made him a solid attraction for decades. But he was also a wrestler’s wrestler, capitalizing on his gymnastics background to pull off some of the most impressive moves in BWF history, including a mind-bending 630 Senton Splash before losing to Bert Assirati on that man’s route to his first championship crown. He was also getting to be known as a bit of a loose cannon, exemplified in spectacular fights like his ’71 match against Killer Karlson (a.k.a. Göran Carlson, but the Federation promoters felt the K would look more menacing and a first name that was ostensibly pronounced urine definitely had to go), in which, rumor has it, he was supposed to have lost but instead broke a startled Karlson’s arm and forced the crying man to submit. The crowd, who had come to expect The Hornet to lose, leapt to their feet in a standing ovation, while behind the scenes Chevston-Darra was able to successfully run damage control to the point where they were not sued by the BWF or Karlson’s team. Miraculously, C-D was able to convince the writers to spin this in a way – “Hornet Cisa starts winning?! It’s the sports story of the year!” – finally giving The Hornet a shot at the belt against current champ Charles Windsor. After a year of solid jobbing to men with half his skill, even if he were to lose once again, this would still be a coup.
With this small taste of success, however, Cisa let himself go. Suddenly, the tables were turned, and other men were jobbing for him, making sure he looked good before his title match with Windsor. So he stopped working out. He took up drinking and carousing. In fact, one of his favorite things to do before the press caught wind and started writing stories about it was to go out on the town with a friend from his weightlifting days, Precious Mackenzie, a black South African who was only 4' 11" but who had recently won the under-62 kg weight division at the Commonwealth Games in Jamaica. Cisa would quiet the bar by waving his arms, then boisterously claim that he could and would lift the tiny man over his head “if one of you will give us free beer all night.” Inevitably, due to his renewed celebrity, someone would recognize him as Hornet Cisa, laugh out loud, and say, “I was there when you tossed The Blonde Adonis out of the ring!”, then point at Precious and say, “If he can lift you, I’ll buy you both dinner, too,” and the two of them would then polish off a keg between them.
Pulling this trick almost nightly in the weeks leading up to the match, Cisa gained nearly twenty-five pounds. Cisa invited the press to watch him train, but he forgot the arranged time, and the photo on the cover of The Guardian showed Cisa passed out drunk in the corner of the weight room. Chevston-Darra was nowhere to be found. Cisa was surly. His skin had begun to yellow, and it hung off him like a blouse. Charles Windsor (a.k.a. The Prince of Wails) was conversely good-looking and charismatic, and according to Windsor’s later biography, The Windsor Knot: Charles Windsor’s Stranglehold on the BWF, Cisa’s pulse was measured at the pre-match weigh-in at more than twice its normal rate. The doctors nearly called it right there, but with so many rabid fans already in the stadium, they figured this might be more dangerous to Cisa than just letting him fight.
Cisa knew the game. He had agreed to lose the match around the sixteen-minute mark, and in return they would create a ridiculous Intercontinental title for him to win in the future. So why bother putting too much into it? He and Windsor had little respect for each other. He considered Windsor a pretty boy without talent and had no interest in making him look good. Windsor, who really did have some nobility in him, found Cisa’s rebellion crass and classless, and had decided to take this opportunity to not only beat The Hornet, but to make sure Cisa knew who was really in control here. Throughout the match, The Prince taunted him, quietly bragging about how he owned him, calling him fat, lazy, impotent, homosexual. In the opening speeches, Windsor repeatedly referred to The Hornet by his given name, and this continued throughout the match, with The Prince bellowing “Come and get it, Shirley!” or “Who’s your big daddy, Shirley?” from across the ring. At sixteen minutes, Cisa refused to be pinned, breaking The Prince’s signature move and applying one of his own called The European Sting, pressing his chin into Windsor’s back and pulling back on both arms. It seemed to most people in attendance that this was the end of The Prince’s reign. But Cisa seemed to navigate him closer to the ropes on purpose, and Windsor was able to get a foot on them and have the clutch broken. With punishing hold after punishing hold, Cisa prolonged the match for an additional thirty-eight minutes, shouting “What’s my name?! What’s my name?!” until The Prince’s eyes were nearly swollen shut and his body could barely move.
Then, just as suddenly, Hornet Cisa slipped awkwardly on some of Windsor’s blood, hit his head on the mat and The Prince was able to crawl to his comatose body and pin him.
Some say they could see Cisa grinning as he was carried from the arena on a stretcher. The Prince, hugging the title belt to his hip, was booed all the way to the dressing room. Within the next six months, The Hornet had claimed his promised inaugural Intercontinental Championship as well as the BWF Championship, both of which he held for the next eleven years.
***
Although The Hornet was definitely the king of the BWF in the seventies, professional wrestling in the UK was still a fairly marginal arena, nothing like the American wrestling spotlight that would emerge in the mid-eighties. It was difficult at the best of times to make ends meet, and most of the men had to find second jobs during the week. While becoming a bouncer or bodyguard seemed an obvious choice, it was incredible how many drunks wanted to pick fights with them, already claiming that the events were staged and that they weren’t nearly as strong as they looked. So several of the top stars found work in the trucking and oil industries or stocking shelves on night shifts. Taking a different tack, The Hornet joined the British National Service, which mostly just involved reporting to the base on a regular basis for basic training (which helped him keep in shape, anyway), and possibly stacking sand bags along the River Don during flood season.
Unfortunately for him, far across the world, Argentina was going through a similar economic crisis. Its citizens were growing restless, and tended to turn their frustration on the military dictatorship they felt was living large while they starved. To distract them with national pride, the Argentine leader, General Leopoldo Galtieri, sent mercenaries disguised as scrap metal merchants to raise their flag on South Georgia, a practically uninhabited and entirely inhospitable island Argentina had theoretically claimed around 1926 but was still occupied, inasmuch as a few Antarctic scientists and support staff could be considered a true occupation, by Britain. A terse radio transmission from the UK kindly urged an Argentinean apology and retreat. Instead, Galtieri ordered his men into the Falkland Islands, too.
Suddenly, England was at war. Cisa, despite making his living as a fighter, was a pacifist, and even while signing his enlistment papers had assumed he would never find himself in this
worst-case scenario. He prayed, due to the islands’ remote location, that the battle would be purely aerial, that they would merely drop a few bombs on the South Americans and everything would just fall into place. But when that strategy failed and the Argentineans managed to sink the HMS Sheffield, the British called in the infantry. Cisa went AWOL, turning up a few weeks later at the home of an ex-girlfriend. He was found guilty of a felony against the state and sentenced to five years in prison.
By the time he was eventually released on good behavior, fans in the UK would no longer accept him. The press had not been kind. Even his manager dumped him the moment he shirked his national duty. Besides, the popularity of British wrestling had been on such a steady decline in his absence – World of Sports had been cancelled the year before Cisa’s parole – so there wasn’t much to even come back to. Due to some connections with another ex-wrestler, he got some work moving barrels of oil at a refinery in Pembrokeshire, Wales, and would subsidize his income by lifting unused coking pots over his head for tips.
Then one day he received a phone call from the United States. The AWA, who had recently come under new promotional management and had already given a break to his friend Haystacks, were losing the ratings game to the fledgling World Wrestling Federation (WWF) and had to come up with some new tactics to save face. First and foremost, they told him, they needed to create a champion that was not the son of the Association’s old owner; someone with real skill and presence, unlike the muscle-bound goons they had now, someone who people could look up to, someone kids would want to grow up to be. Would he be interested in helping make this happen? Yes, he said, yes he would. Then he should get on the next plane to New York (or rather the first truck to Praa Sands, take the bus to Penzance, travel by rail to Plymouth Station, walk two minutes past the Stone Chair – just one of Plymouth’s twenty war memorials, on which Sir Francis Drake sits, a small silver spoon dangling from his right thumb and index finger, his left hand over his face, bereaving the fact that he could only plunder all of the gold from the Spanish in Panama but had to leave the silver behind because it was too heavy – to the city centre for another bus to Heathrow’s central bus station and then another three or four minutes on the underground, and then a plane) and they’d get started right away.
