Natalya and I have something very unusual in common – we were both raised in a dungeon. The impact of this can’t be overstated and it obviously impacted our passageway to adulthood. As a member of the legendary Hart Family, Natalya was raised in Stu Hart’s dungeon. As a kid growing up in York, PA, I was raised in my dad’s living room. Both featured a lot of screaming and foul language. Both featured a lot of stretching. Both were probably not the cleanest places in the world. And in the end, both were places we were happy to escape from. Natalya graduated to the next phase of her career as a professional wrestler, and I graduated high school. These stories are so similar there are times I think I am actually an honorary Hart brother (and I have been known to wear pink…just not in my hair.) Natalya and I were both finally free to pursue our dreams.
Why was my dad’s living room similar to a dungeon? Well, when I started falling in love with pro wrestling, I had to beg, and plead, and beg, and plead, and beg some more for my parents to take me to nearby Hershey Park Arena to see the touring WWF shows. Neither parent was thrilled that I was starting to love wrestling (that “fake stuff” as they called it) which was probably because I was ripping off my t-shirts and calling everybody “brother” (you can’t deny Hulk Hogan’s impact on a generation of kids). But my dad was even less thrilled because I wanted to watch the WWF on TV each week… and our one TV was his. It wasn’t for the family. It wasn’t for the parents. His. His TV. I can’t stress that enough. I had to beg him to watch ‘Wrestling Challenge’ and ‘Prime Time Wrestling’ each week. Thank God he was asleep by the time Saturday Night’s Main Event came on the air. I felt trapped because I could feel something inside of me changing… I was becoming a huge wrestling fan and I wanted to jump in with both feet.
I remember the day when my dad reluctantly bought our first VCR. He looked at that thing like it contained plutonium that would blow up the house if we used it. He reluctantly agreed to buy it because my mom is a dancer and she wanted to watch some dance videos. I was a brainy kid so I tried to learn how to program it to tape my WWF shows (remember when programming a VCR took 43 steps?) and Lord have mercy if I screwed up and accidentally changed his channel by accident. “Time to learn the ankle lock, kid!” AHHHHH. (PS – I’m not a psychology major, but Freud would probably find a correlation between this story and the fact that I now own two giant TiVos, one for my family and one just for me. No one is telling me what I can tape now!)
