'It's the biggest night of my life'
DAVID BEBEE, RECORD STAFF
(Mar 4, 2006)

Eyes downcast, Jay Reso paces a darkened corner of the TV studio, away from the other wrestlers.

"I'm nervous as hell," he says.

In moments, he'll become his alter-ego, Christian Cage. He'll force a cocky smirk onto his face and walk into the most anticipated, and the most frightening, 25 minutes of his life.

He's not afraid of getting hurt. He knows his opponent will help create the illusion of violence -- the essential two-to-tango pantomime of pro wrestling -- without causing injuries.

Nor is Reso fretting about performing for the fans on the other side of the curtain, or the thousands more who have tuned in to the live pay-per-view broadcast from Florida.

Reso has wrestled thousands of matches in the past dozen years, but this one, against villainous champion Jeff Jarrett, will be different.

Last November, 32-year-old Reso took a big leap of faith. Whether that leap will cause him to plummet or to soar depends largely on tonight's match.

What Reso did was turn down a lucrative offer to renew his contract with World Wrestling Entertainment (WWE), the big league of wrestling, in which he had performed for eight years.

Though fans loved his smarmy character, he felt stuck as a mid-card attraction there, a supporting player.

Ever since he was a scrawny kid growing up in Kitchener and in Orangeville, he envisioned becoming a wrestling world champion. If he stayed with WWE, he feared, he might never get that opportunity.

So he crumpled up the contract and joined -- for substantially less money -- Total Nonstop Action (TNA) wrestling, a burgeoning promotion striving to crack through WWE's stranglehold on the wrestling industry.

It was a big gamble. TNA could prosper with Reso as a main-event star. Or it could be squashed -- like every promotion that dared to compete with WWE in the past.

His performance this night is crucial not only to his career, but to the upstart TNA and its wrestlers.

Wrestling is fake? As he waits for the ring announcer to call his name, nothing could feel more real to Reso.

"Anyone who thinks I didn't fight to get to this point . . . is looking at wrestling the wrong way," Reso says. "Since the first time I went to a wrestling show, I dreamed about this night. It's the biggest night of my life."

As Reso paces backstage, his friend Jeremy Fritz is being thrown to the lions on the other side of the curtain.

"You suck!" fans scream at the Cambridge export, saluting him with middle fingers as he walks to the ring.

Fritz recoils, aghast, as if every insult stings him to his core.

The fans don't just hate him. They love hating him.

And secretly, he loves being hated.

The booing spectators know Fritz by his ring-name, "Showtime" Eric Young, a cowardly nitwit. He's a member of a five-man gang of Canuck wrestlers called Team Canada that is universally loathed by the fans.

As a discordant rendition of O Canada blares on the loudspeakers, Fritz and his tag team partner, Bobby Roode of Peterborough, head into certain defeat.

Their opponents, a pair of behemoths called Team 3D, will win the match. The script calls for it.

"I don't mind losing," 26-year-old Fritz mused backstage, moments before heading to the ring. "I just want the match to make sense."

It makes sense for Team 3D to win. They're stronger, more experienced, and infinitely more popular than Team Canada.

Fritz is pragmatic about it: you win some, you lose some more. It's all part of playing the cowardly bad guy.

His job is to make his opponents' attacks look devastating, even if they don't hurt a bit.

In wrestling lingo it's called "selling," and Fritz is regarded by fellow wrestlers and keen-eyed fans as a masterful seller.

Both the physical and dramatic demands of wrestling came naturally to Fritz when he enrolled in a Cambridge wrestling school in 1998. In his hometown of Florence -- a tiny crossroads near Chatham -- he had been a star football player and played a fat princess in a community theatre show.

"Wrestling is action and acting," Fritz said. "My two biggest passions."

Tonight's match will require plenty of both. The script calls for Fritz to get hurled around the ring, dropped crotch first on a ring rope and suffer other legitimately painful attacks.

And Fritz can't wait.

He still can't believe he's working as a bad guy for TNA, a wrestling company that seems poised to become a powerhouse in the wrestling industry.

Just a couple of years ago, he was forging brass horse harnesses for a living, wrestling at small-time, weekend shows around Ontario.

Now he's wrestling in the second-to-last match on a pay-per-view event beamed around the world.

Though he appears terrified as he climbs into the ring, it's an act. This is his idea of heaven.

And he owes his happiness, in part, to his friend pacing backstage.

One day, about five years ago, Jay Reso walked into a wrestling school in Toronto to say hello to some old pals.

By then, Reso was a hot commodity in WWE, earning big bucks performing under the moniker Christian.

During his visit, he noticed a young wrestler practising some moves in the ring. The wrestler was, in some ways, a mirror image of Reso's younger self -- blond, with a fit build and an expressive face. And he was a hell of a seller.

Reso approached the youngster and asked who he was.

Fritz, at first flabbergasted that one of his idols was in his midst, replied that he wrestled under the name "Showtime" Eric Young.

"Have you ever worked for WWE?" Reso asked.

"No," replied Fritz who was still wrestling at small weekend shows.

"Do you want to?" Reso asked.

"Absolutely."

Thanks to some behind-the-scene finagling by Reso, Fritz got booked to wrestle on a number of WWE shows in 2001 on a kind of freelance basis.

Being lowest in the locker room hierarchy, he lost every match he had, serving as a whipping boy to make star wrestlers look good.

Though WWE never offered Fritz a full-time contract -- at a fit 220 pounds, he's relatively small by WWE's monstrous standards -- the experience was invaluable.

He became determined to land a job at TNA. He sold his house in Cambridge and whatever else he could hawk, loaded a few belongings into his car and drove to Nashville, where TNA is based.

His reputation as a charismatic performer and incomparable seller preceded him and TNA quickly hired him.

Fritz might still be stuck making horse harnesses for a living and wrestling as a hobby if Reso hadn't opened the door to the big leagues.

Reso didn't have to help, of course. He was making a six-figure salary performing in arenas around the world.

But he did help, because he understood Fritz's dream of wrestling stardom and he knew how difficult that dream is to realize.

Since he first saw wrestling on TV in the early 1980s, when stars like Hulk Hogan were at the peak of their fame, Reso knew what he wanted to be.

He and his best friend, Adam Copeland, would mimic the wrestling holds they saw on TV. In high school, they lifted weights and grew their hair into matching blond manes to look like their wrestling heroes.

When they were rooming together at Humber College, Copeland was learning the ropes at a pro wrestling school in Toronto.

Reso soon signed up as well, paying for the classes with a good chunk of his student loan.

By 1997, the duo were performing as a team called the Suicide Blondes at small shows around Canada.

They endured gruelling tours of northern Manitoba native reservations, driving for days across frozen lakes to perform for tiny crowds.

The grind took a toll on their bodies and bank accounts, but they forged on in hopes that they might get noticed by the big leagues. And they did.

When they debuted in WWE (then World Wrestling Federation, or WWF), Copeland became Edge and Reso was dubbed Christian.

They wrestled 250 nights a year for eight years, performing despite nagging injuries and the drudgery of life on the road.

Copeland, the taller, more muscular of the two, rose to main-event status, eventually winning the WWE world championship several months ago. Reso, though hugely popular, felt held back from reaching that level.

Still, WWE offered him a generous three-year renewal deal when his previous contract expired last fall.

He agonized over what to do. The WWE contract offered him great money, job security and fame.

But what it couldn't guarantee was the one thing he wanted most -- a chance to fulfil his dream of becoming a headline attraction, a world champion.

TNA recruiters had already been calling, promising such an opportunity if he came to work for them in Florida.

"He will go down in the history of wrestling for what he did," TNA president Dixie Carter says of Reso's decision to change allegiances.

"He walked away from a very good offer with the biggest promotion in wrestling so he could grow personally, and help us grow. His move raised eyebrows and dropped mouths, because he was the first person to choose change like that."

Websites devoted to wrestling gossip buzzed with the news that Reso had jumped ship to join the upstart TNA.

Thanks partly to Reso's star-power, TNA's program on Spike TV will soon move from Saturday nights at 11 p.m. -- a dead zone for ratings -- to a Thursday primetime slot.

It is possible that TNA could break the stranglehold WWE has long had on the wrestling business.

If, that is, the notoriously fickle wrestling fans accept Reso's character, Christian Cage, as TNA's top star.

Reso, still pacing backstage, wrings his taped hands. Soon the bell will ring.

But first, "Showtime" Eric Young must be squashed.

As scripted, Fritz has portrayed his "Showtime" character as a snivelling twerp who can't bear the taunts of the fans.

And also as scripted, he's been tossed from pillar to post, dropped groin-first on the top rope, and thrown off it like a rag doll.

He sells it all with exaggerated, almost comical agony.

And he battles back a bit, too. His opponents' victory is meaningless if it looks like it comes too easily.

Still, Fritz and his partner will lose, in typically dramatic fashion.

The match ends with Fritz, supposedly beaten senseless, lying prone on a solid wooden table until flattened by an opponent's flying leg drop. The impact destroys the table and, apparently, Fritz.

He lies motionless on the mat for some time before hobbling backstage, his face contorted with agony. The moment he's beyond the curtain, however, his smile returns.

Sure, crashing through the table hurt -- it hurt like hell -- but Fritz insists the temporary pain is a small price to pay for doing what he loves.

"I wrestle for a living, man," he says. "It's awesome. How many people get to live their dreams?"

Reso forces a cocky smirk onto his face and steps onto the ramp leading to the ring. The crowd explodes.

Either he has overcome his jitters, or he is very adept at hiding them.

When the bell rings, the match between Reso and Jeff Jarrett unfolds as rehearsed earlier in the day, a back-and-forth battle.

Jarrett, the quintessential bad guy, cheats at the earliest opportunity, using his favourite illegal weapon.

The acoustic guitar explodes into shards over Reso's skull and he collapses to the mat in a heap.

The referee isn't looking. In pro wrestling, the referee is rarely looking.

The guitar shot is a trademark move of the champion.

The crowd erupts in a chorus of boos. Die-hard fans, many of whom lined up for eight hours to see this match, know the guitar shot usually means a victory for Jarrett.

Jarrett pins Reso, the referee comes out of his stupor and counts: one . . . two . . .

Reso thrusts his shoulder off the mat, breaking the count. The roar of the crowd is ear-splitting.

Reso's escape from the pin is, of course, part of the script. And the fans realize it. Promoters long ago gave up presenting their product as anything but athletic theatrics, a rope opera.

This match, like all pro wrestling matches, is a raucous (im)morality play between good and evil. Low theatre, yes, but theatre all the same.

And the fans, their disbelief happily suspended, are in a frenzy, hollering at Reso to get up and fight.

So he does. After a series of semi-solid punches, he drives Jarrett face-first into the mat with his signature move, "The Unprettier."

Pin. One, two, three.

Fireworks explode over the ring, punctuating the din of the crowd. Dozens of fans hurdle the security barricade and clamber into the ring to celebrate with a misty-eyed Reso. They hoist him onto their shoulders and he holds his new title belt high.

When he eventually makes it backstage, he's quiet again.

For a few minutes, he sits alone in a curtained-off area, away from the other wrestlers waiting to congratulate him. He stares at the title belt.

Though every wrestling league has a so-called world championship, TNA owns the rights to a title that has actually been passed down through a century of champions -- wrestlers who Reso idolized as a child.

One of them, Dory Funk Jr., who won the title 37 years earlier, is backstage. When Reso was still a rookie a decade ago, Funk helped teach him the ropes.

Reso spots his mentor, walks over to him and embraces him in a tight hug.

"Thank you for everything" Reso whispers. "Thank you."

Funk, still an imposing figure at 64 years old, is near tears.

"You deserve this," Funk replies. "You earned it."