Wrestling with the Past; Life In and Out of the Ring by Dee Vachon & Paul Vachon

Author:Dee Vachon & Paul Vachon [Vachon, Dee & Vachon, Paul]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: vl-wrestling
ISBN: 9781475070682
Amazon: 1475070683
Publisher: CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform
Published: 2012-04-04T00:00:00+00:00

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During my life as a professional wrestler I have come into contact with many, many people from the four corners of the world. Although some were great and some were small, I never met a person I didn't like. But I would be fooling myself, and you, the reader, if I did not admit that some I liked more than others, for some have become jewels in my memory.

As I sit here today writing this, I worry that if I don't mention them, when I'm gone, all these jewels would lose their luster. That's why I'm writing these thoughts.

Here is a recollection of the first time I saw and met one of these special people. On my first day ever in England, I was standing on the street in front of the Dale and Martin wrestling office, located in the London suburb of Brixton. I had been invited there by Mr. Martin himself two years previously, when he had been on a talent scouting visit to Australia. As I'm about to go in, I see walking down the street towards me what, at first, I thought was an apparition, but, no, it was my soon to be friend and fellow troubadour.

What I saw coming down the street was a bare-chested guy wearing nothing but a skirt, albeit a very flowery colorful one, with long shoulder-length black hair with a flower stuck in it. He also was wearing the biggest broadest smile I had ever seen. He had the biggest chest, arms, and thighs I had ever seen on anybody wearing a skirt.

The streets of Brixton were, even then, the biggest melting pot in the British Empire. Even there, Prince Peter Maivia literally stopped traffic and made heads turn, including mine. When it became clear that he was going to the same place as I was, I stepped up, shook his hand and said, “Hi, I am Paul Vachon from Canada, just coming in from India.”

He said, with a smile, “I’m Peter Maivia, from Samoa, via New Zealand.”

During my 18 month stay in England I was to become friends with Peter, his wife Lea and their daughter Ata, for as soon as my family and I and found a place to stay, we invited Peter and his family to our house -warming party. Peter brought his guitar and ukulele. We would sing and sometimes his wife and his 16-year-old daughter Ata would sway the hula. We had great family gatherings on the rare weekends off.

After a while my friend Peter and I parted ways. I believe it was at least 10 or 12 years before I saw him again. By that time, Peter and Leah had become grandparents.

Their daughter Ata had married a wrestler by the name of Rocky Johnson, a Canadian from Nova Scotia whose African slave ancestors had been ushered out of slavery by the Underground Railroad and established a colony on Cape Breton. Rocky wrestled for Grand Prix Wrestling in Montréal. That's when I got to learn of his family's history.

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