Countdown To Lockdown (26 page)

“That’s right,” Coleman said. His eyes actually kind of twinkled beneath all that swelling. “I beat you at the ’92 Nationals and then the next year you beat me, and I said, take it, brother, it’s all yours.”

Kurt smiled and said a quick good-bye, noting that he had a plane to catch. Which, in retrospect, should have seemed odd, given that we still had plenty of time, probably an hour, before boarding.

Besides, I had other things to think about. Like that “Time in a Bottle Brother” song I had going for me. I was walking around with
my lyrics, regaling whichever guys I thought I could get a chuckle out of with my Croce/Hulkster tune.

There never seems to be enough time

to say your prayers, take vitamins

and pump iron, brother.

Granted, over the past few days not everyone in our crew had written a life-changing tribute to their favorite performer or had gloriously reimagined a favorite song from their youth. But everyone seemed happy, or at least mildly content. The tour was going well, and our final show, in London, was set to break TNA’s all-time attendance record.

But not everyone seemed happy. Kurt Angle mysteriously seemed sullen, somber, morose, like his childhood pet had been put down, or worse.

“Kurt, are you okay?” I asked.

“Something’s bothering me, but don’t worry about it.”

“Are you sure?”

“Yeah.”

“Okay, then … hey, J.B., listen to this line …”

Several minutes later, right before boarding, I checked on Kurt again.

“Kurt, are you going to be all right?”

“Yeah.” What a liar. The guy looked terrible, like he’d just found out his wife was dating his best friend.

“Are you sure?”

“I just can’t believe he said that.”

“Said what? Who?”

“Mark.”

“Coleman?”

“What did he say?” I was really confused. I’d been privy to their entire conversation and hadn’t heard anything even slightly disrespectful or confrontational, or even mildly controversial.

“He said he beat me at the ’92 Nationals.”

“So?”

“I beat
him
at the ’92 Nationals.”

“You’re kidding, right?” I really thought he might be kidding.

“Look, I may not have much,” Kurt said. “But don’t try to take my amateur career from me.” Obviously, I’d been mistaken about Kurt kidding.

Passengers were starting to board. I had to try to get through to this guy, before he killed off my writer’s buzz.

“Kurt, listen … how many times did you two wrestle?”

“Eight times.”

“Okay, how many did you win?”

“Four.”

“So you won four and he won four?”

“Yeah.”

“Well isn’t it possible that he just made a mistake, you know, that he got his dates mixed up?”

“No, he knew,” Kurt said, his eyes beginning to water.

This was crazy. It was like the guy needed an intervention from the three Dans — Hodge, Gable and Severn — to get him out of this funk. Sadly, all he had was me, but I would do the best I could — one last appeal for sanity before getting on the plane.

“Listen, Kurt, I’m going to do the best I can here to help you out, okay?”

He just stared.

“Look, you saw Mark’s face, right? Kurt, he had the crap beaten out of him last night. I think he’d been up all night, probably had a couple drinks. And it was seventeen years ago! Let it go, Kurt, let it … go.”

“I can’t believe he said that,” was all the Gold Medalist could say.

Skip it if you like, but we’ll no longer be friends.

“Did that kid just yell my name?” I was on a dilapidated back road in the Bombali area of the West African country of Sierra Leone, and I thought I’d just heard a young child on the street call my name as our vehicle lurched by.

I remember riding in an Army Humvee, visiting soldiers on peace-time maneuvers in the Kuwaiti desert in the fall of 1997. Our driver continually took the Humvee off road, up little banks, or down into gulleys, to avoid the perilous potholes that pockmarked our desert road.

The road, the driver explained, had been built by Saddam Hussein to advance his tanks from Iraq into Kuwait during the Iraqi invasion that resulted in Desert Storm in 1990. Because the road had been Saddam’s handiwork, the Kuwaitis had vowed never to repair it, leaving U.S. vehicles the hefty task of dodging the huge craters that were the residue of war and neglect.

At that point in my life, that Kuwaiti road was the worst I’d ever seen. Eleven years later, Saddam’s road seemed like the German autobahn
compared to this dirt road in Sierra Leone — the one I thought I’d heard my name shouted out from.

Sierra Leone is one of the poorest nations in the world — second poorest, by some standards. Its infrastructure was ravaged by a vicious civil war lasting from 1992 to 2001, which killed tens of thousands and displaced more than two million — a staggering third of the country’s population. Over 1,200 schools had been destroyed in the war, leaving a good portion of school-age children with nowhere to learn.

Which I guess is where I came into the picture, having agreed to finance the construction of a handful of small, community schools in small villages in Bombali. In November 2008, after a couple of false starts (a passport problem, postelection violence), I returned to Africa after a twenty-one-year absence.

I’d been a part of three separate African wrestling tours in 1987 — two to Nigeria, one to Burkina Faso — and had left with a wealth of experiences and stories but with an emptiness of the pocket, having amassed a grand sum of $480 for my combined six weeks of African wrestling work.

But over the years, especially as I got a little older — old enough at least to see that the world didn’t revolve around me — I kind of felt the continent calling out to me, beckoning me to return. I began reading about Africa in earnest after the 1994 genocide in Rwanda — eight hundred thousand lives lost in less than ninety days, while the outside world sat on its collective hands. I read and saw photos of the horrible atrocities in Sierra Leone — mass amputations by machete as an instrument of terror, the indoctrination of child soldiers as a main method of warfare. I saw photos of Angelina Jolie visiting with refugees — thankfully bringing a little much-needed media attention to the largely forgotten and little-known war.

For several years I’d thought about returning, but wanted to do it in a way that might have some impact — meaning I thought I would visit a country familiar with WWE programming. Don’t laugh — many
African countries are familiar with wrestling, none more so than Nigeria, where wrestling tradition runs deep, and where I learned the hard way that fans take their wrestling seriously. A good rule of thumb for those interested in the Nigerian mat scene: don’t use a foreign object on the Nigerian champion when you’re the lone white man in a crowd of thousands, especially when that particular country hasn’t caught on to the “entertainment” aspect of wrestling.

I paid for that little lapse in judgment with about ten stitches in my head — the result of a little ringside riot — administered without benefit of anesthetic, using sewing thread for the stitching, in a chemist’s office with a dirt floor. The chemist’s office was the place to be stitched, according to the Nigerian wrestlers. The hospital, apparently, was not to be trusted.

I almost went back to Nigeria a few years ago, for a wrestling reunion tour promoted by Mr. Haitti, the man who had booked me way back in 1987. Of all the wrestlers who had worked in Nigeria, he said, I turned out to be the most famous, and having me there would be incredibly big.

Two things changed my mind. First and foremost was the religious tension caused by the Miss World competition in the capital city of Lagos, started when a Nigerian newspaper columnist suggested that the prophet Muhammad might possibly have dated a Miss World contestant if he’d been offered the chance during his lifetime.

The comment sparked rioting throughout the country, killing at least one hundred and wounding hundreds more.

Second, but still important to me, I happened to see a photo of then Nigerian president Olusegun Obasanjo in my copy of
BBC Focus on Africa
, my bimonthly window into the African world. I thought I recognized the guy standing next to the president, apparently his right-hand man, trusted advisor, or personal bodyguard. It was Power Uti, that Nigerian champion I just mentioned — the one I probably shouldn’t have used the foreign object on. I hadn’t exactly heaped praise on Power Uti in my first book,
Have a Nice Day!
, as a wrestler or
as a person. I couldn’t go to Nigeria — I’d never make it back out! This whole invitation was merely a ploy to get me to Nigeria so that Power Uti could exact his revenge! I only half-jokingly thought my body might be hacked to pieces and used to fertilize a mango tree outside Obasanjo’s presidential palace.

So my African plans were put on indefinite hold. At least until I made my first visit to ChildFund International (then known as Christian Children’s Fund) headquarters in Richmond, Virginia, in 2005. I’d been a ChildFund sponsor since 1992, but kind of a lazy one; my checks were always late, I didn’t write to my child too often. And my checks for special projects were certainly nothing to brag about; even during my prime earning years, I would routinely respond to famine, disease, or some natural disaster with a whopping ten or twenty extra big ones.

But in 2004, I interpreted the coincidence that an early childhood education center in the Philippines cost almost exactly what I would earn for my children’s book
Tales from Wrescal Lane
as some kind of sign from God, and made the big phone call, explaining in a slightly shaky delivery that I was Mick Foley, I had a children’s book coming out, and I wanted to help build that center.

And with that one phone call, a relationship was born, or at least greatly strengthened. I was no longer the estranged distant cousin with the late checks and the extra twenty bucks to spend. I really became part of the family, and I even made the shocking, previously unthinkable discovery that in some isolated cases it really might be better to give than to receive.

So when I showed up in Richmond in 2005, it was as an official “major sponsor” — I even have a little plaque on my wall designating me as such. I was invited to address the staff before receiving a tour of the facility, during which I first spotted a photo of Alimany, the two-year-old boy who would hasten my return to the continent.

“I have to sponsor that child,” I said.

For my wife, Alimany’s photo inspired instant feelings of motherly
love. “Can we adopt him?” she said, showing just a slight misunderstanding of what the sponsorship program is all about. She was so taken with the little guy that the adoption subject was not fully dropped for a couple of years.

Sadly, Sierra Leone was not on my official list of African countries where wrestling was broadcast. Not that it would have really mattered too much. As I was to find out, televisions were something of a rarity in the Bombali area — not a whole lot of flat-screens gracing the walls of the mud huts that most villagers called home. Villagers were aware of what a television
was
, but thought of them as a special attraction, an event they might pay for once a year, when a man with a generator came into town and fired up a movie or two.

But as I embarked on my trip, Freetown by way of London — two seven-hour trips (with an eight-hour layover between), crammed into coach, my 300-pound frame squeezed into seats never designed for bodies like mine — I did so knowing I’d be entering a land where I’d be completely unknown.

If the flight from London to Freetown solidified my feeling of anonymity, the next day’s ferry trip from the airport area to Freetown proper cast it in stone. Seven hundred people jammed onto that ferry — poor but proud people heading out to the city for long hours spent hawking their wares, be they fruit or cookies, or nuts or native woodwork. Seven hundred people … and not a single soul knew me. Sure, they stared quite a bit. Other than Gary Duncan and Renee Monroe, the two ChildFund staff members who were with me, I was the only Caucasian on the ferry. And Gary and Renee resembled what most might describe as “normal” white people. Me … not so much. So, sure, I got quite a few looks, but not a soul in Sierra Leone knew who I was.