My latest column on upgruv.com (download their app) is remembering the first day I got to spend and meet with George “The Animal” Steele. It opened my eyes and motivated me in ways that carry to now.
“The Animal” changed my life.
George Steele died Friday, leaving behind a career of memories as one of professional wrestling’s most engaging performers and inspiring characters. And a small part of that engagement/inspiration occurred in the mid 1990s, when he steeled a 9-year-old boy’s passion for “the business.”
My grandfather had just started…
His name is Jim and he was getting involved spot shows staged in conjunction with school fundraisers and other community based organizations. Some of his friends were promoters of those shows. His best friend was serving on the Maryland State Athletic Commission.
My grandfather soon became a dependable “second,” a right-hand man if you will, somebody who would help with whatever was needed.
I had no idea then how his role would set me on my course.
One of my grandfather’s tasks was to serve as chauffeur to wrestlers that arrived at BWI airport near Baltimore. One day, that chauffeur took on a second of his own.
What luck, right?
Our first trip together — though, I still like to think of it as a “transportation mission” — was to retrieve George Steele. Of course, that meant the two of us were driving to pick up “The Animal.”
Back then, I couldn’t process “The Animal” was a person, too.
Even at that young age, I had already fairly educated myself on the world of professional wrestling. I’d known of “The Animal” from watching VHS tapes. Before the world was caught up in a wide web, the way for young “marks” to watch wrestling was mostly on video tapes rented from a local store.
Video tapes helped me see the original WrestleMania. They also brought to me matches from lesser-known cards, matches I otherwise never would have witnessed as a kid.
And if you were a kid watching some of those video tapes, you (as did I) would have expected for “The Animal” to get into your grandfather’s car and immediately begin biting an armrest in that Oldsmobile.
‘The Animal’ wasn’t there…
The man we picked up at BWI was Jim Myers. He was calm, intelligent and polite — an “Animal” in moniker only. He chatted with my grandfather, using words instead of grunts.
After a car ride in which the armrests remained in tact, we helped Jim check into a hotel and then transported him to the high school where the wrestling matches would go on that evening.
Haven’t had many better evenings than that one; it was my first time backstage at a wrestling event.
If you’ve never been there, consider what was before my impressionable eyes: everything.
Those were the faces famous from television shows and those video tapes. Only instead of absorbing punches or kicks, those faces belonged to working men and women sharing laughs while discussing the business of their work for that night. They were wearing denim and fanny packs. They were big, but not larger than life.
Then the fanny packs were removed, the jeans traded for tights, shoes for boots and… well, it’s something to see people seemingly so normal reach into a travel bag for items that would turn them into the most colorful characters in show business, the most exciting athletes anywhere.
But none of them had anything on Jim Myers when he became George “The Animal” Steele.
CLICK HERE for watching the transformation of “The Animal” and what I learned that day.
