You Can’t Beat Time, Even with a Large Wooden Stick

“You know my bip-bopping days are over
I hung my boots up and then retired from the disco floor
Now the centre of my so-called being is
The space between the bed and wardrobe with the louvre doors”
-My Wandering Days Are Over, Belle and Sebastian

My Santa Claus days are over, the last remaining embers of innocence extinguished. And all that remains are hazy memories and a feeling deep in the belly of how things were.

These days, the centre of my so-called being is no longer a wide-eyed belief in heroes and idols and the genuine hope for greatness and the faith in the decency of the world that comes with such worship. Those days, as they say, are gone, buried in the annals of history and the grey matter of my mind. You can’t look through the one prism forever. And for everybody, the end will come. Not only of life and love and learning. But of phases and perspectives and priorities. We are in a state of constant movement and time stops for no man. The sense of the final act becomes increasingly forceful. And knowing that the times are a-changing becomes an entirely tangible thought.

In the space of a month, my two remaining childhood heroes will have retired from their respective games. And with them will go the last flashes of childhood, the finger-nail grip on youthful exuberance released forever. The grimness and cynicism of cluttered reality sits between the bed and wardrobe with the louvre red door now. There is not a lot of room for hope in a world filled with emails, constant news and Irvine Welsh.

March 2008 will always be a melancholy memory of mourning and magic. And those last feelings of cock-eyed belief will be no more, naught but shattered cells of nothingness floating somewhere in the ether. That is growing up, as they say. In the first week of this fateful month, the iconic Brett Favre announced he had played his last game of professional football. Regular readers of Making The Nut have been well versed in the affection the author of same feels for Old Number Four. And in March’s dying days, on a likely cool Orlando evening, the “Nature Boy” Ric Flair will wrestle his final match, the end of a career that began a decade before my birth. What started with the truth on Santa Claus sometime around the age of nine will end at Wrestlemania with a Ric Flair defeat. And it is defeat he will suffer, going down to Shawn Michaels for the good of the business.

Brett Favre and Ric Flair, along with Dean Jones and Terry Lamb and Craig Polla-Mounta and Steve Young and David Knox and David Boon, were heroes without faults, men who transcended the boundaries set for them and thrilled in doing it. They were entertainers and wonder-providers, performing deeds that entertained and excited and defied belief. The Favre deep-ball into triple coverage as a gang of thugs pursues him with hate in their eyes, hitting the man between the numbers and celebrating with such guttural enjoyment. Ric Flair, his blonde mane soaked red, slugging it out with the likes of Ricky Steamboat and Dusty Rhodes and Terry Funk, always overcoming the seemingly impossible with a repertoire of knife-edge chops, bone-breaking submission moves and dirty tricks.

Following the deeds of these legends was not an easy task fifteen and twenty years ago. In a time before the internet and pay television days were spent searching video stores and newsagents for wrestling magazines and videos and nights, Tuesday at any rate, were spent waiting up for Don Lane and the weekly NFL wrap.  Pro Wrestling Illustrated was a life-source and though it was three months out-of-date by the time it got to Australia, it was worth every bit of pocket-money when it would bring news that Flair had fought off another challenger and remained the NWA World Champion. And without Don Lane, Brett Favre may have been just another name not worth remembering, a faceless man playing an unknown game. Perhaps the adventure of working so hard to discover the greatness of their deeds added to their legend, the imagination always wilder than the reality.

Brett Favre was the personification of self-belief. He wasn’t pretty, he wasn’t smooth and he wasn’t brilliant. He was just a roughneck who loved football and played it with the same enthusiasm and same zest and same spontaneity do that children across the South and through the Midwest and all over America do. And we could all sense that, even at a young age. He was different to all the other great quarterbacks of the time, not as chiseled and not as incomparable. He seemed like the player most fathers talk about when discussing the greats of yesteryear. Grizzled and wild, everyone believed that with just a bit of work and a bit of luck, they could be the franchise quarterback of one of the most storied franchises in NFL history. And for that period in the mid-nineties, Favre was unstoppable, always hurting those who cheered against the Pack. He wouldn’t just beat you, he would do it in such an enthusiastic fashion that you really felt that he would have played for nothing more than the thrill. There was, even up to that tragic overtime loss against the New York Football Giants, something magical about watching Brett Favre play football. The touchdowns, the intercepts, the wins, the losses, the ups, the downs…it was always a treat to watch Brett Favre in action.

Ric Flair was no different, at least in terms of the captivation he provided when in the squared circle. At an age when you believe everything in wrestling and in life are on the up-and-up, every match seemed to have the world riding on it and every feud appeared genuine and total. When Flair strutted out to Also Sprach Zarathustra, adorned in the finest robes and usually with the gold wrapped around his waist, the world seemed to stop and nothing else mattered. There has never been a greater match than the Flair-Steamboat clash at Wrestle War ’89, a match filled with drama, athleticism, importance and some of the sweetest wrestling anybody has ever seen. When Terry Funk attacked Flair after the conclusion of the near fifty-minute affair and piledrove him through a ringside table, the feelings of pain were so sharp that they can still be felt nearly twenty years on. Even a decade later, when the truth about wrestling had been learned and the world had become a little more cluttered, the return of Ric Flair to WCW television in Greenville, South Carolina was as emotional as any sporting or television moment. Flair had been gone for over a year after a falling out with Eric Bischoff and when he returned and the Four Horsemen reformed and tears ran down Flair’s face and Bischoff was called a no-good-son-of-a-bitch, the place popped like nothing you have ever heard before. It was a testament to Flair’s legacy of giving his all every night and making people believe. Flair was that good, the greatest ever, the Bradman of his field. Whether he was modest and bloodied or cocky in custom-made suits, whether he had his arm raised in triumph or was spitting in disgust, Flair was always The Man.

Both Favre and Flair were statues that stood above all others, athletes who simply were just better than their peers. They were infallible at their best and they struck a chord that only chimes when true beauty is present. And their exits leave a void that can’t be filled.

Their retirements, of course, were as inevitable as their death and our death and the death of everybody. Yet the surprise and shock of The End was sharp and painful. Even in their declining years, when you watched hoping for just one more glimpse of the greatness that had made them a focal point of your life, knowing that the best days were long gone and the road was getting dusty, The End seemed so far away, hidden in the hazy horizon. There was always one more game, always one more much.

Not come April. As the leaves disappear and the cloak of winter death hangs over us, my last remaining heroes will have performed their last great deed. There will always be great quarterbacks and there will always be great wrestlers. But there will never be another Brett Favre and there will never be another Ric Flair. And at some point in all our lives, there will be no heroes. Everybody will have to say goodbye to their Brett Favre and their Ric Flair one day.

That, as they say, is life. For all of us, our wandering days will come to an end.