Mumbai: The air inside the green room smoked the windowpanes, and the city sky outside turned grey, threatening a street shower. Under the murmur, you could sense seriousness like one would imagine inside a wrestler’s den just before he goes into the ring. Scuttling past the angry looking men, as I entered, there he was – The 7-ft-when standing Big Show, sitting on a white chair. Wearing a black polo shirt and dark blue jeans, he greets me with a genial smile in a baritone and all of a sudden the heaviness vanishes and somewhere in a corner outside the lying rags were nudged to a waltz in the mid air.
Earlier he spoke to a crowd of young students at the St. Andrew’s College auditorium. “Out of every four kids, one is bullied. But it is not the bullied that needs to be taken care of; in fact, it’s the bully who needs more help. To hide his own embarrassment he tries to shift the attention to someone else,” says the 42-year-old wrestler to the audience, where they had gathered to see the RAW superstar.
The seven feet tall WWE wrestler has come to India on a campaign to talk against bullying in schools.
Talking about his own experiences, he says, “When I was in school I had two pairs of shoes. One from each of the pairs had holes in it. So in the cold I wore one shoe from each pair, which didn’t have a hole in it. So, there was a red shoe on my left foot and a green on my right. People in the school used to laugh at me. They thought that I was colour blind, but deep down at heart I was still feeling better because I feared the embarrassment I had to suffer if they came to know that my father was out of a job and he couldn’t afford to buy me a new pair.” Needless to say, that his height had always been a reason for him being ostracised. Albeit a trivial fact, as it may seem, he was already more than six feet when he was just 12 years old. To cope up with the situation, he started participating in sports, and eventually became a basketball player, which in return gave him respect and love.
Talking about daily diets makes him utterly listless since that is almost the most common question asked to him by the curious. “I used to often tell them that I had two fried midgets for breakfast,” he laughs at his joke.
Before he became The Big Show and made his debut in the WWF arena in the year 1995, he was known as Paul Wight and he used to do odd jobs like selling bathroom deodorisers and attending calls at karaoke companies for living. Behind all the stardom and resemblance to the giants from that fictional land of “Brobdingnag”, he says, “Most of the Wednesday afternoons when I am at home, my wife and my daughter are out, while I watch TV and empty the garbage bags.”
This is his second trip to India and he seems to have been enjoying the love that his fans are showering on him. “I think this time when I go back home, it will be a bit difficult for me to do the daily chores and keep up my demeanour of a family man; I’ll be less modest,” he says.
Soon our restricted time is over and to perform the last minute ablutions he takes my hand in his, shakes it gently and I leave. Soon his bodyguard escorts him to his big vanity van surrounded by fans. And as the van leaves, there is a sudden gust of cold breeze to fill up the empty space.
