After more than two decades of battling on weekends around the northern North Carolina independent wrestling circuit, veteran grappler Jeff “The Hitman” Hart wowed rookies in a locker room today with stories about “huge” shows on much larger high-school basketball courts “back in the day.”

“In my day, brother, we were packing three — maybe four — dozen people into the abandoned warehouse behind Safeway for our weekly Dojo Battles,” recalled Hart, 57, who once played a security guard on WWE Raw in the early 2000s (but the segment was cut for time). 

“When I slammed King Kong Bundy in Mocksville at SuperSlammaMania ’92, we blew the roof off that place,” he added, although historical documents show the building’s roof had been blown off six days prior by a tornado. 

While Hart assumes all the rookies backstage (the parking lot of the old Safeway) gaze at him with admiration when he tells his tales of the old days, the rookies tend to be stoned teenagers simply transfixed by the gaps in Hart’s teeth.