The Fink Factor: May 29, 2014

With “The Fink Factor,” I will strive to expound on a few items from each week’s episode of “WWE Legends’ House,” and drop some choice tidbits here and there from my overall experience. Without further ado …

Another week has come and gone in the Legends’ House, but not without the usual surprises and unpredictability that went with it.

• Throughout our stay, when non-competitive events were presented to us, we were all unified in skepticism. Case in point: The breakfast that we had in Palm Springs. Don’t get me wrong, we all appreciated these downtime moments; yet, we all thought that when said moments occurred, there was certain to be a payoff of some sort. Well, that turned out to be true when we returned to the house: A game show was in place to play!

• If I might digress: All of us had our eccentricities, but for the life of me, Jimmy Hart took the cake (or maybe he doesn’t like cake) with his most unique eating habits. Ordering minestrone soup and an iceberg wedge of lettuce for breakfast? Hmmm … beans and potatoes, cheese, olives and crackers. God bless him. It became commonplace in the house for a few of us to verbally pepper Jimmy with an array of culinary items to see if he liked them or not. And the more negative connotations that were uttered by Jimmy, the more hilarious it got.

•  I knew my roommate Pat Patterson and I would have an easy time with the game show, as we’ve been friends for 37 years. We first met in New York City on January 17, 1977 – the night we both debuted in Madison Square Garden.   Despite our longstanding past and the law firm of “Dewey, Cheatem, and Howe” (a.k.a. Roddy Piper and “Hacksaw” Jim Duggan), Hillbilly Jim and Jimmy Hart were the winning team. The prize of the tennis lesson was a neat touch, and the Jim & Jimmy tandem did a good job with their pros. All of the tennis playing we did almost every night paid off, though I’d suggest that Wimbledon is not in either Legend’s future.

• To have Shawn Michaels pay a visit to “Legends’ House” was a wonderful surprise; everyone was thrilled to see him, and having a member of the WWE fraternity with us for the entire day was a godsend. Of course, there was a string attached – or in this case, a worm…:

• We were going fishing! We all had to get licensed to fish by the State of California before we could proceed with our expedition.  I’ve never done a day of fishing in my life, so you can imagine when my fishing pole bent how overjoyed I was. A novice like I was about to become a cast angler! But a “tree bass”? Brutal! Needless to say, some good-natured ribbing came my way from my boat mates.

Thanks for reading. Be back next week!