REAL NAME: Joe Hitchen
BORN: September 2, 1969 in Toronto, Ontario
6’1″, 252 pounds
ALIASES/NICKNAMES: Just Joe, Joe E. Legend, Psycho Joe Sampson, Cowboy Billy Johnson, Master Joe Storm, Dragon, XL Legend, Bluto Belushi
Joe E. Legend has fond memories of the tag team Sex and Violence, but he doesn’t think that he was ever mistaken for Sex.
His partner, the aforementioned Sex was, of course, Sexton Hardcastle, currently making hearts go a-flutter as Edge in the WWF.
“With a skull like this, I couldn’t be Sex,” he told SLAM! Wrestling, backstage at an Empire Wrestling Federation show in Kitchener, Ontario.
Sex and Violence was a successful tag team years back in the Detroit area. S&V themselves were a part of a bigger gang, known as THUG Life — Legend, Hardcastle, Christian Cage (now just Christian), Bloody Bill Skullion and Rhino Richards. While in Detroit, the Headbangers and a team of Reckless Youth and D’Lo Brown lost to Sex and Violence.
THUG Life “was a totally Canadian angle, three weeks before Bret Hart did it (with the Hart Foundation)”, said Legend. The team even went as far as burning a U.S. flag in the ring.
Legend, who has been wrestling for 6 1/2 years, thinks his big break is just around the corner. He was trained by ‘Wonderboy’ Ron Hutchison at Sully’s Gym in Toronto, and hopes to follow fellow grads Edge, Christian and Tiger Ali Singh to the WWF.
He spent two years training before heading out into the wrestling world. On his trainer Hutchison, Legend said “he doesn’t want you to embarrass yourself. More importantly, he doesn’t want you to embarrass him.”
Before starting to learn to wrestle, the Toronto-born Legend (real name Joe Hitchen), was into karate and kung-fu. He chose Sully’s Gym because “they were the only ones who didn’t sell me a line of crap.”
Old friends Edge, Christian, and The Jackyl have put a good word in for him in the WWF, and it looks “99%” like he will be on the Toronto RAW show February 8, probably in a dark match.
Legend hopes that will lead to a WWF contract, and he feels that he is more than ready.
He spent the last four months of 1998 wrestling in Germany for the CWA. Joe E. Legend is known there as XL Legend (“for some reason”) and had a regular tag team with Detroit’s Rhino Richards (who appears bound for ECW).
Besides Germany, he’s done 17 trips to Winnipeg, hit most of the northeastern U.S states, and been to Japan twice — once for the now-defunct NOW, and once for FMW. It was there that he got to chase a thousand people around with a chair.
While he may have scared people in Japan, he recalled a few scary moments of his own.
In South Africa, he had to carry a chair over his head to protect himself from the brick-throwing fans. On a tour of northern Manitoba, he was run off an Indian Reservation by six trucks full of hockey-stick-wielding non-fans.
On the more pleasant side, he fondly recalled one of his early matches in Hamilton, Ontario. He was working for promoter Ted Grizzly, whose mother was a huge wrestling fan, but very sick and unable to attend the show. Grizzly arranged for the wrestlers to head over to his mother’s house during the show. It made her day, and Legend remembered it as “one of the best things I’ve ever done.”
When he’s not wrestling, Legend is a bouncer at a Toronto bar, and likes going to movies and watching talk shows. (There is talk of Legend being on an upcoming Off The Record on TSN.)
He has started to become a bit of a fixture on the southern Ontario scene, and is really enjoying it because, unlike Germany or Japan, he “can get on the mic and mouth off and people will understand me.”
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