Anchorboy by Jay Onrait Page B

have, and when a beautiful blonde woman recognized me from the show I couldn’t help but lap it up a bit. I was feeling lonely and miserable and fully aware I was probably about to get divorced. The lovely blonde and I made our way upstairs to continue our conversation in private in the VIP room.
    After what was probably a half-hour of serious flirting, and perhaps even some light petting, I suggested we take the party toa nearby hotel. While the blonde was trying to figure out how to reject my offer as painlessly as possible, I was suddenly attacked out of nowhere. I didn’t even get a good look at the guy, but the next thing I knew I was being punched square in the forehead four times. Fortunately for me, my forehead is a massive target. Any other part of my face would have been much more susceptible to real damage. A bouncer rushed over to pull the guy off of me but it was too late. The dude had been wearing a ring and cut me wide open. I started bleeding everywhere. While the guy screamed and yelled at me while being bear-hugged by a King Kong Bundy look-alike, I glanced over at the blonde, who gave me a sheepish “I’m sorry” look. Jealous ex-boyfriend. I should have known. I guess that was karma for the whole “attempting to cheat while you are married” thing. Not my best night out on the town in Toronto but a lesson learned: You should always be prepared for something bad to happen.
    A couple of years before that I got my ass kicked even worse. And here’s the rub: It happened on live television, and the person who kicked my ass was a very, very powerful woman. In both cases I was not prepared for what was about to happen. In both cases I suppose you could say I got what I deserved.
    If people regularly watched me host
The Big Breakfast
in Winnipeg, the first thing they ask me about is the time I was beaten up by Dominique Bosshart. Dominique had just won a bronze medal in kickboxing at the 2000 Summer Games in Sydney and had returned home to a hero’s welcome, fielding plenty of national and local interviews about her success. Eventually, she was kind enough to show up on
The Big Breakfast
one morning to not only answer a few questions about her time at the Games but also do a quick demo with me on kickboxing technique.
    We liked to “do things” on the show, and what could be more fun than a powerful, athletic woman showing off her greatest kicks? We planned it out before the segment started: Dominique and Iwould talk for a minute or so about her experience in Sydney and what it’s like to return home an Olympic bronze medallist, and then she and I would stand face to face and she would demonstrate a roundhouse kick, with me holding up a thick pad about waist-high to protect myself. No head gear, no other padding, just me and my Backstreet Boys outfit and my heavily gelled frosty tips to protect me. What could possibly go wrong?
    Before the segment started, Dominique showed me how to hold up the protective pad, and by “protective pad” I mean a rather thin gym mat you would expect children to do somersaults on in kindergarten. For some reason this seemed perfectly reasonable protection to me. Did I mention before that I’m not much of a details guy? Dominique and her coach, who had joined her that morning, wanted me to hold the protective pad up high, so that the bottom was around belt-level and the top was just around my chin. But I was having none of it—I had visions of her perhaps losing her footing and kicking a bit lower than normal, with her foot ending up promptly wedged into my balls. Instead I insisted on holding that pad just a
little
bit lower to protect myself in the nether regions. After a few practice kicks during the commercial break, in which Dominique gave about 22 percent effort, we figured we were ready to go. We had to be ready to go … we were
live
.
    The plan, which, yes, seems flawed now but at the time seemed brilliant, was to have Dominique go
all out
with her roundhouse