A Lion's Tale: Around the World in Spandex

by Chris Jericho

  I reached the end of the field, popped in the new Anthrax cassette and began to paint...and paint...and paint. Four hours later I was totally exhausted, with only seven feet of painted fence to show for my efforts. I’d just finished two months of the most intense physical training I’d ever experienced and now I was reduced to this?

  But there were benefits to painting the Palkos’ fence. Considering that I’d eaten most of my meals that summer at the Petro-Can (paying for them with my dad’s gas card), when Mrs. Palko yelled down the field that she’d made lunch, my stomach jumped for joy. The spread was basic but it was one of the best meals of my life. A thick ham sandwich served on homemade bread; fresh out-of-the-oven chocolate chip cookies, and an ice cold glass of milk. It was so heavenly it may as well have been made in the Vatican; or at least it seemed that way after eight weeks of burritos and Twinkies.

  The Palkos had two sons: Brad, another friendly Palko who I met at lunch, and Tyler, who ended up becoming like a brother to me. You wouldn’t have guessed it the first time we met though. No one had told him that I was going to be painting the fence, so he was quite surprised when a strange longhair in a bottle green jalopy pulled up at his isolated farmhouse and began rummaging through the garage. I was loading up my trunk on the second day when he came outside and eyed me up.

  “You must be Tyler,” I said. Then we both stood there staring at each other. After an eternity, he said “Yup” and went inside to ask his dad who in the hell I was.

  The Palkos had taken in foster kids for years and when they heard my story and figured out that I was dying to get out of the Willy, they offered me their spare room. They suggested I could stay there in exchange for painting the fence, so I moved in with the intention of staying four months and ended up staying four years. They became my second family and were a blessing because no matter how uncertain my wrestling career was, I always knew I had a stable home to go back to. As broke as I was, rent was never a problem either because I only had to pay a scant $10 a day and pitch in with the chores. Since we were on a farm, those chores included chasing escaped cows off the highway, shooting invading gophers in the field, baling hay into the barn and stuffing chickens into coops to ship to the Colonel. But it was a small price to pay, as their love and kindness helped me to become as successful as I did and for that I’m eternally grateful.

  Unfortunately, not everything in my life was going as well as my housing situation. In a botched attempt to make myself look like one of the Nelson twins (whether it was Gunnar or Matthew I’m not sure), I bought a box of cheap dye and ended up with a head of fried canary yellow hair. Then I hit a deer and totaled my precious Volare. But the worst was yet to come.

  A friend named Shane Lanoway had moved with his family to Calgary the same time I did. I had spent the night at his house and was mowing their lawn as a thank-you for letting me stay, when Shane’s mom came out and told me that my dad was on the phone.

  I felt my stomach step into a pothole because my dad had no clue where I was. Something very bad had to have happened for him to do the necessary detective work to find me.

  I answered the phone and was chilled by the severity of my dad’s voice when he said, “You have to come home right now. Your mom has been in an accident.” My heart raced and I asked him if she was dead. “No, but you have to come home right now. She’s in the hospital. She’s in intensive care and she may not make it through the night.”

  My dad picked me up at the Winnipeg airport and told me what had happened. A few months after my parents had split up three years earlier, my mom had started seeing her new boyfriend. Being a rebellious teenager, I was very cold toward them and whenever they came over to our house to swim or hang out, I split. I still hadn’t gotten over the splintering of my own family and wasn’t interested in trying to adopt a new one.

  I was pissed when they first started dating and after countless fights between my mom and me, she finally said, “I’m not expecting you to accept this right away but I have to go on with my life. I want to be happy and you should want that for me too.”

  I drove her to her boyfriend Danny’s house every Friday and then got her car and our house to myself for the whole weekend. Not a bad consolation prize for a teenager living in a broken home I guess.

  My mom was in the ICU because the night before she and Danny had gotten into an argument on the front lawn of our house. During the fight, my mom charged at him and was accidentally back-dropped onto her head when she landed. She instantly became a quadriplegic. She told Danny that she couldn’t move, but he didn’t realize what had happened and he picked her up, put her on her bed and left the house. Hours later when he realized how serious the situation was, he finally called the ambulance.

  The last time I had seen my mom, she was walking up the driveway after seeing me off to the Hart camp on a sunny day in late June and all I could smell was the sweet scent of summer flowers. The next time I saw my mom, she was in an intensive care unit two weeks after I’d graduated from the Hart camp on a gloomy day in mid-September and all I could smell was the sickening scent of hospital disinfectant. Since then, whenever I smell that distinct hospital odor I get transported back in time to that exact moment.

  When I walked into the room I didn’t recognize the frightened person with the swollen face lying there and I thought I was in the wrong room. Then I realized that the face belonged to my mother. She gave me a faint pencil line of a smile and I completely fell apart. All of the hard work that I’d done, my dream of making it into the WWF instantly evaporated when I saw her in that bed. My number one priority was now my mother and I didn’t give a damn about anything else. I sincerely hope that none of you sharing this with me right now will ever experience the feeling of seeing one of your dearest loved ones lying motionless in a hospital bed, with a medical halo screwed into their head so tight that you can see the drops of plasma (not blood) creeping down their waxen forehead.

  I rubbed my hand along her cheek since it was one of the only places that she still had feeling and she looked up at me with another wan smile. But it didn’t mask the sheer terror in her eyes.

  I left the room after a few minutes, in order to compose myself and to decide how I was going to murder Danny. I wanted to kill him and his kids. I’m not exaggerating. A policeman waiting for me in the hallway saw death in my eyes and as I walked by, he stopped me. He was a big man with a thick mustache and I sensed that he wasn’t one to mess with. I also sensed that he wanted to help me.

  He very deliberately said to me, “I’m sorry about your mother, but if you touch this guy, you’re going to jail. If you do what you’re thinking about doing, it’s going to be the end of three lives: his, yours, and your mom’s.”

  I didn’t quite register what he was saying. He was talking like there was a choice. But there was no choice. I had to end him.

  “The law will—”

  I stopped him and said, “Fuck the law. I’m going to kill him.”

  What he said next probably saved Danny’s life…and mine as well.

  “If you do, you’ll go to jail and then your life will be over. Do you want to go to jail at nineteen? Think about it, it’s not worth it. Your life would be over before it even started and that would make your mom’s life even harder and unhappier than it is right now.”

  In the back of my head a little worm of rational thought began to crawl through my brain. What the cop said made sense. As much as I wanted to call some of my Hell’s Angel friends and organize a little party, I started comprehending that it wouldn’t change a thing. My mom would still be severely injured and my life would end up in shambles. How could I help her if I had to spend the rest of my life in prison? I knew that wasn’t what God wanted out of my life either.

  Over the next few days the reality of the situation hit me. I was scared that she was going to die but I began to think how hard her life would be if she didn’t. I held on to the hope that she would start to move her arms, her legs, a finger, anything. Ever
y night when I went to sleep I prayed that something would improve and every morning when I woke up nothing had.

  But every day when I went to see her, she was incredibly strong and never once broke down in front of me. Her attitude began to rub off on me, and I stopped breaking down in front of her. This was the situation; it wasn’t going to change and it was time to deal with it. I’d been having a pity party of my own, but that ended pretty quickly when I saw how mentally tough my mom was being.

  I was a mental mess though. I’d just gotten confirmation that my first match had been booked in Alberta a few weeks later, yet there was no way I was going to leave my mom.

  I had already begun to make plans to move back to Winnipeg. But when she gained enough strength to have a conversation with me, one of the first things she said was, “I don’t want you to change anything. I want you to continue doing what you’re doing. You have a dream and you’re so close to making it happen. I’m not your responsibility.”

  When I protested, she said, “You’ve worked too hard and I’m not going to spoil this for you. I’m proud of you and I want you to do this and be the best that you can be!”

  As broken-down as her body was, her mental drive and iron will were stronger than ever. If she’d asked me, I would’ve moved home in a second, but that wasn’t the way she wanted it.

  Even though my dad was a hard-nosed NHL tough guy, I think I got most of my mental toughness from my mom. She lived as a quadriplegic for fifteen years and during that time she went through enough trials and tribulations for fifteen people, yet she never gave up or stopped fighting. When she gave me her blessing to continue on with wrestling, there was no way on God’s green earth I was going to let her down. Her iron will become my iron will and failure was no longer an option.

  I had to make it big for her.

  CHAPTER 9

  THE PIED PIPER OF PONOKA

  When I got back to Calgary, I knew it was where I was supposed to be. When I’d seen all of my old friends back in the Peg, I realized how much I’d grown and changed as a person. Now that I had something to believe in, there was no turning back.

  October 2, 1990 (just over a month before my twentieth birthday), was the day of my first match, and it was rapidly approaching. Lance, Victor, and I had been booked to make our professional wrestling debut with the Canadian Wrestling Connection, which was owned and promoted by none other than the CWC champ himself, Bob “The Judge” Puppets.

  Puppets was notorious for being a terrible promoter. He never advertised his shows, and most of them bombed like a Ben Affleck/Jennifer Lopez movie. He once promoted a show at a college in Rimby, Alberta, on the same night as the homecoming free beer bash. Final total: Free Beer Bash—1000 tickets sold, Puppets Show—seven tickets sold. I guess those seven people were on the wagon...or nerds.

  But Puppets’s promoting track record meant nothing to us because we had a match to prepare for and names to decide on. Since Dr. Love had already solved his name problem, only Lance and I were still struggling.

  We all agreed that Puppets’s Rob Benoit idea was lame and I decided that Christian Chris Irvine wasn’t flashy enough, so I was leaning toward my new choice of JACK ACTION. Jack Action was perfect and I had already worked out the most important part of any name: how to sign my autograph. Paul Stanley from Kiss signed his name with a star at the end of his Y and I ripped him off by signing a star at the end of my N. Hey, it was better than the X that I signed for the Ranger fans who wanted my autograph just for being Ted Irvine’s son when I was four years old!

  Lance, however, didn’t think that Jack Action was the moneymaking merchandising machine that I did and he told me so.

  “I saw you autographing your notebook as Jack Action and you can’t call yourself that. It’s a terrible name. It sucks.” Always the diplomat, that Lance.

  I denied old Jack quicker than Peter denied Jesus and said, “I know Jack Action is stupid. I was just messing around.” Even though I thought the name was amazing, Lance’s typical bluntness had killed the Action Man forever.

  Then I experimented with different variations of the last name Skywalker. I thought Shawn Skywalker would be cool but I didn’t want my name to be too much like Shawn Michaels. I had already stolen his look, his costume, and his canary yellow hair, so taking his name too would’ve been a bit much. I tried to think of other decent S names to match Skywalker. Shane Skywalker? Seamus Skywalker? Shakira Skywalker? Nothing fit.

  Then I remembered a name that I’d flirted with when I was trying to go the Christian route... Jericho. There was a lame comic book character named Jericho and a great record by the German metal band Helloween named The Walls of Jericho and I thought it sounded cool. I felt I might have something with Chris Jericho.

  I was nervous about my choice because choosing a name is like choosing the side of the bed in a relationship—once you pick one, you’re stuck for life. And the situation got more stressful when it came time to pronounce my new moniker to Lance, the great communicator.

  So I took a deep breath and announced that my name was going to be Chris Jericho. Surprisingly, Ed and Lance smiled and said it had a nice ring to it. I was proud of my marketing genius and decided to give myself a hero cookie. Lance proclaimed that he would now be known as Lance T. Storm. Ed pointed out that the T. was his idea and stood for THUNDER...as if it could’ve stood for anything else. From the look on Ed’s face you would’ve thought he’d just discovered the cure for fucking cancer, but whatever.

  However, Ed also had a name idea for me. He was going to call me Cowboy Chris Jericho from Casper, Wyoming. I kept a poker face as my throat swelled like an erection. I didn’t like country music, I didn’t like cowboys, and I sure as hell didn’t like Casper, Wyoming! (Now that I’ve been there, I’d like to say that Casper is a nice town filled with nice people.)

  “You’re going to be Cowboy Chris Jericho. You’ll come to the ring with chaps and a cowboy hat.” What, no lasso?

  I’d gone from Vince Neil to the Village People in the space of two minutes.

  I was irate when I spoke to Bret Como, who I’d met at the Hart camp, and told him Ed’s idea. But he’d been around a bit and gave me some advice. “Just don’t do it,” he said.

  Just don’t do it...words of wisdom! I didn’t realize that I had a choice.

  So I told Ed, “I just don’t feel comfortable with it. It’s not me and I don’t want to do it.” His reaction proved that Ed really hadn’t been around the wrestling business much. If I was in charge with fifteen years experience under my belt and some punk kid with ZERO matches under his belt said no to one of my suggestions, I would’ve fired him on the spot. Or I would’ve turned him into the most ridiculous cowboy of all time; I’m talking Dumb and Dumber cowboy hat, assless chaps, the works. Instead, Ed respected my wishes.

  Sort of.

  Ed and Puppets had decided that for our first match Lance and I would work against each other and Victor wouldn’t wrestle, but would serve as Lee Barachie’s manager. Vic wanted to save the moneymaking Dr. Love gimmick for his wrestling debut and was stumped in trying to think of a manager’s name. I saw his driver’s license and noticed that his full given name was Victor Benson Cyril DeWilde. Just like Rick Fliehr and Rick Roode, Vic had been born with the ultimate wrestling name. So he got himself a suit and a neck brace (which he wore for no apparent reason) and became Lee Barachie’s stuck-up, snotty manager Benson Cyril.

  Now that we had solved the name problem, the next order of business was to get actual wrestling boots, as simple tennis shoes wouldn’t suffice any longer. I was looking forward to getting a pair of the shiny, patent leather beauties that all of my favorites wore. Instead Ed took us to a cobbler friend who made us boots out of a flimsy soft leather that flipped and flopped all over the place. I had to put rolled-up magazines inside just to keep them standing straight up. I’d also made the controversial decision to order black boots instead of white, as my idea was to have a yellow and black costume like Stryper,
who were famous for their yellow and black threads.

  “You can’t have black boots,” Ed said, horrified. “You’re going to be a good guy, a babyface. If you walk to the ring wearing black boots, everyone is going to think you’re a bad guy and boo you.”

  It was an old-time tradition that babyfaces wore white, but white didn’t fit my gimmick, man! Once again, I held my ground and told Ed that I was going with the black boots. I hadn’t even had my first match, but I was already a pain in the ass for my boss. This was a trend that would continue for most of my career.

  After a short debate Ed eventually gave in again. “Okay, wear black boots, but don’t blame me if people think you’re a big heel.” I thought if I did my job and played my cards right, the people would cheer for me if I had frozen turkeys on my feet. I was right.

  Even though my costume was designed, I was having a problem finding someone who could actually make it for me. Then Vic told me that he’d met a wrestler named Lenny St. Clair whose mom made wrestling tights. They had started hanging out together when Lenny was working the night shift at the Petro Can. I had seen Lenny St. Clair wrestling on TV, so I was confused as to why he worked at a gas station. He was a television wrestler, so didn’t that mean he was too rich and successful for a menial job? The realities of the wrestling biz continued to seep in.

  Lenny’s mom was very good at her job and he had the rep around Calgary for having great wrestling outfits. While most of the local guys wore the same style of tights with lightning bolts on the legs and stars on the ass, Lenny sported a plethora (great word) of different-colored, intricately designed costumes with matching ring jackets. So I bought a yard of yellow and black spandex and his mom made me a pair of black and yellow tights with black and yellow frills and wristbands to match. Voilà—Colorful Chris Jericho was ready for business.

  Our first match was in the town of Ponoka, Alberta, which was famous for its mental institution. The irony that I started my wrestling career only miles away from an insane asylum has not been lost, believe me.