A Lion's Tale: Around the World in Spandex

by Chris Jericho

  After leaving Shotgun Willy’s, Mike and Bret decided that they wanted to indulge in a little of Grandpa’s secret stash. We ended up on a street corner in the middle of a downtown Denver ghetto and once again because I was the greenhorn, it was my job to procure the loot. I should’ve just said no to drugs but I had to prove I was one of the boys; possible felony and extradition be damned!

  I got out of the car and a few minutes later a mean-looking dude walked by. I suddenly morphed into Larry David and said these exact words: “Excuse me, sir, do you have any marijuana?”

  Instead of assaulting me on the spot for massive nerdery, he pulled a plastic bag out of his pocket. It contained a handful of what looked like small, clear pieces of hard candy.

  He said, “I got this and I think you should buy it.” I began to protest until he opened his coat and revealed a Crocodile Dundee knife. I was sold so I gave him Mike’s money and took the bag. I wasn’t sure of the proper crack-buying etiquette, so I thanked him, gave him a thumbs-up, and sprinted back to the car.

  I threw the bag of crack in the front seat, told the boys that we were going to be fricasseed if we had any problems with the service at the drive-thru, and Mike floored it.

  A serious debate followed as we tried to decide what we were supposed to do with a bag of crack. Do we smoke the crack? Do we eat the crack? Do we put a pin in the crack and wear it as a brooch? It didn’t take long for us to decide that we should get rid of the crack as soon as possible. So we stuffed it in the bottom of a Coke bottle and dumped it in the garbage. If there were any garbage-picking vagrants in the area that night, they found a whole lot more in that can than just orange peels and coffee grinds.

  We arrived (crack-free) in Wichita and went to Christopher Love’s fancy adobe-style house. A guy dressed as a butler answered the door and announced in an overexaggerated serious voice, “Mr. Love will see you now.”

  Sitting behind an oak desk, book-ended by a fat black man and a fat white man, was Christopher Love, who was fatter than both of them. He looked like a pissed-off Louie Anderson.

  Love surveyed the three of us and from the way he stared at me as if I was a triple cheese with curly fries, it didn’t take Dr. Phil to figure out that he was quite gay. He introduced the white guy as the Zebra Kid, even though he looked nothing like a Zebra and less like a kid. He introduced the black guy as Rudy and nodded to the RUBBER CHICKEN Rudy was holding in his hand.

  “Say hello to Rudy’s manager, Cluck.” We smiled at his lame joke, then noticed that nobody else in the room was laughing. Rudy’s gimmick was that he asked his manager Cluck for advice, except it didn’t seem like a gimmick—everyone took the Cluckster quite seriously.

  Zebra broke the silence by complimenting Como on his signature move, the Shooting Star Press, which nobody else in the U.S. was doing. The move was similar to a gainer in diving and it was very difficult to do (I broke my arm attempting it, but that’s a story for another chapter). Como had been a trick skier and was agile as a cat. He had mastered the move as a result and had built his reputation on it.

  “I’ve seen you do the Shooting Star Press,” Zebra Kid said. “I can do that too.”

  Looking at the short dumpy guy in front of me, my mind drifted to a Weeble wobbling through the air. Then Love gazed longingly into my eyes and said, “Wow, you look just like Shawn Michaels. I can do a lot with you.”

  I’m sure he could.

  He had a party later that night to celebrate the opening of the company and—surprise, surprise—it was a freaking freak show. The guy dressed as a butler was there, Zebra Kid was there, Rudy was there, Cluck was there. The champion of the company was also there and looked as gay as they come with spiked dyed blond hair and an Errol Flynn mustache. Another wrestler named Rex King was trying to put together a crib for no apparent reason, but was too loaded to figure out how to do it.

  The room burst into gales of laughter when one of the referees downed his drink after returning from the bathroom. Apparently this guy had never heard of the “hold on to your drink” rule, because when he was gone someone had used their swizzle stick as a swizzle stick.

  “Ha! You just drank a Penis Colada,” Rudy said as Cluck guffawed with the rest of the gang. “We got you! We got you with the Penis Colada!” I would have gone postal and kicked the crap out of everyone and their coladas, but this guy just laughed and said with a sheepish grin, “The Penis Colada...oh you got me again!”

  Again?

  AGAIN?

  When a commercial aired for the upcoming big show, the whole room hushed up as everyone watched intently. When it ended, the room exploded out of their chairs jumping up and down like the clock had just struck twelve on New Year’s Eve. Then they lined up to give Christopher Love a high-five, laughing and screaming to each other while he stood there with a proud knowing look on his face.

  I was sitting on the couch trying to make sense of the ridiculosity, when I felt a pair of hands in my hair. I turned around to see that the hands belonged to Christopher Love. When I asked him what the hell he was doing, he told me, “I’m just playing with your hair.”

  I bit my tongue and suggested in no uncertain terms that it would probably be better if he stopped. His whole demeanor changed and he waddled (awesome word) off in a huff.

  The next day, Zebra called us at our hotel to say that there were too many guys on the show and since Christopher thought I was too green, I was the first one eliminated. Just like Celebrity Duets. We all agreed that I was cut because I balked at Love’s hair fondling. But the three of us had come down together with the promise of a booking and that’s what the three of us expected to get. We’d arrived as a team and we decided to cut our losses and get the hell out of Dodge (or should I say Wichita) as a team.

  We stuck together when the chips were down, which was a unique situation in itself. Wrestling isn’t known as a business where you make a lot of trustworthy true friends. But I made two that day.

  My dad still points to that experience as a big reason why I always fought for what I believed in during my career.

  CHAPTER 12

  A HOT DOG AND A GLASS OF ORANGE JUICE

  When we returned from Love Land, Mike got me a shot with the CNWA, the company that had formed from the ashes of Stampede Wrestling. They had two major pluses, in nationwide TV on TSN (the ESPN of Canada) and the announcing talents of the famous commentator Ed Whalen. Ed’s broadcasts were fairly corny but he was the voice of Stampede Wrestling and it was one of my major goals to have him announce one of my matches.

  I made my TSN/CNWA debut with another ten-minute draw against Como. We had a decent match despite the white underwear that also made its debut on TSN by continually sticking out of the back of my yellow and black Stryper tights. The best part was watching the tape and hearing Ed Whalen call the match using his ricockulous catchphrases like, “There’s a malfunction at the junction” and “It’s a ring a ding dong dandy!” I don’t know what they mean either, but it was cool to hear Ed say them about me.

  It was also a thrill when after the match, Ed looked directly into the camera and said, “I like this Jericho kid.” Since the match was shown across Canada, my friends and family got to see me wrestle for the first time and Ed’s endorsement not only gave me instant credibility, but also gave people the idea that my name was the Jericho Kid.

  Backstage, it was the first time I’d ever dealt with an actual booker and a TV run sheet that listed the down-to-the-minute details. The booker was Bulldog Bob Brown, who’d wrestled for Stampede for years and was the biggest star I’d met so far. He didn’t look like much with his crew cut, big gut, chicken legs, and jug handle ears, but I’d watched him for years on Stampede so he was okay in my book—at that point anyway.

  I did well enough that I was invited back the next week and a few weeks after that I brought Lance in to work with me as Sudden Impact. In our first week we had to do our first televised interview and it was the best promo of ALL TIME. We were supposed to tal
k about the big fan appreciation night that was taking place the next week. As I was driving to the Action Center before the show, I heard a radio interview with David Lee Roth. It was vintage Diamond Dave. He was talking all the shit that made him the greatest frontman of all time, and I was digging it huge. When he responded to a question by saying, “There’s a fine line between a pat on the back and a kick in the pants, so let’s dance!,” I thought it was the coolest line ever even though I had absolutely no idea what it meant.

  We began our interview and when I was asked about the upcoming show, I said, “You know, there’s a fine line between a pat on the back and a kick in the pants, so let’s dance!” The interviewer was like, “Huh?” Lance was like, “Huh?” I was like, “Huh?” I didn’t know what to say next and since I didn’t have Diamond Dave to help me, I blurted out the only thing I could think of: “Next week we’ve got midgets coming!”

  Bob Brown equated midgets with boffo box office and had told me to “push the shit out of the little bastards.”

  After discovering that the Roth style of promo wasn’t for me, I learned an important lesson—the first of three seminal moments in my promo development. I had done an interview about my first match with Bulldog and I was talking about how old and slow he was, just burying him. I thought it was pretty good, until I walked back to the dressing room and Bulldog stopped me in front of everyone. “What the hell are you doing? Yeah I’m old and everybody knows it. But I want you to think about this. If I beat you, and I WILL be beating you, then you just got beat by an old man. If you beat me, and you WILL NOT be beating me, then you just beat up an old man. If you talk about how much experience I have and then I cheat to beat you, then at least you got beaten by an experienced vet. And if you beat me, well fuck, then you just beat an experienced vet. The way it stands right now, you just pissed all over yourself. You look like a fool either way.”

  He walked away muttering to himself, and I realized he was right. The first big lesson I learned about promos (get out your pens, kids) was: “Never Totally Bury Your Opponent.” You can tell jokes and insult them all you want, but if you don’t build them up to some extent, you’re just burying yourself.

  The CNWA locker room was filled with guys I recognized from the Stampede roster and I was awestruck to be changing and shooting the breeze with all of these wrestlers that I’d watched on the tube. Johnny Smith, the Great Gama, Gerry Morrow, Bad News Allen. Bad News looked like a bigger, meaner Ving Rhames, who demanded respect and got it from every member of the locker room. He had a hot cougar of a wife named Helen who I had the good fortune of meeting when I was leaving the building, after everyone else had cleared out. I was talking to her and turning up the Jeri-Charm, when from out of nowhere, News appeared like an apparition. He was wearing a head-to-toe suit of red leather, with earrings in both ears and one of those Jim Brown brimless hats; and he was staring a wormhole through me.

  The Jeri-Charm instantly turned into Jeri-Terror. I was scared to death. Time stood still, and I strained to come up with something clever to say to break the iceberg.

  “Hey Bad News, how many earrings do you have?”

  The tradition of saying stupid things to wrestlers upon first meeting continued.

  Shortly afterward CNWA lost their TV deal and while they kept running shows, the attendance declined. With the TV deal gone there was no reason to stay in Calgary, so Mike called another connection and this time the 1-2-3 Stooges sailed off to California to find our fame and fortune.

  We drove for three days to get to our match at a Spanish flea market in Pomona, just outside Los Angeles. The ring announcer couldn’t speak English and introduced me to the crowd of dozens as Chris HerraChico. Paul Heyman still calls me that.

  Mike and I were working Bret and an old Mexican wrestler named the Great Goliath who must’ve been sixty, looked like he was seventy, and wrestled like he was eighty. The ring was rock-hard with ropes made of green rubber garden hose and there were hardly any people there, but I still wanted to put on a show in case there were any scouts in attendance. I was still green enough to think that reps from the WWF and WCW scoured every small show looking for talent—not that I had much of it at that point anyway.

  Goliath was lazy and I’d been in the ring with him the whole match, so when Como tagged in, I went straight to the top hose and gave him a drop kick. The hoses had no leverage, so when I jumped I slipped and landed right on my hand. I instantly knew I was hurt.

  Wrestling is a hard-hitting form of entertainment and you really do live each day in pain just as Jesse the Body had warned me. As a result, you get to know your body to the point of recognizing the difference between an injury that will go away on its own and one that will need medical attention. This one needed medical attention. I finished the match, didn’t get paid the 100 bucks I was promised, and drove to the hospital. After a four-hour wait, I was denied care because I didn’t have insurance. I called my dad, who gave me his credit card number and the doctor told me I had a hairline fracture in my hand. After all was said and done, I drove 3,000 miles, got ripped off 100 bucks, and ended up with a $1,000 hospital bill just for the privilege of wrestling one match in a flea market. That, young grasshoppers, is what is known as paying your dues.

  At least I got to meet Lars Ulrich a few days later on the Sunset Strip...if your definition of “meet” is being brushed off and totally ignored in the middle of the street, that is.

  My job didn’t get any more lucrative when I returned to Calgary and I hit the bottom of the Jeri-Chasm when Ed booked my next match at a kid’s seventh birthday party. You heard me.

  Lance and I showed up at a farmhouse outside Okotoks to find six kids and their moms wearing parkas and party hats in the middle of the frozen barn. Ed was friends with the kid’s dad and wanted to show off, so he arranged for the kid to get his own private wrestling show. I got Kedzo the Klown for my seventh birthday party, and this kid got two full matches including ring entrances. Afterward the kids were excited and the moms were excited and all of them were having their pictures taken with the half-naked muscleheads with the frozen nipples. Since I’d just entertained a bunch of kids with a match and provided a bunch of ladies in mom jeans with Chippendales On Ice, I was expecting a nice payday. And I got paid all right—with a hot dog and a glass of orange juice. They didn’t even give me any ketchup, and at that point my career wasn’t cutting the mustard. (Funny author’s note: Rumors that Ed later booked me at a bar mitzvah are unfounded.)

  With my options drying up in Calgary, I was stoked when I got a call from Winnipeg promoter Tony Condello, who’d decided to bring Chris Jericho back to his hometown for a series of shows—the conquering hero returns! None of my friends had ever seen me wrestle live and I was excited that the first show was a TV taping in a beautiful nightclub called Club Taboo. It was the perfect place to prove to everybody that I was making it big.

  Tony was taping a month’s worth of TV and when I walked to the ring for the first of four matches that night, the crowd exploded. It was one of the best feelings I’ve ever experienced, as it seemed that every single person I’d ever known in Winnipeg was there chanting “Jericho! Jericho! Jericho!” It felt even better when I scanned the crowd and saw my mom in attendance.

  After a lengthy hospital stay, she’d returned home to her newly renovated house and had started getting acclimated to the huge change in her life. One of her first outings was to Club Taboo to see me wrestle and I’ll never forget looking into her face and seeing how proud she was of me. She was living vicariously through me and after urging me to continue following my dreams despite her accident, she’d become my biggest fan.

  I made quite an impact with my matches that night and due to my Calgary training I stood head and shoulders over most of the other wrestlers. Throw in the fact that the crowd was going bananas over me and for the first time since I started wrestling, I felt like a star.

  A few days later I was cruising down the avenue feeling like a real hotshot a
nd basking in the glow of my newfound celebrity. I was thinking about my next match when I drove past a bar called Georgie’s, a local tavern that my friends and I used to go to for beers. The sign on the marquee said FRIDAY NIGHT WRESTLING. It made me smile to think of the low-level sad sacks who would be wrestling at Georgie’s. I thought about checking out the show for a laugh, but remembered that I also had a match on Friday night. The slight touch of a moth fluttered in my stomach as I started to put two and two together.

  I called Condello to find out where we were wrestling on Friday and, sure enough, we were booked in the Georgie Dome.

  It felt terrible to come back to Winnipeg as the big cheese, wrestle a TV taping in the big venue, and then be reduced to working in my local pub. I was convinced that people would laugh at me for being such a nobody and working in a shithole like Georgie’s.

  To make matters worse, the pub ring was the size of a king-size bed, which made it impossible to get pinned, because you could break the count by putting your foot on the ropes no matter where you were.

  I had to change across the street and walk across the road in my yellow spandex, with cars honking and people laughing all the way. The match was abominable, climaxing when I jumped off the top rope and put my head right through the tile of the low ceiling. Dust and debris floated down onto my back as I pinned my foe, who of course had his foot on the rope. I made the decision right then that I would never wrestle in a bar again.

  Due to my refusal to participate in all of the reindeer games, Bob Brown decided that he wanted to work with me for the rest of the tour to teach me a lesson. What he taught me was how not to have a wrestling match.

  Working with Bob was brutal because he would always put himself over by beating all the younger guys, which hurt everyone involved. Except for the Bulldog.