A Lion's Tale: Around the World in Spandex

by Chris Jericho

  The theory worked too well when I had a championship match against a small but technically skilled wrestler named el Dandy in Acapulco. The arena was stiflingly humid and I was drenched in sweat before I even left the dressing room. I worked the match as grimy and dirty as I felt. The crowd was in a frenzy after I won the first fall by hoofing Dandy in the frijoles behind the referee’s back and pinning him with one foot on his chest. While the fans barraged me with garbage, I saw a commotion in the front row as a bunch of security guards dragged a guy out of the arena.

  “Chinga Tu Madre,” I yelled after him in defiance, happy to know that I’d done such a great job of being an asshole that this guy had tried to jump over the rail. The crowd responded by chanting “Corazón de Pollo!” (Heart of a Chicken), which earned points for originality.

  Despite my evil tactics, Dandy won the next two falls and retained his title. I scuttled back toward the dressing room in shame while threatening a little kid in the front row (the same way that Fatwell had done to me a decade earlier), when I was hit in the side of the head and mouth by a plastic cup filled with beer. Then a rancid smell hit me and I realized that the fluid in the cup wasn’t beer—it was urine. And it was warm.

  I was sitting in the dressing room covered in piss, when Dandy returned from the ring with one of the security guards.

  “You remember that big commotion in the crowd after the first fall?” he asked. “The reason the guards took the guy out of the arena was because he was heading toward you with a gun.”

  For those keeping track at home, that was the third time a gun had been pulled on me during my sojourn in scenic Mexico.

  How much did someone have to hate me to want to shoot me because of a wrestling match? For that matter, how much did someone have to hate me to pull out their wiener in a public place and throw a cup of fresh piss at me?

  By the way, did you know that pee tastes salty?

  Thankfully I was tasting success along with pee pee. As a result a plethora of Corazón de León merchandise had hit the market, including trading cards, balloons, clocks, official T-shirts, bootleg T-shirts (I had to buy one from the bootlegger when he refused to give me a freebie), and a comic book that saw me having adventures with the assistance of a magical talking frog. I was on the cover of every wrestling magazine (there were over a dozen at the time) and receiving critical acclaim. I was honored when Arena magazine, the most prestigious lucha magazine in Mexico, voted Corazón de León and Ultimo Dragón vs. Negro Casas and el Dandy the match of the year for 1993. I was awestruck, as there were thousands of matches in Mexico every year. The match had been almost an hour long and was a breeze since all four of us had similar styles and attitudes. Our only goal was to make the other guy look good and we did.

  There was a Mexican tradition that when the crowd felt they had seen something special, they would throw money into the ring. After our match Negro began to encourage the crowd and a domino effect occurred. Soon the entire ring was littered with bills and change. We split it among the four of us along with the two referees who were assigned to the match. It was a nice pat on the back and getting hit with a handful of cash was much more pleasant than getting hit with a cupful of piss.

  Another lucha tradition was settling major feuds with a mask vs. mask match, where the loser would have to unmask for good. For wrestlers who didn’t wear a mask, hair vs. hair matches, where the loser shaved his head, were just as popular. When I was booked in my first hair match, the possibility of me losing my trademark blond mane became a big draw.

  The angle started when a trio of wrestlers called the Cavernícolas (the Cavemen) attacked me, leading to me beating two of them and challenging the third to a hair vs. hair match.

  A loud crowd of 8,000 fans filed into Arena México on a Sunday afternoon three weeks later to see me shave the fat bastard bald.

  It was the first time I was ever involved in a multiweek story line and it was rewarding watching the crowd grow week after week as the story built. The Cavernícolas weren’t a big act on their own, but the cliff-hanger angle made them into an attraction, teaching me that with the right push even an average performer could be made into a star and draw a crowd.

  CHAPTER 19

  HALCION BOWLING

  I was working a crazy schedule and when I had a rare day off I liked to chill out by listening to music and reading a book on the roof of the Plaza. It was a solitary, peaceful place to collect my thoughts and get some alone time. So I was disappointed when I went to the roof one afternoon and found Art Barr, the Chewing Tobacco Kid, already there. I was jealous that another person knew about my private sanctuary.

  We knew each other a little but weren’t exactly best friends, so the meeting was a little awkward at the start. Our conversation was stilted until we spotted a guy nailing a chick from behind in the window of the building directly across from us. The girl had massive guns (and probably weighed about 250 pounds) that were squishing up against the glass with each thrust. The guy finally noticed us mid-coitus, gave us the finger, and closed the drapes. We started howling with laughter and if there was ever a better icebreaker in history, I’d like to hear it.

  Art and I started hanging out on our days off and one day he called me to ask if I wanted to check out a movie set. WWF Hall of Famer Rowdy Roddy Piper was in Mexico shooting the movie Immortal Combat (Oscar winner for the best picture of 1994) and was good friends with Art from his days wrestling for Art’s dad in Oregon. Piper invited him to come hang out on the set and Art invited me.

  We both ended up getting cast in the greatest movie ever. Art landed a role as a waiter and I landed a role as a punching bag. Martial arts legend Sonny Chiba played Piper’s nemesis and was filming a scene where he got into a brawl with a group of toughs, one of whom was me. As we shot the fight scene over and over, Chiba’s endurance started to poop out. He was really good at pulling his punches and kicks during the first few takes but by the tenth take, he was kicking the shit out of me.

  When the movie was finally released directly on video I wasn’t listed in the credits. As a matter of fact, unless you paused the flick at the exact right spot you wouldn’t even see my face. If you did, you’d see my nose and a bunch of hair flying around for two frames. But I looked sexy and it was a screen debut on par with Haley Joel Osment in The Sixth Sense.

  A few days later when Art came up to my room to tell me how awesome Piper thought he (not both of us) had done in the movie, I couldn’t figure why he’d brought a little kid with him.

  Art made me uncomfortable as he swore and talked his typical shit in front of this child, who couldn’t have been more than ten years old. The kid looked like Chicken Little, about five feet tall and weighing no more than 130 pounds, standing silent with a big perma-smile on his face. I almost had a heart attack when Art pulled out a joint and asked me for a light.

  “What are you doing, man? Not in front of the kid! Why are you hanging out with him in the first place?”

  Art laughed and explained that the kid was actually eighteen years old and was a wrestler. I looked at his scrawny build and thought, “Bless his tiny heart...he doesn’t stand a chance.”

  I asked to see some ID and when he showed it to me, he said in perfect English, “I’m a fan of your work and I’m looking forward to wrestling you someday.”

  I nodded and thought that the kid would be lucky to carry my ring jacket, let alone work with me. But I ended up working with him dozens of times when he became Rey Mysterio Jr., the greatest high-flyer of all time.

  Art and I invented the stupidest sport of all time when we created Halcion Bowling. Halcions are sleeping pills that work very well if you take them with the intention of sleeping. But if you took one and stayed awake, you ended up stumbling and mumbling around like you were drunk. We rounded up Eddy, Tonga, Black Magic, Mike Lozanski, Miguel Pérez, José Estrada, and a pair of twins known as the Headhunters who were distinguished by the master marketing names of Headhunter A and Headhunter B. We downed o
ur Halcions and had the worst bowling game in recorded history. It featured such highlights as Eddy getting a strike by walking down the lane and rolling the ball six inches away from the pins, Tonga getting a strike by rifling the ball into a different lane, and me getting a strike when I fell down the stairs and knocked over two rows of stacked chairs.

  When I wasn’t falling on my face like Kramer at a comedy club I was inventing signature moves. In 1993, using a moonsault (a top rope back flip into a splash) was not a common move like it is today. I’d seen it done on a Japanese wrestling tape by the Great Muta and stole it to use in Mexico. When other guys began using it, I wanted to come up with a different variation.

  I called Lenny to ask him for ideas and he said, “Have you ever thought about doing the moonsault from the middle rope?”

  The idea had come to him in a dream and I asked him to elaborate. He explained that if I used the middle rope to do the moonsault across the ring, it could be done quicker with less setup and would be totally unique. It was just what I was looking for.

  So I went to Arena México during the day and practiced my new creation in front of 17,000 empty seats. I filled a duffel bag with dirty clothes and used it as my target. After a dozen practice runs, I figured out how far the guy had to be from the ropes so I wouldn’t land with my knees in his face.

  The next night I slammed Negro Casas exactly four paces from the ropes and performed the Lionsault for the very first time. I used it almost every night afterward for the next twelve years.

  It’s an acrobatic move and because the ropes in the Mexican rings were always either too loose or too tight, doing the Lionsault every night was a risk. So in addition to my nightly pre-match prayer, I decided to try and stay on God’s good side by doing good deeds. Whenever I pulled up in the taxi to the Arena México stage door, there were always a lot of kids hanging around asking to carry my bag, so they could get inside the arena and see the show for free. I admired their ingenuity and let a different kid carry the bag each night.

  It was a tough life for the poor kids in Mexico and it used to break my heart to see them begging with their dirty faces and sad eyes on every street corner in the Zona Rosa. Zona Rosa was a hip section of the downtown area filled with restaurants, record stores, and movie theaters. It was also filled with the smell of sewage and boasted rats the size of small cats that I saw out of the corner of my eye. I wasn’t sure just how big, until one of them ran across Magic’s sandal-covered foot one day.

  I had a soft spot for the kids and frequently gave them decent amounts of money. That changed one day when I saw all of them gathered around an older man, giving him the money they’d collected. The kids belonged to a begging syndicate and this guy sent them out all over the city (like in Oliver!), collected the cash, and gave the kids a percentage. They were probably making more money than I was.

  As soon as kids in Mexico were old enough, they were expected to contribute to the income of their household. Everywhere you looked you saw kids working: washing windows and selling gum at traffic lights, peddling fruit from carts on the street, performing dance routines or playing music for change.

  I was strolling through a park in the center of the downtown area when I came across a band of kids playing rock music. I’m not talking about a few acoustic guitars and a plastic bucket. I’m talking about a full-on professional setup. Two guitars, keyboards, bass, drums, all surrounded by stacks of monitors and amps. They were playing Black Sabbath, Deep Purple, Kiss, Rush, pure 1970s heavy metal...and they were amazing. When they finished the set, I went and introduced myself and found out the band was called los Leones. They were made up of four brothers and a sister ranging in age from fifteen to twenty-two. The Heredia family’s sole income was made up of the change collected by los Leones after each set.

  Each sibling was a virtuoso, especially Jair the lead guitarist. He was only fifteen and his guitar was almost bigger than he was, but he played like Eddie Van Halen on peyote. He broke into a huge grin when I told him that he was my new favorite Mexican guitar player. They all spoke English from listening to American music and we talked for a long time about rock ’n’ roll and Mexico. When they found out that I played bass, Corazón los Leones was born.

  The next day, I showed up and we jammed on “Paranoid,” “Roadhouse Blues,” “Domino,” “Love Gun,” classic songs we all knew and loved. Even though we came from different worlds and had never played together before, we threw down like seasoned vets. They announced that I was Corazón de León from Arena México and the crowd got larger as people came to check out the wrestler ruling the bass. At the end of the set the whole promenade was packed and we had to pass the hat around about a dozen times because it filled up so fast. My share of the earnings was a solid forty pesos and I’ve never been prouder of a payoff.

  They gave me a videotape of our jam and if you watch it, you’ll never see a guy with a bigger smile on his face than the one I had when we were playing. The power of music transcends everything: language, country, race.

  CHAPTER 20

  WHEN YOU LOSE A BROTHER

  I was walking back to the hotel after experiencing maximum rockicity when I ran into Magic. He had moved into a downtown apartment and invited me over to his place to check out a new show that the WWF had on the USA Network called Raw. Watching the show while trapped in Mexico made me remember how much I wanted to wrestle there. Mexico was a great living and a great experience, but to me the brass ring was still the WWF. With the stardom I’d achieved in Mexico, I felt like I was on the path toward my ultimate goal of working there, but I didn’t have the contacts to get in and I still didn’t think I was ready yet. Yeah, my in-ring work was improving and I had learned how to work as both a heel and a babyface, but I hadn’t developed my own character and I hadn’t done any promo work since I left Canada. Even though my Spanish was good by this point, lucha wasn’t based around interviews like in American wrestling. But seeing the Raw broadcast from the Manhattan Center in New York City reminded me what my final goal was.

  As for Raw itself, it was edgier, slicker, and better than anything I’d seen from the WWF before. The company was putting more emphasis on smaller guys like Bret Hart and Shawn Michaels. When I saw the 1-2-3 Kid (a scrawny dude who didn’t even look like he worked out) beat Razor Ramon, one of the top stars in the company, I was psyched. At that moment, I knew that the size hurdle was less of an obstacle to making it to the WWF than ever before.

  It was fun going to Magic’s to watch the show, except for the fact that Vampiro (the guy who suggested I wear a loincloth) was also there. The more time I spent in Mexico, the less I wanted to be around Vamp. Ever since I’d arrived in CMLL, I’d gotten a big push from the company and he didn’t like it. The two of us were the main foreign babyfaces in the company, but I was no threat to him. His position as the company’s biggest star hadn’t changed. Even though we were both from Canada and into music, Vamp’s actions showed me that he had no interest in being my bud.

  • When I first got to Mexico City, he gave me his phone number and told me to call him if I ever wanted to hang out or if I needed any help. When I called, the number he’d given me belonged to an old lady named Rosa who’d never heard of any Vampiro.

  • EMLL referee Roberto Rangel told me that Paco wanted to create a Canadian trio consisting of Vamp, Wild Pegasus (Benoit), and me. When Vamp heard about the idea, he threatened to quit if Paco paired him with me.

  • Marcos, the head of payroll, informed me that Vamp quizzed him weekly about how much money I was making.

  • Paco called me into his office for a meeting one day and was very concerned. He asked if everything was okay and when I assured him that I loved working in Mexico, Paco confessed that Vamp had told him that I hated Mexico. He said I didn’t like Mexican people, I didn’t like the food, I wanted more money and a bigger push, and I was planning to walk out of the company. I informed Paco that it wasn’t the case and he said, “Well that’s just Vamp being Vamp.” />
  When Vampiro wasn’t trying to bury me, he was burying himself by coming up with new bullshit stories on a daily basis. Vampiro had taken a page out of Ed Langley’s book by claiming:

  • He’d been a bodyguard for Milli Vanilli.

  • He played minor league pro hockey for the Winnipeg Warriors. When I told him I grew up in the Peg and was a huge fan of the Warriors, he suddenly remembered that it was the Moosejaw Warriors he had played for.

  • He was a kung fu master.

  • He was a master chef.

  • He’d never watched or liked wrestling as a kid but when he went to a lucha show while on vacation in Mexico, a scout saw him and recruited him.

  I’ve met a dozen wrestlers since who confirmed that they worked with him on shows in Canada years before he came to Mexico.

  I figured out the best way to deal with him was to just ignore him like a mouthy little kid. He was a brat and I treated him as such. Whenever he started talking his Vampshit, I’d make like a tree and get out.

  On the opposite side of the coin, I had become really close with Art Barr. As we spent time together, I learned more about his background. He grew up in Oregon where his father, Sandy, was a wrestler and promoter. He’d grown up in the wrestling business and had gotten a break when Roddy Piper became his mentor and got him a job in WCW. He was given the gimmick of the Juicer, based on the movie Beetle Juice. Sporting white makeup and crazy hair, he became very popular with kids due to his undeniable charisma.

  When he left WCW, he was considered too small to work in the WWF and was floundering, until Konnan brought him into Mexico to work for Paco. When the two of them jumped to the rival AAA promotion, Art met Eddy Guerrero and formed los Gringos Locos, one of the greatest heel tag teams in Mexican history.