A Lion's Tale: Around the World in Spandex

by Chris Jericho

  “Where are you from...America?” he scoffed in a patronizing way.

  “Uhhh, I’m from Canada, pal,” I fired back with great aplomb and stormed out of the pub. My dramatic exit would’ve worked much better if I hadn’t returned a few moments later because I’d locked myself out of my room.

  So I dealt with the community potty by putting toilet paper on the seat before every dumpski and using the sink in my room as a urinal. Then washed my face immediately afterward...

  I keed.

  I waited a few minutes before washing my face.

  The key to my room was an old-fashioned skinny skeleton key. But nobody told me that you had to put the key into the lock and turn it clockwise in order to lock the door. I just assumed that as soon as the door shut, it locked automatically.

  On the first night in my room I was lying on my bed reading The Stand by Stephen King, when the door flew open and a skinny guy dressed in black walked in and started screaming at me in German. I have no idea why he was screaming at me, but before he could pee on my rug I shouted, “Go away...get the hell out of here!”

  He didn’t budge and his tone grew angrier. When he first busted in he’d scared the shit out of me, but now I was pissed off. I started yelling, “Fuck off, Fuck off, Fuck off,” while pointing to the door with authority, figuring that he had to smell what I was cooking. When he didn’t budge, I whipped the 1,100-page novel at him. It smacked him on the noggin and he stormed out the door, screaming all the way down the stairs.

  I have no idea what his deal was, I was just thankful that he hadn’t pulled a gun. I learned my lesson and made sure to always turn the key in the lock every time I walked into my room. After all, I didn’t want anyone interrupting me while I was peeing in the sink.

  The next day I when I showed up for the first night of the tournament, I was introduced to the strange traditions of Catch. At the beginning of the show all the wrestlers in the tournament had to parade out of the dressing room in single file and march around the inside of the ring. Then we all had to stand in a circle staring at each other, units in our hands, while the announcer introduced us individually.

  When I heard “From Canada, Chris ‘Lion Heart’ Jericho,” I would have to walk into the center of the circle and wave like I was on Catch Soul Train. Even if you were involved in a fight-to-the-death blood feud, you still had to stand side by side with your hated rival every night.

  I made my Catch debut against Indio Guajardo, a sixty-year-old wrestler from South America who lived in Germany and spoke no English whatsoever. We were able to string together a match by speaking Spanish, but there wasn’t much to talk about as he really didn’t want to do anything. He was a Hamburg wrestling institution—he’d been working there for decades—but when we got into the ring it was horrible.

  Instead of trusting Indio’s judgment and doing the type of match that he wanted to do, I tried to do a bunch of moves that totally clashed with his style. I tried to give him a monkey flip but when I jumped on his thighs to flip him back he just stood there and I threw myself onto my back for no apparent reason. I tried to give him a leapfrog but when I leaped into the air he just stood there and I did the splits in midair for no apparent reason.

  Instead of working for the match I worked to showcase myself, which made us both look like shit. I finally suplexed him—a big deal because he never left his feet—and got the win, but it was too late.

  The match was one of the first occurrences of what I came to refer to as the Jericho Curse. Every time I debuted in a new company my debut match sucked. Most of the fans and the guys in the back thought I was the shits. That night I learned the very important lesson that while having a good match takes two people, having a bad match only takes one.

  I was feeling like an ass afterward when I was approached by two of the other guys in the tourney. “Don’t worry about it, mate,” one of them said. “Indio has been here a long time and he doesn’t really have good matches anymore.”

  I still felt like the worst wrestler ever but I appreciated their attempt to make me feel better. They introduced themselves as Robbie Brookside and Doc Dean from Liverpool. I was instantly impressed because they hailed from the same city as the Beatles! They were also my age, and had long hair to boot. They’d been coming to Hamburg for a few years and knew a girl who gave them a cheap rate at the hotel she ran—they just had to make up the difference in other ways. Aside from the giant bloodstain splattered across their hotel room wall, it seemed like a good deal.

  It was a constant learning experience hanging out with my new friends because they spoke in their own language. Traditionally, wrestlers spoke a secret code called carny, which was one of the first things I was taught when I finished wrestling school. The basic premise was you would add an E-Z sound in the middle of a word to disguise it. If you wanted to comment on a girl’s boobs when she was within earshot, you would say, “Look at that gezzurl’s teezits.” It didn’t take a mental giant to figure out what teezits meant when you were staring directly at the girl’s chest, but that was the idea. However, the English wrestlers had a much more clever code to disguise what they were saying.

  We’d be standing around talking when one of them would say something like, “Look at those Scotch eggs,” as a girl walked by. I smiled and pretended I had a clue as to what was being said, but in reality I was completely in the dark.

  After a few more of those types of statements, I had to know what the funk was going on.

  “What are you guys talking about? What is a Scotch egg?”

  Robbie laughed and explained that they were speaking Cockney rhyming slang. They would take a word that rhymed with the word they wanted to say and replace it. Therefore, Scotch egg would be used instead of leg. When they said, “Look at those Scotch eggs,” they really meant, “Look at that girl’s legs.”

  Not just any rhyming word would do either. The term “boat race” was used for “face,” but you could only use “boat race.” You couldn’t say, “Look at that girl’s mace”...it didn’t work that way. There were specific words and you had to use them properly.

  A Donald Duck, or a Donald, was a fuck.

  A syrup and fig, or a syrup, was a wig.

  Red reels of cotton, or red reels, meant rotten. And so on.

  As cool as it was, this new code was much trickier to figure out than stinky old carny. It was simple to discern the meaning of, “I’d like to beezang this cheezick with the nice leezegs.”

  But try to figure out: “Even though that bird with the syrup has a red reels boat race, she does have great Scotch eggs and I’d like to take her for a Donald.”

  Huh?

  But once I figured out the Cockney slang, I moved into the inner circle of the English boys. It didn’t hurt that I’d grown up singing “God Save the Queen” in elementary school and watching Fawlty Towers, Benny Hill, and Monty Python on the CBC, since Canada was a member of the Commonwealth and was very English-influenced.

  Robbie and Doc also knew the best places to eat in the city. My favorite was a little hole in the wall called Freddie’s Imbiss. Freddie had the meal of a half roast chicken, noodles, and a liter of milk waiting for us every day. The meal was right up there with Mrs. Palko’s ham sandwich and chocolate chip cookies as one of the best meals I’ve ever had.

  After the matches most of the crew went to a place called Ante’s, a Yugoslavian bar and grill run by a guy named—wait for it—Ante. He was always happy, his smile hidden by an enormous walrus mustache. His gorgeous daughters made us the Ante’s special, which was a plate of sausage, steak, and lamb. There was a jukebox filled with old blues tunes and all the boys and fans who knew about the place danced and drank until dawn every night. Then we’d all sleep till noon, hit the gym, go to Freddie’s for lunch, catch a nap, and go to work. We never had to travel to a different town, so the routine never changed. Tough life huh?

  Everything in Hamburg was perfect—except for my matches. Because of my shit debut, I’d been booke
d into a series of opening matches with the rookie German guys. I just couldn’t get it going and I became the victim of another Hamburg tradition: If you had a red reels match, you would have to bring a case of beer into the dressing room as a peace offering. But you wouldn’t have to buy too many cases in a row because if you stunk it up too much Rene would simply give you the night off. You would still get paid, but it was like being benched by the coach. It was not a good sign. After I’d bought a case of beer two nights in a row, I decided that I’d bought my tournament limit.

  The next night, I brought a case of beer and put it in the dressing room before the match had even started, which got a laugh. I wanted to show that I had a sense of humor about the whole thing, but I was also on a mission to whip ass and show everyone in the place what I could do.

  I explained to the guy I was working that night that I was going to take control of the match and call the entire thing. The pressure of being in the new territory had worn off and I became myself again. I relaxed and let the crowd tell me what they wanted to see. They really got into watching the exchanging of holds known as chain wrestling, so we did a succession of unique reversals and the crowd responded. We ended up having a decent match and my reputation was redeemed. When I left the arena that night, I took my case of beer with me.

  CHAPTER 23

  THERE’S SOMETHING ABOUT JERICHO

  One of the guys who’d been riding me about my initial performances was a Scotsman named Drew McDonald. He’d been working for a decades and was always one of the top workers in the tournament and had made a bunch of snide remarks about my work after the first few nights. I was drinking a few pints at Ante’s after my acquittal, when I saw him staring at me.

  “Mr. Canada, do you want to be a big dog?” he yelled over at me. “If you want to be a big dog, you’ve got to sit in the big dog corner.”

  We started bullshitting and he told me that I’d earned his respect with my work that night. So we clinked our steins and proceeded to act like the big dogs that we were—until seven the next morning.

  The more time I spent with Drew, the more I learned about his extremely disgusting side. He’d worked for Stu in Stampede as one half of the tag team Ben Doon and Phil McCraken (say the two names together quickly, junior) and he had the reputation for getting his rocks off by licking women’s toilet seats. He was also known for having no problem drinking a cup of pee, even if it wasn’t his...he would’ve loved being a rudo in Mexico. So it wasn’t a shock when he asked me if I wanted to go to one of the peep shows on the Reeperbahn.

  We went inside and were ushered into separate darkened rooms the size of closets. I put a deutsche mark coin into the slot and a little TV came on with forty-four choices of movies...like cable.

  On channel 12, I was introduced to the screen gem known as Caviar, which featured people eating each other’s feces. It had crappy reception, so I switched to channel 32, which featured a guy having sex with his foot. You know what they say about guys with big feet.

  I flipped around for a few more minutes until I switched to Blumpkin, which saw a guy getting head while on the toilet. Are there enough people doing this that we need a name to describe it?

  I was disgusted by Blumpkin and after watching for five minutes I left the booth.

  Drew was waiting outside and asked me excitedly, “What did you think!”

  “What did I think? What did you think?”

  “I love this place,” he said. “I came here this morning, had a wank and wiped it on the door handle for the next guy.”

  I recoiled in disgust.

  “Couldn’t you have told me that before I went in there? How do I know that you weren’t in the booth I was just in?”

  “You don’t,” he said and smiled.

  As we walked out of the peep show, “Hold the Line” by Toto was blasting out of the speakers continuously on a tape loop.

  I used to like “Hold the Line.” Now whenever I hear it all I can think of is Drew McDonald whacking off and wiping the product from his Scot knob onto the door knob. Does anybody have any hand sanitizer? There’s Something About Jericho...

  As disgusting as Drew was, he was also very talented and taught me that the less you have to do in the ring the better it is for everyone.

  The fans in Germany were very easily entertained. But I’d say that 65 percent of them were there every night, so it became a challenge to keep them on their feet without constantly relying on the same old tricks. When Drew and I worked the crowd into a frenzy without even locking up one night, I was impressed. Drew kept getting in and out of the ring until the fans became rabid. They wanted him IN the ring and wouldn’t settle for anything less. The next thing we knew, the clock on the wall had moved forward ten minutes and we hadn’t done a damn thing.

  “That’s what it’s all about,” he said after the match. “To not do anything for ten minutes and still have the people going crazy is a wet dream! I wish we could have that every night!”

  I wasn’t sure if he meant good matches or wet dreams.

  Another Catch routine the heels followed was the instigating of fines. If a referee spotted someone breaking the rules, they would fine the offender for bad behavior. A good villain would do something dastardly during the match that everyone but the ref would see. When the blue-eye had no choice but to retaliate, he would get busted and fined by the ref. If the gimmick was done properly, the fans would be furious and volunteer to pay the fine for the innocent man. After the match, the paid fines were split up three ways with your opponent and the ref.

  Because we were wrestling in front of a lot of the same fans every night, working the fine wasn’t something you could pull off regularly. It also wasn’t something that just anyone on the card could sell to the customers; you had to be good at it and have a certain level of heat with the crowd.

  The best fine producer in our tournament was a guy from Tennessee named Moondog Randy Colley. He’d spent a few years in the WWF as part of the Moondogs tag team and claimed to have invented the leather-clad face-painted gimmick of the tag team Demolition, which Vince then stole from him. I liked Demolition better when they were called the Road Warriors anyway.

  Randy was great at getting the crowd to hate him, which made it easy to get them to pay the fines that he caused. He also used solid ring psychology and everything he did made perfect sense.

  He carried a giant dinosaur bone to the ring that he would use as a foreign object during his matches. Whenever he won it was because of the bone and whenever he lost it was because of the bone. It was a simple rule that I’d learned in camp...if you have a gimmick, make sure to use it. Moondog used his gimmick every match and the bone became his trademark.

  Another of my opponents was a New Zealander named Rip Morgan. Rip’s gimmick was performing a Maori haka prior to every match. The haka was a combination dance and chant that became one of the highlights of the night—the fans loved seeing it.

  Rip asked me one night, “Have you ever thought about going to New York?”

  “I don’t feel like I’m ready for the WWF yet.”

  “Really,” he replied. “I think you should send them a tape. You’d be perfect for Vince.”

  I was honored that he felt that way, but I told him I wanted to get more experience first. What I didn’t tell him was I would’ve gone to New York in a New York minute, except for the fact that nobody had ever asked me.

  There were some very good workers in our tournament but there were also a lot of bad ones too, the worst being our boss. Rene Lasartesse had been one of the most hated and feared heels in Europe in the 1960s and 1970s but now he was just plain red reels. He was in his late sixties and insisted on wearing this ricockulous Dracula cape to the ring, because it “scared children.”

  He wrestled every night, his version of wrestling consisting of standing in the corner throwing the worst kicks and punches imaginable. Worst of all, since he was the booker he won all his matches and won them with the worst finishing move
of all time...a cartwheel.

  With his victim lying prone on the mat, he’d put his hand on his throat and do the worst old-man cartwheel ever with the idea being that he crushed his opponent’s larynx. It reality, he only crushed their pride.

  One night as Rene was feebly kicking me, one of my contact lenses popped out and crumpled up on the mat like a dying spider. I deftly rolled over, grabbed my little buddy and put it in my mouth. Storing the lens without swallowing it while trying to carry Rene to a good match was like trying to pat my stomach and rub my head at the same time.

  But it wasn’t just the wrestlers that made it hard to have a good match. The tournament’s referee was an Englishman named Mal Mason who was a true mark for himself. He was the only ref I’ve ever worked with who insisted on having his own ring music.

  Yeah that’s right, referee ring music.

  As soon as the first verse of Right Said Fred’s “I’m Too Sexy” hit, this skinny fifty-year-old man with a horse face jogged to the ring, as serious as a heart attack. I laughed my ass off the first time I saw him do it. I stopped laughing when he dropped down to his stomach during the match as I ran off the ropes, forcing me to jump over him to avoid tripping and crashing to the floor.

  I confronted him afterward and asked, “Why the hell did you do that?”

  “Well, I felt it added to the realism of the match, mate.”

  “Interesting. Well here’s an idea...why don’t you add to the realism of the match by staying out of the way?”

  Quick Rule: A good ref is one that you never notice is there. A bad ref is one that drops down in front of you when you’re running the ropes.

  As enamored as Mal was with himself, he didn’t hold a peace pipe to Suni War Cloud. Suni was a French-Canadian Indian who spoke little English. When he got the night off, which was two or three times a week, Suni waltzed around bragging, “You guy workings again tonight. I not working but make same money!”