A Lion's Tale: Around the World in Spandex

by Chris Jericho

  All of these guys were good for the company, but I’d be lying if I said their talent was the only reason I’d suggested them. There’s something to be said about traveling around the world with your best friends and living your dreams together. I’d spent enough time alone in Mexico and Germany so getting to hang with my bros in Japan made it almost like a paid vacation.

  We always had a blast hanging in the small-town karaoke bars where you could rent a private room for just your party. We stocked up on a sweet Korean drink called Chu-Hi (think a wine cooler crossed with straight vodka) and rocked the hizz by singing whatever English songs were offered in the songbook. Sometimes there were only four or five of them and they’d be the most eclectic mix of songs like “What a Wonderful World,” “The Kid Is Hot Tonight,” “Heartbreak Hotel,” “Auld Lang Syne,” and “The Humpty Dance.”

  So we sang the songs ten times each, then switched it up and did Louis Armstrong singing, “The Kid Is Hot Tonight” or Jackie Mason singing “The Humpty Dance.” The more Chu-Hi we drank, the funnier (and better) the songs got.

  Of all the guys I helped bring over, Lenny and I had the best time because we lived in our own little world of private jokes and bullshit. Our favorite movie was This Is Spinal Tap and we called ourselves the Lovely Lads, which was the name of the Tap before they were famous. We always thought it would be a blast if the Lovely Lads got work in Japan and our dream came to fruition when we were booked as a tag team in Korakuen Hall. I’ve never been so proud as when I stood in the center of the ring and heard our ring introduction echo throughout the sold out venue, “Dr. Russer and Lion Ha-Toe, the Rovery Rads!”

  That night we celebrated the debut and the subsequent breakup of the Lovely Lads (after we lost the match) in an area of Tokyo called Roppongi. Roppongi was jam-packed with bars and restaurants and was popular with all the foreigners in the city. Wrestlers, servicemen, actors, models, strippers, rock stars, botanists; you name it, they went there. When Lenny and I went to the Hard Rock Café for a cocktail, we saw Bono having a drink at the bar and I ain’t talking about Sonny. I’m talking about THE Bono himself.

  We had long debated the selling out of U2 and were determined to tell Bono exactly how we felt. We discussed what form of venom we would spit and when we were ready I marched straight over to him and said, “My name’s Bono too.”

  Actually, we chickened out and stood there like asses until Lenny spit out “Bono, you’re awesome.” Then we stared at him with goofy grins until his bodyguard shooed us away.

  We got another chance to redeem ourselves when we went into the Gas Panic Club (best bar name ever) and saw Christopher Lloyd. We stared at him from afar until Lenny said, “He’s a movie star, so you know he’s rich. I’m going to go pickpocket him and see what I can get.”

  Pickpocket him? Was he going to pull a caper next?

  He came back moments later, all excited.

  “I got something, I got something!”

  He unfolded his hand and we stared at the hotel dry cleaning receipt he’d stolen. Then Lenny decided, “I’m going to go over to talk to him.” He wandered over and they struck up a conversation. I couldn’t hear what exactly they were saying, but if Lenny was getting along so well with Christopher Lloyd, then I could too. I sidled up and did my best Dr. Emmett Brown impersonation.

  “88.8 jigowatts! What are we going to do, Marty?”

  Instead of the raucous laughter I expected, he ignored me and continued talking to Lenny. Len didn’t introduce me either and I was dying a slow death.

  “88.8 jigowatts! Marty get some plutonium!”

  This time Christopher looked at me and said disgustedly, “First off, do you know how many people do that imitation for me every night? Second of all, its not 88.8 jigowatts, it’s 1.21. 88.8 miles an hour was the speed the DeLorean needed to get to in order to time-travel.”

  Embarrassed by my lack of knowledge regarding Back to the Future minutiae, I tried to patch things up with some idle chat.

  “How long have you been in Japan?”

  “Too long,” he responded and turned away for the last time. I shuffled away with my bottom lip dragging behind me and sulked in the corner while Lenny and Lloyd had a grand old time talking about acting or spelunking or whatever. They even called Lenny’s brother in Vancouver to chat and I thought all the while, “Hello, I’m right here Ignatowski! No long-distance charges required, ya jackass.”

  While Chris Lloyd wasn’t a fan of mine, some of my other fans had a lot more in their pockets than dry cleaning receipts. While a few of my sponsors were highly annoying and obnoxious, others had no ulterior motives and honestly wanted to show respect. They appreciated the hard work that was required to entertain them and wanted to repay us in some small way for the sacrifices we’d made.

  My biggest sponsor was Rakutaru, a well-known Japanese television personality, motivational speaker, and comedian. He sat in the front row of every show we had in Tokyo and afterward he always took the whole crew out for Yakuniku. Yakuniku was Korean BBQ and was by far my favorite Japanese food, along with Yakitori (skewers of chicken) and Shabu Shabu, a thinly sliced roast beef that you boiled at your table like a fondue.

  After each feast, Rocky gave me cab fare home, but where a cab cost only 1,000 yen, he’d give me 20,000. “Paying for the taxi” was his way of giving me a present (presento) without being obvious about it.

  One night I had to take one for the team when he took us out for sushi instead. He ordered one special piece that tasted like the mushy poop it resembled. It was rubbery and gelatinous, but I didn’t want to be rude so I took a small bite and swallowed it whole with a gulp of beer. I was pushing the rest of it away, when Dragón informed that it would be better to finish it, as it cost $750 for the single piece. I’d bought my first car for 400 bucks.

  Rocky was an awesome sponsor and even took the entire Fuyuki-Gun to Hawaii for the Christmas of ’95, all expenses paid. I felt bad telling my mom that I wouldn’t be home for Christmas for the first time in my life, but she agreed that I couldn’t pass up a free trip to Hawaii.

  I was quite the James Bond world traveler as I went skiing in Banff in the Rocky Mountains and less than twenty-four hours later I was surfing in the Pacific Ocean off Waikiki Beach.

  The most difficult thing about surfing is paddling far enough out to be able to surf in. What a waste of time! Why can’t somebody invent a towrope made of foam to pull lazy Howlies like myself out into the surf? And once you’ve blown yourself up paddling, you have to actually stand up on the damn thing. I tried and fell down and tried and fell down until I finally got up on the stupid board. The theme from Hawaii Five-0 started playing in my head and I imagined myself a speck of humanity in the middle of an eighty-foot pipeline.

  In reality, I was gliding on two inches of wave until I panicked and fell back into the water five seconds later. As my head popped up out of the drink, I narrowly avoided being surfed over by a pair of giggling eight-year-old girls who pointed at me with laughter as they zipped by.

  Bitches, man. Bitches.

  CHAPTER 37

  YOU’LL NEVER WORK IN JAPAN AGAIN

  When I returned to WAR, business was declining. There’d been a huge influx of wrestling companies in Japan (over twenty) and it was getting harder to draw the fans.

  I started to see members of the Yakuza sitting in the front row, always wearing their loud Bill Cosby style sweaters. I suspect that Tenryu made a deal with the Japanese mafia to help sell (extort) tickets to the shows in the smaller towns. It was a common practice in Japan for the mafia to launder money through wrestling.

  Part of what endeared Tenryu to the fans was his stiff work in the ring. But whenever the Yakuza were in attendance, he worked extra-stiff. He wanted to impress them and prove that “his company was real,” to ensure their future involvement with WAR.

  That meant if you saw Cosby sweaters in the crowd and were booked against Tenryu, you were in for a tough night. I speak from experience as I
woke up many mornings with the pattern of Tenryu’s bootlaces imbedded into my forehead. Beat that, Tito Ortiz.

  A hardcore Yakuza was covered with head-to-toe tattoos and, accordingly, many public places forbade uncovered tattoos. The rule applied to everyone, Yakuza or not, so guys with heavy ink like Lenny or Perry Saturn from the Eliminators would have to wear long-sleeve shirts to use the gym or the swimming pool.

  The mafia weren’t to be taken lightly either, as they were a bunch of mean muthatruckas. Len and I found this out one night after we’d been rocking the Chu-Hi. We were playing catch with a flower pot (sounded like a good idea at the time) and I fumbled the pass. The pot shattered on the street, dirt and daffodils exploding all over the place. Seconds later, a black sedan pulled up beside us and two members of the Osaka chapter of the Cosby kids got out of the car speaking angrily in Japanese.

  One of them said in broken English, “Why you make mess of this street? That is our flower pot. Pay us for the flower pot.”

  We were drunk, not stupid, and these guys weren’t fucking around. So we gave them all our yen and cleaned the shattered pieces of pottery off the street. Besides, I was happy to do it because I wasn’t into the idea of having a gun pulled on me in another foreign country.

  Cleaning up for the Yakuza made us feel like the Japanese young boys who were expected to do all of the menial tasks in the dojo. They had to carry the bags, shine the boots, and wash the backs of their superiors as well as train brutally hard in the ring.

  There was a vicious hazing process and tactics of humiliation were used to weed out the pretenders. They were given crewcuts, demeaned and berated constantly, and were the victims of cruel beatings, both physical and mental. The young boys in the FMW dojo rumored to have to jack off into a jar, place it in the fridge, and drink it, Fear Factor style. I’d rather eat a worm myself.

  They were also expected to set up the ring, work the opening match with little fanfare, and kneel at ringside for the rest of the show, watching and learning from the more experienced members of the crew. When the time was right, they’d be sent away to another country to get more experience. When they returned to Japan, they would be young boys no longer and would begin moving up the ladder. More fun would ensue, as they would get the shit kicked out of them by the veterans. It was Japanese tradition and when Tenryu told me to be extra-stiff with his young boys, I did what my boss told me to do.

  It was a powerful feeling to able to smack guys in the head or kick them in the back as hard as I could. It was like having a Get Out of Jail Free card to be as mean and as stiff as I wanted with no fear of reprisal. It was the only time in my career that I won a match with a punch to the face.

  But what comes around goes around and after I’d taken advantage of the young boys, I became the one who was taken advantage of.

  Koji Kitao was an ex-Yokozuna (sumo’s highest honor) who had gotten into wrestling after being thrown out of sumo. Kitao was 6 foot 6, 400 pounds, with a black belt and a bad attitude. He was a nightmare to work with because he just wanted to kick the shit out of everybody. Guess who had to work with him the most? If you guessed William Hung, guess again.

  So I had to suck it up and accept getting the shit kicked out of me night after night. Working with Kitao reminded me of a Tae Kwon Do tournament when I was eight years old. My opponent was a foot taller than me and was beating me up so bad that the ref said, “Fight back already!”

  “I’m trying,” I replied before eating another toe.

  This was the same story.

  Kitao helped WAR’s business pick up enough that a Ryoguku show was booked for a six-man tag team tournament that featured the first-time pairing of Tenryu and my old FMW boss, Atsushi Onita. Interpromotional matches were rare in Japan and it was a huge deal to see the faces of two big companies tagging together. I was the odd man out of the Fuyuki-Gun that night, so I was paired with Vampiro and a huge bodybuilder named the Warlord for the first-round match against Tenryu’s team, which also included Bam Bam Bigelow.

  It was weird working with Onita. I still felt screwed over because he owed me money and he’d never treated me with any respect when I worked for him. I talked to him briefly before the match and he claimed to remember me but I got the vibe that he was lying...again.

  The finish of the match was booked to have me do the Lionsault onto Onita. But before I could get the win, Tenryu would make the save and Onita would pin me with his shitty Thunder Fire Power Bomb finish.

  I went for the Lionsault, which I usually hit 9.9 times out of ten. But this time, I nailed Onita square in the face with my knees. Maybe he was out of position, maybe the ring lights hit me in the eye, or maybe it was a Freudian slip, but the bottom line was I knocked the bastard out cold.

  I looked into his glazed eyes and I knew he was in Ra Ra Rand. I was in front of 10,000 fans and I’d just knocked out my former boss with my finishing move. Time stood still and a lil devil Jericho appeared on my shoulder saying, “Pin him! Pin him! If you get the clean win over Atsushi Onita, it will catapult you to superstardom! Plus the son of a bitch still owes you $200.”

  A lil angel Jericho appeared on my other shoulder saying, “Christopher! Don’t you even dare. It’s so unprofessional and you’ll get fired. You’ll never work in Japan again!”

  In the end I sided with the angel and as the ref counted to 2 I discreetly popped Onita’s shoulder up, making it seem like he’d kicked out of my pin. He was still dazed man walking, so I basically power-bombed myself and told him to pin me. That’s got to be the first time that someone has been owed money and beaten himself up.

  After the match, I was admiring my pumped-up post-match physique in the mirror when the Warlord walked behind me. He was so huge that he made me look like Nicole Richie in comparison.

  I said to myself, “Why bother,” and grabbed a donut.

  The Warload was obsessed with eating an exact amount of carbs, calories, and proteins per day. The more he came to Japan, the harder it was for him to adapt to the schedule and the available cuisine. Most of WAR’s shows ended by 9 P.M. and in the smaller towns everything closed at eight. We’d have to eat Bento boxes (boxed lunches) or stop at convenience stores. It was an acquired skill, but I’d learned how to get a decent meal at Lawson’s Station. Each night I enjoyed a hearty dinner of boiled eggs, giant pear apples, bottled water, and cookies.

  But the Warload would have none of it and demanded steak every night. Unfortunately it was almost impossible to get a steak at that time. As the bus drove down the darkened roads in the middle of the night, he never stopped grumbling, “I want a fucking steak. I need a steak. I’m a big guy, I’m supposed to eat a steak. This is inhumane treatment.” It didn’t take long for the humor of watching such a big man acting like a such a baby to get old. We turned up the volume of the Kim Duk movie and ignored him.

  The next morning he’d get on the bus bragging, “Well, I had a taxi drive me all over the city until five A.M. and even though I had to spend 100 bucks, I got my steak.” He’d look around proudly like we were going to be jealous of his lucky break.

  The Load was always bragging about how much he could eat. When they let us into the Shabu-Shabu buffets (most buffet restaurants in Japan had signs saying “No Sumo or Wrestlers”) the Loadster would lose control and eat for an hour. One night I mentioned that I could eat more plates of food than he could, which to him was akin to calling his mother a whore.

  I could sense he was outraged, so I made it official and challenged him. We started dipping the Shabu-Shabu meat into the boiling water and chowed down. About an hour later, we were both left with twenty-two plates stacked unevenly in front of each of us.

  “You must be pretty embarrassed. I’m only 220 pounds. You weigh over 300 pounds and I just ate as much as you did.”

  “Hold on a second here. This is bullshit. I ate the rice. I ate three bowls of rice. For you to say that proves that you don’t even know what you’re talking about. I ate more than you. Ha Ha!”
>
  Ha Ha? He’d gone stir-crazy. I expected him to start wagging his finger and chant “Nya, Nya, Nya Nya Nya.”

  CHAPTER 38

  CALGARY KIDS

  The junior heavyweight style of wrestling was more popular in Japan than anywhere else in the world and in 1994 the division gained even more prominence when Jushin Liger created the Super J Cup.

  The J Cup was a one-night all-star tournament featuring the best junior heavyweight wrestlers from most of the major companies all over the world. Liger had major political pull and put together one of the best pro wrestling shows of all time. Liger, Dean Malenko, Eddy Guerrero, Ultimo Dragón, and Hayabusa were among those competing until Chris Benoit as Wild Pegasus beat the Great Sasuke to win the tournament.

  The Super J Cup was technically a New Japan show with Liger as the producer and it was created to be a one-time event. But Dragón scored a major victory when he announced a little over a year later that he would be producing the Super J Cup—Second Stage for WAR.

  I was on pins and needles waiting to see if I was going to be involved. After a few days of not hearing anything, I called Dragón and cut to the chase. “Am I going to be in the J Cup?”

  I breathed a sigh of relief when he said, “Of course.”

  Dragón did a great job orchestrating the tournament and spent months putting together the details. The Super J Cup—Second Stage once again featured the top junior heavyweights from almost all the top companies in the world. Liger, Benoit, el Samurai, Dos Caras, Shinjiro Otani were some of the best on the planet and Lion Heart was now included with them.

  This was also the biggest show I’d ever been involved with. Tickets for the tournament at Ryogoku sold out within hours, I was on the cover of my first Japanese magazine with the rest of the participants, I did interviews with newspapers and radio, and was part of a huge press conference for NHK, one of the biggest TV stations in Tokyo.