A Lion's Tale: Around the World in Spandex

by Chris Jericho

  He was on to me and the jig was up.

  The next day, I went to the airport and picked up my ticket to La Guardia. I was surprised that it wasn’t first-class, but that was wishful thinking on my part. When I landed, McMahon’s limo driver was waiting for me with “Robinson” written on a placard, the secret code name that Russo had given me to ward off any curious fans.

  Why couldn’t I have been Mr. Pink?

  We drove through the dense woods of Connecticut, finally arriving at Vince’s mansion. I’d chosen my clothes carefully, knowing Vince’s propensity for big guys. I wore a tight black shirt that showed off my arms and a pair of hiking boots to make me taller. Before I rang the doorbell, I did a few isometrics to make the veins in my arms pop out.

  My heart was pounding when the door was opened by Vince’s son. “Hey Chris, I’m Shane McMahon, come on in,” he said with a big grin.

  (Marking Out Author’s Note: The following memories of Vince’s house may be correct or they may not. I was so nervous that I don’t really remember for sure what I saw, so cut me some slack, junior!)

  Shane led me through the kitchen into a sunken living room. I saw a big oil painting of Vince on the wall and there was a long oak table in the center. Seated at it was the inner circle of the WWF. Jim Ross, Vince Russo, Ed Ferrara, and Bruce Pritchard were all gathered around and sitting at the head of the table like Don Corleone was Vincent Kennedy McMahon himself.

  They all stopped talking and turned their heads when I walked in. A big smile spread across Vince’s face as he stood up and said, “Chris, how are you doing, pal? Thank you so much for coming!”

  Once again there wasn’t a hair out of place and the clothes were immaculate even inside the comfort of his own home. I noticed how much presence Vince had in comparison to Eric. It was like comparing a king to a court jester.

  I was expecting a secret meeting between Vince, Russo, and myself, but instead I was sitting in the middle of a WWF booking meeting. In retrospect, I can see that Vince was giving me the huge sell to come work for him, because a wrestler from another company would never be allowed in such a sacred inner sanctum meeting now.

  Vince and his boys took a break from the meeting and after ordering in lunch from a deli, Vince took me aside for a talk. When he asked me how things were going in WCW, partially out of nervousness and partially out of frustration, I just started talking and talking and talking.

  “Well at first I enjoyed it but now I know that it’s time to go it’s a good place for the older guys but for a young guy like me it’s a dead end I’ve been doing everything on my own and I’ve been getting over good without any help from the office I feel I have a similar talent as The Rock only he’s in the WWF getting a push and I’m stuck in WCW.”

  I went on and on, just pouring my heart out to this total stranger who was technically my occupational enemy. But to Vince’s credit he listened intently, nodded when he should’ve, and gave me a chance to vent, even though I sounded at best like a raving lunatic and, at worst, a total mark who was comparing himself to The Rock.

  But I’d been watching Vince for so long that I felt like I knew him and I just had to spill my guts and get it all out. I was hoping that he was going to say, “Well we’re going to hire you and make you a big star!” But he kept his cards close to his chest and merely insinuated that we may work together someday. After all I was still under contract to the enemy.

  After our little chat, the meeting resumed and when I was asked my opinions on the show, I gave them. They made me feel like I was already a part of the company. It was a total smoke-and-mirror show designed to impress me. It did.

  After the meeting was done, Vince’s housekeeper brought in a big plate of brownies and they were spectacular. The whole experience was surreal.

  I’d been scraping and clawing my way around the world with the sole intention of someday working for the WWF. Now before I’d even had one match with the company, I was sitting at a table at Vince’s house eating brownies and participating in a booking meeting.

  It was like walking out of the black and white Kansas of the WCW world into the color Oz of the WWF world. Here’s Vince McMahon wearing a suit in his own house in comparison to Bischoff slumming around in sweats and biker gear in front of his employees at a flagship Nitro event. Here’s a team of professionals planning the show weeks in advance compared to a bunch of guys scrambling to get their shit together twenty minutes before the show. Vince was a larger-than-life presence, not some wannabe following the cool kids around, like Eric appeared to be doing at times.

  After Vince and I finished our brownie, there was a moment where each of us silently debated whether or not to have another one. When we both looked at the plate at the same time our eyes met and we knew exactly what the other was thinking. It was a bonding moment that I’ll never forget because it showed that Vince was human, just like me.

  “Well, let’s have another brownie,” he said with a hearty laugh. “Nothing wrong with two gentlemen having a second brownie, right?”

  So we did and shortly after I left his house. If I’d had Dr. Emmett Brown’s DeLorean, I would’ve driven to 88.8 jigowatts (I know, I know) and gone ten months into the future. In my head, I was already having an occupational affair and mentally cheating on my bitchy WCW wife with the much hotter WWF girlfriend.

  As far as I know, Eric never found out about my secret meeting (unless he’s reading this book...sorry Eric) and he was on a mission to have me sign that contract. I couldn’t hold him off anymore and finally told him I wasn’t going to sign.

  Truth be told, I felt bad about my decision because my word had always been my bond and I was going back on it. But I justified my actions by telling myself that since he’d taken five months to get back to me about the contract, he was in breach of our verbal agreement. I know I’m grasping at straws here, but if you’re going to say I went back on my word at least add an asterisk.

  Bischoff was furious. “You can’t do that! What’s wrong with you? We had a deal. You went back on your word.”

  To an extent he was right, although I could’ve brought up all of the promises he’d made to me that never transpired, but what was the point? I was OUT.

  Eric wasn’t going to let it go, calling me an asshole and a fucking liar. Then he said, “Well if you won’t sign, it’s like losing your ticket at a Chinese dry cleaner. No tickee, no laundry.”

  I wasn’t sure exactly what that meant, until Jimmy Hart told me I was losing the TV title to Konnan on Nitro that night in Chattanooga.

  He was making his point by taking away the title (and my laundry I guess) and I planned to make my point by having a great match with Konnan, a guy who wasn’t exactly Chris Benoit in the ring. My mission was to go above and beyond to put on an awesome spectacle and I’m not lying now when I say that we did.

  Since Bischoff was laying down the law and resorting to brass tactics, I needed to do the same and I turned to Kevin Nash of all people for help. I’d heard that Nash and Hall had used an agent to broker their deal into WCW. Having an agent in every other form of entertainment is commonplace, but in wrestling they are regarded as vermin.

  Wrestling began as a carnival attraction a hundred years ago and as far as it has come as a viable entertainment entity, it’s still quite primitive in its treatment of its employees and that will probably never change. But I thought if I had representation, I could avoid further personal conflicts with Eric and formulate a game plan to help me escape WCW.

  Nash put me in touch with his agent, Barry Bloom. We met in New Orleans in yet another secret meeting and it was the smartest move I could’ve made. Barry orchestrated a foolproof plan for my escape and played Eric like a temperamental fiddle. At first Eric refused to deal with him due to previous bad blood, so Barry had me hire a lawyer in Atlanta named John Taylor. John had fought against WCW in the past and Bischoff was reluctant to deal with him too. I had hit the Bischoff hornet’s nest with a stick and he was furious. So I was p
repared for him to make the reminder of my time in the company a living hell. Surprisingly he didn’t.

  Maybe he forgot or maybe he just didn’t care, but nothing happened. I worked an angle with Perry Saturn that culminated in a Loser Wears a Dress Match. What better way for Eric to embarrass me, right? Wrong. Perry wanted to do a Marilyn Manson gimmick and lost willingly.

  I wrestled a battle royal during MTV Spring Break in Cancun. I won and went out drinking for fourteen hours straight with the host, a relative unknown named Kid Rock (who I referred to as Rock Kid) in celebration. Only in WCW could you get a bigger push (and a hell of a party) when you were leaving the company.

  I didn’t escape completely unscathed, as I got a call soon afterward that I’d failed the WCW testing policy. The banned substance found in my system was androstenedione (Mark McGwire’s supplement of choice), which I bought at a GNC in the mall. The fix was in.

  As penance, I had to attend a steroid counseling session with the company quack in Atlanta with two other wrestlers, Lenny Lane and Bobby Blaze. Lenny was about my size and Bobby was built like you (I keed) and none of us were typical poster boys for rampant steroid abuse...although I was a sexy beast and worked out hard. But it was strange that the three of us had been targeted while so many others in WCW were practically neon signs for it.

  What was even more peculiar was the class itself. We sat in a room for two hours watching public service films that looked like they were made in the 1970s.

  “Hello, I’m Lionel Hutz. You may have seen me in such films as Weight Supremacists and The Golden Curls. That was before muscle-enhancing narcotics caused my testes to spontaneously combust.” I took heed and threw all of my GNC products away.

  After receiving another tongue-lashing from Eric about how much of an asshole I was for going back on my word (bor-ring), I was in my apartment in Clearwater, Florida, watching Wayne Gretzky’s last NHL game. Tears were streaming down my face as I watched one my childhood heroes play his final shift. It inspired me to leave a tribute to the Great One on my answering machine.

  “Hey this is Chris, leave a message because I don’t want to talk to anyone. Unless of course this is Wayne Gretzky, the greatest of all time, in which case I’ll pick up.”

  I continued watching the retirement ceremony, and my phone rang. After my stupid message played, I heard a deep voice.

  “Chris, this is not Wayne Gretzky, this is Vince McMahon.”

  I was agog (still a great word) that:

  a) Vince was actually calling me at my house; and

  b) He’d had to endure such a goofy message.

  I picked up the phone in a scramble and bumbled out a hello.

  “Wayne Gretzky, huh?”

  “Well, he just retired today.”

  “I know, I know. He’s a god for you Canadians, isn’t he?” Then he burst out in the patented VKM overexaggerated belly laugh.

  After a few pleasantries were exchanged, Vince got right to the point.

  “Are you going to come work for me? We really want you here.”

  That was all he needed to say. I had the head of WCW calling me a fucking liar and a piece of shit while the head of the WWF was calling me at my home asking me to come work for him. Vinegar and honey, right? It was an awesome selling technique by Vince and it worked, not that I needed much prodding at that point anyway.

  After repeated attempts by Eric to have other WCW employees, from DDP, to Nash, to Eric’s business partner, Jason Hervey, from The Wonder Years (Fred Savage wasn’t available for comment) asking me to stay, he finally changed his tune and started being really nice.

  He put together a new offer that with incentives could’ve ended up in the high six figures. But it was too little too late because on top of everything else, Eric had hurt my feelings. I felt damaged as a performer and as a person and it would’ve been difficult for me to go back to WCW smiling like nothing had happened.

  I’d decided that $1 million (pinky finger on bottom lip) was the magic number that would make me think about staying. But they never offered it to me so I didn’t have to consider it.

  When I confided to my friends that I was thinking of leaving, they told me to get out and never look back. My dad told me, “Sometimes the devil you don’t know is better than the one that you do.” While I’m still not sure exactly what that means, I appreciated the advice.

  Even Brian Hildebrand, who was honored just to be working in the wrestling business, thought it would in my best interests to take my chances elsewhere. Brian’s cancer had returned and he was forced to take a leave of absence from WCW (which tore him apart), with the caveat that his job would be waiting for him no matter how long it took for him to get better.

  Eric wasn’t my favorite person at that point, but his treatment of Brian during his hard times was first-class. He even orchestrated a Brian Hildebrand Tribute show in Brian’s home city of Knoxville (in the same building I’d wrestled with a broken arm four years earlier). Brian was quite touched by WCW’s efforts and when asked what match he wanted to see on the show, he requested Benoit and Malenko vs. Eh and Wey, North and South of the Border, the Greatest Tag Team That Barely Ever Was...Guerrero and Jericho.

  The four of us had wrestled the match before but always with limited TV time. This time there were none of those shackles and in an unprecedented move, Arn Anderson, who was running the show, put our match on last. It was the first and only time I was ever in the main event of a WCW show and the four of us responded by having one of the best matches of our careers.

  Brian was too weak to work on the show, but he was sitting ringside the whole night. I grabbed the mike before the match and cut a vicious promo accusing him of faking his cancer to elicit sympathy from the stupid rednecks. Brian looked at me in defiance as the crowd booed the hell out of me, and I know he loved it.

  The finish was the best ending to a movie ever. The ref got knocked out just as Dean put me in his Cloverleaf submission and Benoit put Eddy into his Crossface submission. Just as we tapped out, Brian slid into the ring and signaled for the bell with his trademark double-handed bang-bang motion to a massive pop. Everyone in the building gave him a standing ovation and the smile on his face was big enough for Oprah to bathe in. It will be etched in my mind forever (the smile, not the image of Oprah bathing).

  I still have a picture of the five of us taken backstage after the show hanging in my office today.

  Afterward, the five of us went back to Brian’s house in Morristown to relax, reflect, and enjoy the rest of the evening. As a token of his esteem, Eddy gave Brian his Black Tiger mask (the character he played in Japan) and Brian did a dance of joy. When I gave Brian the gift of my Super Liger party mask he did a dance of indifference and went back to looking at his Black Tiger mask. Poor Super Liger still got no love.

  Brian had a vial of prescription marijuana to help him deal with the painful chemo treatments. I wasn’t much of a weed smoker, but I got so high I became Cheech if he had smoked Chong. If you can’t smoke weed, drink pure moonshine, and eat hash brownies with your dying cancer-stricken friend, then who can you smoke weed, drink pure moonshine, and eat hash brownies with?

  CHAPTER 52

  SHE WAS MY DENSITY

  Even though my career was a little shaky, things were looking up personally. After years of meeting Mrs. Right Now, I finally met Mrs. Right. I was eating in a Japanese restaurant that all the boys went to whenever we had a show in Tampa. Scanning the crowd, I saw Disco Inferno talking with a breathtakingly beautiful blonde. I was staring at her when she glanced over and busted me red-handed. When our eyes locked, I was completely enchanted.

  But the fact that she was talking to Disco was a warning sign for me, because whenever you saw one of the boys talking to a good-looking girl, chances were that something had already happened between them, or was about to. But she was way out of Disco’s league, which made me think, “How typical. The hottest girls are always attracted to the biggest dweebs.”

  When
Disco finished his conversation, I asked him, “Who is that girl you’re talking to?”

  “Oh, that’s my friend, Jessica.”

  When I heard the magic word “friend,” the race was on and I insisted that he introduce us. He did and we didn’t stop talking until the restaurant closed hours later.

  Disco had been showing Jessica a copy of the new WCW Magazine that featured him on the cover (sign #147 that the company was going down the toilet) and also featured an article that asked me such hard-hitting questions like what was my a) favorite number, b) animal, c) Backstreet Boy (A.J. like a muthaaafuckaaaa), etc.

  I said that ferrets were my favorite animal and she was intrigued because she had two of them at home. She told me that her favorite number was 7 and when we looked at the survey, my favorite number was also listed as 7. When I asked her for her phone number and entered it into my PalmPilot, it was the 77th entry.

  It didn’t take long to realize that she was my density...I mean my destiny.

  I became so intrigued by her that suddenly there was nobody else in the entire restaurant. I went into total fence-building mode (when one of the boys gets so into a girl he gives nobody else a chance to talk to her) and ignored everybody else in the room.

  I didn’t notice when Eddy stole my swank fanny pack off the back of my chair and put it in the freezer for safekeeping. I didn’t notice when the food came or when the plates were taken away. I just noticed this awesome girl with the pretty smile and the prettier personality. But our amazing connection was almost torn apart when Raven broke down my fence and stomped into my yard.

  The two of us had developed a system during our time in the Drunken Four Horsemen where if we saw a girl we liked, he became the bad cop and I was the good cop. This way the girl had two flavors to choose from like a cheap-ass Baskin-Robbins.

  But I didn’t want to play that way with Jessica and tried to shoo the annoying Raven away. But he kept interjecting himself into the conversation and after a few lascivious remarks, flew in for the kill.