“Ryback is going to work with Mark Henry at Mania,” Dave told me, “but don’t worry, Vince has something else planned for you, and he wants to tell you about it himself.”
I appreciated his candor and wondered what Vince had up his sleeve. Four years earlier, he had worked out a deal with Mickey Rourke (who was riding a massive career resurgence from his Oscar-nominated role in The Wrestler) to have a match with me at WrestleMania 25, and even though that match never happened, I still ended up in a pretty good spot working against three WWE Hall of Famers in Roddy Piper, Ricky Steamboat, and Jimmy Snuka . . . and getting knocked out by Rourke at the end. I was excited and wondered what featured role the boss had in mind for me this time around.
I waited a few weeks for him to give me the heads-up, but he never did. I prodded Kapoor to give me a clue, but he insisted that he didn’t know anything. I promised myself I wouldn’t give in and ask Vince what he had in mind (giving him the upper hand), but with all the other Mania programs already full steam ahead, I started wondering if I was even going to be on the show at all. With just over a month until the big night, all of the top names in the company had already been paired off, along with most of the mid-card guys (except a new character with these goofy vignettes on Raw, but there was no way I’d be working with him). I assumed Vince had lined up another outside celebrity, but I’d been racking my brain and had absolutely no idea who it might be.
I couldn’t take it anymore, so I shot Vince a text and said: I HEAR YOU’VE GOT A SECRET PLAN FOR ME AT MANIA. LIBERACE IN A TUXEDO MATCH? SY SPERLING IN A HAIR VS HAIR? WHEN ARE YOU PLANNING ON FILLING ME IN?
Vince texted me back a few minutes later and said something along the lines of: YOU THINK YOU’RE WORKING A MATCH AT MANIA? I THOUGHT I’D JUST HAVE YOU SET UP THE RING.
Uh-oh.
The fact that Vince was dodging my question behind the veil of a bad joke wasn’t a good sign, and I told him so.
Thirty minutes later my phone rang and I saw VKM on the screen. When I answered, Vince was being over-the-top charming, littering his speech with more bad jokes and fake laughs. It felt like he was trying to butter me up before telling me something I wouldn’t like.
Yowzah, was I right.
“Well, I know we talked about you and Ryback, but I want to go in a different direction. I have another idea for you.”
I waited in silence for him to continue. The pause was intentionally uncomfortable and Vince continued in a serious tone.
“We have this new kid called Fandango . . .”
WHAT??
Fandango was the character I’d thought about earlier, whose goofy Dancing with the Stars–themed gimmick had been promoted for weeks on TV with a bunch of campy vignettes.
“He’s a good worker and I really believe in this gimmick. I’d like to have him debut at WrestleMania, and I can’t think of a bigger and better opponent for him than . . . CHRIS JERICHO!” Vince proclaimed boisterously like a jacked-up P. T. Barnum, using his famed McJedi mind tricks to try to convince me that this was the opportunity of a lifetime.
I lost all sense of decorum and lashed out way too harshly at my billionaire boss.
“Are you kidding me?? You’re gonna put me in the ring with FANDANGO at WrestleMania? You agreed to have me work with Ryback and now you’re pairing me with a guy who hasn’t even been on TV yet?”
“This gimmick is going to be big and I need to debut him with a bang, Chris! Get in there with him, take 90 percent of the match, and go straight to the finish.”
It didn’t surprise me that Vince thought that the character was going to be big, because I knew exactly where he came up with the idea. A few years prior when I was on DWTS, Vince called to tell me how proud he was that I was doing the show. We were talking about how intense the rehearsals and training were and I mentioned how in shape the male dancers were.
“Oh, there’s no doubt about that,” he said, “but they look ridiculous dancing and prancing across the floor. How can you ever take them seriously?”
At that moment, I knew it wouldn’t be long before there was a character based on a male ballroom dancer, and here he was. This reminded me of when I predicted a “heel wearing a scarf” character after Vince mocked me for consistently wearing one. (Scarves are cool, and if they’re good enough for Keith Richards, they’re good enough for me.) Sure enough, a few weeks later Alberto Del Rio was walking to the ring wearing one of his own. (I’ve since reclaimed the scarf heat for my own act.)
But despite Vince’s suggestion of squashing Fandango, I still wasn’t happy about the idea and tried to give him some other options.
“What if I challenge Wade Barrett for the Intercontinental Championship instead? We could come up with a story where I’m chasing my self-record-breaking tenth IC title by trying to beat my former protégé.”
I had been Barrett’s mentor on the inaugural season of the original NXT show, which was based around eight “rookies” being advised by their individual “pros,” and Wade was my rookie so the angle was a no-brainer. Vince didn’t agree.
“Oh come on, nobody remembers that. Besides, this Fandango character is a real heat magnet and the kid has a ton of personality. This is the way to go.”
Vince was right in the fact that Johnny Curtis, who was playing Fandango, was charismatic and a good worker. I just didn’t think debuting him at Mania against me was best for My business. But alas, I knew the battle had been lost.
“It doesn’t matter what I say at this point does it, Vince? This is the way you want it and nothing I say is going to change your mind, is it?”
“No. This what I want.”
“Whatever,” I spit out and hung up on him.
I was pissed off and felt double-crossed by Vince. When I called Kapoor and told him that my Mania opponent was going to be Fandango, even he couldn’t hide his surprise.
“Wow,” was his one-word answer that said more than a thousand words could have.
I was caught somewhere in time, mad as hell and thought about simply refusing to do the match. Vince had no right to treat me this way, and broken promises didn’t sit well with me, especially when that meant I was going to be saddled in a prelim match at the biggest show of the year. What should I do? Where should I turn? Who could give me the advice I needed to make the right decision? There was only one man wise enough for that.
The Undertaker.
I called and told him of my conundrum. He listened to my concerns and then calmly gave his analysis.
“Listen, man, I know how you are feeling right now, but let’s be honest. Either you do the match or you quit. And you’d be stupid to quit, because this really isn’t that bad. I know everybody talks about my WrestleMania winning streak [which at the time was 20–0], and over the last few years those matches have been pretty damn good, but they weren’t always that way. Vince put me in there with a lot of dudes who weren’t exactly easy to work with [he mentioned no names, but guys like Giant Gonzalez, King Kong Bundy, and a way past his prime Jimmy Snuka crossed my mind], but I did the best I could with what I was given because it was MY JOB. It was Vince’s call and I did what he wanted. So take this opportunity Vince is giving you, do your best, and make it good. If you do that, he will take care of you. Honestly, Chris, this is part of your job . . . so go do it.”
Everything he said was right, and deep down inside I knew it. I just needed to hear it from him and once I did, it was all systems go (and I ain’t talkin’ about the Vinnie Vincent Invasion) with no looking back. This was my mission and I was going to accept it and do everything I could to get both Fandango and the angle over as much as possible in the short amount of time I had.
My first thought was I needed to get the fans familiar with the Fandango character as quickly as I could, and the best way to do that was to mess with his name so they would recognize it. So in our first meeting, I decided to mispronounce it in as many ways as I could think of. When he made his debut appearance on Raw by interrupting me in the middle
of a backstage promo, I asked him his name and he replied, “Faaan . . . Dahn . . . Go.”
I stared at him in silence until he said it again, and then I tried to repeat it.
“Faan . . . Dum . . . Bo.”
He corrected me and said his name again.
“Faaan . . . Dahn . . . Go!”
“FanDunghole.”
He had a conniption fit and repeated his moniker for a third time.
I proceeded to beat the dead dancing horse by throwing out a litany of butchered attempts to get it right.
“Fandjango, Fandangle, FanDodgeDurango, FanSweetMango, FanWangoTango, Fan-Dingo-Ate-My-Baby-O” (that was my personal favorite), and finally:
“Fan-B-I-N-G-O-Was-His-Name-O.”
Instantly, we established his name and the fact that I couldn’t (or refused to) pronounce it correctly. It gave me and the fans something to sink our teeth into right off the bat, which the angle desperately needed.
The next step was to get him over as a serious threat. With a gimmick that campy, it would be easy to dismiss him as a joke, and I didn’t want that happening on my watch. Fandango was a good worker with a great top-rope legdrop for a finish, so I worked on getting that over. It was an impressive-looking move, and I had him nail me with it every time he attacked me for the next few weeks.
Even when the plan was for me to get one up on him, I changed it to him beating me up and hitting me with the legdrop again. Everybody knew me and my moves, but nobody had seen what this dancing fool could do, and we had to establish that he was dangerous.
Over the next few weeks, it was basically a rotating pattern of Fandango beating me down (always culminating with the toprope legdrop) combined with me mispronouncing his name. It wasn’t much, but it was all we had, and in the end it did the trick because by the time we got to Mania, there was interest in the match. Not huge, but more than I was expecting due to a combination of my strategy, Fandango’s kitschy character, and his catchy I Dream of Jeannie–style entrance music. Some fans were even starting to dance along with his theme song, moving their arms up and down in time with the game show–themed jam while humming along with the melody.
So I took solace in the fact that some fans were looking forward to the match, and even though others thought it was a waste of time, well, it didn’t matter anyway since I was winning.
Or was I?
A few days before Mania, producer Dean Malenko called to tell me (much to my shock) that the finish was Fandango going over clean, and I went berserk. I called Vince and started screaming that I was sick of this double-crossing bullshit! It was bad enough that he had changed my Mania match to Fandango, but now he was changing the finish too?
Vince seemed genuinely surprised at that last comment.
“I never changed the finish,” he replied calmly.
“Are you kidding me? Yes you did!” I bellowed. “You told me to take 90 percent of the match and go straight to the finish!”
“That’s what I said.”
Then I realized he was right, that was EXACTLY what he said. I thought back to our initial phone conversation when he explained how he wanted the match—a verdict that I had just repeated to him verbatim.
Vince said that he wanted me to “take 90 percent of the match” (aka eat Fandango up and get most of the offense) and then “go straight to the finish.” While he never said outright that he wanted Fandango to go over, all I had to do was use the common sense I’d learned after twenty-three years in the business to figure out that if Vince was high enough on Fandango to book him in his first match with me at WrestleMania, there was no way he’d have him lose. I had stuck my patent-leather boot in my mouth by assuming I was going to go over, and we all know what happens when you ASSUME—it makes an ASS out of UME. Now, I’m not sure who in the hell this UME is, but you get the point.
I told Vince that nobody in the audience would buy Fandango beating me clean, but that was precisely what he was counting on.
“That’s what I want. I’d be thrilled if seventy-five thousand people started chanting ‘bullshit’ at the finish. The less they buy it, the better. I wanna really piss them off.”
I was still a little pissed off myself, but now that I knew the finish and understood the reason for it, I hunkered down and strategized on how to make the best of it. I had no interest in taking 90 percent of the bout, because I couldn’t think of a more boring scenario than a Chris Jericho squash match at Mania, even with a twist ending, so I put the match together with the idea that Fandango could beat me at any time. That worked great because at that point, nobody in their right mind thought I was going to lose that match, and I used that to my advantage to put together the most exciting contest possible.
The match ended up being . . . not bad. Not a classic by any means, but a good second match on the show. The finish would have me go for a lionsault, but Dango would put up his knees. However, I would land on my feet and try for the walls, but he would small-package me for the duke. It didn’t go as smoothly as I would’ve liked, as I overshot him on the lionsault and had to no-sell the fact I had completely missed him, but it was what it was. The most important thing was that after he went over, the audience was shocked. They didn’t chant “Bullshit” like Vince had hoped, but they certainly didn’t buy it either, and that’s the way he wanted it.
What they did buy was the entertainment value of the campy Fandango character, especially the next night.
Every year, the Raw after WrestleMania is notorious for being infested with hardcore fans from around the world who try to highjack the show by doing whatever they want, regardless of the performers’ or writers’ intentions. They seem to be more concerned with getting themselves over than sitting back and enjoying the show, and it’s become an annual tradition to see what ridiculous shit they come up with throughout the course of the night.
So at the Raw after WrestleMania 29 at the Izod Center in New Jersey, those wacky hardcore fans made Fandango the most over character in the company. All night long, the crowd sang his theme song, “ChaChaLaLa” (which even made it to number 44 on the UK singles charts), and did the annoying hands up and down dance ad nauseam. When he actually came to the ring they EXPLODED. If you gauged their reaction on the “WWE All-Time Biggest Pop Richter Scale,” I would say it landed somewhere between Hulk Hogan in 1986 and The Rock in 2002. (It still wasn’t at #RoadWarriorPop levels though.)
Even crazier, when I was leaving the venue after the show, there were literally hundreds of fans in the parking lot singing his song as they were walking to their cars. It was so loud that I called Vince and held the phone out of the window so he could hear it. Say what you want about that character, but at that moment on that night Fandango became a cult hero, and I’m taking some credit for that. Granted, Johnny Curtis had done a great job playing the character and getting himself over, but I laid out the blueprint.
What’s the lesson here? It all goes back to the Mike Damone Principle. I had been given an unenviable task, and even though I was furious about it at first, I eventually set my sights on doing the best job I could with the situation I was put in. I did my damnedest to make the Jericho-versus-Fandango match the place to be.
Now, in the long run the Fandango gimmick ended up being just a fad, and a few months later the dancing inferno was put on the back burner. But I’m proud of what Johnny and I were able to accomplish together during those few short weeks, and I’m glad to see that at the time of this writing he’s got a good thing going on the WWE main roster, teaming with Tyler Breeze as Breezango.
Even though the Fandango angle has become a private joke between Vince and me (when I won the 2014 Slammy for Extreme Moment of the Year, Vince chose Fandango to accept the trophy in my absence), when I got my Mania check I was surprised to see that it was one of the biggest payoffs I’d ever received. It was more than I got for headlining WrestleMania 18 against Triple H, and the same as what I made for challenging CM Punk for the world championship the year before.
Undertaker’s advice was right. I’d made the most of the chance Vince had given me, and he had taken care of me in return . . . handsomely.
THE DAMONE PRINCIPLE applies to rock ’n’ roll as well, as I learned when Fozzy was on the Do You Wanna Start a War tour and we were asked to play on the widely popular KISS Kruise, sailing from Miami to Jamaica over the course of four days. All that was required from us was to do three shows, one meet and greet, and I would record a podcast episode of Talk Is Jericho with KISS mega manager, the legendary Doc McGhee.
We jumped at the chance. Hell, I would’ve done a dozen shows for free and swabbed the poop deck with poop if they wanted us to. I mean come on, we would be touring with motherfuckin’ KISS!!
We were stoked when we boarded the Norwegian Pearl in Miami like the damn rock stars we were. We checked in and were given a packet that listed our schedule for the trip, including the set times for our three shows. I’m always a stickler for details, so I checked to see when we would be playing and more importantly, if we would be “clashing” (aka playing at the same time) with any of the other bands. The first show was free and clear, as we were slated to play as the last band of the night, which was perfect, as everybody was going to be in a partying mood and would be ready to rock. I was right, as the show was jam-packed and the crowd was raucously raucous. The third show was in the middle of the day on the main deck, so I figured we would have a decent crowd, even if it was just rubberneckers having a Mai Tai and hanging out in the sun. Once again, I was right.
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