More importantly, I started to let the poison sting of rejection fade away. There was no reason to continue to second-guess myself, because I knew I had done everything within my ability to get the gig. I gave the best performance I could have and the rest was out of my hands. It was time to let it go.
To help me get over the rejection, I asked the advice of some of my veteran show biz friends including William Shatner who said, “If I dwelled upon every gig I didn’t get, I would’ve quit show biz after a year.” He was in his seventh decade of show biz, so I figured he knew what he was talking about and took his words to heart.
My Sharknado simpatico, Ian Ziering, told me a similar story about how he lost The Price Is Right hosting gig to Drew Carey a few years earlier.
“You can’t let it bring you down, man. It wasn’t meant to be, which means there’s another gig out there for you that is.”
My friends were right. I decided to let AFV go for good, and subsequently it became just another gig in a sea of gigs I didn’t get. But somewhere in a dusty warehouse in New Mexico, lying on a shelf beside the Ark of the Covenant, there’s a locked wooden box with a tape inside of an episode of America’s Funniest Home Videos hosted by Chris Jericho . . .
EPILOGUE
While I was writing this very chapter, after not hearing from Vin for sixteen months, I got a call from his office asking about possibly doing another project together.
To be continued . . .
CHAPTER 14
THE
MIKE
LOZANSKI
PRINCIPLE
STAND UP FOR WHAT
YOU BELIEVE IN
Get up stand up, stand up for your rights . . .
—BOB MARLEY, “GET UP, STAND UP”
(Bob Marley, Peter Tosh)
A few months before I moved from Winnipeg to Calgary to train with the Hart brothers, I was hanging out at the local strip club down the street from my house called the Ville. The place was as classy as it sounds, darkly lit with fake-wood-paneled walls that reeked of stale smoke and cheap beer. However, due to the wonders of fake IDs, my friends and I had been hanging out there since we were fifteen years old. So even though it was a shithole, it was our shithole.
That night, a DJ who resembled Bob Ross was playing the hot tunes of the fall of ’89, including healthy doses of Guns N’ Roses, Roxette, Alannah Myles, and the Northern Pikes (there’s some Canadiana for you) while walking the floor with a cordless mic asking the scattered patrons random questions in between dances. He stuck the mic in the face of a guy who looked exactly like Barney Gumble and asked, “My man! What do you want Shelley Sensation to do tonight?”
“Take your clothes off!!” Barney screamed at the top of his lungs to nobody in particular. Considering we were in a peeler joint, it was a fair request.
It just so happened that I’d been staring at said Shelley Sensation from the moment she got onstage, and she’d looked back at me a few times with a beguiling smile. Now, keep in mind that Canadian strip clubs are different than American ones, as instead of hanging around all night hustling for dances, the stripper does four onstage shows a day, consisting of four songs each. When her show is over, she leaves the premises until the next show, which is usually two or three hours later.
That meant that if I didn’t approach Shelley as soon as she left the stage, I wouldn’t see her again for hours. So I power walked over as she slid a silk robe onto her amazingly toned, naked body and chatted her up. She seemed engaged enough, so it didn’t seem out of line to ask her for her number (I mean she obviously wasn’t there to make money, but to hook up with goofy-ass teenagers, right?), but my bubble was burst when she said, “I’d give you my number but my boyfriend probably wouldn’t like that. He’s a pro wrestler too.”
She said “pro wrestler too,” because I had told her I WAS a professional wrestler, not that I was GOING to wrestling school in a few months. But that’s nitpicking, isn’t it? Besides. I wanted to know who this fancy pants wrestler “boyfriend” was, so I asked her his name.
“I’m dating Mike Lozanski,” she said with a smile.
Well, that changed everything.
I knew who Mike Lozanski was because I’d seen him on TV, wrestling for the local Winnipeg promotion run by Tony Condello. Not only was he a good-looking guy and a pretty good wrestler . . . but he was banging this gorgeous stripper, too? I decided right then I wouldn’t mind meeting this Lozanski cat and learning a thing or two from him.
I ended up meeting him a few months later after I finished wrestling school, through Brett Como, a talented performer who had also been on Condello’s TV. I hit it off with both of them instantly and they took me under their wings right from the start.
Brett was a sarcastic rocker dude like me, but Mike was a charismatic schmoozer who made friends with almost everybody he met. He had big-league confidence with the touch of arrogance needed to get out of the local Calgary scene and make it to the next level. And that’s what he did.
With only a few years in the business under his belt, Mike had already wrestled in New Zealand, Japan, Mexico, all across Canada, and over a dozen states. He also came from a wealthy family, which meant he didn’t have to worry about how much he was getting paid or what expenses he might incur along the way. That was the perfect situation for Como and me, because Mike paid for all of our gas and our food bills whenever we traveled together. The drawback to that was it meant Mike called the shots. If he wanted to drive all night or stop for food or head to the ghetto looking for weed (as described in my true-crime novel, A Lion’s Tale), Como and I would have to follow. But it wasn’t such a bad deal because we got to drive across the country and work in places like northern British Columbia and southern California, which most of the other guys in Calgary didn’t have the chance to. I felt bad about that at times and even asked Mike if my tag-team partner, Lance Storm, could join us for a thirty-six-hour drive to a show in Pomona, California.
“Listen, Chris, you’re not going to be a tag team forever, so you need to take the bookings you can get and not worry about your partner.”
I felt bad relaying that to Lance, even though he understood and had no problem with it. It was Mike’s decision and I had to go along with it, just as it was Mike’s decision for us to drive across the continent to work a television taping in Wichita, Kansas.
When we arrived in Wichita, we found out that the promoter wasn’t all that he claimed to be. In fact, he was full of shit. He had surrounded himself with a ragtag collection of yes-men and cronies who boasted about how big they were in the business, even though I hadn’t heard of a single one of them. I had a bad vibe about the place to begin with, which got worse when the promoter decided at the last second that he didn’t want to use Como. He claimed it was because Brett was too small, even though he’d seen pictures of all three of us and knew exactly what he was getting when he agreed to bring us in.
Mike was furious. This guy had made him look bad because he had gotten the three of us booked, and after the marathon journey we’d gone through to get there, he wasn’t able to deliver the opportunity he’d promised. Brett told him pretty much right away that he didn’t give a shit and had no problem with the two of us still doing the show, but Mike wasn’t having it.
“No fucking way! He promised to use the three of us, so either we all work or none of us do.”
I did a mental double take at Mike’s words, because I had made that long drive and dealt with all the bullshit to get to Wichita as well, so I wasn’t as keen on just turning around and going home without taking advantage of the opportunity. I mean, what if I had a good match that ended up on TV and got me more bookings in America? Working in the States was a rare thing for me at that time, and I didn’t want to let this chance slip away. If it had been up to me I would’ve worked the show and given Como half my payoff, but to Mike this wasn’t about the money; it was about standing up for what he believed in. He’d been lied to, which to him was unacceptable, so now we we
re going to stick together. I eventually saw his point and backed him when he told the promoter he was going to have to use all three of us, or none of us at all.
“Fine, then the three of you can fuck off back to Canada. I don’t really give a shit,” the fat bastard snarled.
So we fucked off back to Canada empty handed and matchless. But we left Kansas with our heads held high and smiles on our faces, because we had stuck together and stood up for what we felt was right. And that was a damn good feeling.
Unfortunately, Mike and I grew apart over the years, and even though he had some success working as Mike Anthony in Memphis, ECW, and WCW, we didn’t really cross paths too often before he passed away at just thirty-five years old in 2003. I felt awful when I found out about his death, because I should’ve reached out to him and been a better friend during the problematic latter stages of his life. But I still think about him often, because he was a big influence in the early days of my career, and I might not have made it as far as I did without him, his friendship, and the lesson he taught me in Wichita back in 1991.
Thanks, Mikey.
MIKE’S CONCEPT of standing up for what you believe in has come up time and time again in my WWE career, but most recently in 2016 when I was working with AJ Styles. As we discussed earlier in this fine compendium, I was really excited to wrestle AJ when he first signed with the company.
He was a tremendous performer with a dazzling array of offense, but I found it odd that whenever he won a match, it was always with the top-rope Phenomenal Forearm or the Calf Crusher submission, despite the fact that his Styles Clash finish was already really popular and synonymous with him.
Whenever he teased the Styles Clash, people went bananas (Pat Patterson™) with anticipation only to be let down when the move was thwarted, so when I suggested we use the Clash as the actual finish to one of our matches, I was told that it had been unofficially banned by Vince. Someone had brought it to his attention that a few guys had supposedly been hurt by the move, even though it was one of the easiest bumps I would ever take in my career (Mr. Socko was the easiest by far). Here’s how it worked. AJ would pick up his opponent like he was going to give him a piledriver, but instead of sitting down he would simply fall forward and faceplant the guy. So you would land mostly on your chest and knees, but the illusion would be that your face had been smashed into the mat. It was a piece of piss to take and a great move, so I decided I would make it my mission to get it unbanned.
When we worked our third match at the Fast Break PPV, I thought it was the perfect opportunity to bust it out in the WWE for the first time and show Vince that it wasn’t as dangerous as he had heard. If it was safe enough for one of his top guys to take, then it must be okay for everybody else, right?
Since this was one of AJ’s established finishes, I didn’t want to just take it and kick out with no merit, so we came up with an idea where he’d hit me with it and I’d barely kick out, only to have him roll me right into the Calf Crusher for the tap-out victory. In the fine tradition of a principle that didn’t make the book, “It’s easier to ask for forgiveness than permission,” I figured if Vince really didn’t want us to use the move, we would hear about it after. Thankfully, he didn’t say anything because it was a safe-looking “Whattamanouver!” that got a massive reaction from the crowd. It also got a massive NEGATIVE reaction from the Internet smart mark contingent, who accused me of taking the Styles Clash, just so I could kick out of it and continue AJ’s “WWE burial.” (You should’ve heard how outraged they were when I actually pinned him at WrestleMania . . . apparently, it was the worst decision since Hillary deleted her emails.)
In reality, my strategy wasn’t to kick out of the Clash to bury AJ, but to take the move on camera so that Vince could see with his own two eyes (and I ain’t talkin’ about Fairies Wear Boots) just how safe it was. Step one of my plan worked because we didn’t get any flak, and it was treated as just another great false finish in a match full of them.
The second step of the plan was to use it again as a near fall in front of over a hundred thousand fans at WrestleMania 32 in Dallas. Once again, we built the match to the perfect point so when AJ hit the Clash, the crowd exploded. They were sure it was the finish, until I kicked out at 2.9999 seconds, leading to another huge pop, this one of disappointment. It worked perfectly, and my mission of clearing the good name of the Styles Clash was almost complete.
The perfect chance to finish what I started (and I ain’t talkin’ about Eddie Van Halen) presented itself the next night when the main event of Raw was a fatal fourway between me, AJ, Cesaro, and Kevin Owens to decide the number one contender for the WWE Championship. The finish was AJ over me and that’s when I knew the time was right to strike.
I went into Vince’s office to pitch the finish, but there was one very important rule I had to remember: I could not use the name STYLES CLASH at any time. I had a hunch that while Vince might be against the theoretical move called the Styles Clash, he also might not know what it actually was. But since he had already seen the move, as I had taken it twice already, that would mean he would know what I was talking about if I described it without actually calling it by name.
“Vince, do you remember the move we used at Mania yesterday where AJ picked me up like a piledriver, but just fell forward and pancaked my face instead?”
“Of course. It got a great reaction.”
“Yes it did. That’s why I think we should use it as the finish tonight. It’s easy, it’s over, and it could add another weapon to AJ’s arsenal.”
“I love it, let’s do it.”
There you have it. AJ pinned me with it later that night and biggity-bam, the Styles Clash was officially back in business, thanks to yours truly. So, Constant Reader, whenever you see him use it (including giving it to Roman Reigns on the floor a few months later), holla atcha boy, Jericho.
And to all the Internet smarks who threw so much shade at me the first time I kicked out of it, I accept your apology and hope you’ve learned your lesson, you stupid idiots.
ON NOVEMBER 13, 2015, there was a brutal attack in Paris where ISIS terrorists initiated multiple bombings and shootings, killing 130 people in total, with 89 of them being at an Eagles of Death Metal concert inside a venue called the Bataclan. That attack caused great unrest among European rock fans, and I know this because I was there . . . Fozzy had played a gig the same night in Rotterdam, Netherlands, only 285 miles away from Paris. Even more chilling was the fact that we had a Paris gig of our own scheduled for exactly one week later.
The entire country was in mass chaos and it was a difficult time to be touring in Europe. As a band, we were in a difficult position. On one hand, all of our families wanted us to come home, and the fact that a slew of big bands had already cancelled their European shows didn’t strengthen our case. Within days, they had all postponed their tours and got the hell out of Dodge. And while we considered doing the same, Rich and I eventually decided we didn’t want to do that to our fans. In this difficult time, people needed something to take their minds off the tragedy, so what would it help to cancel our shows and give the terrorists another small win over the world? In the end, we made a unanimous decision as a band to stand up for what we believed in and continue the tour.
The following week wasn’t easy. There was an eerie feeling at every show leading up to Paris, and attendance was understandably way down, as the last thing a lot of people wanted to do was go to a rock show. It all came to a head that Friday when we showed up for our concert at Le Forum in Vauréal, a suburb of Paris. I was a little freaked out playing in France only seven days after the tragedy, but I let go of those thoughts quickly the moment I hit the stage.
We had a band discussion before the gig and decided it didn’t matter how many people showed up; they were going to get one hell of a rock show. Fozzy’s motto of “ten or ten thousand” never meant as much to us as it did that night. We had a job to entertain the fans and help them forget this tragedy, and we were g
oing to do that to the best of our abilities, no matter who came.
When our set began, I was pleasantly surprised to see a couple hundred fans in the room and happy to hear they were a loud crowd right from the start. These Fozzy fanatics were truly hardcore, ready for a good time, and so were we. The show went by smoothly, with the highlight being the “minute of noise” we requested for the fallen Parisians. Let me just say that those two hundred people sounded like twenty thousand, as they roared as loud as they could for sixty seconds. It was such an emotional moment and was as deep a connection to an audience as I’ve ever felt.
What made the night even more special was how many of our fans thanked us for playing the show. They were genuinely appreciative of the fact that we had shown the balls to not cancel, even in the face of potential danger. It reminded me of when I toured Iraq with the WWE three years running to visit the US military, and spent the entire time having soldiers of all ages tell me how much it meant to them that the WWE had come to see them. They were the ones who were living through the horrors of war, but we were the ones being treated like heroes. That night at Le Forum gave me the same feeling, especially after our encounter with Lionel, who was working at Le Forum as our backstage assistant for the day. His job was to stock the dressing room with food, hook up our wifi, bring us towels or ice, and basically take care of anything we needed.
He was a fun guy who spoke fairly good English and we had some brief conversations, but it wasn’t until after the show that I learned he’d been trapped in the Bataclan seven days earlier.
Lionel was watching the Eagles of Death Metal show when the shooting started, and ended up barricading himself with a group of others in an upstairs room by pushing a refrigerator against the door. He and twelve other potential victims waited in total silence for the next three hours as the gunshots cracked outside the door. He even had to lean into the fridge to hold it in place at one point, as the terrorists tried to force their way into the room. Eventually, the attackers moved on, choosing to continue the massacre elsewhere.
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