The Best in the World

by Chris Jericho

  It wouldn’t be an easy character to play, but with the tricks I had learned from my time studying in Los Angeles with acting coach Kirk Baltz and working with The Groundlings (both described in the Emmy-winning novel Undisputed, available at dollar stores worldwide), I knew I could drop into this part and pull it off. The most important lesson I learned was, in order to make any character come alive, I had to commit one hundred percent and play it to the max.

  Whenever I was in the vicinity of a WWE arena, I would never break character. If I pulled into the arena parking lot, I wouldn’t look at the fans or acknowledge them and would never sign an autograph, no matter how hard it was for me. Once I was heading over to Madison Square Garden from the adjoining underground parking lot, when a father with his young son about the same age as my son, Ash, happened to get on the elevator at the same time as I did. I stared straight ahead at at the floor numbers for the entire ride, as Dad continuously asked me to sign an autograph.

  “Hey, Jericho, can you sign something for my kid?”

  I didn’t say a word.

  “Hey, no need to be rude. My kid’s a big fan and he’d like an autograph.”

  I continued staring intently at the flashing numbers, further incensing Dad as a tear welled up in little junior’s eye.

  “You’re not even gonna look at me, you son of a bitch?!?” Dad practically screamed as I escaped off the elevator the moment the doors opened.

  It didn’t make me feel great to be such a jerk, but I didn’t need the two of them going into the arena and smiling to each other as I made my ring entrance and telling the people sitting around them that I was actually a “nice guy in real life.” I wanted them to boo the shit out of me and tell anybody who would listen how much of a total asshole I’d been to them.

  I also wouldn’t allow the WWE to make any more Jericho merchandise. I didn’t want one person wearing my T-shirt and cheering for me because it was the froot (Jericho-ese for “cool,” as described in my street slang guide, Undisputed, available in comic book shops everywhere) thing to do. I vowed to myself I would never be the way the nWo was in WCW, the cool heels who everybody cheered for because they didn’t give a shit about anything, which ate babyfaces like me alive in the process. I wanted to be the ultimate heel with no redeeming qualities. I wanted to be Anton Chigurh, a bastard with an edge who was totally convinced what he was doing was the right thing and who people would be a little scared of as a result . . . and with good reason.

  Now that I had a new character and a battle plan all fleshed out, I needed the right babyface foil to help get it off the ground. And fatefully, I was matched up with the perfect heroic yin to my villainous yang.

  The Heartbreak Kid, Shawn Michaels.

  Shawn the Liar

  (Thanks to Ryan Frye of the Bleacher Report for Time Line Assistance)

  Anybody who knows me (or has read my second book, Undisputed, available at a pawnshop near you) knows that Shawn Michaels is one of my biggest inspirations to get into wrestling, and in my opinion, the greatest sports entertainer of all time. We’d had a classic match at WrestleMania 19 in Seattle (some say we stole the whole effin’ show, and I have to agree), but hadn’t really worked with each other since. That’s why I was happy to hear that I was going to be the guest referee for an HBK-Batista match at the Backlash PPV in Baltimore in April of 2008. I would officiate the match without bias and then turn heel on Shawn at the end, causing him to lose. Then we would have a match at the PPV the next month, when Shawn would exact his revenge on me and that would be it. Not the most well-thought-out plan, but it was a start. At the very least, I’d end up a heel and get another match with HBK.

  Little did I know that the planned one-off between Michaels and Jericho would last seven months and end up as one of the greatest feuds in WWE history.

  —

  When we showed up in Baltimore the day of the show, the finish for the HBK/Batista match hadn’t yet been decided. We asked Vince what he wanted, and he said, “I’ve got no idea; I just book the stuff. You guys figure it out.”

  Shawn and I agreed that there was no reason to rush my betrayal and subsequent heel turn, so we sat down to think of a different scenario. After a few hours of throwing various thoughts back and forth, Shawn came up with the idea that he would “injure” his knee on a powerbomb reversal, which would lull Batistsa into a false sense of security, allowing Shawn to superkick him and get the win. The twist was nobody would know whether he had really hurt himself, and that would get under my skin. If he truly did fake the injury in order to win, why were the fans still rewarding him with their undying devotion?

  We were both babyfaces, but I became more convinced week by week that he had feigned the whole injury to win the match and had been lying about it ever since. I held a mock Academy Awards ceremony on Raw and awarded him an Oscar for best acting job of the year. As the result of my suspicions, the people were slowly turning on me for accusing their beloved HBK of deception. He eventually convinced me he had really hurt himself and I did an in-ring promo apologizing for doubting him. After suckering me in even further, he admitted he was lying and wasn’t actually hurt. Then he superkicked me in the face and he obnoxiously danced out of the ring like one of Chippendales’ finest as the people cheered the hell out of him the whole time. And he was supposed to be the babyface!

  It was the perfect situation for my new heel persona. How could the fans cheer and admire a man who had lied to their face?

  What a bunch of hypocrites!

  In that moment, not only was a new catchphrase born, but my whole modus operandi for turning heel was hatched along with it. The brilliant part was it all happened so organically. It wasn’t a meticulously planned story line that had been mapped out for months beforehand; it was a story we booked on the fly that caught fire because it felt real. I had every reason to be mad. If someone you considered to be a friend lied to you for months until you felt legitimately bad for him, then admitted he was kidding and kicked you in the face, wouldn’t that piss you off?

  What made my case even stronger was that when the fans were forced to make a choice between Jericho and Michaels, they chose Shawn the Liar. He was such a heroic legend to the WWE Universe that even this blatant display of bullshit wasn’t enough to turn the WWE Universe on him and there was nothing the lowly Chris Jericho could do to change it. The whole situation couldn’t have been plotted better if we tried. Then we started trying.

  Week by week we met in the writers’ room with Michael Hayes, Brian Gewirtz, and Vince himself to plot out the upcoming twists and turns. We had stumbled onto the rarest of things—a hot moneymaking angle—and we wanted to fire it up as much as we possibly could.

  The next step was a babyface vs. babyface match at Judgment Day, where Shawn got the victory with a quick roll-up. After five years, it was great to be back in the ring with my favorite opponent of all time, and our in-ring chemistry was as good as ever. Physically, psychologically, mentally, and attitudinally, we were the perfect rivals. It was an excellent technical wrestling match and yet it was the last one we would ever have like it, because a few weeks after the Judgment Day PPV, I made my own judgment on Shawn Michaels.

  He had to be destroyed.

  We decided I would make my official heel turn on Shawn the next month after the One Night Stand PPV, where he had a stretcher match with Batista. I suggested to Brian that I could have Shawn as my guest on “The Highlight Reel” the next night on Raw and throw him through the obscenely expensive JeriTron 5000.

  One of the most famous moments in Raw history was in 1992, when Shawn turned on his partner, Marty Jannetty, and threw him through the plate-glass window of Brutus Beefcake’s Barber Shop. I thought it would be a froot homage and a bit of poetic justice to smash Shawn’s head through my own pane of glass. On June 9, 2008, in Oakland, I went on Raw and told the audience my next guest was my inspiration, my mentor and, most importa
nt, my friend. Shawn came to the ring, and while he was soaking in the adulation of the fans, I reminded them how he had deceived them about his knee injury. He cut me off and reminded me that he’d said from the start he would do whatever it took to beat Batista and that’s what he’d done. So he never lied to anybody . . . except me.

  I could hear the swell of boos rising up from the audience as I continued defending myself, claiming to be the only honest man in the whole scenario and calling Shawn out for his deception. Then I asked him, “How does Shawn Michaels, HBK, one of the greatest performers of all time and one of the most highly decorated superstars in the history of this business, turn into such a lying, cheating, pathetic little worm of a human being?”

  With that, I clotheslined him to the mat and began pounding on him as the crowd looked on in horror. The turn had been such a long time coming, I think the fans were wondering if I was ever going to actually do it. But they reacted huge when I finally did, especially when as he rallied back I cut him off with a swift kick to the plums.

  He crumpled to the ground like a sack of dirty potatoes (just as he did when I nutted him at the end of our 2003 Mania match) and the crowd went silent. I towered over him, staring into his eyes and his eyes only. In my mind at that moment, there wasn’t another living soul on the planet. There was only Shawn and me.

  I told him quietly, so that only the camera mics could hear, that he had caused all of this by lying to me. Then I dragged him to his feet and cradled his face in my hands.

  “The worst is yet to come,” I said, and threw him face-first into the JeriTron 5000.

  Earlier in the day, the WWE prop team had gutted the TV and removed the flat screen, replacing it with sugar glass. Now, I already didn’t trust sugar glass because it never worked properly the times I’d used it in the past. It cut the shit out of me when Kane threw me through a sugar-glass picture window back in ’02 and then again months later when X-Pac broke a sugar-glass wine bottle over my head.

  But despite my reservations, the gimmicked JeriTron looked perfect as it hung above the ring like an overgrown ugly square spider and nobody suspected what was going to happen (even though there were some concerns from Vince that the “Highlight Reel” graphic wouldn’t be displayed on the screen because it wasn’t a working television). We’d rehearsed earlier in the day to see if Shawn could break through the glass quickly and realistically and if the ensuing shard explosion would be visual enough. We filmed the dry run and it looked amazing—but it didn’t even come close to the real thing.

  When I grabbed Shawn by the back of his head and ran him toward the screen, I let go just before impact so he could take his own bump. He put his hand in front of his face and used his momentum to head-butt the JeriTron as hard as he could. And the results were spectacular.

  The sugar glass disintingrated and thousands of minute shards sprayed over the ring, as the Tron swung wildly askew over the crowd’s heads. Shawn writhed in pain, holding his eye with both hands, as the audience gasped and the announcers stopped talking to enhance the severity of what I’d done.

  The heel Jericho of old would’ve been doing a war dance or the electric slide in the center of the ring to rile up the fans even further, but this was a new man. Everyone was waiting for me to say something clever or deliver some kind of witty quip, but instead I walked straight to the back without a second glance, leaving the announcers to speculate about how badly Shawn was injured.

  The segment wasn’t just a home run, it was a mafakkin’ grand slam in the bottom of the ninth in the final game of the WWE World Series. Jericho vs. Michaels was now the hottest angle in the company. But in the words of Karen Carpenter, we’d only just begun.

  —

  The WWE announced the next day that due to my vicious onslaught, Shawn had suffered a detatched retina and his career was in jeopardy. It was pure coincidence that Shawn does have a bit of a wandering eye, but that added to our angle the same way Jim Carrey’s real chipped tooth added to the Lloyd Christmas character. People still ask me if I’m the reason for that wonky eye, and as much as I’d like to take credit, that was all God’s doing.

  The next step was a grudge match at the next PPV, The Great American Bash. We heated up the angle even more a few weeks earlier when I gave HBK a drop toehold into the corner of the announce table, further “injuring” his eye. This was an Arn Anderson idea that sounded good in concept but ended up great with Shawn’s execution. There was a dangerous margin for error with him driving his eye toward the corner of the table at high speed and then pulling back at the last second to protect himself. But as usual, Shawn’s selling was masterful and it looked totally real.

  On the night of the Bash, Shawn stormed to the ring intensely, ever so subtly selling his eye. Our match was a war for the ages that was as good as our “technical wrestling match” a few months earlier, but in a totally different way. This one was a brutal bloodbath. We beat the unholy hell out of each other until I busted Shawn open and he bled so profusely that a few days later, Vince banned blood forever from all further WWE shows. He’s stuck to that verdict ever since, with dire penalities for anyone who dared to challenge him on it. Believe me, I know. (That’s more foreshadowing, kids.)

  I won the match by ref stoppage when I kept visciously pounding his wounded eye until he couldn’t defend himself any longer. The new Jericho character had arrived and was a huge success. My combination of Bockwinkle suits and big words, Chigurh slow-paced, intense speech patterns, a more intense in-ring style, and Shawn’s incredible performances had made me the most hated man in the company. The kernel of truth that I continued to use as the crux of my motivation to act the way I did was still a thorn in the fans’ sides as well. They were the hypocrites, and whenever I reminded them of that, the “Jericho Sucks” chants were deafening. My character had no catchphrases, merch, or redeeming qualities whatsoever and that was exactly the way I wanted it.

  Public Enemy Number One

  As a result of the reactions I was getting, Vince decided he wanted to put me with a “heater,” a big guy who would help me cheat to win and be an intimidating presence I could hide behind whenever things got bad. Gewirtz mentioned that they were considering a new recruit named Ricky Ortiz, who was standing out in the WWE developmental system and had a personality similar to mine. Ricky did have great charisma, but he was playing a goofy over-the-top character that would have meshed great with the old Y2J, but not with the new me. We were also pretty much the same height, and if I was going to have a heater, I wanted somebody a lot bigger.

  So I went to the Florida Championship Wrestling (FCW) training center, where the WWE prospects worked out, to scout for a better fit. When I saw this massive, jacked-up, good-looking dude with a similar haircut to mine I thought, I want that guy. His name was Rob Terry, but it turned out his days in the WWE were numbered. As much of an amazing physical presence as he was, he was let go shortly afterward (he eventually made it to TNA) and I was left empty-handed. A few days later, the name Lance Cade was brought up and I thought he would be perfect.

  Lance was a handsome six-foot, six-inch muscular kid, who’d originally been trained by Shawn, so story line–wise he was perfect. He became my protégé after he attacked Michaels on Raw, with the explanation he wasn’t going to wait around for Shawn to attack him first like he had with all of his other friends at one time or another. It was the truth. Shawn’s track record with tag-team partners was pretty awful, which substantiated my claim that HBK was the true villain in all of this.

  I really enjoyed working with Cade, for his presence gave me a completely different set of options for my matches. He could be my excuse for winning or losing a match and help me get heat on my opponent. He was still a little green but was on his way to becoming a well-rounded performer and a real asset.

  Then he passed out on a plane and got fired.

  When I heard the news, I called John Laurinaitis (the head of
Talent Relations) to see if he would give Cade another chance, but the plane incident was another in a long line of incidents for Lance, and that was his last straw. I was really mad at him for blowing his big chance and affecting our angle at the same time. I never heard from him again after his firing, until a few years later when he dropped by a live event to apoligize to me. He eventually got hired back by the WWE but was let go again soon after, and died of heart failure in 2010. It was a damn shame because I really liked Lance, and if he were alive today, I think he’d be a big star.

  —

  After The Great American Bash, Shawn was off Raw for a few weeks selling his eye injury, with his career seemingly in jeopardy. Behind the scenes, the plan was for us to have our last match at SummerSlam, but Shawn had a real issue with that. The PPV was being built around the double main event of John Cena vs. Batista and Undertaker vs. Edge in a Hell in a Cell and Shawn felt that our story line would be lost in the shuffle. Vince argued that he needed the attraction of the Michaels-Jericho blow-off match to solidify the SummerSlam lineup.

  But Shawn had an idea for an even bigger attraction. He’d advertise that he was going to be making a major announcement at the PPV, with every indication pointing toward him retiring. Vince loved it, and thought people would pay to hear what Shawn would say, especially if they thought he was announcing the end of his legendary career. So it was agreed that our story would continue through SummerSlam and finish up at the September PPV.

  The plan for the PPV was for me to interrupt Shawn’s announcement and beat him down, which would lead to him putting everything on the line to face me in one more match. But I was driving in my car one afternoon, when he called me to say he’d been toying with the idea of having his wife, Rebecca, and their two kids come to the ring with him. When I came down for the interrupt, I’d go to sucker-punch him, but he’d move out of the way and I’d hit his WIFE instead.