The Best in the World

by Chris Jericho

  I slowly made my way through the pack and rolled to a stop at a red light a few feet away from the parking lot. Suddenly, there was a loud noise to my left and I saw some jack-off kicking in the driver’s-side door of my car. I didn’t have the insurance option on the rental, so I knew he’d just cost me the amount of the repair and he was now standing in a fighting pose bouncing back and forth on his legs like a scrawny Brock Lesnar. Ever since my bud Dimebag Darrell had been shot and killed onstage at a Damageplan concert by a disgruntled, psychopathic fan, I’d taken fan attacks a little more seriously. What if this asshole had a gun? Was I just going to sit there and find out? Fuck that. I got out of the car and yelled at him to back away.

  I figured as soon as I got out of the vehicle, security would intervene and eliminate my problem, but I figured wrong. Nobody came to my rescue and in the interim, another mob of fans converged on me and knocked the door shut behind me. Now I really did feel like Rick Grimes surrounded by shambling, mindless, drooling drones, and considering how drunk some of these zombies were, I wasn’t too far off. Unfortunately, I didn’t have a gun and I could smell the booze on the breath of Mr. Car Kicker as he circled around toward me. I could tell he was spoiling for a fight by the look in his eyes, the booze on his breath, and his nonsensical accusations of “You screwed Shawn Michaels. You’re a disgrace to Canada!”

  Good Lord, dude, it’s a fucking show! When Anthony Hopkins walks down the street, he’s not wearing a straitjacket, ready to eat a human liver with some fava beans and a nice Chianti! Hannibal Lecter is a character, the same way that Chris Jericho is a character. Not that this guy understood that as he was ready to go to war with his nemesis, the Jericho he knew from TV.

  I had spent the afternoon doing my job by giving the fans an evil villain to hate, and now those same fans were allowed to just waltz right over and attack me? I never should’ve been put in this situation in the first place. Where was the security?

  My question was answered when a dopey-looking rent-a-cop wearing a yellow SECURITY shirt came wandering over to assist me. Or so I thought, but all he did was stand in there with his back to the crowd and tell me to get back in my car. Meanwhile the attack of the fans continued as the gathering crowd blocked my way and Eddie Drunk advanced on me quickly.

  “Turn around, this guy is going to swing at me!” I yelled, but the security slow had no idea what I was talking about, so I pushed him aside. Dory Drunk Jr. swung at me and I took a step backward to avoid his blow, grabbed his shoulders, and shoved him straight to the ground, scattering the crowd.

  “DO YOUR FUCKIN’ JOB!!” I screamed at nobody in particular, as the fans continued asking me for autographs and filming the proceedings on their cell phones.

  I took stock of the situation and decided it was too far out of control, with the potential to get a lot worse VERY quickly. It was time to bail. I was wading through the crowd back to my car, when I felt someone weakly punching me in the ass and trying to grab my package. I spun around and saw a chick with glasses and a bad blond dye job screaming in my face, “You hit my boyfriend!”

  Car Kicker’s more inebriated worser half was now trying to take me out as well. I wriggled out of the way and managed to open the car door, slipping into the front seat. Before I could shut it, Bad Dye Blonde followed me inside. I have no idea what she was planning to do and I’ll bet she didn’t either, but I knew what I was going to do . . . and spit a big greener into her face.

  It was the quickest thing I could think of to get her out of the car without actually touching her. My saliva salvo caused her to recoil, but she bounced right back and tried to force her way in again. I pushed her in the chest as hard as I could to get her away from me. She disappeared into the crowd and I started the ignition, just as another dipshit jumped on the hood of the car and held on to the windshield wipers like a bad guy in a James Bond movie.

  I did a hard swerve to throw Odd Job off the car and drove away as fast as I could, glancing in the rearview mirror as I sped down the downtown street. The mob was waving their arms and hurling profanities at me like villagers out to kill the monster. All they needed were pitchforks and torches.

  I was on my way back to the ferry, when I got a call from Jimmy Tillis (the same head of WWE security who wasn’t around when I got hit with the battery in Frisco a few months earlier) saying that the cops (where the hell had they been when I was getting attacked?) wanted me to come back to the arena to discuss what happened. I told them both to go fuck themselves, as I was fuming and had a ferry to catch.

  I texted Vince to tell him what happened so he would hear the news from me first. It was a lesson I learned when I got into the fight with Goldberg years earlier (as told in the self-help classic Undisputed, available at a flea market near you) and Vince was mad he heard about it from everybody other than me. I explained there had been an altercation with some fans in the parking lot of the Victoria arena and it was a good thing I told him when I did because when I woke up, the word that a WWE wrestler had gotten into a fight with a bunch of fans (one of them a woman) was all over the news.

  This was a big story to the mainstream press, and I was deluged with requests asking for my comments. Soon afterward, I got a call from the head of WWE PR telling me that the networks had gotten ahold of some footage that made me look really bad and now wanted my head on a platter.

  A clip of the fight filmed on somebody’s cell phone had been released and it appeared to show me punching Bad Dye Blonde in the face. Of course I hadn’t punched her in the face or anywhere else, for that matter, but the clip sure made it look that way. It had been filmed from a close-up side angle and when I thrust my arm forward to push her away from the car, my hand disappeared offscreen. The last you saw of my fist, it was heading toward her face, so the natural assumption was I had punched her in the mouth (even though I’d only pushed her in the chest), and that’s all the gossip news channels needed to see. They were like a school of piranhas frenzied over a drop of blood in the water and ready to rip me apart, with the worst of them all being Nancy Grace.

  She had treated me with respect when I’d chosen her show to offer my thoughts about the Chris Benoit tragedy a few years earlier, but now it was like we had never met. She ran the clip multiple times, demanding my immediate firing by the WWE and subsequent arrest by the Canadian police. “This hooligan thinks he can do whatever he wants by striking a female fan and getting away with it? Not on my watch! I demand Chris Jericho be punished for his actions to the full extent of the law.”

  It was typical sensationalist bullshit, but I wasn’t worried in the least, because I knew the truth. The clip didn’t do much for my reputation, though. When I was told the two idiots who had attacked me were pressing charges, I was advised by WWE legal to press my own set of charges as part of their strategy to protect me. I spoke to the Victoria Police Department, who gave me the good news that they’d arrested Car Kicker and BDB and had found witnesses willing to testify that I was in the right for defending myself. The only drawback was I would have to fly back to Victoria (one of the farthest places to travel to in North America from Tampa) to appear in court in a few months.

  It was a brutal situation that could get a lot worse depending on Vince’s reaction. I’d already heard that some of the higher-ups in the company were angry with me and wanted to release a statement vilifying me for what had gone down, but that didn’t matter. They weren’t my boss . . . Vince was.

  I went into his office in the arena in Oakland the next day at Raw and explained what happened. He listened intently and said something that meant the world to me. “You did the right thing and we will support and defend you as a company.” To hear he was behind me washed away the stress I was feeling about the whole situation—even though I knew I was in the right, I worried on some level that I had overreacted. Vince agreed that I never should’ve been left alone in the parking lot and put in that position in the first place. Not onl
y was he not mad at me, he promised it would never happen to me again.

  I know that he was secretly proud of me for the work I had been doing and the reactions I was getting. I had struck gold with this character, and because it was so believable, sometimes I had to face the consequences. If the odd fan tried to kill me once in a while, then so be it. Vince told me a story of how he was once on a private runway waiting to board the company jet years earlier, when an unidentified man raced toward him on the tarmac. The intruder was tackled by security and was found with a gun in the waistband of his jeans. So Vince completely understood my motivation for defending myself.

  A few days later, I got another call from the Victoria police saying that all charges against me had been dropped due to the lack of evidence. That also meant that the charges against Drunk and Drunker had been dropped as well, but I didn’t give a shit as it saved me having to take the twelve-hour journey to Victoria. The most important thing was I was innocent and my good name had been cleared, even though the story that “Chris Jericho was cleared of all wrongdoing in the Victoria incident” didn’t have quite the same ring as “Maniacal WWE wrestler goes on woman-beating rampage,” and the news of my innocence wasn’t mentioned on Nancy Grace or anywhere else.

  I’m still waiting for my apology, Nancy. You know where to find me.

  Six Years and Five Months Later

  As hated as I was and as many times as I was attacked by random fans, there was one person who despised me more than anbody else on the planet: Shawn Michaels.

  But that was only within the confines of a WWE ring, because in reality, Shawn and I were the closest we’d ever been. We’d created something special and as veteran performers in the wrestling business, we knew that didn’t happen every day. But it was time to once again up the ante.

  On Raw the night after SummerSlam, HBK came to the ring wearing his heart on his sleeve and made a shocking announcement. He told the crowd that after looking his injured wife in the eye, there was no way he was going to retire no matter what the doctors said. Against their orders, he challenged me to a match at the next PPV Unforgiven, but since WWE officials wouldn’t sanction the match, it would only be allowed to happen if Shawn signed a waiver stating that if he was seriously injured, nobody at the company would be held responsible.

  At a Raw in Indianapolis, Vince told me I would be working twice at Unforgiven. First off I would do the unsanctioned match with Shawn with the finish being him kicking the ever-living shit out of me to get his revenge for all of the horrible atrocities I had committed on him and his family. Then I would come back and work again in the main event (and there it is again) in the Championship Scramble, a slightly confusing concept where five superstars would come to the ring in five-minute intervals until everyone was fighting each other at once. Then, whoever got the last pin before the time ran out would end up as the World Champion.

  I wasn’t supposed to be officially in the match, but I’d replace CM Punk, who would be deemed unable to compete after being attacked backstage earlier in the night. Got all that? I was confused too, but what Vince said afterward didn’t confuse me in the least.

  “You will go over in the match and become the new WWE Champion.”

  Chris Jericho was going to be the new WWE Champion? I had been waiting to hear him say those words since I dropped the Undisputed Championship to HHH at WrestleMania 18 back in 2002.

  Finally, six years and five months later, I was getting another shot at the ultimate prize in my business. Even though I was technically a three-time World Champion (WCW title from The Rock 11/2001, WCW title from The Rock 12/2001, WWE title from Steve Austin 12/2001), it had been a long time since I’d held the gold. And the first three times, I wasn’t really a top guy anyway, but this time was different. I was the most hated heel in the company embroiled in the hottest feud in years (veteran Blackjack Lanza told me it was the best feud in WWE history), and on certain nights I believed I was the best sports entertainer in the world. It was my time, and now (after almost getting a pay cut before I left the WWE in 2005), I was going to be THE MAN.

  The best part was I knew I deserved it.

  My getting this ipso facto promotion to World Champion was also a testament to the work Shawn and I had done. When we started our story line, I was the Intercontinental Champion, scheduled to do a quick turn on Shawn with a one-match blow-off. But Shawn had done everything in his power to put me over and now I was embroiled in the angle of my career.

  The unsanctioned match was made official during an in-ring contract signing on Raw that was one of my favorite performances ever. I sat at the table that had been set up in the ring across from HBK and never looked him in the face once. I totally avoided eye contact and it came off so slimy, such a cowardly reaction after all I had done to him. I showed no remorse, no repentance for punching his wife, offered no apology for messing up his eye, and made no excuses for anything that had happened.

  Shawn stewed silently as I signed the contract, but the moment I did, he attacked, throwing me out of the ring and flying out after me. But he landed awkwardly on the floor and immediately grabbed his elbow, leaving me to scuttle to the safety of the backstage door.

  I thought nothing of it until I found him in the trainer’s room afterward, grimacing in pain as Doc Amann twisted and turned his arm in a multide of directions, deducing that he may have suffered a torn tricep.

  A torn tricep sounded pretty serious . . . and it was.

  If Shawn had torn his tricep, it meant immediate surgery and a four-to-six-month recovery period. It meant our angle was over. And it meant I wouldn’t be ending up as the World Champion.

  —

  My cell phone rang and when I saw the name SHAWN MICHAELS on the screen, I answered with bated breath. I’d been waiting all week to find out if his tricep injury was real or prognosis negative (or was it Rochelle Rochelle). Thankfully, it was prognosis positive (the sequel) and I proceeded to do the Future World Champ Dance around my living room. If you want to know what it is, just ask me about it the next time we meet. And trust me, it’s much better than the Nitro Dance.

  It turned out that Shawn had only suffered a partial tricep tear and would be totally fine for our match on Sunday. The Lord had come through and answered both of our prayers, although if I’d known then what Shawn was going to do to me, I might’ve had a different prayer request.

  The unsanctioned match was barbarically brutal and one of the best I’ve ever had. During my prematch promo, I again showed no remorse and proceeded to blame everything that had gone down on Shawn and his fans, declaring that I was proud of what I’d done to him and his family.

  That was enough to send him completely over the edge and he totally dominated me—or maybe massacred might be a better word. He was beastly in his battery (awesome alliteration), never letting up as he relentlessly pounded me from the mount like he was a UFC fighter.

  I eventually stopped him and climbed up the top rope, but he bashed me in the head with a chair and sent me crashing through a table that had been set up earlier. I’d never bumped backward through a table before and I was a little nervous, but it was postioned perfectly, allowing me to land directly in the middle and break it completely in two. The crowd roared its approval as I sold the effects of the fall, with the outer band that encircled the edge of the table wrapped around my forehead like a plastic crown of thorns.

  Shawn was wearing street-fighting clothes (I thought it would be cheeky if I wore my wrestling trunks, as if I was underestimating the viciousness of the match), so he took off his belt and whipped me like a redheaded mule. He was relentless with his strikes and must have lashed me a dozen times. Have you ever been whipped with a leather belt? It hurts! The crowd could feel (and hear) every blow, due to the loud crack that emanated off my poor back every time Shawn punished my exposed flesh. The massive welts that were rising on my back added to the effect and there was nothing “s
ports entertainment” about them.

  As he annihilated me with pure rage, in classic HBK fashion, he added an extra element of emotion that took things to yet another level.

  He started crying.

  It was pure genius. Even though he was getting the revenge that he and the audience wanted him to get, in the end, it accomplished nothing. Just like when Maximus kills Commodus at the end of Gladiator and gets revenge on the man who murdered his family, it still didn’t bring them back. Shawn would have to live with what I’d done to his wife for the rest of his life, and the emotion and facial expressions that he displayed during that match were nothing short of masterful. It was one of his finest hours and the perfect example of why I’ve always felt that if Shawn chose to pursue acting, he would be very succcesful in Hollywood.

  He continued to pound me, with tears streaming down his face, until the referee stopped the match in a turnaround of our finish from a few months earlier. Despite the victory, Shawn was a defeated man battling with his own conscience over what had happened. Meanwhile, I was beaten, bruised, and scarred as blood dripped out of my nose. But the night wasn’t over.

  HBK beats the hell out of me during the unsanctioned match. Notice his heavily taped-up elbow due to the feared torn tricep. Jess took this picture from the front row.

  I went to the dressing room and waited for my turn to enter the Scramble, with the blood still drying on my face. I decided not to wash it off, change my wrist tape, or fix my hair, because I wanted to come back to the ring the exact same mess I was when I’d left it. Nobody was going to forget the beating Shawn had given me.