The Best in the World

by Chris Jericho

  As we drove through the city, I marveled at the brilliant architecture of the immaculately constructed buildings, each one seeming more beautiful than the last, as if the designers were playing a game of one-upmanship with each other. We arrived at a gorgeous multitiered arena that looked like a fortress and was about as hard to get inside as one. Armed guards checked our passports and looked through our bags multiple times before allowing us entry.

  Backstage workers and security guards buzzed around, doing a whole lot of nothing and wearing very concerned looks on their faces as they did it. I was whisked away to a press conference and placed in front of a gang of suit-clad reporters, with nary a smile among them. They asked me generic questions and I responded with sarcastic and comical answers that would’ve brought the house down in any other country. But not with this lot. Either the translator wasn’t properly relaying my words, or these guys had no sense of humor.

  “Is it illegal to laugh in China?” I deadpanned. Nobody laughed . . . in fear of incarceration, apparently.

  As strange as the press conference was, the show itself was even stranger. We were briefed beforehand that the show was sold out, but we weren’t allowed to punch or choke our opponents and under no circumstances could we do anything on the floor. If we did, the government officials would shut down the show, as they were skittish about having us there in the first place.

  But when I walked out for my match, I was surprised to see a largely empty arena with nobody on the floor and only a few pockets of fans scattered around in the stands. Directly in front of the ring was a long table decorated with bunting and flowers, and sitting behind it was a group of diplomats in tuxedos like something out of a James Bond movie. I guess they wanted the best seats in the house to witness this barbaric display of Western entertainment.

  But the strangest part was that the upper deck was jam-packed with rabid fans screaming and cheering our every move like teenage girls at a One Direction concert. Besides the upper-deckers, though, the rest of the meager audience sat on their chopsticks and did nothing. A sold-out show usually meant a lively, standing-room-only crowd in a packed house. What kind of sellout was this?

  Later I found out that all the tickets had been bought by the government, which then distributed a small portion to the fans and threw away the rest because they were afraid a riot was going to break out. Guess nobody had filled them in that we were entertainers and not actual bloodsport fighters.

  Punk and I share a smile for some ringside fan after some match in some arena.

  What the Chinese government didn’t understand about the WWE, the government in Dubai did, and we were treated like royalty during our three-night stand in Abu Dhabi. I noticed the audience was wearing an interesting mix of fashions, some in Western-style street clothes, others in traditional Muslim garb. I was teaming with R-Truth, and during his rap sing-along entrance, it was hilarious to see people in burkas and keffiyehs hopping up out of their chairs, raising the roof, and chanting “What’s up!” like something out of The Naked Gun.

  Much like Shanghai, Abu Dhabi was immaculate and boasted spotless streets lined with perfectly groomed shrubbery, and every car on the street seemed to have been built within the last few years. We were staying thirty minutes outside the city in a brand-new entertainment complex complete with five-star hotels, a waterslide park, a Ferrari theme park, and bars and restaurants everywhere. (There was even a Tim Hortons!)

  After the show, we went to have a few drinks at a posh nightclub on the top floor of one of the hotels. I was enjoying a fine Yeah Boy! and minding my own business when a mean-looking balding dude with dark skin, a unibrow, and a bad attitude started barking orders at us in Arabic. He was obviously drunk and not very happy that the American (I’m from Winnipeg, you idiot) pigs were invading his territory. He finished his tirade, and his friends started laughing at Unibrow’s witty repartee. He went back to the bar, but he had rubbed me the wrong way and I thought I’d give him a little what-for. So I followed him and, without a second glance, threw my shoulder into his back with a solid twist. Uni was off balance, so my little nudge caused him to lose his footing and he stumbled into the wall as I disappeared through the crowd. Apparently, he didn’t appreciate my love tap and was waiting for me outside when we left the bar about an hour later.

  Uni and his crew where lined up on the curb and looked pretty intimidating in their black sport coats. I hoped I hadn’t gotten in over my head, but just in case the situation got out of control and I had to take a swing at someone, I stuck my old-school hotel room key (didn’t know they still made these) in between my first and middle fingers.

  “Hey, motherfucker, I’ve been waiting for you,” Uni said, looking like Samuel Jackson but sounding like Michael Jackson.

  “I see that,” I replied, fingers clenched around my weapon.

  “You just made a big mistake, pig. My father owns twenty-seven percent of this city and I have all the power here.”

  Wow, that was a random number.

  “You messed with the wrong guy and you’re going to pay for it with YOUR LIFE. . . .”

  My life? I expected him to finish his sentence with “Dr. Jones!” and laugh diabolically. What was with this guy?!

  “I am placing a bounty on your head for twelve million dollars. You have twenty-four hours to live!”

  I’d never had a bounty placed on my head before and I actually felt kind of froot, like I was The Outlaw Josey Wales (sans Tarantino commentary, of course). But there was something I had to know.

  “Is twelve million dollars a good bounty?” I asked, feeling like Larry David. “Like in the grand scheme of things, is that a lot of money to pay for someone’s head? If I were say, Mel Gibson, would it cost more to have me executed?”

  “Careful, man!” Jack Swagger warned me in a panic. “This is the Wild West over here. You can’t talk back to these guys!”

  He was probably right, but I didn’t know how things worked in Abu Dhabi and was curious. Maybe placing bounties on people’s heads was an average thing over here, like playing Parcheesi or going to Applebee’s was in the States.

  But if I only had twenty-four hours to live, then I needed to know the answer to one more question.

  “OK, I understand you’re going to pay somebody twelve million for my head, but if your dad owns twenty-seven percent of this city, then why are you driving yourself around in a Dodge Charger?”

  Uni fumed and Swagger cringed, worried that I was poking a bear. My eyes drifted to the top of the buildings across the lot and wondered if there was a rifle scope trained on my head at that very moment.

  “You have one day to live!” he reiterated as he got in the Charger, followed by all five of his cronies. They kept filing in as if it was an ugly clown car, until they were all stuffed in like a pack of teenage girls driving to the mall. They were practically sitting on each other’s laps and their intimidation factor pretty much flew out the open window of the Charger at that point.

  “Twenty-four hours!” Uni said one last time as one of his minions squished up against his shoulder from the backseat. . . .

  He gunned down the road and squealed the tires around the corner as Swagger and I started laughing and waved bye-bye. (By the way, in case you’re wondering, I did not die within the twenty-four-hour time limit.)

  —

  I was excited to tour Brazil as I’d never been, and the WWE was now headed there for the first time to try to open up the possibly lucrative market. But the tour got off to a rocky start when our first flight out of the States got canceled and we didn’t arrive in São Paulo until a few hours before the show.

  It was a hot steamy evening and I was already sweating as I prepared to face off against Punk in the main event (there it is again . . . I’m such a worker). The crowd was a decent size but hardly a sellout and they’d been fairly quiet throughout the show, as if they were still tryi
ng to figure out what it was they were watching (maybe they just wanted to see dancing). The arena security made up of members of the Brazilian Army lounged around the arena with their guns displayed on their hips to remind everyone who was in charge.

  Punk came down to the ring and got a good reaction when he hopped on the apron, waving a Brazilian flag that a ringside fan had given him. As he marched past me, brandishing the banner, I thought about snatching it out of his hand, but he didn’t come close enough. He draped it on the turnbuckle and ref Mike Chioda took it to hand back to the fan.

  “No, give me that flag, Mikey,” I hissed.

  I wanted to do something to wake the crowd up, so I took the flag from Chioda, dropped it to the mat, stomped on it twice, and kicked it to the floor in a hail of boos. It was a standard heel tactic that I had used many times before, but even that didn’t get the response I was expecting. People were mad, but not “jumping out of their seats wanting to kill me” mad, which was what I was hoping for.

  We began the match and I had just started getting heat on Punk about five minutes later, when I noticed out of the corner of my eye a second ref in the ring. Did Chioda get hurt?

  “Stop the match now,” Charles Robinson whispered in my ear, but I ignored him and continued my beatdown.

  “Seriously, Chris! You have to stop the match NOW and apologize for kicking the flag or you’re going to get arrested!”

  I stopped kicking Punk and took a step back. The entranceway was now swarming with Brazilian soldiers, all of them glaring at me. Then John Laurinaitis ran down the aisle, waving his arms and yelling, “You need to apologize now, Chris! This is real, so don’t joke around!”

  I could tell by Johnny’s demeanor that there was some serious shit going on, so I grabbed the mic in the center of the ring and addressed the crowd as Punk sold his beatdown in the corner.

  “I just want to say that I would never purposely disrespect the country of Brazil or your beautiful flag. I did what I did to entertain you and I would like to sincerely apologize to everybody here in the arena and to the entire country of Brazil. I’m sorry.”

  The crowd applauded respectfully but seemed a bit confused, as if they were wondering why I was apologizing in the first place. I turned my attention back to Punk (who’d been waiting in the corner patiently), and like a kid yelling “game on” after a car zooms by in the middle of a street hockey game, I continued the match.

  Punk won the bout and then wore the flag like a cape as he made his ringside victory lap, slapping the fans’ hands all the way. His lionizing of the banner was the payoff to me kicking it earlier and was what we had planned the entire time. Bad guy assaults flag, good guy assaults bad guy, then beats him, and gets revenge on behalf of the entire country.

  I felt that having to give the apology in the middle of the match was a little overdramatic, but if that’s what the authorities needed in order to calm down, then so be it. But when I walked through the curtain, everybody was staring at me with a threatening glare, like I was Flounder walking into the roadhouse to see Otis Day and the Knights. I went past a group of soldiers and their eyes bored a hole straight throught me, with one older guy in particular (who looked like the Nazi that Indiana Jones throws through the windshield of the truck in Raiders of the Lost Ark) giving me the real stink eye.

  Dean Malenko, the road agent on the tour (along with Johnny), rushed over and pulled me into his office.

  “When you kicked the flag, that old guy went crazy. He’s some sort of colonel and wanted to rush the ring and arrest you right then and there. We had to beg the guy not to do it and he settled for an apology, but he’s still furious. He thinks all of this is real and wants to take you right to jail.”

  I could only imagine having to spend the night in a Brazilian prison, wearing nothing but my sparkly short little wrestling trunks. I’d be targeted as a lady boy instantly. That was a dash of cold-water reality and I realized just how much trouble I was in.

  I hurried back to the dressing room and changed my clothes just in case the colonel changed his mind and decided to take me away. I also thought I’d better text Vince and head this off at the pass before he found out from somebody else and things got out of hand like the London glow stick incident. I shot him a message explaining that I had upset the Brazillian Army by kicking a flag and I wouldn’t do it again on future tours.

  Vince replied immediately, “There will be no more Brazilian tours for you or any of us. The WWE will no longer be allowed to perform in Brazil in the future! WTF, Chris!”

  I don’t know who told him we wouldn’t be able to go back to Brazil, but I tracked down our marketing rep and asked if that was the case. He said he hadn’t heard anything along those lines, but it didn’t matter because Vince was already seething.

  I texted him back and told him I’d kicked flags a dozen times before in the States, Canada, Mexico, Japan, and nobody had ever been this upset before. But Vince wasn’t having it.

  “It was F’N stupid! When was the last time I allowed this kind of shit? 1985? Go home, you’re suspended. We will talk when you get back to the U.S. Thanks for ruining what would have been a great market for us. Who knows how this is going to hurt us elsewhere?”

  Suspended? Now I was pissed off. After all I’d done for the WWE over the years, he was going to punish me for doing my job as a heel? I called him immediately and he barked that he was too mad to talk and not to call him again. So I texted him and told him he should have my back in a situation like this instead of turning on me.

  Then I started getting messages from random people saying they read on wwe.com that I’d been suspended. I went online and read the headline: CHRIS JERICHO HAS BEEN SUSPENDED INDEFINITELY DUE TO AN IRRESPONSIBLE ACT OF DENIGRATING THE BRAZILIAN FLAG.

  The word denigrating had Vince’s fingerprints all over it, so I knew he had written the statement himself. It bugged me that he had posted the info so quickly, as he really could’ve just ignored the whole thing. But he felt the WWE had to officially acknowledge the incident and deal with it before videos of the incident popped up on YouTube.

  I asked him if he’d even seen what happened (he hadn’t) because if so, he would know that I didn’t do much more than lightly stomp on the flag and slide it out of the ring with my foot. Vince didn’t care and created a self-fulfilling prophecy, because once wwe.com posted the info, it spread quickly.

  “Great. The story just broke on TMZ,” Vince texted me.

  “That’s because you posted the info thirty minutes earlier,” I fired back.

  In Vince’s mind, he had to suspend me to cover his ass with the Brazilian government as well as other countries around the world that he hoped to do business with in the future. I couldn’t blame him for it. He had to show that if any of his employees insulted a country or broke the rules, they would be dealt with immediately. And I had broken the rules, since kicking a flag was a felony in Brazil . . . although that was something I wish they would’ve told me BEFORE the show.

  Now that I’d been kicked off the tour, there was a mad scramble to find me a flight out of Brazil. Rather than leave me there by myself and take the chance I’d get carted away by the authorities in the middle of the night, Vince decided it would be best for me to take the overnight charter to Ecuador with the rest of the crew and fly home from there the next day.

  He eventually called me to make sure I was safe, and to say he wanted me out of the country ASAP. He made it clear that under no circumstances was I to allow myself to be separated from the rest of the company, and then explained why he was so angry at me.

  “These people have nothing but pride for their country. All they have is the flag and what it represents. What if the fans had rioted and somebody got hurt? That would’ve been on your hands.”

  The irony was, I had kicked the flag to TRY and get the fans to riot. In retrospect, it was a bad idea. Vince then said we’d talk
in the morning about about how long my suspension would last, and hung up. It was time to board the plane, but as I was walking down the jetway, I was stopped by a soldier. After Vince’s warning not to get separated, I envisioned myself being dragged away in a ball and chain in front of my coworkers. The guard looked at me menacingly, reached into his pocket . . . and pulled out a camera.

  We took a picture together with his crew and I boarded the plane. Just as we were taking off, I shot Vince one last text and told him I had made it out of the country and thanked him for checking up on me.

  “I love you, you idiot. AC/DC still the best band.”

  I told him I loved him too as the wheels left the tarmac and flew me out of harm’s way.

  A shot from my impromptu photo session with the Brazilian airport police, taken after I’d been kicked out of the country. I clutch my passport in my hand and promise myself never to give it to anybody—until I was forced to hand it over to a cop in Ecuador the next night.

  —

  I woke up in Quito, Ecuador, to another handful of texts asking me what I thought about being suspended for a month. A MONTH? I hadn’t heard anything from Vince since the night before, so once again I surfed over to wwe.com to find out private information about my own life (the same way I found out I’d been drafted to SmackDown a decade earlier).

  I was livid at Vince. How dare he inform his social media minions about my punishment before telling me first? Ironically, a few minutes later I got a text from Vince asking if I was having any any fun yet and to call him. But there was no way I was going to call him, as the battle lines had been drawn. I felt double-crossed and disrespected and had nothing to say to him.

  I spent the whole day in the hotel room stewing, the disgraced pariah who wasn’t even allowed to go to the arena with the rest of the crew. That night I was given a police escort to the airport (I have no idea why) and had to explain to every Tomas, Raphael, and Geraldo why I was flying home at the same time the WWE show was taking place.