by Jon Robinson
So I call Justin, our announcer, and I tell him what happened, how we called Avis and they’re sending someone out to repair our tire, and I tell him that if he passes a Subway or something, that he should bring me a sandwich. So Justin actually finds a Subway that’s still open, and he buys me a sandwich and brings it to me before they come fix our tire. So there I am, sitting on the trunk of the car eating my sandwich as traffic flies by. I’m just hoping I don’t get hit, but I don’t care, all I wanted to do was eat at that point.
Tony was sitting in the car because he was scared. All he kept saying was, “There are snakes out there. I don’t want to get bit by no snakes.” I told him, “C’mon, man, there aren’t any snakes on the highway.” So now Jesse and Festus pull up, and they have the same kind of car we rented, so we go into their trunk, pull out the tools, and start fixing our tire. Next thing we know, Tony jumps out of the car to help, but he doesn’t have the car in park. When he was in the car his foot was on the brake, but now he jumps out, taking his foot off the brake, and Jesse was underneath the car changing the tire. The new tire wasn’t even on yet and now the car starts rolling back. Everyone was like, “Oh no!” Jesse gets pulled back out of the way—he almost got crushed by the car. That’s not the funny part. We were all like, “Damn, Tony, why didn’t you put the car in park?” And he said, “Why does everybody always try to blame everything on me? Awww!”
So now they go back to fixing the tire, but we were right on the edge of the road, and I’m standing there making sure no car gets close to hitting us. By that time the roadside assistance guy calls and says he’s lost. We told him exactly where we were at, the highway, the mile marker, and everything. So I told him, “We got the car fixed now, so you can just turn around and go back.” This was an hour and a half after we initially called. And the guy goes, “If you don’t mind, I’m going to tell Avis that I helped you so I can get paid.” I was like, “I mind.”
After the tire is fixed, Tony tells me that we should drive to Nashville . . . that was like four and a half hours away! I told him, “There’s no way in hell I’m riding on this donut for the next four and a half hours.” He tells me, “Well, if we go fifty miles per hour, we’ll be fine.” And I’m like, “Tony, it’s going to take us six or seven hours to get to Nashville on a donut, with a good chance we’re going to end up popping the donut and be on the side of the road once again.” I told him we’d stop in Birmingham, change cars, call the office, and tell them that we might be late for the show. We’d get there when we get there. Tony started panicking. He wasn’t used to calling the office and dealing with problems. He was used to dealing with problems his own way, but that’s another story. I still just remember Tony sitting there mad, saying, “We’re stuck on the side of the road and you worried about eating.” I was like, “That’s because you didn’t work today.” What can I say, I wanted a sandwich.
Jumping the Wrong Curb
Jack Swagger
The road: That’s where you really earn everything that’s thrown at you. The travel schedule is crazy. Once you get into it, three months seems like a year because you’re working every weekend. There are a lot of good times too, because we have a good group of guys, a really good atmosphere backstage, so to travel with these guys, they really become your family. The three-hundred-mile drives can be tough, but it’s worth it.
Strange things end up happening, though, when you spend so much time driving. A few months ago, we were in Laredo, Texas, trying to get to this Outback Steakhouse. I’m driving down the street and all of a sudden it turns into a one-way street heading into this hotel. But instead of pulling all the way around to get to the Outback, I think I can cut through the hotel parking lot, but as I pull around, I see that the parking lot is all blocked in. So I’m driving around and I see this little area open up, and it looks like a little service road, so I figure I’ll just drive down off what looked like a little curb and we’ll be right there. Only thing is, as I’m driving out of the parking lot and onto the grass in front of this curb, I realize the drop is actually about four feet down, right onto cement. So I try to stop, but I hit the brakes too late and we can’t stop and the front wheels are off the curb. I try to back up, but the tires are just spinning, so the only place I can go now is down. So I take the rental car and we do the drop. Bam! Not too much damage, just messed up the bumper a little bit. But now we realize we’re not even in the Outback parking lot. We just dropped into the parking lot of some speaker store, and not only is the store closed, they have their parking lot gated off and the gate is locked. So not only did we just take a four-foot drop in our rental car, but now we’re locked in this speaker store’s parking lot.
So we’re looking around and we find some little wooden pallets, and there we are in the middle of the night, trying to build a bridge back up the four-foot drop so we can drive back to our original spot by the hotel. Unfortunately, all we end up doing is messing the car up some more. Next thing we know, a cop pulls up and he’s just looking at us, like, “What do you guys think you’re doing?” Luckily for us, the cop ended up calling the owner, and the owner of the speaker store came down and unlocked the gate for us. The whole time, though, the cop just kept looking at us like we were idiots.
Full Moon
Maria
I like to drive fast. Very, very fast. And this one time I was driving fast, and of course I get pulled over, but what I didn’t realize is that I had another speeding ticket that I forgot to take care of. So I’m driving by myself in the middle of Ohio, there’s nobody around for miles, and I’m going about eighty-five to ninety in a sixty-five-mile-per-hour zone. When the cop pulls me over, he tells me, “I can’t let you drive. You don’t have a valid license.” I was like, “What?” I didn’t realize that I had this other speeding ticket out, so they ended up towing my car and I was stuck on the side of the road with all of my suitcases waiting for a cab to come pick me up. All of a sudden, this other car goes zooming by and my phone starts ringing. It’s Matt Hardy, and he’s like, “Are you on the side of the road?”
I started telling him what happened, how I don’t have a car, and he ends up pulling around, and he’s with his brother Jeff, and they pick me up and bring me to the show. They always tell me they’re my angels now because they picked me up from the side of the road. It was absolutely ridiculous, but yes, this really happened to me.
The other thing that happens a lot on the road is people mooning each other. Of course, I can’t name names on that one, but we like to entertain ourselves with that.
And of course, it’s always an adventure driving with Maryse because she doesn’t know where anything is inside the car. I even have to tell her where the blinker is. I remember this one time we were driving through some town and we decided to stop at a Starbucks. We figure there are so many places to stop that we wouldn’t see anyone, so we get our coffee and hop back in the car. But when Maryse goes to pull out, she somehow hops up on a curb, and for like two minutes we’re seriously driving over this big curb in front of Starbucks. We just laugh it off and think it’s no big deal because nobody was around to see what was happening, but then when we get to the show, Fit Finlay was like, “Was that you guys?” He had seen us driving over the curb laughing our butts off and not even caring. We figured that between shows was about three hundred miles, no way anyone saw that. But it’s always that way. We always end up stopping at the same gas stations, the same places to go to the bathroom, the same food places. For some reason, everyone always stops at the same places.
Tennessee, Part 1
Shad
My most messed-up road story is the time Jay and I were driving through Tennessee. We left our hotel and started driving, but when we were on the road, some guy in his minivan, driving his family, he cut us off. And so me, being a New Yorker, I sped up and got ahead of him and cut him off back, then just kept driving. A couple of miles up the road, a cop came flying up on us, got in front of us, and pulled us over. First thing he asked us i
s if we had drugs in the car. I told him we didn’t have any drugs. Then he wanted to see my license and registration, and I said, “Cool.” I tell him it’s a rental car, then I reach over to grab my license and the cop rips the door open. He pulls out his Taser gun and points it at me, telling me to get out of the car. I didn’t want to get out, but he said he was going to Tase me if I didn’t get out, so I got out. When I stand up, I’m 6'7", this guy is 5'8" and he’s an old, fat, hillbilly cop. Next thing I know I’m in handcuffs and the cops are telling me how they know we’re drug dealers and how they just know we’re transporting drugs over state lines. I’m like, “Really?” Then all of a sudden, there are like six more cop cars pulling up along with a drug dog. The dog goes in and starts sniffing the car, and the only thing they find is some weed residue that must’ve just been left over from the rental car. I’m telling him it’s a rental car, that we don’t have any drugs, and that the residue is not from us . . . it’s a damn rental, but he tells me that he’s taking me to jail.
To make things worse, we had an autograph signing that we needed to get to and it was two hours away. So I’m sitting in the back of the cop car, and we’re on our way to jail, and I tell the cop, “You know why you’re doing this, right?” And he’s like, “Why?” So I tell him, “It’s because I’m black.” The cop was like, “No, you were breaking the law.” So I asked him, “What law was I breaking?” And he tells me I was speeding. After all that, he was taking me in for speeding. I was going like two miles an hour over the speed limit and they were arresting me! So I kept talking. I told him how he screwed up. How he put me in handcuffs in front of everyone, so he had to arrest me even if I didn’t do anything. This guy argued with me the entire way to the police station. We finally pull up, they close the gate, and this guy tells me I have two choices: I can either wait until Monday and go to court, or if I give him one hundred dollars, he’d let me go right there. So of course, I gave him a hundred dollars, and on the hundred-dollar bill I wrote “F—- you!” I walked out of there a free man.
The funny thing about it was, one of the other cops told me that they were informed of two black guys running drugs by the minivan we cut off. Turns out the guy driving the minivan was an off-duty officer. The cop in the minivan called it in saying we were smoking blunts as we were driving down the road. I told them I don’t smoke weed. I’ve never failed a drug test. The cop told me that once they got on the crime scene with the drug dog, they knew we were clean. They knew the residue was from the rental car and not from us. And they also knew who we were. Last thing he said was, “Can I get your autograph?”
Tennessee, Part 2
JTG
There are some good times in Tennessee. It’s not just all about what Shad said.
One night we ran out of gas and we had to pull over to the side of the road. We had seen a gas station, but it was miles away. Shad wanted to hike there, but I was like, “Hey man, I’m rockin’ Timbs here, I’m not hiking to no gas station.”
So I stuck my leg out and some ladies pulled over. We didn’t get to the gas station right away, but we had some fun on the way there, ya dig?
The other thing we love to do is roast each other in the car. Me, Shad, and Kofi go at it nonstop. I love to roast. We love to make it hot. Just thinking about it makes me hot. That’s how I get my kicks, that’s my passion, roasting Kofi. I’ll roast him right now, that fake Jamaican. I call him a Jafakin’. I love Kofi though, that’s my boy. But we roast each other from sunup to sundown. It can be three, four in the morning and it’s still just continuous roast. Then when one of us does something good and we start to compliment each other, we get right back to cutting each other down. We cut each other right back down to reality. Like, “Hey, that was a nice match . . . but you’re still bad.”
Was That Flying Hummus?
Dolph Ziggler
I’m a boring guy. Life on the road for me is usually gym-hotel-sleep–wrestling show . . . gym-hotel-sleep–wrestling show. There was this one time, though, where we saw Gail Kim driving in the car next to us, so naturally we started throwing plastic bottles at her car. After a couple of the plastic bottles hit her car, and we naturally went back and recycled them, we all stopped up the road and had a good laugh while we got gas. Next thing we knew, Gail Kim and Alicia Fox came out of the convenience store and pelted us with powdered donuts. We all thought, “Oh how funny, everything is now even and fair.” But then as I was about to open my car door, Gail Kim took a bowl of hummus and threw it over the roof of her car and winged it at me. I just happened to be turning to look at something at the same time for some reason, so I saw it out of the corner of my eye and managed to avoid it. The flying hummus grazed my hair and splattered all over the car behind me. Gail Kim is here and alive right now, so that is testament that she never hit me. But hummus at a gas station? I didn’t even know you could do that. A sandwich maybe, but hummus?
Usually when you have a really good car ride, though, you’re not distracted by flying food or bottles. If you’re having a real good car ride, you don’t ever turn the radio on. I’ve been traveling with Tommy Dreamer and Christian for a little while now, and I don’t know that we ever turn on the radio. Here are a couple of guys who have been around, been to the top, and are still at the top of their games. So it helps me out riding along with them. They are really helping me become a better Superstar. One thing they stress to me is how some people have a couple thousand matches, and you’re going to have a bad night somewhere along the road. Sometimes you have maybe twelve hours to think about it before your next match, and you need to use that time to figure out what your mistakes were and let it go. You need to move on to the next match and do better next time. Almost like a quarterback in football: You get picked off, you have to lead your team right back down the field and score a touchdown. It’s hard to let those bad matches go, but you need to move on if you want to move up.
Look Ma, No Hands
Santino
Randy Orton likes to mess with me while I’m driving all the time. He’ll check my blind spot, and if no one is beside me, he’ll grab the wheel and change lanes on me really fast without saying anything. It just got to the point where now when I see him grab the wheel, I try to get him back a little by taking my hands completely off the wheel while he’s turning. I’m like, “Go ahead and take it.” I know he’s not going to make us smash.
Turning Heads
Ezekiel Jackson
I’m used to being the big guy, but then I started traveling with Khali. So I’m walking into places, and now people are looking at me wondering who is this small guy talking to the really big guy. I remember walking into a Denny’s with Khali in Alabama. Everyone stopped what they were doing and gave us one of those “holy crap” moments. Here I am, I’m not a small person, but I’m walking into Denny’s in Alabama with a giant. You can imagine the faces of everyone inside. You don’t even get comments from people, they’re just speechless.
No matter where we go to eat, though, it’s always funny to see the looks on people’s faces. Here I am, a 6'4", 300-pound dude with muscles bulging from everywhere. Then you have a 7'4", 400-something-pounder walking in. It’s like, “Holy crap!” What else can you even say? You just see them look, then there are a lot of whispers around the tables. That’s life on the road for me and Khali.
Unfortunately, when we do travel, everybody still thinks I’m Bobby Lashley. I’ve been called Bobby Lashley, I’ve been called Ahmed Johnson . . . but I’m Ezekiel Jackson. If you don’t recognize me, that’s cool, but don’t get mad at me if I don’t sign. I’m not going to sign Bobby Lashley’s name.
The iPhone King
Christian
In my car, it’s usually me, Edge, and Tommy Dreamer. Then when Edge got hurt, Dolph Ziggler jumped in with us, and in our car it’s nonstop talking. We talk about everything and anything from wrestling to sports to politics to finance. There are a lot of different things going on in our car, a lot of good debate. What’s great for me
is the invention of the iPhone, because so many times there are disputes about who is right and who is wrong during these talks, so I just jump on my iPhone and use Google or Wikipedia to figure out 99.9 percent of the time that I’m right. We always seem to argue over which actor appeared in a certain movie or which band played a certain song. The iPhone makes it so easy to end an argument.
iDisagree
Tommy Dreamer
Christian is never always right. That’s just Christian’s ego talking there, but he is the master of everything iPhone. He looks up anything and everything that we might have a question about. It’s pretty funny because it could be the most random question about the drummer of some band we hear on the radio, and he looks up everything he can on the guy and then informs us. He’s like a human Pop-Up Video guy.
But when it comes to traveling, I don’t think fans realize just how much we’re actually on the road. On the ECW/SmackDown! side, we usually work Saturday, Sunday, Monday, then we do TV on Tuesday. They’ll fly us from our home to wherever our first destination is, then we usually get into a rental car and drive anywhere up to three hundred miles. It’s just what we do. We spend a lot of hours in hotel rooms and inside cars. But this time inside the car, it’s so important because this is where you learn by talking to some of the veterans who you share rides with. Wrestling isn’t just about living your dream and having fun. This is a business, and we talk about any variety of topics just to keep awake, from current events to your future, to what’s going on with your career. A lot of younger guys don’t realize that it’s hard to find that longevity in this business. I’m sure Christian can Google name after name of guys who have come and gone in this business using his iPhone. Guys who didn’t know anything about the importance of financial planning or trying to build for their future. That’s the kind of stuff you learn in the car. If you’re a young guy just starting out, the most important thing you could do for your career is to ride with a couple of veterans so you can learn about this business the right way.