by Jon Robinson
That was it. That just pushed Flair completely over the edge. From his investment getting blown away to all the giggling in the back to now Arn taking the first somewhat normal conversation we’ve had in an hour and snapping at him, Flair just couldn’t take it anymore. He slams the brakes on the car in the middle of the desert, gets out, and starts running around the car, screaming. “Raaahh!” Flair just lost it.
Eventually we get him back in the car and calm him down, and we still have to drive like three hundred miles to get to the show, and the whole time, I just keep breaking down laughing.
Now, this whole time, Flair is wearing this all-white suit. So I tell him, “You know what, Ric, I’ve been to Lancaster before and it’s a bit dusty. You’re wearing this nice all-white suit, so you might want to stop somewhere before we get to the arena and change.” But he says, “Oh no, brother, I’m the Nature Boy, I wear suits.” So I tell him, “There’s nowhere to shower, there’s nowhere to get clean once we’re there, and the way the wind is picking up, you’re going to be a mess.”
“No, brother, I’m the Nature Boy,” he tells me. “I’m wearing the suit.” So we eventually get there after what seemed like the never-ending drive as we eventually find the right way through the desert, and I ask him one last time, “Are you sure you don’t want to get changed?” And one last time he tells me, “No, brother, I’m the Nature Boy. I wear suits.” So he jumps out of the car, slams the door, and right as he slams the door, a great big dust cloud blows all over him, and literally he’s covered from head to toe. His blond hair, his white suit, his eyes—he’s covered in red clay. He turns and looks at me like it’s my fault. Like I’ve done something to cause this dust cloud to attack him. He just looked at me like, “You dirty, rotten bastard.”
Life Before GPS
Chavo Guerrero
When I first started wrestling, there were no cell phones, no computers, no GPS, there was no iPod . . . none of that. You know what we had? Maps. We were lost for ten years. We were seriously lost for my first ten years on the road. We would have to constantly stop and ask for directions. All you have to do now is punch in the address on the GPS, and it tells you, “Turn right here, turn left here.”
It’s funny, because now when we get to a town, we’ll tell a lot of the young guys, “Hey, there’s a gym over here,” or how there’s a good place to eat down this road. They always want to know how we know where everything is, but we had to, we had to know this stuff. Back when I first started, you couldn’t just punch in IHOP into the GPS and find something to eat. There was none of that. Life on the road is definitely a lot easier now thanks to technology. It was a lot tougher back when I first started. We were on the road more, and if you had someone who wasn’t good at reading maps, you were constantly getting bad directions. There was a lot less food out there back then too, and what you did find was never as healthy as you can find today. Now you can go to a convenience store and get a Muscle Milk. There was none of that stuff before. We used to live on Snickers bars. Now you have protein all packaged for you. I remember when protein bars first came out, they were a lifesaver because now you had something to eat.
And think about trying to do all of this without computers. Now you can just jump on the Internet and make your own hotel reservation with the click of a button. Back then, we just drove until we saw a hotel and hoped they had a vacancy. In fact, we slept in a car many a night because we couldn’t find a hotel. It was a lot harder when I first started, and the generation before me had it even harder. Every generation, it gets a little easier . . . but it’s still not easy.
Five
Hotel Hell
“When someone doesn’t have a lock on their door and someone else has a bloodstain on their wall, it’s not hard to put two and two together.”
—DREW McINTYRE
What do you do when you check into a hotel at three in the morning and can’t sleep? If you’re R-Truth, that might mean writing rap lyrics. “Sometimes late at night, when it’s quiet, that’s when you get your best ideas,” he tells me. For Ezekiel Jackson, that’s the time he finally gets to catch up on the scores of his favorite sports teams. “When I get to my room, I’m not a big partyer. Just get me a room with a TV and a bed and I’m good,” he says. “When it’s two in the morning and you’re in some random city, all you can really do is kick back and watch SportsCenter. Two in the morning is when I catch up on all of those highlights I missed when I was on the road.”
And while every trip would be a whole lot smoother if all you had to do was get to your room, relax, write lyrics, and watch sports, unfortunately for the WWE Superstars, that’s not always (and sometimes never) the case. From sleazy hotels to mystery stains in random rooms, sometimes just finding a clean, safe place to sleep is the hardest part of the job.
Or as Tommy Dreamer puts it, “Some of the hotels we’ve had to stay in are absolutely disgusting. You wouldn’t believe we actually paid money to rent these rooms.”
These stories detail what goes on in a WWE hotel when things get downright dirty (and a little bizarre).
The Dirty Divas
Maria
I thought life on the road would be a little more . . . clean. I think that’s the best way to explain it. Some of those hotels we stay in have giant bugs! You wouldn’t believe it. There was this one night where I found a huge spider in my bed. So I throw the blankets off me and jump out of bed, and this spider is seriously coming to attack me as I’m getting out of bed. Five minutes later, I hear Layla start screaming, and there was a giant spider in her bed too. Then we look up on the wall and what do we see? Another spider! The next day, we got back to the room, and the spiders were gone, but there was this strange yellow beetle flying around. So I take a picture of it and Twitter it to show people what was in our room. Eve’s brother sees this, and he tells us the official name, how it was an arachnid blah-blah-blah [not the official name], but it was hilarious. I guess I always thought life on the road would be more glamorous. But at the same time we have a lot more fun than I thought we would. We’re all so close, and we all know even the smallest details about everyone. We know who sleeps well together—like I need to sleep by myself because otherwise I end up elbowing people in the face. But sometimes you have no choice and you have to share a bed because the hotels run out of rooms or they give you a room with only one bed. The other night this happened, and it was me, Layla, and Eve all in bed together. I hit Layla like three times with elbows while I was sleeping. I was trying to hug the side of the bed, but I guess I rolled over in the middle of the night and got her pretty good.
The other thing that happens in the hotel is we all tan each other. When we’re getting ready for a show, it’s like a fog of tanner overtakes the whole hotel. The Divas are actually the Dirty Divas, because we’re pretty nasty.
In a Pickle
Beth Phoenix
I traveled very little before I got on the road and started in the wrestling business, so it was all kind of new to me going from town to town to town. When I first started with WWE, the money wasn’t really coming in yet, so I was trying to skimp and save every penny I could wherever I could. So I would go on Hotwire and look for the lowest stars of any hotel in town just so I could get the lowest prices.
I remember one time, it was only my second or third loop with Raw, and I ended up getting a place called something like the Econo Motel . . . something very generic like that, but when I pulled up, it looked more like the Bates Motel. It was one of those motels that was one floor, with the red roof where the doors accessed outside, and when I walk into the main area, all I see is this guy with two dirty socks up on the desk. He had a hole in one sock, he was smoking a cigar, and I see that his office looked more like an area where maybe he had been living. There were empty McDonald’s wrappers everywhere, and the whole scene was just quite chaotic and filthy. All I wanted to do was get my key as fast as possible and lock the door to my room. I just remember, I’m walking to my room, and as I look ar
ound, there are shady characters everywhere. I hear yelling and screaming coming from different rooms, but I don’t spook too easily. I just put my head down and went right to my room. But when I open the door and look inside, I notice this foul odor. I don’t know what it is, but it’s very pungent and smells like vinegar. I can’t figure out what’s going on in this room, so I turn around and flip on the lights, and at the foot of my bed is a smashed jar of pickles. No lie. I don’t know why there are pickles in my room or how they got smashed, but that’s the situation and the awful smell I am faced with.
But I was just so tired and it was the middle of the night, so I was just like, “Forget it.” I’m not dealing with any of these people, I’m just going to change into my pajamas and go to bed. But when I head into the bathroom, I notice that inside is all just brick walls. The bathroom wasn’t even finished being built. You could still see the mortar and everything. Then as I go to get into the bed, I flip open the comforter and there aren’t even any sheets on the bed. I was like, “Econo Motel, you are gross.” So what I did was I laid towels all over the comforters, then I slept with my jacket on and got out of there the first thing in the morning. And you know what? I can’t stand the smell of pickles to this day. Of all the bizarre things to find in your room, I can’t say that I would ever guess that one night I’d find a smashed jar of pickles. And I really don’t want to know why or how they got there.
Disco Fever
Ted DiBiase
Randy Orton and I stayed at a Quality Inn near Penn State that seemed a bit sketchy. Not sketchy like we thought we were going to get robbed, but sketchy like there was a disco in the lobby with all these old people dancing at two in the morning when we checked in. Someone recognized us from the dance floor, and we both just put our heads down and ran to our rooms. It was the only hotel I’ve ever stayed at where I actually double locked the door and put the latch on. I feared for my life from these dancing old people. You see some strange things on the road, I’ll tell you that, but you have to have a good time with it. You have to entertain yourself, and it’s funny to sit back and think of things like that. I mean, what kind of hotel has a disco for old people in the lobby in the middle of the night?
Escape from L.A.
Mickie James
I use Hotwire a lot, but when I first started using it, I didn’t understand how it worked. I was just looking for the best deal. So this one time, I was in Los Angeles and I booked a two-and-a-half-star hotel. Depending on where you are in the world, star ratings are different. So I’m thinking I’m going to get a Comfort Inn or something comparable. But I end up getting to this chain motel in L.A. that’s out by the airport, and it was the scariest place I’d ever seen. The walls of my room were made of concrete, and literally, I heard gunshots all around. I seriously thought I was going to die that night. I was up all night. I couldn’t sleep because the gunshots had me freaking out. That was the worst night I can remember.
But before I got to WWE, I’d travel wherever I could just so I could make it to the dance. I’d sleep in my car or find some cheap hotel for twenty dollars or whatever I could afford. But then once you’re on the road full-time, you get accustomed to a certain level of comfort, or at least a soft bed. I couldn’t even sleep in that bed in L.A. It was just too freaky. The room had two double beds, and when I heard the gunshots, I actually ducked down in between the two beds for extra protection. That was one night the clock just couldn’t move fast enough for me.
Three’s a Crowd
Tyson Kidd
One night we show up to this hotel in Memphis, but there’s nobody working the front desk, so this janitor or security-looking guy is the one who actually gives us our room key. But when we go up to the room, we realize that there’s only one king-size bed for the three Hart Dynasty members. We go back downstairs to try and switch rooms, but there’s nobody around. There’s nobody working the front desk. Everyone is gone. So we can’t change the room. Plus the air-conditioning in the hotel doesn’t work, so not only are the Hart Dynasty going to get real close and all sleep in the same bed, we’re going to sweat it out in this Memphis hotel in the middle of summer. It was bad. It’s one thing to all share a bed, it’s another thing to do it while we’re all sweaty. And this has actually happened to us a few times, where we book two double beds, but when we show up the hotel is full and they can’t switch us. That’s when the Hart Dynasty bunks as one. It happens a lot more than it should.
The Rainbow Hotel
Tommy Dreamer
I was riding with Christian and Dolph Ziggler, and we had about a 290-mile drive in Canada. And there is nothing, and I mean nothing, along these highways along what is considered Midwest United States, but this is way up there in Canada. I think the drive was from Regina to Moose Jaw, or something ridiculous like that. There are no gas stations, there’s nothing, so when you see a sign that this is your last place to fill up, you usually want to do it because you’re not going to find anything else for at least a hundred or so miles. Anyway, it was getting close to the end of summer, and we didn’t know that a lot of people vacation around the spot we were headed, and all of the hotels around the location were already booked up. So we drove about halfway, and there was not a hotel to be found with a vacancy. We looked everywhere until we finally stumbled across this one hotel called the Rainbow Hotel, and it was basically, what I feel, a hotel you rent by the hour, not the night . . . it was not a nice hotel whatsoever. They also knew how much the hotels cost in the area and knew everything was booked, and they got us for like a hundred dollars for a prison-cell–type hotel room. A lot of times you’re traveling, and you’ll see your fellow WWE Superstars at the show, but you won’t see them at the hotels. But I guess all of the people who were on that card realized that this was one of the only places with a vacancy, so here came Cryme Tyme, Mike Knox, Vladimir Kozlov, the Bella Twins, John Morrison, CM Punk, Melina . . . they probably had about fifteen WWE Superstars all staying at this one disgusting hotel.
My room, the guy didn’t have a key to get me inside, so he had to actually come with me and open the door for me. So I asked him, “What if I have to leave?” And he said, “You can’t. If you do, you’re just going to have to leave your door open.” So I didn’t even have a key to my own room and I couldn’t leave. You couldn’t even close the bathroom door because whoever designed it put the door in last, and you would hit the toilet with the door, so it wouldn’t even close. I mean, seriously, who designed this place? There were brown stains in the washtub and it was just a gross hotel. My bed was a single, and I slept with my clothes on because everything just looked so dirty. And worst of all, my room had these windows that were so low, any crook could’ve climbed inside my room in the middle of the night. All they had to do was push on the window, and they could’ve climbed right in.
So I ended up moving the refrigerator against the door just to make sure nobody could get in. I figured if I didn’t have the key, I didn’t know who did. Then I put my suitcase up against the window so at least if anyone tried to get in I could hear it. Things were really that bad. I mean, this was seriously the worst hotel I’ve ever been to. We got in around three in the morning, hoping we could at least get some sleep, and when I’m investigating my room, Christian shoots me a text saying that his room was so bad, so disgusting, that he couldn’t take it any longer and decided to sleep in the car.
The next morning, we’re all swapping stories of how bad our rooms were, and as we pull out of the parking lot, we see that behind the hotel is a cemetery. Just when we thought our hotel couldn’t get any worse, we see the cemetery.
Rainbow Hotel, Part 2
Drew McIntyre
Oh yeah, the Rainbow Hotel. First hotel I’ve ever stayed at where there were bloodstains on the wall and dead roaches in the shower. It’s one of the only places where you had a group of these big, tough wrestlers worried about their safety. When someone doesn’t have a lock on their door and someone else has a bloodstain on their wall, i
t’s not hard to put two and two together. The funniest thing about staying there, though, was showing up at the arena the next day. Morrison walks up and says, “I stayed at the worst hotel ever last night.” And then Christian would be like, “No, my hotel was the worst.” Then CM Punk said, “Nothing can top the disgusting place I stayed.” No one realized until the next day that we were all staying at the same place. Ask anyone who was there, and they’ll tell you, this was the single worst hotel they have ever stayed at. When you have guys blocking their doors and sleeping out in their cars, you know things are beyond bad.
Then to make matters worse, that same trip, after we left the Rainbow Hotel, I was traveling with the Bella Twins and the trunk on our rental car broke. So we had to go buy some bungee cords at the Home Depot just to keep the trunk closed. Luckily for us, nothing was stolen. I’m surprised, too, because it was open all night while we were inside the Rainbow Hotel. Maybe the cemetery spooked all the thieves.
The Overflow
Evan Bourne
Since I was eighteen years old, I’ve never really stayed in the same place. Until I got to WWE developmental, I was never even in the same city for more than a week. I’d be sleeping in four or five beds a week. It’s just standard for us. So life on the road, that’s just what it is . . . lots of different beds and the ability to live out of three different bags and a rental car for the rest of your life.