Undisputed: How to Become World Champion in 1,372 Easy Steps

by Chris Jericho

  We ran onstage and I stormed up and down the catwalk screaming at the crowd to go crazy. After Gamma Ray had lulled them into a daze minutes earlier, we woke them up instantly.

  We played for forty minutes and tore the house down, especially when we did “Balls to the Wall” by the German band Accept. I felt such power in leading 25,000 people to chant like monks (including a guy in the crowd who was actually dressed as a monk), and as strange as we might have seemed with our wigs and costumes in the United States, in Germany we fit right in. The crowd kept chanting, “Fozzy, Fozzy, Fozzy,” and their relentless energy helped us blow Gamma Ray out of the water.

  Mission accomplished: Auf wiedersehen, Kai.

  A few weeks later, Heavy Oder Was, one of the biggest metal magazines in Germany, backed up our victory by saying, “Gamma Ray could take some tips from Fozzy about how to work a crowd.” It was quite gratifying to read that we had gained some respect from the German metal community. It wasn’t quite as gratifying to read that Fozzy (or Fotze ) meant “Cunt” in German.

  No wonder the crowd wouldn’t stop chanting our name.

  CHAPTER 16

  Twists and Turns

  It was May 2001 and I was once again the Intercontinental Champion. The Rock had taken a temporary leave of absence to film The Scorpion King, while Austin had won the WWE world title by turning heel at WrestleMania X-Seven and began an association with HHH known as the Two-Man Power Trip. The roster lacked top babyfaces to battle them, so it was decided that Benoit and I would get the chance to be the top good guys in the company.

  When I arrived at the arena in Oklahoma City for Raw I was approached by a new writer named Pete who sported a chipped tooth and an even chippier Irish accent.

  “Top of the morning to ya!” (It was the afternoon.)“You’re having a match for the Intercontinental title against HHH tonight. And guess what? You’re going over!”

  His words took me by surprise. I’d never beaten HHH (the State College non-win notwithstanding), and found it interesting that the office was ready to give me the big win.

  “Really?” I asked Pete. “So I’m finally going to beat him?”

  “No, I’m just kidding! You’re not beating him! In fact, you’re dropping the title to him tonight.” Pete laughed.

  I failed to see his humor and sprayed Mace in his eyes.

  I snapped out of my daydream and added “Chipping the rest of Irish Pete’s teeth with a crowbar” to my bucket list instead.

  I lost the championship to HHH, which meant that the Two-Man Power Trip were now in control of both singles titles. Then a few weeks later they won the tag team titles from Undertaker and Kane at Backlash, which gave them a complete monopoly on all of the major championships within the company. At the following PPV, Judgment Day, Chris and I won a Number One Contenders match to face Austin and Hunter the next night in San Jose. The plan was for us to beat the Two-Man Power Trip for the tag titles and then branch off into two separate feuds for the summer: Benoit vs. HHH for the IC title and Jericho vs. Austin for the world title.

  So in San Jose for Raw, the four of us spent a few hours with Pat Patterson putting together the match. We wanted it to be the ultimate roller-coaster ride, a match jam-packed with twists and turns that would play with the fans’ emotions and lead to the two Chrises standing victorious.

  Sometimes the match you plan doesn’t work as well as you think it will, and other times it turns out even better than you could have expected and is pure magic. Jericho/Benoit vs. Austin/HHH was one of those matches. It’s been called one of the greatest matches in Raw history, and with good reason.

  First off, the crowd was amazing. They’d been waiting for someone to bring down the Two-Man Power Trip and sensed that Benoit and I were the guys to do it.

  As the twists and turns unfolded, the crowd got louder and more voracious. The TMPT got the heat on Benoit until finally Hunter gave him a Pedigree behind the ref’s back. I evened the score by drop-kicking Hunter from the top rope, which enabled Benoit to make the smoking hot tag. I came storming in and dismantled the two of them, until finally ending up with Austin in the Walls. Hunter ran in from behind to make the save, and that was when disaster struck.

  When he planted his foot to nail me, he tore his quad completely off the bone.

  People often ask me what happens when somebody gets hurt in the course of the match, and the answer for the most part is—nothing. The first thing any of us thinks about is simply finishing the match and dealing with the consequences later. Hunter followed me to the floor and tore the top off the announce table, where he was going to attempt to Pedigree me as planned. I noticed he was limping gingerly, and when he pulled me onto the table I asked him if he was okay.

  “No, my leg is fucked.” When one of the boys says he’s hurt, you know he must really be hurt, because most of the time he’ll just shrug it off. Not this time.

  I was supposed to block his Pedigree and turn it into the Walls, which would apply direct pressure onto his injured leg.

  “What do you want to do?” I asked, ready to improvise if necessary.

  “Put me in the Walls,” he said, forever earning my respect. He was in a lot of pain, and even though he knew the submission would hurt him even more, he still wanted to put the match first and go through with it.

  That, dear readers, is one tough mofo.

  As I slowly turned HHH over on the announce table trying to apply the loosest Walls of Jericho ever, inside the ring Austin hit Benoit with a Stunner. I let go of Hunter’s legs as gently as possible, ran to the ring, and pulled the referee out by his leg before he could count to three.

  Austin and I fought back and forth until I finally hit him with the Lionsault. As I had him covered, Hunter staggered back into the ring like Jason Voorhees (how he was able to do that I have no idea) and went to bash my brains in with his dreaded sledgehammer. I moved at the last second and he nailed Austin in the stomach. Benoit then tackled Hunter, forcing him to take yet another bump, and I pinned Austin for the dramatic 1-2-3. The Calgary Kids were the new WWE Tag Team Champions!!!

  The fans rocketed off their chairs and roared like lions. They erupted in a way crowds rarely do anymore, and on that night at that moment those people realized they had just seen something legandary. It’s unfortunate that it has been buried forever and technically doesn’t exist anymore.

  Even though that match was one of the best of my career, the aftermath was one of the worst. After you are lucky enough to have the elusive perfect match, it’s tradition to celebrate with your opponents, congratulate each other on your work, go through the minutiae of the performance, and generally just bask in the moment.

  Hunter’s injury meant that there was none of that after that match. The mood was somber when we learned that he’d be out of action for six to eight months. Everybody was in a state of complete lugubriousness and we never got to properly rejoice in the magical night we’d created. As a result I’ll always have bittersweet memories of that match.

  With HHH gone, Austin didn’t have a partner against Benoit, and so an unlikely ally stepped in. Vince decided that it would be good heat if Austin teamed with his former nemesis Mr. McMahon, and he was right. It worked out great for me as well, especially when we returned to Calgary for Raw.

  I opened the show by cutting a promo about how much of a nerd Vince was, flaming him for his outdated pompadour hairstyle and his tacky suits and showing his infamous performance of “Stand Back” from the ’80s, where he sang and danced worse than William Hung and Master P combined. The crowd was laughing heartily and hanging on my every word when, in a throwback to my debut appearance at MSG, the mic died.

  But this was an older, wiser Jericho, one who had killed the Jericho Curse and eaten it Raw (tastes like chicken), and instead of standing there dumbfounded, I threw the mic into the crowd. I yelled that as rich as Vince was, he still couldn’t get me a microphone that worked. Even though the crowd loved my rebel actions, Vince didn’t and asked
me later why I’d thrown the mic into the crowd.

  “Well, I’ve seen Austin do that before when his mic died.”

  Vince replied, “ Steve Austin can throw dead microphones into the crowd. Chris Jericho should just lay his on the ground and wait for another one.”

  Stu Hart was at ringside that night, along with various members of his massive family. After the show ended with Benoit putting Austin in the Crippler Crossface submission and me locking Vince in the Walls, we addressed the manic Alberta crowd. I grabbed the mic and said that I had just wrestled my first match in the Saddledome and if it wasn’t for the time I spent training in Calgary I never would’ve made it there. Chris and I continued by thanking Owen Hart and then Stu himself, noting that both of them had made it possible for us to make it in the business. Stu stared straight ahead with a dazed look like he had no idea what was happening as 15,000 Calgarians cheered and chanted his name. But then he slowly stood up and waved at the crowd, showing that he knew exactly what was going on. It was one of the biggest reactions I’ve ever received, and it was nice to come full circle and thank the Hart family in the city where it had all started for me.

  When Stu passed away a few years later, the city of Calgary bought his famous house and decided to tear it down. We had a show in Calgary right after he died and Benoit went to pay his respects to the battleground where he and hundreds of others had trained. At his suggestion, I decided to make one last visit of my own to the house and the dungeon that lurked inside. Armed only with a ten-pound weight plate emblazoned with the name HART that Stu handmade himself (Bret had given it to Chris to give to me), I walked up to the front door and knocked. There was no answer and the door was unlocked as usual, so I opened it and yelled, “Hello?”

  There was no reply so I walked inside.

  The Hart House was huge and old, made creepier by the fact it was totally empty. It reminded me of the house in The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, and as I inched through the kitchen toward the basement, I half expected a homicidal Leatherface to attack me at any second.

  I made my way down a set of creaky stairs into the basement and laid my eyes upon the closest thing to a medieval torture chamber I’d ever seen—the infamous Dungeon.

  It looked exactly the same as the last time I’d been in its clutches over a decade ago. It still wasn’t much more than a dingy ring, eight inches off the ground, jammed into the corner of the tiny basement. But this wasn’t your average ring. It was a ring haunted by the ghostly screams of the hundreds of students who’d been tortured and stretched within its storied ropes. In the silence, I could still hear their cries of pain in the distance.

  I was spooked and took a quick look around for Leatherface. It had been twelve years since Mr. Hito made me take five hundred back bumps in a row in that very ring, but when I closed my eyes it seemed like it was only yesterday. I stood at the bottom of the stairs, reminiscing about the early days of my career and letting the musty smells of the basement take me away to a time when—CRASH!!

  My eyes flew open at the sound of the door slamming against the wall, and standing at the top of the stairs was Leatherface.

  “AHHHHH!” I squealed anxiously. How did he find me? What had he done with the rest of the Harts? Was he planning on skinning me alive and wearing my face as an authentic Corazón de León mask?

  I stood in terror as Leatherface began stomping down the stairs, shirtless and wearing a pair of tight faded brown dress pants that accuentuated the ample gut hanging over them. It was a ghastly sight, made even more horrific by the human head he held in his hands. I stood at the bottom of the steps like Ichabod Crane as he pulled back his arm and threw the head right at mine. I shrieked and swung at it with my HART plate as it hurtled toward me, but as it flew past I saw that it wasn’t a head at all, but rather a balled-up sheet, reeking with the unmistakable odor of urine. I looked up the stairs and saw that Leatherface wasn’t Leatherface at all, but in fact Stu’s oldest son, Smith.

  “Fucking cats pissed in my sheets again,” he said and disappeared into the shadows.

  I stood frozen for a few moments, my heart double pounding like a Dave Lombardo bass drum, then ran as fast as I could up the stairs (two at a time) and out of the house forever.

  CHAPTER 17

  Canadian Jesus

  After a few weeks, Vince decided that there was no reason for him to team with Austin any longer and added Benoit into our program, making it Jericho vs. Austin vs. Benoit at King of the Ring for the world title. I was disappointed that I wouldn’t have the chance to prove myself as a legitimate singles opponent for Austin. I also found the match to be a strange dynamic because three-way matches usually work better if it’s two heels vs. one good guy. Vince’s rationale was the fans would believe Austin had a chance of losing if it was two-on-one, because if it was just me vs. Steve, they might not believe I’d be capable of beating him.

  My big push was over before it began … again.

  The buildup of the match was even stranger, as Chris and I had no out-of-ring confrontations with Austin and hardly any with each other. There was no drama built into the match regarding whether or not Chris and I would turn on each other or work together. It was a really flat promotion made even more vanilla when a few weeks before the PPV, Austin was put into a mini-feud with Spike Dudley.

  You read that right—Spike Dudley. Don’t get me wrong, Spike was a hard worker and had a good connection with the fans, but putting him into an angle with the World Champion only weeks before our big match diluted our barely existing storyline even further. Then Vince decided to have us lose the tag titles to the Dudleys the week before the match because he felt that fans would expect one of us to beat Steve if we lost them. It was a solid theory, but I saw the signs (Ace of Base, represent) that Vince for some reason had lost faith in both of us, weeks before the match even took place.

  Benoit was also having some serious neck problems after wrestling hard for over fifteen years and it was wearing him down. He told me he was looking forward to a break and was excited to spend the extra time with his family. Chris loved his kids and talked about them constantly and I could tell he was relieved to get off the road for a while.

  He was headed for surgery after the three-way, and even though he worked his ass off, the match ended up being mediocre at best and was about as memorable as its buildup.

  Even so, it’s unfortunate that it has been buried forever and technically doesn’t exist anymore.

  With all of the prominent matches I’d been having, my profile was bigger than ever. As a result, I was getting more outside opportunities, including being asked to be a presenter at the NHL Awards. I was excited to rub elbows with the players, especially when I found out that one of my all-time heroes, Wayne Gretzky (I’m Canadian, so it’s a given, right?), was going to be there.

  I came to the ceremony decked out in my Sergio Georgini tuxedo and roamed around with a camera crew while interviewing all of the various celebs in attendance. I had just finished giving Chad Kroeger of Nickelback a Fozzy CD (sell, sell, sell) when a vaguely familiar face approached me and introduced himself. “Hey, you’re Chris Jericho, right? How are you doing?”

  When I cautiously replied that I was okay, he leaned in and whispered, “Go into that closet and close the door. I’ll give you five minutes.”

  I had no idea what this guy’s schtick was, but like I said, he looked kind of familiar.

  “Trust me, you’ll love it.”

  What the hell was in that room? The Crystal Skull? The Pick of Destiny? The ghost of Terry Sawchuk?

  I walked inside the broom closet and in front of me was a large trunk. I approached it cautiously and opened the lid slowly. I was shocked to see what lay inside.

  Gwyneth Paltrow’s head.

  Actually it was the Stanley Cup, and it was more beautiful than I ever could’ve imagined. The guy who let me in the closet was Mike Bolt, who’d been transporting and guarding the cup for a decade. Now, for the next five minutes I was
allowed to do whatever I wanted with the most coveted trophy in sports!

  I briefly considered pulling an American Pie but couldn’t find a hole. Then I imagined that the closet was MSG and I had just scored the winning goal of the Stanley Cup Finals—in overtime, no less. I grabbed the cup and lifted it over my head, all the while making crowd noises.

  “Hhhhhaaaaaaaaahhhhhaaaaaaaaaaahhhhh!!”

  I kissed it and lifted it up and down, still making the noises.

  “Hhhhhaaaaaaaaahhhhhaaaaaaaaaaahhhhh!!”

  When I told my dad what I’d done, he said he had never touched the Cup. I asked him why and he told me: “Because we lost the Stanley Cup Finals in Game 6 in 1971 against the Bruins. I had my chance and we didn’t get the job done, so I don’t deserve to touch it.”

  I respected my dad’s sense of honor, but possessed none of it myself, so I kept lifting the Cup up and down over my head before eventually hugging it. I began waltzing with it, and cradling it in my arms like a long-lost lover. I started singing my own little song as I was dancing.

  “I love my Cup. I love my Cup. Without you, I’m all screwed up. I love my Cup—”

  Lost in the moment, I did a double pirouette straight into Mike Bolt, who was standing in the doorway staring at me.

  The silence seemed to last longer than the 1936 Detroit-Montreal game.

  “Okay, Chris. Put the Cup down and leave … please.”

  I lowered it to the floor and squeezed past him out the door, sparing one last glance at my long-lost paramour as I left it forever.

  Goodbye, Cup. I’ll always love you.

  After my Cup coitus, I wandered into the banquet hall and surveyed the scene. The attendees of the awards show were milling around, exchanging stories and kibitzing with each other. Here was Jarome Iginla talking to Patrick Roy. There was Scottie Bowman sharing a laugh with Cam Neely. On the dance floor, Moe Mantha was break-dancing with Harold Snepsts. And over in the corner, Gary Bettman was playing with a brightly colored ball of yarn.