Barry Bloom and I had been negotiating with the WWE for weeks and couldn’t come to an agreement. I had a certain dollar figure in mind that I wanted in order to come back, and they were hesitant to give it to me. So after my meeting with Dixie, I had Chad type up an email asking if Chris Jericho was going to TNA since he had just seen him eating lunch with Jeff Jarrett and Dixie Carter in Tampa. He signed it Ralph Molina (the drummer of Neil Young’s Crazy Horse), and wisely sent it off to a few prominent wrestling websites.
The news spread quickly, and suddenly the magic number was soon agreed upon. That meant everything to me, as it proved that Vince saw me as a major player, something I hadn’t felt for the last few years I worked for him.
Two weeks later I signed my contract, and for the first time in twenty-six months I was once again an employee of the WWE. All thanks to the assist from Ralph Molina.
I wanted to make my return to the WWE as unique and impactful as my debut was eight years earlier. I didn’t want to repeat the countdown clock again, so I was looking for something a little more cryptic. Then the idea struck to use the phrase “Second Coming,” while incorporating the black-and-green binary codes I’d seen while watching The Matrix a few nights earlier.
I flew to WWE headquarters in Stamford to meet with Vince and Brian and pitch them my concept. My idea was a four-week run of vignettes that would begin with the binary codes filling the screen with computer-generated 2s. In the second week all but one of the 2s would disappear. Then in the third week the 2 would grow to the size of the screen and morph into the words “2econd Coming.” I would show up on the fourth week and make my grand return. Vince listened to my ideas, nodded, and agreed to the concept in about two minutes. His only caveat was that he wanted the vignettes to run for more than four weeks.
“The longer, the better,” he said, and then he talked about old-time wrestling and Bobo Brazil for the next half hour.
I met with Stephanie, Kevin Dunn, and Adam Penucci (who had created the graphics to my original countdown clock) to discuss the details of the vignettes. We decided to change the color from green to blue (to avoid any comparisons with DX) and Adam came up with a slogan of “Save_Us.222” to be buried in the middle of a jumbled jungle of blue-and-white computer graphics. Adam then created the first teaser, which was going to run the following Monday night on Raw.
It was time to party like it was 1999.
I wanted to be in the best shape of my life for my return, so for the first time I enlisted the services of a personal trainer in Tampa, Chris Gonzales, who tortured my body until he got the results we both desired. I also thought it would be a smart move to work off some of the ring rust I’d accrued over the last two years by going back to Calgary to train right where it all started. The Hart Brothers Camp was long gone, but it had been replaced by an even more esteemed school run by my oldest friend in the business and first ever opponent, Lance T. Storm. He was the best trainer I knew and the only guy I trusted to help me get back into ring shape.
I flew to Calgary to attend the Storm Wrestling Academy, and what an impressive facility it was. The academy was housed in an expansive warehouse decorated with giant hanging banners advertising various PPVs, which Lance had acquired while working for the WWE as a trainer a few years prior. He’d installed a world-class ring and a nice lounge in the front of the building with a DVD player where students could study classic matches. This place blew the pink bowling alley where Lance and I trained out of the water!
Moments after I arrived I sat down on a plush couch and changed into my training gear of a white tank top, black spandex New Japan shorts, and Trace knee pads.
Then it was time to put on my boots. As dusty as they were when I had taken them off the shelf at my house, they had seemed to magically reboot themselves (real groaner). It was as if they had gotten newer since I’d rescued them from the darkness of the closet, like they were a footwear version of Christine.
I laced them up and they felt clunkier than a pair of Paul Stanley Starchild boots, but after a few steps they began to feel like a part of me again. Then I made my way to the ring to re-acquaint myself with my old battleground. I had grown up within these ropes, and now that I was an older man it was time to try my luck with the surly wizard yet again.
I climbed inside and hit the cables a few times. They were a little tighter than I remembered, a little less forgiving, but after a few crisscrosses they seemed to loosen up a bit. It was like riding a bike—if a bike bounced back and forth within a twelve foot-radius. Then I thought about taking a bump, but it had been such a long time and I was a little tentative. What would it feel like? How would my body react? Would it hurt?
After my warm-up, Lance invited his students into the ring and started his drills. I watched in silence, giving tips when I could and getting the feel of being back in a ring again.
And the feeling was good.
Being around these kids who had given up everything to follow their dreams reminded me of a certain canary-yellow-haired kid who had done the same thing seventeen years earlier. Their enthusiasm for the business fanned the flames of my renewed passion and inspired me to get off my ass and start bumping.
One student who had named himself Fighting Action Guy (you figure it out) was having problems learning how to take a fast-snapping back bump, and I decided I would step in and show him how it was done. Lance shot me off the ropes and I hit them with authority, running like a juggernaught straight into his elbow. I threw myself back as fast as I could and took my first bump since the Attitude Adjustment from Cena two years earlier.
It almost killed me.
My body threatened to shatter into a million pieces like a frozen T-1000 and my head wanted to explode like a thirteen-year-old’s wet dream. I lay on the mat, not wanting to let the young boys know that the mighty Chris Jericho had almost taken a dumpski in his spandex. Thankfully the next bump wasn’t quite as bad (I just peed myself), and the one after that felt almost normal. Then after the class ended, Lance and I wrestled a ten-minute match with Lance calling, and I felt my (stuck) mojo begin to return.
Lance helped me regain my confidence in 2007 the same way he helped me find it in 1990, and I can’t thank him enough for both.
One of the things that was missing from my first run in the WWE was an explosive finish that I could hit from out of nowhere, à la the Stone Cold Stunner or the RKO. The Walls was a submission move and the Lionsault took too long to set up. I needed something new.
After some intense thought I came up with a move I’d never seen, a bulldog into a DDT-type maneuver that I wanted to call the Boomstick (a homage to Bruce Campbell in Army of Darkness ). Less than a week later, I almost had an aneurism when I saw WWE Diva Candice Michelle use my new move as her finisher on Raw. Even worse, she named it the “Candy Wrapper.”
What does that even mean?
Back to the drawing board …
A few weeks later I was watching a DVD from an independent company called Ring of Honor. A Japanese wrestler named Marufuji hit this move in the middle of the match where he jumped into the air and grabbed the back of his opponent’s head, driving it into his knees. I jumped out of my chair thinking, “Secret Squirrel! That is the frootest move I have ever seen and I shall now steal it for my new finish!”
I showed it to Lance while we were training and he thought it was perfect.
“What are you going to call it?” he asked.
“The Boomstick!” I replied enthusiastically.
“Boomstick?” Lance deadpanned disgustedly. “That name sucks.”
It was 1990 all over again.
Somewhere in a parallel universe where Lance Storm does not exist, there is a famous wrestler named Jack Action who defeats his opponent every night with the dreaded Boomstick.
The following Monday the first “Save Us” vignette played and the speculation started immediately about who it was referring to. My phone blew up with calls and texts asking if it had anything to do with me. Cena
texted me right after it aired and said that if the vignette was indeed signaling my comeback, he would fly to the ring on the head of a dragon to wrestle me when I returned.
The trailer was an amazing fifteen-second riddle that said nothing of note, but was enough to get everyone talking. Some fans thought that I was behind the teaser, but nobody really knew for sure. They searched for clues, watching it repeatedly on YouTube and analyzing it frame by frame.
I became the “Paul Is Dead” of wrestling—people were finding Jericho clues in the computer scramble that didn’t exist. One fan claimed to have seen the date 10-27-03 in the alphabet soup, which was the date I won the Intercontinental Championship for the seventh time. Another found numbers representing a Bible verse relating to the Walls of Jericho, and yet another fan was convinced the word “Jericho” was being played backwards in the audio mix of the vignette. None of those things were programmed intentionally and Adam Penucci and I knew we were onto something good.
For the next few weeks we crammed the teasers with red-herring clues that made people think that the messages were heralding the return of Shawn Michaels or the debut of a rumored new Hart family stable. We placed legit Bible verse numbers and phrases within them, like “Save Us,” “The Second Coming Is Upon Us,” and “Can You Break the Code?”
After six weeks Vince decided he wanted to hold off my return even longer to make it as impactful as possible. I was getting paid, so it didn’t bother me even though fans had pretty much figured out that I was the one behind the bits and were chanting my name at shows.
When Cena tore his pectoral muscle and wasn’t able to wrestle Randy Orton at No Mercy in Chicago, Vince had to announce a replacement on the PPV. He got in the ring and told the fans, “I always give you people what you want, and I’m going to give that to you tonight.”
The arena exploded with “Y2J” chants that were so loud they threw old Vincenzo off his game, forcing him to acknowledge them.
He looked like someone had just pissed on his toupee as he said, “Well, I’m not going to give you that.”
To fuel the speculation, I started posting misleading items on my website to make people guess if my return was ever going to take place. If Raw was taking place in Philadelphia, I would say I was taping VH1’s I Love the 60s in New York City. I wanted to keep the cat in the bag for as long as I could, even though at that point my return was a worse-kept secret than Clay Aikens’s sexuality.
In the three weeks leading up to my return, the clues became more advanced; instead of “Save_Us.222,” the phrase now became “Save_Us.X29.” Despite all the clues the fans had found, this X29 code was the one that gave them the most problems. It was a pattern that was deciphered like this: if you added one letter to each of the characters you would get X + 1 = Y and 9 + 1 = 10. The tenth letter of the alphabet is J. Therefore, “Save_Us.Y2J.”
Wow. After typing that, maybe it is more complicated than I thought. No wonder nobody figured it out. I feel like a real 9-D-17-J!
Finally, to erase any confusion and eliminate any further doubts on when my return would be, the last vignette simply said, “Next week the Second Coming arrives.”
In the two years since I’d left the WWE, I had changed my look considerably. The Y2J that had captured the fans’ imagination was a wildly dressed rock star with multiple earrings and chest-length blond hair—hair that was now cut short. I was wondering how people would react to this new-look Jericho, as I knew how I felt when James Hetfield and Bruce Dickinson cut their hair. It threw me off, and even though nothing had changed about their music ( Load notwithstanding in James’s case), I didn’t relate to them or like them as much. I felt a disconnect toward them and I wondered if my fans would feel the same way about me as a result of my new ’do.
I also wanted to come back with a whole new look wardrobe-wise. I saw Sting on the cover of Rolling Stone (Dr. Hook like a maafaaakaa!), wearing a wifebeater/vest combination that I thought looked really froot. But being Chris Jericho, I couldn’t wear just any vest, so I found a tuxedo shop that specialized in flashy ones and ordered a dozen of them in different colors. I bought a pair of black skintight jeans and black boots to match, and voilà!
The new-look Jericho was complete.
My return was going to take place on the November 19, 2007, edition of Raw from Fort Lauderdale, and I was so nervous that I drove down from Tampa the night before. I wrote a lengthy promo about how I was going to save the WWE just as I had done the first time around in 1999 and spent the better part of the night working on it. I’d contacted Zakk, to record an updated version of my “Break Down the Walls” theme song for my return, but Kevin Dunn didn’t care for it and wasn’t convinced he wanted to use it for my first night in. (He never did use it and I’m one of the only people who’s ever heard it. It’s on my iPod right now.)
There were so many details to go over, but Brian and I had decided that we would protect the secret of my return for as long as possible and keep me from showing up at the arena until after the show started, the same way Cena had when he made his secret debut on Raw over two years earlier.
The storyline for my return was that Randy Orton, the World Champion, had organized his own ceremony where he would demand that the torch of the WWE be literally passed on to him. Brian and I had come up with the idea of having an Olympic runner come all the way from Miami to Fort Lauderdale carrying the flame of the WWE. He would run straight into the arena, but I would get involved before he could pass the torch over to Randy. Then I’d attack the champ and hit him with my new finisher, which I had named the Codebreaker (with Lance’s approval, of course).
I spent the day driving around the arena listening to the Doors, memorizing my promo, and trying to quell my nervous energy. I was fiddling with my tie, as I’d decided as part of my new image that I would wear a suit to work every day. A few years earlier the WWE had implemented a dress code that I fought tooth and nail. I was a rock star, dammit! I didn’t dress in business casual clothes! But I had matured during my time away from the company and figured that wearing a suit wasn’t so bad. Vince dressed in a suit every day, and if it was good enough for him, it was good enough for me. So I became the dress codebreaker. Good one, eh?
(Ironic Author’s Note: It wasn’t until I arrived at the arena that I found out they had abolished the dress code a month earlier. I was back to wearing my rock-star clothes within weeks.)
I needed to find a mall though, because earlier in the day as I was getting pimped out in my fancy new Hugo Boss suit I realized that I forgot my Prada dress shoes at home. Therefore I needed to buy a new pair of shoes, but there was no rush since I wasn’t needed at the arena until after Raw started at 9 p.m., right?
As if on cue I got a call from Brian telling me I was needed at the arena immediately, because Vince wanted to explain what he wanted me to do that evening in person.
Doh! All I had to wear with my fancy new suit was a pair of cowboy boots, and I couldn’t walk into the venue wearing those.
Who was I, JBL?
I found a T.J.Maxx on the way to the building and hurriedly bought a pair of cheap dress shoes for $29.99, polishing kit included. So I walked into the arena for my first day of work wearing a thousand-dollar suit and thirty-dollar shoes.
When I arrived, Vince gave me a big hug and complimented me on my sharp new threads. Luckily he didn’t look at my feet.
Vince wanted to know what I was going to say that night, so I recited my perfectly written, well-crafted promo for him. He listened intently and promptly cut it in half.
“We don’t want to hear too much from you tonight. Less is more.”
Well the audience sure as hell wanted to hear from me, as “Y2J” chants filled the arena during the entire show. Throughout the course of the program, cutaways of the torch runner progressing toward the arena aired. Just as he was about to arrive, Orton went to the ring and began cutting a promo heralding the runner’s entrance.
The sprinter made his way off the
highway, across the parking lot, through the backstage entrance, and to Randy’s bliss was about to run up the flight of steps that would bring him into the arena. Suddenly a dark figure stepped out of the shadows and leveled the poor son of a bitch with a vicious clothesline. The audience was taken by surprise and shrieked in shock at the force of the blow—I mean this guy really took the poor runner’s head off. The camera panned up from the motionless carcass to reveal a sparkly vested form with his arms held out by his side in a familiar Jesus Christ pose.
I’d been worried about how the crowd would react for my return, but my worries were for naught. The roar of the fans ignited me and I instantly transformed into Chris Jericho.
It had been a while and I missed the crazy bastard.
Becoming Jericho again was like putting on a favorite pair of jeans that I thought I had lost—a little tight at first, but within minutes it felt like I never took them off.
Orton reacted and there was fear in his viperlike eyes, as the alphanumeric “Save_Us.X29” appeared on the Tron and the X started spinning like a Vegas slot machine before finally settling on Y.
Save_Us.Y29
The crowd buzzed like a fistful of bees, knowing exactly where this was going, as the 9 began spinning into a 10 and then morphed into a J.
Save_Us.Y2J
The wait was over. For the audience and for me.
It had been a long hard road that led me to the WWE the first time, and it had been just as long and hard a road that led me back.
I walked up the stairs to the Gorilla position as the countdown began …
Acknowledgments
I’d like to first thank God and Jesus Christ for allowing me to write another one of these bad boys! Jesus Rocks!
If I included everyone’s name who has been an influence or an ally to me over the last three years in these thank-you’s, the list would take up the entire book and have to be printed microscopically, probably giving everyone who read it cataracts. Besides, nobody except for the people whose names are on the list really care about thank-you lists anyways. So, here’s a froot thumbs-up to all of my family, friends, confidants, band members and business associates who have believed in me!
Undisputed: How to Become World Champion in 1,372 Easy Steps Page 39