A Lion's Tale: Around the World in Spandex

by Chris Jericho

  The tourists would file in while a guy dressed in a dog costume explained, “When that big sign over there lights up, put your thumbs in the air and cheer! When that sign tells you to boo, put your thumbs down and boo.”

  If you watched the show, you would see a bunch of people who had no idea what they were reacting to, putting their thumbs up and cheering, only to turn on a dime and instantly start booing when the next guy came out. They were the exact opposite of ECW fans and I was now a part of Turner Broadcasting Corporate Wrestling.

  But I was also still a part of the wrestling fraternity and some things never change. Riddle me this: What happens when you take 120 cooped-up wrestlers and unleash them into the adult playground known as Downtown Disney?

  The answer: complete chaos and debauchery on a nightly basis. It seemed the entire roster ended up at the disco 8 Trax, drinking, partying, and dancing until three in the morning. After that, the party would continue in one of the dozen nearby hotels that housed us. Many a time we’d go straight from the party back to Universal Studios for the tapings, hoping and praying that we wouldn’t be booked on the 9 A.M. show.

  Here’s a secret. If you were a fan of the World Wide show, you watched many matches performed by severely hungover or still slightly loaded wrestlers.

  I’m talking from experience.

  One night I had a dream that I threw up in the sink. When I woke up I found out it was no dream. That day I was booked on the 9 A.M., 11:30 A.M., 2 P.M., and 4:30 P.M. tapings. Six bucks and my right nut says that one of the bookers saw me doing the hustle to “Disco Duck” in a drunken stupor at three in the morning and thought it would be funny to have me wrestle four times the next day. It wasn’t.

  But it was a great gig and the World Wide shows helped me to get into the groove of having fast-paced, exciting matches against guys like Benoit, Eddy, and Dean Malenko.

  I was a little concerned with my entrance music though. After meticulously choosing such heavy songs as “Over the Mountain” by Ozzy, “Electric Head Pt. 2” by White Zombie, and “Silent Jealousy” by X, my new music was a synthesizer-drenched, castrated rip-off of “Only the Young” by Journey.

  I’ve always put major thought into my intro music, as it sets the tone for my attitude and character in the ring. This song failed miserably in both cases. It might’ve been okay if used for a montage in a 1980s teen comedy but it was awful for a rocker wrestler with big energy. Even worse, I was watching basketball highlights on TBS one night and heard my ring music playing in the background. My oh-so-important intro song was actually a generic track from the TBS music library.

  “Jericho needs ring music? Okay, give him Basketball Highlights #12.”

  In a way the intro song choice was perfect, because it was just as boring as my character was. I was a generic good guy with no discernible charisma, who won some and lost some. It was a dangerous place to be.

  I’d been sheltered by the canned World Wide crowds but when I wrestled on my first Monday Nitro in front of actual paying fans, I didn’t fare as well.

  Nitro was Bischoff’s answer to the WWF’s Monday Night Raw and his idea to air it head-to-head against Raw in the same time slot sparked one of the biggest boom periods in wrestling history. It was an exciting time for fans and wrestlers alike and was one of the reasons why Eric had hired me in the first place. He wanted to scarf up as much available talent as possible and worry about how to use them afterward.

  It hit me just how much talent he’d signed when I went into the arena in Palmetto, Florida, for my first Nitro. Unlike the World Wide tapings, all the big stars were there.

  I walked into one dressing room and saw Ric Flair, Sting, and Lex Luger playing cards. I went into another dressing room and saw Randy Savage talking to Scott Steiner. I turned the corner and saw Hulk Hogan walking out of his private dressing room with Jimmy Hart.

  I took a moment for myself and completely marked out. I’d followed Flair in my mom’s car, waited in the Polo Park Inn for Hogan’s autograph, jumped out of my chair when Savage won the WWF title.

  Now I was working in the same company!

  I took a deep breath of professional and exhaled the mark. The heroes from my childhood were now my peers and I was going to act accordingly.

  At Chris’s suggestion, I’d gone out and bought some nice clothes, or at least I thought I had. I couldn’t find proper dress pants, so I purchased a pair of ill-fitting tan jeans and a wrinkled, black button-up shirt. I looked like a five-year-old kid who’d dressed himself for Sunday school and the shorts and tank top were probably a better look.

  I made a point of introducing myself to as many people in the locker room as possible, as I’d been taught in wrestling school. Most of the guys were cordial, but had no idea who I was. I approached Lex Luger and figured that talking to him about the gym he owned in Atlanta where I worked out would be a great icebreaker.

  “Hey Lex, I’m Chris Jericho and I just wanted to say that I think you’ve got a kick-ass gym. How long have you had it?”

  He looked at me with an annoyed face and said, “Who are you again?”

  It didn’t take long to find out that his pompous attitude was shared by most of the big names in the locker room.

  My first Nitro match was against Alex Wright, a young high-flyer from Germany. We were given eight minutes for the match (including entrances), and since it was my live prime-time national TV debut, my mind was racing with all of the cool spots and moves I wanted to do.

  I gave Alex all of my awesome ideas and he nodded.

  “Out of those ten things you want to do, pick your best three because that’s all we’re gonna have time for.” He was now Dick Murdoch and I was the Japanese young boy. He wasn’t being a jerk, just a realist.

  By the way the match was booked it wouldn’t have mattered what I did, I was still screwed.

  Kevin Sullivan gave me the absolute worst finish that a debuting 1996 babyface could not have asked for. He wanted us to have a back-and-forth match, culminating with Alex jumping off the top rope at me on the floor. I would move out of the way and he would land on the barricade, leaving himself incapacitated. But instead of standing over my injured opponent screaming in victory, I was supposed to roll out of the ring and help him up.

  The guy who once wrestled with a broken arm and beat a man with a punch to the face was going to make sure his opponent was okay.

  The match would end with the both of us getting counted out because I refused to accept such a cheap win.

  Bobby Heenan was on commentary and said, “What a stupid move Jericho just made. You’ve got to take the wins any way you can in the big leagues. Why didn’t he want the victory?” He wasn’t wrong.

  Bischoff was also announcing, but he defended my decision.

  “Chris Jericho is a stand-up human being. He plays by the rules and he wouldn’t dream of taking a victory that way. He’s a good kid.”

  Sickening I know. Each one of his words buried me deeper.

  Even Heenan realized how shamelessly Eric was putting me over.

  “Did you co-sign a loan for this kid?”

  The squeaky-clean babyface might’ve worked a decade earlier, but it was now the wrestling version of rat poison: sure to induce vomiting.

  To make matters worse, I did an interview with Mean Gene Okerlund directly after the match to explain my actions.

  “I didn’t want to win the match that way, Mean Gene. Hulk Hogan and the nWo would take a win like that, but not me.”

  Instead of focusing on myself, I had to talk about how the nWo were a bunch of meanies. Another total self-burial. In eight minutes, I’d portrayed myself as a goody-two-shoes who would rather talk about Hulk Hogan than himself. Who in their right mind would get behind a loser like that?

  Not the WCW office, that’s fer damn sure.

  Despite the fact that Eric seemed to be high on me (Terry Taylor flat-out told me, “The boss digs you”), the rest of the booking team seemed to be digging me into a hol
e. My suspicions were confirmed when I had my first ever PPV match against Chris Benoit at Fall Brawl ’96.

  I knew Chris and I could tear the house down like we had at the J Cup, but my bubble burst like a pimple when Sullivan told us that the match should be structured 80 percent for Benoit and 20 percent for me.

  It made no sense to book any important match that way, never mind one featuring the debut of a guy “the boss digs.” Maybe Sullivan didn’t like the fact that he’d looked stupid by calling me for a tryout after I’d already been hired by the boss. Maybe it was because he was about to start an angle with Chris and wanted him to look strong. Either way, he killed my morale dead.

  Chris and I ignored Sullivan’s order and had a good back-and-forth match anyway. Afterward, Sullivan said, “It was a good match, but you got in way too much offense.”

  Was I supposed to be the next Shawn Michaels or the next Barry Horowitz?

  Things continued to get worse on my first loop of house shows. I was booked against Jerry Lynn and with none of the time constraints imposed at the TV taping, we were having good matches. They must have been too good because I was approached by Scott Hall.

  “Listen, you guys are going way too long and doing too much stuff during your matches. Nobody is paying a dime to see you, so you shouldn’t be out there for twenty minutes. Do a short match and hit the showers,” he said arrogantly and sauntered away.

  I was furious. Was he Scott Mascaras? He didn’t like the fact that we were working hard and he had to follow us. Except his name value was a million times bigger than mine so he didn’t have to do much to get a reaction. But in my case, hard work was all I had because nobody knew who in the hell I was. The nWo could’ve cared less about match quality but that’s all I did care about and I wanted to slap him in the face for dissing me.

  Benoit was as mad as I was. “It’s not his place to say that. He’s just pissed because he’s lazy and wants us all to be lazy too. Don’t listen to him.” Benoit already wanted to kick Hall’s ass, after he had drunkenly pissed on Chris’s cowboy boots one night.

  Hall’s comments were indicative of the nWo’s overall attitude as they were being paid millions and had turned into massive prima donnas. One night in Tupelo, Mississippi, there was a problem with the arena sound system and the intro music wouldn’t play. Hall and Nash started complaining loudly that it was JoJo (their special term for something bush-league) and refused to go to the ring.

  “In New York, there was always music. Isn’t this supposed to be the big time? This is JoJo. If there’s no music we’re not going to the ring.”

  They were wrestling against Sting and Randy Savage and after a few minutes of nonstop, Warload-type bitching, Savage said, “Listen, I don’t give a shit if there’s music or not, I’m going to the ring.”

  Sting agreed and they walked to the ring without another word. Savage was one of the biggest stars in WWF history and he didn’t think the lack of music was JoJo. Hall and Nash reluctantly followed, bitching and complaining all the way to the ring.

  After the show Eddy, Chris, Dean, and I were driving out of town, having a few post-match beers in the car. Eddy had to take a leakus and when we pulled over, we were right next to the house Elvis Presley had grown up in. We knew because there was a big placard in the front yard advertising the fact. Eddy decided to piss in the bushes lining Elvis’s house as a tribute. We all started laughing when Eddy, in the midst of his stream of consciousness, looked up and said, “Fuck Elvis! Who did he ever beat?”

  I guess the King didn’t play in El Paso.

  CHAPTER 45

  INDIAN CASTE SYSTEM

  After floating around with no direction for the first few months of my tenure, Sullivan told me that I was finally going to be put into a story line.

  “That’s tremendous,” I said with excitement. “Who’s it going to be with? Eddy Guererro? Ric Flair? Randy Savage?”

  “Nick Patrick,” he replied.

  Nick Patrick was a referee.

  I’d worked all over the world to make it to the big time and my first angle was going to be against a referee. How low can you go?

  It got worse when Sullivan told me that I was going to be managed in the feud by Teddy Long. Personally, Teddy was a great guy and a great performer but the problem was at the time Teddy’s protégés lost most of their matches. As soon as Sullivan aligned him with me, I knew I was screwed. I was battling a referee in a one-arm-tied-behind-my-back match with Typhoid Teddy as my mentor.

  Shawn Michaels never had it so good.

  Things fell apart during the big match, when the rope tying my arm behind my back came loose and I had to pretend it was still securely fastened. It didn’t matter anyway as the announcers hardly commented on the bout—they were too busy plugging the nWo.

  The social aspects of WCW were equally as disheartening. The locker room was infested with politics and cliques (great title for a rap song), and the office gave special treatment to the powerful ones. Hogan and Savage had their own dressing rooms and didn’t really talk to anybody else. Hall and Nash were in their own little unit and acted above everyone. Other guys like Scott Steiner, DDP, Paul Wight, and Booker T later became my friends, but within the WCW environment they seemed uptight and defensive. Booker even balked at working with Dean, Eddy, and me, complaining, “I ain’t no cruiserweight,” as if he would get leprosy from touching us.

  There wasn’t a lot of cross-pollination among the cliques. It was almost like regressing to high school, where you had to be careful about who you talked to and where you sat in the lunch room. Once I sat down in catering at Hogan’s table and he looked at me like I’d just whipped him in the face with my Jack Johnson. Maybe I should’ve; it would’ve given him no choice but to talk to me.

  The booking of the matches worked the same way. The guys who made a certain amount of money worked almost exclusively with each other. There was a level that you were placed at and it was rare to ever move to another level. It was like an Indian caste system. Whatever level you came in at was the level that you were destined to stay at.

  I came in at $165,000 and that’s where I would stay. I hardly ever worked with someone who made, let’s say, $750,000, because they were worth more than me and worked with the guys in their tax bracket. On the odd occasion that I did work with one of the big-money guys, it was usually in a quick squash. In WCW, a $750,000 salary had to be justified with a $750,000 push.

  There was also a cavalcade of guys who were getting paid huge amounts of money and never worked at all. Horace Boulder, Hogan’s nephew, was on the payroll for almost two years before he ever started working steadily. Randy Savage’s brother, Lanny Poffo, was on the payroll for the whole three years I was with the company and I only saw him work ONE match. I’ll bet you a free copy of this fine publication that he was making in the same ballpark as I was and I was wrestling twenty-two matches a month.

  Sure I was making a decent wage, but ATM Eric was paying a lot of guys way more money to do less work. But it didn’t matter to him, and he was fond of saying, “I don’t care, it’s not my money. It’s Ted Turner’s.”

  Because it wasn’t his money, he seemed to have a real lackadaisical attitude and wore sweat pants, a leather jacket, and a baseball cap turned backward at most of the shows. He was running a multimillion-dollar company and looked like a change vendor at an arcade.

  As smart as Eric was, he conceded so much power to Hogan, Hall, and Nash that they pretty much ran the show. The booking team would hammer out a Nitro episode and an hour before the show the nWo would rewrite it. Some nights we still didn’t know the lineup ten minutes before the show aired live to millions of people.

  Their attitude toward their work was piss-poor as well. I overheard Scott Hall asking Bret Hart one night in Huntsville, Alabama, “Why do you care so much about this match? It’s just a house show.”

  That attitude was shared by head booker Sullivan, who asked me once, “Why do you care so much about your match? Nobod
y else does. Just go in the ring and get it over with. This company is the Titanic heading toward the iceberg anyways.” It was great to hear such positive words from the man who was technically in charge of my on screen career.

  Ric Flair overheard Sullivan’s words and though he had jobbed me out three years earlier, he was one of the few vets in the WCW locker room who gave a shit about the young guys.

  “Don’t ever stop caring about your work,” he said with dead seriousness. “Around here a good match is all you have. It’s the only thing that makes you rise above the bullshit.”

  Flair was right, because as a plain, dry piece of babyface toast, a good match WAS all I had. The nWo were supposed to be the bad guys, the evil empire tearing the company apart, yet they booked themselves to be the most entertaining, coolest act on the show. They had crowd-pleasing catchphrases, cool merchandise, a great sense of humor, and nobody in the company ever stood up to them. The fans started to treat them as the babyfaces, which emasculated other babyfaces (like me) who had no angles, no balls, and no chance to show any personality. The era of the Cool Heel had arrived.

  As WCW continued its domination over the WWF, Eric became increasingly drunk with power. To capitalize on the company’s growing popularity, TBS had started another two-hour weekly show called Thursday Thunder. Bischoff was looking to give the show a boost and decided at the last minute to re-form the Four Horsemen, who had broken up a few months earlier.

  Flair had received permission weeks earlier to miss the show so he could attend his son’s wrestling tournament, and when Eric found out, he fired him on the spot. Then he called a meeting with every WCW employee in the Target Center in Minneapolis.

  “I’m going to starve that piece of shit Flair and his family. I’m going to make sure that they end up living on the street.”