The Best in the World

by Chris Jericho

  I stood in the middle of the ring looking at the middle rope like it was my white whale, scared to try the move but more scared not to. If I didn’t get this out of the way right now, it was going to screw with my entire psyche and affect my training. I had to get rid of the doubt inside my head quickly because if I didn’t, I was going to get hurt, and the only way to conquer the fear was to move full speed ahead and get this funky monkey off my back. It was like passing a car on a one-lane highway with another vehicle approaching; you have to speed by as fast as you can with no hesitation, or risk a head-on collision.

  I didn’t have “head-on collision” planned on my schedule today, so I said a quick prayer and thought of Joel Goodsen’s motto.

  “What the fuck,” I whispered and took off running.

  I jumped onto the second rope and let my weight force it downward until it reached its nadir. I pushed off with my legs, threw my arms in the air, and tilted my head. I flipped backward, rotated, and landed picture-perfect on my stomach. I lay on the mat for a few seconds, waiting for that burning buzz saw blade to tear up my insides, but praise God, it didn’t happen and I felt great.

  Since the spell had been broken and the curse had been lifted, we spent the next few hours having mock matches and running through some of my patented moves to see how they felt. To my pleasant surprise, I pulled them all off pain free: Codebreakers, crossbody blocks from the top rope, enziguris, bulldogs, Walls of Jericho. They all felt better than ever, especially the Codebreaker, which had always seemed to hurt me more than my opponent.

  Since I came back in 2007 with my new finish of the Codebreaker, I wanted to come back in 2012 with a new move as well. I had the idea of doing a sliding forearm to the face and calling it Apocalypse Now. I practiced the move a dozen times with Lance, making tweaks along the way. It looked badass and I was excited to start using it as soon as I returned. I texted Vince to tell him that I had a new finishing move and his reply was typical McBad comedy.

  “You already have a finish . . . looking at the lights!”

  Hardee frickin’ har.

  I actually only used the move once, during a match with Kofi Kingston in Dubai. But I decided I didn’t have the time or the patience to get it over and I gave up on it after a few weeks. So if you want to use Apocalypse Now as your new finish, fearless readers, be my guest.

  Once I could do my patented Lionsault without any pain, I knew I was ready to return to the WWE.

  Now that I was warmed up and ready to return to the grueling full-time WWE schedule, my free time was about to be cut down significantly. So before I went back, I wanted to do one last thing for myself and check out one of the Metallica XXX anniversary shows in San Francisco.

  I’d been contacted a few months before by Lars’s assistant to see if I would do a short video congratulating them on their thirty-year career and was blown away. To be asked by the mighty Metallica to give my thoughts on their legendary career for these monumental shows was a huge honor. I whipped up a ninety-second soliloquy praising them for all they’d accomplished and thanked them for all they’d done for me.

  “No matter what I’ve been through in my life, Metallica has always been there for me. Thanks to James, Lars, Kirk, Cliff, Jason, and Robert for always having my back,” I concluded.

  Then Lars invited me to come to as many of the four shows as I could. My schedule was pretty packed as I had a lot to prepare for with my return only weeks away, so I was only able to go to the first show. But it was one of the best nights of my life as a musician and a fan, because it was something that had never been done by a band and might never happen again. Over the course of the four shows, Metallica played a whopping EIGHTY songs encompassing their entire career—rare tracks, instrumentals, songs they’d never played live before, some of their famous covers joined by the original guys who played them, and all in front of a small number of lucky hard-core fans who’d won tickets from their fan club.

  I walked into the 1,200-capacity Fillmore in downtown San Francisco with Speewee and good friend Brian Slagel, the founder of Metal Blade Records (and huge hockey nut), and saw it had been transformed into a veritable Metallica museum. They had assembled an amazing collection of rare Metallicartifacts including Lars’s infamous early ’90s white leather jacket, the Gibson Explorer that James was playing when he was horribly burned by a pyro blast (just like The Undertaker), rare posters from their early days, and a jean jacket once worn by my hero Cliff Burton.

  We waited for the show to start in the VIP balcony as a New Orleans brass band played instrumental versions of Metallica tunes, and various dignitaries milled about, including Jason Newsted, who was rejoining the band for the first time in a decade to play a few songs. Then I was introduced to Biff Byford, the lead singer of Saxon (one of my favorite bands), who was there to sing his band’s classic “Motorcycle Man” with Tallica.

  “When I was fourteen, I only asked for one present for Christmas, the Crusader album by Saxon,” I gushed to Biff like a teenager.

  Then I was taken to meet Cliff Burton’s eighty-year-old father, Ray, and was kind of starstruck. I couldn’t believe I was standing next to my hero’s dad and he was so froot to talk to, standing there wearing his Cliff Burton T-shirt and Metallica button. One of the highlights of my fanboy career for sure.

  Meanwhile the various tribute videos were playing on a big screen to the crowd, some getting massive responses (Lemmy), others getting booed out of the building (Avril Lavigne). My video aired in a great slot between Michael Schenker and U2 and I’m proud to say I got a bigger cheer than Bono (who’s still awesome, #alionstalecallback).

  I was laughing to Slagel about the response to my video, when I saw a skinny tall dude with a faux hawk standing in the corner trying so hard to look like Hetfield it was pathetic. The guy walked toward me and I realized it WAS Hetfield. I couldn’t believe how great he looked and how much weight he’d lost since I’d last seen him eight months ago at The Big Four show in Indio, where he’d been getting quite beefy.

  He told me how much he appreciated my video and how much it meant to them. After some small talk (I was still a little tongue-tied to be talking to Jaymz), I asked him how he got into such good shape.

  “I’ve been doing the caveman diet,” he said simply.

  Caveman diet? I hadn’t heard of that before. James explained that it consisted of eating only meat, chicken, fish, berries, nuts, eggs, and vegetables; basically no breads or carbs, processed foods or sugars. You only ate what a caveman could hunt or forage from the land.

  “But didn’t cavemen only live until they were like thirty years old?”

  “Yeah, but that’s because they all got eaten by dinosaurs,” James said with a smirk.

  All jokes aside, the concept sounded interesting and DDP had been urging me to start a gluten-free diet anyway, so if the Caveman Diet was good enough for Papa Het, it was good enough for me. I started it the next day, lost ten pounds in the first three weeks, and have stuck with it ever since. I’ve changed its name to The Hetfield Diet (much to Zakk Wylde’s chagrin) and don’t even consider it a diet anymore. It’s just the way I eat. So if you’re looking to drop a couple pounds, I strongly suggest it.

  I spent the rest of the night drinking Yeah Boy!s (cavemen had vodka, didn’t they?) and going nuts with one of my favorite bands as they celebrated their career with their closest fans. I ended up in the photo pit thrashing all around, acting like a maniac, but I was interfering with the cameramen who were filming the show and was asked to move by their head of security, Big Mike.

  “But James said I could stand here,” I lied.

  Big Mike shook his head and dragged me out of the pit by my ear like I was seven years old.

  A few minutes later, back in the safety of the balcony, I texted HHH (who’d also done a video) to tell him mine had gotten a much bigger pop (it had), and he asked why wasn’t I home wat
ching Raw. I laughed, but it would only be a few more weeks before I was watching Raw . . . this time live and in person.

  Hanging with the amazing Ray Burton, father of Cliff. He was the star of the show in the VIP room of the Fillmore and told me that after twenty-eight years, he was still Metallica’s biggest fan.

  CM Drunk

  The first Raw of 2012 was in Memphis, Tennessee, but to keep the hellhounds off my trail, I flew into Nashville (over two hundred miles away) instead. Even though most of the fans suspected by that point that I was the one behind the End of the World videos, I wanted to keep my return as much of a secret as possible. The best way to do that was to avoid the fans who waited at the airport for autographs and would instantly post the news of my arrival online if they saw me.

  Alas, my careful efforts to go incognito were in vain; I was somehow spotted at the Nashville airport. A picture of me standing stoically in the baggage claim, holding my black leather computer bag by my side, was posted within minutes. As soon as I saw it I counterattacked by tweeting a recent picture of me, Speewee, and the very wise Chad snowboarding in Banff, and claimed it was from that day, which started an online debate as to my whereabouts. A few minutes later, fans began posting Photoshopped pictures of me standing stocially with my leather bag at famous landmarks around the world like a bizarre Where’s Waldicho? There I was standing next to the pyramids in Egypt, on the grassy knoll during the Kennedy assassination, and my personal favorite, crossing Abbey Road with The Beatles.

  Crossing Abbey Road with The Beatles, courtesy of a mysterious Photoshopper who made this and a dozen others, including one of me and my briefcase standing next to Princess Diana’s destroyed car in the Pont d’Alma tunnel in Paris.

  I drove to Memphis and parked my car on a dark side street close to the arena, then was picked up by a black sedan and escorted under the cover of night by Bruno Lauer to a backstage bus to await my cue.

  Toward the end of the show, the last of my vignettes played to the live crowd and ended with Nasal Boy saying ominously, “The end of the world as you know it begins NOW.”

  The lights went down and the fans were humming like a bird waiting for something big to happen. I hadn’t been gone long enough for them to forget who I was like they had for my 2007 return, so this time when my patented “Break the Walls Down” war cry resounded through the arena, they went ballistic.

  I hurried out onstage in total darkness and hit the switch inside the pocket of my new accoutrement (fun word), powering on the hundreds of blue lights crisscrossing the jacket and turning me into a new millennium version of the Electric Horseman . . . sans swank ’70s Robert Redford mustache.

  When the lights illuminated and I appeared onstage, the crowd went wild, which was all fine and El Dandy, except I was supposed to be the bad guy, remember? Even though I’d ended my last run as a heel, I’d now reached the status where people were excited to see me no matter what side of the fence I was on.

  Penucci had anticipated this reaction when we were working on the videos and suggested, to remedy it, I take away the thing that my fans loved about me the most.

  My mouth.

  “What if after all this buildup and hoopla, you came to the ring and said absolutely nothing?”

  I loved it. By staying silent, I’d be verbally blueballing all the Jerichoholics who were excited to see me again. Everyone would be expecting some witty repartee or my famous catchphrases, but by not giving them what they wanted I’d leave them feeling ripped off, confused, and less apt to cheer for me the next week.

  I strutted down to the ring, but as soon as I stepped through the ropes, the jacket’s entire right arm of lights went dead. I must’ve snapped a wire with my movements as the fragile electronics weren’t designed to withstand that sort of expansive motion. But it didn’t matter. The crowd was hot, hot, hotter than hell, and I stood there for five minutes with a shit-eating grin on my face, basking in their glory and holding the mic in front of my mouth. Then I dropped it on the mat and retreated out of the ring, still grinning.

  Vince’s first comment when I came through the curtain was “Your jacket broke already? Well, that was rotten!” But besides my wardrobe malfunction he loved the segment, so much so that he decided he didn’t want me saying anything at all until my first match three weeks later at the Royal Rumble. I thought it was a great idea and spent the following weeks thinking of creative ways not to say anything during a promo.

  I came out the next Monday and pulled the Silent Bob gimmick again, this time welling up with fake tears at the reaction I was getting and mouthing the word Why? (a trick I stole from Hulk Hogan, who had done the same thing during a huge crowd reaction in Montreal a decade earlier) as the fans wondered what the hell I was doing. The next week, I came to the ring with a T-shirt gun and shot merch into the crowd while screaming “Yeah, Yeah!” for no reason in particular. The crowd was onto me at this point and knew I was trolling them, but instead of booing, they just got apathetic.

  The reactions got better during the Rumble match when I made it to the final two with Sheamus, but it confused the crowd when he eliminated me and won. I thought it would’ve been better for the Best in the World feud for me to win the Rumble, but the decision was made to go with my favorite Irishman instead.

  Finally, the night after the Rumble, I broke the silence and did a long promo about how the talent in the WWE had robbed me of all my ideas and inventions. The suits, slow-talking promos, high-flying moves, sparkly tights, anything I could think of, I took credit for. (The “Chris Jericho invented everything” gag is still as popular as ever. I even read a tweet today saying, “Chris Jericho invented Chuck Norris.”) Finally I zeroed in on the catchphrases and called out Punk for stealing mine, which drew the ire of the crowd and Punk himself.

  He was the most over babyface in the company, and his reaction was off the charts when the opening riff of “Cult of Personality” played. The fans were looking forward to seeing the two of us butting heads in a verbal dual and we gave them what they wanted.

  “So you invented everything, huh? Did you invent Canada too?” he smirked.

  Then he got serious. “While you were off dancing with the stars, I was here swimming with the sharks” (such a great line), alluding to how he’d conquered the WWE machine with his new character. At the end of the fifteen-minute segment, the battle lines had been drawn and the WWE Universe was ready to see who really was The Best in the World.

  The thing I admired most about Punk was, like me, when he said he was The Best in the World, he truly believed it. We were a lot alike and had come through the ranks of the WWE the same way (as did Shawn Michaels), both of us accused of being egomaniacal, arrogant, and hard to deal with because we had confidence in our abilities. Neither one of us had been groomed to be World Champions from the start. We’d gotten to the top by being all-around performers who could make anybody look good and stood firm in our beliefs to take no shit from anybody, including each other.

  A few years earlier, in 2010, we had a live event in a little barn of a building in Amarillo, Texas, on the same day Canada was playing for the Olympic gold medal in hockey against the United States. It was a monumental battle between the two biggest rivals in hockey history, and as a Canadian, I was excited to watch it. The afternoon’s match was Punk and me vs. Morrison and Edge, and since we were all familiar with each other’s styles, we agreed to call the match in the ring and not get together beforehand so that Edge and I could watch the game. We sat on the crew bus and watched Canada beat the U.S. in overtime, with the final goal scored just as my ring music began.

  Punk started the match and did a few spots with Morrison and then Edge. I stood on the apron waiting for the tag, but he kept ignoring me. He stopped Edge and started getting heat on him but still didn’t tag me in. I started getting hip to the fact that he planned on working the whole match himself.

  I stood on the
apron watching him do all the work and munched some popcorn from a ringside fan, until Morrison finally got the hot tag and pinned him. I wasn’t selling it outwardly, but inside I was fucking pissed, especially when a fan hit me in the back of the head with an empty Pepsi can as I walked to the back.

  I called the four of us into the trainer’s room after the match and asked Punk what his problem was. He opened up instantly and admitted he felt Edge and I had been unprofessional in watching the hockey game instead of putting together the match beforehand.

  I wasn’t having any of it and exploded right back, “You can’t call a match in the ring? I don’t need to explain myself to anybody in this arena, never mind you. And you wanna talk about unprofessional? If ONE person out there bought a ticket to see me, you just took that away from them. If you had a problem with me watching the game, you should’ve said something back here, not in the ring. What you did out there was fucking unprofessional!”

  We agreed to disagree but to this day I still feel he was out of line, although I have to admit the guy has balls. It’s one of the reasons why I requested to work with him, and one of the reasons why I knew he would be into the idea of me tattooing my initials on him.

  I ran the idea past him and he agreed it was a great way to take our feud to a completely different place from any of the others on the show. He even offered to fly his regular tattoo artist in from Chicago to teach me how to do the simple procedure, but we still needed final approval from Vince, who had strangely been avoiding the subject whenever I asked him about it.

  When I got to the arena in Boston before Raw, I found out from Michael Hayes why Vince was ducking me.

  “He doesn’t want to do the tattoo angle. He found out that people bleed when they get inked and is totally against it now.”

  I still wanted to hear Vince’s reasoning for myself, so I went and asked him why he’d canceled the angle. He admitted he was concerned about seeing even a few drops of blood, but he also felt that tattooing Punk wasn’t all that big a deal.