by Jon Robinson
That night, we found a shop that sold fireworks. Not your normal little Fourth of July fireworks. These were quarter sticks of dynamite. And I’m not just calling these things quarter sticks of dynamite, these were legit quarter sticks of dynamite . . . these things would blow your hands off. They were eight inches long with a twenty- or thirty-second wick on them that burned slow just so you could run away. They were nuts and they were only like eight bucks each, so I bought a dozen of them.
Later that night, we were doing a show outdoors at this bullfighting arena that was probably a century old if not more, and the place was huge. They had all of these little pits where they kept the bulls, but the pits were empty and they had all of this loose dirt, so a couple of us dug this big hole and put a quarter stick of dynamite underneath. And this fuse was so long that we were able to use some old shovels lying around and bury this thing pretty deep. Before this, we had lit a few off just to see what they could do, and man, were they dangerous! But this one that we buried, dirt went flying everywhere and the noise was just unbelievable. It sounded like a bomb went off. The vibrations and the percussions of this arena with 20,000 seats and all of the old stone and cement of this bullfighting arena . . . the walls shook when this thing exploded.
The thing is, we had a lot of policia down at the arena. The Mexican police were guarding the building outside and keeping order with all of the big mobs of people who were lining up to come in. All of these policia were armed with machine guns and pistols, and they heard this big boom and they all drew their weapons and ran inside. It was total chaos.
I thought I was going to get in trouble when they found out what I was doing, especially when you see all of these guys with machine guns running in your direction, but it ended up that they all thought it was funny . . . so we did it again.
At that point, Santino and I put our heads together and came up with the idea that we should act like I got arrested. So they handcuffed me and dragged me out like they were arresting me for lighting the dynamite. We actually walked through the backstage area with me in handcuffs, and I just kept my head down, like, “Damn, what have I gotten myself into.” Nobody knew what to think. They all thought I got arrested by the Mexican police, which is definitely not something you ever want to do.
Miz gets Down to Basics
Ted DiBiase
You need to be strong-willed and mentally tough for this life on the road or it will catch up with you. You need to eat right and train and you’re away from your family, so if you don’t love sports entertainment, if you’re not passionate about it, there’s no way you can do it. But the fans are amazing, and they make all of the travel and everything that goes along with it totally worth it. It’s tougher than people think because we’re not just traveling on Mondays and one Sunday a month. We’re traveling from town to town, and we’re not driven, we drive ourselves. We have to find hotel rooms, we live out of a suitcase, and you see the world out of a window. It’s hard, but it’s worth it. It’s especially worth it when we’re all together in the same hotel and something happens that just makes you laugh harder than you could ever expect.
I remember this one night we were all in France. We were all sitting down eating inside the hotel at the restaurant after the show, and it was late. It was the last night of our tour, and we were all just hanging out and talking. When it’s our last night of a long tour like this, we don’t usually sleep that night because then you can just sleep easier on the plane the next day. So most of us were down in the restaurant along with Hornswoggle. He’s a funny guy as it is, but he was ready to cause some trouble that night. He’s asking everyone, “Where is The Miz?” We were all looking for The Miz, but The Miz had already gone to bed. So Hornswoggle leans over to me and he’s like, “Teddy, we need to go find The Miz and wake him up. We need to do something to him.” We didn’t know what we wanted to do, but one thing we knew, we already had stolen the key to his room from earlier in the night. So we go up to his room, and Hornswoggle was carrying this giant bottle of water. I was actually just there to protect the little guy in case The Miz tried to kill him. I was his bodyguard.
So we go up there, and all the lights were out. Hornswoggle sneaks into his room, and while The Miz was sound asleep, he dumps the entire bottle of water over The Miz’s bed. Miz jumps out of bed, Hornswoggle starts to run out of the room, I’m running behind him, and Miz is running after us, and he chucks this bottle of water at us as we race down the hall. But what’s funny is, The Miz is running down the hall and all he’s wearing is his underwear, and I swear, we all stop at the same time and hear the door behind him go click. So now Miz has been woken up, he’s just had water poured all over him, and he’s locked out of his hotel room half naked. Hornswoggle and I then head down to the hotel lobby and tell all the boys to gather around and watch what’s about to happen, as the only way Miz could get back in his room was to go up to the woman at the front desk . . . we weren’t going to do it for him.
So The Miz walks down, and while he’s trying to figure out what to do soaking wet and half naked, we realize that we still have the key to his room. I tell Hornswoggle that I’ll stall The Miz while he goes back up to his room and finishes the job. Miz was a pretty good sport about it, walking off the elevator in front of all of the boys while everyone was laughing at him, and he actually sat down in the lobby for a minute in his underwear. But while he was doing that, Hornswoggle used his key to get back in the room and he stole all of The Miz’s clothes, all of his towels, all of his sheets . . . everything! He even dumped more water on his bed and was back down before Miz got his new key. And Miz had no idea. Everyone goes back to their rooms to go pack, as we only had an hour or two at this point before we needed to leave, and Miz didn’t even realize all his stuff was gone. He fell asleep for a few hours, then woke up the next morning and realized he didn’t have any clothes. We made him sweat it out until we were about to leave before we told him where his clothes were. Man, the midget got him good.
Permanent Ink
Christian
Don’t ever fall asleep first. If I had one piece of advice for future wrestlers traveling in groups, that would be it. The reason? I was on an airplane with the Hardys and Edge. We were all on a red-eye flight from Las Vegas to Chicago, and we might have all had a little too much to drink as they say, and the flight was pretty much empty, so we were all just hanging out in the back of the plane and having some laughs. Not anything crazy, but we were just all joking around and talking. I then made the mistake of thinking I was going to sit back and relax for a couple of seconds, but instead I ended up falling asleep. I woke up when we landed, and as I stood up, I started to notice people staring at me. I was like, “Hold on here a second, something is just not right.” Then I looked over at Matt and he had fallen asleep right after me, and I saw that they had taken a Sharpie and written all over his face with black ink. So I didn’t say anything to Matt, I just went into the bathroom, and of course, they had written all over my face with the same Sharpie. They had drawn the people’s eyebrow on me. They wrote “Dickface” across my forehead. So I go to the bathroom of the airplane and I’m trying to scrub as hard as I could to get all of this off my face. Of course, you just can’t do that great a job scrubbing the people’s eyebrow off your mug in an airplane bathroom, so when I come out, now I have marker smudged all over my face. I had to walk through the airport with Sharpie smeared everywhere, and I’m sure I didn’t look too great. But I did look better than Matt. Matt had no idea they had written on his face too. Not until he walked out into the airport and he realized everyone was staring at him. He finally put two and two together, that he fell asleep right after I did on the plane, and when he ran to the bathroom he found all the Sharpie drawings across his forehead too. And actually, remembering this story reminds me of something . . . I never got Edge back.
Two-for-One
Chavo Guerrero
One of the things you always need to do is keep yourself occupied, keep yourself
entertained. You’re always looking for something to do. That’s how the ribs come into play. Just the other day, I was checking into the hotel at three in the morning and I saw a bag on the ground. One of the guys had checked in right before us but left his Adidas bag at the counter. I saw this and I figured it had to be one of the wrestlers. I asked the person at the counter, “Who just checked in?” and they told me it was Evan Bourne, Miz, Kofi, and Hornswoggle. So I convinced the lady at the desk to give me their room number. Then I called the room and pretended to be the cops. I was like, “This is Sergeant Daniels, did somebody leave an Adidas bag down here?” Miz was like, “Yeah, we did.” So I told him, “Could the person whose bag it is come down and bring their ID with them? We found some illegal substances in the bag and we need to talk to you.”
All of a sudden, they started freaking out and I could hear them arguing. “Did you put something in my bag?” “No!” “What are they talking about?” “Someone from the hotel must’ve put something in our bag!”
By the time they actually came down, they were so scared, but then they saw it was me and they started laughing. They were like, “You jerk!” They thought someone from the hotel tried to set them up or something. It was too funny.
But that wasn’t the only time I got The Miz. We were riding together one time and I got pulled over for speeding. The officer looked at me and he recognized me, but he didn’t recognize Miz. Then he asked me to step out of the car and walked me to the back. He was like, “You’re Chavo, right?” And I told him I was, but before he could say anything else, I told him, “Help me play a rib on my friend.”
He asked Miz for his license, and Miz’s license was really old and you couldn’t really read the expiration date or any of the info, so the cop totally played along and asked Miz to step out of the car. Then the cop really started grilling him about why his license looked like that and why he had an out-of-state ID. Miz tried to explain, but he was nervous, so I pretended to stick up for him, but the cop told me to shut up, how this didn’t concern me. He really played it up good. Miz was going crazy on the side of the road, but I couldn’t let it go any farther, so we told him it was a rib. It doesn’t get much better than getting a North Carolina state trooper to rib The Miz. Any chance we get, we’re going to get someone good, and the opportunities always seem to arise with some of these younger guys.
Walk It Out
Kofi Kingston
Me and Hornswoggle travel together all the time, but I don’t really let him drive because his car back home has pedal extenders that enable him to keep his feet at a normal length so that if the air bag goes off, it won’t suffocate him. When we’re on the road, the rental cars don’t have these pedal extenders, so if he wants to drive, he literally has to pull his seat all the way up to where his chest is on the steering wheel. God forbid if we ever got into an accident and the air bag went off, he would suffocate. So I never let him drive. But whenever we travel with The Miz and Evan Bourne, they both always play it up like they want Swoggle to drive. They really try to get everyone riled up, like, “Hey, why don’t you let Swoggle drive? What are you going to do about it?” But I’m like, “Look, I will not get in the car with him. Aside from his safety, I’m really concerned for our safety because Hornswoggle drives pretty recklessly. He’s not what you would call a conscientious driver by any means.” So I think it’s safer for everyone if I do the driving . . . or if anyone but Swoggle gets behind the wheel. That’s when we’re the safest.
So we were all driving through Canada this one time, and Miz and Evan were busting my chops about wanting to have Swoggle drive. So when we stopped to fill up for gas, I went inside to pay, and apparently they were all conspiring the whole time to see what I would do if Swoggle got behind the wheel. So when I got out of the gas station, Hornswoggle was in the front seat. At that same time, I saw The Miz start to get out of the car. Now, me and Hornswoggle travel and we spend so much time together that we can look at each other and start to read each other’s minds. So at this point, as soon as The Miz left the car, I made eye contact with Hornswoggle and I knew exactly what to do.
Now, all this time, Miz thought he was going to rib me. He thought he was working with Hornswoggle and he was on the good side of the rib. But not for long. When Miz left the car, I jumped in and Hornswoggle took off, leaving Miz at the gas station. I thought Hornswoggle would just drive up like ten or fifteen feet and we’d all get a good laugh and let The Miz back in. But it turns out, our hotel was about a half mile away and it was directly across this highway from the gas station, so Hornswoggle just kept on driving. He left The Miz at the gas station, drove all the way to the hotel, parked the car, then we sat there and watched The Miz try to cross this busy highway on foot and make his way back to our hotel. He was out there dodging traffic, then he finally made his way to this really big field that he had to cross in order to get to the hotel. Hornswoggle made him walk back the entire way. I couldn’t believe it.
It’s funny because Hornswoggle can’t be more than three and a half feet tall, but he bullies The Miz. He really is a bully, and there’s nothing The Miz can do about it.
Tanning Twins You On?
Randy Orton
We were in Alabama at a tanning salon, and there were six of us: Evan Bourne, me, Santino, Chris Masters, Cody Rhodes, and Ted DiBiase. Cody was the last one in the tanning bed, and it’s a common prank amongst us that if you leave that tanning bed door open while you’re tanning, we’ll go in there and steal your clothes. So it all started off with me finding out what room Cody was in, sneaking up, trying the door, and finding out the door was unlocked. Next thing you know, I’m in his room and I steal all of his clothes. Everyone is laughing outside, but I decide, “Let’s take this a step farther.” So I went back inside his room, and of course he’s tanning, so he’s got a towel over his face and he has no idea what is going on. So I take my foot and open the door, and there is Cody Rhodes with only a towel over his face and he’s, let’s just say, standing at attention. A picture was taken but we had to delete it so Cody would stop complaining. It was probably the most embarrassing moment of his life.
Rib Gone Wrong
Goldust
It was me, Owen Hart, Davey Boy Smith, and Billy Gunn, and we were driving from Montreal to Bangor, Maine. It was snowing like hell, and I was driving in this nice thick Cadillac. You can’t really see the road, but it just looked so flat out on the sides, like plains. Just flat plains on both sides. So I thought this would be a good time to rib the boys and scare the crap out of them. I figured I’d pull over and just drive straight through one of these fields. The moonlight was out but you still couldn’t see too far in the distance. So I got everyone talking and I’m driving pretty fast, but there was nothing around, and I mean absolutely nothing. There was this little itty-bitty general store on the right, and I pass that at about eighty miles per hour when I decide now is the time. I pull off to the right to head straight into this field. Only thing is, I was thinking it was a field, but it’s really not. I ended up hitting this snowbank and all you hear is boom-boom-boom-boom-boom! Snow is going everywhere, and it’s up over the hood—the snow was that deep. And now we’re stuck. Everybody is freaking out. All I hear is, “What the hell are you doing?” and “We’re going to die!”
I get out of the car, and when I see the damage, I’m like, “Damn, I just ribbed myself.” I knew I wasn’t going to be able to get us out of there. There wasn’t anybody on the road anywhere around, but luckily for us, here comes this truck. It had to be the only truck for miles, but he saw us and pulled us out. It was lucky because this was three in the morning, and here we are stuck off on the side of a road in a snowbank. We got back in and everyone was laughing about it, but it was still really cool because I had everyone so scared. Here I was thinking it was just a field, and I almost got us all frozen to death. It could’ve been disastrous, but it wasn’t. I guess that’s what still makes it so funny.
Fixing Up Marcus
The Miz
One night we were driving, and we had about five people in our car. We were trying to find someplace to watch the Oscar De La Hoya versus Floyd “Money” Mayweather fight. We end up getting out of our car and walking around, trying to find someplace that is showing the fight, and these guys carrying beer recognize me from being on The Real World. I ask them where we can watch the fight and they tell us to follow them through these bushes, where we end up at this fraternity house with about seventy people inside watching the fight. It’s standing-room-only inside the house, but these guys give us prime seating. So we all sit down, and Marcus Cor Von kicks back in one of the last La-Z-Boy chairs. This one guy sees Marcus, and he sits down on one of the arms of the chair, and he’s staring at Marcus. This guy is like, “Wow, you’re big.” And Marcus tells him, “Thank you very much. Just watching the show.” Then the conversation goes something like this:
“What’s your name?”
“Marcus.”
“What do you do?”
“I’m a professional wrestler.”
“Oh really? Wow. You have such big muscles.” And this guy actually starts feeling on Marcus’s biceps.
So Marcus turns to him and says, “Thank you very much, but I’d appreciate it if you don’t touch me.”
“Sorry about that,” the guy tells him, “but you’re just so cute.”
This guy goes on like this for the entire fight, and of course, we start egging the guy on. We tell him how Marcus is kind of shy and how you have to really warm him up. So he keeps asking Marcus if he wants something to drink, and Marcus is like, “Sure, I’d love a water.” We tell the guy to get him beer because once he starts drinking a little bit, he gets really touchy-feely.
So this guy just keeps trying and trying anything he can to talk to Marcus, and Marcus is getting really upset. Literally, Marcus gets up from his chair and walks to the complete other side of the house, and the guy follows him. Finally, Marcus says that he really needs to go, but the guy really wants his phone number. So of course, we gave the guy Marcus’s number, and as soon as we get to the car, Marcus starts getting these texts, like, “You’re so cute!” and “You’re so fun, why don’t you talk to me?” Marcus had no idea who it was, but the texts kept coming and we kept laughing. Things like that can really make a long car ride seem a whole lot shorter.
