Another thing that bugged me about Hughes was that our ring attire didn’t match. I was wearing flashy rave shirts and leather pants, while he wore cheap black jeans and a ratty black T-shirt. So I gave him one of my blue sparkly shirts and told him to cut the sleeves off. He did and proceeded to wear it every single time he came to the ring. I thought he might get the hint and buy a new wardrobe but he didn’t.
He just fell asleep.
My first official Raw match was against The Rock. Even though it was only a few months after one of the biggest debuts in WWE history, I’d lost so much steam in the eyes of the office at that point that our monumental first match was aired for free and Rock beat me clean. Our feud was being blown off before it ever started, which was peculiar for two reasons: (1) the match had been built from my first night in, and (2) I was the one with a bodyguard, which gave him an out if he lost, so why would he go over clean?
Jim Ross said before the match, “We’ve got Jericho vs. The Rock next, this should be a classic!” Good ol’ JR doesn’t say anything he doesn’t mean, but despite his lofty expectations our match ended up being about as classic as the Gary Cherone Van Halen lineup. Rocky is one of my favorite opponents ever and we ended up having great chemistry, but in our first match together that chemistry was zilch, zippo, nada, bupkus (Thesaurus Author’s Note: Insert other word of your choice for nonexistent here).
One of the biggest problems was that I still hadn’t learned how to be a WWE-style heel, which required a serious, strong beatdown of the babyface during the heat, followed by quick bumping and feeding for said babyface during the comeback. In WCW, you would just take a bump, stay down, and sell it. But in the WWE you had to jump up and down as fast as you could in order to constantly sell for the babyface. I didn’t know that yet and looked lazy and slow throughout the match, and I could tell Rock was wondering what the hell I was doing.
Ugh. Nobody told me there’d be days like these …
The match had no flow and was totally scatterbrained. I was trying too hard instead of just letting my basic skills and instinct shine through. I had morphed back into 1996 Jericho during my first WCW match against Mr. JL. I was choppy and a complete klutz, like I’d been possessed by the spirit of Matt (not Mick) Foley and had moved into a van down by the river.
But the worst was yet to come.
When Rock threw me over the barrier and into the crowd, I spotted a soda cup on the floor and decided it would be cool to throw it into his face. So I did. Except the liquid in the cup wasn’t Sprite—it was spit.
I had thrown someone’s tobacco dip cup into the face of the biggest star in the WWE.
I was mortified. Rocky was disgusted. Hughes was sleeping.
Up to that point, Rocky had been one of the only guys in the company who was good to me, and I had disrespected him with a pure rookie mistake, on live television no less.
Even though I apologized a thousand times, he had every right to tear into me, but he never did. I think he felt bad for me because when he first started in the company he was in a situation similar to mine: a guy who was brought in to be a star but wasn’t up for it at first and everybody hated him as a result.
But he certainly wasn’t happy about being doused in winter mint saliva, and he must have showered for forty-five minutes that night.
After I had given Rock a worse facial than Erik Everhard ever could, I just wanted the match to end, and mercifully it soon did. Hughes slid a chair into the ring, but before I could use it, Rocky turned the tables and gave me his patented Rock Bottom on it. However Hughes was tired, and instead of sliding the chair into the ring with the smooth side up, Sleepy slid the chair in upside down. So when Rocky slammed me onto its raised metal edges it almost killed me—but not as badly as the match itself did.
After Rock covered me for the win, I woke Hughes up and we skulked to the back, both of us knowing that we’d just stunk up the joint. On the way to the sanctuary of the dressing room, Jeff Jarrett and Road Dogg asked me, “So how did it go?”—which is wrestler code for, “I saw your match and it sucked bagski.”
A few days later I started hearing rumors that Vince and the other higher-ups within the company thought I couldn’t work. Who could blame them? I hadn’t shown anything since my arrival that would make them think otherwise. The combination of my thinking that I was better than I was (which wasn’t arrogance so much as ignorance), my unfamiliarity with the WWE style, and my cowardly, comedic heel tendencies caused me to make a record-time plunge from Vince’s penthouse to Vince’s outhouse.
And I was about to get shit on.
Looking back now, I think one of the biggest problems I faced at the beginning of my WWE career stemmed from the fact that Vince Russo loved the character I played in WCW. He loved my cowardly heel comedy schtick and wanted me to continue in that vein. I played that character in WCW because I wasn’t getting any attention from the office anyway and had nothing to lose. In the WWE main event world, money players couldn’t be comedians or cowards all the time, and I had been brought in to be a major player. Major players have to be believable, and in Vince’s mind while there can be elements of comedy to them, people have to believe they can kick somebody’s ass. Russo didn’t see things that way and kept booking me in all these preposterous WCW-esque situations.
As a result, I was caught in the middle, and I ain’t talkin’ about Ronnie James Dio.
After the Hughes experiment tanked, Curtis went into hibernation and I was instead saddled with Howard Finkel, who was earmarked to be the WWE version of Ralphus. I began a program with Ken Shamrock, which started with me being lowered into the ring inside of a shark cage, like Richard Dreyfuss in Jaws. I called Ken out, telling him that I wasn’t in the cage to protect me from him; I was in the cage to protect him from me.
Ken pried the bars open and I freaked out and escaped. Backstage, Shamrock found Finkel in a blond wig, thinking that he was me. As he was accosting Harold (as I called him), I snuck up from behind, slammed Shamrock’s head in a car door, and put him in the Walls as Harold took pictures.
The next week Russo decided he wanted me to wear a suit of armor—yes, an actual suit of armor—for a First Blood match on Raw, with the idea being I couldn’t bleed if I was wearing it.
Let me ask you, dear reader, have you ever tried to wear a suit of armor? Great Caesar’s Ghost, it’s almost impossible to put on because—well, it’s a suit of fucking armor! I wriggled and struggled gingerly to affix each section of the metal bodysuit to my extremities, trying not to gouge myself to death. Then, once I finally got it on, it was like being in a tin can with the top opened. There were all of these sharp edges cutting and digging into me. At one point I took a big step to the left and thought the codpiece was gonna saw my ballbag clean off. There was no way I was going to be able to work a match in this thing without slicing myself up worse than Abdullah the Butcher’s forehead.
As a compromise, I came up with the idea of wearing full hockey gear, including a helmet with a face cage. The show was in Dallas, whose team had played Buffalo in the NHL playoffs that year, so of course I wore a Sabres jersey for cheap heat. I walked down the ramp and got a great nasty reaction from the crowd, but just as I got to the ring the referee told me to go back to the Gorilla position. It turned out that Vince wanted Shamrock to go to the ring first, otherwise why would he face me if he saw me standing there wearing hockey gear? The fact that he was the world’s most dangerous man was good enough reason for me. It was a taped show, so I went out to the ring again, but this time the reaction to my enemy jersey was lukewarm at best. The surprise had been ruined, and as I walked out to a chorus of crickets and tumbleweeds I couldn’t help but think that, once again, I had been stricken by fate in a bad way. I was dying more deaths in the WWE than Jason Voorhees.
It was decided that Shamrock and I would have the blowoff match for our angle at the next PPV, Unforgiven. We were booked on a few live events beforehand to work on our chemistry, which was a good thing b
ecause we had none. In San Diego I backed him up against the ropes, bent his head back, and unleashed a wicked chop to the center of his chest.
“Haaaaaaa!!” I said in defiance. “Ahhhhhh!” I said in anguish two seconds later as Shamrock stuck my head up my ass. He took me down to the mat, snorting and grunting as he bent me into more positions than Jenna Jameson. I screamed at him, asking why he had taken such offense to my chop.
“I don’t like those chops. They’re bullshit and they don’t hurt, and I’m not going to sell them.”
Fair enough, but I kindly suggested the next time I did something he didn’t like, to simply tell me about it instead of turning me into human origami.
For the finish, I was supposed to hit him with a steel chair, but when I went to ringside to grab one, all I saw were the red comfy padded kind. Needless to say, the viciousness of a chair shot is kind of diluted when the object in question is covered with a plush red feather pillow. I was expected to clock the World’s Most Dangerous Man with a weapon that the Girls Next Door would use to arouse Hugh Hefner’s horn.
But the soft satin sex toy was all that was available, so I improvised and whacked him over the head. Shamrock looked at me with disgust as the crowd went mild. Afterward I got in trouble from agent Jack Lanza for not making sure there was a proper steel chair at ringside. Since when was checking the furniture around the ring my job? I was surprised I didn’t get in trouble for not checking the bathroom for extra toilet paper too.
Shamrock ended up pulling out of our PPV match on the day of the show with a neck injury and was replaced by X-Pac. I had some ideas I wanted to try with Ken that I thought would work with Pac as well, but he didn’t show up until about 4:30 for the eight o’clock show. When he arrived, I told him I had some ideas for the Shamrock match that I wanted to transfer over to him. It was such a stupid concept, because Pac and Ken were total opposites in the ring, but I was convinced that the match I’d plotted out was a classic, and I wanted to stick to it.
I was really wrong.
X-Pac’s signature move was the Bronco Buster, where the other guy would be lying prone in the corner and he’d stick his X-Cock into his opponent’s face, and ride that shit up and down. I had to be different, so I wanted to take a Shawn Michaels turnbuckle flip upside down into the turnbuckle, and X-Pac would give me a reverse Bronco Buster. I figured the Michaels turnbuckle bump would prove my mettle and totally save my WWE career. Of course I completely botched it, flipping poorly and not making it all the way up into the corner. When X-Pac did the reverse Bronco Buster, it looked terrible. His crotch and my mouth were in the same place and he didn’t have my legs to support him. The crowd didn’t react at all to my impromptu blowjob and they didn’t react to the horrible DQ finish either. X-Pac was a smart worker and the match should’ve been good, but it wasn’t. I just couldn’t get it together.
Later on I asked X-Pac what he thought about the bout and he said, “It was what it was.”
Translation: “That sucked, my friend, and we both know it.” The Jericho Curse was refusing to leave the party and was vomiting all over the furniture to boot. I began to wonder if I’d ever have a good match again.
To make matters worse, my new Chris Jericho shirt bombed. The first piece of Y2J merchandise was a black T-shirt with “Y2J” printed in electric blue on the front and a mock definition of the term on the back. It was a huge success.
For the second shirt I had the idea of doing a shiny rave shirt similar to the ones I wore, with “Y2J” on one of the breast pockets. However, instead of embroidering the name on, the production company stitched a cheesy black patch in the middle of the silver material that stuck out like a sore ass. The shirt resembled what a gas station attendant would wear to a club, looked terrible, and sold accordingly. It did about twelve units, and thousands of dollars went down the drain courtesy of Calamity Jane Jericho.
I was in over my head in the WWE and desperately needed an ally I could trust to come in and watch my back. My first choice was Lenny St. Clair, my old friend from Calgary who had finished up as Dr. Luther in Japan and was now living in Seattle. I believed in Lenny and knew he was a good worker who could play any character and personify any gimmick that was thrown at him. I went to Vince and said, “I have a friend who’s a great performer and I’d like to get him a tryout.”
“Is he a good human being?” Vince asked.
When I affirmed that he was, Vince sent me to Russo, who asked to see some photos and a tape. After all the years Lenny had been on the job, he’d never assembled a decent highlight video, so I took some of his matches and rented an editing suite. I put together a four-minute clip of his best stuff with “The Call of Ktulu” by Metallica in the background and handed it to Russo.
I wanted him to get the job because he deserved a break and, more important to me, I needed someone to help me combat the opposition I was facing. Unfortunately, after a few tryouts and bad breaks, Lenny didn’t get the gig.
My one-man wolfpack remained intact.
CHAPTER 3
Schizo Deluxe
I always prided myself on being a good performer who could get a decent match out of anyone, but now I had become the guy that nobody could get a good match with. It was completely unacceptable to me and I knew that time was running out. I needed to find somebody who could teach me the style and psychology I needed to get my head above water—and there was one man I knew who could do that.
Pat Patterson had wrestled around the world for years until finishing his in-ring career in the WWE, but it was as a backstage booker, advisor, and agent that he achieved his biggest success. Pat is a wrestling Jedi and the smartest man I’ve ever met in wrestling. He taught me 90 percent of what I know about how to put together a match, and when I first approached him I had no idea how little I really knew about the psychology of the business.
Every week I hung around Pat and picked his brain. He’d always been friendly to me, as we were both Canadian and he knew I’d trained in Calgary. His love and respect for Bret Hart led us to talk about the famous sixty-minute match Bret and Shawn Michaels had at WrestleMania XII. Pat had been brought out of retirement at the request of the two of them to be the agent on the match, and he helped put it together. He was also the agent for all of The Rock’s matches, which was one of the reasons why they were always good (my first match with Rocky notwithstanding). I told him I felt that I could be as valuable to the company as The Rock if I could only learn a few tricks and make a few changes to my work, which wasn’t an egotistical statement as much as a straight-from-the-heart sentiment. I had all of these tools and experiences that so many other guys in the locker room didn’t, but I had no idea how to use them. I had the magic spells but no magic wand, and Pat was the wizard who could help me find it.
Pat was from Montreal and had a thick French accent with a thick sense of humor to go with it, telling the same bad jokes over and over again:
“Hey, do you know who was asking about you the other day?”
“Who?”
“Nobody!!!”
“Hey Chris, your match was taken off the show.”
“Really?”
“Yeah, it was canceled due to lack of interest!!”
After each moldy oldie, he would walk away howling at his comic genius.
Pat also had an affinity for butchering the English language with his French Canadian accent, which made him sound like Adam Sandler’s talking goat.
“When the Dudleys Boy hit the ring, DVD hits JYD with the Sprog Flash.”
Translation: “When the Dudley Boyz hit the ring, RVD hits Y2J with the Frog Splash.”
He didn’t know the meaning of superimposed either.
But Pat was deadly serious when it came to wrestling and he had no problem giving his opinion about the flaws in my work. His first piece of advice was to stop working like I was still in another country. He helped me to understand that every territory I worked in was different. Mexico was different from Japan, which was differe
nt from Germany, which was different from ECW, which was different from Smoky Mountain. But for some reason, I had figured that WCW and the WWE were the same style with the same requirements needed to be a main event performer. Not that I had a clue what it took to be a top guy in WCW, as I had never worked with Sting, Luger, Hall, Nash, Hogan, or Savage. All I knew was what I had learned in other countries over the years, and that wasn’t enough to be a top star in the WWE.
Pat helped me realize that I wasn’t as good as I thought I was—but that I could be. He saw the same thing in me that I did: the desire to be the best and the drive and talent to get there. From then on, I listened to everything he told me and tried to pattern my thought processes after his. I hung on his every word and studied each of his principles. We watched my matches together and I took notes as he critiqued my performance while I carried him on my back in a little sling through the swamps of Dagobah.
Pat explained to me that it was the little details that made a good worker into a great worker: timing, listening to the crowd, giving them what they want—or don’t want. You had to have a crispness with everything you did in the ring. At the time, when I threw someone off the ropes, I wasn’t following through with my arms or putting enough effort into it. Pat pulled me aside and told me that the way I was doing it looked bad and explained the right way to do it. To this day, I still see his face whenever I push a guy off the ropes.
Another agent who helped me develop into a legitimate WWE star was Blackjack Lanza, a retired wrestler in his sixties, whose autograph my dad got for me in 1978. He was very blunt in his criticisms that he delivered while chain-smoking, which meant that you usually got a lungful whenever he spoke. My matches were so bad at the time, I’m surprised I didn’t get cancer from all the secondhand smoke I inhaled during the nonstop criticism he gave me.
Undisputed: How to Become World Champion in 1,372 Easy Steps Page 3
