She didn’t like the crowd turning on her, and even though I was working my ass off to change that, the crowd wasn’t buying her as a babyface champion. It was out of my control.
But the match was in my control and I was fairly happy with it. I was able to carry her to a decent showing, and it was one of the better bouts on the show. We did the top-rope Pedigree as a finish, and while it wasn’t the prettiest thing, it got a great reaction and to my knowledge, it’s the only time it’s ever been done. So I had that going for me.
One of the other things that bothered me about Chyna was that while she trusted me and expected me to put together a good match, she never helped me by telling anybody else that. When we came through the Gorilla position, everybody congratulated her on the match. Even though she had worked hard and done a good job, she just stood there and accepted the praise solo, smiling as if she’d just wrestled herself.
We had a rematch at Armageddon, the next PPV from Fort Lauderdale. During the weeks building it up, I had the idea to smash her thumb with a hammer. I wanted to do something dastardly to try to get her more sympathy as a babyface and got the idea from the gloves she wore wherever she went. So I kidnapped her, tied her up in a dark room, and brought the hammer down on a sausage that had been stuffed into one of the thumbs on her gloves. Kind of Psycho psycho, I know, but Vince liked it.
Her thumb mutilated, she decided to exact her revenge by challenging me to a wrestling match instead of just having me arrested for assault. The next few weeks, I antagonized her and the fans by making a bunch of bad jokes about her smashed appendage. “Well, your dreams of being the next Fonz are over,” and “Will you be hitchhiking home after the show?” or “Thumbs up, Chyna, things are going to work out!”
Heath Ledger as the Joker had nothing on me.
At the PPV, Vince wanted me to do an impromptu promo before my match, so I went on about how I was going to become the Intercontinental Champion and ended it off by chanting the “Go Jericho Go” bit I’d used in my first promo with The Rock.
It was a big night for me because I was going to win the title from Chyna and become the Intercontinental Champion for the first time. Ever since I first saw Ricky the Dragon Steamboat holding that title when I was in high school, it was my biggest goal to one day be the champion just like him.
I spent the match using the unique modus operandi of torturing her injured thumb. I trapped her arms in the ropes and kicked and punched her exposed digit. I stepped and ground on it until she finally tapped out to the Rock and Roll Finisher. Just like that, despite all the shit I’d been through, my dream had become reality: Chris Jericho was the new Intercontinental Champion! More important, our match was better than the first one and ended up being the best on the show. I took great pride in the fact that I’d carried Chyna to one of the best performances of her career.
When it was over, I walked through the curtain but couldn’t find her anywhere. It was customary after a match to wait in Gorilla for your opponent so you could congratulate each other and thank each other for the match, but she was nowhere to be found. I looked up and down the halls, checked the dressing rooms, and finally found her in Vince’s office, conversing with HHH. They stopped talking as soon as I walked in and looked up guiltily as if I’d caught them doing something wrong.
I asked Chyna if everything was okay. She said, “Yeah, I’m fine.”
I said, “Good match! I thought it went really well, huh?”
“Yeah, it was good,” she said woodenly.
I could tell she was upset about something but I couldn’t figure out what, as we had just put on a hell of a performance. Was she mad she lost the title? Did she not like the way I put together the match? Had she run out of vanilla perfume?
I noticed that she had the tiniest bit of a shiner under her eye, like she had caught a stiff shot. When I worked with her I knew there would be some live rounds thrown and I had no problem with that. Neither did she; it was the way she liked to work.
I could tell I had interrupted something, so I thanked her again and left the office. I could feel two pairs of eyes boring a hole in my back as I did.
I wasn’t going to let her blasé attitude spoil the fact that my childhood dream had come true. I was on a high and felt like I was the king of the world. I wanted that feeling to last forever, and it did—for the next twenty-four hours or so.
Then the house of Jericho cards came crashing down.
CHAPTER 5
Green as Grass
The next day we were doing Raw in Tampa. I brought my girlfriend Jessica with me backstage for the first time and we were both a little nervous.
Even though the WWE was one of the biggest sports companies in the world, we didn’t have a trainer or a team doctor. What we did have was a strange New Age shiatsu chiropractor named François. He was French with a long ponytail, and he was famous for being the guy who tended to Mick Foley (who incidentally has never bested me in a match) during the infamous Hell in a Cell against The Undertaker. François was convinced that he could heal any ailment with his magical powers.
“Okay, your ankle is hurting, but it has feelings and it’s insulted right now. Apologize to it and your ankle will forgive you.” Ummm, okay.
A few weeks earlier, Jessica had been hit by a car while she was out for a run and her back had been bothering her ever since. When François heard this, he insisted he could make her feel better and had her lie down on his table. Somehow she ended up getting a stinger that temporarily paralyzed her. It was terrifying because she could hardly move her legs, and all I could think of was my mom, who had become a quadriplegic nine years earlier. I was consoling her when I got a message that Vince needed to see me. Like one of Pavlov’s dogs, I instantly snapped to attention.
I asked Jess if she would be okay with me leaving for a few minutes, and even though she was trying to be strong I could see the fear in her eyes, and I felt the same way.
I told her I’d be right back and rushed over to Vince’s office. I wasn’t sure exactly what he wanted to talk to me about, but I was pretty certain he was going to congratulate me for stealing the show with Chyna the night before. The more I thought about the match, the more I liked it, and I was excited to hear his feedback. Was I finally going to get some prizzops from my bizzoss?
I knocked on his door and walked in to find him talking to HHH. They gave me a strange look (similar to the one HHH and Chyna had given me the day before) and Vince asked me to come back in a few minutes. I checked on Jess, who thankfully had gotten her feeling back, and after a couple of minutes I went back to his office. This time HHH was gone and Vince was with Jim Ross, the head of talent relations, and Jack Lanza. He told me to shut the door and take a seat, and surprisingly, he didn’t look happy. As a matter of fact, he looked downright pissed.
My expectations of praise were quickly shot down by feelings of dread—this wasn’t gonna be good.
Vince looked me in the eye and said, “What is your problem?”
“Pardon me?”
“ What the fuck is your problem ?”
Uh-oh. My normally calm and collected boss was now swearing at me.
“I’m sorry, I don’t understand.”
“What did you do to Chyna yesterday, huh? You gave her a black eye. You were stiffing the shit out of her. How could you do that?”
Caught off guard, I tried to defend myself. “It wasn’t intentional, Vince. It’s just part of the job sometimes. You know that.”
Vince’s eyes bugged out and the veins in his neck pulsated as he said in a gravelly voice, “How could you do that, man? She’s a woman !!”
I didn’t think it was prudent at that juncture to remind him that he was the one who had told me to work strong and not to take it easy with her. Not that I had a chance to get a word in edgewise, as the Vin-Man was just getting started.
“You don’t have a fucking clue what you’re doing out there. You’re as green as grass and it’s embarrassing. I was sold a bill of
goods in bringing you in here and you’re not worth the paper your contract is printed on. Everybody is complaining about you.”
Yikes! Well, that wasn’t what I expected to hear when I walked into his office. I was in shock. Before this little tête-à-tête, I would’ve bet a thousand dollars Canadian that Vince was going to wrap me in his arms and congratulate me. Instead he was giving me a whipping worse than the one Jesus got in The Passion of the Christ.
I didn’t know what to do or how to react, so I found a happy place and hid in the recesses of my mind. I figured if I tried to make excuses, he’d just fire me on the spot, so I morphed into Kevin Bacon in Animal House and kept repeating to myself, “Thank you, sir, may I have another?”
He gave me another, all right. And another. And another.
“You have no respect for anybody here. You even stole The Rock’s catchphrase on the pay-per-view yesterday.”
It took me a while to figure out what the hell he was talking about. “If you smell what The Rock is cooking”? No. “It doesn’t matter what your name is!”? Nope, not that one either.
Did he mean “Go Jericho Go”? In his mind was that too similar to The Rock encouraging the fans to chant, “Rocky, Rocky, Rocky”?
Hardly a direct ripoff of a tried-and-true catchphrase, but it didn’t matter what I thought. The tongue-o’-nine-tails lashing continued.
“The problem with you is that you’re an elitist, you think you’re better than everybody else. But you’re not. You’re the drizzling shits.”
Well I never! I’d been called a lot of things during my career, but “the drizzling shits” was not one of them. I’d always prided myself on my work, and hearing him say that cut me to the bone. But not as much as his next statement.
“I want you to go and apologize to Chyna.”
Exsqueeze me? Baking powder?
Apologize to Chyna? For what? Carrying her to two of the best matches she’d ever had? Putting up with her politics and making her look like a million loonies? What the fuck was I supposed to apologize to her about? I had a better poker face than Lady Gaga, but inside I was fucking furious.
In my mind’s eye there were two scenarios: (1) tell Vince to buy a one-way ticket to hell and back, trash his office, and leave the WWE forever; or (2) obey his orders, swallow my pride like a shot of Crown, and apologize to Chyna.
It wasn’t an easy choice, but I’d worked nine long years to get to the WWE and I wasn’t going to let it slip away so easily.
“Okay, Vince, I’ll apologize to her.”
JR and Lanza nodded their heads in approval. I’m not sure why they were in the room, since they didn’t say anything, but their presence made Vince’s words even more biting and embarrassing. It was going to be hard looking any of these guys in the face from now on.
And the hits kept on coming.
“From now on, you have to go over every one of your matches with X-Pac. He knows how to work and how to put together matches; you don’t. I want you to pick his brain and talk to him about every move you make in the ring.”
I’d known X-Pac (a.k.a. Sean Waltman) for years, after working together in Japan and WCW. Now he was firmly entrenched in DX and one of Vince’s golden boys. Pac was a very smart worker who understood the WWE way of doing things, and in the long run he did help me with my in-ring psychology. But it was a tough pill to swallow knowing that I had to approve everything with a guy who was not only younger than me with less experience, but was also part of the DX gang who clearly had issues with me.
I was scheduled to have a match with him that night on Raw, and Vince said, “You better show me something tonight, Chris. Because if you can’t have a good match with Pac, you can’t have a good match with anybody. I’m not going to take the title off you, that would be too obvious. So we’ll do a DQ. But you better have a good one.”
After those words his oral assault was finally finished. I skulked out of his office, with my tail between my legs and my heart between my bollocks.
I stopped in the hallway to take a breath and figure out what had just happened. Yesterday I was on the top of the world. Now less than twenty-four hours later, my girlfriend was barely able to move, and I had just been told that I wasn’t worth the paper my contract was printed on. My career was hanging by a thread, totally dependent on my performance that night. Needless to say, it was the most important match of my life.
I went and told X-Pac what had just transpired, and of course he acted like he had no idea I had any heat. But I was far beyond caring about pride or bravado and asked him to put that night’s entire match together, and it went well—not amazing or even all that memorable—but it was good enough for Vince to give me a thumbs-up after it was over.
I had gotten a reprieve and my career was saved from extinction for at least another day. But I was still deep in the hole and knew it was going to take a long time to pull myself out.
It was time to grab the rope and start climbing.
I searched the arena until I found Chyna standing smugly in the hallway, wearing gloves, smelling like vanilla, and sporting the smallest baby bruise under her eye.
She was the enemy and we both knew it—and I had to apologize to her.
“Hey, I just talked with Vince and I want to say that I’m ssoo … ssoooo … ssoooo …”
Like the Fonz, I was genetically unable to apologize to this woman.
So I stuck my fingers right up her nose.
I shook myself out of my dream state and continued talking.
“Hey, I just talked with Vince and I want to say that I’m ssss … sorry for giving you that shiner. It was an accident. But I still really liked the match, though. A lot of people told me that we stole the show.”
Her face was Vulcan and it was clear she was expecting the apology, because she was quite short with her response.
“Yeah, yeah, it’s okay, no problem.”
She couldn’t have been more insincere with her reply to my atonement, and it made me sick. But I had done what Vince wanted and now I needed to investigate a little more as to why I had been crucified.
I knew one Triple H would surely have some insight. I saw him a few minutes later and got right to the heart of the matter.
“Hey, I need to ask you a question … do I have heat?”
To his credit, he was totally honest with me. “Yeah, you’ve got a lot of heat. You’ve got scorching heat.”
Even though it was axiomatic that I was in the doghouse, it was still a shock to hear him say it so bluntly.
“Why?”
“Why? Well, ever since you got here, all you talk about is how you did things in WCW. You act like you have all the answers and know everything, like you’re a huge star, but you haven’t proven shit. We have a different way of doing things here and you’re not getting it.”
In retrospect, he was right. Whenever I put together my matches, I was always talking about things I had done in WCW and how things were different in the WWE. I’d made the mistake of thinking that I could fit in right off the bat, instead of adapting to the new style like I had when I first went to Japan or Mexico or ECW.
I felt terrible, but I wanted to make as many amends as I could, so I went to talk to The Rock. I found him in the dressing room and told him that Vince had just torn me a new intestinal tract opening and asked whether he had complained to anyone about me stealing his catchphrase.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“Well, yesterday I did a promo and got the crowd to chant, ‘Go Jericho Go.’ ”
“Well, that’s not even close to the same thing.”
Rock could see that I was shaken up. “Chris, you’ve got to realize that the cream always rises to the top in this business. I’ve been watching you since WCW and you’re good. But you have to rise above this and not get eaten by the sharks. I went through the same thing when I first started here, but I always kept my confidence and rose above it. You have to do the same thing.”
I ap
preciated his pep talk, as it was nice to hear somebody say they thought I was good. After everything that had transpired during the day, I wasn’t sure who or what the hell I was anymore. But Rock had walked in my shoes and was on my side—and that meant everything to me.
As I was leaving the arena I ran into Vince. Surprisingly, he gave me a big hug and didn’t mention a word of what had happened earlier. “Give me a call tomorrow, kid, and we’ll talk,” he said before breaking out in his patented belly laugh.
I smiled back quizzically, even though I couldn’t help but wonder what exactly it was that he found so damn funny.
The next day, Jessica was able to move, but her back was still screwed up and she couldn’t get out of bed. I had to leave her to fend for herself, so I could drive to Tallahassee for Smackdown! I tried calling Vince a few times during the drive but he never answered. I was still bothered by what had happened and needed to vent, so I called Chris Benoit, who was still with WCW.
He listened to my story and I could tell by his voice that he was really angry. He felt somebody was out to get me for sure and called back a few hours later after asking Bret Hart for some advice on my behalf. Bret told him that I shouldn’t be too worried because a similar thing had happened to him when he first started. He explained that Vince was like a drill sergeant who liked to tear people down and build them back up in his own image. Well, he had done half of that so far. I just hoped he wouldn’t rebuild me with a bad pompadour and a loud suit.
That night I had a match on Smackdown! against The Big Bossman. As per my orders from the actual big bossman, I found X-Pac before the match and ran all of my ideas past him. He added a few ideas of his own and the match went well, enough so that Vince greeted me with a Laurel and Hardy handshake afterwards.
Undisputed: How to Become World Champion in 1,372 Easy Steps Page 5
