A Lion's Tale_ Around the World in Spandex - Chris Jericho [133]
Bischoff mentioned that he wanted me to start with WCW as soon as I could finish up my previous commitments with ECW and WAR. My life was about to get busier than ever.
So while I still had a few free days, I drove from Calgary to Winnipeg to visit my mom.
It was the end of the summer and her health had improved enough that she was able to spend a lot of time outside. She navigated the neighborhood in her motorized wheelchair and we were able to take a walk to our favorite restaurant, D-Jay’s, for dinner. I was proud to accompany her.
She was adjusting to her injury and dealing with it. The next year, she even flew three hours to Calgary to attend my cousin Chad’s wedding. She had used her iron will to rise to the challenge that God had given her.
One beautiful Indian summer evening she asked me if I could give her a ride in my Mustang convertible with the top down. It was unusual for her to want to leave the safety of her house, but I was too busy hanging out with my friends (or something equally stupid) and told her I’d take her for a ride the next day.
Then I got a call from WCW a few hours later telling me that I was needed for a TV taping the next day in Dalton, Georgia. I never did get the chance to give her a ride in the convertible and I kick myself for it every day. I’ve often wondered what she would’ve looked like with the top down and the wind whipping through her hair. I imagine she would’ve had a big smile on her face, but now I’ll never know for sure.
I’d put her off when she was able and the chance had passed me by forever. It’s the other major regret of my life.
Regrets are a terrible burden and even though I only have a few, they’re a few too many.
The next day I flew to Atlanta and drove to Dalton with instructions to be at the arena at 1 P.M. I was on Japan time and arrived at the building at 12:45. When I got there, the place was deserted; no TV truck, no ring crew, and only two other wrestlers...Scott Hall and Kevin Nash.
They were sitting side by side in the corner like wallflowers, so I went over and introduced myself. We exchanged pleasantries and Hall knew my name because he’d met my dad in an airport once. My dad was always my biggest fan and had put me over huge to Hall.
The three of us sat around laughing at how stupid we felt for being the only ones at work on time. But we were all new to WCW and since I had the Japanese mind-set and they had the similar WWF mind-set, we had been taught to get to work on time with no exceptions. It seemed the rules were a tad bit looser in WCW-land.
Hall and Nash hadn’t yet adopted the bad attitudes they would later become infamous for and on that day we were at the same level. But it was the last day that would be the case.
Everyone else finally showed up and I was booked to wrestle my first match against Jerry Lynn. The office had recently given him a gimmick change and were portraying him as a masked superhero. They’d outfitted him with a cool purple and yellow costume and the clever yet cryptic moniker of Mr. J.L. I still haven’t solved the mystery of what the initials of Jerry Lynn’s masked identity stood for.
But I had other problems to solve. Mr. J.L. and I were given seven minutes for our match, including ring entrances, which worked out to roughly five minutes of action. In Japan, I was used to working twenty-minute matches on a nightly basis...but I wasn’t in Kanagawa anymore.
When Terry Taylor, the assistant booker, told me that the company had decided I was going to be a babyface, I didn’t think it was the best decision. The good-looking, blond-haired, muscular young babyface would have been a no-brainer a few years earlier, but in 1996 the world was changing.
Society as a whole was starting to accept the bad guy as the new good guy and the good guy as the new bad guy. WCW was behind the curve in that respect and I was doomed from the start when I was booked as a nameless faceless babyface.