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First time in the Tokyo Dome.

When I went to meet with my opponent, Kanemoto, I got the vibe that he didn’t want any part of the match and wasn’t happy about having to put me over. It was a recipe for disaster but I was ready for the challenge and I knew I would persevere. This was my big chance and nothing was going to stop—

Hold on, someone’s at the door.

“Hello?”

“Yes hello, it’s me...the JERICHO CURSE!”

The Super Liger match was a bigger bomb than a Pauly Shore comeback.

I walked to the ring on the football-field-sized walkway and couldn’t see a damn thing the whole time. I had to stare intently at my feet with every step as it was the only way I could keep on the path. Every time I looked up, the red lights that dominated the lighting rig made me feel like I was in the middle of a strobe light rave party. And me without my glowsticks.

I had no peripheral vision, which made even hitting the ropes a challenge. I felt like Wilf from the Hart Brothers Camp.

With the crowd going mild for the match, I tried to get something going. I knocked Kanemoto out of the ring and got ready to do my trademark crowd-pleasing move of jumping straight to the top rope and drop-kicking my opponent off the apron.

But when I went for my big leap, my legs felt like they were painted with concrete. I didn’t even come close to getting my footing and slipped right off the ropes onto my ass inside the ring.

The Dome crowds were notorious for being quiet and it was hard to hear any noise anyway as it dispersed in such an expansive building. But I sure as hell heard the sound of thousands of people laughing at me when I fell. Giggling crowds are the kiss of death in Japan; the Asian equivalent of “You fucked up!”

I ended up winning the match but Super Liger’s fate had been sealed, especially when one of the New Japan employees took my costume “for safekeeping,” the moment I took it off in the locker room.

There was a big party after the show that I had to attend while wearing the Super Liger Party Mask. I might as well have been wearing the Masque of the Red Death. I’d been painted with the scarlet letter and nobody at the party would even look at me, except for my friend Black Cat.

After waiting to work for New Japan for a half dozen years, I’d finally gotten my chance and delivered a barn burner of match...people were burning their barns in protest.

Failure be thy name.

In order to live up to the huge Liger legacy, I needed to put on an A+ performance, but I’d responded with an F-(for Fugettaboutit) abortion instead. Super Liger was hung, drawn, and quartered, never to be seen again. Luckily, I was already contracted to return the following month as Chris Jericho.

When I returned to the States I heard Mark Madden on the WCW Hotline say, “Chris Jericho stinks in his first appearance as Super Liger.” If word of my failure had reached America before I did, Super Liger really must’ve stunk worse than my nuts do. As a matter of fact, I didn’t even wrestle in the Dome. I was attacked and stuffed into a closet and my assailant actually wrestled as Super Liger. Years passed before Kevin Federline would enter a wrestling ring again.

So I went back to New Japan the next month as plain old no-frills Chris Jericho. If my plane ticket and visa hadn’t already been processed, I probably wouldn’t have been brought back under any name. In my first match back I wrestled Takashi Iizuka, who had the reputation of making his opponents look good. I used to have the same reputation, but now New Japan felt I needed all the help I could get.

My confidence was shot once again after the Dome disaster (coming soon to a theater near you) but I still had a decent match with Iizuka. The next night I was in a tag match against the masked Samurai and Jushin Liger himself. While a lot of guys in wrestling can hide their true feelings and be nice to your face even if they don’t like you, Liger isn’t one of them.

He knew I could wrestle from my matches with WAR and that’s why he’d come up with the Super Liger idea in the