A Lion's Tale_ Around the World in Spandex - Chris Jericho [152]
I wanted to remain the hated heel, but the bookers were making it more difficult than algebra. I’d already beaten Chavo Jr. a dozen times when we were booked together again in Fargo and given the usual finish: I would win with the Liontamer in the center of the ring.
It was an uninspired finish that we’d already done many times so I wanted to spice it up a bit. Chavo was doing a crazy gimmick where he’d made friends with a hobby horse named Pepe. I was supposed to beat Chavo clean and snap Pepe in half afterward. Keep in mind I was the bad guy.
Before the match, Chavo and I drove to a Toys R Us and bought a giant pogo stick and stuck its head on the end of an aluminum bat. We went back to the arena and stashed the bat underneath the ring.
I beat Chavo, and when I did, I snapped Pepe in two. While the crowd booed the hell out of me, Chavito went under the ring and pulled out José, Pepe’s big brother. When I turned around, Chavito nailed me in the stomach and José exacted his revenge. The crowd loved it and the whole thing aired on live TV.
We didn’t get anybody’s permission to do the José angle, but nobody in the office said jack shit to us about it afterward. If I would have tried the same thing in Vince McMahon’s company he would have fired me on the spot.
It was becoming a joke to see if anyone in the office was paying attention to my matches, so I started rubbing the front of my hair as hard as I could until it stood straight up like a member of Poison in 1986. I walked to the ring with a cheese-eating grin plastered across my face, looking like I was caught in a wind tunnel. I demanded only brown M&M’s in catering. Strangely, some people in the crowd were starting to love it. Despite my efforts, I was becoming the dreaded cool heel.
But I was still being booed by 90 percent of the crowd when I orchestrated my WCW masterpiece: an angle with Dean Malenko. Dean wanted to take some much needed time off, so after defeating him on a PPV in Birmingham, Alabama, he did an interview saying he was going home.
In the course of three months, I built a hot feud with a guy who wasn’t even on the show.
I made fun of him for taking his ball and going home. I buried his father, Boris, who had been a wrestler and was now actually buried as well. I called him Stinko Malenko and claimed he was now working the grill at Harry’s Burgers in Tampa, all the while mocking his serious demeanor and wrestling style.
Dean was known as the Man of 1,000 Holds so I stole the Floyd Creachman angle I’d seen as a teenager and began calling myself the Man of 1,004 Holds. I knew four more.
On a Nitro in Chicago I pulled out a stack of connected computer paper and began reading off each one of my holds.
“Number 1—Arm Bar. Number 2—Body Slam. Number 3—Arm Drag. Number 4—Mexican Arm Bar.” We went to commercial break while I was still listing them off. When I knew we were off the air, I started insulting the crowd and whipping them into a frenzy. When we came back from the break, I was now at Number 366—Russian Arm Bar, with the crowd booing the shit out of me.
I was finally interrupted by Prince Iaukea (currently residing in the “Where Are They Now?” file) and my pages were flung up into the air. I chased them around like a toddler chasing bubbles, screaming, “My holds, my holds!”
The comedy never ends...
I kept the feud alive by getting a negative of Dean’s promo picture and blowing it up at Kinko’s. Then I carried around a giant framed picture of him as a tribute. The ring crew wouldn’t let me leave the portrait-sized picture on the truck, so I had to transport it (and the easel I rested it on) to and from work every week myself.
My incessant needling was paying off. The people were begging Dean to come back to shut me up. But I couldn’t be stopped. I interviewed the portrait