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While we said that the letter was from Ted, in actuality I wrote it. Eric originally insisted on writing it for me, but after giving me the runaround for four hours, I wrote the letter thirty minutes before showtime and read it unapproved.

Terry came up with the idea of bringing my dad onto a Nitro in Buffalo to further put me in my place. The Baby-Faced Assasin walked out in the middle of one of my tirades and browbeat me on live TV in front of millions of fans. He had never done a live promo before, but wrote it himself backstage and delivered it better than 80 percent of the wrestlers. He pointed to the retired hockey jerseys hanging in the rafters of the HSBC Arena and said I was an embarrassment to my family and an embarrassment to the legacies of Tim Horton and Gilbert Perreault. The crowd loved seeing the pompous jerk get yelled at by his daddy.

Terry wanted my dad to turn heel and help me to win my matches by hitting opponents with his hockey stick. Neither one of us was very excited about the idea especially when my dad got stiffed on his payoff from the first show.

Even though I was making decent cash I still had to pay for all my expenses on the road. Wrestling is the only sport or form of entertainment where the performers are responsible for most of their own arrangements. The company provided our plane tickets, but once we flew into the town we were on our own. We were responsible for reserving and paying for our own cars and hotels. There were times when every hotel within a thirty-mile radius was sold out and we had no place to stay at all. I once spent the night with Eddy and Brian Hildebrand (the SMW ref who’d since been hired as a WCW ref) in our rental car in the parking lot of the Greenville–Spartanburg Airport on Eddy’s birthday. I put my alarm clock on the dash and we brushed our teeth with a bottle of water.

Feliz Cumpleanos, Eduardo.

I also wasn’t making any money off of merchandise royalties because WCW was horrible at producing it for anybody except for the biggest names. Even though the crowd’s reactions were much bigger for me than for someone like Ric Steiner, he had a T-shirt and I didn’t. While the nWo was making hundreds of thousands off of merch, I once received a royalty check in the mail for 0 dollars and 0 cents. Stamps cost 37 cents...what was the sense in even mailing it?

So I organized a meeting with the merch guy and came up with an idea for my first T-shirt.

I’d already started calling Nitro, Monday Night Jericho, so my idea for a shirt was a takeoff of the Nitro logo, with Jericho replacing Nitro. But I needed something for the back of the shirt and I was stumped. Then I decided that I needed a name for my nonexistent fans, the same way that Hulk Hogan named his fans Hulkamaniacs.

I got a dictionary and a thesaurus and pieced together words that began with the letters CO onto my name. Jeri-Coalition, Jeri-Co-Conspirators. But nothing was really rolling off the tongue until I saw the word alcohol. It took me two seconds to compute Jerichohol into Jerichoholics and biggity bam, my trademark catchphrase was born.

Eric allowed the shirt to be produced and I wrote and directed a commercial that featured the silhouette of a raving Jerichoholic who needed treatment and a T-shirt to prove his loyalty. Suddenly the boom mike fell into frame, knocking the screen over and revealing that the Jerichoholic in question was really me. The commercial was top comedy and helped me sell some shirts too. I know this because my next royalty check was for 0 dollars and 37 cents.

If the company would’ve promoted me half as much as they promoted the Nitro Girls, I would’ve made millions. The Nitro Girls were WCW’s version of the Dallas Cowboy cheerleaders. They would come to the ring in skimpy costumes and dance before commercial breaks and during the show. Nitro was three hours at that point and I guess they needed something to fill the segments.

The girls were made up of ex-NFL cheerleaders, strippers, and dance majors and they were gorgeous. They were also like lambs being led to