A Lion's Tale_ Around the World in Spandex - Chris Jericho [171]
I went in for a meeting with the Boss himself. His office had a view of the Stamford skyline and was decorated with WWF memorabilia. I sat down in a plush chair that was worth more than my apartment and he pulled a script out of his desk for the movie Toxic Avenger IV, which included a part written specifically for me.
“You’ve been here a day and you’re already a movie star,” he grumbled.
My star-making role as Toxie’s new sidekick was never mentioned again, but it was a nice dangled carrot anyway.
Then Vince hit me with a bombshell. His idea was to have the Countdown to the New Millennium clock reach zero right smack-dab in the middle of a promo by The Rock. I was floored because interrupting The Rock took me to the highest level right off the bat. It was a great example of VKM’s genius, as he’d taken my already good idea and increased it a thousandfold. We were a good team already.
Then Vince asked me what my finishing maneuver was and I explained it was a submission similar to the Boston Crab. He was reluctant to have me use a submission, feeling that I was more of an explosive pin fall type of guy. I would’ve used a sweaty sock as a finish if he’d wanted me to and I wasn’t going to disagree. But I told him whether I was using a pin fall or a submission, I wanted to call my finish the Y2J Problem. Y2J was a take-off on the much ballyhooed Y2K problem that was apparently going to destroy us all at midnight on January 1, 2000. It didn’t, although I personally was destroyed on that night.
He smelled what I was cooking straight away and said, “That’s not going to be the name of your finish. That’s going to be your name period.”
“The Y2J Problem?
“No, just Y2J.”
The rest is Jeric-History.
I was a nervous wreck the night the clock was supposed to first appear on Raw. I’d been in the business long enough to know never to count on anything until it happened. I still didn’t quite believe that I could actually be going to the WWF.
Sure enough midway through the show, the screen went to a neon blue graphic that said “Countdown to the Millennium” while the numbers clicked backward. 28 days, 1 hour, 4 minutes, and 11 seconds...10 seconds...9 seconds, each click accompanied by an awesome whooshing sound effect.
It was definitely happening.
I spent that week writing my debut promo. In WCW I’d done a lot of my promos improv, but with this one I wanted to get everything just right beforehand. This was a different world and there would be no Onta Gleeben Glouten Globens allowed here. I had a few ideas about what I wanted to say and when I put pen to paper, the whole thing flowed out of me within ten minutes.
I was going to talk about how complacent the WWF had become and how they were in need of a new savior to carry them into the next millennium. That savior was their role model. That savior was the Ayatollah of Rock N Rolla. That savior was Chris Jericho.
I flew into Detroit the night before my debut in Chicago to observe the WWF behemoth at work. They were filming the Sunday Night Heat show for MTV and I watched the whole production from the Gorilla Position (named after WWF legend Gorilla Monsoon), the brain center of the operation where Vince and his crew called the shots.
It was such a change from WCW where there was no Gorilla Position, no Giraffe Position, no nothing. Just an empty hallway and a curtain. But Vince was hands-on running everything, just like the Wizard manipulating everything from behind the black curtain.
The only thing that bothered me about joining the WWF was some of the provocative angles the company was doing, like when the World’s Strongest Man Mark Henry received oral pleasure from a transvestite. I thought that stuff had no place in wrestling and I tried to get veto power in my contract if I was ever asked to participate in an angle I felt to be questionable.
Vince gave me his word that if I was ever asked to do something