A Lion's Tale_ Around the World in Spandex - Chris Jericho [53]
The match culminated with my huge swan dive over the top rope onto Felino. The crowd responded with a huge cheer and I think they were surprised that a pretty-boy gringo with long blond hair could actually wrestle the way I did.
The next day, a big picture of me doing the dive appeared in Afición and Ovaciones, newspapers in Mexico City that boasted millions of readers. Fans all over the country read the reporters’ opinions that my debut had been a success. When the lucha magazines filled with my pictures arrived on the stands later that week, I officially became a national star.
My schedule filled up instantly and a typical week saw me working in Guadalajara on Sunday, Naucalpan on Monday, Puebla on Tuesday, Acapulco on Wednesday, Cuernavaca on Thursday, and Mexico City on Friday and Saturday. There were so many shows across the country that I was working as many as ten matches a week, including four matches on Saturdays.
I was twenty-two years old and making three or four grand a week with no expenses. But I was working hard for my money.I had to travel to the shows by bus and while some of the lines offered first-class service, most of them didn’t. So I had to make the four-to six-hour trips on glorified school buses.
Even when all of the seats were filled it didn’t stop the bus driver from picking up other passengers. We’d be driving down the highway in the dark in the middle of nowhere and the driver would pull over on the dirt shoulder whenever any Tom, Dick, or Javier waved him down for a ride. People would get on the bus with dogs, cats, goats, chickens, and once even a parrot that wouldn’t stop squawking in Spanish. The seats and the aisles of the goat bus would be full of people chattering, animals barking, baying, clucking and I would be wondering what the hell I was doing.
“Vaya con Dios...SQUAWK...”
While I had learned decent Spanish from watching Spanish language TV shows (Sábado Gigante rules) and having various girls teach me, I still couldn’t pronounce Irvine in a way that people could understand. So the name on my bus ticket went from Chris Irbo to Chris Irbin to Chris Ririn, until I gave up and started calling myself José Sánchez. It saved a lot of hassle for both me and the ticket sellers.
In the meantime, I was learning the art of lucha libre and the man I learned the most from was Negro Casas. Negro was known as the Ric Flair of Mexico and one of the best wrestlers in Mexican history. He was from the same famous lucha family as Felino and was one of the smartest performers I’ve ever worked with. He was the perfect example of a guy who got over (wrestling vernacular for being popular with the fans) because he knew exactly what his audience wanted to see. He knew his people. He was so good that all the fans respected him and knew he was the best no matter what role he was playing. When he was a rudo (and he was the best rudo in the country) I had the feeling that people booed him just because they were supposed to and not because they really hated him. But he was the master of working a crowd and always had them in the palm of his hand. With a simple gesture or facial expression he could make them cheer or boo at the drop of a peso.
Negro taught me when to do a certain move and when not to. He taught me timing, how to use the crowd’s reactions as a blueprint for the match, and how not to get frazzled when things went wrong. “Nobody knows it’s a mistake unless you let them know,” he said in his broken English.
He also taught me not to obsess about a match if it didn’t work out the way I wanted it to. “Don’t worry when you have a bad match, tomorrow there will be another one. Are you going to worry about the match that’s in the past or are you going to do better tomorrow? Tomorrow, this match doesn’t mean anything.” His point was that you can’t change the past, you can only learn from your mistakes and make the future better. I still live