A Lion's Tale_ Around the World in Spandex - Chris Jericho [61]
I called Lenny to ask him for ideas and he said, “Have you ever thought about doing the moonsault from the middle rope?”
The idea had come to him in a dream and I asked him to elaborate. He explained that if I used the middle rope to do the moonsault across the ring, it could be done quicker with less setup and would be totally unique. It was just what I was looking for.
So I went to Arena México during the day and practiced my new creation in front of 17,000 empty seats. I filled a duffel bag with dirty clothes and used it as my target. After a dozen practice runs, I figured out how far the guy had to be from the ropes so I wouldn’t land with my knees in his face.
The next night I slammed Negro Casas exactly four paces from the ropes and performed the Lionsault for the very first time. I used it almost every night afterward for the next twelve years.
It’s an acrobatic move and because the ropes in the Mexican rings were always either too loose or too tight, doing the Lionsault every night was a risk. So in addition to my nightly pre-match prayer, I decided to try and stay on God’s good side by doing good deeds. Whenever I pulled up in the taxi to the Arena México stage door, there were always a lot of kids hanging around asking to carry my bag, so they could get inside the arena and see the show for free. I admired their ingenuity and let a different kid carry the bag each night.
It was a tough life for the poor kids in Mexico and it used to break my heart to see them begging with their dirty faces and sad eyes on every street corner in the Zona Rosa. Zona Rosa was a hip section of the downtown area filled with restaurants, record stores, and movie theaters. It was also filled with the smell of sewage and boasted rats the size of small cats that I saw out of the corner of my eye. I wasn’t sure just how big, until one of them ran across Magic’s sandal-covered foot one day.
I had a soft spot for the kids and frequently gave them decent amounts of money. That changed one day when I saw all of them gathered around an older man, giving him the money they’d collected. The kids belonged to a begging syndicate and this guy sent them out all over the city (like in Oliver!), collected the cash, and gave the kids a percentage. They were probably making more money than I was.
As soon as kids in Mexico were old enough, they were expected to contribute to the income of their household. Everywhere you looked you saw kids working: washing windows and selling gum at traffic lights, peddling fruit from carts on the street, performing dance routines or playing music for change.
I was strolling through a park in the center of the downtown area when I came across a band of kids playing rock music. I’m not talking about a few acoustic guitars and a plastic bucket. I’m talking about a full-on professional setup. Two guitars, keyboards, bass, drums, all surrounded by stacks of monitors and amps. They were playing Black Sabbath, Deep Purple, Kiss, Rush, pure 1970s heavy metal...and they were amazing. When they finished the set, I went and introduced myself and found out the band was called los Leones. They were made up of four brothers and a sister ranging in age from fifteen to twenty-two. The Heredia family’s sole income was made up of the change collected by los Leones after each set.
Each sibling was a virtuoso, especially Jair the lead guitarist. He was only fifteen and his guitar was almost bigger than he was, but he played like Eddie Van Halen on peyote. He broke into a huge grin when I told him that he was my new favorite Mexican guitar player. They all spoke English from listening to American music and we talked for a long time about rock ’n’ roll and Mexico. When they found