A Lion's Tale_ Around the World in Spandex - Chris Jericho [76]
Drew ended up pinning me but we were both winners, as Rene told me it was the best match he’d ever seen during his time in Hamburg. Considering my less than auspicious start, it was nice to end the tournament with a bang.
The final match was Blackie Boy Smith winning the tournament by beating Rene (Rene was in the final? What a surprise.) and they had no chance of following Drew and me. I took great pride in that.
Even though I’d been wrestling for years, I’d never experimented with steroids. I didn’t have the guts to try them. Plus I didn’t know where I could get them and after my crack-buying experience in Denver, I’d proven that I didn’t have much flair for purchasing illegal drugs.
But when I found out that they were easy to obtain in Germany, I decided to pop my sterry and bought 150 tablets of Dianabol. The Dianabol looked exactly like these little sugar tablets that Germans use to sweeten their coffee. They came in this Tic-Tac container type thingy, so I bought one and replaced the sugar pills with Dianabol pills. I’d discovered the perfect way to smuggle contraband over international borders, but I got paranoid and became convinced I was going to get caught. I wrapped the dispenser in a pair of dirty undies, but that still wasn’t enough. So I stuffed the gonch into a stinky sock and then stuck the stinky sock into a pair of sweaty tights. But I needed more protection, so I put the whole rolled-up wrinkly mess into the bottom of my laundry bag. I figured if the customs guys found my stuff after all that, I deserved to get busted.
I was freaking out when I took my bags through German customs, even though there still wasn’t a customs area. When I approached Canadian customs I felt like I was packing a shoe bomb, but thankfully my bags weren’t searched.
So it was official. I had transported illegal substances across international borders.
My first felony!
(Apologetic Author’s Note: If any customs officials are reading this book, please don’t search me as I promise to never smuggle illegal contraband again. I don’t know why I even bothered because the Dianabol didn’t do shit for me. As a matter of fact, I think they actually were sugar pills in the first place.)
PART SIX KNOXVILLE
CHAPTER 25
AIN’T NO PARTY LIKE A WAL-MART PARTY
After returning from Germany I decided it was time to get serious about working in the States. I’d thought a lot about Rip Morgan’s comment that I was ready to break into the WWF and wondered if he was right. But even though I’d achieved some worldwide notoriety, the WWF still hadn’t acknowledged my existence or sent out any kind of feelers toward me. Since they were essentially compana non grata, it was time to look elsewhere for mainland exposure.
I called Lance to touch base and share stories about working in Germany and I asked him what he had coming up next. He mentioned that he’d been talking with Jim Cornette (who I had interviewed years earlier for my college newspaper), now the promoter for Smoky Mountain Wrestling, one of the top independent companies in the States.
SMW was based out of Knoxville, Tennessee, and it had been getting a lot of recognition because of Cornette’s involvement. He’d been a successful manager and assistant booker in both the WCW and WWF, before getting tired of the grind and walking away to form his own company.
SMW offered more of a slower-paced, old-time style of wrestling than what the glitzy WWF was selling. To a certain extent the fans in the Southern states preferred Smoky’s style to the WWF’s, with a lot of them still believing that they were watching a legitimate sport and behaving accordingly. This included automatically cheering or booing a wrestler based solely on whether he came to the ring from the heel or babyface locker room.
The company also relied more on wrestler interviews to build up the big matches. This was the opposite of wrestling in