A Lion's Tale_ Around the World in Spandex - Chris Jericho [79]
The Thrillseekers were ready to come aboard. We just had to agree upon the finances, so after the show we met with Cornette to talk numbers.
There was no way Corny could afford to pay me what I’d been making in Mexico and I didn’t expect him to. After what I’d just seen, I wanted to work in SMW more than ever but I still wanted to make the best deal I could. Lance had given me his blessing to work out the deal for both of us, so I decided to swing for the fences. I told Jimmy I couldn’t come in for anything less than $850 a week and of course Lance would have to make the same.
Without a word, Jimmy grabbed a pen and after a few minutes of number crunching, he said he might be able to do it.
A major revenue stream for the workers in SMW was the sale of merchandise, or gimmicks. Guys would peddle T-shirts, pictures, mugs, buttons, anything. They would have sold turds if there was a Sharpie that could write on them. Cornette told us he could guarantee the $3,400 to each of us monthly by keeping the proceeds from our gimmick sales.
I think he figured he could pay us 100 bucks a match for four matches a week and make up the remaining $1,800 with Thrillseeker gimmicks. It might have been possible except I think Corny forgot that Lance and I would have to generate $1,800 a month in gimmicks EACH to cover the guarantee. Therefore the Thrillseekers would have to sell $3,600 a month in merch for him to break even. So the deal put him in as much of a hole money-wise as our crappy vignettes put the Thrillseekers in image-wise.
What made his offer stranger was that even with the biggest push in history, nothing was going to make us more popular than the Rock ’n’ Roll Express in SMW. He’d just made a deal to pay an unproven tag team twice as much as he was paying his top-drawing main event tag team.
The bottom line: great deal for us, bad deal for Cornette.
With Cornette in charge of producing our gimmicks, it wasn’t a priority for us to put any thought into what we were selling. It didn’t matter if we sold 1 or 100 dollars’ worth because we got our monthly guarantee either way. So we refused to take the beefcake pictures of us soaking in a hot tub in Speedos that were standard for babyfaces in the Southern territories. We wanted to be known as serious wrestlers and the only pictures we agreed to take were of us on horseback, wearing jackets and jeans. We didn’t even show off our physiques, which was what a lot of the female fans wanted to see. It was a piss-poor attitude to have because Jimmy was paying us a lot of money to play the pretty boy role. It was almost embarrassing to compare our inventory with the rest of the guys who made the lion’s share of their income from the sales of merchandise.
The Rock ’n’ Roll Express were the kings of the gimmicks. They made hundreds, sometimes thousands of dollars a night by selling anything and everything, including shirts, buttons, dog collars, key chains, can openers, and ball caps. They’d buy a white bedsheet, rip it into strips, write R+R on them in black marker, and sell them as official headbands. Once I saw a fan give Ricky Morton a rebel flag license plate as a gift. As soon as she turned her back, he signed his name on it and sold it ten minutes later for twenty bucks. They’d shamelessly shill their stuff to any fan in the place who had more than a dime to their name. If a dime was all you had, they’d take that too.
The more you schmoozed the fans the more you sold, but the whole concept of whoring yourself out bothered me. Here we were, so-called big-time superstars sitting at a table during intermission, hawking a button for a dollar as if our lives depended on it. You never saw Hulk Hogan at the merch stand at intermission selling red and yellow headbands and I didn’t think I should have to do it either. I felt that it