A Lion's Tale_ Around the World in Spandex - Chris Jericho [94]
I guess it was better than the Dirty Harrys...
Fred’s other genius idea was to have Sudden Impact wear tights made of fabric that would change colors as we wrestled. I’d never heard of such a magical textile; perhaps Fred was planning on purchasing this mystical fabric from Willy Wonka. But even if an Oompa Loompa was growing the fabric from a Shazbot tree wouldn’t the concept of color-changing tights fit the Northern Lights gimmick much better?
The amazing material never materialized, but our Japanese tour did. Fred had us sign contracts supposedly sent from Japan which were pockmarked with white-out and printing errors. In hindsight, it’s obvious he’d doctored an old contract and passed it off to us as a new one, the same way he fabricated the WCW contract for Big Titan.
He also promised us work visas and then changed his mind and said we didn’t need them. Instead he gave us his friend Ricky Fuji’s address in Tokyo and told us if we were hassled at immigration to say we were on vacation and staying at Ricky’s place. (Sounds like the name of a sitcom.)
The actual flight concerned me too. I didn’t understand how an airplane could stay up in the sky for that long and I was afraid I was going to freak out en route. Unfortunately, since I couldn’t take a steamship to the Orient I had no other choice.
When I picked Lance up on my way to the airport, he was wearing a collared shirt and tie for no apparent reason. When I asked him why, he replied, “Well, we’re going to Japan, so I thought I should wear a tie.” Naturally.
He was already annoyed at me because I was late in picking him up. But that pretty much defined our relationship...I was late and he wore a tie.
FMW was still a fledgling company and didn’t have a lot of money so they bought us the cheapest plane tickets possible. Therefore we had to fly three hours south to Los Angeles in order to connect and fly the three hours back north on our way to Narita, Tokyo’s airport.
When we boarded the plane to L.A., I saw that the Edmonton Oilers were also on our flight—sitting in coach with the rest of us peasants. Mark Messier, Jari Kurri, Bill Ranford, most of the guys who’d eliminated my beloved Winnipeg Jets from the Stanley Cup Playoffs only a year earlier were all there.
I knew that the guy who sat beside me used to play for the Oilers but I couldn’t remember his name. It was driving me nuts, so when he got up to go to the bathroom I bent over to examine his carry-on bag stuffed under the seat. I fumbled around until I found the name tag and a cold chill ran up my spine when I saw whose bag it was. Then a warm squirt ran down my undies when a pissed-off deep voice from over my shoulder said, “Get your fucking hands off my bag.”
I slowly looked up and faced Dave Semenko, one of the toughest goons in NHL history. Cementhead’s sole reason for employment with the Oilers was to annihilate anybody who came even the slightest bit close to Wayne Gretzky.
And now he wanted to annihilate me.
I sat in silence, speechless and quivering in the face of death.
Semenko leaned into my face with the power of 1,000 knockouts behind him...and his coffee breath almost made me knockout 1,001.
“Don’t touch my stuff, asshole.”
When I began to retort he cut me off and said, “Don’t even think of talking to me for the rest of the flight either.”
I stared at my suddenly quite interesting shoelaces for the rest of the trip and survived the flight to L.A. unscathed. I passed the time by reading my Japanese-English dictionary and making note of all the phrases and words I was going to use when we landed.
So Lance and I arrived in Narita with no work visa, no idea who we were supposed to be meeting, no address for the company that had brought us over, and less than $200 (Canadian) between us. After making it through customs trouble-free (once again without having to utilize the Force), we were met by Ito, the FMW referee. He spoke English, but it didn’t matter to