A Lion's Tale_ Around the World in Spandex - Chris Jericho [96]
“You like Richie Sambora’s hat?”
“Do you know any hockey players’ wives?”
“Do you like jeans?”
“How many pairs of sunglasses do you have?”
Ricky also sported one of the biggest fanny packs I’d ever seen. The fanny pack was a wrestler’s fashion staple in the ’90s, and my neon green pack was no slouch, but Ricky’s pack covered half his torso. He’d look through it for a pack of cigarettes, a pair of chopsticks, a monkey wrench. I’m not kidding about the monkey wrench, by the way.
Once again the power of music was universal and because he liked heavy metal as much as I did, we became instant friends. One night he took me to see a band called the Privates play at a small club. I was amused at how polite the Japanese rock fans were. They didn’t make much noise and just watched, clapping politely when the song ended. I soon learned it was the same way with Japanese wrestling crowds.
When we arrived at the arena in Kanagawa for the first night of the tour, Lance took a look at the list of the evening’s matches taped to the wall and his face dropped.
“This is terrible.”
“What’s wrong?”
“We’re not on. It’s our first night in and we’re not even on the show.”
I looked at the card and sure enough the names Chris Jericho and Lance Storm weren’t on the list. But the names Clise and Runce were—and that was us.
Like Cher, no last names were necessary. It was just CLISE and RUNCE. Clise was a bad phonetic translation of my name with the R sound not being pronounced the same way in Japanese, but I’d been called worse. I was once listed on an ad in the Calgary Sun as Chris Cherrykoo.
I also noticed that Clise and Runce were written across from Onita’s name, which meant that we were in the main event of the show. Excited by the huge opportunity we suited up in our fancy new multicolored Sgt. Pepper ring jackets with green and black Rockers rip-off tights, both made by Lenny St. Clair’s mom.
I threw a few warm-up kicks and said the same prayer that I said before every match. I was almost ready to rock.
I had one more task before the match, and when I went to drop the kids off at the pool I was agog (great word) when I saw the toilets in the bathroom.
They were nothing more than porcelain-covered holes in the ground, and the idea was to squat a few inches above the “toilet” and let it rip. To me, the bathroom is supposed to be a sanctuary, but there’s nothing relaxing about straining your legs in a crouch while trying to get the job done.
After a while I became smart enough to look for a handicap stall, or a Western Toilet. The Western Toilet didn’t feature cowboy hats or lassos, just a good old North American dumper. So did the handicap stall and they both featured a diagram on the wall of a stick man sitting on a stick toilet, showing people how to use it.
If you don’t know how to use a toilet...
I got the job done and hit the ring for the main event of Sudden Impact and Mark Starr vs. Onita, Sambo Asako, and Ueda, a kickboxer who wore boxing gloves during the whole match.
Lance and I made our big entrance by vaulting up to the top rope and back-flipping into the center of the ring. I remembered asking Shawn Michaels back in Winnipeg how to do a back flip and him telling me to get up there and just do it. I’d practiced back-flipping a few times in Calgary but this was the first official voyage. So I got up there and just did it, flipping backward with so much force that I over-rotated and landed on my ass. It was a complete embarrassment, made even worse by the platoon of magazine photographers who captured me falling on my posterior for posterity and the sour look on Lance T.’s face.
I got over my embarrassment when Onita got into the ring. It was a sobering experience to be standing across the ring from the boss of the company and one of the biggest stars in all of Japan.
Atsushi Onita had started FMW after becoming unhappy wrestling for All Japan, when he rallied a few sponsors and formed his own company. FMW was the first company to promote such delicate displays as electrified barbed-wire matches