Death Clutch - Brock Lesnar [19]
Meanwhile, while I’m going through the motions on the never-ending treadmill that road life had become, all I could think of was getting home so I could see my baby daughter Mya, because she would grow up just a little bit more every day I was gone. I was missing out on all these wonderful experiences with my child, missing out on all the greatest things about being a dad, and was doing the bullshit “shaking-hands routine” with a bunch of people I just saw a few hours ago like they were long-lost brothers. It was insane.
It got to the point that I remember one day looking across the locker room at Ric Flair, who was then in his midfifties, and saying to myself, “That’s not going to be me.” I don’t mean that as any disrespect toward Ric. He gave his life to the wrestling business. He was truly one of the greats, and he deserves a lot of credit for what he did.
But with all the greatness that his name is supposed to represent, and all the years he had spent on top, what the hell was he still doing there? He got in, but he never got out.
I wasn’t going to be the guy missing his kids’ birthday parties and graduations.
I wondered how many of his own kids’ birthday parties did Flair miss? How many of their graduations? I didn’t want to be pushing sixty years old and still wearing tights.
Flair was known as the best, and if the business could break him, it could happen to anyone. Even me. That’s why, every time I looked at Flair, every time I saw him climb in the ring and let out his trademark “Wooooooooooooooo!,” I heard Curt Hennig’s voice in my head: “Get in to get out.”
WINNING THE TITLE . . . FROM THE ROCK
I only wrestled Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson three times. The first time was in Australia, right before we worked the SummerSlam main event at the Nassau Coliseum in Long Island, New York, for the Undisputed WWE Championship. I had won the King of the Ring and was headed for my first pay-per-view main event. There’s a lot of pressure on someone when they have to main-event with the top star of the day. You have to be careful not to hurt the Golden Goose, but you also have to make your match look good.
To get me ready for the Rock, we did a match on television against Hulk Hogan. This was a big deal, because Hogan didn’t wrestle every week on TV. WWE was portraying him as the legend of all legends, and to make me the focal point of the promotion, we were going to do a major incident on television where I took Hulk Hogan OUT. I was honored to get into the ring with Hogan, but at the same time, I looked at things a little differently from everyone else. Yes, Hogan was the biggest star of the eighties and nineties. He drew huge gates and sold millions of pay-per-views. This guy had made more money than any other wrestler of his era, but here he was, squeezing out another run at age fiftysomething . . . just like Ric Flair.
So we did this deal with Hulk Hogan where I took Hogan out violently on the WWE Smackdown! TV show. I knew the script, because Paul was the lead writer of the show, and we communicated all the time. Vince kept telling me we needed to make this as memorable a night as possible for the fans, because this was a big moment in my career. I was going to slay the immortal Hulk Hogan, bust him open, and leave him for dead. Other wrestlers had “jumped” Hogan from behind before, or “attacked” him to build interest in an upcoming match, but I was going to beat the crap out of him face-to-face. Vince didn’t just want me to “get over,” he wanted me over the top. There was a lot riding on that SummerSlam pay-per-view, and WWE was counting on a big buy rate to carry the promotion into the fall.
The Rock was a proven commodity, but putting a rookie in the main event of your second biggest show of the year was a risk. Vince liked to take chances in life, but he called them “calculated risks.” The idea was to really pump up the interest in my match with The Rock by having me hit Hulk Hogan with the F-5, crack him over the head with a chair, bust his head open, and wipe his blood across my chest