Death Clutch - Brock Lesnar [24]
Before he could get up, I ran across the ring, grabbed him, and locked my hands around him again. He started panicking: “Brock, what the hell are you doing? Wait wait wait wait wait wait wait!” So I flung him around a few more times. He learned his lesson.
After that, we got along great. I flew around for Show when it came time for the part of the match they call “the heat,” which is when the heel is getting the crowd angry by beating up the babyface, and building the anticipation for the babyface to get back up and kick the heel’s ass. Show got on my nerves a little bit sometimes, but I could never hate him. I’m sure I got on his nerves, too, especially when I brought along a midget to dinner one night. By the way, Big Show fears midgets. I don’t know why. It’s a phobia. So just to “get” him, I brought one along . . . who kept sneaking bites out of Big Show’s hamburger!
VODKA AND VICODINS
As my first WrestleMania was approaching, I was already feeling the toll of life on the road and in the spotlight. I was hurt, dating back even before I dropped the title to the Big Show. My ribs were broken, and they hurt like hell, and I had a torn PCL (posterior crutiate ligament) in my right knee. I was flying to a new city every night, drinking more and more vodka and washing down more Vicodins, all just to dull the pain. It got old real fast. I kept thinking to myself that I was living a life that my mom and dad wouldn’t want me living, and there was good reason for that.
It’s easy for people to blame the wrestling business when top notch people like me get consumed, but that’s just a cop-out. It’s not the wrestling business’ fault.
I could easily have ended up like some of the less fortunate. I had been popping pills for a while just to kill the pain of being on the road, of injuries that never heal, and I started drinking vodka. Lots of vodka. I can’t even tell you how much for sure, but it seems like a bottle every one or two days, with a couple hundred pain pills each month to go with it. You want to know why there aren’t more stories in this book about my pro wrestling days? Because the truth is, I don’t remember a lot of that period of my life.
The even sadder truth is that my consumption of booze and pills was on the light end of the scale compared to some guys who had been around longer than me. They were really trapped, and they knew they would never get out. So they escaped another way. When I started to make an assessment of my life back then, I realized that if I stayed long enough, I’d end up just like them. Nowhere to go, and not even remembering where I had been.
It’s not the pro wrestling business itself that’s the real problem, it’s the lifestyle that goes along with it.
The schedule is too demanding for anyone. You have to live on the road, and at the same time deal with the injuries, fans, rental car people, hotel clerks, restaurant waiters and waitresses, company politics, everyone walking around like a zombie, and never being home. And on those rare occasions when you get to go home, you are supposed to suddenly turn it all off and just try to be “Daddy.”
Yeah, salesman travel and they are gone a lot, too. But they don’t get body-slammed by 250-pound men, or tear up their knees by landing a backflip off the top rope, or have their ribs crushed, or get concussed, or have their arms twisted out of the sockets each night before they head to the airport. Pro wrestlers do, and they are expected to heal on the plane, get a few hours of sleep in a hotel, then show up “looking good” the next night, in the next city.
I found myself