Death Clutch - Brock Lesnar [30]
Then I realized: “Something ain’t right here.”
The show had already started, and Jack hadn’t given us a finish yet. Dwayne and I started talking about our match, and I kept thinking “Okay, but what’s the finish here?”
It was about an hour and a half before we were supposed to step into the ring for the main event of the evening, and Dwayne says to me, “. . . and that’s when I’ll hit you with the Rock Bottom, one . . . two . . . three!”
I actually laughed, because I thought Dwayne was ribbing me. I was the WWE Champion. The Golden Boy. It was my time to be on top. I was supposed to win. And here’s the Rock, who should know better, saying he’s going to pin the WWE Champion with the Rock Bottom. That was funny.
Dwayne had this nervous look on his face, and he wasn’t laughing with me. He just put all the heat on Vince right away, and said, “I can’t believe Vince didn’t tell you . . . didn’t he call you about this?” Dwayne made it seem like he thought I knew he was supposed to beat me, and that he was shocked I didn’t.
“I told you about things like this,” Dwayne said. “A lot of shit falls through the cracks, you gotta stay on top of Vince about everything.”
I remember the week I stayed with Dwayne, he was on the phone with Vince constantly. It was the right way to handle his business. Dwayne had a hand in everything they did with his character. He was a big enough star that he had some say in how his character was used, and how Vince would market and promote him. Even back then, Dwayne would tell me, “Now that you’re going to be on top, you need to stay on top of everything, all the time.”
So I went to Lanza and said, “Jack, tell me what the hell is going on here . . . I’m the WWE Champion, and I’m losing tonight? Why didn’t anyone tell me?” Jack’s only reply was, “Well, it’s a non-title match!”
What the hell did that mean? I never knew that my title wasn’t on the line that night. I never knew that I was supposed to lose to the Rock.
“It’s Miami,” Jack said. “No one will ever know!”
I can remember hearing Jack say that like it was yesterday. I wasn’t upset about losing. That wasn’t the point at all. What bothered me was that I was the last guy to know, when I should have been the first. No one had the guts to tell me the truth, until it was time to step into the ring. Just from the look on Dwayne’s face and the tone in Jack’s voice, I knew they were in on something I wasn’t. It was obvious to me that Vince, Dwayne and Jack were all in cahoots, and I wasn’t being smartened up to the situation until the very last minute.
That night changed my attitude toward the WWE, because it’s when I started to feel Vince was a manipulating bastard, and that I was being played.
I thought it was a stupid decision to have the WWE Champion lose in a “non-title match,” but that was something I was going to have to accept. As someone who fights for real, it made no sense to me for the champion to lose … and still be the champion. If someone can beat the champ, then they deserve the title. It’s that simple.
Who wants to see that? People pay to see the champion because he’s the champion, and his position as number one is on the line. I didn’t like it. I had been pulling the company plow, been filling the arenas and selling the pay-per-views, and no one even tells me that Dwayne wants to get his loss back? No one has the balls to just say, “Brock, this is the way it is”?
Vince can’t tell me the angle, the story, and why it makes sense for me to lay down for the Rock in a “non-title” match? He doesn’t want my two cents’ worth? I’m the damn poster boy for this company, and I’m the only one who doesn’t know what’s going on?
Even though I knew one day I would have to do a job for The Rock, I still kept