Undisputed_ How to Become the World Champion in 1,372 Easy Steps - Chris Jericho [10]
And I was about to get shit on.
Looking back now, I think one of the biggest problems I faced at the beginning of my WWE career stemmed from the fact that Vince Russo loved the character I played in WCW. He loved my cowardly heel comedy schtick and wanted me to continue in that vein. I played that character in WCW because I wasn’t getting any attention from the office anyway and had nothing to lose. In the WWE main event world, money players couldn’t be comedians or cowards all the time, and I had been brought in to be a major player. Major players have to be believable, and in Vince’s mind while there can be elements of comedy to them, people have to believe they can kick somebody’s ass. Russo didn’t see things that way and kept booking me in all these preposterous WCW-esque situations.
As a result, I was caught in the middle, and I ain’t talkin’ about Ronnie James Dio.
After the Hughes experiment tanked, Curtis went into hibernation and I was instead saddled with Howard Finkel, who was earmarked to be the WWE version of Ralphus. I began a program with Ken Shamrock, which started with me being lowered into the ring inside of a shark cage, like Richard Dreyfuss in Jaws. I called Ken out, telling him that I wasn’t in the cage to protect me from him; I was in the cage to protect him from me.
Ken pried the bars open and I freaked out and escaped. Backstage, Shamrock found Finkel in a blond wig, thinking that he was me. As he was accosting Harold (as I called him), I snuck up from behind, slammed Shamrock’s head in a car door, and put him in the Walls as Harold took pictures.
The next week Russo decided he wanted me to wear a suit of armor—yes, an actual suit of armor—for a First Blood match on Raw, with the idea being I couldn’t bleed if I was wearing it.
Let me ask you, dear reader, have you ever tried to wear a suit of armor? Great Caesar’s Ghost, it’s almost impossible to put on because—well, it’s a suit of fucking armor! I wriggled and struggled gingerly to affix each section of the metal bodysuit to my extremities, trying not to gouge myself to death. Then, once I finally got it on, it was like being in a tin can with the top opened. There were all of these sharp edges cutting and digging into me. At one point I took a big step to the left and thought the codpiece was gonna saw my ballbag clean off. There was no way I was going to be able to work a match in this thing without slicing myself up worse than Abdullah the Butcher’s forehead.
As a compromise, I came up with the idea of wearing full hockey gear, including a helmet with a face cage. The show was in Dallas, whose team had played Buffalo in the NHL playoffs that year, so of course I wore a Sabres jersey for cheap heat. I walked down the ramp and got a great nasty reaction from the crowd, but just as I got to the ring the referee told me to go back to the Gorilla position. It turned out that Vince wanted Shamrock to go to the ring first, otherwise why would he face me if he saw me standing there wearing hockey gear? The fact that he was the world’s most dangerous man was good enough reason for me. It was a taped show, so I went out to the ring again, but this time the reaction to my enemy jersey was lukewarm at best. The surprise had been ruined, and as I walked out to a chorus of crickets and tumbleweeds I couldn’t help but think that, once again, I had been stricken by fate in a bad way. I was dying more deaths in the WWE than Jason Voorhees.
It was decided that Shamrock and I would have the blowoff match for our angle at the next PPV, Unforgiven. We were booked on a few live events beforehand to work on