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I was in over my head in the WWE and desperately needed an ally I could trust to come in and watch my back. My first choice was Lenny St. Clair, my old friend from Calgary who had finished up as Dr. Luther in Japan and was now living in Seattle. I believed in Lenny and knew he was a good worker who could play any character and personify any gimmick that was thrown at him. I went to Vince and said, “I have a friend who’s a great performer and I’d like to get him a tryout.”

“Is he a good human being?” Vince asked.

When I affirmed that he was, Vince sent me to Russo, who asked to see some photos and a tape. After all the years Lenny had been on the job, he’d never assembled a decent highlight video, so I took some of his matches and rented an editing suite. I put together a four-minute clip of his best stuff with “The Call of Ktulu” by Metallica in the background and handed it to Russo.

I wanted him to get the job because he deserved a break and, more important to me, I needed someone to help me combat the opposition I was facing. Unfortunately, after a few tryouts and bad breaks, Lenny didn’t get the gig.

My one-man wolfpack remained intact.

CHAPTER 3

Schizo Deluxe

I always prided myself on being a good performer who could get a decent match out of anyone, but now I had become the guy that nobody could get a good match with. It was completely unacceptable to me and I knew that time was running out. I needed to find somebody who could teach me the style and psychology I needed to get my head above water—and there was one man I knew who could do that.

Pat Patterson had wrestled around the world for years until finishing his in-ring career in the WWE, but it was as a backstage booker, advisor, and agent that he achieved his biggest success. Pat is a wrestling Jedi and the smartest man I’ve ever met in wrestling. He taught me 90 percent of what I know about how to put together a match, and when I first approached him I had no idea how little I really knew about the psychology of the business.

Every week I hung around Pat and picked his brain. He’d always been friendly to me, as we were both Canadian and he knew I’d trained in Calgary. His love and respect for Bret Hart led us to talk about the famous sixty-minute match Bret and Shawn Michaels had at WrestleMania XII. Pat had been brought out of retirement at the request of the two of them to be the agent on the match, and he helped put it together. He was also the agent for all of The Rock’s matches, which was one of the reasons why they were always good (my first match with Rocky notwithstanding). I told him I felt that I could be as valuable to the company as The Rock if I could only learn a few tricks and make a few changes to my work, which wasn’t an egotistical statement as much as a straight-from-the-heart sentiment. I had all of these tools and experiences that so many other guys in the locker room didn’t, but I had no idea how to use them. I had the magic spells but no magic wand, and Pat was the wizard who could help me find it.

Pat was from Montreal and had a thick French accent with a thick sense of humor to go with it, telling the same bad jokes over and over again:

“Hey, do you know who was asking about you the other day?”

“Who?”

“Nobody!!!”

“Hey Chris, your match was taken off the show.”

“Really?”

“Yeah, it was canceled due to lack of interest!!”

After each moldy oldie, he would walk away howling at his comic genius.

Pat also had an affinity for butchering the English language with his French Canadian accent, which made him sound like Adam Sandler’s talking goat.

“When the Dudleys Boy hit the ring, DVD hits JYD with the Sprog Flash.”

Translation: “When the Dudley Boyz hit the ring, RVD hits Y2J with the Frog Splash.”

He didn’t know the meaning of superimposed either.

But Pat was deadly serious when it came to wrestling and he had no problem giving his opinion about the flaws in my work. His first piece of advice was to stop working like I was still in another country. He helped me to understand that every territory