Undisputed_ How to Become the World Champion in 1,372 Easy Steps - Chris Jericho [125]
But mentally I was burned out.
It was getting harder to leave my wife and my son to go to work and it was getting increasingly more difficult to put together matches. Normally I would go into a quiet corner somewhere and ideas for a match would pop into my head rapidly. Now I’d rack my brain for hours and only the most generic of ideas would come.
My drive and desire weren’t there like they used to be either, partially because I’d been painted with the scarlet letter of being a “Hell of a Hand,” and further down the card in working with guys like Tomko, Carlito, Muhammad Hassan (remember him??). I once again felt like I’d gone down a rabbit hole and returned to 1999.
If I was working in the ’70s territory system, it would’ve been time to pack up my Caddy and move on to the next company. But now there was nowhere else to go, and even if there was, I wasn’t interested in wrestling anymore. I wasn’t 100 percent mentally into it, and that’s a dangerous place to be. It makes it that much easier to get injured, and more important, it’s the source of a bad attitude. I was starting to complain more in the dressing room, and I didn’t want to become one of those guys.
The WWE had been very good to me and I wasn’t going to start grumbling and whining about every little thing, setting a bad example and breeding unrest among the entire roster, especially the younger guys.
Plus, I needed to get away to explore my other opportunities and interests. Fozzy had offers to tour the world, but I had no time to take advantage of them. I also wanted to get a place in L.A. so I could seriously study the art of acting. Most important, I had an awesome wife and a young son whom I wanted to spend more time with.
My contract was coming up in July and Johnny kept asking me about re-signing. I kept stalling and telling him I needed to think about it, but in my heart I already knew that for the first time in my life I didn’t want to wrestle anymore.
CHAPTER 35
The Hardest Working Man in Show Business
Our WWE bus pulled up to the hotel in Birmingham, England, and I couldn’t wait to hit the sackski. We were in the middle of a UK tour of twelve shows in twelve nights and we’d been driving for hours. It was past midnight and I was surprised how many people were still hanging around drinking in the expansive lobby. As I was waiting to get my bags off the bus, the driver told me that there had been a kickboxing tournament at the arena next door that night and both the boxers and their fans were staying at the hotel.
As we walked through the lobby to the elevators, a drunken fan with a skinjob for a hairdo asked HHH for an autograph. He was being obnoxious, so H ignored him and got on the lift to his room. The punter started yelling, “All you wrestlers are assholes! You’re all a bunch of pussies!”
One of our referees, Jack Doan, told him to calm down and the guy popped him in the face and tackled him to the ground. I dropped my bags and ran to Jack’s rescue, pulling the guy off by fishhooking his eye socket with my finger. Baldboy’s friends rushed over to help him, our guys ran over to stop them, the kickboxers and their hooligan sycophants joined the fray, and suddenly the lobby was a Charles-town Chiefs– Syracuse Bulldogs bench-clearing brawl. But even Ogie Ogilthorpe would’ve skated away screaming from the beatdown the WWE boys were giving the kickboxers and their fans.
Bodies were being batted around like Hacky Sacks at Woodstock ’94, and it wasn’t the boxers doing the batting. Viscera, a 400-pound behemoth, was simply sitting on one hooligan, giggling as his victim squirmed and wheezed for breath. Benoit had another guy in the Crossface, laughing outright as the guy screamed like he was in Stu Hart’s dungeon. I was wandering around tearing the shirts off of random wankers because I felt like it, which was akin to shooting fish in a barrel.