• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

He was right in saying that my style was hard hitting from years of working with guys like Chris Benoit, Eddy Guerrero, Ultimo Dragon, and Rey Mysterio. That was Mick’s nice way of telling me that I better lighten up a bit if I wanted to work with the big boys in the WWE. I appreciated his honesty and was able to tweak my work as a result. I paid Mick back for his kindness the next night on Raw, when I told him the only reason I had read his book was to see if he died at the end of it. (Did I mention I’m undefeated against Foley?)

A few weeks later on a chilly fall afternoon, I arrived at the Meadowlands Arena in New Jersey and found out that Vince Russo had quit the WWE and jumped to WCW. It seemed like a huge blow to the company at first because he took a lot of credit for being the main architect of the Attitude Era. But Vinny Mac and the rest of the front office weren’t so worried because they knew that wasn’t the case.

I asked Pat, “What do you think is going to happen?”

“I’ve seen them come and I’ve seen them go, it doesn’t make a difference. As long as Vince McMahon is here, it’s going to be okay. No big deal.”

But it was a big deal to me, as Russo was the one who had brought me into the WWE and was my biggest supporter in the company. He was the middleman between Vince and me. The guy who constantly backed me up when Vince thought I wasn’t good enough to cut it. Russo believed in me and treated me with the respect of a top guy.

Now he was gone.

Sure, he dug me into a bit of a hole with all of his preposterous cartoon ideas. But at least I had a story, a presence on the show and a raison d’être. Things in the WWE were already bad for me as it was, but now I was really up shit creek—and my paddle had just floated away to WCW.

Russo’s leaving meant the end of whatever kind of push I was getting, and I soon became a denizen of Sunday Night Heat. I worked with such luminaries as Stevie Richards, Godfather, Gangrel, the Headbangers, Bull Buchanan, and Naked Mideon, losing to all of them. Only three months earlier the clock had hit zero in the middle of The Rock’s promo, yet now I was washed up at at the ripe old age of twenty-nine.

My confidence was shot and I was scrambling, desperate to get some sort of recognition, some sort of credibility. I worked against Big Show on Raw in Greensboro, North Carolina, and had the idea to use the famous Antonio Inoki/Andre the Giant short-arm scissor spot, where I would put him into an arm lock and he would use his immense strength to lift me straight off the ground up onto his shoulders, seven feet in the air. Proud of my originality and technical prowess, I went to Vince and bragged, “I’m doing the short-arm scissors tonight,” trying to impress him any way I could.

Then I fucked up the short-arm scissors and slapped Show squarely in the face to make up for it. He was furious about it and tore the dressing room wall down in a blind fury. Then he ripped the stereo out of his rental car. When he told Ron Simmons what he had done, Ron looked him in the face and deadpanned, “So you went into your own car and smashed in your own stereo?”

“Yes!!!”

“Damn, you sure showed him …”

I embarrassed myself even further when Arnold Schwarzenegger made a guest appearance on Smackdown! to promote his movie End of Days. In the film, he plays a character named Jericho Kane, and I instantly figured that because we were both Jerichos (You’re a Jericho, I’m a Jericho, that’s terrific) it would be obvious for us to do something together. (Keep in mind that I was losing to Headbanger Mosh that night.) So I wrote a detailed, intricate storyline for the two of us and handed it to Vince. He looked at it as if I had written it with a poop pen and told me he was looking forward to reading it. He must’ve perused it very quickly, because I saw it in a garbage can forty-five minutes later.

My storyline with Schwarzenegger had been terminated forever. (Cocky Author’s Note: Yeah, it’s clichéd, but it’s my book so deal