Undisputed_ How to Become the World Champion in 1,372 Easy Steps - Chris Jericho [15]
Even though Vince had squashed my proposed angle with Arnold, I still had to meet him. He was one of my heroes growing up and I didn’t know if I’d ever get another chance. The Schwarz had been sequestered in his dressing room all day long, but I was not to be deterred. I walked over to his door, gave a terse knock, and barged inside.
Arnold was sitting there with his entourage and they all stared at me, annoyed. A nervous grin spread across my face as I said, “I’m sorry, Mr. Schwarzenegger, I hate to interrupt you, but I just wanted to say hi.” He looked at me, his face chiseled out of granite, and replied stoically in his thick Aryan accent, “Absolutely.”
“Are you having a good time today?”
“Absolutely.”
“That’s great. Are you ready to tear it up tonight?”
“Absolutely.”
“Does your mother like bananas?”
“Absolutely.”
“Do you mind if I take a picture with you?”
“Absolutely.”
I wasn’t sure if he meant absolutely yes or absolutely no, but I went ahead and took the picture anyway.
“Thank you so much, Mr. Schwarzenegger.”
“Absolutely.”
I lingered for a few seconds longer, waiting for Arnold to crack a smile or a frown or a grimace—anything to show me that he was human. But he didn’t. He stared at me stone-faced until I skulked out of his room and out of his life forever.
I won’t be back.
Even though my first idea had ended up in the bin, I kept the hits coming. I wrote up ideas and gave them to Vince on a weekly basis, some of them good, some of them bad, all of them unused. One of my favorites was a story with Steve Austin where I would commandeer Raw and be in charge of everything, renaming it Raw Is Jericho. I would confront Austin, who would be in the ring at the beginning of the show, and shoot down the giant Raw Is War banner from the rafters with a bow and arrow, revealing a Raw Is Jericho banner instead. Later in the night I would kidnap Austin and throw him into the trunk of my car. At the end of the show he would use his own bow and arrow to pin my shirt to the wall and proceed to stomp a mudhole into me.
What? You think that sucks?
Okay, I just reread that, and you’re right, it does suck. I wouldn’t have used it either, but at least I was trying.
As my stock was falling faster than a Bob Barker erection, the Hardy Boys, Edge, and Christian were becoming the hottest acts in the company. They wrestled in a best-of-seven series that culminated in a Ladder match at No Mercy 1999 and absolutely tore the house down. They became bigger stars in one night than I was after four months. What stung even worse was that these guys had asked me years earlier to help them get jobs in Japan and Mexico and they were now stealing a show that I wasn’t even booked on.
It was quite depressing, and I started to wonder if coming to the WWE hadn’t been a huge mistake.
I sat in front of the monitor watching the PPV and taking notes on a legal pad, trying to figure out what I was doing wrong and why I was sitting on the sidelines. It was the same thing I did in WCW, when I watched the guys cut promos in the box so I could learn how to do them better.
After the show I made a point of approaching Vince in his office to tell him what I had been doing, how I’d been jotting down ideas while watching the show. I wasn’t looking to kiss his ass; I was just letting him know that I was trying. I’d been dreaming about working for the WWE for twenty years, had designed and cultivated my entire career to make it there, and now that I had finally arrived, my dreams were turning to dust.
The best part about taking notes at the monitor that night was watching my old friend Tyler Palko of the Okotoks Palkos (see the New York Times best-seller A Lion’s Tale by Chris Jericho for more info) and his seventy-five-year old Uncle Joe yelling and screaming at all of the action. Joe lived in Cleveland and Tyler had come to visit him and see me wrestle. He was just as disappointed that I wasn’t on the show as I was, so afterwards we went down to the bar district called the Flats to drown our sorrows in a bucket of Crown Royal. After