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“You don’t have a fucking clue what you’re doing out there. You’re as green as grass and it’s embarrassing. I was sold a bill of goods in bringing you in here and you’re not worth the paper your contract is printed on. Everybody is complaining about you.”

Yikes! Well, that wasn’t what I expected to hear when I walked into his office. I was in shock. Before this little tête-à-tête, I would’ve bet a thousand dollars Canadian that Vince was going to wrap me in his arms and congratulate me. Instead he was giving me a whipping worse than the one Jesus got in The Passion of the Christ.

I didn’t know what to do or how to react, so I found a happy place and hid in the recesses of my mind. I figured if I tried to make excuses, he’d just fire me on the spot, so I morphed into Kevin Bacon in Animal House and kept repeating to myself, “Thank you, sir, may I have another?”

He gave me another, all right. And another. And another.

“You have no respect for anybody here. You even stole The Rock’s catchphrase on the pay-per-view yesterday.”

It took me a while to figure out what the hell he was talking about. “If you smell what The Rock is cooking”? No. “It doesn’t matter what your name is!”? Nope, not that one either.

Did he mean “Go Jericho Go”? In his mind was that too similar to The Rock encouraging the fans to chant, “Rocky, Rocky, Rocky”?

Hardly a direct ripoff of a tried-and-true catchphrase, but it didn’t matter what I thought. The tongue-o’-nine-tails lashing continued.

“The problem with you is that you’re an elitist, you think you’re better than everybody else. But you’re not. You’re the drizzling shits.”

Well I never! I’d been called a lot of things during my career, but “the drizzling shits” was not one of them. I’d always prided myself on my work, and hearing him say that cut me to the bone. But not as much as his next statement.

“I want you to go and apologize to Chyna.”

Exsqueeze me? Baking powder?

Apologize to Chyna? For what? Carrying her to two of the best matches she’d ever had? Putting up with her politics and making her look like a million loonies? What the fuck was I supposed to apologize to her about? I had a better poker face than Lady Gaga, but inside I was fucking furious.

In my mind’s eye there were two scenarios: (1) tell Vince to buy a one-way ticket to hell and back, trash his office, and leave the WWE forever; or (2) obey his orders, swallow my pride like a shot of Crown, and apologize to Chyna.

It wasn’t an easy choice, but I’d worked nine long years to get to the WWE and I wasn’t going to let it slip away so easily.

“Okay, Vince, I’ll apologize to her.”

JR and Lanza nodded their heads in approval. I’m not sure why they were in the room, since they didn’t say anything, but their presence made Vince’s words even more biting and embarrassing. It was going to be hard looking any of these guys in the face from now on.

And the hits kept on coming.

“From now on, you have to go over every one of your matches with X-Pac. He knows how to work and how to put together matches; you don’t. I want you to pick his brain and talk to him about every move you make in the ring.”

I’d known X-Pac (a.k.a. Sean Waltman) for years, after working together in Japan and WCW. Now he was firmly entrenched in DX and one of Vince’s golden boys. Pac was a very smart worker who understood the WWE way of doing things, and in the long run he did help me with my in-ring psychology. But it was a tough pill to swallow knowing that I had to approve everything with a guy who was not only younger than me with less experience, but was also part of the DX gang who clearly had issues with me.

I was scheduled to have a match with him that night on Raw, and Vince said, “You better show me something tonight, Chris. Because if you can’t have a good match with Pac, you can’t have a good match with anybody. I’m not going to take the title off you, that would be too obvious. So we’ll do a DQ. But you better have a good one.”

After those words his oral assault was finally