Undisputed_ How to Become the World Champion in 1,372 Easy Steps - Chris Jericho [8]
When we raced through the curtain out of the audience’s view, I slowed down but he didn’t, and he tackled me as hard as he could in the hallway.
“Ken, did you really need to tackle me? Nobody can even see you!”
“I knew I could catch you,” he replied laconically.
I have a feeling he would’ve chased me all the way to Yonkers until he did.
Next up was SummerSlam, and my assignment was to cut yet another promo, this time on D-Generation X member Road Dogg. Dogg hit the ring to massive cheers and did his patented introduction for himself: “I’m the R-to-the-O-to-the-A-to-the-D-to-the D-to-the-O-to-the Double-G.”
I interrupted him with my patented countdown clock (which had gone from ten seconds, to five seconds, to a much more efficient three seconds) and told him, “You think you’re impressing everyone by spelling ‘Road Dogg’? Big deal. If you want to impress me, spell ‘lugubrious.’ ” The camera showed a close-up of his face as he mouthed, “I don’t even know what that means.”
It was one of the few good segments in my early WWE career. I was in the groove that night and Road Dogg totally sold my verbal barbs. But even at that, it was one of the biggest shows of the year and I was still only doing a promo. I was the one feeling lugubrious.
My first televised WWE match was on the very first episode of Smackdown! against Road Dogg. Backstage, I saw the sheet listing the matches for the night, but it looked different than what I was used to in WCW. Beside the listing of Chris Jericho vs. Road Dogg were a pair of initials. I asked what they meant and was told they were the initials of the agent who would assist us in putting together our match.
Someone to help us with our match? That was new to me.
In WCW, there were no agents. We would walk into an office in the arena that was deemed the War Room and the booker, Kevin Sullivan, would tell us who was winning, how much time we had, and that was about it. We would be expected to do the rest ourselves, with no direction from the office at all. But here in the WWE veteran former wrestlers were hired solely to work with the younger talent and help us put together the best possible match we could, using guidelines set by Vince himself.
Everybody was working together to produce the best match—what a concept.
Unfortunately, even though my agent, Blackjack Lanza, did the best he could to help us, my match with Road Dogg was mediocre at best, and afterwards Russo had a new plan for me. He decided that I needed a bodyguard, someone who could do my dirty work. What I didn’t know when I agreed to the plan was that the guy they wanted to put me with was Mr. Hughes. Curtis Hughes was a former football player who used to weigh 400 pounds, but by the time they put him with me he was down to about 250. I started calling him “Curtis Huge,” but Vince didn’t like the moniker because he’d lost a ton of weight and wasn’t so huge anymore. As a matter of fact, he was pretty much the same size as me. But Russo thought Hughes looked great and was hell-bent on putting the two of us together.
I didn’t care for him from the start. He loved to talk shit about how good he was. He constantly bragged about how his sunglasses never came off during his matches … like that was somehow the secret to becoming the next Lou Thesz. Combine that with the fact that Hughes was also narcoleptic—he could fall asleep at any time and once did in the ring mid-backdrop—and you can see I had a real dandy of a bodyguard.
Another thing that bugged me about Hughes was that our ring attire didn’t match. I was wearing flashy rave shirts and leather pants, while he wore cheap black jeans and a ratty black T-shirt. So I