Undisputed_ How to Become the World Champion in 1,372 Easy Steps - Chris Jericho [81]
He was the Deadman.
I expressed my concerns to The Undertaker, who listened intently before giving me his thoughts.
“The one thing that’s different here is that Vince is the boss. He’s in charge and we all know it. In WCW there were a half dozen bosses, and that made it easy for everyone to get what they wanted. These guys are going to do business and do what they’re told, and if they don’t, they won’t last. I’ll make sure of it.” With that he waved his hand and disappeared in a cloud of smoke.
The master had spoken.
All shall be well and all manner of things shall be well.
D-Day finally arrived, and after three years of amnesty I found myself in the same company as Scott Hall, Kevin Nash, and Hulk Hogan once again. When they showed up on the first day, they of course were all on their very best behavior, especially Hulk. He shook my hand with a smile and reiterated what he’d said to me at Owen Hart’s funeral three years earlier.
“You said you were going to take me with you when you jumped over here.”
“I knew you’d find a way to get here on your own,” I replied with a bigger smile.
Nash attempted to bust my balls right off the bat by commenting on the bright red color I had dyed in the tips of my hair, inspired by Ozzy’s latest coif.
“Nice dye job there, Jericho.”
Not missing a beat, I fired back, “Well, some of us dye our hair red when it’s blond and some of us dye our hair brown when it’s gray.” The truth hurt, and Nash’s sarcastic smile faded like his hair pigment.
Hall was the last to arrive and was all phony smiles and fake hellos, but I could see his true self waiting to emerge like a shark beneath the surface. It didn’t take long for Jaws to attack as only five minutes later he shook Bubba Ray Dudley’s hand and murmured in his deep voice, “I love the 3D. What a great finishing move … can’t wait to kick out of it.”
Hall was full of such witticisms and was always saying things like, “It’s the wrestling business, not the wrestling friendness,” and “It doesn’t say anywhere in my contract that I have to be nice to anybody.” That was his old WCW attitude, but that shit wasn’t going to fly here. The WWE was about making money, not a corporate sandbox where you could drop trou and take a dumpski whenever you felt like it.
Things were different now and I wasn’t intimidated by them like I once was. I wasn’t the same guy I was in WCW. I was the motherfucking champion now.
But how good of one was still to be determined.
Austin was my opponent at the next PPV, No Way Out. Steve and I were pretty much left on our own to think of how to build up the match, and we came up with a few good ideas (including me pummeling him over the head with his own beer cooler) with no input from the boss, which was surprising. But as mediocre as the build was, the match was 316 times worse. Nothing clicked for us at all and my performance was brutal. We’d had decent to good matches in the past, but that night we were like Peanut Butter and Chong. It just didn’t work, and I take full responsibility for it because Steve was a proven great worker and I was the damn champion whose job it was to take control and make a match work no matter who I was up against.
I ended up beating Steve after the NWO interfered, and I disappeared as they continued to beat him down for minutes afterwards. I was a complete afterthought and should’ve been after my dismal performance. Maybe I wasn’t good enough to be the top guy in the WWE after all.
The next day, Paul Heyman told me that I would be losing the title to HHH in the main event of WrestleMania X8 in Toronto. He also told me there were rumblings that certain people were lobbying for Nash to beat me for the title on Raw and go on to face HHH at Wrestle-Mania instead. But to Vince’s credit, he wanted HHH and Jericho, and that’s the way it was going down no matter what anybody said.
Unfortunately, Vince also booked Hogan vs. The Rock for the show. It was wrestling’s version of Mike Tyson vs. Muhammad Ali and by far the most anticipated match on the card—they were the true