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“Tonight was very good for business. If you ever want to work for my company, give me a call.”

Only in Japan could you sucker-punch the CEO of a company and have him offer you a job.

Taking Flair’s words to heart both in the ring and out, I sure as hell acted like an old-school World Champion during that tour. I had three consecutive five-star matches against Rocky in three different countries, combined with three consecutive five-star nights of drinking on about three hours total sleep. I learned that another important duty of a champion was to be the last man standing at the bar—and there were shortcuts to achieve that.

One of my favorites was to buy trays of shots for whoever was out that night. When everyone toasted and drank, I simply tossed every third shot over my shoulder. Or poured it into a nearby flowerpot. Or flicked it onto the floor.

At the end of the night, the ground underneath my feet was wet and sticky from all the alcohol I hadn’t drank, but when 6 a.m. rolled around and everybody was plastered, I was still standing—totally loadski, mind you, but still standing.

Hey, I was the champion and I couldn’t pass out—I had responsibilities, dammit!

Another of my favorites was to challenge random fans to whiskey-gargling contests. Whenever we went out to a bar, there were always people around who wanted to hang out and be one of the boys. These fans were usually filled with liquid courage and bravado and would always agree to have a Jack Daniel’s gargling contest with me.

What the poor fans didn’t know was that Curt Hennig taught me how to gargle Jack years earlier, but more important, Flair taught me how not to gargle Jack years earlier.

I would let the fan go first and he would dump the shot glass into his open mouth and proceed to gargle it back and forth for a respectable forty-five seconds or so. Now, as I explained in my wildly popular first book, A Lion’s Tale (available … well, you know the drill), gargling alcohol isn’t as easy as it sounds. Imagine swishing yellow Listerine around in your mouth for thirty seconds and then swallowing it. Now multiply that by a hundred and you get a small sense of what I’m talking about.

The fan would painfully swallow the aptly named fire water and look at me expectantly. I would then toss the hooch into my mouth, facing the fan with my left side, and begin to gargle. What the fan couldn’t see was me slowly dribbling the sweet amber out of the right side of my mouth, effectively spitting it out. By the time I reached my record-setting three minutes and thirty-nine seconds, I was gargling nothing but fumes, and even that was enough to almost make me bap when I swallowed my saliva. The poor fanboy never knew what hit him or why he was so much drunker than me, but suffice it to say that most of my foes were carried out of the club an inebriated mess. Once again, I had responsibilities, remember?

Another one of those responsibilites was to try and be the most entertaining performer on the show, which wasn’t easy when working with The Rock. After another great twenty-minute match in Singapore, we followed up with another twenty minutes of improv comedy. Pat was the agent for the tour and it drove him crazy when we spent so much time in the ring after the match.

“What are you dooooing? You’re spending so much time in da fucking ring after da match dat nobody remembers how good da match was!!”

Rock and I respected Pat more than anyone in the company, but we knew this was probably the only time Rocky was going to be wrestling in these countries. The Asian fans wanted to see the most electrifying man in sports entertainment, and that’s what they were going to get.

In Singapore, we reviewed Scorpion King and plugged its opening in April. We called each other names, got into a mock argument, and then made up. Then I went to shake Rock’s hand, he gave me a Rock Bottom, and that was it for me.

I’m wearing a scarf here in Singapore because it’s my theory that if you wear one, you’ll NEVER catch a cold. Ever. It really works … try it! (The cut on my