Undisputed_ How to Become the World Champion in 1,372 Easy Steps - Chris Jericho [88]
I finally got into bed at 6 a.m., and when the 7 a.m. wake-up call arrived, I closed my eyes to get that crucial one extra minute of sleep. The phone rang again and I hopped out of bed in a panic when I saw that it was now 8 a.m. My heart nipped up when I remembered the bus was supposed to leave at 7:45.
Pat was gonna be pissed!
I woke up, and made the bus in seconds flat—where Pat was standing furiously with his arms crossed. After my grandiose promise to him the night before, the only person late for the bus was me.
* * *
A week after the Asian tour, it was time for WrestleMania. On the final Raw before the big show, I finally got the upper hand on HHH by attacking him with his own sledgehammer and putting him in the Walls on the announce table, the same way I had the night he tore his quad. Vince came to me after the show and said, “How does it feel to finally have some heat?”
The way I’d been booked over the past month, it was amazing I had any at all.
For the week before the show, the entire city of Toronto was abuzz with anticipation. The WWE was on the cover of the Toronto Sun for a week straight, I was on the cover of the Canadian TV Guide for the second time, and every news channel and talk show had us on as guests.
The biggest of the shows was Off the Record, the same program where Moongoose McQueen had batttled Pink years earlier.
In the week leading up to WrestleMania, OTR had a WWE Superstar as the sole guest each night for the entire thirty minutes. First up was HHH. I was watching the interview, and when host Michael Landsberg asked him what he thought of his opponent for Mania, I couldn’t believe his response.
“Jericho can be as good as he wants to be but he’s missing something. I don’t know what that something is, but it’s keeping him from being what he could be.”
He was basically telling everybody that I wasn’t living up to my potential. The first rule I learned about interviews from Bulldog Bob Brown in Calgary was you always put over your opponent. That way if you win, you’ve really beat somebody. It didn’t matter if he thought I was missing something, I was the Undisputed World Champion! I felt that it wasn’t the best way to sell the huge match coming up in only a few days, and it annoyed me.
Jericho vs. HHH was technically the main event of WrestleMania X8, in that we went on last, but in reality the main event was Hogan vs. The Rock. Their images were on all of the posters, T-shirts, newspapers, and promotional materials, and that’s the way it should have been.
Very froot to see my name at the top of the WrestleMania card as champion. How many guys can say they were in the final match at a WrestleMania? It’s also interesting that you can pretty much count on one hand the performers on this show who are still in the WWE today.
I felt that Hogan and Rock would be impossible to follow, but Vince decided that the title match should go on last, which meant we had our work cut out for us.
Hogan and Rock put on an epic match and the fans lapped up everything they did. It wasn’t the greatest of matches technically, but with the ridiculous crowd reactions it was one of the best matches of the year. As I watched it I knew we were in trouble. I hoped that maybe my Canadian brethren would save some energy for me and help rescue us, but they didn’t.
Before we went to the ring HHH said, “Now it’s time to give them something completely different than Hogan and Rock. This is going to be a wrestling match.”
And that’s what we gave them. By no means was it a bad match, but after Hogan and Rock the crowd was mentally done. In the end, HHH pinned me with a Pedigree and we had a new Undisputed World Champion. The crowd reacted, but they were clearly tired and it was kind of an anticlimatic finish to the biggest show of the year.
But no matter the result, the bottom line was I had been in the official main event of WrestleMania, and only seventeen