Undisputed_ How to Become the World Champion in 1,372 Easy Steps - Chris Jericho [9]
He just fell asleep.
My first official Raw match was against The Rock. Even though it was only a few months after one of the biggest debuts in WWE history, I’d lost so much steam in the eyes of the office at that point that our monumental first match was aired for free and Rock beat me clean. Our feud was being blown off before it ever started, which was peculiar for two reasons: (1) the match had been built from my first night in, and (2) I was the one with a bodyguard, which gave him an out if he lost, so why would he go over clean?
Jim Ross said before the match, “We’ve got Jericho vs. The Rock next, this should be a classic!” Good ol’ JR doesn’t say anything he doesn’t mean, but despite his lofty expectations our match ended up being about as classic as the Gary Cherone Van Halen lineup. Rocky is one of my favorite opponents ever and we ended up having great chemistry, but in our first match together that chemistry was zilch, zippo, nada, bupkus (Thesaurus Author’s Note: Insert other word of your choice for nonexistent here).
One of the biggest problems was that I still hadn’t learned how to be a WWE-style heel, which required a serious, strong beatdown of the babyface during the heat, followed by quick bumping and feeding for said babyface during the comeback. In WCW, you would just take a bump, stay down, and sell it. But in the WWE you had to jump up and down as fast as you could in order to constantly sell for the babyface. I didn’t know that yet and looked lazy and slow throughout the match, and I could tell Rock was wondering what the hell I was doing.
Ugh. Nobody told me there’d be days like these …
The match had no flow and was totally scatterbrained. I was trying too hard instead of just letting my basic skills and instinct shine through. I had morphed back into 1996 Jericho during my first WCW match against Mr. JL. I was choppy and a complete klutz, like I’d been possessed by the spirit of Matt (not Mick) Foley and had moved into a van down by the river.
But the worst was yet to come.
When Rock threw me over the barrier and into the crowd, I spotted a soda cup on the floor and decided it would be cool to throw it into his face. So I did. Except the liquid in the cup wasn’t Sprite—it was spit.
I had thrown someone’s tobacco dip cup into the face of the biggest star in the WWE.
I was mortified. Rocky was disgusted. Hughes was sleeping.
Up to that point, Rocky had been one of the only guys in the company who was good to me, and I had disrespected him with a pure rookie mistake, on live television no less.
Even though I apologized a thousand times, he had every right to tear into me, but he never did. I think he felt bad for me because when he first started in the company he was in a situation similar to mine: a guy who was brought in to be a star but wasn’t up for it at first and everybody hated him as a result.
But he certainly wasn’t happy about being doused in winter mint saliva, and he must have showered for forty-five minutes that night.
After I had given Rock a worse facial than Erik Everhard ever could, I just wanted the match to end, and mercifully it soon did. Hughes slid a chair into the ring, but before I could use it, Rocky turned the tables and gave me his patented Rock Bottom on it. However Hughes was tired, and instead of sliding the chair into the ring with the smooth side up, Sleepy slid the chair in upside down. So when Rocky slammed me onto its raised metal edges it almost killed me—but not as badly as the match itself did.
After Rock covered me for the win, I woke Hughes up and we skulked to the back, both of us knowing that we’d just stunk up the joint. On the way to the sanctuary of the dressing room, Jeff Jarrett and Road Dogg asked me, “So how did it go?”—which is wrestler code for, “I saw your match and it sucked bagski.”
A few days later I started hearing