Hitman My Real Life in the Cartoon World (64 page)

Meanwhile, Jim missed several shots after Christmas and got himself fired again. It was too bad, because Vince had been going to put the Tag belts on him and Owen, and Owen would have been the perfect babysitter. It didn’t help when Ellie dug him a deeper hole by calling J.J. Dillon and Vince’s secretaries to plead for Jim’s job; when it was to no avail, she cursed them all out.

Davey was also faltering in the face of a serious drug problem. One minute he’d be talking to me and the next minute he’d completely zone out. He was also distraught because his mother was dying of stomach cancer back in England; while riding with me he took so many Somas, a potent and popular muscle relaxant and pain reliever, that he turned into a trembling zombie, slurring over and over,

“I’ve got problems.”

Since taking the belt, Diesel had proven he didn’t have enough experience to have a good match with Backlund. To the serious fans he’d had a short climb to the top and it was damn near impossible for him to get anything close to sympathy, being a giant bad-ass trucker. But after I got back in January, Kevin seemed less interested in advice from me and I began to notice how Shawn, Razor and Kid cozied up to him as if he were a prized Great Dane. They were all trying to sniff his ass; I’d had mine sniffed enough to know. Kevin was soon resented by some of the other wrestlers because he wasn’t a champion for all of us, but only for his little band of buddies.

On January 22, 1995, we had a title match at the Royal Rumble. Vince was worried that his new superstar could end up a total heel, which would be bad for business. My fans wanted me to get the belt back, and I assured Kevin that the only way to go was to let me be the aggressor, yet keep him strong. After a solid back-and-forth battle, with all kinds of outside interference from Owen, Shawn, Backlund, Jarrett and The Roadie, the match finally ended in a disqualification. Afterwards, Kevin shook my hand and thanked me for giving him his first decent match as champion. He didn’t seem to understand that all I would have had to do to turn him heel was to have started selling dramatically; but I didn’t operate like that.

Shawn won the battle royal, which set up his main event spot facing Diesel at WrestleMania XI. But NFL all-star defensive linebacker Lawrence Taylor was sitting in the front row and ended up stealing the show right out from under Shawn and Diesel when he got pie-faced by an irate Bam Bam Bigelow.

Just like with Yoko, Diesel’s head got very big, very fast on the promises Vince fed him to make him feel important and the big checks, the perks and the almighty spotlight. But Kevin was also finding out that being champion was a lot of hard work. Just like me, he’d believed Vince when he was told that he’d be champion for a long time. But Diesel wasn’t drawing, and it agitated him that the hype leading up to WrestleMania XI was focused not on him but on a match between Bam Bam and Lawrence Taylor.

At a press conference in San Francisco, Shawn and Diesel openly sat together in front of the fans and the media: a complete and utter disrespect for kayfabe from the champion and his opponent. Even though by then some fans—the so-called smart marks—were starting to understand pro wrestling was a work, not to kayfabe was an intentional affront to old-school ways and an insult to the other wrestlers. It was bad for the business and I couldn’t have been more disappointed in them both.

A tenacious WCW was adding more pay-per-views. Vince had exclusivity deals with many of the cable conglomerates that aired the WWF, similar to the deals that kept anyone else from running wrestling in “his” buildings. To maintain control of the cable outlets and hold on to the pay-per-view industry that he, in large part, helped create in the first place, Vince soon promised to deliver a pay-per-view every month. What started out as the annual WrestleMania extravaganza each spring had already grown to five major shows a year with the addition of King of the Ring in June, SummerSlam in August, Survivor Series in November and Royal Rumble in January. Now, for every month that there wasn’t an already established pay-per-view, we were going to do a new series called In Your House. WrestleMania would still be the biggest show of the year, with the original big four feeding it and the In Your House pay-per-views keeping the storylines going. The danger was that with so many pay-per-views between the two promotions, the market would become saturated and the big shows would become nothing special. Not to mention that it was getting too expensive for the casual fan, who, as a result, would be forced to choose between WWF or WCW.

In Your House was scheduled to debut in May, and Vince would need his depleted, burned-out crew of wrestlers to dig a little deeper to help him turn the tide against WCW. Color announcer Jim Ross had just become Vince’s right-hand man in the booking department, with Pat staying close to Florida now. For the first one, they booked Hakushi to work with me, but Vince also wanted me to work on the same show against Lawler and put him over in order to build for a huge rematch at King of the Ring.

On April 2 I flew down to Hartford for WrestleMania XI with Dallas and Blade. I was dreading my match with Bob because I knew Vince’s idea that the two of us would use only submission holds in the match was guaranteed to stink the building out.

When I marched out to face Bob I got a huge pop, but from the moment the bell rang the match went downhill. Roddy Piper was the guest referee and kept sticking a live mic in our faces, asking,

“What do ya say?” which only sounded comical and made the crowd laugh. I cringed, thinking nobody laughs during my matches unless I want them to! As hard as Bob and I tried, the match deteriorated into a farce. Finally Bob went for his chicken wing, and I slipped under and reversed it, hooking his hold on him, falling backward to the mat. Bob was finding out, as I had, that the hold hurt like hell, so bad that as Roddy stuck the mic in Bob’s face and asked, “Do you give?” Bob could only manage to scream, “Yes!” Bob was specifically supposed to say “I quit,” but with the painful hold cutting off his air, Roddy finally had no choice but to ring the bell and declare me the winner.

This was, without a doubt, my worst pay-per-view match ever.

Diesel had a good match with Shawn, in which they both worked hard, but Shawn went out of his way to outshine the champion, reminding me of a Bugs Bunny cartoon in which Bugs outsmarted a ferocious, but clueless, bull. When Shawn gave Diesel his superkick finish and covered him, Earl Hebner twisted his ankle as planned, and after an eternity he finally crawled over to make the count.

When Diesel kicked out to boos, I immediately knew that Shawn had played him. Diesel would, in fact, beat Shawn moments later, but it wouldn’t be enough to build Diesel up for their return match at the In Your House pay-per-view coming up in June. All anyone would remember about Diesel’s championship match at WrestleMania was Shawn Michaels, which was, clearly, what Shawn intended all along. In the ensuing panic in the dressing room, all plans were scrubbed, and Shawn was turned babyface the following night on -Raw.

As for the main event, Lawrence Taylor put in a damn good effort, considering how inexperienced he was. Bam Bam worked his ass off carrying L.T. through the match and put him over with an elbow smash off the second rope, the saving grace in what was the worst WWF pay-per-view I could remember.

Shawn’s sudden face change threw a monkey wrench into everything. I saw right away that he was my direct competition now. I had been around for eleven years, five straight as a babyface; some of the fans were looking for a new star, and clearly it was going to be Shawn. He wasn’t tough enough to pretend to be Bret Hart. There’s no denying that he was a great talent, but a great worker has to be able to wrestle everyone, and Shawn was only capable of carrying the opponents that suited him.

He had the girls screaming for him when he did silly Flair spots, like having his opponent pull his trunks down to his ankles during a sunset flip, but most of the men in the audience hated him for being too much of a cutie boy.

After TVs on April 5 I stood off on the side of the road with Dallas and Blade on a dark star-lit night arcing our piss in three varied heights. As the moon peaked out between clouds I felt proud as I wondered how many other wrestling dads over the years had enjoyed this same kind of moment with their sons.

Bang. On April 21, I was in Germany again. There was a lot of negative talk among the boys about Diesel, Shawn, Razor and their rather obvious clique. Most of the wrestlers were finding Shawn’s attitude hard to take and were relieved that he wasn’t on the tour. The boys were always the first to feel a slide in business, and many of them let me know that they were much happier with their payoffs when I was champion. It reminded me of how I felt when Warrior took the belt from Hogan.

I sat with Davey, Lex and Jeff Jarrett at the Sugar Shack in Munich. I may have been a toppled king, but I was still tearing the house down every night, especially in Europe.

Davey had cut his hair and now sported a flat-top that gave him a fresh, chiseled look, and he was enthusiastic about the possibility of forming a new tag team with Lex. I enjoyed reminiscing with him about our old Stampede days and soon had him laughing about the time Jim stuck fish eyes in the pockets of Davey’s pants. I was happy to see him laugh, and I kept giving him little jabs in the ribs every time he tried to order. He’d been laughing so hard, with those big dimples showing, that he was never able to get his order in. He told me he hoped to work with me again and that he was thinking of turning heel just so he could challenge me. “Fookin’ clique’s trying to take over now,” he said. “Fookin’ Shawn is barely two hundred pounds sopping wet.”

“Shawn’s a decent guy, but he’s got his little hang-ups,” I replied. “Unfortunately, one of them is being an asshole.”

I celebrated the safe end of another tour at Cookies in Frankfurt and thought about how I could blow them away at In Your House by working two totally different matches with Hakushi and Lawler.

Diesel was wrestling Sycho Sid as a carry over from WrestleMania XI, and I doubted they could top me. What Sid Eudy lacked as a worker he made up for as a great-looking specimen; he was well muscled at six-foot-nine, with a big square jaw and curly blond hair. Owen and Yoko were going to win the Tag belts at In Your House, which would help now that Owen and Martha were expecting their second child in October. Owen and I had no idea if or when we would ever work together again, and I kidded him, “Don’t worry, we’ll do the dance of death somewhere down the line.”

Our match wasn’t expected to mean much as Hakushi and I opened that first In Your House, on May 14, 1995, in Syracuse, but we completely blew them away with unexpected aerial moves that’d only been seen in Japan. Then I rolled him up tighter than a sushi roll for the pinfall.

Diesel and Sid delivered the kind of sub-par match that was to be expected.

My second match, with Lawler, had a ton of heat, especially when Hakushi interfered by helping Lawler steal a pinfall on me. At the end of the night, Vince told me that my matches saved the show.

Kevin was irritable and gave me a look as though he wanted to kick that gold belt across the dressing-room floor to me.

Over the next few weeks I watched Sid and Diesel struggle to carry the main event while I cruised through matches with Hakushi. Meanwhile, Lawler and I were building heat for a rematch at King of the Ring, for which I’d obliged Lawler by letting him come up with any kind of match he wanted.

I got Chris Benoit a tryout at TV in Johnstown, Pennsylvania, on June 7, working with Owen. They put on a wrestling clinic that would have impressed any wrestler anywhere. There was another new arrival from WCW, Paul Levesque, a hook-nosed bodybuilder who came out of Killer Kowalski’s wrestling school. He was a decent worker who was quick to cozy up to his old pal Kevin Nash.

That night, I drove to Pittsburgh with Owen and Benoit. I could tell by the way Owen talked about the baby coming that he relished having a second child. Benoit looked really happy for him, and I realized then that these two were close. Like Owen, Chris was a notorious ribber, and I enjoyed hearing of their old antics when they were in Calgary and Japan together. I thought for sure Benoit would be hired, but both Pat and Jim Ross passed on him for reasons that nobody in their right mind could ever understand, especially considering that Vince was so low on talent.

There was the usual fired-up Philly crowd for King of the Ring on June 25, a growing number of whom were becoming hard-core ECW supporters, largely because the promotion was based there.

The match of Lawler’s choosing turned out to be a “kiss my foot” match. The silliness of it ended up being just what this crowd was looking to sink their teeth into. Lawler and I delivered another intense brawl, which ultimately ended with me propped up on the top corner, plucking my laces, pulling off my boot, and cramming my toes into Jerry’s mouth. I even crunched Jerry up like an accordion and stuck his own toes into his mouth.

Diesel injured his elbow, which was a real no-no for the champion, because everything was built around him and now he couldn’t work. Payoffs were down, morale too.

On that flight home I finally found time to study my lines for my first episode of the new season of Lonesome Dove. I’d done two shows as mountain man Luther Root and was now written in as a semi-regular character. I saw Lonesome Dove as a sabbatical from wrestling. I’d still wrestle weekends, but I’d finally have more time at home, where I celebrated my thirty-eighth birthday and my thirteenth wedding anniversary. I spent time with my kids riding hard around the bike paths of Calgary to keep up my cardio conditioning and the elasticity in my knees. My world was spinning as fast as the blurred spokes of my wheels. Blade rode in front of me, and I had to admire him when he said, “Don’t worry about me, man. I’m a happy little kid!” So was I.

Shawn was now the Intercontinental champ. While I’d been home, the clique had managed to maneuver themselves into all the top spots, and it wasn’t sitting well with the boys in the dressing room.

I showed up for Raw in Louisville, Kentucky, on July 24, where I was booked against Hakushi again. I liked him enough to have established him as a serious heel, but, unfortunately, because of his kindly nature, everyone who had worked with him since had made a point of eating him up. He seemed relieved to see me and got real serious when I explained that we’d just have to go out and show them all over again. I put together a match filled with all the aerial moves we thought were too risky to do at our In Your House match. Midway through it, I was on the floor when Hakushi hit the far ropes and did a cartwheel, a handspring and then back-somersaulted over the top rope, spinning right on top of me in what Dave Meltzer aptly described as the first space flying tiger drop ever seen in the United States. With one kick out after another, we tore the house down until I suplexed him standing off the top and twisted him in the sharpshooter. The Louisville Gardens came unglued.