Hitman My Real Life in the Cartoon World (70 page)

I felt badly, but I had to keep Eric hanging until my deal with Vince was done. Eric was making every concession he could think of, including offering to have both Flair and Hogan call me to tell me themselves that they had no hard feelings about some less than complimentary things I’d said about them in past interviews, and that I’d be welcomed aboard. Even Hall and Nash agreed to waive their favored-nations clause, which had guaranteed that no one in a similar position could be paid more than they were making, just so I could come to WCW.

Vince was already advertising that I’d be doing a live interview on Raw to announce whether I was staying or going. I assumed the whole contract thing would be sorted out in plenty of time, but it wasn’t until the Friday before I was to make my appearance at Raw that I received a very controlling draft contract, which, once again, my lawyer said only an idiot would sign. Since the draft bore no resemblance to the deal Vince and I had shook on, I called him. I could only reach his wife, Linda, who was now president of operations, so I had no choice but to tell her that all bets were off and that I would not appear unless my contract was worked out. Before I could tear up Bischoff’s lottery ticket, I simply had to have my deal with Vince inked and dry. Carlo believed that Bret Hart going to WCW at that precise moment could devastate the WWF and pressed Vince to finalize my deal. Then Vince’s office called to tell me that his legal department had accidentally sent me the wrong contract: This was the third time over the years that I’d been given this same lame excuse.

When I flew into Fort Wayne for Raw I had the WCW contract folded up in the back pocket of my jeans. I still didn’t have a signed WWF contract, but my appearance on the live show had been heavily hyped in an all-out effort to finally beat Nitro in the ratings. One lesson I had learned in my twelve years in the WWF was that Vince stripped you bare when he was through with you, using up all or most of what you had left, including your name and persona. Carlo, believing my departure would be a disaster for the organization he worked for, helped me put together a contract that wrested more control away from Vince and gave me more protection than any wrestler had ever had before, though officially it was my lawyer, Gord, and my accountant, John Gibson, who handled the whole thing. The contract provided me with all the usual perks and also two ground-breaking concessions. The first was that if I was injured on my way to a show or in a match so that I couldn’t wrestle, I’d be fully compensated for all my wages. The second allowed me creative control for my last thirty days if for any reason I was ever to leave the WWF. In short, this meant that my character didn’t have to do anything I didn’t want him to do, which would keep Vince from devaluing my stock on my way out. I liked hearing Carlo repeat over and over, “They can never, ever fuck you now.”

I stayed in my hotel room until one hour before the show. Backstage I was whisked away to a room where copies of my contract were laid out on a long table. Carlo even had fancy pens on hand to commemorate the occasion. Vince seemed anxious as he signed, and when it was all done Carlo clapped and suggested we uncork some champagne after the show.

Within seconds of signing, I ran into Shawn. We spoke briefly as I waited for my cue to go through the curtain. He’d just done a nude spread for Playgirl magazine, which I thought was a dumb move for someone posing as a role model for young boys. I asked him, “Do you mind if I say something about your Playgirl magazine spread?” I wanted to start building our heat right away. He said, “Say whatever you want.”

I marched out to my music wearing jeans, shades and a tight gray T-shirt and was interviewed by Jim Ross in the ring. The first thing I did in this completely unscripted live interview was thank Eric Bischoff for treating me with respect and making me such a great offer. I regretted that I hadn’t had a chance to call him and that Eric was about to find out that I had just resigned with Vince along with the rest of the world. Mind you, I referred to Eric only as an unnamed rival because, to that point, neither organization had uttered the name of the other on their TV shows—but the fans knew exactly who and what I was talking about. (Dave Meltzer had put out such an accurate account of my contract negotiations in the October 14, 1996, Wrestling Observer that I was sure it was all coming from an insider from one or both organizations.) I spoke about not being greedy for money, but being greedy for respect and about how much soul searching I’d done. But when it came right down to it, I owed everything I’d ever done and everything I planned on doing to my WWF fans. “I’ll be in the WWF forever!” I proclaimed. I said I wanted wrestling fans all over the world to have somebody they could look up to, somebody who didn’t dance and pose for girlie books: “Shawn Michaels will never be as tough as me. He’ll never be as smart as me. And that is why I’ve accepted the challenge to face the best wrestler in the WWF, Stone Cold Steve Austin!” For the first time in months, while I was on the air, Vince got the ratings he was looking for.

37

EVERYONE AROUND THE WORLD HATES AMERICANS

WHILE I’D BEEN GONE, Steve Austin had really flourished as a heel. By Survivor Series ’96 on November 17, he’d become such a good heel he was starting to turn babyface—the fans loved him!

This was something he wanted to avoid because his heel run still had plenty of steam. He had such a great look for a heel, with a bald head and menacing eyes that burned a hole through you. He wore simple black trunks with black boots and came across like a real bad-ass son of a bitch. His promos were intense: His Texas talk and ornery look gave him a unique magnetism.

This was a big night for Steve. The week before Survivor Series he flew to Calgary to work out the entire match with me. He was a friend of Shawn’s, and they had been having some great matches together, but standing next to the ring in my pool room Steve confided in me that Shawn wasn’t the right guy to lead the company. I took this as the endorsement it was. In a surprising turn of events, Shawn was going to drop the belt to Sycho Sid at Survivor Series, so he could win it back in his hometown of San Antonio at the Royal Rumble in January. In the middle of all that, I’d be thrown into the main event to work a title match with Sid at the December In Your House. I wasn’t sure how Shawn’s losing the belt and then winning it back again would effect the big rematch that Vince led me to believe we were having at WrestleMania XIII. For now, all I could do was focus on my match with Stone Cold.

At Survivor Series, Steve and I worked fast and hard, and I only got tired near the end. I had no idea that Vince and J.R. were going to great lengths in their live commentary to subtly tear me down.

When I heard it later, I got the first hint of what lay ahead for me. J.R. described me as being slow getting up and attributed it to ring rust. “Bret Hart, with a huge move, can’t execute the cover . . .”

Vince was quick to add, “He just didn’t have it, J.R. He couldn’t capitalize on it!” I?felt that they were going out of their way to portray me as old and beat-up, while I was only doing my best to make Steve look strong while still putting me over. The bout was filled with believable moves in one long, continuous fistfight. We brawled on the floor, leveled the Spanish announcers’ table, broke down a metal barricade and duked it out in the front row! As Stone Cold closed in for the kill, he stalked me from behind, clamping on a cobra clutch. Much like I’d done with Piper at WrestleMania VIII, I jumped up and kicked off using the corner to topple backward, pinning Steve for the one . . . two . . .

three.

When I walked around the ring high-fiving my fans, I was happy when Vince reached out to shake my hand. Still wearing his headset he smiled and with what I took to be the loving eyes of a father, he said, “Unbelievable!”

Later on that night Sid took the title from Shawn using a gimmicked TV camera to bash him while Shawn was distracted when his mentor, Jose Lothario, was supposedly stricken by a heart attack at ringside.

On November 20, Taker, Shawn, Sid and I appeared at a huge press conference in San Antonio. My In Your House title match with Sid was totally downplayed so they could hype Sid’s match with Shawn at Royal Rumble.

The following week, the WWF headed over to England for shows in London and Birmingham, though Vince kept Shawn in the United States as he’d done with Hogan. If anyone wondered whether I was still over, the question was answered when hordes of chanting Hitman fans were there to meet us at Heathrow. Sold-out shows had become a rarity in the United States since I’d been away, but there wasn’t a ticket to be had for the shows in the U.K. A fan explained it this way in a letter to TheWrestling Observer: “No adult male is going to support an obnoxious, blonde, ponytail wearing self-professed sexy boy. No matter how well he does in the ring.”

I was grateful when a lot of the boys came up to me and thanked me for coming back; most of them still called me champ. In London, I worked a good, solid match with Vader. He was considered tough, quick and nearly as agile as Bam Bam Bigelow, but he was also one of the stiffest guys to ever lace up a pair of boots. He’d recently potatoed Shawn so badly that Shawn dressed him down in front of the boys, threatening that if it happened again he’d have his fat ass fired. But you had to be careful with the monsters of the business. They could mop the floor with you any time they wanted, and they were doing a guy my size or Shawn’s a favor when they let us look good by pinning their shoulders to the mat.

Yoko, Fuji, Backlund and M.O.M. were all missing from the dressing room. The 1-2-3 Kid, Roddy Piper and the recently fired J.J. Dillon were all in WCW (no-one was sure why Vince had dumped Dillon). A lot of fresh faces had come in the few months I’d been gone; some I’d only met once or twice. The one who immediately stood out was Dwayne Johnson, pro wrestling’s first third-generation worker.

His grandfather, Peter, a tough Samoan powerhouse, had been a very close friend of Stu’s. I told Dwayne that I remembered him as a little kid running around the dressing room when I worked in Hawaii back in the 1980s. He was shy around me, a nice, bright kid who was still innocent as far as wrestlers went. He was a handsome blend of black and Polynesian, well built and a real athlete; he’d played some CFL with the Calgary Stampeders just a couple of years earlier. Like me, he’d resigned himself to trying his hand in the family business and was anxious to learn. I wanted to see this kid make it, and I told him I’d help him all I could. I watched him in the ring that night, wrestling under the ring name of Rocky Maivia, and I remember coming back to the dressing room and saying to everyone, “Mark my words, three or four years down the road that kid will be the franchise.” He already had the look and the skill. If he learned to talk, he could be great.

Another new face trudging around the dressing room was a frumpy curiosity called Cactus Jack.

Everyone called him Jack, but his name was actually Mick Foley. Vince had just reinvented him as Mankind. He was a big kid from Long Island, New York, with a scruffy beard and bushy, long black hair. He was already a hard-core legend famous for his crazy, violent matches in ECW, WCW and Japan. But I found him to be a friendly guy, well read and intelligent, a far cry from the lunatic character he played so persuasively, complete with straitjacket and Hannibal Lecter mask!

In the dressing room in Birmingham, Mankind stalked me eagerly, waiting to work with me. I hoped he’d tone down all the crazy shit because the last thing I needed at that point was to get hurt. The more we talked, the more I could see that he had the gift of seeing a match unfold in his head like a movie, just like I did. And I was blown away by our match. Mankind took all the risks and bumps, yet he was exceptionally skillful and tight. Most amazingly, he was never stiff. He became not only one of my favorite characters in the business, but one of my favorite people too. Foley was one of only a handful of guys who I thought had a similar imagination for the business as I do. While I’d been off, his pay-per-view matches with Shawn were the ones that finally gave Shawn his opportunity to get over. Mick Foley was a great wrestler, and I was amazed that WCW had lost him.

In West Palm Beach, the night of December 14, 1996, I slid under the sheets hurting so badly that I had no choice but to wash down a couple of pain pills, plug in my heating pad and smear Icy Hot over my knees and back. I was supposed to wrestle Sid in our title bout the next day on In Your House. Wrestling with Jim in the Hart Foundation in the early days, I used to feel like the zippy Porsche to Jim’s armored tank. Now I felt like an old race car with my dings hidden before every match under a coat of fresh paint.

Our match turned out to be surprisingly good. Sid had come to respect me because I helped him when I could. During our match, Shawn sat with Jim Ross at the announcers’ table ranting about his God-given right to live his life as he chose. Apparently the remark I’d made a month earlier about him posing for Playgirl had been eating away at him the whole time. Shawn got involved in the finish by climbing on the ring apron, where we collided, allowing Sid to jackknife powerbomb me to the mat for the win. I furiously jumped out and pulled Shawn’s shirt over his head like we were in a hockey fight and pretended to beat him senseless. It looked fantastic. Sid came back to the dressing room thrilled with how it went, and Shawn seemed nothing but upbeat. But over the next two days of TVs in Florida he was noticeably distant with me. When I told Vince that I was concerned that I was pissing Shawn off, he downplayed it. Still, I asked him to clarify things for both me and Shawn, so we could do this thing right. He wouldn’t listen. Instead of us sorting things out, Shawn went out and did an angry in-ring interview, with me as the target of his rage. I was disappointed to see him lose his babyface composure. I was thinking, Oh, Shawn, don’t do this . . . stay humble . . . I’m only workin’ . . . let me be the heel. I shook my head in utter dismay trying to figure out what was happening between us.

I spent my Christmas holiday aching all over, yet I worked with Leo Burke and a bunch of green local wrestlers he was training at my house in the WWF ring Vince had given me. Over time those young men became Christian, Edge, Glen Kulka, Teddy Hart (Georgia’s son, Ted Annis), Mark Henry, the fake Razor Ramon, Kurrgan, Don Callis, Test and Ken Shamrock, who was the Ultimate Fighting Champion at the time, just to name a few. Despite the tension with Shawn, I was on top of the world, set to regain the title, while being the highest paid WWF wrestler of all time. That Christmas, Julie and the kids had everything, including me.