Rumble Road (12 page)

“Elijah, she’s not giving us free carrot cake.”

“But she offered it to us,” he says.

So I tell him, “It’s her job to ask us if we want dessert. She’s just doing her job.”

“Now, now, now, now, now, Daddy, she’s giving it to us for free. Trust me on this. You should get a piece of carrot cake from her and give it to me. Get it to go so I can take it with me on the airplane.”

“Elijah,” I tell him, “she’s not giving this to us for free.” But he just keeps insisting until I finally give in and ask for a piece of carrot cake. Lo and behold, what’s on the receipt? Carrot cake.

“But you offered it to me, ma’am,” Elijah insists. The poor waitress tries to explain that after every meal, they ask if you’d like dessert, but he sits there and complains for a half an hour. Half an hour about stupid carrot cake. Half an hour over $4.95. That is what he is complaining about. I paid for my carrot cake just to give it to him, but he didn’t pay for his carrot cake. She gave it to him for free. She actually took it out of her check, just for Elijah Burke.

No Shakes for You

John Morrison

My biggest pet peeve is any time we go anywhere and it’s late, the first thing that all of the fast food places do is turn their shake machines off. And it’s only because they’re lazy. I don’t know what it is—that they don’t want to make the shakes or they don’t want to clean their machines. But it doesn’t matter where you go, whether it’s McDonald’s or Wendy’s or wherever, my favorite cheap meal is a milk shake, and whenever we pull in, I just have this sixth sense of when the shake machine is going to be turned off.

No Translation Necessary

D’Lo Brown

This is back in 1998, when Taka first came to the company. He didn’t speak any English, and he was the only Japanese guy there at the time. So Jim Ross sees me as the responsible one and he tells me, “Hey, we’ve got this kid Taka here, he doesn’t speak any English. For a couple of road trips, can you take him on the road with you? Since he can’t speak English, he can’t read road signs, so we don’t want him to drive.” So Taka, the whole time, all he would say to me was, “Thank you, D’Losan . . . okay, okay.” That’s all the English he knew.

So we were doing a show in West Virginia one night and we flew into Columbus. It’s about a four-hour drive to Huntington, and after the show, we’re driving back to Columbus in the middle of the night. The highway we’re riding on is this desolate, two-lane highway, and about halfway through, we see this oasis of two gas stations, a McDonald’s, and a Burger King. In the car it was me, The Rock, Mark Henry, Grandmaster Sexay, and Taka, and Taka was sleeping in the back. I’m driving along and I’m like, “Guys, what do you want to eat?” Everyone chimes in, but Taka’s still sleeping. Mind you, it’s about two o’clock in the morning at this point, so I start yelling, “Taka, what do you want to eat?” Taka shakes his head, looks up, and says, “McDonald’s or Burger King, it doesn’t really matter to me.” Taka then closes his eyes like he’s about to go back to sleep, then he realizes that he just spoke in perfect English. He sits up and says, “Ah, D’Losan, McDonald’s or Burger King . . . okay, okay.” He knew how to speak English the whole time but he was just pretending not to know English. He even tried to go back to his Pidgin English, but I told him, “You let the genie out of the bottle now.” All he could say was, “Oh, I’m sorry. My boss told me to keep it a secret that I know English.” We all got on him after that and gave him the keys. Here we were chauffeuring him, now it was his turn to drive. All this time, we’ve been trying to help him around, and you’ve got Rocky talking to him like he’s a five-year-old kid, and the whole time, the guy speaks better English than Mark Henry.

Nose Plugs, Please

Maria

Natalya and Eve love to eat corn nuts, and I hate the smell of them. I’ll be sitting in the car trying to plug my nose. The smell of corn nuts is gross. I remember one night in Tampa, I was traveling with Layla and there was nothing open, so we stop at a gas station, and as they’re stocking up on corn nuts, I buy three packs of tuna and a bottle of mayonnaise. This store had a hot dog stand, so I took some relish and onions and I stirred it into my tuna in this big to-go cup, and I ended up eating it with crackers. It didn’t make me sick or anything, but it sure did smell bad in the car. Not corn nut bad, but it was bad.

The Shakes

Chavo Guerrero

Late-night food is awful. The Waffle House is open 24/7, so a lot of times that’s all you can eat. I’ve done it before where I had Waffle House at three in the morning and I ate a chicken breast that wasn’t totally cooked, so I had them cook it more. The very next day I was sick to my stomach. I remember I was in Florida at the time, and the sickness started to really kick in. I couldn’t even wrestle that day it got so bad. I was just sitting there shaking. Billy Kidman actually had to drive me to a hotel by the airport, and I couldn’t even get out of the car without help. I was sitting in my room, and my back just started really tightening up. I don’t know if it was because of cramps or what, but my back was really tight. I was freezing cold, I’m throwing up, and now even though I’m freezing, I had to put ice on my back because it was so tight I couldn’t even lie down. It was a horrible night, and that’s happened to me a few times. When you’re on the road, it’s not just about finding something to eat . . . it’s about making sure it doesn’t come back to get you.

And when it comes to eating, we got bad habits all over the place. We all come from different walks of life, so what works in one place might not work in another. We have people who like to eat with their mouths open and smacking their food. We have people farting all over the place. A guy like Big Show will stink out the bus until finally we’re all yelling at him to stop farting or we’ll all kick his butt. That’s what it takes, because not one of us could kick his butt by ourselves, but if there are ten of us, we could do it.

Miller Time

IRS

One night we had a show at the Boston Garden, and during the show, the Iron Sheik had asked me if he could catch a ride with me back to Hartford so he could make it to the airport. But he was in a match that was on a little bit later than mine, so I told him I’d give him a ride, but we needed to leave before the show was over. So he has his match, then he just grabs his bag and walks out with me still in his wrestling gear, with his curled-up boots. It’s a Sunday in Boston, and you can’t buy beer on Sunday in Massachusetts, but Sheik says, “No, no, Mike Baba, I know this guy across the street from the Boston Garden.” So we pull up to what looks like a bar—it had these big bay windows that you could see through—and Sheik goes in the bar and I see his hands moving and they’re talking back and forth as Sheik tries to convince the guy to sell him some beer.

This went on for like fifteen minutes before Sheik finally convinced the guy to sell him some beer. But sure enough, this took so long that here comes everyone out of the Boston Garden, and as people leave the building, they all see Sheik inside the bar in his wrestling gear. So they all start banging on the windows and they’re yelling, “That’s the Iron Sheik.” Meanwhile, I’m still in the car and I’m trying to scoot down as far as I can in my seat so no one will recognize me. Then finally, the Sheik comes out and gets into the car with a bag of beer, but now the fans all turn their attention to our car. They’re pounding our windows and shaking our car from side to side. I thought, “Well, this is the end of my life.” We had a pretty good mob surrounding our car to the point where we couldn’t even drive along the street. I actually had to jump the car onto the sidewalk just to maneuver around to a spot where we could get back on the road where traffic was moving and get on the highway. Both of us, our hearts were racing. It’s pretty scary when you have that many people out there shaking your car and pounding on your windows. Finally, we’re on the highway, and Sheik opens up a beer and says, “Oh well, at least the beer tastes good.”

Instant Karma

Kofi Kingston

One night I was traveling with Cryme Tyme, and we were driving to D.C., and we stopped at a Roy Rogers because it was open twenty-four hours. I get in line, JTG gets in line, and we’re trying to meander our way around. Then Shad cuts in front of us . . . but this is karma at its best. Shad is looking at the food, and they didn’t have any chicken. So here is big Shad, a 6'8", 285-pound guy, and he asks this lady if they have any chicken, and she totally punks him out. She was like, “Does it look like we have chicken? Don’t you think if we had chicken it would be out there with all of the rest of the food?” It was just hilarious to see Shad get punked out by some lady with a hairnet. Shad just couldn’t say anything. He was speechless. But that was karma. Had he not cut us in line, then it would’ve been one of us asking about the chicken and getting yelled at by the hairnet lady.

Almond Joy

Dolph Ziggler

My one guilty pleasure on the road is eating almonds. Almonds are pretty healthy for you, so I justify it by getting the chocolate-covered almonds and going low carb all day, then every once in a while waking up with an empty bag next to me.

I Don’t Like Mustard

Matt Hardy

Life on the road is definitely challenging. First and foremost, when you’ve been doing this for a while and you start to get your body beat up, it turns into a full-time job just keeping your body together. Here, your body is your business. Your body is your product. People always ask me when I go to the gym. My response is, “Whenever I can.” If you work for WWE, even the people who look like they don’t go to the gym, they go to the gym. If you wrestle on a full-time basis, you go to the gym. You just have to. If you don’t, your ligaments and tendons are just going to fall apart. It takes a very special animal to do what we do.

That being said, you won’t survive in this business for any amount of years unless you truly have the passion of loving the sport, and I do, and I know Jeff does as well. You have to look at what we do and see what it does to your body, and you have to realize that later in life, this is going to influence my health. This is going to affect my health. And I truly accept this. My motto is this: You only live one time, and I would rather have some aches and pains while living an amazing seventy-five years, than living a dull eighty-five years.

I’m thirty-four right now, and I promise you, I’ve lived a life gazillions of people wish they lived. I couldn’t begin to tell you how great my life has been. Not only living my dream day after day, but this has also been very financially rewarding. And beyond even that, it’s just nice to wake up every morning and know that I’m doing what I love.

To think that any week, I could be getting off a plane and be in any country in the world, that’s still amazing to me. It’s mind-blowing to me. And part of the reason why it’s so amazing goes hand in hand with another one of my mottoes: It’s not necessarily where you’re at, it’s who you’re with. If I’m with my brother or if I’m with some good friends, then we’ll make a good time out of a 370-mile drive. We’ll plug in the iPod, we’ll have some Kings of Leon playing, we’ll stop to eat a couple of times, tell some stories, joke around, and have a good time.

I’m trying to retrain myself, though, because I’m in a real bad habit of going to bed at four or five in the morning and waking up around eleven. That’s just how my schedule is now. Even when I’m home, I have about four other business projects I’m working on. So during the day, I’m training or doing work. But when it gets to be around one in the morning, that’s what I love because that’s my alone time. My favorite thing to do at home is to sit back around two or three in the morning in my hot tub, maybe have a cocktail like a vodka cranberry, and just relax. I live on 140 acres, and there are no neighbors nearby. That’s when I can see a sky full of stars and just relax. To me, that’s the ultimate form of relaxation. And when I’m having a tough time on the road, all I have to do is think ahead to the next time I’ll be home sitting back in the hot tub, looking at those stars.

But that’s not the only thing I miss about home. There is this place about ten minutes away from my house called the Checkered Flag. It’s a truck stop that stays open twenty-four hours. It’s a real hole in the wall, mom-and-pop–type joint, but they have the most amazing hamburgers, cheeseburgers, and hot dogs you can ever eat. There will be nights when we’re all hanging out at like four in the morning, and we’ll call our buddy to come pick us up and take us to the truck stop. I’ll get my cheeseburger with no mustard. I don’t like mustard. That was a Matt Fact that people liked a lot, that I dislike mustard—but anyway, I get mine without mustard and Jeff gets his all the way, and we sit back in this truck stop and we’ll eat cheeseburgers and fries. That’s truly our guilty pleasure. We talk about it all the time when we’re on the road. We’ll be sitting in a hotel in Texas or California or wherever, and one of us will say, “Man, nothing would beat a truck stop cheeseburger right about now.”