Rumble Road (9 page)

We used to get lost all the time, though. It was
Dumb and Dumber
out there on the road. I remember one time with Eddie Guerrero and Dean Malenko, we made a right turn instead of a left and we were supposed to be headed toward Nebraska, when all of a sudden we saw mountains. We ended up in like Oklahoma or Colorado and were all like, “Where the hell are we?” There was this other time when we had a show in Gainesville, Florida, and we ended up in Gainesville, Georgia. Just stupid crap like that would happen because nobody would ever bother checking anything.

But for the most part, Dean Malenko was the best road partner because he was like a human GPS. Sure, we might make the wrong turn before we got to the right city, but once we were there, he would remember everything about every town. “Take a right, then take a left down here, and after the alley you’ll find the McDonald’s.” It didn’t matter if we hadn’t been in the town for two years, he just remembers everything. I always thought that it would’ve been smart to get an address book, and in this address book you put the town, say, Indianapolis. Then under the city name you put the gym you go to, the radio station you listen to, and the hotel you stay at. It would be so easy just to put all of this information together and just have it all in one place, because we go to the same towns over and over again, but you just forget after a while, and you’re forced to find out all over again where you should stay and where you should work out. Every time you come back to the same town, you’re forced to do the same work all over again. Stuff like that would make things a lot easier if I was a lot more organized, but I just wasn’t. Now that there’s GPS, you don’t need to worry about it as much, but even the GPS will throw you off from time to time. Like today, I punched in a tanning place, and instead of calling the number, I just end up driving there, and fifteen minutes later I pull up to a place that doesn’t even exist anymore. If only I was smarter, I would’ve had all that information in my address book.

The Two-Hour Turn

Rey Mysterio

One time I was on the road with Eddie Guerrero, and this was back before GPS, back before you could just punch in the address to your navigation, and I remember we were on the way to a show somewhere around Lubbock, Texas. We got turned around somehow and ended up driving two and a half hours in the wrong direction before we realized we were going the wrong way. When we realized it, we had to turn around and drive as fast as we could in order to still get to the show on time.

Usually when you’re driving, you see the signs: thirty miles to wherever you’re going, then twenty-five miles. But it was just one of those nights where we started talking about something, and the conversation was so good, neither one of us realized we were headed completely in the wrong direction. We just kept driving and talking, talking and driving, and then finally I asked him if he saw a sign to the city. He said no, so we decided to pull over and ask someone. Back then, that was our method of getting directions. So we stopped at a gas station, and they were like, “You guys are about two hundred miles away.” Oh my God, I couldn’t believe it. It was already six o’clock and the show started at eight. We hustled as fast as we could and ended up making it to the show at about eight thirty. We were late, but we were still able to wrestle that night. We didn’t miss the show, even with our bad sense of direction.

The Hangover

William Regal

I live a pretty boring life nowadays, but I didn’t used to. I remember one time when myself, Ric Flair, Arn Anderson, and Bobby Eaton were on a loop from Arizona to Lancaster, California, so we decided to base ourselves in Las Vegas for what turned into a three-day bender. We were pretty wild back then, and basically, while we were in Las Vegas, I hadn’t been to bed for three days. But on Monday, we needed to be in Lancaster, and it was Arn Anderson’s idea for us to rent a car and drive from Vegas rather than flying to Los Angeles and driving to Lancaster from there. But as we go to the rental car agency, there were hardly any cars to be had, so we ended up settling for the most ridiculously small car you’ve ever seen. Ric Flair was absolutely horrified by even the look of this tiny car, as he was used to riding everywhere in limousines. But here we were, the four of us crammed into this small car, all of us hung over and in need of some food before we get out of Las Vegas.

So we pull over to a Subway to get a sandwich, and while we’re in there, let me just say that for the two weeks leading up to this moment, Ric Flair had been—I won’t say bragging, but let’s just say he’d been
overemphasizing
to all the boys that he had just opened up a new gym in St. Martin in the Caribbean. So we’re inside this Subway, and Flair had just walked out and gotten into the car because he had decided he was going to drive us to Lancaster. But while I’m waiting for my sandwich, I hear on the radio inside the store that a huge hurricane had just ripped through St. Martin and wiped out the whole island. So I get back into the car and sit in the back, and I waited until we were about five miles outside of Vegas until I decided to tell him. “I just heard on the radio how a big hurricane just blew through St. Martin and is blowing everything away.” Ric looked up at me through the rearview mirror and just went, “Oh no, brother.” The look on his face, I just started laughing.

Now some people, when they get nervous they smash things up, but to me, I get lost in these giggle fits where I just can’t stop laughing. I actually end up making myself ill from laughing so much. So I started laughing so much that Bobby Eaton started laughing, and there are bits of Subway coming down my nose by this point, and Arn Anderson sees this, so he started laughing. Flair had just spent over one hundred thousand dollars on gym equipment, and it all just blew away.

So we’re driving farther and farther into the desert, and every once in a while I just break out laughing again, and that gets everyone else laughing except for Flair. He’s absolutely out of his mind now as he just can’t find the funny side to this, but we were all hung over driving through the middle of the desert, just driving and driving, when he says to me, “Get the map out. Are you sure we’re going the right way?” So I took the map out, and I just read the map the way I saw it. He asked me where we were, and I said, “We’re in the Mo-Jo Desert.” He was like, “You stupid bastard, it’s the Mojave Desert.”

He then proceeded to cut a promo on us while he’s driving. He started saying how he’s the Nature Boy and how he’s used to riding in jets and limousines, but for some reason he was lost in the middle of the desert with three drunk lunatics and the Gila monsters. So we’re laughing even harder now and steam is just coming out of his ears at this point. Bobby Eaton then points to me and he says, “Lord keeps lizards.” Bobby always called me “Lord” because back then I went by the name Lord Steven Regal. Anyway, Flair then sees an opening to get the topic of conversation onto something else and get everything back to normal, so he asks me what kind of lizards I keep. I tell him, “I have a few of this and a few of that.” And then he asks me, “Are they still alive?” And Arn Anderson says, “No, he’s got them nailed to a board in his house.”

That was it. That just pushed Flair completely over the edge. From his investment getting blown away to all the giggling in the back to now Arn taking the first somewhat normal conversation we’ve had in an hour and snapping at him, Flair just couldn’t take it anymore. He slams the brakes on the car in the middle of the desert, gets out, and starts running around the car, screaming. “Raaahh!” Flair just lost it.

Eventually we get him back in the car and calm him down, and we still have to drive like three hundred miles to get to the show, and the whole time, I just keep breaking down laughing.

Now, this whole time, Flair is wearing this all-white suit. So I tell him, “You know what, Ric, I’ve been to Lancaster before and it’s a bit dusty. You’re wearing this nice all-white suit, so you might want to stop somewhere before we get to the arena and change.” But he says, “Oh no, brother, I’m the Nature Boy, I wear suits.” So I tell him, “There’s nowhere to shower, there’s nowhere to get clean once we’re there, and the way the wind is picking up, you’re going to be a mess.”

“No, brother, I’m the Nature Boy,” he tells me. “I’m wearing the suit.” So we eventually get there after what seemed like the never-ending drive as we eventually find the right way through the desert, and I ask him one last time, “Are you sure you don’t want to get changed?” And one last time he tells me, “No, brother, I’m the Nature Boy. I wear suits.” So he jumps out of the car, slams the door, and right as he slams the door, a great big dust cloud blows all over him, and literally he’s covered from head to toe. His blond hair, his white suit, his eyes—he’s covered in red clay. He turns and looks at me like it’s my fault. Like I’ve done something to cause this dust cloud to attack him. He just looked at me like, “You dirty, rotten bastard.”

Life Before GPS

Chavo Guerrero

When I first started wrestling, there were no cell phones, no computers, no GPS, there was no iPod . . . none of that. You know what we had? Maps. We were lost for ten years. We were seriously lost for my first ten years on the road. We would have to constantly stop and ask for directions. All you have to do now is punch in the address on the GPS, and it tells you, “Turn right here, turn left here.”

It’s funny, because now when we get to a town, we’ll tell a lot of the young guys, “Hey, there’s a gym over here,” or how there’s a good place to eat down this road. They always want to know how we know where everything is, but we had to, we had to know this stuff. Back when I first started, you couldn’t just punch in IHOP into the GPS and find something to eat. There was none of that. Life on the road is definitely a lot easier now thanks to technology. It was a lot tougher back when I first started. We were on the road more, and if you had someone who wasn’t good at reading maps, you were constantly getting bad directions. There was a lot less food out there back then too, and what you did find was never as healthy as you can find today. Now you can go to a convenience store and get a Muscle Milk. There was none of that stuff before. We used to live on Snickers bars. Now you have protein all packaged for you. I remember when protein bars first came out, they were a lifesaver because now you had something to eat.

And think about trying to do all of this without computers. Now you can just jump on the Internet and make your own hotel reservation with the click of a button. Back then, we just drove until we saw a hotel and hoped they had a vacancy. In fact, we slept in a car many a night because we couldn’t find a hotel. It was a lot harder when I first started, and the generation before me had it even harder. Every generation, it gets a little easier . . . but it’s still not
easy
.

What do you do when you check into a hotel at three in the morning and can’t sleep? If you’re R-Truth, that might mean writing rap lyrics. “Sometimes late at night, when it’s quiet, that’s when you get your best ideas,” he tells me. For Ezekiel Jackson, that’s the time he finally gets to catch up on the scores of his favorite sports teams. “When I get to my room, I’m not a big partyer. Just get me a room with a TV and a bed and I’m good,” he says. “When it’s two in the morning and you’re in some random city, all you can really do is kick back and watch
SportsCenter.
Two in the morning is when I catch
up on all of those highlights I missed when I was on the road.”

And while every trip would be a whole lot smoother if all you had to do was get to your room, relax, write lyrics, and watch sports, unfortunately for the WWE Superstars, that’s not always (and sometimes never) the case. From sleazy hotels to mystery stains in random rooms, sometimes just finding a clean, safe place to sleep is the hardest part of the job.

Or as Tommy Dreamer puts it, “Some of the hotels we’ve had to stay in are absolutely disgusting. You wouldn’t believe we actually paid money to rent these rooms.”

These stories detail what goes on in a WWE hotel when things get downright dirty (and a little bizarre).

The Dirty Divas

Maria

I thought life on the road would be a little more . . . clean. I think that’s the best way to explain it. Some of those hotels we stay in have giant bugs! You wouldn’t believe it. There was this one night where I found a huge spider in my bed. So I throw the blankets off me and jump out of bed, and this spider is seriously coming to attack me as I’m getting out of bed. Five minutes later, I hear Layla start screaming, and there was a giant spider in her bed too. Then we look up on the wall and what do we see? Another spider! The next day, we got back to the room, and the spiders were gone, but there was this strange yellow beetle flying around. So I take a picture of it and Twitter it to show people what was in our room. Eve’s brother sees this, and he tells us the official name, how it was an arachnid blah-blah-blah [not the official name], but it was hilarious. I guess I always thought life on the road would be more glamorous. But at the same time we have a lot more fun than I thought we would. We’re all so close, and we all know even the smallest details about everyone. We know who sleeps well together—like I need to sleep by myself because otherwise I end up elbowing people in the face. But sometimes you have no choice and you have to share a bed because the hotels run out of rooms or they give you a room with only one bed. The other night this happened, and it was me, Layla, and Eve all in bed together. I hit Layla like three times with elbows while I was sleeping. I was trying to hug the side of the bed, but I guess I rolled over in the middle of the night and got her pretty good.