Countdown To Lockdown (43 page)

The TNA World Heavyweight Championship Belt (I’ll call it a belt if I feel like it) is handed to me. I give the belt a kiss … and … cut, we’re off the air. Wow, we finished the match with literally seconds to spare.

I’m tired but I’m happy, relieved, maybe even ecstatic. I know I’ll be hurting tomorrow: my knee, my ankle, my eyebrow, my hands, will all pay the price. But backstage I just kind of bathe in the warm glow of a job well done. By both of us. Sting’s happy, I’m happy. In a moment of most sincere sappiness, he thanks me, I thank him, there are a few awkward hugs, maybe even an ultramanly “I love you, brother.”

The Stinger really wants to know what I think—he really respects my opinion. “You know, Steve [and I rarely call him Steve, even backstage], maybe we could have done a few things differently, but all things considered, I think we did pretty well.”

All things considered: my age, my weight, my knees, my back, my thighs, my nerves, my dry mouth, the blue cage that wasn’t meant to be, the Sony Discman I’d forgotten to pack. Maybe I’ll forever remember
Lockdown
as the night I learned to stand up for myself, because after all, Tori Amos can’t always be around.

There is a bigger triumph to be taken from all of this, however. I get to write a happy ending to a story that has been so much fun to tell—in the ring, with the microphone, on these pages. There is really only one proper way to celebrate a personal and professional triumph of this magnitude—drive the four hours back to my house with twenty-seven guests in my Chevy minivan. Twenty-seven? Sure. J.B., Vince, and the twenty-five stitcheroonies! Twenty-five big ones. Twenty-five bad boys.

I concluded my last book by both asking and answering my own question (which I’ll paraphrase here): If I had known then what I know now, would I have still gone through with the idea, the buildup, the match? My answer? “Oh hell, no!” For better or worse,
The Hardcore Diaries
documented one of the most frustrating times of my career.

I will always be grateful for the time I spent in WWE, and, in the event I never get the WWE Hall of Fame platform to do so, I would like to thank both Jim Ross, for staking his reputation and possibly his job on his belief in me, and Vince McMahon, for allowing an unlikely tailback to take the WWE ball for a run now and then. Without those two men, it’s highly unlikely that so many of the good things in my life would have been possible.

But I honestly felt like my days of making a difference in WWE were over. TNA has given me that chance. My opinion is respected, my contributions are appreciated, and my boss looks like a movie star. And she’s never dropped an F-bomb on me.

So, if I knew then what I know now, would I have gone through with this whole
Lockdown
thing? Absolutely—it was one of the best experiences of my career. I wouldn’t have tweaked a thing.

April 2010

One year later

For several hours a day, my home is filled with the sounds of human suffering. As early as six o’clock some mornings, one can hear the telltale
ohhhhs
and
aaghs
of Hughie and Mickey at play, a mountain of action figures about two hundred wrestlers deep in front of them, five or six different rings (steel cage, Hell in a Cell, Punjabi Prison, official Mick Foley hardcore ring, etc.) at their command, waiting to play host to unrivaled agony. Once in a while, those sounds of suffering will momentarily cease, just long enough for a “Let’s take another look at that, J.R.,” or a “Right in the family jewels” to supplement that aforementioned collection of
ohhhs
and
aaghs.

My little guys have turned into big-time wrestling fanatics, just like their brother and sister before them, and the Impact Zone has become something of their own little theme park (a theme park within a theme park) where they even got to bear witness to that inevitable first-ever singles match with their dad and Kurt Angle. Thankfully, I got through it, I survived it, and while it most likely won’t be remembered as one of Kurt’s classic confrontations, it was far from the embarrassment I’d feared for so long. Mickey even consoled me by farting an
emotional, somber version of “Jingle Bells” under his arm following the big contest.

Ordinarily, that would have been it for me for a while as an active wrestler. After all, that’s my deal: I do my one big match and go back into wrestling hibernation, emerging every so often from my regular on-air nonwrestling role to talk a big game and attempt to back up about 40 percent of what I’ve said. But not this time. I lost the TNA championship in June (after a two-month reign as TNA World Champion) in a four-way “King of the Mountain” match, then followed it up with that first-ever singles with Kurt.

The match with Kurt came at a time when I was suffering from a particularly acute case of professional vulnerability. The “King of the Mountain” had been something of a career lowlight for me. It had been a good match, but I’d clearly been the weak link in the contest; appearing only in sporadic bursts, protected from the potentially embarrassing prospect of trying to go toe-to-toe, move for move, with guys (Angle, A. J. Styles, Samoa Joe, Jeff Jarrett) whose league I clearly wasn’t in anymore. On three separate occasions, I had that distinct, disturbing feeling of getting my bell rung, but unlike other occasions throughout my career where I could look back and pinpoint the obvious sources of the bell ringing (stiff chair shot, bad landing) on video, none of the three shots that had nearly separated me from my senses seemed to be particularly impactful. I watched the three blows several times over, thinking that the camera angle must have been to blame, thinking “they must not have caught it,” before considering the sobering possibility that I simply might no longer be the guy I used to be when it came to absorbing punishment in the ring.

At one point during the “King of the Mountain,” Joe launched A.J. high over the top rope to the outside, where I was waiting to absorb the blow to slow A.J.’s momentum; keeping him safe while simultaneously selling the spectacular move. Any good wrestler takes pride in being a dependable “catcher”—it’s the only thing that allows the highfliers in the business to perform such high-risk maneuvers on a
regular basis without seriously injuring themselves. In my prime, I considered myself to be one of the best catchers around, the type of wrestler that anybody could trust with their riskiest stuff. But on this occasion, my guts and pride just kind of went on hiatus, and in what can only be considered an act of self-preservation, I put my head down and closed my eyes, hoping for the best. Poor A.J. barely grazed me before crashing to the floor. I went down hard as well; despite the fact that I’d failed to look out for the well-being of my opponent, my neck would be sore for several days from my decision to block his momentum with my head.

I apologized profusely to A.J. a few days later, telling him that I was deeply sorry and personally embarrassed to have put his health in jeopardy with such a poor display of professionalism. I may have been guilty over the years of taking risks with my own body, but refusing to look out for the best physical interests of my opponent was an unacceptable affront to everything I thought I stood for in the business. I really wondered after “King of the Mountain” whether I should ever step into the ring again.

Yes, I was feeling pretty down before I locked up with Kurt, pretty sure that I might be participating in the most embarrassing Pay-Per-View main event of all time. But I dodged a bullet that night by not stinking up the place, and I was looking forward to that much-deserved and long-awaited wrestling slumber. But wait, what’s this? In a real-life scenario that seemed lifted right from a wrestling story line, Jeff Jarrett’s previously clandestine relationship with Kurt Angle’s ex-wife, Karen, became public, leading to Jeff ’s departing TNA for several months. Literally overnight, the carefully constructed Foley/Jarrett power struggle for control of TNA was over, flushed down a figurative Bemis; leaving me with absolutely no story line and Kurt with no upcoming opponent.

In an attempt to kill two birds with one stone (rectify two problems at once, in case that metaphor is a little dated), I become Kurt’s opponent for the entire set of
Impact
tapings, and he becomes part of my
story line. Essentially, I inherit the matches with Kurt that Jeff was supposed to have, bringing my three-day total of matches with Kurt to three—a series that leaves me exhausted, aching … but oddly thankful. Thankful to Kurt for helping me find my confidence. Despite the fact that Sting and I had pulled off a good match at
Lockdown
, I really thought any semblance of in-ring confidence was a thing of my past. But midway through that second match with Kurt, I was struck simultaneously by two distinct and welcome images: an image of my two younger children no longer booing but wildly applauding me, and an image of myself as a wrestler who no longer either sucked or lived in fear of sucking! I was actually pretty good, really “feeling” the action, selling the blows, doing what came naturally; no longer feeling quite so naked in that lonely wrestling ring.

I’m not under any illusions of grandeur. Unlike past years, I’m no longer sure I have that one really great match left in me. In fact, I tend to doubt it. Mother Nature and Father Time have hit me with some pretty devastating tag team moves, and my head, lower back, and knees (not to mention those gross-sounding pubis and ischia bones I wrote of earlier) are most likely not going to allow me that one last truly great moment in the ring. But I think I still have a few
pretty
good ones left. As a matter of fact, following those Kurt Angle matches, I’ve come to believe that all of my matches have the potential to be pretty good.

Looking back on the past year, some of those matches really were pretty good; a couple of them—the big match with Sting, a “Monster’s Ball” match in October 2009 with Abyss—even got a respectable number of votes from TNA fans for match of the year. In 2004, I beat myself up pretty bad emotionally for settling for “good enough” in my comeback match at
WrestleMania.
It had been my first match in four years—an eternity in the wrestling world, and I was bitterly disappointed in myself for settling for anything less than my absolute best. A month later, I came back and avenged that emotional defeat; coming through big with the best match of my career. I firmly believe
that every wrestler, after retiring, should feel entitled to one honest-to-goodness comeback match—if it’s done for all the right reasons. After that, every comeback is at least partially about the money. I did that honest-to-goodness comeback match with Randy Orton in 2004. This is 2010. And in 2010, unfortunately, “good enough” really is going to have to be good enough—at least in the ring.

I was mildly disappointed with the post-
Lockdown
ratings, which remained strong but showed no appreciable overall increase (although the ratings were up considerably from where they had been at the same point a year earlier), and with the
Lockdown
buy rate, which did increase, but not to the type of numbers I had hoped for. TNA actually had a very good 2009, not only surviving but turning a considerable profit in an incredibly tough economy; 2010, however, might turn out to be a different story. The January arrival of Eric Bischoff and Hulk Hogan seemed to inject new energy into TNA, and the decision to go head-to-head with WWE on Monday nights created a temporary buzz around the wrestling business that had been missing for several years. But the 2010 version of the Monday Night Wars didn’t work out well for TNA, and
Impact
is back on Thursdays, its ratings well down from where they were a year earlier—though international ratings have seen a sizeable increase. Despite the addition of huge stars to its roster, TNA as a brand has had trouble gaining any real traction outside of its core audience.

Looking back on
Lockdown
now, almost a year after the fact, what strikes me most is how fast the wheels of the wrestling machine move, and how much fuel—in the form of ideas and matches—is needed to fill those weekly two-hour television shows and monthly Pay-Per-View extravaganzas. All the moments that fed the machine in those weeks leading up to the big match with Sting—the vignettes, the matches, the promos (even the one where Mick interviewed Cactus)—are largely forgotten, as if they’d never existed at all. I mean, really, how much different would the wrestling landscape look if I had opted not to turn heel, if I’d just extended my hand and said “Brother, I respect
you” to the Stinger, instead of leaping headlong into this great adventure I’ve chronicled for you? More than likely, the landscape would look just about the same. Maybe even exactly the same.

So I think it’s fair to ask if any of this was important at all. I had my doubts, even while writing this book, wondering whether a fourth wrestling memoir was important enough to
write
, let alone important enough to expect people to read. Yet, for the past several months, while going through rewrites and edits, reading and rereading this book a half-dozen times over, I keep coming back to how much I like it and, in a few different ways, how important it feels to me.

With over three hundred annual hours of first-run weekly programming (
Impact, Raw, SmackDown
), and another ninety or so yearly on Pay-Per-View, the pro-wrestling business rarely has time to look back and appreciate its components. It serves so many people at such a fast pace—kind of like a massive, daily luncheon buffet, where customers are rushed through a never-ending line as they grab what they can, with each daily buffet seeming identical to the one before it and the ones to follow. Hopefully, with
Countdown to Lockdown
I’ve allowed TNA diners to sit back and really enjoy just one little part of that huge buffet, to savor the flavor of one homemade piece of apple pie, to taste the cinnamon, or the nutmeg, or the allspice, or whatever the hell Grandma used to put in there. And hopefully you, the readers, will remember this particular piece of pie, and perhaps recall years later just what it was you liked about it, regardless of whether the pie won official “pie of the year” honors, or was purchased by a dozen, a thousand, or a million pie-eating customers.