Countdown To Lockdown (28 page)

Amid the many smiling faces of my family, I saw one of some concern. “Hughie, are you all right?” I said.

“Dad, have you seen Cluto?”

Oops.

April 11, 2009

Long Island, New York

11:41 p.m.

It’s just a few minutes until Easter, and my challenge for the evening is to outwait Mickey, who has his heart set on catching the
Eastern
Bunny (Hughie’s name for the floppy-eared Easter icon). The idea was originally Hughie’s, who had set up a sleeping bag in the living room, intent not only on catching the furry little guy but on killing
him as well, all part of a sinister plot to confiscate and hoard goodies meant for an entire world of good boys and girls.

Fortunately, Hugh nodded off right at the end of
Nim’s Island
, one of his favorite movies, and a very good choice for family movie night, even if it can’t top
Stealing Home
on my list of all-time favorite Jodie Foster movies.
Stealing Home
, you may ask? Yeah,
Stealing Home
, the movie I saw all by myself back in August 1988, on a rare evening off in the old Memphis territory, after hearing of the death of my beloved cat, Sunny, my faithful companion for some sixteen years.

But then this
Nim’s Island
Jodie made me think of the
Stealing Home
Jodie, which made me think of Sunny — which made me think of this poor cat I saw a few miles from my home, a most unfortunate example of excessive roadkill.

Man, I know I’m showing my wimpy side here, but that cat just kind of tugged at my conscience, the way it lay there in the rain, fur all matted down, its body nearly flat from numerous postmortem impacts.

Somewhere, I kept thinking, even as I ran my errands — the post office, the bank, the library — there’s a little child who loves that cat. And that little child will be devastated, not only because his beloved pet is gone but because no one cared enough to pull him out of the road.

No one but me, I guess. My brother and his wife had once seen me moving the dead carcass of a raccoon out of the road and thought it was borderline psychotic behavior. After all, it wasn’t as if it was anyone’s pet. Oh yeah? Well apparently, they hadn’t met Jeff Hardy, who did indeed once have a pet raccoon.

That cat was in rough shape. Its head was crushed, its brains splayed out on the wet pavement. I wished I’d stopped when I first saw the cat, instead of waiting that extra hour. I put a couple plastic bags over my hand and lifted the poor thing by its hind feet. A few hours earlier, it might have been playing with a ball, some yarn, maybe freaking out with some catnip. A night before it might have been curled up next
to its owner, the small kid I imagined finding it in this battered state. Well, at least he’d find it beneath a tree, on the grass by the side of the road.

Wow, thanks for opening up that wound, Jodie Foster. And no, I never had a pet named Sable, Ivory, or Chyna.

I’ve been thinking a lot about this match at
Lockdown.
Thinking of ways to make this thing work. And I do believe I’m onto something, courtesy of the Undertaker and Shawn Michaels at
WrestleMania.
As I watched that classic contest unfold last Sunday night, I realized how much they were getting out of each big move. How they maximized the emotional impact of their saga by making sure each big move really meant something. Even while Gino, and Wynn, whose home we were in, and the other guy whose name I can’t quite recall, were
ooh
ing and
aah
ing, I was busy absorbing, thinking to myself,
I can do that.

So, if conditioning is my weakness, I’ll make sure to stay away from the type of match that will more readily expose it: I’ll play to my strengths, which may seem like a challenge, since I have so few of them left. But one of my goals in this match is to create one magic moment, a lasting impression that wrestling fans can keep with them for a while, maybe even share with a friend or pass down to their heirs. And one thing I learned from this horrible Virginia vacation is that impressions are relative.

Busch Gardens was a disaster — one of my worst theme-park failures. Sure, I wasn’t granted an optimal hand to play with, as a radio call-in to Bubba the Love Sponge took me to five minutes until ten, only five minutes to official park opening. Bubba had been on hand in Orlando for the taping where I’d conducted an interview with myself (don’t worry, I’ll explain later). He seemed quite impressed with it, noting several times that he thought I was the only guy who could pull off a promo that would have seemed ridiculous in the hands of a more reasonable, mentally balanced man.

Actually, the feedback I’m getting from both nights of tapings has
been really good, including the buildup and match with the Machine Guns. I don’t know the rating and won’t unless someone tells me, but I hope that it did well enough for the Guns to get another try in a big angle.

Dixie Carter has been very pleased with the way things have been unfolding. I have previously told her that I am having more fun in the wrestling business than I’ve had in nine years, since I was the WWE commissioner and could kind of just make things up as I went. But in these past few weeks, I also feel that I am as valuable to the direction of a company as I’ve ever been. And it’s all been relatively easy.

Sure, there was a part of me that enjoyed the give-and-take with Vince McMahon. But this has been more like give-and-give. I give Russo and Jeff Jarrett a few suggestions, and more often than not those suggestions get done. Maybe not exactly as I’d laid them out, but close enough to give me creative fulfillment.

For example, I had suggested making Kurt Angle the guest referee for my match with Sting. Russo and Jeff both looked perplexed. Why would you want to do that? they asked.

“Because I think the idea of the executive shareholder making unreasonable, selfish decisions might lead to a lot of intrigue as to who really has the power in the company.”

So, maybe the Kurt-as-referee idea didn’t make the final cut, but the suggestion of a little tension between the founder and the shareholder has become a big part of the show. And there’s room to grow.

A few weeks ago, when I gave my initial rationale for my actions toward Sting — the chair shot heard round the world — I had made the conscious decision to sit in the founder’s chair, a place where no one but Jeff had dared to reside. And over the course of the next few shows, I continued to sit there, thinking the chair would be symbolic of a greater struggle for ultimate control of the company.

Before one segment, Jeff threw out a suggestion: “If you really want to look like you’re moving in, why don’t you hold my guitar.” Yes, the guitar! The guitar was like Orson Welles’s Rosebud, Linus’s blanket,
Flavor Flav’s clock, and Davy Crockett’s rifle Old Betsy all rolled into one.

Right before filming I had to fight to suppress a laugh.

“Oh, no,” Jeff said. “What have you got going on?”

“Nothing,” I lied. “But if I happen to start singing, try not to laugh.”

And that’s how the “Tweak It” song was born: “Tweak it, just tweak it.”

So I feel really good about where my character has gone. I’m not rehashing old material, and thankfully, I’m not going into our go-home week with that homogenized “Look, brother, I respect you, but when that cage door slams shut, I only know one way to wrestle” promo that I had really thought could have been my best approach just a few weeks ago.

So what does any of this have to do with my vacation? Plenty. Even though Bubba the Love Sponge had blown me off my “arrive half an hour before official park opening” schedule, even though I had to wait in a forty-minute line just to get into the parking lot, and even though my son Mickey absolutely, positively would not hear about riding the Big Bad Wolf until he’d done a water ride, I still had high hopes for a successful day of theme-park touring. After all, the counterintuitive strategy of hitting water rides on fifty-degree spring mornings is a virtual guarantee of procuring multiple thrills without the hassle of long lines,
if
you plan ahead:

1. Lawn and leaf bags, the effective economic way to repel most water thrown your way? Check!
   
2. A change of clothes in a backpack? Check!
   
3. An extra pair of shoes? Oops! Kind of forgot that one.
   

What a rookie mistake. You always bring an extra pair of shoes for the water rides. Flip-flops, beach shoes, old Chuck Taylors. Something. Alas, it was not to be. The Raging Roman Rapids so thoroughly
saturated their sneakers that no rationalizing, no apologizing, no promise of buying flip-flops at the park was going to work. Our day was shot. This certainly was going to be the worst vacation ever.

But it wasn’t. Until that desperate point, I hadn’t realized that I’d been avoiding my obvious vacation strength. It wasn’t Colonial Williamsburg. It wasn’t Busch Gardens. It was the water park! Jeez, there was a water park in our hotel. And doggone it, I was going to use it.

We went to that water park when we returned from Busch Gardens. We returned three hours later and stayed until closing; challenging the wave pool, cascading down the slides, navigating the lazy river. By the way, what is it about the name “Lazy River” that so many teenagers don’t seem to understand? It’s a
lazy
river, guys, not a
raucous
river. Not a
crazy
river. A
lazy
river.

Couldn’t there be some type of prerequisite for entry onto the river? An ID bracelet showing that one is either under twelve, over twenty-four, or certified “not an asshole” by some type of officially sanctioned authority?

We even returned the next morning for one last hour of water-park madness before heading home.

I decided to test out my vacation/
Lockdown
metaphor on the way to the airport. By focusing on the strengths of the vacation — the water park — I felt that my children would believe they had just had an awesome vacation experience.

“Hey guys,” I said, a little Clark Griswold sparkle in my eyes, “wasn’t that the best vacation ever?” My eyes would sparkle all the time, too, if I got the chance to nail Beverly D’Angelo, even in a fictional setting.

“Yes,” Mickey yelled. Exactly what I thought. A few big moves, each one providing maximum emotional impact, and my legacy at
Lockdown
will be secure.

“No,” Hughie said, his definitive tone cutting off my enthusiasm like an early morning wake-up call snuffing out a carnal dream.

“What do you mean, buddy? We had a great time.”

But Hughie wasn’t buying into my optimism. “No we didn’t,” he
said. “Busch Gardens was bad.
Mall Cop
wasn’t even funny. And you were in bed for two days.”

I swear, sometimes I think that kid is too smart for his own good. Maybe he’s more of a Bryan Danielson–Nigel McGuinness type of fan (now known as a Daniel Bryan–Desmond Wolfe type of fan); a guy who wants his wrestling pure, from lock-up to pinfall. For that type of fan, nothing I do in Philadelphia is going to suffice. My hope, then, is that there will be far more Mickeys than Hughies as we head into
Lockdown.

It’s now 3:05 a.m., Easter morning. If you’ll excuse me, I have some eggs to hide.

April 12, 2009

Long Island, New York