Countdown To Lockdown (31 page)

This entrance-ramp tribute was the exact way the WWE had paid tribute to the very real deaths of Owen and Eddie, and I found the replication of those tributes for the sake of a completely fabricated death to be of almost impossibly bad taste.

I returned to
Raw
a week later to promote the
Vengeance
main event I’d been so subtly repackaged for, and felt an instant sickening in my stomach and an inexplicable tightening of my back when given dialogue that would have me expressing similar forlorn sadness at the fake fate of Mr. McMahon.

Several wrestlers had told me of their feelings of disgust and shame while standing on that ramp, but unlike me they weren’t just occasional visitors to the WWE playground. They more or less needed to keep their relationship with the boss as harmonious as possible, which from time to time meant having to do little things like hiding their shame and disgust.

I simply couldn’t take it, and I asked Vince if I might have a few words with him concerning my dialogue on that evening’s show.

A few words turned into a contentious forty-minute conversation. I wish I could say that I delivered a well-reasoned, well-structured dissertation on the tastelessness of this story line, but in truth it was more of a rambling outpouring of pent-up frustration, throwing in things
like the rescinding of my dress code waiver, the lack of promotion for
The Hardcore Diaries
, and the whole need for repackaging Mick.

There were, however, some highlights to the rambling dialogue.

For one, Vince had found the very idea of my objection to the angle to be objectionable.

“Vince McMahon didn’t die, Mick,” Vince said. “Mr. McMahon died.”

Excuse me? What? Actually, I don’t think I said anything. I think I let my open-jawed look of disbelief do all my talking for me. Apparently Vince McMahon is a real person who was still alive and well. Mr. McMahon was a television character. He was the dead guy. So, Vince said, there was no need for my concern.

I picked up my open jaw long enough to ask if he was sure our fans knew the difference.

“Of course they do, Mick,” he said.

Apparently, all this time I’d been the only one too dumb to make that obvious distinction.

I had hoped to approach this discussion as something of a linguistic pugilist, dissecting Mr. McMah — oops, I mean Vince McMahon with razor-sharp verbal jabs. Instead, I’d resorted to throwing wild ideological haymakers, most of them either missing by a mile or easily dodged or deflected by a wily Mr. McMah — oops, Vince McMahon.

But before retreating from the fray, I landed one solid verbal blow.

“Vince, what will happen if, God forbid, one of our guys really dies? How will our fans ever trust us again?”

This whole
Vengeance
main event thing had come about pretty suddenly. One day I’m at home, wondering how to go about reconnecting with the fans. The next — I’m in the main event.

I had already committed to attending the opening dedication ceremony for an early childhood education center I’d helped fund in the southwest Mexican state of Michoacán and didn’t want to miss it. After all, this was the center I’d worked hand in hand with the Dalai
Lama on, and it was very special to me. Okay, so maybe we hadn’t really worked together, and maybe I didn’t actually even know the Dalai Lama personally, but we really were the two biggest donors on the project. Pretty cool.

Fortunately, the
Vengeance
show was in Houston, where I would connect for my flight to Michoacán anyway, so the trip for the dedication was possible, if not completely advisable. Door to door, from my home in Long Island, it was a seventeen-hour trip. Plus a four-hour drive to Mexico City after the dedication. Then a simple three-hour flight to Houston the next morning. Looking back at it now, I guess twenty-one hours of travel in the thirty-six hours before a big Pay-Per-View event was probably a mistake. But it’s a mistake I’m glad I made and hopefully would make all over again.

The education center was beautiful and will no doubt be a place of great importance in its small village for decades to come. More important, I had a chance to meet Rosita, one of the children I sponsor through ChildFund International. I had been to Michoacán about a year earlier on a ChildFund study trip, and I had returned home with a plan to help out with the funding of the center and to sponsor a few more children.

Rosita was one of those children, and she had become my steady pen pal over the following months, a thoughtful writer with a wisdom that belied her eleven years.

I hoped I would get a chance to meet her on this trip. But, man, it was hard to tell. All the girls I saw looked almost identical, with long, dark hair and traditional dresses for the festive occasion.

One of the girls said hello. Actually, I think she said
hola
, since, you know, we were in Mexico.

“Como se lama,”
I said — “How are you?” — utilizing my extensive knowledge of Spanish, which consists of two or three dozen words.

“Rosita,” the girl said.

“Rosita,” I said, before it dawned on me. “My Rosita?”

And with that, my Rosita gave me the biggest hug her little arms were capable of, instantly making the seventeen hours spent traveling seem like a very small price to pay for such a special moment.

Sure, I’d be a little tired for my main event match in Houston, but I felt like I had taken part in something very good in that little village in the Mexican state of Michoacán.

Meanwhile, unbeknownst to any of us, back in the United States, another event involving a wrestler was simultaneously taking place. Something very, very bad.

Vengeance
turned out fine. The main event match, the five-way for the WWE Championship, was a good match, and my participation had not been a source of embarrassment. Just as I’d hoped, the number of wrestlers involved had afforded me the chance to take a few much-needed rests, a chance to catch my breath while other guys took turns as the focal points of the match. Plus, I finally had a new answer for all those kids who always wanted to know if I’d ever “versed” John Cena.

Oddly, Chris Benoit had not made it to Houston for his match — staying home, rumor said, because of a case of food poisoning.

“It must be pretty bad for Chris not to make it,” I’d said out loud in the dressing room earlier that night.

Yes, for Chris Benoit, among the most dedicated wrestlers I’d ever met, to miss any show, let alone a Pay-Per-View match, something pretty bad must have happened.

My flight into Corpus Christi was delayed for two hours the next morning, and upon arriving at the arena I was told that my services would not be needed at that evening’s show. Which was fine with me, as I had no desire to take part in the elaborately planned funeral for Mr. (not Vince) McMahon. All of the wrestlers had been told to bring their best attire for the solemn occasion, which was scheduled to include, among other things, a gospel choir honoring Mr. McMahon’s memory with a rendition of “Amazing Grace.”

I was glad to be heading home, despite the threatening skies, which had all flights out of Corpus delayed for an unknown period of time.

That unknown period of time just kept getting longer. An hour, then two, then four, finally eight before we took off. All the while, I was forging ahead through
Children at War
, quite possibly the most depressing book I’d ever read. I’d visited places of great historical suffering over the years — the Dachau concentration camp in Germany, the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Park in Japan, the Nanking massacre monument in China — but the depictions of brutality I read in this book were almost unfathomable.

The weather that had delayed the Corpus flights had hit much of the country hard, causing delays and cancellations of flights on a massive scale. When my flight landed in Atlanta, it was almost midnight, and I had no chance of catching my connection to New York until the following day. Thousands of travelers found themselves in similar situations, scrambling to find last-minute hotel rooms in a city whose every hotel was seemingly booked to capacity.

I tried every number I could — as a frequent traveler, I’ve got a lot of contact information — before finally finding an EconoLodge with one extra room in a pretty shady part of town. The hotel shuttle buses were overwhelmed, and lines for taxis stretched hundreds of yards. I’ve done quite a bit of traveling since 1985, and this was without a doubt the worst debacle of its kind I’d ever endured. I managed to hop on board a hotel shuttle bus whose list of hotels serviced didn’t include mine. The driver did the best he could, dropping me off about a mile from my hotel.

Slowly, I trudged toward the EconoLodge in the bad part of town, a pro wrestler with a rolling bag making his way past pawnshops and a couple of nefarious street deals.

With the exception of the fifteen minutes I’d been in the arena in Corpus Christi, I’d been driving, waiting, flying, and walking for sixteen straight hours, during which I’d started and finished
Children at War
, a truly disturbing and enlightening work.

Two days earlier I’d been on hand for the dedication of the early childhood education center I’d played a big part in, and met my
sponsored child, Rosita, the girl from Michoacán whose letters mean so much to me.

The night before, I’d been respectable in the main event of a big Pay-Per-View show.

But this day, June 24, 2007, had been a disaster, probably one of the worst days of my year, possibly even my life.

And that was before the phone call.

“Hi, Mick, it’s Colette.”

“Yes?” Right away I knew something was wrong.

“Did you hear about Chris Benoit?”

“No, what is it?”

“Chris, his wife, and child were all killed in their home in Atlanta.”

Mandatory for every wrestler.

Of course, as it turned out, there was far more to the Benoit deaths than originally thought. For reasons that may never be completely known, Chris Benoit murdered his wife and child before taking his own life. This series of events shook the foundations of the wrestling world, and for a long time — weeks, months — it made me feel self-conscious and even ashamed to be part of the business. There had been brief moments of time over the course of my career where I might have wondered just what I was doing in a business that can be occasionally heartless and uncaring, but for the first few weeks following those previously unthinkable actions, I actually felt ill at ease just walking around, thinking I would be looked at, pointed to, and talked about as “one of them.”

The press didn’t help much. It seemed for the most part that they were interested only in ratings and information that fit into their two-word sound-bite explanation: “’roid rage.” I’m not really into bashing the mainstream media, but it would certainly seem that with so many hours to fill on cable news, there should have been more room for some nuanced reporting and actual investigation instead
of a parade of talking heads and a grand rush to judgment. I almost became one of those talking heads, after agreeing to do
The O’Reilly Factor
, before a friend at ChildFund International convinced me to reconsider. “You’ve done so much to help people,” she said. “Are you sure you want to jeopardize all that to be on his show?”

“I think we could have a good conversation,” I said.

“Yes, Mick, you could … but that’s really his choice. Do you want to trust him to make that choice for you?”

Not really. Which was probably a good decision, especially after seeing Bill tee off on one of his wrestling guests (I can’t honestly remember who — there were so many of them for a few weeks) for no real reason, and then present cherry-picked information on the famous Lionel Tate murder case without ever mentioning that the judge and jury had unanimously rejected the Tate defense team’s bogus “wrestling defense.” (They had attempted to blame the murder of a little girl on Tate’s imitating moves he had seen on pro-wrestling television shows.) I’m not really bashing O’Reilly, either; he was no worse than anybody else out there, even if his reporting on the Tate case was a pretty good case of putting a little misleading spin into the “no-spin zone.”

But there was part of me that really wanted to talk. I felt like the wrestling business was being unfairly blamed for the heinous Benoit deaths, and I wanted to defend it. But so many of the guys in the wrestling business came off poorly — even Kevin Nash, one of the smartest guys in the business, wasn’t allowed to make valid points without enduring constant interruption on
Hannity & Colmes.
Really, only Chris Jericho and Bret Hart came across truly well — in Jericho’s case, because he was smart enough to agree to appear only if he wasn’t part of a panel of guests, where arguing and yelling are seemingly encouraged.