Countdown To Lockdown (16 page)

“I know that, and I’m looking forward to it. Have you seen the Guns lately? Fire, J.B.! Pizzazz! [This is a little tribute to an ECW promo I cut in early 1996.] These guys are great white meat babyfaces. Boy, have I got my work cut out for me. But if you don’t mind, I need some time. I’m going to tweak that match a little bit, I’m going to tweak it.”

“What do you mean? You’re going to
tweak
what?”

“Tweak it,” I reiterated.

There it is, the birth of a catchphrase, or at least a catchword. The word had actually been Russo’s idea, his ball, more or less, that he handed to me. But I pumped that ball up, shined it, nurtured it, and ran with it.

A few minutes later, Jeff entered his office, the one I’d kind of requisitioned from him. I was trying to be the cuckoo bird of TNA — the guy who moves into a nest another bird has built and kicks the original nest builder out.

Common sense would state that a regular guy would be upset at the prospect of wrestling a two-on-one match against two nerds hell-bent on vengeance. I intended to prove to the world that this version of the TNA shareholder was no regular guy.

“Yes, that’s what I’m talking about,” I say to Jeff, guitar in hand, seemingly unfazed by the big match he’d booked. “Two weeks ago I told you to turn that frown upside down, and that’s just what you did. You found your smile tonight, brother, you booked yourself one heck of a main event, and if you don’t mind, I’d like to add a little sizzle to that steak by … tweaking that match a little bit.”

“
Tweak?
” Jeff says, savoring the sheer ridiculousness of the word. “Mick, whatever you want, but …
tweak?
”

Here it is, one of my great career moments, modifying the Michael Jackson/Eddie Van Halen hit “Beat It” to meet my own needs. Sing along if you want. “Tweak it, yeah, tweak it. Just tweak it … Just tweak it.”

Meanwhile, Sting was doing a great job of showing the wrestling world another side of Mick Foley — the side that needs to be taken seriously at
Lockdown.
In a pretaped sit-down interview with announcer Mike Tenay, Sting shed some valuable light on our past — long past and recent past — and possible future. I thought it was very effective.

Announcer Mike Tenay said, “Sting, I think it’s pretty obvious that when it comes to Mick Foley’s recent actions, you have probably been as surprised as the rest of us. I have to admit I never saw that chair shot coming, and judging by your reactions I don’t think you did, either.”

“I was surprised the first time he hit me with the chair,” Sting replied. “Only because there is a twenty-year friendship, a twenty-year history there, between Mick Foley and myself, matches against him from all over the world and here in the United States. So I was surprised about it, but if you had to try to put logic to something that Mick Foley was doing, from one old salty veteran to another, I know that he is smart enough to start at the very top, he’s going to start with the World Champion. That is why the chair to the back of Sting’s head, because right now, I happen to be the World Champion.”

“I’m going to have you play psychologist if I can,” Mike said. “What do you think is going through the mind of Mick Foley?”

Sting replied, “To be a psychologist and try to get into his mind, I think that is impossible. I would have to be a schizophrenic, I think, to be able to get into the mind of Mick Foley. I know better what Kurt Angle is going to do from one moment to the next, but Mick Foley, no idea what he is going to do next.”

“On several occasions in the past you and I have talked about your potential retirement,” Mike said. “When it comes to
Lockdown
, is this a case where it’s more about your well-being than it is about wins or losses and how concerned are you?”

Sting said, “That’s a good question. You know, I’m no spring chicken, that’s no secret. In 1990 my left knee was reconstructed and I came back five months later. That same kind of injury happens to me now, there is no comeback. It doesn’t matter how good the doctor is, there is no comeback, and going into this match, I’m reminded of 1994. In 1994, in Germany I saw Cactus Jack [my ring name for the first eleven years of my career] wrestle a match against Vader. I was one of those guys at the back, peeking through the curtain to see what was going to happen in this match with Cactus Jack and Vader and the next thing I know, Cactus was tangled up in the ropes. There was blood. I saw blood on his head, but didn’t think much of it because it’s like an every-night thing, you see blood it seems like. Gary Cappetta, who was the ring announcer that night in Germany, he came into the locker room with a human ear in his hand. He came up to me and said, ‘Sting, I think I have Cactus Jack’s ear,’ and Cactus came into the locker room a few minutes later, blood all over the side of his head, pulled back his hair, no ear. I said, ‘Cactus, are you all right? ’ This is exactly what he said. He said, ‘I think I lost my frickin’ ear — bang bang,’ with the big smile, the missing teeth, the whole picture. That pretty much sums up who my opponent is at
Lockdown.
He’s out of his mind. He’s going to be in his element, steel cage, the right crowd, so when I say that when I go into
Lockdown
against Mick Foley, it very well could be my last match, I know that.”

We’re at the midway point of the two-hour show. Time for a little promo — the one I hope will give Guns fans reason to plead with moms and dads across the land for just one more hour before going to bed. I need to make fans understand why this match matters. And to do that I’ll need my six-year-old son.

Here it is, the hard-earned fruit of my negotiating labor. All those hours in Houston — e-mails, texts, and phone calls — coming to fruition in my big in-ring promo.

“To tweak or not to tweak? That is the question,” I begin. Yes! You can never go wrong when paraphrasing/bastardizing Shakespeare in
wrestling! “Now some might say, Mick, why feel the need to tweak a great main event like you in a handicap match against both Motor City Machine Guns? After all, both Shelley and Sabin are tremendous wrestlers.” Always build up your opponents. If you lose, you’ve lost to
someone.
If you win, you’ve actually beaten
someone.
“It’s a match that would push me to my absolute limits, but I have, after all, decided to tweak because of what is right here in this notebook, containing the beginnings of my next book.” A cheap plug for this book? Absolutely. “That’s not why I’m out here.” No, of course not.

“A couple of months ago I was at my son’s basketball game. He’s seventeen years old. Some of you might remember Dewey.” An idiot in the crowd yells out “Cane Dewey” in reference to one of the most intense promos of my career, circa 1995, in response to a fan whose sign had read “Cane Dewey.” One of the few drawbacks of the Impact Zone is the tendency for jaded fans to try to get themselves over at the show’s expense. “I’ve been writing about him and talking about him since he was just an infant. I looked over to my wife and I whispered in her ear, and I said, ‘Jeez, Colette, Dewey looks kind of ridiculous out there with that haircut.’ She said, ‘Mick, why don’t you let him have his own style, leave him alone, after all, we don’t bother you about your hairstyle.’ I said, ‘Point well taken,’ but then I saw this little thing on my refrigerator. It was a birthday card, legit, this was on my refrigerator. When I opened it up, there was this picture right here and it said, ‘To Dewey, have a great birthday, P.S. MMG 24-7, 365.’ When I came home, I asked my son what the deal was, and he said, ‘Yeah, that’s why I wear my hair like that, I want to look like Alex Shelley.’

“If I may, let me call for a photo. You guys don’t know my six-year-old son, Hughie. Let’s have a photo of little Hughie up there on the screen.” The little guy’s face pops up on the screen and he is absolutely adorable; shy little smile, shoulder-length blond hair. “Look at that face, oh, give me a collective ohhhh.” The crowd actively
ooh
s. “I went away on the road for a few days, I came back and found my six-year-old son Hughie looking like that” — a photo of the faux-hawked
Hughie — “and he said, ‘Dad, now I look like Alex Shelley, too.’ Well, is that a fact, kids?”

I start showing a little anger here, about to apply Freud’s principle of transference — switching the heat from my children to Alex. “See, this is where the tweaking process comes in. Sure, we could have a great main event on our hands with a normal match, but I’ve decided to
tweak
it a little bit so tonight’s main event is a first blood match.” A big
oohh
from the crowd, excited at the prospect of this First Blood match, in which the first person to bleed loses. “And to make sure there is no interference and to make sure that the Stinger has a great view of what’s on tap for him at
Lockdown
, I want Sting to be down here as a special guest enforcer. And you know what, as long as I’m at it, I’d like Jeff Jarrett to be down here to do whatever the hell it is that founders do at ringside. Jeff Jarrett, come on down.” Even though, as it turned out, Jarrett never did come down. “And here’s my promise to all of you — now I’ve tried hard to make my home a Machine Gun–free environment. I doubt even Ted Nugent would want
those
particular guns in his home.”

Yes! There it was, the Nugent line! So what if it elicited only a couple muffled chuckles. It was my line and I got it in! Mission accomplished, or so I tell myself. I’ve got about forty minutes before my match. Forty minutes to figure out a way to at least be presentable against one of the best tag teams in the business. “So by the time I’m done tonight,” I conclude, “no child will ever want to look like Alex Shelley again, because I will carve that kid up like a Thanksgiving turkey.” A subtle tie-in to Alex Shelley’s Thanksgiving nightmare — the one that smelled like burned hair.

Bell time, and my goal has never been clearer — just get through it. Actually, I’ve had a separate goal throughout the course of this march to
Lockdown.
I am aware of the distinct possibility that I will look like a tired old man inside that cage at
Lockdown.
But if that tired old man shows up in Philadelphia inside that cage, I want
Lockdown
to be his debut. No one’s going to pay to see a tired old man (Ron Jeremy and
Ozzy Osbourne exempted), so I will do whatever it takes to keep him in hiding until
Lockdown.

The best way, I figure, is to let the Guns do their cool stuff, be their punching bag, let them fly around me, like jet fighters taking down a bruised and battered King Kong. So it’s the Gun show out there — double kicks, double tope, double Ds, Doublemint gum.

Amid the general fun, there’s a moment that I will watch back several times on DVR. A moment that gives me cause for great concern. It starts out innocently enough: by capping off a simple sequence of moves from the Dynamic Kid/Tiger Mask series of matches from Japan from the early eighties — one of the greatest if not
the
greatest series of matches in wrestling history. I attempt to suplex Shelley, who instead drops behind my back and applies a waist lock. I reverse the waist lock before having it reversed by Shelley, then I immediately make a dive for the ropes, bringing Alex along with me for the ride.

When I’d first seen that little sequence — on a videotape (remember them?) custom-made for me by my buddy Brian Hildebrand — it had seemed almost unfathomable, like it was some kind of magic trick being performed. The series of moves took about five seconds to complete. But getting to the bottom of it, trying to figure out how they did it, took several minutes. Not since that brief Phoebe Cates topless scene in
Fast Times at Ridgemont High
had I hit Stop, Rewind, and Play so often.

Unbeknownst to me (at least in theory), Shelley had made a legal tag to Sabin as he was tumbling through the ropes. So when I turned to Sabin, I was hit with a beautiful drop-kick off the apron, sending me flying and depositing my 300 pounds onto the cold, unforgiving concrete with a sickening thud.

Sting later told me that the landing had made him cringe, as it had taken place directly in front of him on the floor. The bump had definitely jarred me, but hadn’t seemed especially noteworthy until I watched it later on DVR.

It certainly was a sickening thud, but it was an unusual thud. This
wasn’t the classic “raw liver falling onto the kitchen tile” type of full body splat. It was more specific. I watched the landing a couple more times before identifying the thud/splat distinction. The difference, I deduced, was that the thud was being caused primarily by the back of my skull bouncing off the concrete, which is not good.

As far as I can remember, I had always kept my chin tucked tightly to my chest during every potentially painful fall. Chin to chest, chin to chest, chin to chest — it’s practically beaten into any wrestling recruit by any self-respecting wrestling trainer, until the actions become instinct. And now, at age forty-four, my instincts seemed to be failing me.

At a certain point, Sabin, unable to contain his disdain for the older generation, openly mocked Sting: pounding his chest, Stinger style, before cringing in faux pain, holding his back, and hobbling as if the slightest physical exertion would simply be too much for a man of the Stinger’s advanced age to handle.

This raised the ire of the real Stinger, who pulled Sabin down from the ring apron and planted him with a quick Scorpion Death drop on the concrete. One Gun down, one to go. The Sabin thud (not quite as sickening, but certainly impressive) distracted Shelley for just a moment — which happens to be a moment too long when dealing with the catlike reflexes of the Hardcore Legend.

A quick boot to the gut. Double-arm DDT. Here comes Mr. Soc — wait, not sure if I have the copyright to that name, so we’ll just refer to it as “a sock with a face drawn on it.” I shove Shelley toward the ropes and he tumbles out, leaving me all alone with the sock, which happens to have a smudge of blood on it. Shelley’s blood. The devastating sock had simply been too much for Shelley to handle and now, by First Blood rules, I was the winner.