Countdown To Lockdown (3 page)

Enter Al Snow’s hundred-rep training, specifically as it pertained to my legs. As I mentioned earlier, this method seemed to contradict everything I’d read about the subject over the last twenty-five years. Sure, specifics had changed, and I’d long since abandoned the training magazines and books that had once taken up so much of my time. But as far as I knew, the basics pertaining to repetitions remained the same — 1 to 2 for explosive power, 4 to 8 for size and strength, 8 to 15 for toning and endurance. I’d even heard or read that the legs were most responsive to reps in the 15-to-25 range. But a hundred reps?

According to resident expert Al Snow, the philosophy was actually quite simple. The weight should be light enough to limit strain on ligaments and tendons. But any weight starts becoming difficult at around the 25-rep stage. Somewhere around 50, my legs would start
to burn. This was where testicular fortitude came in — and brother, if there is any one word that accurately described my testicles, it is
fortuitous.
At 75 reps, the exercise would seem almost unbearable. Only my legendary fortitude could see me through to 100, at which point I’d thank God for the forty-eight hours I’d have to rest before forcing myself to endure this kind of abuse again. Luckily, I had those experiences at Neil’s Gym to fall back on — those extreme sessions of gratuitous suffering that even former V.P. Dick Cheney might have frowned on. “Dammit, man, get bin Laden off that Nautilus machine! Can’t you see he’s had enough?”

I didn’t have a Nautilus machine handy for the task, even though my wife and I had donated a whole line of the classic Arthur Jones originals (which we’d bought used but in great condition) to a local church community center when we’d closed our gym in the Florida panhandle.

We’d opened the gym in late 1997 as a business to fall back on when my wrestling days were through. Fortunately, a couple of years later the wrestling business just exploded, and after the dust settled it became pretty obvious that unless we got completely stupid with our money (i.e., invested it in the stock market), we weren’t going to need that gym as much as we thought.

Plus, I was a terrible businessman. In a business where a rule of thumb was to never under any circumstances offer a refund, my answer to every problem, big or small, was to offer people their money back. So when the State of Florida told us they needed our property to widen the highway, I did several Nadia Comaneci–like somersaults in my mind (despite outweighing the ’76 Olympics sensation by some 240 pounds), followed by an incredible mental dismount. Of course, I didn’t let the state representative witness my mental gymnastics. No, the state guy got a “but this was my dream, and now you want to take it away” story. All in all, we were paid almost enough to make up for three years of losses from running the gym, but perhaps more
important, I understood that I should never ever think about running a business again.

We donated about half of the pieces we’d bought, sold some others at a steep discount, and had about ten Cybex machines moved up to New York and placed in the Foley garage, where they instantly set new standards in coat hanging, spiderweb clinging, and mouse feces collecting. Within about a year, I would donate half the pieces to the Homeless Veterans Residence Center in Queens, a place that wrestling legend Fred Blassie had visited regularly in the years before his death.

Among the pieces I hung on to, however, was a heavy-duty Cybex leg press machine — and brother, using Al Snow’s hundred-rep routine as my guide, I began wearing that machine out, a hundred reps at a time every other day, in preparation for my big run the day after
WrestleMania.

Heading into January, the world appeared to be my oyster.
The Hardcore Diaries
had received tremendous preorders, and Pocket Books was sure they had a hit on their hands. Sure, in some places the book was a little rough on WWE and on Vince McMahon in particular. But hey, Vince himself had given it his blessing, saying to his staff “Well, if that’s the way he feels, just print it” after concerns were raised about its not completely pro WWE content.

We’d taped some cool commercials for the book, centered around an unsubstantiated rumor that I was something of a name-dropper — a charge I’m pretty sure
CBS Evening News
anchor Katie Couric, who has interviewed me twice, would refute.

And thanks to Al Snow’s hundred-rep training, I was starting to get in serious shape. Every day I was feeling stronger, leaner, more determined, more punctual, sexier, more empathetic, and far humbler. I was about to have another best seller on my hands — and a return to WWE television that would go down in history as one of the most
recent
returns to WWE in history. What could possibly go wrong?

Umm, how about everything?

I was somewhere around my sixtieth rep when I felt a sharp pain in my lower back. A sharp, burning pain. But “Hell’s Bells” was on the boom box — the same boom box that had been given to me in 1999 (when the boom box people were our sponsor) for being featured in the “boom of the week” just about every week — and Angus Young, the armadillo hiding in Brian Johnson’s trousers (read
Hardcore Diaries
for more info on the armadillo), and the rest of the gang in AC/DC still had a couple of minutes of uplifting Christian folk rock to deliver.

Plus, like I’d mentioned, Al’s hundred-rep training was so foolproof that one could just gut their way through the pain — even if that pain happened to be a rupturing of the L4/L5 disc in the lower back. So, instead of getting off the Cybex leg machine — as common sense would have dictated — I gutted my way through those last forty horrible reps using the image of some incredible moment of upcoming Pay-Per-View glory to see me through.

As usual, I climbed out of this modern-day torture apparatus, holding on to some other piece of former “Foley’s gym” equipment to keep from falling over due to dizziness and complete exhaustion of the thighs. I walked the little hill from my detached garage, savoring the light-headedness and total muscle expenditure, but a little concerned about that burning pain in my back.
You know
, I thought as I opened the door to my house,
I think I may have hurt myself.

A week later, I was looking for some major relief. I’d tried ice, rest, heat, hot tubs, stretching. Thankfully, I’d fought off the quick-fix pain-pill urge. Pain medication has always been a last resort for me — an admission of failure in the battle against pain. And I wasn’t ready to raise the white flag of surrender just yet. I realized that all of my measures in this battle had been defensive. Ice, rest, heat, hot tubs, stretching? All weak counterpunches. I needed to go on the offensive, to go deep into the tissue, the spasms of the muscle, to confront the source of pain head-on. I needed a surge of sorts. A deep tissue massage. A massurge.

But who to go to? Where to turn? I knew from the summer of 1993, when I had suffered a bruised shoulder after being thrown down a flight of stairs by Randy Orton, that I couldn’t go to a spa. Much too nice in there, much too gentle. Kind of like a UN peacekeeper with those intimidating sky blue helmets; it might keep the issue from getting worse, but it really wasn’t going to solve anything.

So I ruled out the spa possibility, opting for Healing Hands Physical Therapy. I told them I’d just about reached the end of my rope, that I’d be willing to do just about anything to feel better … except, you know, let a guy touch me. Because it feels weird. And there’s always the remote possibility of having to deal with the psychological aftermath of “it” moving during the male therapist encounter. Just ask George Costanza.

So I had no idea who would be working on me when I got to Healing Hands, and I didn’t really care, just as long as the person doing the work didn’t have a penis. I scanned the room wondering who my new ally in this battle against back pain might be. The attractive blond by the desk? That would be cool. Or the brunette with the well-defined biceps? Yeah, I bet she could really dig in deep.

Then I heard a high-pitched little voice: “Hello, Mickey.” I turned to see a tiny Asian woman with dark glasses, maybe five feet tall, maybe a hundred pounds — not likely to be much of an ally in the battle against pain.

“Hi, I’m Jessie,” she said. She led me down a hallway, to what I was sure would be the least helpful massage of my life, not to mention my most wasteful expenditure of money since picking up that
Best of the Curry Man
DVD. As I watched the tiny lady in front of me, I could tell she was having trouble navigating the hallway, seemingly unable to see where she was going, using her hands to touch walls and furniture as she went. Suddenly it made sense. The dark glasses, the difficult walk down the hall. Oh, great, not only was my therapist tiny, she was blind, too.

But the moment the little lady put her hands on me, it was like,
bam
, Mr. Miyagi, the wizened martial arts expert/spiritual mentor/apartment complex custodian from the original
Karate Kid
movie, who was able to heal Daniel-san from the injuries he suffered at the hands of Sensei Martin Kove’s Cobra Kai bullies.

As I lay on the table, appreciating Jessie’s deep-tissue-probing hands and elbows, realizing this woman might just be my greatest weapon in the war against pain — I had a separate, borderline-indecent thought.

A massage recipient is almost always given the option to wear or not to wear underwear during the massage. No undies offers the benefit of allowing the gluteus maximus (buttocks) to be worked on — a valuable and large muscle group for a therapist to have access to for the most effective massage possible. The commando downside? Being completely naked, which I’m not totally comfortable being in front of anyone, including my wife. Even while covered by a towel, there’s too much that can go wrong — camera phones, secret video, the human gag reflex. So, glutes or no glutes, I’d always exercised my right to keep my undies on.

I say the recipient is “almost always” given the option, because in September 1994, while suffering from some pretty acute sciatic pain while on a tour of Austria, I was told in no uncertain terms that I absolutely, positively had to remove my undies, sparking the following dynamic Deutsche dialogue between the future Hardcore Legend and a male Austrian therapist with particularly bad teeth. You need only know that
Unterhosen = underpants.

M
ICK
:
Ich möchte auf meinen Unterhosen halten.

B
AD
T
EETH
:
Nein, sie können seine Unterhosen nicht tragen.

M
ICK
:
Ja, Ich möchte auf meinen Unterhosen halten.

B
AD
T
EETH
:
Nein, sie können seine Unterhosen nicht tragen.

Oh, don’t worry,
Ich hatte mein Unterhosen getragen.

Good thing I had those
Unterhosen
on, too. Because “it” moved
during the course of my time with that bad-toothed therapist. Oh, yes, it moved!

It would take several months of semiregular massages with Jessie before I would become confident enough to discard my
Unterhosen
, providing unrestricted access to my long-suffering gluteals. And with that historic discard of the
Unterhosen
, Jessica at Healing Hands became the first woman — in my limited history of being naked around women — that I felt comfortable being naked around.

And if “it” happens to move once in a while? No big deal — I mean, how’s she going to know?

I would come to see Jessica as not only an incredible massage therapist but as something of a modern-day superhero. Life cannot have been easy for a blind orphan from Vietnam, especially when her husband took off on her — returning for good to his native Mexico, leaving her to raise their three small children by herself.

Despite those troubles, she refused to stay down, putting herself through massage school, riding trains, taking buses, doing whatever it took to make her own living. And now … she gets to put her hands on the naked Hardcore Legend. What an inspirational story!

After a few massages from Super Jessie, I was feeling good enough to start anew, even seeking the services of a personal trainer for the first time. I kept hearing about the advantages of training the core, those muscle groups surrounding and including the abdominals and lower back. No doubt about it, I was going to be in really good shape for this big return.

I would actually be making a couple of WWE appearances before my
big
return a day after
WrestleMania
— just enough to fan the flames that were starting to surround the release of the
Diaries.
Pocket Books continued to be pumped about the release.

Speaking of pumped, my first personal training session went well. Sure, that exercise ball stuff seems a little, you know, wimpy at first, but when done correctly, that stuff will wear a guy out, especially when it’s hitting muscles I didn’t even know existed. I still had a small amount
of back pain to contend with, but keeping in mind for a moment that I’m the guy who single-handedly dealt the mighty Cell (as in Hell in a Cell) a major ass kicking, I really didn’t think that a small amount of pain was worth worrying about.

It was March 2, 2007, when lower-back-disc disaster struck — just three days before my official return to
Raw
, my first WWE appearance since I was “fired” by Vince McMahon and WWE Diva Melina over six months earlier. What a great day for WWE fans. They were going to eat up this return. Please stow those previous two lines away with “Wait until Otis sees us! He
loves
us!” from the 1978 classic
Animal House
under the heading “Returns that didn’t quite live up to the returnee’s expectations.”