SATURDAY, APRIL 5, 2014—7:34 P.M.
Couples congregate backstage at a small cloaked booth with pictures plastered all over its exterior. A special WrestleMania photo booth gives all Hall of Fame guests the chance to snap four quick pics to commemorate this night to remember and bring home something for the front of their fridges. “Braniel” keeps the mood light with peace sign poses (Brie) and feigned mean mugs (Bryan), then takes the opportunity for a sweet lip connection. The couple collects their print, then gets prompted to the lineup for their arena entrance. But first, a certain seven-footer seeks his own photo-taking fun with his enemy-turned-tag-team-partner-turned-enemy. Unmasked and thus channeling a good deal less of his “Big Red Monster” side, Kane cuddles up with Bryan in a seat too small for the Superstars. The unlikely allies and real-life buddies pose for posterity—which just happens to be the foundation of their friendship.
After falling out of the WWE Title picture when my story with Punk was over, I was concerned about what was next. In an effort to be more of a bad guy, I stopped saying “Yes!” and told the fans to stop saying it as well. Of course they didn’t, so I started saying “No!” when the fans would say “Yes!” and I pretended the whole thing drove me crazy.
My music would hit, everyone would start “Yes!”-ing, and I would run out and make giant motions with my hands, screaming “No!” It was a lot of fun, actually, and a big part of the fun was getting in screaming matches with fans at ringside, where we’d be going back and forth with the “Yes!” and the “No!” These bursts of anger changed my character entirely and made me more entertaining, something I needed since I was no longer in the main event scene.
I soon found out that the plan for SummerSlam 2012 was for me to do a match with celebrity Charlie Sheen. He was going through a very public mental breakdown at the time, and somehow WWE brokered a deal for him to perform against me. He taped a couple of videos for Raw insulting me, and even though it was a goofy match to be in, it would have put me in one of the top matches at SummerSlam. Unfortunately, whoever brokered the Sheen deal never got him to sign any sort of contract to do the event, and in typical Charlie Sheen fashion, he bailed. What came about as a result ended up being the most fun period of time I’ve had with WWE.
During my story with Punk, WWE interjected veteran monster Kane, and we ended up doing a triple-threat match for the title in June at No Way Out; we ran the same triple-threat match on live events for a month or two afterward as well. This made Kane an easy person to start a story with on short notice heading into SummerSlam, where I faced and beat him with a small package. At the time, I was doing my damnedest to become “Mr. Small Package”—a moniker I coined on the independents after claiming to have the “inescapable small package”—but it never caught on in WWE. Still, I used my flash win over Kane to get him more and more aggravated with me.
More important than our match at SummerSlam was a series of vignettes—filmed before SummerSlam, though they aired several weeks after the event—involving the two of us taking “anger management” classes, which was maybe not so ironically the name of Charlie Sheen’s television sitcom. We spent all day doing the shoot, and as we were filming the segments, I thought they would be rotten.
It was the first time I had done something with WWE that was filmed movie-style, where we shot the scene a few sentences at a time from a ton of different angles. Kane and I drew “anger collages,” did a “trust fall,” and essentially mimicked all the stereotypes you would think of about an anger management class. Although we thought they were awful when we filmed them, after they were put together, they turned out really well, and the fans liked them. Part of it was the entertaining dynamic between me, outrageously crazy and angry, and Kane, in his mask playing the more lucid, straightforward one. The funniest bit to me was Kane dryly recounting all the horrible things his character had done in the past, like electrocuting a man’s testicles.
What also made the series work was “Dr. Shelby,” an acting/drama teacher who played our therapist and was amazing in the role. He started off the vignettes as a therapist with infinite patience who saw the good side in everything, but just when Kane and I looked to have a “breakthrough,” we instead started fighting, causing Dr. Shelby to lose it and throw the best fit ever. He was only supposed to be a one-time character, but he was so good that WWE kept bringing him back to shoot stuff with us on Raw. The only reason we eventually stopped using him was because he had a limited number of days off he could use as a teacher.
The vignettes turned Kane and me into a comedy duo of sorts. After they aired over the span of several weeks, the two of us were put in one of the weirdest segments I’ve ever been a part of. Occasionally on Raw, WWE gives the fans the power to vote on what they want to see. Usually it’s choosing somebody’s opponent or tag team partner, but in our case it was entirely different. The fans got to choose whether Kane and I would A) wrestle each other, B) team up together, or C) hug it out. As I walked to the ring, I didn’t know which one the fans had voted for, so I had to prepare for each. Resoundingly, the fans voted for us to hug it out.
I was a little worried about that one option because we had a ten-minute segment to fill. How on earth were we going to fill a ten-minute segment hugging each other? I’m not quite sure how we did it, but not only did we fill the time, we went three minutes over. We stood there in the middle of the ring and made several attempts to hug each other. We just couldn’t quite do it. The fans live in Chicago loved it and chanted, “Hug it out! Hug it out!” It was crazy. We were two grown men trying to hug each other not only in front of a packed arena but in front of millions of people on TV; one of us was in a full spandex leotard with a mask, and the other was in trunks as small as underwear and a T-shirt. When we finally did hug, the place went nuts. Of course we then started fighting—because, after all, it is pro wrestling—but when we walked back through the curtain, Vince was thrilled with it. Despite being worried the whole thing would bomb, I loved the segment, too. The “Hug it out!” chants followed us the entire time Kane and I teamed together.
WWE decided to do another fan vote to choose our name as a tag team, which is one time I wish they wouldn’t have left a decision in the hands of the fans. The live interactive fan polls are, by nature, unpredictable. You can guess what the fans are going to want, but often you guess wrong. A good example of that was the night of the Nexus attack: They used an online poll to see who would wrestle John Cena, with the options being Rey Mysterio, Jack Swagger, and CM Punk. They thought it would be Rey because of his popularity, but the fans actually voted for Punk. As a performer, given you don’t know about the results until the last minute, it can make things very challenging.
Kane and I didn’t want a fan poll to determine our team name. We really liked the name Team Friendship and had already come up with a few ideas for awesome T-shirts, which included cartoon drawings of each of us with clouds and rainbows. I’m sure it would have been a real winner, but we never got to find out. In a poll between Team Friendship, Team Teamwork (a name I actually used on the independents when I teamed with Austin Aries and suggested as a throwaway option here, knowing fans wouldn’t vote for it), and Team Hell No, the WWE Universe picked Team Hell No as the winner with 59 percent of the vote. I get why fans voted for it; Kane was supposedly a demon from hell, and I said “No!” a lot, so it would seem like a good fit. But from a merchandising perspective, we were a kid-friendly team, and very few parents will allow their kids to wear shirts that say “hell” on them. Sure enough, though we were a popular team, our shirts never sold as well as they should have, and I blame it on the name. Plus, how fun is “Team Friendship”?
Shortly after we started teaming, Kane and I won the WWE Tag Team Championship from R-Truth (whom I’ve known since he was thirty years old) and Kofi Kingston. At first we were just a comedy team who would argue a lot, and the idea was to break us up and have us feud shortly thereafter. Instead, since we clicked so well, we ended up teaming up for the next nine months. During that time I got to know Kane a lot better, but it was a slow process. Kane’s real name is Glenn, and I’ll refer to him as such from now on, because calling him Kane now feels really weird. Glenn is someone who is almost universally respected in the locker room. He debuted as the Undertaker’s evil younger brother Kane in 1997, though he wrestled previously in WWE as the “fake” Diesel doppelganger of the original character portrayed by Kevin Nash, and Isaac Yankem even before that. I graduated from high school in 1999, so it was my junior year when Kane first appeared in WWE, and a veteran like Glenn could be intimidating to young new guys coming in, like me. He’s also relatively quiet except with his closer friends, so I didn’t get to know him very well until we started working together. Once we did, though, I was able to see a whole different side to him.
The two of us are a pretty absurd duo, and the first time we really started joking around was over a pretty absurd premise. I was reading a book by Mantak Chia called Awaken Healing Energy Through the Tao: The Taoist Secret of Circulating Internal Power. It’s a long story, but I don’t sleep well, and at the time I really lacked energy. I could feel it catching up to me in my body, so I was reading this book that talked about taking your sexual energy up your chakras and then back down, circulating the energy to help you heal and be more vibrant. It’s a very Eastern way of thinking. In order for it to work, you have to stop ejaculating, which, as you can imagine, makes most people stop reading right away. But not me; I plowed through the information, some of it interesting and some of it ridiculous. I was showing the book to someone in the locker room when Glenn came in, and we got him involved in the discussion. At first he was put off by the conversation entirely, but soon he started to enjoy the ridiculousness of it. He grabbed the book and started thumbing through it, then immediately stopped at a little drawing of a naked man lying down and a sun, along with an arrow that went from the sun to the man’s perineum (otherwise known as the “taint”). The suggestion was essentially that to increase your sexual energy and, therefore, overall energy, you should expose your perineum to the sun. It was the most outlandish idea Glenn had heard in a long time, but for some reason he couldn’t stop talking about it. And neither could I. The first bond I formed with this towering man who had participated in some of the most twisted scenes in WWE history was based on the idea of us tanning our taints.
Another time, in Spokane, Washington, there was a separate coach’s office in the locker room. As the senior member of the locker room, Glenn claimed it and had his own little space. That day, for whatever reason, Cesaro and I had gotten the Petula Clark song “Downtown” stuck in our heads. While Glenn was sitting in his office, I blasted the song on my phone, tossed it into the office, and immediately closed the door. I hid underneath the window and slowly peeked my head up to watch as he picked up the phone, stared at it for a long time, confused, then looked up to see my stupid grin peering at him through the window. He shook his head in disgust. I had “Downtowned” him.
After our tag match on the show, I was the only person in the locker room. Earlier, I’d been ribbing Cesaro by stealing and hiding his chair every time he left the room, which would force him to go find a new chair. I decided to use all of those chairs to form a wall over six feet high in the middle of Glenn’s office, creating an enormous barrier that separated his bags from the entrance. I turned off the lights to the office, slid my phone back in with “Downtown” blaring on repeat, and waited.
When Glenn got back to the dressing room, he looked a little confused when he saw that the lights were off. As he stepped through the door and turned the lights on, he saw the work I had done. This whole thing could have gone very wrong; Glenn was a veteran, and someone of his status isn’t necessarily a person you should rib. But I didn’t think about that before I started. When Glenn saw the chair wall, I saw a flash of anger cross his face. He dropped his head, looked at the phone (still playing “Downtown”), and then just shook his head. I popped out with a big “I gotcha, Glenn!” thinking I was the funniest man alive. At first he didn’t think it was funny at all, but when he realized how much effort it took for me to build all the chairs so high, he came around and laughed at the ridiculousness of my hard work. Although it could have easily gone the other way, that was the moment when our bond became closer, from tag partners to friends.
The first several months of us teaming together was almost exclusively comedy stuff, the two of us being an odd couple who couldn’t stand each other yet would ultimately be successful. Because I’d done some comedic stuff throughout my career, like at Butlins with All Star Wrestling and places like Pro Wrestling Guerrilla in Los Angeles, I felt very comfortable in the role and enjoyed it more and more by the week. I was actually grateful for all that time spent in England developing my humorous style because it gave me experience and really helped me embrace this new side of my character in WWE.
But we weren’t always comedians. Kane and I got to do some really intense matches against the Shield, including the trio’s WWE debut match: a Tables, Ladders, and Chairs match in which Glenn and I teamed with The Ryback. I also had my first good WrestleMania experience alongside Glenn in 2013. Our match against Dolph Ziggler and Big E was only a little over six minutes, but we really entertained the fans. The entire MetLife Stadium was chanting “Yes!” at the end of it, and I was happy because I got to share that moment with Glenn.
On the European tour after WrestleMania 29, I teamed with the Brothers of Destruction, Glenn, and his storyline brother, the Undertaker, against the Shield. This was my first time being in the ring with the Undertaker, a wrestling legend I’d been watching since I was a kid. He is one of the most respected men in our industry because of his toughness, wrestling intelligence, and locker room leadership. It’s weird for me to say this, because I normally don’t get like this, but I really wanted to impress him.
Our generation of wrestlers has a reputation among the veterans of “not knowing how to work”—and that especially holds true for independent wrestlers, which, despite having been on the WWE roster for over three years, I still considered myself to be. I felt like I had to prove otherwise. That night, the Shield did a live event somewhere else in England and took a helicopter to our building after their match. They got straight off the chopper and went directly to the ring to wrestle us. (Ironically, Shield’s Dean Ambrose was the guy I did that with on the independents that one winter night, although I wasn’t in a helicopter.) None of them had wrestled Undertaker before, but they were unfazed while doing their thing inside the ring. Ambrose, Seth Rollins, and Roman Reigns were wrestling machines that night, and they made us look like a million dollars. We had a great match, and the crowd was on fire for the entire thing.
Prior to the match, Vince told me he’d pay me several thousand dollars if I could get Undertaker to hug me. After we went off the air, I tried my damnedest. I grabbed the microphone and asked the crowd if they wanted to see me and the Undertaker “hug it out,” and they all exploded with “Yes!” in response. As soon as I got the mic, though, ’Taker started moving toward the back, and even with the crowd reaction and me chasing him, he still escaped without me giving him that hug.
After the show I thanked Undertaker and told him it was a really cool experience teaming with him that night. He seemed physically sore but happy as he thanked me in return, then told me he thought I’d been doing a great job and he enjoyed watching me work. It was a really nice compliment coming from somebody like ’Taker.
With a WWE Tag Team Championship reign that lasted 245 days, Glenn and I finally lost the titles to Shield members Seth Rollins and Roman Reigns at the Extreme Rules pay-per-view in May 2013. We teamed for almost another month after that, but we ultimately “broke up,” pretty much as if we were a couple. The period I spent with Glenn as Team Hell No was one of the most fun times of my career. The live events, the backstage skits, videos for the WWE app, photo shoots for WWE Magazine—all of it was fun. We even had a good time doing early morning media where I’d make outlandish claims about him being a Communist while he would tell everyone about my desire to have a composting toilet. I’m not sure we sold a single ticket, which is the purpose of the whole thing, but we had a good time. Not only that, but our partnership was a great learning experience for me as well, because throughout Glenn’s long, successful career, he’s seen what works and what doesn’t. He’s one of the smartest people I’ve met in wrestling. He’s turned me on to a bunch of his Libertarian craziness as well, which is an entirely different book, but I have to say that knowing him has made my life better.
One of the biggest compliments I’ve ever been paid was when Glenn told me that our teaming up was some of the most fun he’d had in his entire career as well, which says a lot. When he said that to me, I had to try really hard not to get too emotional. I responded by telling him I was going outside to tan my taint.