One

Ribs

“Don’t ever fall asleep first. If I had one piece of advice for future wrestlers traveling in groups, that would be it.”

—CHRISTIAN

Forget everything you know about curved bones and barbecue sauce. When it comes to the world of sports entertainment, any type of practical joke or prank is referred to as a rib. It can be wrestler on wrestler, wrestler on wrestler’s car, wrestler on entire backstage, and even wrestler on poor convenience store clerk who just happens to be working at three in the morning. Whatever the combination, the amount of effort and thought that goes into some of these setups (some unfold over months!) is downright amazing, but there’s no denying, the results are hilarious. “We like to have fun with each other, and the ribs are all in good fun,” explains Kofi Kingston with his trademark smile. “But once you rib somebody, you have to expect to get ribbed back, and it’s probably going to be worse than the rib you did, so it kind of keeps spiraling. It tends to get out of control at times, but I try to stay out of the whole ribbing scene just because I don’t want to be ribbed. But we’re on the road so much, we have to find something to keep ourselves entertained, otherwise it’ll just be us driving on the road listening to boring conversations and bad radio.”

So here they are, the best road ribs in recent WWE history. Ever hear the one about Chris Jericho’s deaf music fan?

Can You Hear Me Now?

Christian

Back when I was in the Independents, I had this manager in Detroit who was deaf. And basically, if someone who is deaf wants to call you on the phone, they call this other person first and they type in what they want to say. This other person then reads what is typed word for word almost like a translator. They have to say the words exactly like it is written to them, no matter what it says. So back in the day, this manager used to rib me all the time and he’d call me throughout the week with his deaf telephone interpreter and he would say these really rude things. He’d use language not befitting a woman, and this poor woman operator would have to say it to me word for word. I’d have to respond, and I would be so embarrassed listening to this woman that I’d just give one-word answers. Yes. No. Maybe. That’s all I’d ever say because all I wanted to do was get off the phone as soon as possible. It was so embarrassing, and this manager just got a big kick out of it because he knew how uncomfortable it made me.

Anyway, out of the blue years later, I get a call and it’s the same sort of thing happening. I figured out right away that someone was trying to pull a rib on me, so I hung up and I immediately looked up the area code where this number came from. The number was a Minnesota area code, so I scrolled through my phone and looked to see who I knew from Minnesota. There was only one wrestler . . . Daivari. So I called him up and said, “Why are you trying to rib me, kid? You’re just a rookie here.” All of a sudden he got so quiet, so I told him, “Hey, you didn’t answer my question.”

He started apologizing, but I told him it was all right. All I wanted to know is if he told anyone what he was up to. When he told me no, I asked him to help me rib Chris Jericho.

So for months and months and months, Chris was with his group Fozzy, and we pretended we were a deaf fan of him and his music from England named Gertrude and we’d contact him using this same deaf translating service. We said that we got his number, and even though we attended all his concerts and we couldn’t hear him actually sing, we just knew he had a beautiful voice and we could tell that he was singing to me. We even went so far as to have Gertrude say that she told her mom about him and her mom told her it might be a long shot, but that she should go after him and try to make the relationship work. What’s funny is, Chris would come up to me and tell me what she’d said during the call and he’d ask me if I knew anything about this. He’d tell me how he had this crazy fan who loves his music and loves his words but she’s deaf. He was really starting to get freaked out. And then any time we’d head to England, we’d really crank up the calls. We’d hide around the corner and watch him answer his phone. He’d talk for a second, hang up his phone, and then we’d see him sitting there just shaking his head. So we’d call back and we’d see him look at the caller ID and he wouldn’t want to answer it, he’d just put the phone away and pretend it wasn’t ringing.

We actually had this going on for months until we finally let the cat out of the bag and told him it was us. He got a pretty good laugh out of it. The funniest moment was probably when we called and told him that Gertrude was going to his concert and that after the show she was going to head to the hotel so they could finally meet and talk about things, talk about their future together. You’d see him walking through the lobby of our hotel and he’d be looking side to side as he hurried to the elevator. The look on his face was too funny. I think he was really scared this deaf stalker was going to jump out at him from the elevator or something.

Yeah I Hear You, But That’s Not the Whole Story

Chris Jericho

When Christian was off one time for an injury, for some reason I got this e-mail about celebrity phone calls. It was this service where you could get various celebrities to call you on your birthday or for a special occasion or whatever it was. And one of the names on the list was this guy named Lash LeRoux. He was listed as a “WCW Wrestling Superstar” . . . he was in WCW for like five minutes and he had this really bad Cajun gimmick that always made Christian and me laugh. He’d talk like he was “Cay-jon,” the “Cay-jon” man. So I signed up for the celebrity birthday call, and you could choose the celebrity you wanted, and these celebrities were like Frank Stallone, Todd Bridges, Urkel, and Lash LeRoux. So I signed up for Lash LeRoux, and in the e-mail, you could type in the message you wanted to send. So I wrote: “To little Jason Reso [Christian’s real name], I hear you’re not feeling good. Keep your head up, buddy. We’re all pulling for you, little trouper.” So Jay was at home and he got the call: “Hey, this is Lash LeRoux!” Jay was like, “Yeah?” And Lash went through the message, like, “Hey little buddy, hope your knee feels better soon,” then he hangs up after like fifteen seconds. That was Christian’s celebrity call, and that was the reason he wanted to get his revenge with the deaf fan/stalker. It’s because I got him first with the Lash LeRoux celebrity birthday call. That’s what started it off.

But the thing about the deaf calls, he had the woman sounding like a complete psycho. He was having her say Fatal Attraction–type stuff, about how we were meant to be together, and I kept getting these calls every couple of weeks that would just get progressively crazier and crazier and crazier. And the one I remember most is this time when I was on a bus in England. Christian was on a different bus, but they had pulled up next to each other, so he was watching my reaction when his deaf stalker was saying things like, “Just because I’m three hundred and fifty pounds doesn’t mean I’m not beautiful.” And what’s funny is, I didn’t even know you could do this. The operator literally has to say whatever the message is, so the operator is saying everything so stoically, but what he’s saying is things like, “I’m going to come to your room and bury this knife in your chest if you don’t want to have sex with me.” It was crazy. And this one time when we were sitting on the bus, he could see me through the window being like, “What the hell is going on?” It was insane.

The get Back

Shelton Benjamin

Everyone knows that character-wise, I’ve had my problems with Cryme Tyme, but some of the problems extend outside the show as well. Like one night after a Pay-Per-View in Indianapolis, traffic was crazy and we were all trying to get out of the building. I’m trying to navigate through the crowd and through traffic, and as I pull up to the light, Cryme Tyme was in the car next to me. We’re pretty good at ribbing each other, so just for the heck of it, I threw an empty bottle of water from my car right into their car through an open window. We were all laughing and everything, and I pull away. But when I stop at the next light, I see Cryme Tyme pull up behind me and Shad gets out of the car. He runs up to my car and pours a complete bottle of some sort of chocolate protein shake over my windshield. It was so thick, even when I turn my wipers on, I can’t get this stuff off and I can’t even see through my windshield. I actually needed to pull over to a gas station a few blocks down the street just to clean this shake off, and there was chocolate everywhere. It was at that point I gave them a warning that there would be payback.

So about two or three weeks later, there was a super show in Nassau, and myself and one other wrestler stopped before the show and bought a couple of quarts of oil, peanut butter, and a down pillow. While Cryme Tyme were in the ring, me and this other gentleman proceeded to go out and pour the oil all over their car. Then we ripped the feathers out of the pillow and put the feathers all over the top of the car, all over the backseat, all over the front seat, and I spread peanut butter all over the steering wheel and the handles. It was a complete mess.

When Cryme Tyme came out and saw the car, they couldn’t believe what happened. But as it turned out, it wasn’t their car. They were actually riding with Primo, so poor Primo just got caught in the cross fire. The funny thing is, Cryme Tyme started yelling, “Ha-ha, you tried to get us, but you didn’t get us!” And I was like, “Okay, so what you’re saying then is you’re still in my crosshairs.” And they both look at each other, then they turn to me at the same time and were like, “Yeah, you’re right. You got us.”

I ended up paying Primo for the car to be cleaned, but it was worth it.

Boom Boom Pow

Randy Orton

We were in Tijuana about three years ago, and Revolution Avenue is notorious down there for all their little shops and clubs and strip bars and the craziness going on. I used to frequent that area when I was in the Marine Corps, back in 1999. All of us guys would go down there, taking the bus to San Diego, then taking the trolley to the border at San Ysidro and finally taking a cab to Revolution Avenue. It took about three hours for us to get there from base, but it was worth it. It was a ton of fun. Now I come back there all these years later, only now I’m a WWE wrestler. Back in the Marine Corps, no one bothered us. Now there are like a hundred kids following us up and down the street. It’s crazy.

That night, we found a shop that sold fireworks. Not your normal little Fourth of July fireworks. These were quarter sticks of dynamite. And I’m not just calling these things quarter sticks of dynamite, these were legit quarter sticks of dynamite . . . these things would blow your hands off. They were eight inches long with a twenty- or thirty-second wick on them that burned slow just so you could run away. They were nuts and they were only like eight bucks each, so I bought a dozen of them.

Later that night, we were doing a show outdoors at this bullfighting arena that was probably a century old if not more, and the place was huge. They had all of these little pits where they kept the bulls, but the pits were empty and they had all of this loose dirt, so a couple of us dug this big hole and put a quarter stick of dynamite underneath. And this fuse was so long that we were able to use some old shovels lying around and bury this thing pretty deep. Before this, we had lit a few off just to see what they could do, and man, were they dangerous! But this one that we buried, dirt went flying everywhere and the noise was just unbelievable. It sounded like a bomb went off. The vibrations and the percussions of this arena with 20,000 seats and all of the old stone and cement of this bullfighting arena . . . the walls shook when this thing exploded.

The thing is, we had a lot of policia down at the arena. The Mexican police were guarding the building outside and keeping order with all of the big mobs of people who were lining up to come in. All of these policia were armed with machine guns and pistols, and they heard this big boom and they all drew their weapons and ran inside. It was total chaos.

I thought I was going to get in trouble when they found out what I was doing, especially when you see all of these guys with machine guns running in your direction, but it ended up that they all thought it was funny . . . so we did it again.

At that point, Santino and I put our heads together and came up with the idea that we should act like I got arrested. So they handcuffed me and dragged me out like they were arresting me for lighting the dynamite. We actually walked through the backstage area with me in handcuffs, and I just kept my head down, like, “Damn, what have I gotten myself into.” Nobody knew what to think. They all thought I got arrested by the Mexican police, which is definitely not something you ever want to do.

Miz gets Down to Basics

Ted DiBiase

You need to be strong-willed and mentally tough for this life on the road or it will catch up with you. You need to eat right and train and you’re away from your family, so if you don’t love sports entertainment, if you’re not passionate about it, there’s no way you can do it. But the fans are amazing, and they make all of the travel and everything that goes along with it totally worth it. It’s tougher than people think because we’re not just traveling on Mondays and one Sunday a month. We’re traveling from town to town, and we’re not driven, we drive ourselves. We have to find hotel rooms, we live out of a suitcase, and you see the world out of a window. It’s hard, but it’s worth it. It’s especially worth it when we’re all together in the same hotel and something happens that just makes you laugh harder than you could ever expect.

I remember this one night we were all in France. We were all sitting down eating inside the hotel at the restaurant after the show, and it was late. It was the last night of our tour, and we were all just hanging out and talking. When it’s our last night of a long tour like this, we don’t usually sleep that night because then you can just sleep easier on the plane the next day. So most of us were down in the restaurant along with Hornswoggle. He’s a funny guy as it is, but he was ready to cause some trouble that night. He’s asking everyone, “Where is The Miz?” We were all looking for The Miz, but The Miz had already gone to bed. So Hornswoggle leans over to me and he’s like, “Teddy, we need to go find The Miz and wake him up. We need to do something to him.” We didn’t know what we wanted to do, but one thing we knew, we already had stolen the key to his room from earlier in the night. So we go up to his room, and Hornswoggle was carrying this giant bottle of water. I was actually just there to protect the little guy in case The Miz tried to kill him. I was his bodyguard.

So we go up there, and all the lights were out. Hornswoggle sneaks into his room, and while The Miz was sound asleep, he dumps the entire bottle of water over The Miz’s bed. Miz jumps out of bed, Hornswoggle starts to run out of the room, I’m running behind him, and Miz is running after us, and he chucks this bottle of water at us as we race down the hall. But what’s funny is, The Miz is running down the hall and all he’s wearing is his underwear, and I swear, we all stop at the same time and hear the door behind him go click. So now Miz has been woken up, he’s just had water poured all over him, and he’s locked out of his hotel room half naked. Hornswoggle and I then head down to the hotel lobby and tell all the boys to gather around and watch what’s about to happen, as the only way Miz could get back in his room was to go up to the woman at the front desk . . . we weren’t going to do it for him.

So The Miz walks down, and while he’s trying to figure out what to do soaking wet and half naked, we realize that we still have the key to his room. I tell Hornswoggle that I’ll stall The Miz while he goes back up to his room and finishes the job. Miz was a pretty good sport about it, walking off the elevator in front of all of the boys while everyone was laughing at him, and he actually sat down in the lobby for a minute in his underwear. But while he was doing that, Hornswoggle used his key to get back in the room and he stole all of The Miz’s clothes, all of his towels, all of his sheets . . . everything! He even dumped more water on his bed and was back down before Miz got his new key. And Miz had no idea. Everyone goes back to their rooms to go pack, as we only had an hour or two at this point before we needed to leave, and Miz didn’t even realize all his stuff was gone. He fell asleep for a few hours, then woke up the next morning and realized he didn’t have any clothes. We made him sweat it out until we were about to leave before we told him where his clothes were. Man, the midget got him good.

Permanent Ink

Christian

Don’t ever fall asleep first. If I had one piece of advice for future wrestlers traveling in groups, that would be it. The reason? I was on an airplane with the Hardys and Edge. We were all on a red-eye flight from Las Vegas to Chicago, and we might have all had a little too much to drink as they say, and the flight was pretty much empty, so we were all just hanging out in the back of the plane and having some laughs. Not anything crazy, but we were just all joking around and talking. I then made the mistake of thinking I was going to sit back and relax for a couple of seconds, but instead I ended up falling asleep. I woke up when we landed, and as I stood up, I started to notice people staring at me. I was like, “Hold on here a second, something is just not right.” Then I looked over at Matt and he had fallen asleep right after me, and I saw that they had taken a Sharpie and written all over his face with black ink. So I didn’t say anything to Matt, I just went into the bathroom, and of course, they had written all over my face with the same Sharpie. They had drawn the people’s eyebrow on me. They wrote “Dickface” across my forehead. So I go to the bathroom of the airplane and I’m trying to scrub as hard as I could to get all of this off my face. Of course, you just can’t do that great a job scrubbing the people’s eyebrow off your mug in an airplane bathroom, so when I come out, now I have marker smudged all over my face. I had to walk through the airport with Sharpie smeared everywhere, and I’m sure I didn’t look too great. But I did look better than Matt. Matt had no idea they had written on his face too. Not until he walked out into the airport and he realized everyone was staring at him. He finally put two and two together, that he fell asleep right after I did on the plane, and when he ran to the bathroom he found all the Sharpie drawings across his forehead too. And actually, remembering this story reminds me of something . . . I never got Edge back.

Two-for-One

Chavo Guerrero

One of the things you always need to do is keep yourself occupied, keep yourself entertained. You’re always looking for something to do. That’s how the ribs come into play. Just the other day, I was checking into the hotel at three in the morning and I saw a bag on the ground. One of the guys had checked in right before us but left his Adidas bag at the counter. I saw this and I figured it had to be one of the wrestlers. I asked the person at the counter, “Who just checked in?” and they told me it was Evan Bourne, Miz, Kofi, and Hornswoggle. So I convinced the lady at the desk to give me their room number. Then I called the room and pretended to be the cops. I was like, “This is Sergeant Daniels, did somebody leave an Adidas bag down here?” Miz was like, “Yeah, we did.” So I told him, “Could the person whose bag it is come down and bring their ID with them? We found some illegal substances in the bag and we need to talk to you.”

All of a sudden, they started freaking out and I could hear them arguing. “Did you put something in my bag?” “No!” “What are they talking about?” “Someone from the hotel must’ve put something in our bag!”

By the time they actually came down, they were so scared, but then they saw it was me and they started laughing. They were like, “You jerk!” They thought someone from the hotel tried to set them up or something. It was too funny.

But that wasn’t the only time I got The Miz. We were riding together one time and I got pulled over for speeding. The officer looked at me and he recognized me, but he didn’t recognize Miz. Then he asked me to step out of the car and walked me to the back. He was like, “You’re Chavo, right?” And I told him I was, but before he could say anything else, I told him, “Help me play a rib on my friend.”

He asked Miz for his license, and Miz’s license was really old and you couldn’t really read the expiration date or any of the info, so the cop totally played along and asked Miz to step out of the car. Then the cop really started grilling him about why his license looked like that and why he had an out-of-state ID. Miz tried to explain, but he was nervous, so I pretended to stick up for him, but the cop told me to shut up, how this didn’t concern me. He really played it up good. Miz was going crazy on the side of the road, but I couldn’t let it go any farther, so we told him it was a rib. It doesn’t get much better than getting a North Carolina state trooper to rib The Miz. Any chance we get, we’re going to get someone good, and the opportunities always seem to arise with some of these younger guys.

Walk It Out

Kofi Kingston

Me and Hornswoggle travel together all the time, but I don’t really let him drive because his car back home has pedal extenders that enable him to keep his feet at a normal length so that if the air bag goes off, it won’t suffocate him. When we’re on the road, the rental cars don’t have these pedal extenders, so if he wants to drive, he literally has to pull his seat all the way up to where his chest is on the steering wheel. God forbid if we ever got into an accident and the air bag went off, he would suffocate. So I never let him drive. But whenever we travel with The Miz and Evan Bourne, they both always play it up like they want Swoggle to drive. They really try to get everyone riled up, like, “Hey, why don’t you let Swoggle drive? What are you going to do about it?” But I’m like, “Look, I will not get in the car with him. Aside from his safety, I’m really concerned for our safety because Hornswoggle drives pretty recklessly. He’s not what you would call a conscientious driver by any means.” So I think it’s safer for everyone if I do the driving . . . or if anyone but Swoggle gets behind the wheel. That’s when we’re the safest.

So we were all driving through Canada this one time, and Miz and Evan were busting my chops about wanting to have Swoggle drive. So when we stopped to fill up for gas, I went inside to pay, and apparently they were all conspiring the whole time to see what I would do if Swoggle got behind the wheel. So when I got out of the gas station, Hornswoggle was in the front seat. At that same time, I saw The Miz start to get out of the car. Now, me and Hornswoggle travel and we spend so much time together that we can look at each other and start to read each other’s minds. So at this point, as soon as The Miz left the car, I made eye contact with Hornswoggle and I knew exactly what to do.

Now, all this time, Miz thought he was going to rib me. He thought he was working with Hornswoggle and he was on the good side of the rib. But not for long. When Miz left the car, I jumped in and Hornswoggle took off, leaving Miz at the gas station. I thought Hornswoggle would just drive up like ten or fifteen feet and we’d all get a good laugh and let The Miz back in. But it turns out, our hotel was about a half mile away and it was directly across this highway from the gas station, so Hornswoggle just kept on driving. He left The Miz at the gas station, drove all the way to the hotel, parked the car, then we sat there and watched The Miz try to cross this busy highway on foot and make his way back to our hotel. He was out there dodging traffic, then he finally made his way to this really big field that he had to cross in order to get to the hotel. Hornswoggle made him walk back the entire way. I couldn’t believe it.

It’s funny because Hornswoggle can’t be more than three and a half feet tall, but he bullies The Miz. He really is a bully, and there’s nothing The Miz can do about it.

Tanning Twins You On?

Randy Orton

We were in Alabama at a tanning salon, and there were six of us: Evan Bourne, me, Santino, Chris Masters, Cody Rhodes, and Ted DiBiase. Cody was the last one in the tanning bed, and it’s a common prank amongst us that if you leave that tanning bed door open while you’re tanning, we’ll go in there and steal your clothes. So it all started off with me finding out what room Cody was in, sneaking up, trying the door, and finding out the door was unlocked. Next thing you know, I’m in his room and I steal all of his clothes. Everyone is laughing outside, but I decide, “Let’s take this a step farther.” So I went back inside his room, and of course he’s tanning, so he’s got a towel over his face and he has no idea what is going on. So I take my foot and open the door, and there is Cody Rhodes with only a towel over his face and he’s, let’s just say, standing at attention. A picture was taken but we had to delete it so Cody would stop complaining. It was probably the most embarrassing moment of his life.

Rib Gone Wrong

Goldust

It was me, Owen Hart, Davey Boy Smith, and Billy Gunn, and we were driving from Montreal to Bangor, Maine. It was snowing like hell, and I was driving in this nice thick Cadillac. You can’t really see the road, but it just looked so flat out on the sides, like plains. Just flat plains on both sides. So I thought this would be a good time to rib the boys and scare the crap out of them. I figured I’d pull over and just drive straight through one of these fields. The moonlight was out but you still couldn’t see too far in the distance. So I got everyone talking and I’m driving pretty fast, but there was nothing around, and I mean absolutely nothing. There was this little itty-bitty general store on the right, and I pass that at about eighty miles per hour when I decide now is the time. I pull off to the right to head straight into this field. Only thing is, I was thinking it was a field, but it’s really not. I ended up hitting this snowbank and all you hear is boom-boom-boom-boom-boom! Snow is going everywhere, and it’s up over the hood—the snow was that deep. And now we’re stuck. Everybody is freaking out. All I hear is, “What the hell are you doing?” and “We’re going to die!”

I get out of the car, and when I see the damage, I’m like, “Damn, I just ribbed myself.” I knew I wasn’t going to be able to get us out of there. There wasn’t anybody on the road anywhere around, but luckily for us, here comes this truck. It had to be the only truck for miles, but he saw us and pulled us out. It was lucky because this was three in the morning, and here we are stuck off on the side of a road in a snowbank. We got back in and everyone was laughing about it, but it was still really cool because I had everyone so scared. Here I was thinking it was just a field, and I almost got us all frozen to death. It could’ve been disastrous, but it wasn’t. I guess that’s what still makes it so funny.

Fixing Up Marcus

The Miz

One night we were driving, and we had about five people in our car. We were trying to find someplace to watch the Oscar De La Hoya versus Floyd “Money” Mayweather fight. We end up getting out of our car and walking around, trying to find someplace that is showing the fight, and these guys carrying beer recognize me from being on The Real World. I ask them where we can watch the fight and they tell us to follow them through these bushes, where we end up at this fraternity house with about seventy people inside watching the fight. It’s standing-room-only inside the house, but these guys give us prime seating. So we all sit down, and Marcus Cor Von kicks back in one of the last La-Z-Boy chairs. This one guy sees Marcus, and he sits down on one of the arms of the chair, and he’s staring at Marcus. This guy is like, “Wow, you’re big.” And Marcus tells him, “Thank you very much. Just watching the show.” Then the conversation goes something like this:

“What’s your name?”

“Marcus.”

“What do you do?”

“I’m a professional wrestler.”

“Oh really? Wow. You have such big muscles.” And this guy actually starts feeling on Marcus’s biceps.

So Marcus turns to him and says, “Thank you very much, but I’d appreciate it if you don’t touch me.”

“Sorry about that,” the guy tells him, “but you’re just so cute.”

This guy goes on like this for the entire fight, and of course, we start egging the guy on. We tell him how Marcus is kind of shy and how you have to really warm him up. So he keeps asking Marcus if he wants something to drink, and Marcus is like, “Sure, I’d love a water.” We tell the guy to get him beer because once he starts drinking a little bit, he gets really touchy-feely.

So this guy just keeps trying and trying anything he can to talk to Marcus, and Marcus is getting really upset. Literally, Marcus gets up from his chair and walks to the complete other side of the house, and the guy follows him. Finally, Marcus says that he really needs to go, but the guy really wants his phone number. So of course, we gave the guy Marcus’s number, and as soon as we get to the car, Marcus starts getting these texts, like, “You’re so cute!” and “You’re so fun, why don’t you talk to me?” Marcus had no idea who it was, but the texts kept coming and we kept laughing. Things like that can really make a long car ride seem a whole lot shorter.

Bikini Blues

Beth Phoenix

It’s not the easiest thing in the world to wrestle in a bikini. We’re doing some really physical things out there and trying to really lay into each other, but at the same time, we’re trying to look hot. So I thought it might be fun to play a rib on Gail Kim one day by convincing her we were going to have a Bikini match.

It’s always a challenge for us girls to have a match like this because you’re showing so much of your body and you want to look perfect, so that involves tanner. So it’s a whole big process to prepare for these matches. In fact, the less clothes you wear, the more preparation is needed.

Anyway, I found out that we were scheduled to have a tag match on Raw, so I decided, since there’s all sorts of stress and anxiety involved in wrestling in a bikini, that I’d send a text message out to all of the girls to convince Gail that we were going to be in a Bikini match just to stress her out. So she came to TV all worried, and we let her sweat it out for a while before she finally realized that we were just having a regular match.

I’ve known Gail for a long time and we’ve had a lot of matches against each other, so it was fun to be able to get under her skin a little bit. I really wanted to let it go as long as possible, even if that meant her getting in her bikini and getting ready for the match, but unfortunately it never got that far. Maybe next time.

The Kidnapper

Shelton Benjamin

When I first got on the road with the SmackDown! crew, there were a lot of us traveling together. I was in a group with Charlie Haas, Rikishi, Rey Mysterio, and a few other guys . . . all together, there would be about ten of us. We would rent a few SUVs or minivans and follow each other around from town to town. But what Rey and I would do, we’d stop for gas and walk into a convenience store. Obviously, no one would know who we are because a lot of people don’t recognize Rey without the mask, and at the time I was so new, I could pretty much walk around unnoticed. But me and Rey would always do this thing where, right in front of the cashier, we’d bump into each other and we’d get into it like we were about to fight. Like, “Hey man, watch where you’re going!” “No, you watch where you’re going!” We would get to the point where we’d be real loud and animated, and we did it just to get a rise out of the cashiers. The cashier would always be like, “Please, guys, calm down. Please don’t fight in here. Just calm down.” We’ve done it so many times, and I swear, it’s the funniest thing ever when these cashiers think a fight is about to break out in their store.

The best was one time, Rey said something and I was like, “Fine, we’ll see . . . I’ll get you!” So I walk out of the store and hop in the van we rented. Then when Rey walked out the front door, we sped the van in front of the store, slammed on the brakes, threw the door open, and snatched Rey into the van before speeding off. We looked back and the cashier was freaking out like you couldn’t believe. He thought we just kidnapped one of his customers. I don’t know if he ever called the cops or what. All I know is it was funny as hell.

The Kidnapper

Rey Mysterio

What’s funny about this story is, as soon as we’d bump into each other, we’d start arguing and we’d really work the whole scene good, raising our voices louder and louder the more we got into it. “Hey, watch where you’re walking!” I’d say. Then Shelton would snap at me, “Screw you!”

“No, screw you, man!” I’d shout back. Shelton would walk away, and I’d turn to the cashier and be like, “Man, what a jerk. This guy is walking around like he owns the store. You just can’t treat people like that.” And the cashier would always be on my side, like, “You’re right. You can’t treat people like that.” We would go into it with words for so long, like at least five minutes, and that’s a long time to argue in a convenience store in the middle of the night. And you could tell the cashier would be getting more and more freaked out, and then we’d do the big finish by taking it outside. The clerk never knew if he should call the cops or what.

The ultimate was when Shelton pulled up in the van, grabbed me, and threw me in like he was kidnapping me. We were laughing our asses off inside the van. We actually pulled this stunt about six or seven times, and it never got old. Sometimes we would even do it at a convenience store near an arena, so there would be a lot of fans hanging out there, and they would start to look at us like stuff was about to go down between Shelton and me for real. Everyone would be looking at us in shock like we really hated each other. Those were good times.

 

Two

Road Warriors

“So not only did we just take a four-foot drop in our rental car, but now we’re locked in this speaker store’s parking lot.”

—JACK SWAGGER

Think your back aches after a tough day on the job? Can’t wait to get out of rush-hour traffic just so you can get home and relax? Now think about driving three hundred miles to a show, getting suplexed a few times by a four-hundred-pound opponent, then cramming back into a small rental car with three or four other muscle-bound men as you drive three hundred miles more to the next show. Now do that over two hundred days a year. “The travel we do can be brutal at times,” Randy Orton tells me. “You figure a normal family goes on vacation across the country and back over a week, and that takes everything out of them to the point they almost need a vacation from their vacation. And they might only do that once a year. We live out of a suitcase. We live out of hotels and rental cars where three-hundred-mile drives are the norm. I’m around these guys more than I’m around my wife and my child. It’s tough. We’re a close-knit group of guys. Guys you can depend on and talk to and we’re there for each other. Band of brothers . . . it really is.”

With all that time on the road, the Superstars and Divas have gathered quite a collection of road trip stories. From late-night crashes in broken-down rentals to run-ins (and posing) with the police, you’ll never view driving cross-country the same again.

Imagine driving down the freeway only to see Mark Henry lifting his car out of a ditch in the middle of the night . . .

World’s Strongest Man . . .
No, Seriously

MVP

I was in a car one night with Mark Henry, and Mark was driving us to the airport. We end up going in the wrong direction, so Mark decides to make a U-turn, and our car goes off the road a little bit and gets stuck in ice and snow. He kept hitting the gas, but our wheels were just spinning. We were stuck. We look at the clock, and time was really ticking down on us. If we didn’t do something fast, we were going to miss our flight. So Mark told me to stay in the car, and when he gave me the word, I was supposed to hit the gas. I see Mark walk around to the back of the car, and next thing I know, he’s actually lifting the back of the car up off the ground. And this wasn’t a small car. We’re talking about a Chevy Impala being lifted out of a ditch in the snow. The World’s Strongest Man literally lifted the back end of our car so we could make our flight on time. I was so stunned, I didn’t even have any words, and when he got back in the car, all he said was, “Man, I sure hope we don’t miss our flight.” The man didn’t have to say anything else. He knew what needed to be done and he did it. His sheer strength just left me in awe. Mark Henry is better than a tow truck.

 

 

Strike a Pose

John Morrison

I call WWE an express train with very few stops. You get on the train and you usually don’t get off until your career is over or you’re injured. I got on this train in 2003 and I’m still on this train and everything that I’ve done and seen feels like a blur. It’s like I just watched everything fly by at 100 miles per hour.

But when you’re on the road, some crazy stuff just ends up happening. I remember this one time I was driving through Cleveland at about 110 miles per hour, or something ridiculously unsafe. And of course, I get pulled over by a cop. I was driving with Melina, and when the cop pulled me over he started yelling at me to get out of the car. I could tell by his voice that he was really nervous. He didn’t have his gun drawn, but he must’ve thought I was some kind of drug dealer or criminal to be driving that fast. He’s watching my every move, yelling at me to get out of the car. I roll the window down and put my hands out, and I yell to him, “I’m really sorry, sir. I’m just a WWE Superstar.”

He’s like, “What!?!”

So I told him again that I was a WWE Superstar, but he didn’t understand what I was talking about, so I started to name-drop everyone from Hulk Hogan to Undertaker to The Rock. He looked at me and started shaking his head. “You don’t look like one,” he said.

So I was like, “Actually, I’m the Intercontinental Champion.” But he still didn’t believe me. That’s when I told him I’d make him a deal. I told him that if he’d give me a break and not give me a ticket, I’d show him the championship belt. He looked at me, still not really believing me, but then he said, “Okay, if you show me your championship, I’ll think about it.”

And I swear, the second I took my championship belt out of my bag, he forgot all about being an officer and reverted back into little-kid mode. I handed him the belt, and he was holding it up like he had just won the title. Then he put it over his shoulder, and then he actually had me pose in front of his cop cam on his car where I was holding his hand up.

I don’t think any of the boys would’ve ever believed this story if Viscera hadn’t driven by right when I was holding the cop’s hand up. The next day I was at the building trying to tell the story, and nobody believed me. They all thought it was BS. Five minutes later, Viscera walks in and was like, “Hey, Johnny, was that you standing on the side of the road just outside of Cleveland taking pictures with some cop and your belt?”

Everyone just looked at me, and I was like, “Yes, thank you. True that. That was me.”

Just goes to show, it doesn’t matter who you are, for some reason people see that championship and go nuts.

Divas in a Ditch

Mickie James

Life on the road is rough because if it’s under three hundred miles to the next town, we’re driving it. I remember there was a Monday Night Raw in Sioux Falls and I was driving back to Omaha because that’s where we were flying out of the next morning. There was this huge blizzard, and they had shut down the roads for a while and weren’t letting anyone drive. So they finally opened the roads, and I was riding with Katie Lea Burchill in this white Dodge Charger. Katie Lea is from Europe, and she was saying how she had never seen snow like this in Europe. So I start telling her, yeah, you need to be really careful because even though they cleaned the roads, there’s still a lot of black ice out there. I was telling her how you could see the ice patches, but how the black ice isn’t really something you could see. I’m sitting there explaining how you’re supposed to navigate your way through black ice while I’m driving, and just as I tell her what you’re supposed to do when you hit a patch of black ice, we hit a patch of black ice. I was like, “Oh no, oh no!” And we started to fishtail a little bit, but luckily I managed to steer the car straight. I was like, “Oh my God, that was a close one.” As soon as I said that, the whole back end spun out and I started doing 360 after 360 after 360 after 360. We were in the middle of the highway with cars flying by us from both sides. In the middle of the road there was this huge median with a big ditch, and we had already done four 360s at least, and there we were in the median still spinning. The only way I can describe it is like we were living in a real-life snow globe because there was snow spinning all around us and there was nothing we could do about it. I’m fearing the worst, and when I look over, Katie is holding on for dear life. We both just kept screaming, “Make it stop, make it stop!”

Finally we stopped, and we were stuck in the middle of the median in this big ditch and we were packed in about three feet of snow. I get out of the car, and I’m not sure what to do, so I call the tow company, but they tell me that they can’t come out and tow us because the police have just called all people off the road and the tow company needs to wait until the morning to find out if they get the all-clear. But that might not be until five or six in the morning. So I’m on the phone and I ask them, “So what am I supposed to do?” And they tell me that it’s a $1,500 fine if they come out onto the road and help. But I’m outside in this blizzard and my car is stuck in a ditch, so I tell them, “I’ll pay your fine if you come out.” I had a flight to catch the next morning, and I just really wanted to make it to the hotel and get warm. But they told me, “Sorry, ma’am, we can’t do that. It’s against the law.”

So I had Katie get behind the wheel, and I told her, “Okay, we’re going to rock it. When I tell you to, gun it. Gun it, then let it off, gun it, then let it off.” My job was to push the car while she gunned it, and I thought we could get the car back up the hill. Mind you, it is freakin’ freezing outside, I’m in three and a half feet of snow, and coming from the show I’m still wearing what I wore on Raw, which is Diva clothing: not much to it and definitely not snow appropriate. I have my little leather jacket on and my Diva pants and I have the car rocking, but all that’s happening is the tires are spinning and spitting dirty snow all over me. I’m frozen to the bone by that point, so I text John Cena and Beth Phoenix. I’m telling them how I’m stuck in this ditch and I don’t know what to do. Luckily, they were both only a few minutes behind us on the same road, but by this point, literally, I saw my whole life flash in front of me while I was in this snow globe. My body was shaking, I was so freezing, and the only gloves I had were to keep me warm while I was walking from my car to the hotel—they weren’t gloves to try to push a car out of a ditch during a blizzard.

But then I think we’re saved because a cop in a truck pulls over before John or Beth even arrive. He calls me over, making me climb out of the ditch and walk all the way over to where he parked for some reason instead of getting out and walking toward us. Then he goes, “Ma’am, where do you think you’re going?” So I tell him I already called the tow company but they wouldn’t come out, and he goes, “Of course they’re not going to come out. And ma’am, you can’t be down there trying to push your car out of the ditch.” So I ask him, “What am I supposed to do? I have a flight to catch in the morning.” Then he tells me, “I can either take you to a hotel or you can come to the station and wait until the road is clear, but that won’t be until five or six in the morning.” But my flight was at seven, so I told him there was no way I could do that. So he asks me, “What do you want me to do then? Do you want me to take you to a hotel, or do you just want me to leave you here?” Next thing I know, he starts asking me if I’m the one who sideswiped some car. He’s like, “Are you sure you didn’t hit anybody?” And when I tell him no, he just goes, “Huh,” and he leaves Katie and me there. He just drove off.

So there I was, walking back to the car and then trying to push it back up the hill again while Katie tried to gun it one last time. I still remember John finally pulling up and looking down at us after the cop had already left. He was like, “Get back in the car and warm up.” Within a few minutes it ended up being John, Beth, Cody Rhodes, Ted DiBiase, and one of our security guys all out there trying to push my car out of this ditch. And I’ll tell you how crazy John is, he was in sneakers and shorts, the shorts he wears to the ring, and a T-shirt. While the rest of us were trying to get bundled and wrapped up with as much as we can find, he’s out there in a blizzard in his shorts.

Anyway, we all get behind the car and push it out of this ditch and back onto the road. Somehow, someway, we were able to all work together and get my car back on the road. So what we did was, we all followed each other the rest of the way to the hotel. We were this big trail of cars slowly working our way through the blizzard at 30 mph down the highway. Then we saw some guy who had also spun out up ahead, so we all pulled over and tried to get him out of the ditch as well. Then that same cop pulled up and told the guy that he had to leave his car there, so the guy hopped in someone’s car and took off.

But all I kept thinking was, “Why would that cop just leave me there?” What if I was all alone? Would he have just left me to freeze? But looking back, we’re just lucky there wasn’t a whole lot of traffic on the road when we started to spin. Once we started into our 360s, I was just so worried that we were going to keep going all the way through the median to the other side and spin through the oncoming traffic. We’re very fortunate that we ended up in the ditch, even if it did take us a long time to get out. Luckily, with the muscle of all our guys and the sheer brute strength of a couple of Divas, we were able to get out of there.

Wrestler’s Rhapsody

Santino

One time we were on a long road trip. I was with Kennedy and Randy Orton, and they were both taking naps while I drove. Then that song “Bohemian Rhapsody” came on from Queen. I turned it up a little bit. I looked back and they were still sleeping, so I turned it up a little more. All of a sudden that part of the song comes on where it goes, “Figaro! Figaro!” and they both woke up and sang the different parts. Right from his sleep, Randy wakes up and sings, “Figaro! Figaro!” and Kennedy wakes up and sings, “Galileo! Galileo!” It was too funny. It was like a real-life Wayne’s World moment.

Hungry Man

Mark Henry

As far as the camaraderie and enjoying the journey, life on the road is good. But being a big guy, it’s hard to maneuver around hotels, flights, and small rental cars. It’s difficult.

One of the funniest things that happened was the night Tony Atlas and I were in a car after a show in Monroe, Louisiana, and as we were driving, I kept telling him that I was hungry and that we needed to pull over and get something to eat. But Tony kept saying we’d stop later, even though I told him over and over that I wanted to eat. Next thing we know, the tire on our car popped and we’re stuck on the side of the road. But the rental car agency, they didn’t put all of the tools to fix the tires in the trunk. So we called Avis and started fussing at them, and in the meantime I’m cussing Tony out because I’m hungry, I’m stuck on the side of the road, and because he never pulled over I have no food.

So I call Justin, our announcer, and I tell him what happened, how we called Avis and they’re sending someone out to repair our tire, and I tell him that if he passes a Subway or something, that he should bring me a sandwich. So Justin actually finds a Subway that’s still open, and he buys me a sandwich and brings it to me before they come fix our tire. So there I am, sitting on the trunk of the car eating my sandwich as traffic flies by. I’m just hoping I don’t get hit, but I don’t care, all I wanted to do was eat at that point.

Tony was sitting in the car because he was scared. All he kept saying was, “There are snakes out there. I don’t want to get bit by no snakes.” I told him, “C’mon, man, there aren’t any snakes on the highway.” So now Jesse and Festus pull up, and they have the same kind of car we rented, so we go into their trunk, pull out the tools, and start fixing our tire. Next thing we know, Tony jumps out of the car to help, but he doesn’t have the car in park. When he was in the car his foot was on the brake, but now he jumps out, taking his foot off the brake, and Jesse was underneath the car changing the tire. The new tire wasn’t even on yet and now the car starts rolling back. Everyone was like, “Oh no!” Jesse gets pulled back out of the way—he almost got crushed by the car. That’s not the funny part. We were all like, “Damn, Tony, why didn’t you put the car in park?” And he said, “Why does everybody always try to blame everything on me? Awww!”

So now they go back to fixing the tire, but we were right on the edge of the road, and I’m standing there making sure no car gets close to hitting us. By that time the roadside assistance guy calls and says he’s lost. We told him exactly where we were at, the highway, the mile marker, and everything. So I told him, “We got the car fixed now, so you can just turn around and go back.” This was an hour and a half after we initially called. And the guy goes, “If you don’t mind, I’m going to tell Avis that I helped you so I can get paid.” I was like, “I mind.”

After the tire is fixed, Tony tells me that we should drive to Nashville . . . that was like four and a half hours away! I told him, “There’s no way in hell I’m riding on this donut for the next four and a half hours.” He tells me, “Well, if we go fifty miles per hour, we’ll be fine.” And I’m like, “Tony, it’s going to take us six or seven hours to get to Nashville on a donut, with a good chance we’re going to end up popping the donut and be on the side of the road once again.” I told him we’d stop in Birmingham, change cars, call the office, and tell them that we might be late for the show. We’d get there when we get there. Tony started panicking. He wasn’t used to calling the office and dealing with problems. He was used to dealing with problems his own way, but that’s another story. I still just remember Tony sitting there mad, saying, “We’re stuck on the side of the road and you worried about eating.” I was like, “That’s because you didn’t work today.” What can I say, I wanted a sandwich.

Jumping the Wrong Curb

Jack Swagger

The road: That’s where you really earn everything that’s thrown at you. The travel schedule is crazy. Once you get into it, three months seems like a year because you’re working every weekend. There are a lot of good times too, because we have a good group of guys, a really good atmosphere backstage, so to travel with these guys, they really become your family. The three-hundred-mile drives can be tough, but it’s worth it.

Strange things end up happening, though, when you spend so much time driving. A few months ago, we were in Laredo, Texas, trying to get to this Outback Steakhouse. I’m driving down the street and all of a sudden it turns into a one-way street heading into this hotel. But instead of pulling all the way around to get to the Outback, I think I can cut through the hotel parking lot, but as I pull around, I see that the parking lot is all blocked in. So I’m driving around and I see this little area open up, and it looks like a little service road, so I figure I’ll just drive down off what looked like a little curb and we’ll be right there. Only thing is, as I’m driving out of the parking lot and onto the grass in front of this curb, I realize the drop is actually about four feet down, right onto cement. So I try to stop, but I hit the brakes too late and we can’t stop and the front wheels are off the curb. I try to back up, but the tires are just spinning, so the only place I can go now is down. So I take the rental car and we do the drop. Bam! Not too much damage, just messed up the bumper a little bit. But now we realize we’re not even in the Outback parking lot. We just dropped into the parking lot of some speaker store, and not only is the store closed, they have their parking lot gated off and the gate is locked. So not only did we just take a four-foot drop in our rental car, but now we’re locked in this speaker store’s parking lot.

So we’re looking around and we find some little wooden pallets, and there we are in the middle of the night, trying to build a bridge back up the four-foot drop so we can drive back to our original spot by the hotel. Unfortunately, all we end up doing is messing the car up some more. Next thing we know, a cop pulls up and he’s just looking at us, like, “What do you guys think you’re doing?” Luckily for us, the cop ended up calling the owner, and the owner of the speaker store came down and unlocked the gate for us. The whole time, though, the cop just kept looking at us like we were idiots.

Full Moon

Maria

I like to drive fast. Very, very fast. And this one time I was driving fast, and of course I get pulled over, but what I didn’t realize is that I had another speeding ticket that I forgot to take care of. So I’m driving by myself in the middle of Ohio, there’s nobody around for miles, and I’m going about eighty-five to ninety in a sixty-five-mile-per-hour zone. When the cop pulls me over, he tells me, “I can’t let you drive. You don’t have a valid license.” I was like, “What?” I didn’t realize that I had this other speeding ticket out, so they ended up towing my car and I was stuck on the side of the road with all of my suitcases waiting for a cab to come pick me up. All of a sudden, this other car goes zooming by and my phone starts ringing. It’s Matt Hardy, and he’s like, “Are you on the side of the road?”

I started telling him what happened, how I don’t have a car, and he ends up pulling around, and he’s with his brother Jeff, and they pick me up and bring me to the show. They always tell me they’re my angels now because they picked me up from the side of the road. It was absolutely ridiculous, but yes, this really happened to me.

The other thing that happens a lot on the road is people mooning each other. Of course, I can’t name names on that one, but we like to entertain ourselves with that.

And of course, it’s always an adventure driving with Maryse because she doesn’t know where anything is inside the car. I even have to tell her where the blinker is. I remember this one time we were driving through some town and we decided to stop at a Starbucks. We figure there are so many places to stop that we wouldn’t see anyone, so we get our coffee and hop back in the car. But when Maryse goes to pull out, she somehow hops up on a curb, and for like two minutes we’re seriously driving over this big curb in front of Starbucks. We just laugh it off and think it’s no big deal because nobody was around to see what was happening, but then when we get to the show, Fit Finlay was like, “Was that you guys?” He had seen us driving over the curb laughing our butts off and not even caring. We figured that between shows was about three hundred miles, no way anyone saw that. But it’s always that way. We always end up stopping at the same gas stations, the same places to go to the bathroom, the same food places. For some reason, everyone always stops at the same places.

Tennessee, Part 1

Shad

My most messed-up road story is the time Jay and I were driving through Tennessee. We left our hotel and started driving, but when we were on the road, some guy in his minivan, driving his family, he cut us off. And so me, being a New Yorker, I sped up and got ahead of him and cut him off back, then just kept driving. A couple of miles up the road, a cop came flying up on us, got in front of us, and pulled us over. First thing he asked us is if we had drugs in the car. I told him we didn’t have any drugs. Then he wanted to see my license and registration, and I said, “Cool.” I tell him it’s a rental car, then I reach over to grab my license and the cop rips the door open. He pulls out his Taser gun and points it at me, telling me to get out of the car. I didn’t want to get out, but he said he was going to Tase me if I didn’t get out, so I got out. When I stand up, I’m 6'7", this guy is 5'8" and he’s an old, fat, hillbilly cop. Next thing I know I’m in handcuffs and the cops are telling me how they know we’re drug dealers and how they just know we’re transporting drugs over state lines. I’m like, “Really?” Then all of a sudden, there are like six more cop cars pulling up along with a drug dog. The dog goes in and starts sniffing the car, and the only thing they find is some weed residue that must’ve just been left over from the rental car. I’m telling him it’s a rental car, that we don’t have any drugs, and that the residue is not from us . . . it’s a damn rental, but he tells me that he’s taking me to jail.

To make things worse, we had an autograph signing that we needed to get to and it was two hours away. So I’m sitting in the back of the cop car, and we’re on our way to jail, and I tell the cop, “You know why you’re doing this, right?” And he’s like, “Why?” So I tell him, “It’s because I’m black.” The cop was like, “No, you were breaking the law.” So I asked him, “What law was I breaking?” And he tells me I was speeding. After all that, he was taking me in for speeding. I was going like two miles an hour over the speed limit and they were arresting me! So I kept talking. I told him how he screwed up. How he put me in handcuffs in front of everyone, so he had to arrest me even if I didn’t do anything. This guy argued with me the entire way to the police station. We finally pull up, they close the gate, and this guy tells me I have two choices: I can either wait until Monday and go to court, or if I give him one hundred dollars, he’d let me go right there. So of course, I gave him a hundred dollars, and on the hundred-dollar bill I wrote “F—- you!” I walked out of there a free man.

The funny thing about it was, one of the other cops told me that they were informed of two black guys running drugs by the minivan we cut off. Turns out the guy driving the minivan was an off-duty officer. The cop in the minivan called it in saying we were smoking blunts as we were driving down the road. I told them I don’t smoke weed. I’ve never failed a drug test. The cop told me that once they got on the crime scene with the drug dog, they knew we were clean. They knew the residue was from the rental car and not from us. And they also knew who we were. Last thing he said was, “Can I get your autograph?”

Tennessee, Part 2

JTG

There are some good times in Tennessee. It’s not just all about what Shad said.

One night we ran out of gas and we had to pull over to the side of the road. We had seen a gas station, but it was miles away. Shad wanted to hike there, but I was like, “Hey man, I’m rockin’ Timbs here, I’m not hiking to no gas station.”

So I stuck my leg out and some ladies pulled over. We didn’t get to the gas station right away, but we had some fun on the way there, ya dig?

The other thing we love to do is roast each other in the car. Me, Shad, and Kofi go at it nonstop. I love to roast. We love to make it hot. Just thinking about it makes me hot. That’s how I get my kicks, that’s my passion, roasting Kofi. I’ll roast him right now, that fake Jamaican. I call him a Jafakin’. I love Kofi though, that’s my boy. But we roast each other from sunup to sundown. It can be three, four in the morning and it’s still just continuous roast. Then when one of us does something good and we start to compliment each other, we get right back to cutting each other down. We cut each other right back down to reality. Like, “Hey, that was a nice match . . . but you’re still bad.”

Was That Flying Hummus?

Dolph Ziggler

I’m a boring guy. Life on the road for me is usually gym-hotel-sleep–wrestling show . . . gym-hotel-sleep–wrestling show. There was this one time, though, where we saw Gail Kim driving in the car next to us, so naturally we started throwing plastic bottles at her car. After a couple of the plastic bottles hit her car, and we naturally went back and recycled them, we all stopped up the road and had a good laugh while we got gas. Next thing we knew, Gail Kim and Alicia Fox came out of the convenience store and pelted us with powdered donuts. We all thought, “Oh how funny, everything is now even and fair.” But then as I was about to open my car door, Gail Kim took a bowl of hummus and threw it over the roof of her car and winged it at me. I just happened to be turning to look at something at the same time for some reason, so I saw it out of the corner of my eye and managed to avoid it. The flying hummus grazed my hair and splattered all over the car behind me. Gail Kim is here and alive right now, so that is testament that she never hit me. But hummus at a gas station? I didn’t even know you could do that. A sandwich maybe, but hummus?

Usually when you have a really good car ride, though, you’re not distracted by flying food or bottles. If you’re having a real good car ride, you don’t ever turn the radio on. I’ve been traveling with Tommy Dreamer and Christian for a little while now, and I don’t know that we ever turn on the radio. Here are a couple of guys who have been around, been to the top, and are still at the top of their games. So it helps me out riding along with them. They are really helping me become a better Superstar. One thing they stress to me is how some people have a couple thousand matches, and you’re going to have a bad night somewhere along the road. Sometimes you have maybe twelve hours to think about it before your next match, and you need to use that time to figure out what your mistakes were and let it go. You need to move on to the next match and do better next time. Almost like a quarterback in football: You get picked off, you have to lead your team right back down the field and score a touchdown. It’s hard to let those bad matches go, but you need to move on if you want to move up.

Look Ma, No Hands

Santino

Randy Orton likes to mess with me while I’m driving all the time. He’ll check my blind spot, and if no one is beside me, he’ll grab the wheel and change lanes on me really fast without saying anything. It just got to the point where now when I see him grab the wheel, I try to get him back a little by taking my hands completely off the wheel while he’s turning. I’m like, “Go ahead and take it.” I know he’s not going to make us smash.

Turning Heads

Ezekiel Jackson

I’m used to being the big guy, but then I started traveling with Khali. So I’m walking into places, and now people are looking at me wondering who is this small guy talking to the really big guy. I remember walking into a Denny’s with Khali in Alabama. Everyone stopped what they were doing and gave us one of those “holy crap” moments. Here I am, I’m not a small person, but I’m walking into Denny’s in Alabama with a giant. You can imagine the faces of everyone inside. You don’t even get comments from people, they’re just speechless.

No matter where we go to eat, though, it’s always funny to see the looks on people’s faces. Here I am, a 6'4", 300-pound dude with muscles bulging from everywhere. Then you have a 7'4", 400-something-pounder walking in. It’s like, “Holy crap!” What else can you even say? You just see them look, then there are a lot of whispers around the tables. That’s life on the road for me and Khali.

Unfortunately, when we do travel, everybody still thinks I’m Bobby Lashley. I’ve been called Bobby Lashley, I’ve been called Ahmed Johnson . . . but I’m Ezekiel Jackson. If you don’t recognize me, that’s cool, but don’t get mad at me if I don’t sign. I’m not going to sign Bobby Lashley’s name.

The iPhone King

Christian

In my car, it’s usually me, Edge, and Tommy Dreamer. Then when Edge got hurt, Dolph Ziggler jumped in with us, and in our car it’s nonstop talking. We talk about everything and anything from wrestling to sports to politics to finance. There are a lot of different things going on in our car, a lot of good debate. What’s great for me is the invention of the iPhone, because so many times there are disputes about who is right and who is wrong during these talks, so I just jump on my iPhone and use Google or Wikipedia to figure out 99.9 percent of the time that I’m right. We always seem to argue over which actor appeared in a certain movie or which band played a certain song. The iPhone makes it so easy to end an argument.

iDisagree

Tommy Dreamer

Christian is never always right. That’s just Christian’s ego talking there, but he is the master of everything iPhone. He looks up anything and everything that we might have a question about. It’s pretty funny because it could be the most random question about the drummer of some band we hear on the radio, and he looks up everything he can on the guy and then informs us. He’s like a human Pop-Up Video guy.

But when it comes to traveling, I don’t think fans realize just how much we’re actually on the road. On the ECW/SmackDown! side, we usually work Saturday, Sunday, Monday, then we do TV on Tuesday. They’ll fly us from our home to wherever our first destination is, then we usually get into a rental car and drive anywhere up to three hundred miles. It’s just what we do. We spend a lot of hours in hotel rooms and inside cars. But this time inside the car, it’s so important because this is where you learn by talking to some of the veterans who you share rides with. Wrestling isn’t just about living your dream and having fun. This is a business, and we talk about any variety of topics just to keep awake, from current events to your future, to what’s going on with your career. A lot of younger guys don’t realize that it’s hard to find that longevity in this business. I’m sure Christian can Google name after name of guys who have come and gone in this business using his iPhone. Guys who didn’t know anything about the importance of financial planning or trying to build for their future. That’s the kind of stuff you learn in the car. If you’re a young guy just starting out, the most important thing you could do for your career is to ride with a couple of veterans so you can learn about this business the right way.

Measuring Up

Evan Bourne

One time I was traveling with Colin Delaney and we had just gotten on the road. We were the super rookies at this point, and we were riding with another guy named “Cadillac” Casey James, who was a developmental guy who never really made it on TV. But while we were driving, we all started having this debate: How long are the white stripes in the middle of the road? Blazing down the highway, they look like they’re only three or four feet, but Cadillac says, “No, they’re ten feet long. I swear to you, they’re ten to twelve feet long.” Me and Colin are like, “Hell no. At max these things are six feet, but the lines are not taller than us. These lines are not longer than me.” So we end up pulling over into a Whataburger parking lot and go out to the street to stand out there on the lines and measure foot to foot, toe to toe. And I’ll be darned, these white lines in the middle of the road really were twelve feet. We were dead wrong. So here we are, Colin and I are in the middle of the street at like one in the morning, walking a tightrope along these lines to measure, when we see another car pull into Whataburger. They turn right by us, and it’s Teddy Long and Mark Henry. They both just looked at us, they looked at each other, and Teddy was like, “What are you boys doing out there in the middle of the street?” It was definitely a shocking experience for them to see us out there, but we had to know who was right about those lines. I still can’t believe they’re twelve feet.

That’s the Jam

MVP

My musical tastes are real eclectic. I listen to a lot of hip-hop and jazz. I’m really into Jamiroquai, Paul Wall, Led Zeppelin, Young Jeezy . . . depends on my mood. I had Chris Masters in the car with me a while back, and as we’re driving along we were listening to jazz for a while. And this was classic jazz . . . a trio with the drummer, pianist, and a trumpet. I love jazz, especially the classic stuff with Charlie Parker, and after about five or ten minutes, Chris Masters turns to me and is like, “Man, this is really cool.” He had never really listened to jazz like that before. After a while, the song is over and there’s a commercial on the station, so I change it, and Living Colour is on with “Cult of Personality.” He had never heard that song before. Then when I told him they were black, I blew him away. He was like, “For real?” A couple of minutes later, Fleetwood Mac came on with “The Chain,” and he had never heard that either. I think by the time we had finished our drive, I had enlightened him and broadened his musical horizons. Everyone always looks at me and thinks, “MVP: hip-hop, rap, and that ballin’ Superstar,” but musically, my tastes are all over the place. I like what I like. I can talk music for hours.

The All-American American’s
Ultimate Road Hit List

Jack Swagger

One thing people don’t know about me is, I love to sing. That doesn’t mean I’m a good singer—in fact, I’m a horrible singer—but I love doing it. And while I love music, I have absolutely no musical ability whatsoever. It’s funny because every once in a while I’ll be jamming out and I’ll catch a strange look from somebody I’m riding with, like, “Dude, c’mon, let’s wrap this up.”

Anyway, here are five of my favorite artists to drive to and sing along with (to the dismay of everyone else in the car) . . .

5. Madonna, “Like a Prayer”: You gotta have a little something for everyone, and you never know when you’ll be traveling with a Diva.

4. Billy Idol, “Rebel Yell”: I just love Billy Idol, and this song gets me pumped up. Every trip needs a song like this to get your heart really pumping.

3. Taking Back Sunday: One of my favorite bands. It’s hard to pick one song, so just put all their CDs on your iPod before a trip.

2. Kings of Leon: Everything Kings of Leon does is great. They’re from Oklahoma and are big Oklahoma Sooner fans.

1. Dr. Dre, “Let Me Ride”: Talk about a song that makes me sing. This is my favorite hip-hop song of all time. [Starts singing] “Let me ride . . .”

Million Dollar U-Turn

IRS

Back in the early nineties, Ted DiBiase and I were tag team partners and our team was known as Money Inc. I remember going down the New York State Thruway, we were on the toll road and it had to be about two or three in the morning, so there was no traffic on the road. There was snowy weather, and it was getting pretty nasty out there, and as we’re driving along, driving along, we miss our exit. So we keep driving, but then we see the sign that the next exit isn’t for thirty miles. So Ted goes, “We’re just going to have to turn around in the middle of the thru-way.” We hadn’t seen another car in probably twenty to thirty minutes, so he sees a spot to make a U-turn, and we turn around in the middle of the thruway and start heading back in the opposite direction. Sure enough, five minutes later, we see the blue lights, and a patrol car was pulling us over from behind. It was just one of those deals we couldn’t believe. Here we were, driving for twenty to thirty minutes without seeing another car, then as soon as we do something we shouldn’t, the cops show up. Why does it always seem to happen like that?

My Bad

Tyson Kidd

Driving from Tampa to Miami, it’s myself, Natalya, and David Hart, and there was a sign that said “Last Stop for Gas.” I had about a quarter of a tank left, but it said that the next gas was in eighty miles. I figured I could make eighty miles easy. And this way, if we didn’t stop, we would’ve gotten to Miami by eight o’clock the night before the show. So we’re driving, and Natalya of course says, “I don’t know, I think you should stop for gas.” But I assure her, “No, no, it’s fine.” Long story short, we ran out of gas. I kept seeing it was low, and I was watching the miles on the car, and when we got to about seventy-eight miles, we were out. And there were no service stations anywhere. DH was sleeping, Nattie was half asleep and not really paying attention, so I kept punching in searches for service stations on the GPS, and the GPS is now telling me the closest is twenty-four miles away. I’m like, “Oh no!” Now, I’m pretty stubborn, so what’s even worse for me than running out of gas is me being wrong. I just kept saying, “No, no, we gotta get there. We gotta get there.” Well, next thing we know, we lose the power, and I start to pull over to the side of the road. Natalya looks at me and says, “You ran out of gas, right?” And I had to tell her, “Yep, we ran out of gas.”

So now we’re on the side of the road in the middle of nowhere and there’s nothing around but highways. But I knew there were a few other guys driving in from Tampa, so I call Tyler Reks because I knew he was one of them. We were only half an hour outside of Miami, and luckily for us, Tyler Reks was only about forty-five minutes behind us. But as we waited for him to show up, Natalya and David walked down the road trying to find one of those emergency phones. While they were walking, some lady pulls over and offers to give them a ride to a gas station, so they tell me to stay with the car. So I stay with the car and after a while, Tyler shows up. Luckily, he tells me he’ll wait with me until they show up with the gas. Now, I’m assuming that this lady is bringing them back. But then Natalya calls me and says, “The lady just dropped us off.” She pulled up to some random gas station and told them to get out and drove off. So now they’re stuck at some gas station that we don’t even know where it is, and I’m stuck with my car—this wasn’t even a rental car—and I’m stuck there with Tyler Reks and the guys riding with him. So I jump in their car to go get some gas in a jerry can, drive back to my car to fill it up, and by this time it’s already after ten thirty. Now I’m filling up the car and gas is spilling out all over the place. Natalya had just bought me a pair of brand-new Puma shoes for my birthday, and when I get to the hotel at eleven thirty at night, I realize that my shoes are completely ruined from the gasoline. All because I tried to drive with no gas. It was a long, long, long, long drive to Miami that night. Then I went on to wrestle Cryme Tyme twice the next night, and that’s even worse than the drive.

The Bicker Twins

Nikki Bella

One time Brie and I were driving through Reno, and we love to sing and dance in the car, and we were blasting songs from the eighties. I had an open water bottle and some of it got on Brie while I was dancing, so she turned around and poured her whole water bottle on me. All of a sudden, I’m dumping the rest of my water bottle on her, and we got into this full-on water fight while we were driving. By the time we made it to the gas station to fill up, we were both dripping wet and it was freezing cold. We were already in our Diva outfits, lace and heels, so we had people staring at us. Here we are, twin Divas walking up to the gas station attendant dripping wet on a cold night. He was just staring at us, like, “What the hell is happening?”

But Brie and I always fight when we’re on the road. We’re like husband and wife the way we bicker the entire time. That’s why people like The Miz like to travel with us. I remember this one time I had the GPS in my hand and Brie was driving. So she asked me, “What am I going to make?” And I told her, “Make a right.” Two seconds later, she’s like, “Wait, what am I going to make?” And I tell her again, “You’re going to make a right.” Two seconds later, I swear, she asks me again, so I start yelling, “YOU’RE GOING TO MAKE A RIGHT!” And what does she do? She makes a freakin’ left! I was like, “Bri-anna!” and I just started yelling. So now The Miz, all the time he walks up to us with this voice that he does and says, “Bri-anna! No way! Just shut up, just shut up.” He does all these impressions of us all the time, and it’s all because Brie doesn’t know her rights from her lefts.

 

 

Living “The Life”

Cody Rhodes

Three in the morning, can’t sleep, sometimes you have those long, three-hundred-mile drives and you’re on the road at all hours of the night. One game we like to play is with the iPod receivers inside the car. We call it “The Life” game, where you turn the radio all the way down and one person shuffles the iPod until someone shouts stop. When someone says stop, you turn the radio up and whatever song that is playing, that is the song that describes your life for that day. It’s always funny. The last time for me, I turned it down and as I cranked it up, the song was “You Belong with Me,” by Taylor Swift. So it had no actual reference to my life, but it was my Life song for the day.

This is a game that Ted DiBiase, Randy Orton, Beth Phoenix, Santino Marella, and I like to play. I think the best of the best is when Randy got an instrumental once. We were all like, “Uh-oh, that’s the most ominous song that could play.” It was so ambiguous, no lyrics or anything . . . it was just an instrumental for Randy Orton. But the way he played it, he said luck was on his side. Since there weren’t any lyrics, you could make it anything, and he flipped it into a positive. But for me, keep me away from those instrumentals. I’ll take Taylor Swift for my Life song any day.

But getting back to those long drives, one thing that should be established as a major faux pas of road tripping is, don’t be a phone-talker. Do not get on the phone with your wife, your girlfriend, or your buddy and talk for thirty minutes. That means the music in the car needs to be turned down when you’re on the phone, conversations in the car can’t take place, and it makes the trip seem that much longer.

Ted DiBiase is a notorious phone-talker, and that is the worst. And he’s never talking to anyone important. It’s Jimmy from Iowa who he met at church when they were eleven, and they’ll talk for half an hour. Never anyone important. Never.

No Driver Necessary

Goldust

What people don’t realize is that us wrestlers are professionals when it comes to stunt driving.

I remember a long time ago I was driving from Fort Lauderdale back to Tampa and I was trying to catch up to Barry Windham. Barry was my mentor. He was in a car up ahead of me, and I was driving by myself in a big Lincoln Continental. So I’m driving and I see his car, then I slide over into the passenger side while keeping my left foot on the pedal and holding the steering wheel with my left knee. I’m going like eighty-five to ninety miles per hour, and I’m leaning my head against the passenger-side window with a newspaper in my hand while I pass him. I’m looking at the newspaper while trying to watch the road at the same time, and when I pull up beside him, Barry gave a double take because he couldn’t figure out who was driving the car. You had to see his face to believe it. It was really cool. I used to do that all the time and I always loved it. It used to freak people out. They’d be like, “If Dustin’s reading the paper, who is driving his car?”

The DibiDot

Beth Phoenix

In the attempt to entertain ourselves, we’ve gotten into the habit of raiding local gas stations for the most bizarre items we could find. It’s all about buying the most random stuff we could find at gas stations and rest stops. I don’t know where or how they got this, but Ted and Cody bought this rubber Koosh ball that looked like a dot with little eyes on it and some little rubber hair sticking out of the top. If you poke or punch this thing, a light starts to flash in the middle. So they hung this ball from the rearview mirror for this long loop we had, from Friday to Monday night, and it got lovingly named the DibiDot. It was in reference to DiBiase, and I don’t know why, but this strange rubber Koosh with little eyes and hair sticking up became the DibiDot. So then each weekend after that, we were on a mission to find more of these Koosh balls to hang from our mirror. But there were times when we bought cowboy hats and the weird Hawaiian bobble-head ladies for the dashboard, and maybe a pirate’s hat on one side and a buccaneer’s hat on the other. I remember this one time we found a Jeff Gordon air freshener. That was my favorite, because Jeff Gordon had this really strange look on his face and it was quite an interesting smell. And when we looked on the package, it didn’t even say what the smell was supposed to be, so I was like, “Hey, this smells like Jeff Gordon.”

That’s Not All We Buy

Ted DiBiase

Actually, when it comes to buying the most random item from a gas station or a truck stop, John Cena is the best. We’ll go to these huge truck stops where all the truckers stop and sleep, and you can find the strangest things you could ever imagine. Cena bought this massive Elvis painting one time, and we just put it in the front window of our rental car the rest of the weekend as we drove. We buy cowboy hats, Koosh balls . . . if it’s weird and they sell it, we’re buying. What’s funny is when you go to return the car to the rental agency and you just leave all of that stuff in there. One time I would love to see the reaction of the guy who has to clean our car out. I wonder what they do with Elvis paintings and piles of McDonald’s bags.

Get On the Bus

Big Show

I was so sick of all the problems associated with traveling that I went out and got a tour bus. You see, Big Show now rides around in a million-and-a-half-dollar tour bus with a driver. But the young Big Show, that was a different story. The young Big Show one time had a Tuesday-night TV taping in Rome, Georgia, but I had an 11:20 P.M. flight out of the Atlanta airport that I wanted to make. Now, Rome, Georgia, is about an hour and twenty minutes away from Atlanta on a normal drive, and we had to go through Atlanta to the other side to make the airport. But like I said, I really wanted to make my flight. “Mean” Gene Okerlund lived in Tampa as well and was also on my flight, so he wanted to catch a ride with me to the airport. I said, “Sure, Gene, no problem.” But then we wrapped up from TV a little late, and Gene didn’t think we’d be able to make it to the airport on time.

Now, back then, we used to rent Cadillac DeVilles, and those Cadillac DeVilles, their speedometers shut down at 112 mph. So I set the cruise control at 110 mph and headed to the airport. We go through Atlanta, stop at the Omni hotel in downtown Atlanta so Gene could grab his suit bag from the concierge. The bellman handed it to Gene as he jumped out, then he hopped back in the car and we hauled ass through Atlanta and got to the airport with enough time to drop off our rental car at the Avis return. We made it from Rome, Georgia, to the Atlanta airport in fifty-eight minutes with a stop in Atlanta to pick up the suit.

“Mean” Gene never said a word the entire trip. We go through check-in, get on the plane, and we’re sitting next to each other when “Mean” Gene orders two drinks back to back. He slammed them both and looked as white as a sheet. He looked right at me and said, “Well, if I ever need to get somewhere in a hurry, I know who to call.”

I never even thought anything about it. I was just trying to make our flight. But I guess I completely terrified “Mean” Gene Okerlund and took a few years off of his life with that one car ride.

These days, though, like I said, different story. I ride in Toby Keith’s “American Soldier” bus, and I have a driver to take me wherever I need to go. The bus has a big king-size bed in the back, fifty-inch plasmas, Michelob Ultra Light on tap, Bud Light on tap, full bar . . . I don’t even drink that much, but every now and then, it’s great to have a cold beer. I’ve got wireless Internet, DIRECTV, and I even have an Xbox 360 hooked up so I can play all of my first-person shooters, like Rainbow Six: Vegas, Call of Duty, and Wolfenstein.

I like it because I never have to look for hotel rooms. I always have a locker room to get dressed in, I always have my own shower, and since I have all of my clothes in the back, if I need a suit or something special to wear, I have it with me accessible at all times. About the only bag I bring with me to the airport is the one holding my computer and my wallet. That’s about it. So these days, in the States, traveling works out really well thanks to the bus.

Driving up and down the road two hundred and fifty to three hundred miles every night, I did it for twelve years and it’s just too much for me. So the past couple of years I’ve been on my bus and it works out so much better. I’m done with hotels. I’m done checking into hotels at three in the morning. You wouldn’t believe how many times I’ve checked into a hotel, they see how big I am, but then they give me a room with two double beds. Give me a break.

Something Everyone
Should Strive For

Randy Orton

Show, Hunter, and Taker all have these tour buses that they travel on, and now that Hunter is getting a new bus custom built, I’m taking his old bus off his hands. So many guys don’t realize how great these buses are. Stone Cold, The Rock . . . these guys never did it. I think Hunter was the first one to do it, and it costs some money, but in the long run, we pay for our own rental cars and hotel already. That’s not taken care of. It’s a write-off for us, but we spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on rental cars and hotel stays each year, and that cost will be erased by having the bus. Sure, the bus is a little more, but the benefits are unbelievable. Now when I fly into a town, that bus picks me up and I don’t need to worry about a rental car. My driver will take me to go eat, and inside the bus I have a fridge, an oven, a microwave, a washer, a dryer, bathroom, shower, king-size bed, a crew bunk, a bed for my baby with a crib, and even a little lounging area with two flatscreens. It’s like a traveling apartment.

So while I’m at the show, my driver can leave and go pick up some Outback or something to eat at the grocery store and make sure I have something for dinner. After my match, instead of hitting the showers in the locker room, getting dressed, and going out in the rental car and finding something to eat, a process that can take up to two hours before we even start our three-hundred-mile drive to the next town, now I can just go straight on the bus, eat dinner, and shower. And by the time I’m showered up, I’ve already eaten, and now I’m relaxing and playing video games on the bus or watching TV or sleeping, and we’re already in the next town . . . or at least halfway there. Then I get better sleep. And to top it off, I’m not sitting in the front seat of the car for hundreds of miles, which is horrible for your back, especially with what we do. I’m able to lie down, relax, and I can even bring my wife and child whenever I want.

As far as overall health, longevity, and stress level, it’s night and day. The bus gives you so much more opportunity, so much more time. Without the bus, you’re driving in the middle of the night, maybe get to your hotel at four o’clock, then you wake up at one in the afternoon, head to the gym, and it’s always rush-rush-rush-rush-rush just to make it to the next show. With that bus, I’ll be able to sleep and get up at a decent time and still be able to get my stuff done.

When I started, it was still like three or four years until GPS was around. But now having a driver and not even thinking about being behind the wheel and being able to sleep on the road, that’s as good as it gets. That should be the ultimate goal for any of us. Where you can get to a position in the company where you can afford the luxury of the bus. The bar has been raised to this. Now you know, if you can afford this type of luxury, you’ve made it. You’re finally where you want to be.

 

 

Three

Time to Play
the Game

“You know how embarrassing that is? A person who doesn’t even play that much to beat someone who plays every day?”

—THE MIZ

Back in the Nation days, Mark Henry once lost his European Championship to The Rock in a backstage game of Madden. Henry destroyed The Rock in the rematch and eventually took his title back with him to Raw, but this story just goes to show how invested some of these athletes are in their video games. In fact, Christian was once one of the top-rated online players at a tennis game called Top Spin 2. “I figured I’d play the game until I was ranked number one in the world,” he tells me, “then I could break the disk and never play it again.” Didn’t happen. Instead, Christian ended up losing to some guy from England after his opponent kept hitting lob shot after lob shot, frustrating the wrestler and throwing him off his game. “So afterward, I’m asking the guy why he did that and we end up getting into an argument over the headsets,” Christian explains. “Next thing I know the door to my game room swings open and my wife is standing there with her hands on her hips, glaring at me like a mother scolding a child.”

And while that might have been Christian’s last game of Top Spin 2, the video game competitions across the WWE roster continue to heat up, especially in a car full of Madden gamers as they play round-robin tournaments while they travel the world.

Who is the champ? Depends on who you ask.

The Referee

Evan Bourne

I usually drive the car when I travel with Kofi Kingston, Hornswoggle, and The Miz, and those three have a heated Madden rivalry. There’s so much smack talk going on, I can literally hear them shouting things like, “March, march, march, march, I’m marching down the field,” while they play. I’ll ask for score updates while I drive, but sometimes I actually need to referee these guys because they are getting really upset at each other. When Miz starts losing, he gets very upset. And whenever Hornswoggle wins, he just grinds that victory in. He digs it in and keeps reminding Miz who beat him, and he will ask about the score for the rest of the night. Just digging and digging it in. I would say the most fun I have is riding in that car with Hornswoggle, Miz, and Kofi when they’re playing that game.

The Underdog

Hornswoggle

When we’re on the road, Kofi and I constantly play Madden. We have a big video game rivalry, and a big rivalry in general about everything. It’s a friendly rivalry, and we play jokes on each other constantly. He makes fun of my love for the Muppets, and I make fun of his love for just about everything else. But when it comes to Madden, nobody can beat me.

Things can get pretty heated in the car when we play, though, especially between Kofi and Miz. One time they made a bet that if Miz won, Miz would autograph Kofi’s PSP. But if Kofi won, he would sign Miz’s stupid guitar that we all hate but he demands to bring everywhere we go. Kofi ended up killing him and immediately pulled out his pen. I even took a picture of the victory celebration using my iPhone. So now every time Miz wants to play his guitar, he’s staring at Kofi’s signature. Priceless.

 

 

 

The Underrated

The Miz

When I travel with Kofi Kingston and Hornswoggle, we always end up having these long video game feuds. One of us will drive while the other two are playing video games on the PSP. Now, Hornswoggle and Kofi are avid Madden players. Huge, huge fans of the game, and the thing about it is, I’ll play here and there. I play sporadically, and really, the only time I ever play is when I’m in the car playing against them. I don’t play anywhere else. But I beat them almost half the time we play, and these guys play every single day. They go online and play Madden all the time with their little headsets, like, “Ohhhh, I’m going to beat you, I’m going to beat you.” They’re doing that whole thing all the time, and here I am with my little PSP portable player, and I’m beating them. You know how embarrassing that is? A person who doesn’t even play that much to beat someone who plays every day? I think I’ve gotten better at the game, but I’ve also gotten smarter. Kofi always likes to play as the New England Patriots. We all know the New England Patriots are the best freakin’ team in the whole game, so that’s why he plays as them. So what do I do? I started playing as the New England Patriots so he couldn’t. I make sure when we get to the team-select screen that I pick them first. As I got better at the game, I’ve switched over to the San Diego Chargers. Granted, the Browns are my favorite team, but I’m not playing as the Browns in Madden. You have to be some kind of video game guru to beat anybody as the Browns in Madden. So now I have my Chargers, and the last game me and Swoggle played, I beat him 28–14. He still owes me twenty dollars. Swoggle, if you’re reading this, you still owe me twenty bucks.

The Abbot

Kofi Kingston

Miz and Hornswoggle both know that I am the Madden abbot and I run the Madden temple and give them lessons all the time. But as I can see, the lesson of humility has not been well taken by these two. To be honest, Hornswoggle lost to The Miz so bad that he really hasn’t been the same since. He hasn’t even played that much lately, the loss hit him that hard.

As far as The Miz, you know The Miz, he’s a big talker, but last time we played I beat him 21–0. We have a 21-rule. It’s the skunk rule, where if you’re beating someone by 21, the game is over because you’re basically just wasting your battery at that point. After Miz was doing all his talking about how he was going to pick the Patriots, he ended up switching up so he could pick whoever he perceives is the best team. If he manages to win one game with a team, whatever team that is, that’s his new favorite team. No loyalty to the Browns . . . that’s where he’s from. But I’m from Boston, I’m a huge Patriots fan, so that’s my team in the game, I play as the Pats. Last time we played, it was 21–0 and it wasn’t even halfway through the first quarter. I don’t think it was fun for him at all, but it was great for the rest of the car because it was one of the few times he actually shut up all tour.