And why not, especially when one wrong turn can not only lead you in the wrong direction, it can sometimes even lead you to the wrong state.“We were seriously lost for my first ten years on the road.”
—CHAVO GUERRERO
Rey Mysterio calls me from the road to break down his GPS obsession. “I love this thing,” he says, and in the background I hear the GPS voice telling him to turn left. “I’m almost too obsessed with my navigation system, though, especially when I’m driving by myself. I’ll go back in and punch in the address two or three times just to make sure I’m going to the right place.” And why not, especially when one wrong turn can not only lead you in the wrong direction, it can sometimes even lead you to the wrong state.
Are There Mountains
in Nebraska?
Chris Jericho
I can’t believe we ever found our way anywhere before GPS. You’d drive into town completely blind and head to the gas station and ask where the arena is or where the wrestling is. Most big cities have signs on the road for the arenas, but other than that, you’re really heading into these cities blind where you need to pull over and ask somebody where you’re going. And the thing that’s funny is, when you do this, you’ll go to the gas station and you’ll ask somebody where something is, and they’ll say either, (a), it’s two hours away, or, (b), it’s five minutes away. And you can ask ten different people how far away something is and they’ll give you ten completely different answers. Oh, it’s about an hour away . . . Oh, it’s about ten minutes away . . . Oh, it’s about a half hour away. It’s all people from the same town we’re asking, and they’re all giving us different answers. Where is it? People in general just have a really bad sense of direction, so I don’t know how we got by without the GPS . . . or cell phones. I remember having to wait for a pay phone by the side of the road. Either that, or you’d wait by the phone in your hotel room for your girlfriend to call. You’d give her the room number and a time to call, and you would just sit and wait for that phone to ring. You would never go out because you were always waiting to talk to somebody. And it’s hard to believe, that was only ten years ago. Now life on the road is a cakewalk compared to what it used to be like.
We used to get lost all the time, though. It was Dumb and Dumber out there on the road. I remember one time with Eddie Guerrero and Dean Malenko, we made a right turn instead of a left and we were supposed to be headed toward Nebraska, when all of a sudden we saw mountains. We ended up in like Oklahoma or Colorado and were all like, “Where the hell are we?” There was this other time when we had a show in Gainesville, Florida, and we ended up in Gainesville, Georgia. Just stupid crap like that would happen because nobody would ever bother checking anything.
But for the most part, Dean Malenko was the best road partner because he was like a human GPS. Sure, we might make the wrong turn before we got to the right city, but once we were there, he would remember everything about every town. “Take a right, then take a left down here, and after the alley you’ll find the McDonald’s.” It didn’t matter if we hadn’t been in the town for two years, he just remembers everything. I always thought that it would’ve been smart to get an address book, and in this address book you put the town, say, Indianapolis. Then under the city name you put the gym you go to, the radio station you listen to, and the hotel you stay at. It would be so easy just to put all of this information together and just have it all in one place, because we go to the same towns over and over again, but you just forget after a while, and you’re forced to find out all over again where you should stay and where you should work out. Every time you come back to the same town, you’re forced to do the same work all over again. Stuff like that would make things a lot easier if I was a lot more organized, but I just wasn’t. Now that there’s GPS, you don’t need to worry about it as much, but even the GPS will throw you off from time to time. Like today, I punched in a tanning place, and instead of calling the number, I just end up driving there, and fifteen minutes later I pull up to a place that doesn’t even exist anymore. If only I was smarter, I would’ve had all that information in my address book.
The Two-Hour Turn
Rey Mysterio
One time I was on the road with Eddie Guerrero, and this was back before GPS, back before you could just punch in the address to your navigation, and I remember we were on the way to a show somewhere around Lubbock, Texas. We got turned around somehow and ended up driving two and a half hours in the wrong direction before we realized we were going the wrong way. When we realized it, we had to turn around and drive as fast as we could in order to still get to the show on time.
Usually when you’re driving, you see the signs: thirty miles to wherever you’re going, then twenty-five miles. But it was just one of those nights where we started talking about something, and the conversation was so good, neither one of us realized we were headed completely in the wrong direction. We just kept driving and talking, talking and driving, and then finally I asked him if he saw a sign to the city. He said no, so we decided to pull over and ask someone. Back then, that was our method of getting directions. So we stopped at a gas station, and they were like, “You guys are about two hundred miles away.” Oh my God, I couldn’t believe it. It was already six o’clock and the show started at eight. We hustled as fast as we could and ended up making it to the show at about eight thirty. We were late, but we were still able to wrestle that night. We didn’t miss the show, even with our bad sense of direction.
The Hangover
William Regal
I live a pretty boring life nowadays, but I didn’t used to. I remember one time when myself, Ric Flair, Arn Anderson, and Bobby Eaton were on a loop from Arizona to Lancaster, California, so we decided to base ourselves in Las Vegas for what turned into a three-day bender. We were pretty wild back then, and basically, while we were in Las Vegas, I hadn’t been to bed for three days. But on Monday, we needed to be in Lancaster, and it was Arn Anderson’s idea for us to rent a car and drive from Vegas rather than flying to Los Angeles and driving to Lancaster from there. But as we go to the rental car agency, there were hardly any cars to be had, so we ended up settling for the most ridiculously small car you’ve ever seen. Ric Flair was absolutely horrified by even the look of this tiny car, as he was used to riding everywhere in limousines. But here we were, the four of us crammed into this small car, all of us hung over and in need of some food before we get out of Las Vegas.
So we pull over to a Subway to get a sandwich, and while we’re in there, let me just say that for the two weeks leading up to this moment, Ric Flair had been—I won’t say bragging, but let’s just say he’d been overemphasizing to all the boys that he had just opened up a new gym in St. Martin in the Caribbean. So we’re inside this Subway, and Flair had just walked out and gotten into the car because he had decided he was going to drive us to Lancaster. But while I’m waiting for my sandwich, I hear on the radio inside the store that a huge hurricane had just ripped through St. Martin and wiped out the whole island. So I get back into the car and sit in the back, and I waited until we were about five miles outside of Vegas until I decided to tell him. “I just heard on the radio how a big hurricane just blew through St. Martin and is blowing everything away.” Ric looked up at me through the rearview mirror and just went, “Oh no, brother.” The look on his face, I just started laughing.
Now some people, when they get nervous they smash things up, but to me, I get lost in these giggle fits where I just can’t stop laughing. I actually end up making myself ill from laughing so much. So I started laughing so much that Bobby Eaton started laughing, and there are bits of Subway coming down my nose by this point, and Arn Anderson sees this, so he started laughing. Flair had just spent over one hundred thousand dollars on gym equipment, and it all just blew away.
So we’re driving farther and farther into the desert, and every once in a while I just break out laughing again, and that gets everyone else laughing except for Flair. He’s absolutely out of his mind now as he just can’t find the funny side to this, but we were all hung over driving through the middle of the desert, just driving and driving, when he says to me, “Get the map out. Are you sure we’re going the right way?” So I took the map out, and I just read the map the way I saw it. He asked me where we were, and I said, “We’re in the Mo-Jo Desert.” He was like, “You stupid bastard, it’s the Mojave Desert.”
He then proceeded to cut a promo on us while he’s driving. He started saying how he’s the Nature Boy and how he’s used to riding in jets and limousines, but for some reason he was lost in the middle of the desert with three drunk lunatics and the Gila monsters. So we’re laughing even harder now and steam is just coming out of his ears at this point. Bobby Eaton then points to me and he says, “Lord keeps lizards.” Bobby always called me “Lord” because back then I went by the name Lord Steven Regal. Anyway, Flair then sees an opening to get the topic of conversation onto something else and get everything back to normal, so he asks me what kind of lizards I keep. I tell him, “I have a few of this and a few of that.” And then he asks me, “Are they still alive?” And Arn Anderson says, “No, he’s got them nailed to a board in his house.”
That was it. That just pushed Flair completely over the edge. From his investment getting blown away to all the giggling in the back to now Arn taking the first somewhat normal conversation we’ve had in an hour and snapping at him, Flair just couldn’t take it anymore. He slams the brakes on the car in the middle of the desert, gets out, and starts running around the car, screaming. “Raaahh!” Flair just lost it.
Eventually we get him back in the car and calm him down, and we still have to drive like three hundred miles to get to the show, and the whole time, I just keep breaking down laughing.
Now, this whole time, Flair is wearing this all-white suit. So I tell him, “You know what, Ric, I’ve been to Lancaster before and it’s a bit dusty. You’re wearing this nice all-white suit, so you might want to stop somewhere before we get to the arena and change.” But he says, “Oh no, brother, I’m the Nature Boy, I wear suits.” So I tell him, “There’s nowhere to shower, there’s nowhere to get clean once we’re there, and the way the wind is picking up, you’re going to be a mess.”
“No, brother, I’m the Nature Boy,” he tells me. “I’m wearing the suit.” So we eventually get there after what seemed like the never-ending drive as we eventually find the right way through the desert, and I ask him one last time, “Are you sure you don’t want to get changed?” And one last time he tells me, “No, brother, I’m the Nature Boy. I wear suits.” So he jumps out of the car, slams the door, and right as he slams the door, a great big dust cloud blows all over him, and literally he’s covered from head to toe. His blond hair, his white suit, his eyes—he’s covered in red clay. He turns and looks at me like it’s my fault. Like I’ve done something to cause this dust cloud to attack him. He just looked at me like, “You dirty, rotten bastard.”
Life Before GPS
Chavo Guerrero
When I first started wrestling, there were no cell phones, no computers, no GPS, there was no iPod . . . none of that. You know what we had? Maps. We were lost for ten years. We were seriously lost for my first ten years on the road. We would have to constantly stop and ask for directions. All you have to do now is punch in the address on the GPS, and it tells you, “Turn right here, turn left here.”
It’s funny, because now when we get to a town, we’ll tell a lot of the young guys, “Hey, there’s a gym over here,” or how there’s a good place to eat down this road. They always want to know how we know where everything is, but we had to, we had to know this stuff. Back when I first started, you couldn’t just punch in IHOP into the GPS and find something to eat. There was none of that. Life on the road is definitely a lot easier now thanks to technology. It was a lot tougher back when I first started. We were on the road more, and if you had someone who wasn’t good at reading maps, you were constantly getting bad directions. There was a lot less food out there back then too, and what you did find was never as healthy as you can find today. Now you can go to a convenience store and get a Muscle Milk. There was none of that stuff before. We used to live on Snickers bars. Now you have protein all packaged for you. I remember when protein bars first came out, they were a lifesaver because now you had something to eat.
And think about trying to do all of this without computers. Now you can just jump on the Internet and make your own hotel reservation with the click of a button. Back then, we just drove until we saw a hotel and hoped they had a vacancy. In fact, we slept in a car many a night because we couldn’t find a hotel. It was a lot harder when I first started, and the generation before me had it even harder. Every generation, it gets a little easier . . . but it’s still not easy.
“When someone doesn’t have a lock on their door and someone else has a bloodstain on their wall, it’s not hard to put two and two together.”
—DREW McINTYRE
What do you do when you check into a hotel at three in the morning and can’t sleep? If you’re R-Truth, that might mean writing rap lyrics. “Sometimes late at night, when it’s quiet, that’s when you get your best ideas,” he tells me. For Ezekiel Jackson, that’s the time he finally gets to catch up on the scores of his favorite sports teams. “When I get to my room, I’m not a big partyer. Just get me a room with a TV and a bed and I’m good,” he says. “When it’s two in the morning and you’re in some random city, all you can really do is kick back and watch SportsCenter. Two in the morning is when I catch up on all of those highlights I missed when I was on the road.”
And while every trip would be a whole lot smoother if all you had to do was get to your room, relax, write lyrics, and watch sports, unfortunately for the WWE Superstars, that’s not always (and sometimes never) the case. From sleazy hotels to mystery stains in random rooms, sometimes just finding a clean, safe place to sleep is the hardest part of the job.
Or as Tommy Dreamer puts it, “Some of the hotels we’ve had to stay in are absolutely disgusting. You wouldn’t believe we actually paid money to rent these rooms.”
These stories detail what goes on in a WWE hotel when things get downright dirty (and a little bizarre).
The Dirty Divas
Maria
I thought life on the road would be a little more . . . clean. I think that’s the best way to explain it. Some of those hotels we stay in have giant bugs! You wouldn’t believe it. There was this one night where I found a huge spider in my bed. So I throw the blankets off me and jump out of bed, and this spider is seriously coming to attack me as I’m getting out of bed. Five minutes later, I hear Layla start screaming, and there was a giant spider in her bed too. Then we look up on the wall and what do we see? Another spider! The next day, we got back to the room, and the spiders were gone, but there was this strange yellow beetle flying around. So I take a picture of it and Twitter it to show people what was in our room. Eve’s brother sees this, and he tells us the official name, how it was an arachnid blah-blah-blah [not the official name], but it was hilarious. I guess I always thought life on the road would be more glamorous. But at the same time we have a lot more fun than I thought we would. We’re all so close, and we all know even the smallest details about everyone. We know who sleeps well together—like I need to sleep by myself because otherwise I end up elbowing people in the face. But sometimes you have no choice and you have to share a bed because the hotels run out of rooms or they give you a room with only one bed. The other night this happened, and it was me, Layla, and Eve all in bed together. I hit Layla like three times with elbows while I was sleeping. I was trying to hug the side of the bed, but I guess I rolled over in the middle of the night and got her pretty good.
The other thing that happens in the hotel is we all tan each other. When we’re getting ready for a show, it’s like a fog of tanner overtakes the whole hotel. The Divas are actually the Dirty Divas, because we’re pretty nasty.
In a Pickle
Beth Phoenix
I traveled very little before I got on the road and started in the wrestling business, so it was all kind of new to me going from town to town to town. When I first started with WWE, the money wasn’t really coming in yet, so I was trying to skimp and save every penny I could wherever I could. So I would go on Hotwire and look for the lowest stars of any hotel in town just so I could get the lowest prices.
I remember one time, it was only my second or third loop with Raw, and I ended up getting a place called something like the Econo Motel . . . something very generic like that, but when I pulled up, it looked more like the Bates Motel. It was one of those motels that was one floor, with the red roof where the doors accessed outside, and when I walk into the main area, all I see is this guy with two dirty socks up on the desk. He had a hole in one sock, he was smoking a cigar, and I see that his office looked more like an area where maybe he had been living. There were empty McDonald’s wrappers everywhere, and the whole scene was just quite chaotic and filthy. All I wanted to do was get my key as fast as possible and lock the door to my room. I just remember, I’m walking to my room, and as I look around, there are shady characters everywhere. I hear yelling and screaming coming from different rooms, but I don’t spook too easily. I just put my head down and went right to my room. But when I open the door and look inside, I notice this foul odor. I don’t know what it is, but it’s very pungent and smells like vinegar. I can’t figure out what’s going on in this room, so I turn around and flip on the lights, and at the foot of my bed is a smashed jar of pickles. No lie. I don’t know why there are pickles in my room or how they got smashed, but that’s the situation and the awful smell I am faced with.
But I was just so tired and it was the middle of the night, so I was just like, “Forget it.” I’m not dealing with any of these people, I’m just going to change into my pajamas and go to bed. But when I head into the bathroom, I notice that inside is all just brick walls. The bathroom wasn’t even finished being built. You could still see the mortar and everything. Then as I go to get into the bed, I flip open the comforter and there aren’t even any sheets on the bed. I was like, “Econo Motel, you are gross.” So what I did was I laid towels all over the comforters, then I slept with my jacket on and got out of there the first thing in the morning. And you know what? I can’t stand the smell of pickles to this day. Of all the bizarre things to find in your room, I can’t say that I would ever guess that one night I’d find a smashed jar of pickles. And I really don’t want to know why or how they got there.
Disco Fever
Ted DiBiase
Randy Orton and I stayed at a Quality Inn near Penn State that seemed a bit sketchy. Not sketchy like we thought we were going to get robbed, but sketchy like there was a disco in the lobby with all these old people dancing at two in the morning when we checked in. Someone recognized us from the dance floor, and we both just put our heads down and ran to our rooms. It was the only hotel I’ve ever stayed at where I actually double locked the door and put the latch on. I feared for my life from these dancing old people. You see some strange things on the road, I’ll tell you that, but you have to have a good time with it. You have to entertain yourself, and it’s funny to sit back and think of things like that. I mean, what kind of hotel has a disco for old people in the lobby in the middle of the night?
Escape from L.A.
Mickie James
I use Hotwire a lot, but when I first started using it, I didn’t understand how it worked. I was just looking for the best deal. So this one time, I was in Los Angeles and I booked a two-and-a-half-star hotel. Depending on where you are in the world, star ratings are different. So I’m thinking I’m going to get a Comfort Inn or something comparable. But I end up getting to this chain motel in L.A. that’s out by the airport, and it was the scariest place I’d ever seen. The walls of my room were made of concrete, and literally, I heard gunshots all around. I seriously thought I was going to die that night. I was up all night. I couldn’t sleep because the gunshots had me freaking out. That was the worst night I can remember.
But before I got to WWE, I’d travel wherever I could just so I could make it to the dance. I’d sleep in my car or find some cheap hotel for twenty dollars or whatever I could afford. But then once you’re on the road full-time, you get accustomed to a certain level of comfort, or at least a soft bed. I couldn’t even sleep in that bed in L.A. It was just too freaky. The room had two double beds, and when I heard the gunshots, I actually ducked down in between the two beds for extra protection. That was one night the clock just couldn’t move fast enough for me.
Three’s a Crowd
Tyson Kidd
One night we show up to this hotel in Memphis, but there’s nobody working the front desk, so this janitor or security-looking guy is the one who actually gives us our room key. But when we go up to the room, we realize that there’s only one king-size bed for the three Hart Dynasty members. We go back downstairs to try and switch rooms, but there’s nobody around. There’s nobody working the front desk. Everyone is gone. So we can’t change the room. Plus the air-conditioning in the hotel doesn’t work, so not only are the Hart Dynasty going to get real close and all sleep in the same bed, we’re going to sweat it out in this Memphis hotel in the middle of summer. It was bad. It’s one thing to all share a bed, it’s another thing to do it while we’re all sweaty. And this has actually happened to us a few times, where we book two double beds, but when we show up the hotel is full and they can’t switch us. That’s when the Hart Dynasty bunks as one. It happens a lot more than it should.
The Rainbow Hotel
Tommy Dreamer
I was riding with Christian and Dolph Ziggler, and we had about a 290-mile drive in Canada. And there is nothing, and I mean nothing, along these highways along what is considered Midwest United States, but this is way up there in Canada. I think the drive was from Regina to Moose Jaw, or something ridiculous like that. There are no gas stations, there’s nothing, so when you see a sign that this is your last place to fill up, you usually want to do it because you’re not going to find anything else for at least a hundred or so miles. Anyway, it was getting close to the end of summer, and we didn’t know that a lot of people vacation around the spot we were headed, and all of the hotels around the location were already booked up. So we drove about halfway, and there was not a hotel to be found with a vacancy. We looked everywhere until we finally stumbled across this one hotel called the Rainbow Hotel, and it was basically, what I feel, a hotel you rent by the hour, not the night . . . it was not a nice hotel whatsoever. They also knew how much the hotels cost in the area and knew everything was booked, and they got us for like a hundred dollars for a prison-cell–type hotel room. A lot of times you’re traveling, and you’ll see your fellow WWE Superstars at the show, but you won’t see them at the hotels. But I guess all of the people who were on that card realized that this was one of the only places with a vacancy, so here came Cryme Tyme, Mike Knox, Vladimir Kozlov, the Bella Twins, John Morrison, CM Punk, Melina . . . they probably had about fifteen WWE Superstars all staying at this one disgusting hotel.
My room, the guy didn’t have a key to get me inside, so he had to actually come with me and open the door for me. So I asked him, “What if I have to leave?” And he said, “You can’t. If you do, you’re just going to have to leave your door open.” So I didn’t even have a key to my own room and I couldn’t leave. You couldn’t even close the bathroom door because whoever designed it put the door in last, and you would hit the toilet with the door, so it wouldn’t even close. I mean, seriously, who designed this place? There were brown stains in the washtub and it was just a gross hotel. My bed was a single, and I slept with my clothes on because everything just looked so dirty. And worst of all, my room had these windows that were so low, any crook could’ve climbed inside my room in the middle of the night. All they had to do was push on the window, and they could’ve climbed right in.
So I ended up moving the refrigerator against the door just to make sure nobody could get in. I figured if I didn’t have the key, I didn’t know who did. Then I put my suitcase up against the window so at least if anyone tried to get in I could hear it. Things were really that bad. I mean, this was seriously the worst hotel I’ve ever been to. We got in around three in the morning, hoping we could at least get some sleep, and when I’m investigating my room, Christian shoots me a text saying that his room was so bad, so disgusting, that he couldn’t take it any longer and decided to sleep in the car.
The next morning, we’re all swapping stories of how bad our rooms were, and as we pull out of the parking lot, we see that behind the hotel is a cemetery. Just when we thought our hotel couldn’t get any worse, we see the cemetery.
Rainbow Hotel, Part 2
Drew McIntyre
Oh yeah, the Rainbow Hotel. First hotel I’ve ever stayed at where there were bloodstains on the wall and dead roaches in the shower. It’s one of the only places where you had a group of these big, tough wrestlers worried about their safety. When someone doesn’t have a lock on their door and someone else has a bloodstain on their wall, it’s not hard to put two and two together. The funniest thing about staying there, though, was showing up at the arena the next day. Morrison walks up and says, “I stayed at the worst hotel ever last night.” And then Christian would be like, “No, my hotel was the worst.” Then CM Punk said, “Nothing can top the disgusting place I stayed.” No one realized until the next day that we were all staying at the same place. Ask anyone who was there, and they’ll tell you, this was the single worst hotel they have ever stayed at. When you have guys blocking their doors and sleeping out in their cars, you know things are beyond bad.
Then to make matters worse, that same trip, after we left the Rainbow Hotel, I was traveling with the Bella Twins and the trunk on our rental car broke. So we had to go buy some bungee cords at the Home Depot just to keep the trunk closed. Luckily for us, nothing was stolen. I’m surprised, too, because it was open all night while we were inside the Rainbow Hotel. Maybe the cemetery spooked all the thieves.
The Overflow
Evan Bourne
Since I was eighteen years old, I’ve never really stayed in the same place. Until I got to WWE developmental, I was never even in the same city for more than a week. I’d be sleeping in four or five beds a week. It’s just standard for us. So life on the road, that’s just what it is . . . lots of different beds and the ability to live out of three different bags and a rental car for the rest of your life.
Typically wrestlers, what we do now is use Hotwire. It has great rates, and it lets you know the amenities of each hotel. Two stars is really cheap, two and a half stars is pretty cheap, three stars is a pretty decent rate, and four is your high-end rate that is usually over one hundred dollars. Usually we stay at the three-star hotels, but every once in a while you make a concession to go down to a two-star just because it’s available, it’s cheap, and it’s right by the airport. Besides, most of the time, we’re only in our rooms to sleep, so how bad could it be?
Well, let me tell you about my two-and-a-half-star hotel in New Jersey. It was right by the airport, and I thought it would be great. But then I get dropped off at the front office and say, “Hi, I made a reservation under Hotwire.” I give him my name, and the guy looks at me and shakes his head. That’s all he would do, shake his head. I was like, “What does that mean?” And he finally says, “We don’t have any rooms.”
“But I already paid for this room,” I tell him. “You have to have a room because I paid for it. That’s the whole point of making the reservation and paying in advance.” Next thing I know, the guy is making me fill out some paperwork, all the usual—name, address, phone number—and he’s like, “Yeah, room 32, right up there.”
I lug my bags up the stairs, and the room looks pretty decent, until I go into the bathroom. When I flushed the toilet, everything backed up to the point water started pouring over the side of the toilet and flooding the bathroom. Water hit the side of the tub, then it hit the other wall, and the water just kept on coming. I couldn’t believe how much water was flooding my room after just one flush. It was literally a disaster. And this was at like one, one thirty in the morning. So I knew I wanted out. I looked out my hotel-room window, looked up the street, looked down the street, and saw a sign for Dunkin’ Donuts in the distance. I made sure I had my wallet and my cell phone, and I went for a walk. Twenty minutes later I get to the old Dunkin’ Donuts and hang out there for an hour. Got a donut, a coffee, and a cheese-whatever, then I got some more, then I started my long walk back to the hotel. When I was on my way back, I stumbled upon a gentlemen’s club that was halfway between the Dunkin’ Donuts and my hotel. And that’s where I spent the rest of my night. The club was alcohol free, so I just sat there and drank bottled water and enjoyed myself.
Blame It on Eve
Tyson Kidd
One weird trip was this time we were headed to New York City for TV. In our car was the Hart Dynasty and the Great Khali. And then, whoever Eve was riding with originally on the loop had to go to Raw, so now Eve was riding with us to New York as well. We’re all crammed in this car. And Khali, he has to sit like this—it’s not his fault, but he has to sit in the front seat with the seat leaning all the way back. So whoever is sitting behind him, and it’s usually me, Khali is right in your lap. We always try to make things easier for Khali, and I have a hotel room where Khali is staying, but we decide we’re going to drop off Khali, then drive Eve to her hotel, which is totally out of the way, then we’re going to drive back to our hotel. So we drop Khali off, and this is after a show and after eating, so this is like three in the morning, and now we’re driving Eve back to her hotel, but there is all this construction on the road, so now it’s like four in the morning. On our GPS, it says we’re going to get back to our hotel at five, and there’s all the same construction we just drove through in order to get back. So we decide to forget it, we’re just going to look up hotels and stay at the closest one to us. We end up finding some little rat-hole hotel in New York, but we figure it’s worth it just to save the time. But when we get to the hotel, the room is so hot, we can’t even breathe. To make things worse, the people staying in the room above us were running around, and the walls and floor were so thin, it sounded like these people were in our room. I didn’t sleep the whole night at all. Then the next morning, we had to go back and drive another hour to go pick up Khali and take him to the building. And guess what? The hotel we were originally going to stay at was right next to the arena. The moral of the story: Don’t help Eve. And that’s because she’s associated with Cryme Tyme. Don’t ever help out anyone associated with Cryme Tyme. That’s my recommendation.
Roll of the Dice
Chris Jericho
If you go to one hotel and it’s sold out, that usually means that all of the hotels in that area are going to be sold out, and that means you have problems. There have been plenty of times when Eddie Guerrero and myself and this referee named Mark Curtis had to sleep in the car in the parking garage of the airport. I’d put my alarm on the dash so we didn’t sleep late, then I’d brush my teeth with a bottle of water and go from there. There are other times when you wish you slept in your car because you get to your room, there are towels everywhere, pubic hairs on the toilet, stains on the carpet that you don’t even want to know where they came from. You never really know what you’re going to get, especially if you’re not smart enough to make your own reservations. Sometimes you just roll the dice and hope for the best with the type of room you’re going to get.
Not the Best Time for a Swim
Nikki Bella
We are in Green Bay, and we are staying in this hotel that also has a casino. So after dinner and a few glasses of wine, I tell Brie, “C’mon, let’s just go to bed. We have to catch our flights in the morning.” But she was like, “No, no, let’s go to the casino.” But I kept telling her, “No, it’s time to go to bed.” So we get to our room and I’m getting into bed, but she is stomping up and down on the bathroom floor. I can hear her in there because the floor was this loud tile. She was stomping, trying to wake me up, like, “I want to go to the casino.” So I tell her, “Bri-anna, are you serious right now? Just go to bed.” So she gets into bed, and I fall asleep. Next thing I know I’m woken up by someone knocking on the door. I look over, and there’s no Brie. So I hurry up and answer the door, and there’s Brie. She’s standing there dripping wet in her white dress, with two security guards on each arm. Security was like, “Excuse me, miss, is this your sister? We found her at the pool swimming laps by herself.” I was like, “Brie, get in this room right now!” It was like three in the morning, and she was down there swimming laps in an all-white dress that went above her knees. I couldn’t believe it.
Blame It on the A-A-Alcohol
Brie Bella
If there’s a pool, you’ll find Brie in there, it doesn’t matter the hour of the night or what clothes I have on. That’s just the way I am . . . especially if I’ve had a few drinks first. And that’s basically what happened that night in Green Bay. I just wanted to go to the casino so bad, but my sister wouldn’t go with me, and you know how when you’re a little intoxicated, things get exaggerated in your mind. So I was mad she wouldn’t come to the casino. I was just like, “Screw this, I’m going for a swim.” It wasn’t the smartest thing I ever did because I totally ruined my white dress, but at least I remembered to take my shoes off so I didn’t ruin those as well. If you want to know anything else about this story, you’ll have to ask Jose Cuervo.
Brood Awakening
Tommy Dreamer
Whenever I travel with Edge and we only have a few hours of sleep until we need to catch our early-morning flight, we’ll end up sharing a room just to save money. I will always want to go to bed, but a lot of times Edge will be so amped up, he’ll want to go out and stay up all night before our flight. Then, of course, he’ll call in his partner in crime, Christian, and I’ll be dozing off and then all of a sudden someone will do a Superfly Splash off their bed onto me or someone will drop an elbow on me while I’m sleeping, and then we basically have some sort of semifight because they’re both pulling covers off of me or wrapping the covers around me while they double-team me just to wake me up. So what always happens is, they get me woken up, I’m all wound up and fired up, and then they wind up going to bed.
The New Gambit
Kofi Kingston
When things really get crazy is late at night in the hotel. When Hornswoggle and I check in, we both get a copy of the key. Then as soon as we get in the door, we know it’s time to be on alert because we try to throw the keys at each other like Gambit from X-Men. And those things hurt if they get you in the right spot.
At first we never hit each other, then one time he hit me in the eye, so I tried to lock myself in my room. But then when I tried to get out, I realized that there was this hair dryer that was attached to the wall, and the cord was just long enough that Hornswoggle wrapped it around the door handle. So he locked me in my room. We got a good kick out of that, but there’s always shenanigans going on inside the hotel.
Kofi Still Owes Me
Hornswoggle
Oh yeah, the ninja hotel keys. It all started when he and I started sharing rooms to save money. I like two-star hotels. I like to save money. Kofi stays in nothing but three-star and above, but it’s really just a waste of money. But anyway, ninja hotel keys all started one night when he walked in the room, I picked up a key and I whipped it at him, and it hit him in the face. That’s when the war started. I’m still winning the war, as he has a lot of catching up to do. He finally caught me in the cheek the other day, and it was great. I actually applauded him. But then I also tied the door to his suite shut with a blow dryer to get back at him. He then proceeded to rip the blow dryer off the wall, and it cost me $150. He still owes me the money to this day.
“When you’re on the road, it’s not just about finding something to eat . . . it’s about making sure it doesn’t come back to get you.”
—CHAVO GUERRERO
Finding something to eat at four in the morning can be a challenge. Scratch that—finding something healthy to eat at four in the morning is the real challenge. “I’m a big fan of the Wendy’s Baconator,” Kane confesses with a laugh. Make that a Double and we’re talking almost 1,000 calories and 2,260 mg of sodium in one meal . . . and that doesn’t even count fries and a drink. Yikes. “That’s one of the worst parts about life on the road, all the fast food you end up eating as you travel from one stop to the next,” he says. Then again, when you’re a WWE wrestler, sometimes finding a place to sit down and eat healthy is only half the battle. The other half? Eating with each other.
One Man’s Trash . . .
The Miz
I used to travel with Elijah Burke, and let me tell you, Elijah Burke is a character. Whenever we were on the road, we would stop at Cracker Barrel or Denny’s or a Waffle House, whatever we could find open late at night. And every time Elijah would sit down, he would immediately ask the waitress for a glass of hot water. She would bring the hot water, and he would stick all of his silverware into the hot water. I’d ask him why, and he’d say, “Daddy, have you seen the silverware here? There are spots everywhere on it.” Okay, I’ll let that go. But then we would get our food, and I would have some extra fries left. Now, if you’re a nice guy at the table and you have extra fries, you always ask the other person at your table, “Do you want my fries?” That’s the nice thing to do. So here I am, “Elijah, would you like my fries?” And he’s like, “How dare you, Daddy!” He’s screaming at me in the middle of a restaurant, and all of these old people inside Cracker Barrel start turning around wondering what’s happening. “How dare you offer me trash! That is your trash!” Elijah is screaming at me. “That is your trash, Daddy!”
I’m like, “Elijah, this isn’t my trash. I’m done eating it.” And he says, “You’re done eating it? Well, where does it go when you’re done eating it?” So I tell him, “Well, when the waitress takes it, she puts it in the trash.”
“That’s right,” he says. “She puts it in the trash.”
So we actually went around and started an argument through the entire restaurant whether extra fries on a plate are trash. We’re asking all of these old women, like, “Ma’am, excuse me, but if I had extra fries and I was offering them to you, would that be me offering you trash?” And this one little old lady tells us, “No, I don’t think so.” And Elijah yells out, “Are you kidding! That is trash. You’re telling me you would eat this man’s trash?” This poor lady is like, “Well, I wouldn’t eat his fries because I don’t really know him, but I would eat my husband’s fries.”
Elijah just looks at her and says, “I can’t believe you eat trash. That is disgusting.”
Needless to say, I can’t believe this guy. He’s incredible. But that’s not where the weird late-night food stories end with Elijah Burke. This other night we go to Denny’s, and let me tell you, Elijah loves carrot cake. “Love” might not even be a strong enough word for how Elijah feels about carrot cake. Anyway, the waitress comes over after our meal and asks us if we’d like dessert. “I’d love dessert. In fact, I’d love carrot cake. Thank you very much,” he says. Then she asks me if I want dessert, but I tell her I’m full and that I don’t want anything. Elijah can’t believe I didn’t want anything. “Daddy, she’s giving us free carrot cake.”
“Elijah, she’s not giving us free carrot cake.”
“But she offered it to us,” he says.
So I tell him, “It’s her job to ask us if we want dessert. She’s just doing her job.”
“Now, now, now, now, now, Daddy, she’s giving it to us for free. Trust me on this. You should get a piece of carrot cake from her and give it to me. Get it to go so I can take it with me on the airplane.”
“Elijah,” I tell him, “she’s not giving this to us for free.” But he just keeps insisting until I finally give in and ask for a piece of carrot cake. Lo and behold, what’s on the receipt? Carrot cake.
“But you offered it to me, ma’am,” Elijah insists. The poor waitress tries to explain that after every meal, they ask if you’d like dessert, but he sits there and complains for a half an hour. Half an hour about stupid carrot cake. Half an hour over $4.95. That is what he is complaining about. I paid for my carrot cake just to give it to him, but he didn’t pay for his carrot cake. She gave it to him for free. She actually took it out of her check, just for Elijah Burke.
No Shakes for You
John Morrison
My biggest pet peeve is any time we go anywhere and it’s late, the first thing that all of the fast food places do is turn their shake machines off. And it’s only because they’re lazy. I don’t know what it is—that they don’t want to make the shakes or they don’t want to clean their machines. But it doesn’t matter where you go, whether it’s McDonald’s or Wendy’s or wherever, my favorite cheap meal is a milk shake, and whenever we pull in, I just have this sixth sense of when the shake machine is going to be turned off.
No Translation Necessary
D’Lo Brown
This is back in 1998, when Taka first came to the company. He didn’t speak any English, and he was the only Japanese guy there at the time. So Jim Ross sees me as the responsible one and he tells me, “Hey, we’ve got this kid Taka here, he doesn’t speak any English. For a couple of road trips, can you take him on the road with you? Since he can’t speak English, he can’t read road signs, so we don’t want him to drive.” So Taka, the whole time, all he would say to me was, “Thank you, D’Losan . . . okay, okay.” That’s all the English he knew.
So we were doing a show in West Virginia one night and we flew into Columbus. It’s about a four-hour drive to Huntington, and after the show, we’re driving back to Columbus in the middle of the night. The highway we’re riding on is this desolate, two-lane highway, and about halfway through, we see this oasis of two gas stations, a McDonald’s, and a Burger King. In the car it was me, The Rock, Mark Henry, Grandmaster Sexay, and Taka, and Taka was sleeping in the back. I’m driving along and I’m like, “Guys, what do you want to eat?” Everyone chimes in, but Taka’s still sleeping. Mind you, it’s about two o’clock in the morning at this point, so I start yelling, “Taka, what do you want to eat?” Taka shakes his head, looks up, and says, “McDonald’s or Burger King, it doesn’t really matter to me.” Taka then closes his eyes like he’s about to go back to sleep, then he realizes that he just spoke in perfect English. He sits up and says, “Ah, D’Losan, McDonald’s or Burger King . . . okay, okay.” He knew how to speak English the whole time but he was just pretending not to know English. He even tried to go back to his Pidgin English, but I told him, “You let the genie out of the bottle now.” All he could say was, “Oh, I’m sorry. My boss told me to keep it a secret that I know English.” We all got on him after that and gave him the keys. Here we were chauffeuring him, now it was his turn to drive. All this time, we’ve been trying to help him around, and you’ve got Rocky talking to him like he’s a five-year-old kid, and the whole time, the guy speaks better English than Mark Henry.
Nose Plugs, Please
Maria
Natalya and Eve love to eat corn nuts, and I hate the smell of them. I’ll be sitting in the car trying to plug my nose. The smell of corn nuts is gross. I remember one night in Tampa, I was traveling with Layla and there was nothing open, so we stop at a gas station, and as they’re stocking up on corn nuts, I buy three packs of tuna and a bottle of mayonnaise. This store had a hot dog stand, so I took some relish and onions and I stirred it into my tuna in this big to-go cup, and I ended up eating it with crackers. It didn’t make me sick or anything, but it sure did smell bad in the car. Not corn nut bad, but it was bad.
The Shakes
Chavo Guerrero
Late-night food is awful. The Waffle House is open 24/7, so a lot of times that’s all you can eat. I’ve done it before where I had Waffle House at three in the morning and I ate a chicken breast that wasn’t totally cooked, so I had them cook it more. The very next day I was sick to my stomach. I remember I was in Florida at the time, and the sickness started to really kick in. I couldn’t even wrestle that day it got so bad. I was just sitting there shaking. Billy Kidman actually had to drive me to a hotel by the airport, and I couldn’t even get out of the car without help. I was sitting in my room, and my back just started really tightening up. I don’t know if it was because of cramps or what, but my back was really tight. I was freezing cold, I’m throwing up, and now even though I’m freezing, I had to put ice on my back because it was so tight I couldn’t even lie down. It was a horrible night, and that’s happened to me a few times. When you’re on the road, it’s not just about finding something to eat . . . it’s about making sure it doesn’t come back to get you.
And when it comes to eating, we got bad habits all over the place. We all come from different walks of life, so what works in one place might not work in another. We have people who like to eat with their mouths open and smacking their food. We have people farting all over the place. A guy like Big Show will stink out the bus until finally we’re all yelling at him to stop farting or we’ll all kick his butt. That’s what it takes, because not one of us could kick his butt by ourselves, but if there are ten of us, we could do it.
Miller Time
IRS
One night we had a show at the Boston Garden, and during the show, the Iron Sheik had asked me if he could catch a ride with me back to Hartford so he could make it to the airport. But he was in a match that was on a little bit later than mine, so I told him I’d give him a ride, but we needed to leave before the show was over. So he has his match, then he just grabs his bag and walks out with me still in his wrestling gear, with his curled-up boots. It’s a Sunday in Boston, and you can’t buy beer on Sunday in Massachusetts, but Sheik says, “No, no, Mike Baba, I know this guy across the street from the Boston Garden.” So we pull up to what looks like a bar—it had these big bay windows that you could see through—and Sheik goes in the bar and I see his hands moving and they’re talking back and forth as Sheik tries to convince the guy to sell him some beer.
This went on for like fifteen minutes before Sheik finally convinced the guy to sell him some beer. But sure enough, this took so long that here comes everyone out of the Boston Garden, and as people leave the building, they all see Sheik inside the bar in his wrestling gear. So they all start banging on the windows and they’re yelling, “That’s the Iron Sheik.” Meanwhile, I’m still in the car and I’m trying to scoot down as far as I can in my seat so no one will recognize me. Then finally, the Sheik comes out and gets into the car with a bag of beer, but now the fans all turn their attention to our car. They’re pounding our windows and shaking our car from side to side. I thought, “Well, this is the end of my life.” We had a pretty good mob surrounding our car to the point where we couldn’t even drive along the street. I actually had to jump the car onto the sidewalk just to maneuver around to a spot where we could get back on the road where traffic was moving and get on the highway. Both of us, our hearts were racing. It’s pretty scary when you have that many people out there shaking your car and pounding on your windows. Finally, we’re on the highway, and Sheik opens up a beer and says, “Oh well, at least the beer tastes good.”
Instant Karma
Kofi Kingston
One night I was traveling with Cryme Tyme, and we were driving to D.C., and we stopped at a Roy Rogers because it was open twenty-four hours. I get in line, JTG gets in line, and we’re trying to meander our way around. Then Shad cuts in front of us . . . but this is karma at its best. Shad is looking at the food, and they didn’t have any chicken. So here is big Shad, a 6'8", 285-pound guy, and he asks this lady if they have any chicken, and she totally punks him out. She was like, “Does it look like we have chicken? Don’t you think if we had chicken it would be out there with all of the rest of the food?” It was just hilarious to see Shad get punked out by some lady with a hairnet. Shad just couldn’t say anything. He was speechless. But that was karma. Had he not cut us in line, then it would’ve been one of us asking about the chicken and getting yelled at by the hairnet lady.
Almond Joy
Dolph Ziggler
My one guilty pleasure on the road is eating almonds. Almonds are pretty healthy for you, so I justify it by getting the chocolate-covered almonds and going low carb all day, then every once in a while waking up with an empty bag next to me.
I Don’t Like Mustard
Matt Hardy
Life on the road is definitely challenging. First and foremost, when you’ve been doing this for a while and you start to get your body beat up, it turns into a full-time job just keeping your body together. Here, your body is your business. Your body is your product. People always ask me when I go to the gym. My response is, “Whenever I can.” If you work for WWE, even the people who look like they don’t go to the gym, they go to the gym. If you wrestle on a full-time basis, you go to the gym. You just have to. If you don’t, your ligaments and tendons are just going to fall apart. It takes a very special animal to do what we do.
That being said, you won’t survive in this business for any amount of years unless you truly have the passion of loving the sport, and I do, and I know Jeff does as well. You have to look at what we do and see what it does to your body, and you have to realize that later in life, this is going to influence my health. This is going to affect my health. And I truly accept this. My motto is this: You only live one time, and I would rather have some aches and pains while living an amazing seventy-five years, than living a dull eighty-five years.
I’m thirty-four right now, and I promise you, I’ve lived a life gazillions of people wish they lived. I couldn’t begin to tell you how great my life has been. Not only living my dream day after day, but this has also been very financially rewarding. And beyond even that, it’s just nice to wake up every morning and know that I’m doing what I love.
To think that any week, I could be getting off a plane and be in any country in the world, that’s still amazing to me. It’s mind-blowing to me. And part of the reason why it’s so amazing goes hand in hand with another one of my mottoes: It’s not necessarily where you’re at, it’s who you’re with. If I’m with my brother or if I’m with some good friends, then we’ll make a good time out of a 370-mile drive. We’ll plug in the iPod, we’ll have some Kings of Leon playing, we’ll stop to eat a couple of times, tell some stories, joke around, and have a good time.
I’m trying to retrain myself, though, because I’m in a real bad habit of going to bed at four or five in the morning and waking up around eleven. That’s just how my schedule is now. Even when I’m home, I have about four other business projects I’m working on. So during the day, I’m training or doing work. But when it gets to be around one in the morning, that’s what I love because that’s my alone time. My favorite thing to do at home is to sit back around two or three in the morning in my hot tub, maybe have a cocktail like a vodka cranberry, and just relax. I live on 140 acres, and there are no neighbors nearby. That’s when I can see a sky full of stars and just relax. To me, that’s the ultimate form of relaxation. And when I’m having a tough time on the road, all I have to do is think ahead to the next time I’ll be home sitting back in the hot tub, looking at those stars.
But that’s not the only thing I miss about home. There is this place about ten minutes away from my house called the Checkered Flag. It’s a truck stop that stays open twenty-four hours. It’s a real hole in the wall, mom-and-pop–type joint, but they have the most amazing hamburgers, cheeseburgers, and hot dogs you can ever eat. There will be nights when we’re all hanging out at like four in the morning, and we’ll call our buddy to come pick us up and take us to the truck stop. I’ll get my cheeseburger with no mustard. I don’t like mustard. That was a Matt Fact that people liked a lot, that I dislike mustard—but anyway, I get mine without mustard and Jeff gets his all the way, and we sit back in this truck stop and we’ll eat cheeseburgers and fries. That’s truly our guilty pleasure. We talk about it all the time when we’re on the road. We’ll be sitting in a hotel in Texas or California or wherever, and one of us will say, “Man, nothing would beat a truck stop cheeseburger right about now.”