"Bischoff made me an offer to go to WCW, but I don't know if I really want to go."

"Well don't go then," he said matter-of-factly.

I didn't have to explain the reasons why I couldn't say no and he knew I was gone. But to my surprise, he explained that before I left he wanted me to win the ECW television championship.

It took a lot of trust for Paul to want that, as I had no contract with him. I could've won the belt and thrown it in the garbage can on live WCW TV. But he trusted me and I took that very seriously. We agreed it was best for business to keep the WCW deal a secret until my last night with ECW. We couldn't have done that now with the influence of the Internet, but back in those medieval times secrets could still be kept secret.

The plan was for me to win the title at the ECW Arena from Pitbull #2. The day I was supposed to leave Paul called and left a FedEx tracking number on my answering machine, explaining that my plane ticket had been FedExed to the airport and I had to pick it up.

Why would a FedEx be at the airport? Why wouldn't they just deliver it to my house?

I drove to the FedEx outlet at the airport, but when I gave them the number, they told me that it was a digit short, nine numbers instead of ten.

The night before the match I was still waiting for my plane ticket. Even though Paul was notorious for leaving flight arrangements to the last minute, this was getting ricockulous.

I was stir-crazy in my apartment waiting, so I left for a beer. When I came back a few hours later there was still no word from Paul. I called him every hour to no avail, until I finally said, "I've been calling you all night with no response. I don't care about your stupid belt and I'm not coming to your stupid show. Later."

I hung up and literally thirty seconds later, Paul called me back.

He was as friendly as can be and said cheerily, "Hey, what are you doing? I've been hanging out with a bunch of strippers and I just got home. I called you a few hours ago and left a message on your tape. There's a ticket waiting for you at the airport."

I had an answering machine with no messages on it and a caller ID with no calls on it, which proved two things:

1. I was a loser with no friends.

2. Paul E. was telling another bald-faced lie.

Jim Cornette once said that Paul E. would rather climb a tree and lie than stay on the ground and tell the truth. I was starting to agree, although this was probably Paul's revenge for me deciding to jump to WCW. I wanted to tell him him to go to hell, but he was one of those guys who was impossible to stay mad at. Besides, I was still excited that I was about to win my first American championship.

The match for the title was one of the best of my career and ended with me reversing Pitbull #2's top rope power bomb into a Frankensteiner for the victory. The move came out of nowhere and the crowd exploded out of their chairs when I won. It was a gas to watch the tape back and see their various euphoric reactions to my victory. On the eve of my exit, I had become a big part of the family.

After my victory, I jumped into the crowd and celebrated with the fans, even trading my belt for Hat Guy's Panama lid. I was the ECW TV champion at twenty-five years old and it was a great moment in Jeric-History.

I continued the celebration by hosting a victory party in my room until the wee hours at the Travellodge and woke up late for my flight. When I called the airline to get on the next one, they told me, "You should be able to fly standby on the next flight. Don't you worry and we're very sorry about your brother-in-law."

"My brother-in-law?"

"Yes, Mr. Irvine. We were so sorry to hear about the passing of your brother-in-law." I had neither a brother-in-law nor a sister.

Something was rotten in the state of Pennsylvania but I rolled with it, "Oh, yeah, yeah. I keep forgetting. I still can't believe it."

What I really couldn't believe was Paul E. had flown me in on a bereavement fare and hadn't told me.

The next weekend, I confronted him.

"Hey, the next time you're going to fly me on a bereavement fare, can you at least tell me so I don't blow my own cover and get arrested for fraud?"

Once again, Paul didn't bat an eye as he pulled a doctor's note pad out of his bag and said, "Did they hassle you? If they do, just give them this."

Then he took a pen and wrote in his illegible chicken scratch:

To Whom It May Concern, Thank you so much for your compassion during this horrible time. You have been so understanding and the Irvine family thanks you.

Sincerely, Dr. Horowitz

Now he was adding medical fraud to his list of felonies.

I lost the title one month later in a four-way elimination match against Pitbull #2, Too Cold Scorpio, and Shane Douglas. Paul surprised the fans again by having the champion (yours rockingly) be the first guy eliminated.

It was another memorable night highlighted by my first ECW brawl through the crowd. The fans were famous for bringing their own weapons for the wrestlers to hit each other with and there was quite a selection. Nintendo consoles, cheese graters, muffin pans, pencil sharpeners, and even a fishing net. What kind of evil violence could I dish out with a fishing net? Was I expected to capture my opponent like a huge butterfly and put him into a giant jelly jar with holes cut into its massive lid?

My next weekend in ECW was my last and Paul had one last laugh when he booked bereavement fares for me and a Calgary wrestler named Johnny Smith. This time another brother-in-law had choked on a grape or something.

Just a tip, kids: Don't ever think of marrying one of my sisters.

Johnny and I drove to the airport trying to figure out how we could have the same brother-in-law if we weren't related. We surmised that we would have to be married to sisters whose brother had died.

After my last match in ECW against Too Cold Scorpio, the crowd in the Arena started chanting "Please don't go." I'd been spared the "You sold out," chants because I think people were genuinely saddened at my departure. I know I was.

I had a tear in my eye as I grabbed the mike and cut an emotional promo praising the Arena, ECW, and all its fans. It was a genuinely bittersweet moment. If I could've stayed there forever and made good money in the process, I would've seriously considered it.

When I walked back through the curtain, Paul was standing there looking like he'd just lost his best friend. He gave me a hug like it was the end of an era...which it was.

I called Paul for advice many times afterward and he was always there for me-even though it took him forever to call me back.

A lot of people associate me with ECW and consider me an ECW guy. In reality, I only wrestled twenty-two matches for the company over the course of six months. But my connection to ECW isn't solely based on the amount of time I spent there, but rather on the attitude that I exuded while I was with the company.

I was tailor-made for the fighting spirit that the company was built on and I had the true respect for the wrestling business that everybody in ECW shared. There was nobody in the company that had been drafted from another sport or was in the business to make a quick buck or to become famous. We were all there because we loved wrestling and believed in the company and in ourselves. That's why it's difficult to explain or to understand what ECW was all about unless you were actually there.

I'm proud to say I fought in ECW and serving my tour of duty there helped take me to the big time.

Unfortunately making it to the big leagues of WCW almost killed my love for the wrestling business, in the same way that working in the minor leagues of ECW had intensified it.

PART NINE

ATLANTA.

CHAPTER 43.

DOOMED FROM THE START.

After the Peace Festival, it didn't take long to set up a meeting with Bischoff in Atlanta. There would be no Flair-style runaround this time.

WCW had recently taken the ratings lead over the WWF, so if things went well with Eric I would be working for the biggest wrestling company in the United States.

A few days after I'd received a plane ticket to Atlanta in the mail, I got a call from WCW booker Kevin Sullivan. He sounded almost annoyed, like he'd been forced to call me.

"Eric wants to fly you in for a tryout."

Sullivan spoke in a thick Boston accent and came off like a total dick. He arrogantly told me that he wanted to book me for a tryout so he could take a look at what I could do. I didn't have the heart to tell him I was already flying to Atlanta in a few days to negotiate a long-term contract with the boss.

Tryout? I don't need no stinking tryout.

In retrospect, Sullivan's call was an early warning about how the communication between the people in charge of WCW worked. The left hand didn't know what the right hand was doing or what it was hiring.

WCW was owned by Ted Turner and its offices were housed in the CNN Center along with TBS's and TNT's offices. WCW didn't arrange a ride from the airport, so I took the MARTA (subway) to my meeting with the multimillion-dollar corporation.

Eric wasn't ready when I arrived, so I was told to wait with Paul Orndorff. Paul was working behind the scenes in WCW after being one of Hulk Hogan's main WWF rivals in the 1980s as Mr. Wonderful.

He was friendly to me but I must've gotten him on a good day, because the rest of the office referred to him as Oscar the Grouch. He was full of advice and his first suggestion seemed of utmost importance to him: I had to get a flashy robe to wear to the ring for my matches. Apparently Paul was quite morose about the lack of flashy robes currently being worn in the business.

At least it was better than a loincloth.

When Eric finally arrived he was brash and arrogant; a tougher John Davidson, wearing jeans, cowboy boots, and a leather jacket. His outfit seemed far too casual an ensemble for the head of a multimillion-dollar company.

When we went to eat at a sports bar in the concourse of the towers, I started second-guessing my abilities. I was here to sign a contract and I'd never done any negotiating before-at least not at this level-so I wasn't very confident about the process.

WCW was spending a lot of money to get the upper hand in its nasty ratings war with the WWF. Both companies aired live shows head-to-head on Monday nights and were pulling out all the stops to get the advantage. Bischoff had taken the lead by masterminding one of the greatest wrestling angles of all time (which he had lifted from Japan): the nWo invasion.

He'd convinced two of the WWF's top stars, Diesel and Razor Ramon, to jump to WCW and threaten to take over the company. They became the first members of the nWo and were causing chaos (on screen and off) to a huge response from the fans and were on the verge of bringing in their new secret third member. During our lunch I asked him like a mark, "So, who's the third member going to be?"

He looked at me with a smirk and said, "If I told you, I'd have to kill you."

DOH! I was trying to get a job in the company and here I was asking questions like a twelve-year-old fan. I should've asked Eric for his autograph while I was at it. There went fifty grand in Jericho salary down the toilet.

I wanted to grab the words and shove them back down my throat, but I still couldn't get off the topic.

"I'm sure that WWF owns the names Razor Ramon and Diesel. So what are you going to call them?"

"I'm not sure yet," Eric said. "But if worse comes to worst, I'll call them by their real names Kevin Nash and Scott Hall. We're not going to get too fancy with it."

I couldn't stop my verbal diarrhea and told him that Big Titan (who, ironically, would become the WWF's Fake Razor Ramon) and I had come up with names that would still allow them to use similar gimmicks.

"Instead of Diesel and Razor Ramon, you should call them Octane and Philoshave Phil," I said with a grin. Eric didn't respond and I wilted like a sixty-year-old man's boner.

Awkward silence.

After I ate my lunch of crow, we went back up to Eric's office and he got right to the point.

"I'm not going to waste any time with bullshit, I want you to come work for WCW. I think you have the potential to be our version of Shawn Michaels. You have the look and the charisma and you could be a big asset for us. I want to bring you in and start you off hot."

I was honored by his compliments but I was confused by Eric's next statement.

"I'd love to see a Chris JerichoBrad Armstrong feud. I mean, I really see this Brad ArmstrongChris Jericho thing."

Talk about a mixed message.

Eric had just compared me to Shawn Michaels, one of the WWF's biggest stars. Then in almost the same sentence, he talked about starting me off in a feud against Brad Armstrong, who was universally regarded as a great worker but had been portrayed by WCW as a much smaller star than Shawn Michaels.

A feud with Brad didn't seem to be a fast ticket to stardom, but I respected Eric's vision and agreed. Then he asked me how much money I wanted per year. This was the moment of truth. I'd done a little math and figured out how much I was making in Japan and how much I thought I was worth to WCW. I summoned up my courage, took a deep breath, and went for it.

"Well, Eric, I thought about it and since I'm making good money in Japan, I can't see myself coming in for any less than $100,000."

There...it was out.

It was a ludicrously high number and I expected him to laugh my inflated-self-worth ass right out of his office. Instead Eric nodded and said, "I see you in the category of Dean Malenko, Eddy Guerrero, and Chris Benoit and I don't want you to make any less than they do. I'll give you $135,000, which is what they're making."

My eyes bugged out of my head like Jim Carrey in The Mask The Mask.

A hundred thirty-five thousand dollars to do something I loved? Was he high?

But Eric wasn't finished.

"I'm also going to want you to move to Atlanta and that's not going to be cheap. So I'll give you another $30,000 a year to help you cover the cost of the move. And I want you to sign the deal for three years."

I was blown away by his offer despite the fact that he was negotiating against himself and telling me how much my fellow employees were making, and I was ready to sign for ten years. Keep in mind that the most I'd ever made in a year up to that point was about $50,000 and you'll understand why I was in shock. I'd just been exposed to the magical generosity of ATM Eric.

I accepted his offer, left his office, and called my dad to tell him what had happened. He was as awestruck as I was, but he told me a story about his first contract negotiation with the New York Rangers almost twenty-five years earlier.