No is a Four-Letter Word by Chris Jericho

Author:Chris Jericho
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781409165583
Publisher: Weidenfeld & Nicolson

CHAPTER 12

THE

BRIAN PILLMAN

PRINCIPLE

DO SOMETHING DIFFERENT

I never played by the rules, I never really cared . . .

—SKID ROW, “YOUTH GONE WILD”

(Rachel Bolan, Dave Sabo)

Earlier in this palimpsest, you read about the impact that Paul Stanley had on me as a teenager. But as I was growing up and getting involved in the wrestling business, another performer who was just as big of an influence on me was The Heartbreak Kid, Shawn Michaels. I’d go so far as to say that when I started out wrestling, I basically copied him. I grew my hair into a sweet mullet and dyed it canary yellow like Shawn, wore ring gear that was as closely modeled to HBK’s as I could afford, and ripped off his trademark high spots move for move. But it didn’t take me long to realize that being a direct copy of Shawn, while fine for starters, would put me in a specific box and limit my potential for success.

So by taking a few of Shawn’s best qualities, adding some of Paul’s magic, and throwing them into a show business blender along with a healthy dollop of me, I now had something. I was never interested in being the “next whomever.” I just wanted to be the first Chris Jericho, because I knew if I wanted to make it, I had to do something different.

The late Brian Pillman hammered this principle home to me the one and only time our paths crossed at an ECW show in 1996—his last weekend with the company happened to be my first. We hit it off right away, and I’m guessing that’s partly because he knew I had trained in Calgary like he did, and partly because Chris Benoit was a mutual friend.

We sat in the corner of the dressing room/basement of the Lost Battalion Hall in Queens, New York, where Brian filled me in on his upcoming plans to go to WCW and start the new-age Four Horsemen (who would use a “two arms crossed in an X” gesture instead of the iconic “four fingers up” sign) with Benoit and Dean Malenko. He asked me if I would consider being the fourth member and I told him I’d check my busy skedge. Actually, I said, “Absofuckinlutely!” because I would’ve given up everything and done it in a second. Unfortunately, I never saw Brian again nor heard another word about the new-age Horsemen, so I assume the angle was dropped.

But what I remember most about our conversation was Brian telling me about his decision to reinvent himself as the “Loose Cannon,” a subtly crazy hothead who would lash out in uncontrolled outbursts at random. It was a completely different persona from the squeaky-clean babyface he had embodied in the ring for the past decade.

I asked him why he felt the need to change things up, considering the amount of success he’d already had. He looked off into the corner of the room and murmered softly, “If you want to really make it in this business, you have to do something different.

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