Countdown To Lockdown (2 page)

Don’t get me wrong, I like Kurt. He’s a caring, giving person and a genuine American hero; a guy who won a gold medal in the Olympics while competing with a broken neck. He is also one of the most talented performers in the history of our business, with a résumé of classic matches that rivals anyone’s, of any era.

And later tonight, I’m going to be in the ring with him for the very first time. Okay, okay, all you nitpickers, I know I’ve actually “been in the ring” with him plenty of times — for interviews, angles, even an odd punch or really hard head butt or two. Granted, tonight is a tag team match, and really more of a door I must pass through to get me into the creative corridor leading to a different big match with a different big opponent.

But Kurt Angle really isn’t interested in any talk about opening doors and creative corridors and big matches in the future. He’s interested in tonight. And that same competitive fire that vaulted him to the top of the amateur wrestling world — possibly the most thankless and difficult world in sports — drives him to pull off the best match he is capable of, night in and night out, no matter how big the show, no matter how limited the opponent, no matter the physical or emotional toll to himself.

I respect that attitude. At one time I probably shared it. But I’m a different man now — older, weaker, slower — and a lot more realistic.

If anything, Kurt is more driven on this night than usual. Last night was
Destination X
, a TNA Pay-Per-View that held a world of promise. Following a February offering that looked flat on paper and, if anything, underperformed those limited expectations, TNA looked ready to regain its form with
Destination X.
Led by a complex, well-told,
long-term story involving Kurt and his Main Event Mafia partner/nemesis Sting, our
TNA Impact
show (Thursday at 9:00, Spike) was on a roll, recently eclipsing two million U.S. viewers for the first time. I liked the odds of Kurt and Sting pulling off a classic, and I was looking forward to my role as special guest enforcer at ringside, which more or less ensured me the best seat in the house (although technically I’d be standing).

But at
Destination X
on that particular night, expectation gave way to disappointment, reality couldn’t compete with hope, and a good, hard-fought match simply wasn’t enough for our fans … or for Sting or Kurt, especially Kurt. I was not without a disappointment of my own in the match, having shattered my own long-standing belief that I went up “light” for big moves — a necessity if one wants to avoid the worst of the injuries that the business can offer. Instead I went up like a 300-pound S.O.S. — figure out the acronym for yourself (I’m trying to stay PG-13 in this book) — for Kurt’s Angle Slam, injuring my pride, and possibly Kurt’s vertebrae, in the process.

Like I said, it was a good match, a point I kept reiterating in separate long conversations with both men after the show. I was trying to look at the glass as half full. But the glass-half-empty view was indeed troubling. Sting looked old. I looked like a 300-pound S.O.S. And Kurt Angle looked human. Apparently, a few voices on the Internet, I would guess a vocal minority, said that Kurt was washed up, his best days were behind him. I knew Kurt would be looking to prove himself. And guess who he’d want to do it with? Me. Great. Kind of reminds me of the night I wrestled Dr. Death, Steve Williams, in Saginaw, Michigan, in early 1990 — the same night Doc learned that WCW (World Championship Wrestling) intended to reduce his contractual guarantee. I remember how I felt that night. Pretty much the same way I feel tonight, over nineteen years later — terrified. Absolutely terrified.

How did this moment ever arise?
I asked myself. Why hadn’t I just
stayed under the safety of the WWE umbrella? Sure, my situation with WWE hadn’t been perfect, but it couldn’t have been that bad, right? At least it was a certified Angle-Free Zone.

Well, to truly understand my story, I’m going to have to introduce you to an old friend of mine. Readers of my earlier memoirs will remember him well, if not fondly. Ladies and gentlemen, say hello to Al Snow.

Required reading.

I think it might have been Al Snow’s fault. For looking so darn good. No, that’s not a misprint. At a certain point in time — 2000, 2001 — Al looked really good. No, not his ring work, which continued to be sloppy and juvenile. Not his facial features, either, which strike me as “Village People cop meets generations of inbreeding.” But at a certain point, Al Snow’s physique showed a marked improvement; leaner, meaner, more muscularly defined. Not that it affected his push in WWE, which continued to be almost unchartable, or his reaction from the crowd, which was nearly inaudible. But Al Snow, for a time, as a physical specimen, looked pretty darn good. The progress, according to Al, was a direct result of hundred-rep training.

Hundred-rep training seemed to fly in the face of all the conventional wisdom I’d picked up since my first gym visits in late 1979, when my dad used to drive my brother and me to the Gyrodyne Flowerfield, an isolated business development, where he’d park the car and catch up on his newspapers while his two children were tortured inside. Yes, after all these years, I can look back objectively and make a good case for the treatment we received constituting torture.

Neil’s Gym was divided into two distinct areas. In one half was the free-weight section, where anyone in that part of Long Island who knew anything about weight training congregated, pressing barbells and dumbbells on equipment that would seem downright antiquated these days, but were cutting-edge by the standards of the day.

The other half, containing a full lineup of Arthur Jones’s innovative Nautilus machines, was the only part of the gym my dad allowed my brother and me to venture into. Free weights were supposed to make people muscle-bound, which was an absolute no-no for anyone looking at athletic endeavors that didn’t begin and end on the offensive or defensive line for the football team.

The notion seems downright primitive now, given the musculature displayed by athletes ranging from LeBron James in basketball to Tiger Woods in golf. But the experts of the time more or less forbade experimentation with free weights. I have an old book,
Inside Basketball
, written by Dick Barnett, a member of the 1970 World Champion New York Knicks, that actually touted the idea of using kitchen counter isometrics as its primary form of strength training.

These Nautilus machines, however, were supposed to be the athlete’s answer to progressive strength training. Jones’s machines featured the philosophy of pre-exhaustion; each one was designed for an exercise isolating a specific muscle, followed by a second one that incorporated a larger group of muscles. For example, pectoral flies, which isolated the chest muscles, would be followed by an exercise simulating decline bench presses, which allowed the body to borrow strength from the triceps and deltoids to aid the pre-exhausted pecs. Isolated bicep curls would be followed by lat pull downs — both performed on the same apparatus, so there was absolutely no time for resting. Most daunting of all was the Nautilus leg station, where leg extensions were followed by seated leg presses. Adding to the agony were the trainers at the gym, who would move the athletes/guinea pigs of this physiological dark age through the circuit at warp speed, pausing only to incorporate little goodies like the sixty-second wall
squat into the proceedings. The legs would start to throb at twenty seconds, shake at thirty to forty, and more or less cease to function just about the time the minute was up.

Indeed, if not for the encouragement/taunting/insults from the friendly staff at Neil’s, I’m not sure I could have made it through a single workout. If memory serves me correctly, the instructors even had plastic buckets on hand, just in case an athlete/guinea pig couldn’t quite make the bathroom in time to do what needed to be done.

Meanwhile, the guys on the other side of the gym — the free-weight guys — seemed to be the only ones making visible progress. And they seemed to be doing it at a much more leisurely pace; a set of six to ten reps of a single exercise followed by a few minutes of walking around, talking, and flexing in the mirror.

But all the walking around and talking added up, and by the time those free-weight workouts were over, it was not unusual for a couple hours to have passed — plenty of time to look down on the Nautilus guys crying and puking during their paltry twenty-minute workouts.

Thankfully, my dad caved in to my continual assault of free-weight requests, about the time a couple friends got their driver’s licenses — sometime during my junior year of high school — and all those fears came to fruition; my body swelled almost instantly to Herculean proportions, eventually leading to my current status as muscle-bound stiff, my cartoonlike musculature proving useful only for impressing women and showing off on the beach.

Okay, so maybe even at my free-weight-pushing peak, my two-hours-a-day gym physique didn’t show the slightest hint of training at all. But that didn’t stop me from diving into the pool of bodybuilding literature that was getting deeper every day. I read everything I could find —
Muscle & Fitness
,
Muscular Development
,
Arnold: The Education of a Bodybuilder
,
Beef It!
— all in the quest to set free the ripped and ruthless body I knew I had locked away deep inside of me. Funny how none of those magazines or books seemed to make the slightest mention of things like genetic limitations — that some
bodies just weren’t meant to be buff, no matter how much protein was ingested, no matter how many hours were spent in the gym.

Over the years, I grudgingly learned to accept the weak hand that Mother Nature had dealt out to me. Sadly, I was never going to be Lou Ferrigno in the gym or Jimmy Snuka in the ring — a realization that no doubt played a role in developing my distinct pro-wrestling style. Somewhere along the way, I also took note of a direct correlation between how bad I looked and how much money I made: 220-pound Mick slept in his car. 235-pound Mick got a job in Memphis. 270-pound Mick became a player in Dallas and got a job in WCW. 300-pound Mick won a WWE title and wrote a towering
New York Times
best seller. 330-pound Mick pushed the theory a little too far, asking way too much of a lower back and knees that would have been far better off and lasted a few years longer at a far lesser weight.

Fast-forward to January 2007. I’m somewhere around 300 pounds, a weight I’d struggled to maintain for most of the previous five years, with the notable exception of a period in 2004 when I would get down to 272, my lowest weight since the late eighties, for a comeback that would yield the best match of my career — a brutal hardcore bout with a young Randy Orton.

A new book,
The Hardcore Diaries
, was due out in March, and it seemed to be practically begging to have its contents exploited for the good of a big match. Sure, the book detailed a frustrating six weeks in WWE in 2006 — a period of time that saw my high hopes for the second
One Night Stand
Pay-Per-View deflate, sputter, and fall to the ground like a childhood balloon released from thumb and forefinger. Even the accompanying farting sound of the sputtering balloon seemed appropriate.

Nonetheless, my name had surfaced as a possibility for a
WrestleMania
main event, as Donald Trump’s chosen “guy” in the highly publicized “Hair vs. Hair” match between Trump and Vince McMahon. Eventually, I was passed over in favor of Bobby Lashley, a world-class amateur wrestler and mixed martial arts practitioner with a massive
chiseled physique and a world of potential — a guy who looked to be a huge part of the company’s future … at least until he left WWE forever four months later.

Not to worry, I had a Plan B all lined up and approved by Mr. McMahon, and given the blessing of my publisher, Pocket Books. Plan B, I assured Pocket, was going to be a home run. While everyone else was vying for attention at
WrestleMania
, I would begin my big television push the day after the biggest show of the year, using the contents of the book to fuel a match with John Morrison, still known as Johnny Nitro at the time. I hoped that this match could do for John what my 2004 match had done for Randy Orton: move him up the ladder of success — give him an exciting Pay-Per-View opportunity with an opponent willing to help him make that big step.

We could even take advantage of the groundwork I’d laid down a year earlier, involving Morrison’s real-life/on-screen girlfriend, Melina, who I still felt had untapped big-star potential.

But in order to have this big match with Morrison, I was going to need to be in top physical condition, or at least as close to it as I could realistically expect, given my knees and back … and neck … and pretty much everything else.