Rumble Road (6 page)

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) . . .

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.”