Rumble Road by Jon Robinson Page A

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 .
     
Five
Hotel Hell
    “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