Rumble Road by Jon Robinson Read Free Book Online Page B

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,