Black Widow
10-28-2009, 06:40 PM
BUFFALO, N.Y. – Two of NASCAR’s most unflappable drivers were nervous, butterflies filling their stomachs and the anxiety of speaking to more than 16,000 screaming fans – and millions watching at home – weighing on their minds.
Kyle Busch and Joey Logano sat in a small locker room at the end of a hallway in the bowels of Buffalo’s HSBC Arena, just a couple doors down from the spacious clubhouse of the National Hockey League’s Buffalo Sabres.
Each had a script in their hands with passages marked in yellow highlighter, signifying their roles in World Wrestling Entertainment’s “Raw” show, of which they were preparing to guest-host.
The 19-year-old Logano suddenly looked up from the packet of paper in his hand.
“There’s like six pages of lines,” he said to Busch. “You gonna be able to remember all that?”
“No way,” Busch replied. “You?”
There seemed to be little optimism in the room that the show, which draws ratings comparable to or higher than most NASCAR races, would go well for the drivers. But the Joe Gibbs Racing teammates pressed forward, intent on embracing their jobs for the evening.
As part of an upcoming promotion at the Texas Nationwide Series race, Busch will run a car with “Raw” on the hood and Logano’s car will feature the rival WWE program “Smackdown!” It’s all designed to call attention to the release of a new wrestling video game called “WWE Smackdown! vs. Raw” (Gamestop is Logano’s Nationwide sponsor).
In keeping with the theme of the game, and wrestling tradition, the WWE writers split the drivers into good guy/bad guy roles. Busch, who has often been seen as NASCAR’s villain in the eyes of many fans, was appropriately assigned the bad guy role.
Still, there was the matter of how exactly to pull it off. Logano, when first given a draft of the script, had seen the amount he needed to memorize and said, “This is going to be an issue.”
“I can’t even remember my lines from a commercial when I have to say, ‘Whoa,’” he joked, referring to his oft-played ad for Sprint Cup sponsor The Home Depot.
Logano, despite being firmly in the WWE’s core demographic at the age of 19, had never been a wrestling fan. He was only vaguely familiar with the concept and wasn’t even sure if the event was outside or inside.
But just as in the Sprint Cup Series this year, Logano learned quickly. Upon emerging from a limousine that whisked him to the arena on the border of downtown Buffalo, he was greeted by WWE champion John Cena, himself a NASCAR fan and a co-star to some of the drivers in a Gillette Young Guns commercial.
“How has your season been?” Cena asked Logano after both signed autographs for fans who had lined up at the back entrance to the arena more than six hours before show time.
“Oh, a rollercoaster,” Logano said. “Up and down.”
Once Logano and Busch were inside and settled, along with their girlfriends and a handful of support staff who had come along from Joe Gibbs Racing, the drivers delved into the script.
The plan was to have Busch agree with the controversial actions of wrestler “Big Show,” who had betrayed his teammates. Logano would stand up to Big Show and say what he did was wrong.
To top it off, Busch would play the “heel” and incite the Buffalo crowd by making fun of their sports teams and even suggesting that their National Football League team, the Bills, would move to Canada.
“Are they gonna boo me?” Busch asked the group assembled in the locker room.
“Yes,” he was told by several people in unison.
“He’s not used to that,” Logano chimed in sarcastically.
Busch thumbed through the pages of a WWE magazine and frowned. He held up some of his trademark oversized sunglasses and joked he needed to find a way to have his lines run across the bottom of his glasses so he could read them while he was on the mat.
On a monitor across the room that showed what was happening inside the arena, the drivers noticed some of the wrestlers had taken to the ring to warm up.
Busch, beginning to feel more comfortable with his surroundings, declared, “I want to jump off the top rope and see how bad it hurts. It can’t hurt that bad.”
The drivers decided to practice some of the lines they had been given, and while Logano looked a bit tentative, Busch became more animated as he rehearsed.
“Joey is young and dumb!” Busch said, reading from the paper in front of him.
“Oh, that’s nice,” Logano replied, seemingly unaware of that portion of the script.
Logano, too, experimented with his lines.
“I can’t believe how selfish you are!” he said in a deep voice, taking his Connecticut accent into a lower octave.
Around that time, the man who Logano was supposed to confront – the 7-foot-tall, 465-pound Big Show – lumbered into the room to greet the drivers.
He thumped down next to Logano on a loveseat, taking up about 80 percent of it while the young driver was squeezed into the remaining space.
Big Show tried to make conversation, but the mood in the room had become a bit subdued upon his entrance.
“For a bunch of guys who drive fast, you all don’t do too much,” he said, pretending to cuddle with Logano and putting his leg across the driver. “You’re going to have fun tonight. We have a lot of the same fans, so it’s going to be good.”
Then, in a more serious voice, he advised, “Have fun, relax and enjoy it.”
With the massive Big Show towering over him, Logano had seemed even more uncomfortable – likely because the wrestler looked as though he could break the driver in half with his pinky finger.
But once the giant left the room, Logano seemed fascinated with the meeting.
“He had to duck to go underneath that doorway!” Logano said excitedly. “I wonder how he flies! They’d have to give him two seats. Seriously!”
Logano noted incredulously that Busch had greeted Big Show by saying, “Your hands are kinda soft.”
The imposing wrestler replied simply, “Thank you.”
As the hours before the show ticked away, the drivers alternated between filming pre-recorded segments, practicing their grand entrance (burnouts in a back parking lot, then driving into the arena) and grabbing a bite to eat.
But memorizing their part of the story was never far from their minds.
At one point, Busch looked at the script and realized two of the WWE “Divas” were going to be escorting the drivers while wearing their firesuits. He pointed it out to Logano, who observed, “They’re going to look a lot better in them than we do.”
Three hours before show time, the drivers themselves changed into their firesuits – their costumes for the evening. Busch, at this point completely immersed in the proceedings, was coming up with his own lines to add to the script while Logano still appeared tentative.
Logano ventured his own idea for a line, but Busch looked at him and said, “Your dad is going to kill you.”
Busch said he felt bad about one part of the script, which called for him to criticize his teammate for not knowing how to win a championship.
In reality, the older driver said, “You have a championship. I don’t.”
Logano, with a mouth full of food, replied humbly, “Yeah, in the Busch East [Series].”
Said Busch: “That’s still a championship!”
After practicing their burnouts, which were to take place at the same time, the drivers said they were slightly worried about running into each other. Even being in the cars, the portion of the event that should have been most comfortable for them, was cause for concern.
“If we wreck, man…” Busch said in a hushed voice.
“Oh, I know!” Logano replied, then quickly added, “I think we’ll be fine.”
After a closed session with the writers and a final walk-through, the drivers exchanged handshakes with the JGR staff and received “good luck” words from everyone. WWE legend Shawn Michaels, a huge NASCAR fan who had earlier snapped pictures of the practice burnouts, came into the room and asked Logano to autograph some memorabilia for his kids.
Finally, it was show time. Logano and Busch were escorted to their cars as fireworks and music thundered through the packed arena.
With Big Show and his tag-team partner Chris Jericho in the ring, the video screen showed the drivers tearing up the pavement with burnouts, then steering their cars into an arena loading dock.
As the fans realized what was happening, they jumped to their feet and cheered wildly as Busch and Logano drove straight onto the arena floor and then climbed from their cars and waved to the crowd as they walked to the ring.
Busch took a microphone and said, “Ladies and gentlemen: Now that right there is how you make an entrance!” as the crowd cheered.
But he soon drew boos by telling Big Show he agreed with betraying the team. A defiant Logano refused to shake Big Show’s hand and exclaimed, “What you did last night was wrong!”
“You left your team hanging,” Logano told the imposing wrestler. “That’s not impressive – that’s just weak.”
“So you’re saying what I did was weak?” Big Show thundered back. “Kyle, you need to teach your little friend here some respect.”
“Big Show, I apologize,” Busch said. “Joey, he’s young and dumb. He doesn’t know much about championships.”
The crowd hissed and let out a collective, “Ooh.”
Busch continued with his speech and then changed the topic to Buffalo.
“We’re in the city of Buffalo, man,” Busch said as the crowd erupted in cheers and seemed to forgive him.
But just as quickly, Busch added, “A city that hasn’t been to the playoffs since Hulkamania,” referring to wrestler Hulk Hogan’s heyday in the 1980s.
“And you bring T.O. in? What’s he done?” Busch said in reference to Bills wide receiver Terrell Owens as the boos cascaded down from every level of the arena.
Then, with the Bills’ possible move to Toronto in mind, Busch delivered the knockout punch: “Next thing you know, we’re going to be singing ‘O Canada.’”
The drivers informed the crowd of the matches for the evening, though Busch accidentally called wrestler Kofi Kingston “Kofi Johnson” before correcting himself. It seems everyone in NASCAR has Jimmie Johnson on the brain lately.
When he returned backstage, Busch was mad at himself for “butchering it.”
“I was nervous pretty bad,” he said. “I don’t know why. After I ripped on Buffalo, the crowd started chanting, ‘We hate NASCAR! We hate NASCAR!’ It [messed] with my head.”
Logano was awed by the size and volume of the crowd, saying he’d never been in a stadium with so many people.
“At driver intros [at the track], the crowd is like, ‘Ooh,’” he said. “Here, they were like, ‘AAAAAH!’”
Then he smiled and said to Busch, “They loved me out there.”
The drivers watched most of the two-hour show from the locker room on the monitor, commenting on their own acting performance when their pre-recorded bits would appear.
Cena made a return visit during one of his breaks, and Logano asked the wrestler which moves hurt and which don’t.
“Everything hurts,” Cena replied.
Midway through the program, Kingston was shown destroying one of the race cars with a crowbar and finishing by pouring bright orange paint on the hood. As the wrestler was violently attacking the car, the program took a commercial break.
“Oh no!” Logano said, standing up from his seat. “They can’t go to commercial!”
He laughed at his newfound interest in wrestling.
“I’m gonna watch next week,” he said. “I gotta know what’s gonna happen. I gotta know the next deal.”
When the show came back on, cameras showed a bunch of muscular men in the front row of the crowd, whom the announcers identified as some of the very Buffalo Bills players Busch had insulted.
“The Bills are here!” someone in the room exclaimed.
“No they’re not!” Busch said with a bit of disbelief as he suddenly rose from a couch to get a closer look at the monitor.
After the drivers took to the stage once more to announce a future match, it was time to quickly depart the arena and head back to North Carolina.
“This was way, way, way outside my box,” Logano said while changing into his street clothes. “This is a once-in-a-lifetime experience. Not too many people get to do this.”
“It was a neat deal,” Busch said. “More fun than I thought it would be.”
Then he said, only half-jokingly, “We better get out of here before we get killed.”
scenedaily.com
Kyle Busch and Joey Logano sat in a small locker room at the end of a hallway in the bowels of Buffalo’s HSBC Arena, just a couple doors down from the spacious clubhouse of the National Hockey League’s Buffalo Sabres.
Each had a script in their hands with passages marked in yellow highlighter, signifying their roles in World Wrestling Entertainment’s “Raw” show, of which they were preparing to guest-host.
The 19-year-old Logano suddenly looked up from the packet of paper in his hand.
“There’s like six pages of lines,” he said to Busch. “You gonna be able to remember all that?”
“No way,” Busch replied. “You?”
There seemed to be little optimism in the room that the show, which draws ratings comparable to or higher than most NASCAR races, would go well for the drivers. But the Joe Gibbs Racing teammates pressed forward, intent on embracing their jobs for the evening.
As part of an upcoming promotion at the Texas Nationwide Series race, Busch will run a car with “Raw” on the hood and Logano’s car will feature the rival WWE program “Smackdown!” It’s all designed to call attention to the release of a new wrestling video game called “WWE Smackdown! vs. Raw” (Gamestop is Logano’s Nationwide sponsor).
In keeping with the theme of the game, and wrestling tradition, the WWE writers split the drivers into good guy/bad guy roles. Busch, who has often been seen as NASCAR’s villain in the eyes of many fans, was appropriately assigned the bad guy role.
Still, there was the matter of how exactly to pull it off. Logano, when first given a draft of the script, had seen the amount he needed to memorize and said, “This is going to be an issue.”
“I can’t even remember my lines from a commercial when I have to say, ‘Whoa,’” he joked, referring to his oft-played ad for Sprint Cup sponsor The Home Depot.
Logano, despite being firmly in the WWE’s core demographic at the age of 19, had never been a wrestling fan. He was only vaguely familiar with the concept and wasn’t even sure if the event was outside or inside.
But just as in the Sprint Cup Series this year, Logano learned quickly. Upon emerging from a limousine that whisked him to the arena on the border of downtown Buffalo, he was greeted by WWE champion John Cena, himself a NASCAR fan and a co-star to some of the drivers in a Gillette Young Guns commercial.
“How has your season been?” Cena asked Logano after both signed autographs for fans who had lined up at the back entrance to the arena more than six hours before show time.
“Oh, a rollercoaster,” Logano said. “Up and down.”
Once Logano and Busch were inside and settled, along with their girlfriends and a handful of support staff who had come along from Joe Gibbs Racing, the drivers delved into the script.
The plan was to have Busch agree with the controversial actions of wrestler “Big Show,” who had betrayed his teammates. Logano would stand up to Big Show and say what he did was wrong.
To top it off, Busch would play the “heel” and incite the Buffalo crowd by making fun of their sports teams and even suggesting that their National Football League team, the Bills, would move to Canada.
“Are they gonna boo me?” Busch asked the group assembled in the locker room.
“Yes,” he was told by several people in unison.
“He’s not used to that,” Logano chimed in sarcastically.
Busch thumbed through the pages of a WWE magazine and frowned. He held up some of his trademark oversized sunglasses and joked he needed to find a way to have his lines run across the bottom of his glasses so he could read them while he was on the mat.
On a monitor across the room that showed what was happening inside the arena, the drivers noticed some of the wrestlers had taken to the ring to warm up.
Busch, beginning to feel more comfortable with his surroundings, declared, “I want to jump off the top rope and see how bad it hurts. It can’t hurt that bad.”
The drivers decided to practice some of the lines they had been given, and while Logano looked a bit tentative, Busch became more animated as he rehearsed.
“Joey is young and dumb!” Busch said, reading from the paper in front of him.
“Oh, that’s nice,” Logano replied, seemingly unaware of that portion of the script.
Logano, too, experimented with his lines.
“I can’t believe how selfish you are!” he said in a deep voice, taking his Connecticut accent into a lower octave.
Around that time, the man who Logano was supposed to confront – the 7-foot-tall, 465-pound Big Show – lumbered into the room to greet the drivers.
He thumped down next to Logano on a loveseat, taking up about 80 percent of it while the young driver was squeezed into the remaining space.
Big Show tried to make conversation, but the mood in the room had become a bit subdued upon his entrance.
“For a bunch of guys who drive fast, you all don’t do too much,” he said, pretending to cuddle with Logano and putting his leg across the driver. “You’re going to have fun tonight. We have a lot of the same fans, so it’s going to be good.”
Then, in a more serious voice, he advised, “Have fun, relax and enjoy it.”
With the massive Big Show towering over him, Logano had seemed even more uncomfortable – likely because the wrestler looked as though he could break the driver in half with his pinky finger.
But once the giant left the room, Logano seemed fascinated with the meeting.
“He had to duck to go underneath that doorway!” Logano said excitedly. “I wonder how he flies! They’d have to give him two seats. Seriously!”
Logano noted incredulously that Busch had greeted Big Show by saying, “Your hands are kinda soft.”
The imposing wrestler replied simply, “Thank you.”
As the hours before the show ticked away, the drivers alternated between filming pre-recorded segments, practicing their grand entrance (burnouts in a back parking lot, then driving into the arena) and grabbing a bite to eat.
But memorizing their part of the story was never far from their minds.
At one point, Busch looked at the script and realized two of the WWE “Divas” were going to be escorting the drivers while wearing their firesuits. He pointed it out to Logano, who observed, “They’re going to look a lot better in them than we do.”
Three hours before show time, the drivers themselves changed into their firesuits – their costumes for the evening. Busch, at this point completely immersed in the proceedings, was coming up with his own lines to add to the script while Logano still appeared tentative.
Logano ventured his own idea for a line, but Busch looked at him and said, “Your dad is going to kill you.”
Busch said he felt bad about one part of the script, which called for him to criticize his teammate for not knowing how to win a championship.
In reality, the older driver said, “You have a championship. I don’t.”
Logano, with a mouth full of food, replied humbly, “Yeah, in the Busch East [Series].”
Said Busch: “That’s still a championship!”
After practicing their burnouts, which were to take place at the same time, the drivers said they were slightly worried about running into each other. Even being in the cars, the portion of the event that should have been most comfortable for them, was cause for concern.
“If we wreck, man…” Busch said in a hushed voice.
“Oh, I know!” Logano replied, then quickly added, “I think we’ll be fine.”
After a closed session with the writers and a final walk-through, the drivers exchanged handshakes with the JGR staff and received “good luck” words from everyone. WWE legend Shawn Michaels, a huge NASCAR fan who had earlier snapped pictures of the practice burnouts, came into the room and asked Logano to autograph some memorabilia for his kids.
Finally, it was show time. Logano and Busch were escorted to their cars as fireworks and music thundered through the packed arena.
With Big Show and his tag-team partner Chris Jericho in the ring, the video screen showed the drivers tearing up the pavement with burnouts, then steering their cars into an arena loading dock.
As the fans realized what was happening, they jumped to their feet and cheered wildly as Busch and Logano drove straight onto the arena floor and then climbed from their cars and waved to the crowd as they walked to the ring.
Busch took a microphone and said, “Ladies and gentlemen: Now that right there is how you make an entrance!” as the crowd cheered.
But he soon drew boos by telling Big Show he agreed with betraying the team. A defiant Logano refused to shake Big Show’s hand and exclaimed, “What you did last night was wrong!”
“You left your team hanging,” Logano told the imposing wrestler. “That’s not impressive – that’s just weak.”
“So you’re saying what I did was weak?” Big Show thundered back. “Kyle, you need to teach your little friend here some respect.”
“Big Show, I apologize,” Busch said. “Joey, he’s young and dumb. He doesn’t know much about championships.”
The crowd hissed and let out a collective, “Ooh.”
Busch continued with his speech and then changed the topic to Buffalo.
“We’re in the city of Buffalo, man,” Busch said as the crowd erupted in cheers and seemed to forgive him.
But just as quickly, Busch added, “A city that hasn’t been to the playoffs since Hulkamania,” referring to wrestler Hulk Hogan’s heyday in the 1980s.
“And you bring T.O. in? What’s he done?” Busch said in reference to Bills wide receiver Terrell Owens as the boos cascaded down from every level of the arena.
Then, with the Bills’ possible move to Toronto in mind, Busch delivered the knockout punch: “Next thing you know, we’re going to be singing ‘O Canada.’”
The drivers informed the crowd of the matches for the evening, though Busch accidentally called wrestler Kofi Kingston “Kofi Johnson” before correcting himself. It seems everyone in NASCAR has Jimmie Johnson on the brain lately.
When he returned backstage, Busch was mad at himself for “butchering it.”
“I was nervous pretty bad,” he said. “I don’t know why. After I ripped on Buffalo, the crowd started chanting, ‘We hate NASCAR! We hate NASCAR!’ It [messed] with my head.”
Logano was awed by the size and volume of the crowd, saying he’d never been in a stadium with so many people.
“At driver intros [at the track], the crowd is like, ‘Ooh,’” he said. “Here, they were like, ‘AAAAAH!’”
Then he smiled and said to Busch, “They loved me out there.”
The drivers watched most of the two-hour show from the locker room on the monitor, commenting on their own acting performance when their pre-recorded bits would appear.
Cena made a return visit during one of his breaks, and Logano asked the wrestler which moves hurt and which don’t.
“Everything hurts,” Cena replied.
Midway through the program, Kingston was shown destroying one of the race cars with a crowbar and finishing by pouring bright orange paint on the hood. As the wrestler was violently attacking the car, the program took a commercial break.
“Oh no!” Logano said, standing up from his seat. “They can’t go to commercial!”
He laughed at his newfound interest in wrestling.
“I’m gonna watch next week,” he said. “I gotta know what’s gonna happen. I gotta know the next deal.”
When the show came back on, cameras showed a bunch of muscular men in the front row of the crowd, whom the announcers identified as some of the very Buffalo Bills players Busch had insulted.
“The Bills are here!” someone in the room exclaimed.
“No they’re not!” Busch said with a bit of disbelief as he suddenly rose from a couch to get a closer look at the monitor.
After the drivers took to the stage once more to announce a future match, it was time to quickly depart the arena and head back to North Carolina.
“This was way, way, way outside my box,” Logano said while changing into his street clothes. “This is a once-in-a-lifetime experience. Not too many people get to do this.”
“It was a neat deal,” Busch said. “More fun than I thought it would be.”
Then he said, only half-jokingly, “We better get out of here before we get killed.”
scenedaily.com