I am sitting in the Los Angeles airport waiting to board my flight home to Memphis. We did RAW tonight at the Arrowhead Pond in Anaheim, California and a friend drove me here and dropped me off to wait nearly three hours on my flight. Actually, I killed an hour and a half eating some Mighty Wings at McDonalds in the International terminal, so now I only have a little over an hour until I board my plane. (I really only sat and ate for around an hour, but the walk to and from the International terminal took over 30 minutes.)  Ahhh, the perils of the road.  I guess it is officially Tuesday morning, September 24th, since it is 12:35 Pacific time here. My flight to Memphis leaves L.A. at 1:40am and arrives in Memphis at 7:35am.  Even if you could fall asleep the minute the plane took off you would still get less than four hours sleep, hence the name "redeye flight."  I can assure you my eyes will be red and blurry when I arrive home.

  When I get to my house I can't go back to bed because I have to do some artwork on a Gibson guitar that is going to be auctioned off at the Annual "Memphis Blues Ball" this coming Saturday.  The deadline for having the guitar finished was last week, but being the ultimate procrastinator that I am, I will finish mine tomorrow.  The Blues Ball is this huge party put on every year by Priscilla Presley and Pat Kerr Tigrett. It's a swanky black tie affair that raises a lot of money for the Memphis Music Association and the Gibson guitar company donates several brand new, unfinished, electric guitars that are then painted or decorated by artists and auctioned off at the party. For the past five years they have asked me to paint something on one of the guitars, and my guitars have sold for as high as six thousand dollars!  Anyway, that's what I'll be doing later on this morning instead of sleeping.

  I know I need to apologize for the fact that I haven't updated my website in several months.  Many of you have e-mailed me and asked what was up and I want you all to know I appreciate the interest.  What was up, most of the time, was my book....my autobiography that will be coming out around the middle of December. I think the actual target date for the book to be in stores is December 17th.  I finally finished it a couple of weeks ago, thank God, because I was beginning to think it was going to be the "never ending story."  I also want to thank those of you who took the time to respond to the question my webmaster posted a while back about what you would like to read about in my autobiography and what you liked or didn't like in other wrestler's books.  Your feedback was very, very helpful.  Hopefully most people will enjoy the book.  It's entitled, "It's Good To Be The King...Sometimes!"  And as you can tell from the title it covers the many "ups," and most of the "downs" of not just my career, but my entire life.

  For several weeks I was spending nearly every waking minute working in some capacity on that book, so that is what I am going to use for my excuse as to why there has not been a recent update.  And that's my story and I'm sticking to it!  But now I am doing an update!  Here it is!  And I would really like your feedback on this update as well.  I'd like to know from you what you'd like to hear from me.  It goes without saying that people want to hear from an insider's point of view what is going on in the WWE. That's what I've always tried to do.  I usually try to keep you abreast of what is going on in my personal life as well.  Now that I think about it...I don't guess there's anything else I can write about because that is all I know.  So maybe I don't need your feedback after all. Just kidding about that...I always enjoy hearing from any and all of you out there.  And I promise I do read each and every e-mail I get, Personally! I regret I don't always have time to respond to all of them but I do try to write back as often as I can.  So feel free to e-mail me at JERLAWLER@AOL.COM with any comments or questions you may have.  But please don't bother asking stuff like, "King, will you please send me Stacy Keibler's e-mail address," or "King, will you tell Triple H that I said he sucks!"  Because I really don't have time for that kind of stuff, plus I don't want to get into anyone else's business, if you know what I mean.

  Well, I guess I can go back and try to get you caught up on what's been going on with the King for the past few months. Besides writing the book I've been pretty busy on the road wrestling and doing appearances and such. I guess I will start back around the month of July.  July was a pretty rough month for me for a couple of reasons. I still can't believe it's been a year ago, July 13th, that my wife Stacy left me.  One year and two months she's been gone, and sadly, I still miss her as much today as I did the day she left. I know that sounds hard to believe, but I have had a really tough time trying to get over Stacy.  I still remember a lot of the e-mails I got from people last year saying things like, "You'll get over her in time...." or "It will hurt less and less as time goes by....or "One day you'll find someone new and you'll forget about Stacy."  Well, to me, a year is a pretty long time, and I was hoping that by now it would hurt less, and that I would be over her, but that's just not the case.  Stacy is still in Florida. We talk on the phone from time to time and I have even gone down there to seen her a few times, but nothing good has come of it.  We are not officially divorced yet either. That is still in the works.  I guess I haven't been rushing the divorce proceedings because I was hoping for some sort of reconciliation but it is one of those situations where she says she wants us to be "friends," but that is all she can offer me.

  If you visit my website very much you probably have seen a photo or two of a young lady named Joni. She's the one that my webmaster dubbed, "The King's hot new babe!"  Well, actually Joni has been a Godsend to me.  She came along when I was really at my lowest and provided me with some much needed companionship and understanding. It seemed that she had been through similar circumstances a few times in her life and she knew exactly what I was going through.  I met Joni last November, on Thanksgiving to be exact, and since that time, we have spent a lot of time together. She has worked with me as my valet on many independent wrestling shows, and it kept me from having to make so many of those trips alone.  She has been with me at times when, had I been alone, I would have been the most miserable person on earth.  Times like last Christmas.  Christmas was always such a special time of year for Stacy and I, and I don't know if I could have made it through it alone.  Thank God Joni was there for me at Christmas.  She's been a great friend...she's tried to help me through this whole Stacy situation with patience and understanding.  She knows I am not over Stacy and she doesn't put any pressure on me or try to rush things. She just says, like everyone else, "It's going to take time." 

  Speaking of time, let me get back to telling you what's been going on the last few months. Back In July I wrestled on several independent shows.  Two in Massachusetts, one in North Addlesboro, one in Hyanisport, and one in Pittsburgh.  I also wrestled on a couple of house shows for the WWE. Bob Holly and I teamed up to go against Christian and Lance Storm, the Un-Americans, in tag team title matches in Jonesboro, and Little Rock, Arkansas. Those matches were really a lot of fun and the crowd reaction was terrific, especially since Jonesboro was one of my regular wrestling stops for many, many years. Speaking of regular wrestling stops, I also worked on a show at the Mid South Coliseum in my hometown of Memphis, Tennessee. Some 20 year old kid named Matt Holder called me up sometime in June and said he was planning to have a big wrestling extravaganza at the coliseum in Memphis and wanted to know how much it would take to get me to headline the card for him.  I tried my best to talk him out of running because I felt it was going to be next to impossible for him to just walk into town with a limited budget and put on a successful wrestling show. But he insisted...and he paid in advance!  So on July 26th, I wrestled Billy Travis, (my opponent was supposed to be Terry Funk, but the kid had run out of money and couldn't afford Terry's payoff or plane ticket to get him to Memphis from Amarillo, Texas) in front of about 500 people in the 11 thousand seat Coliseum.  It was kind of embarrassing for me, but it must have really been embarrassing for Matt Holder. He had to lose his shirt that night. 

  I played softball every Wednesday night in July and my team made it to the championship game in the city tournament, but we lost a slugfest by one run, 26 to 25. In August I wrestled against Terry Funk right outside of Clearwater, Florida and then threw out the first pitch and signed autographs at a Clearwater Phillies minor league baseball game. I wrestled for Bert Prentice at the annual Western Kentucky State Fair in Hopkinsville, Kentucky. I Wrestled on a show in Windsor Ontarion, Canada with Terry Taylor. I Wrestled at the Houston horse racing track, after the races, and I was the special referee for the WWE in matches featuring the WWE Divas, Victoria, Molly Holly, and Trish Stratus. Now that I've gotten back to Memphis, I'm going to go ahead and post this much of the update and I will continue to update the site about every other day...talk to you later!

   Well, last Sunday, September 29th was not only Stacy's birthday, it was also our second wedding anniversary. The day came and went without my hearing from Stacy. I called her several times, but, no answer. I finally left a message on her answering machine simply saying...."I was just calling to wish you a happy birthday and anniversary." I didn't get to spend my anniversary with my wife, but I did get to spend it with someone I love. Maybe I shouldn't say "someone," because it was more than one person. It was the Cleveland Browns! I think by now everyone knows I am a lifelong Cleveland Indians fan and Cleveland Browns fan.  Well, this past weekend may have been the ultimate for me. On Saturday, the 28th, I was booked to wrestle Dusty Rhodes in one of those "Legend Matches." It was on an Independent show in Canton, Ohio. The Legion of Doom, Hawk and Animal, were also on the show, as well as Sabu and NewJack, formerly of ECW.  Brian Christopher, formerly Grandmaster Sexay, was on the show along with the Spellbinder, who is one of our regular wrestlers in Memphis, and they also had a special appearance by Jimmy "Superfly" Snuka. It was quite a show! Well, Canton is only about 60 miles south of Cleveland and so when they asked me about being on this show, I started checking schedules. Unbelievably, the stars were alligned just right for me! The wrestling show in Canton was to start at 8pm. but more importantly, the Cleveland Indians were playing their next to last game of the season at home at 1pm. Then, the very next day, the Cleveland Browns were playing the Pittsburgh Steelers in Pittsburgh at 1pm. This could be perfect if I could line up some flights that fit. As I said, the stars must have been alligned perfectly for me, because there was a flight that left Memphis Saturday morning at 8:45am that would get me into Cleveland at 11:30am, just in time to head over to Jacobs Field for the game. Then I found a flight that came back from Cleveland on Sunday night at 8:25pm that would get me home at 9:35pm. Great! Now all I had to do was make sure I could get into the games. First, I called my buddy, Frank Derry. He owns two sports publications in Cleveland. "Indians Ink," which is the official weekly periodical of the Cleveland Indians, and "Bernie's Insiders," which is his, and former Brown's quarterback, Bernie Kosar's paper that covers the Browns. Frank is a great friend of mine and a huge wrestling fan as well and he's always glad to hear from the "King." He said he would be more than glad to hook me up with a press box pass for the Indians game if I could manage to snag a couple of tickets to the wrestling show I was going to work on in Canton for him and his girlfriend, Debbie. No sooner said, than done! Now I'm set for the Indians game so it's time to go to work on the Browns game in Pittsburgh. I figured this one would be a little tougher because the tickets were completely sold out for this game long ago. Plus, I had never exactly endeared myself to anyone in Pittsburgh, especially anyone connected to the Steelers. Cleveland and Pittsburgh have one of the most heated rivalries in all of the NFL and the fans always flock to the games. I called my friend John Shultz who is the ticket manager at Cleveland Browns Stadium (a really good guy to know, right?) John confirmed my fears when he told me the tickets for the game were all gone....even the people on his staff couldn't get seats for this one. Ahh, but  somehow John found one for the "King!" Like my book title says, "Sometimes, It's good to be the King!" He said the ticket would be waiting for me at "will call." That was good, but it even got better. After that, I called up my buddy, Bobby Monica. Bobby is the equipment manager for the Browns and a big wrestling fan as well. When I told him I was coming to the game in Pittsburgh, he said he would try to fix me up with a sideline pass! He called me back the next day with an even better surprise. He said I was going to be listed as an "Inactive Player," and would be in the locker-room with the team before the game and at halftime, and on the sidelines with the players and coaches. Just imagine your all-time favorite National Football League team playing in one of their biggest games of the year and all of a sudden you're going to be just like part of the team. This was like a dream come true for me! I flew to Cleveland on Saturday morning, picked up my rental car and headed straight for Jacobs Field, home of the Indians. Jacobs Field is a great stadium and their pressbox is a really good place to watch the game from. Frank was waiting for me when I arrived in the press box, and several of the local media writers came over and wanted to talk about wrestling. One of the writers asked about the current state of the WWE and he said he saw that tv ratings and live event attendance was down some from what it used to be. He wondered if wrestling was entering a "down cycle." I looked around the stadium and it gave me the perfect example to tell him what I feel we are experiencing. For the past seven years, the Cleveland Indians have made the playoffs each year. It started when they built the new stadium for the Indians and they moved from the old Municipal Stadium on the shores of Lake Erie. In that old stadium the Indians suffered through years and years of bad teams and bad attendance. But suddenly, they had a new stadium and a new owner that went out and paid for some talented players and the Indians became a winning franchise with huge crowds. As a matter of fact they set a Major League record for consecutive sellouts at Jacobs Field. For years it was next to impossible to get a ticket to an Indians game. The tickets would sell out for the entire season before the season even started. And the team gave the fans their money's worth at every game. The Indians won and were in the playoffs for seven straight years. They had some great young talent that developed over the years like Omar Visquel, Manny Ramirez, Jim Thome, Charles Nagy, Bartolo Colon and others. And the owner brought in veteran free agents like Matt Williams, Roberto Alomar, Ellis Burks, Travis Fryman and Kenny Lofton to name a few, and together they formed a winning combination. The Indians were an exciting team to watch and the fans turned out in droves. Jacobs field holds around 43 thousand fans and as I said, every game was a sellout. But not too long ago, the sellout streak came to an end, and as I looked out of the pressbox window at the crowd last Saturday, the writer and I estimated it to be about 20 thousand people...less than half full. Why was the attendance down for the Indians? And why are the Indians not in the playoffs this year? I think it's similar to the WWE's current situation. You see, The Indians got a new owner and a new general manager, and their philosophy was different from the past regimes. The new owner either didn't want, or couldn't afford, to spend as much money on talent as the past owner. Now everyone knows that in baseball, in order to cut payroll, you cut the veteran players who have the big contracts. You field a team of younger, less proven players from within your organization who have not had enough playing time to do the things to earn the big contracts. And when you do this, you don't win. You don't win until those young players have enough experience to compete with the veterans. And when you don't win, the fans don't come. They wait until the team is competitive and then they come.

In baseball this is called "rebuilding." Most people say it is a necessary evil when you own a team, but I don't belive it. Why do the Yankees never seem to have to rebuild? Or the Braves? Somehow they always keep the right mix of veterans and young players that you need to be successful. In wrestling, this type of "rebuilding," is usually called a "youth movement." I think that's what the WWE is going through right now. In wrestling, just like baseball, you need the right mix of veterans and young talent to be successful. And I know that what I am about to say will make a lot of you think I am crazy, and I know a lot of you will not agree with me, but right now, I think the reason the WWE is not selling out every event and the ratings are off a bit is because we have too much young talent. Well, let me rephrase that, you can never have "too much" young talent, I just don't think we have enough veteran talent. Part of that is due to some circumstances beyond the WWE's control and part of that is due in large to the internet. First of all, at this moment, the WWE is without two of it's biggest veteran stars they have ever had in their history, and they both pretty much left abruptly. "Stone Cold" Steve Austin and the Rock were the biggest Superstars this company has had in the last ten years. With them at the top, ratings and attendance was it's highest ever. You just don't replace two guys like that overnight, as a matter of fact, you don't ever replace them. Steve Austin was a phenomenon. In the 30 years I've been associated with wrestling, I've never seen anyone quite like him. He was the right guy, in the right place, at the right time, with the right promotion and the right storylines, and it all came together to make magic. That may never be able to be duplicated again. The Rock, on the other hand, is a genuine, marquee hearthrob, leading man, wrestler/movie star! Who's ever done that before? I don't know of many. Both these guys had "transcended" wrestling. They were not just known by wrestling fans, they were known by everyone, everywhere. The hardcore fans, the "smart marks," and maybe, most importantly, the casual fans. It takes all of those fans tuning in to put the WWE over the top. Now when you lose Austin to personal problems and you lose the Rock while he shoots a movie, you know it's gotta have a major impact on you. Combine those losses with the "Brand Extension" where Austin and the Rock were figured to be pretty much the top guys for Raw and Smackdown, and you got a major effect on the WWE. What you're left with is the same thing the Cleveland Indians are left with...a lot of good young guys, but without the right amount of veterans, you don't have a winning team. Don't get me wrong, I'm not knocking the young wrestlers...they're great, and you gotta have them...and, hopefully, they'll be the great veterans for this company some day. But there's a difference. Each brings something different to the table. The young guys like Benoit, Angle, Jericho, Lesner, Guerrero, Edge, Christian, Storm, the Hardy's, and the list goes on, can do amazing things in the ring. Hurricanrana's, moonsaults, planchas, and death defying leaps from really scary heights. But somehow I just can't picture Chris Benoit holding a toy pistol to Vince McMahon's head and making Vince "pee" on himself like Stone Cold did. Only Austin, or someone who has been around long enough to be "over" with the fans like Austin is could have pulled that off. That's the kind of stuff that the casual fans talk about around the water cooler the next day at work. As much as some of you may hate to admit it, they don't talk about moonsaults and German suplexes. I've never seen Steve Austin do a moonsault in his life, but I've never seen anyone as over with the fans as Austin either. This is sports entertainment, with the emphasis on entertainment. And right now, I think we've lost a lot of those casual fans. The fans that aren't as interested in the actual in ring wrestling as they are the entertainment aspect of the WWE. Brock Lesner may be one of the most impressive real athletes I've ever seen in the WWE, an NCAA wrestling champion, but I just can't picture Brock making an interview about "Poontang Pie" and having every young man in America wanting a "piece" of it. Now I'm not saying Brock will never be able to do that sort of entertaining interview, but right now he's too young. He's too inexperienced. That's why the WWE needs the mix. I hear over and over, people on the internet saying, "get rid of the old guys...they're holding the young guys back...put the young guys on top." Well, basically that's what you're getting...out of necessity, and you see what the WWE is getting. It takes the mixture of veterans and youth to make a winning team in baseball, football and in the WWE. And that's another thing I see on the internet that I don't think some of the internet fans get. The WWE IS a team. Every single person that works for the WWE busts their butts to do the best job they can to make the company successful. Believe me, every wrestler, every writer, every agent, and especially Vince McMahon wishes that every show they put on the air got a 10 rating and rave reviews reviews from everyone. Unfortunately, that's impossible. It's the old, "you can't please everyone" thing. But believe me, no one ever tries to do a bad show, or have a bad match, or do anything bad. The older wrestlers are not going to Vince and saying, "don't push the young guys." That just doesn't happen. All the writers work together and help and have input on both shows. It's not "Smackdown" against "Raw" and some of the writers hope one show sucks and the other one doesn't. Everyone in the WWE wants you all to like everything we do. That's what performers strive for. But obviously we don't please everyone all of the time. Barry Bonds is known as a "home run hitter" but he doesn't hit a home run every time at bat. As a matter of fact, he may strike out almost as many times as he homers, but he is still known as a home run hitter. Every WWE show is not going to be a home run....we even strike out sometimes...we know that. But we are all up there swinging for the fences every time at bat. So cut us a little slack every now and then. And sometimes some of the internet fans should realize that the more critical they are, they lose some of the power they have. And believe me, you do have power. What you guys say on the internet is read and listened to by the powers that be in the WWE. But when you are overly critical or attack some talent personally, they have a tendency to tune you out because it doesn't come across as constructive criticism, it comes across as a vendetta. Oh well, I guess it's time for me to get down from my "soapbox." and get back to what this update started to be about. But now I don't really have much time left to write. I am on a flight from Boston to Las Vegas for Raw and we are getting pretty close to landing. Let me just go back and say that the Indians game was a lot of fun. They won. The show in Canton was fun as well, but it went a little too long for my liking...the Main Event went into the ring at almost midnight! But last Sunday was the "bomb." Being on the field and in the locker room with the Cleveland Browns was one of the coolest experiences of my life. Even though the Browns lost in overtime, I still had a great time. That day was a classic example of the title of my autobiography..."It's Good To Be The King...Sometimes." It was wonderful standing on the field with the Browns, but it sucked when Stacy wouldn't answer her phone so I could tell her about it. Well, I'll talk with you all again in a couple of days!