Drew McIntyre - A Chosen Destiny: My Story

A Chosen Destiny

Drew McIntyre

My Story

APRIL 5, 2020

T he dishes are washed. Cats fed. The trash taken out.

Weve pulled the bamboo blinds across the big sliding doors that look out across a cluster of palm trees and the lake and switched on some dim lighting. With a large bowl of popcorn, we are now sitting in one of our favorite spots in the worldthe big cream leather wraparound sofa that is the heart of our living room. To my left, Kaitlyn is huddled in a huge blanket (she is cold, as usual). On my lap sits a twenty-pound black cat (all the males in our household fall into the heavyweight category). We are not the most outgoing of people. We like to stay inside, happy in our own company, hanging out with our cats, Chaz and Hunter.

It could have been any old evening in front of Netflix. But this was not any old evening. It is fast approaching 7 p.m. on Sunday the second night of WrestleMania 36.

With a casual flick of the remote, and a stomach full of butterflies, I am preparing for a surreal but freaking cool out-of-body experience. I am going to watch myself fulfill my destiny live on a sixty-inch TV screen.

It counts as an out-of-body experience because I am two distinct selves. One self is me, here, sitting very comfortably, stroking Chaz and picking at popcorn next to my wife, who is not the biggest fan of wrestling, at home in St. Petersburg, in the Tampa Bay area of Florida; my other self is about a hundred miles down the road at the Performance Center in Orlando, where I am about to stalk menacingly into the ring to beat up Brock Lesnar, the most dominant champion in the history of WWE. I am hovering between two dimensions: I am here, but not here. I am happily sitting here in jeans and a black T-shirt, and I am the spray-tanned, hairy Scottish Terminator from Claymore Country, restlessly pacing up the locker room, hauling my trademark leather duster over my trunks, soon to be embroiled in the most physically and mentally demanding form of competitive combat known on the planet: a heavyweight world championship match against the evil-chuckling muscle mountain known as the Beast Incarnate.

Crazy, right? Paranormal, even. Which is kind of fitting, as Ive always had an interest in supernatural phenomena. Images of my grandmothers flash across my mind: my nana, who showed me the power of the other dimension with a glass whizzing across her Ouija board and who made me promise never to toy with her tarot cards; and Gran, Dads mum, who would read tea leaves to divine the future, but gave up when she started foreseeing awful things happening to her friends. Cant you see it? Cant you see it? she would say, showing us the leaves in the bottom of a cup. No, we never could!

Over the years, I have learned that when you compound the hard commercial requirements of WWE with the strange reality that television imposes on the world, the results can often be paranormal in ways that would have amazed both of my grandmothers. But this was a situation even more bizarre.

For nineteen years Ive been imagining exactly how I would one day wrench the WWE Title from a storied Superstar and shake the title above my head with a roar of triumph, reveling in being the main event of the annual laser-lit, firework spectacle that is WrestleMania. I have a whole back catalogue of dream-scenario montages in my head: me taking the big falls, being slammed down onto the canvas, surviving an incredible onslaught before flipping the momentum, powering out of a face-buster and sensationally overcoming my opponent. I drop to one knee to contemplate my victory, then clamber up, climb through the ropes out of the ring, and work my way through the frenzied crowd to find Kaitlyn. I lay the belt on her hands, to acknowledge that the title is something we have achieved together. Maybe get a kiss. The crowd would leap to their feet, the atmosphere is electric And then I wake up.

Never in my overcharged imagination did I think I would experience the biggest match of my life in a time warp, one degree removed, with no fans present.

My sofa-bound self is trying hard to block out the what-could-have-been dream montage: the magical interactive intensity of the fans surround-sound egging me on to beat the hell out of Brock Lesnar. My audience numbers three: my wife and two cats.

These are surreal times, however, and to be world champion you must stand tall against all challenges. I do266 pounds and six feet, seven inches with my boots on. People say that few can match Brock Lesnars imposing, bodybuilder physique, but squaring up to him, eyeball to eyeball, let me tell you: I look down on him.

And six feet, three inches Brock Lesnar is nothing compared to some of the challenges I have had to overcome. My journey in wrestling has been complicated, a series of struggles and disappointments, like a giant game of Snakes and Ladders. Ever since I was fifteen years old, Ive heard a word repeated, potential, potential, potential, ringing in my years. When I was twenty-four, I was branded the Chosen One by Vince McMahon, the big cheese who made WWE the global phenomenon it is today. I climbed the ranks and had the ultimate goal in wrestling in sight, only to slide back down to the bottom of the reckoning. Let me tell youthis period, personally, professionally, psychologically, was the lowest of the lows. But here I am now on the cusp of converting years of pent-up potential into blockbuster achievement. Thanks to winning a sensational Royal Rumble in January, I have earned my shot at the heavyweight title. If I winand I sense that is what the fans really, really wantI will be the first ever British-born WWE World Champion.

After kicking down every dooras well as a number of my opponents teethI am back near the top of the board. It has been a long, purposeful climb up the rungs of every ladder in the wrestling business around the world, and the ultimate prize is once again within reach And then, just as I ready myself to grasp it, a new snake slithers across my path, breathing a deadly cloud of invisible virus particles. The question was, how to bypass it to get to the top? None of the classic escape moves would rescue me from this situation. Nor was it something that I could finish off by running at full speed and booting it smack in the face. I couldnt just pick up a microphone and cut a brilliant promo to inspire a U-turn in the mood of the people.

With the spread of COVID-19 confirmed as a global pandemic, WWE decided the only solution was to follow World Health Organization protocols. So an empty-arena match it would be. It was an irony not lost on some of us that a sport as technically dangerous as wrestling was forced to fall in line with social distancing precautions.

On Planet WWE, we larger-than-life super-strong combatants pride ourselves on prevailing against any objectionable threats that stand in our way, but we were powerless in the face of a global pandemic. The timing was such that those evil spikes of COVID contagion killed off the participatory element of our annual extravaganza, the fans who flock in for WrestleMania week, the very lifeblood of WWE. When there are tens of thousands in the arena, the stories in the ring take on their own compelling momentum. For a wrestler, it is absolutely the best feeling in the world: you are improvising in the ring, the crowd is reacting to every move, pulling its collective strings to will the action on. Everyone is on board and strapped in for the emotional roller coaster. And, thanks to COVID-19, I was going to be denied that euphoria, that moment in the sun of the screaming adulation of seventy-five thousand fans?