Vickie Guerrero On Missing Eddie Guerrero's Final Phone Call To Her, Chavo On Their Last Talk
Recently on Talk Is Jericho, AEW World Champion Chris Jericho shared another podcast recorded from Chris Jericho's Rock 'N' Wrestling Rager At Sea. Jericho welcomed Vickie, Shaul, and Chavo Guerrero to talk about the late great Eddie Guerrero. Among many other things, Vickie talked about Eddie's extreme personality and his prescription drug abuse. Vickie and Chavo talked about Eddie's unusual behavior prior to his untimely passing.
According to Vickie, there were two very different sides of Eddie, as he took pills to cope with pain, but the pills did not agree with him.
"The thing to do when guys got hurt, instead of missing work, they took pills. And so, to me, I thought it was the norm at first," Vickie admitted. "I thought everything is okay – he's just trying to cover up his injuries, but then I started seeing that I was driving him everywhere. I was picking him up because he couldn't function. I mean, what y'all saw in the ring, he would turn on his lights in the ring. He loved what he did, but coming home, it was a mess.
"I mean, it was two sides of Eddie. There was the Eddie, he didn't like the drugs, but the drugs liked him and he fought that all the time. And Chavito saw a lot of what we went through and I hid a lot from the girls, so when it was a bad night, the girls knew it was a bad night, but when it was a good day, we all enjoyed watching TV or Eddie's time off. But there was a time when we all left Eddie alone."
Interestingly, Chavo, who worked as a trainer on the Netflix series GLOW, shared that Eddie had a strong intuition. Apparently, Eddie asked to talk to Chavo before Eddie's untimely passing, but Chavo never found out why Eddie wanted to talk.
"Eddie had, like, a sixth sense. I don't know if y'all saw it because we didn't really talk about it, but enough times to where we'd be driving and he'd say, 'man, I don't feel [right]. Something's wrong. Something's not going right.' And then, we'd get a flat tire, boom! And then, we'd serve. Oh yeah. Enough so that if he said, 'something's wrong, something's weird, something doesn't feel right,' I would stop and listen! Like, 'what? What do you mean?' And the night? my last night with him – and not to get too much into that at all – but he called me."
Chavo recalled, "he goes, 'hey man, can I talk to you.' 'Yeah, but hold on a second. I've got to run downstairs to the lobby and go get something, but I'll be right back up.' So then, I called him right afterwards and I go, 'hey man, where are you? What's up?' He goes, 'no, it's okay, man. It's cool.' I said, 'no, no, no, I'll come up. No problem.' And he goes, 'no, you know what? It's okay. I'm good. Okay, I'll see you in the morning.' And that's the last time we spoke. But he had a sixth sense. I wonder what he was going to tell me. He had something he wanted to tell me enough to where he would say, 'hey, I need to talk to you.'"
On a similar note, Vickie said she received a call from Eddie the morning he expired and she regrets not answering the telephone.
"For some reason, that morning, he just stayed a little longer with us," Vickie remembered. "After the fact when he passed away, we were like, 'gosh, was this what was going on?' Another thing to that was that that morning that he passed away, I got a phone call at 5:30 in the morning and it was Eddie, but usually he would just call and wait for me to call him back whenever I would wake up. And for some reason, I heard it and I was like, 'no, I'll just call him back later when I wake up.' And I hate myself every day because if I answered it, I would have heard from him. And that's something you just never know. You never know what God has in store for you that day."
Vickie divulged that Eddie started to exhibit concussion-like symptoms before his passing and that she wished she knew more about concussions at the time.
"Yeah [Eddie's body was breaking down]. This is interesting because back then when Eddie was wrestling a lot, he would forget things and there was just a lot of signs that I saw from him. Like, he would always be tired and having the concussion CTE studies come out, I wish I would have said something. I wish there was more awareness. I was at home with the girls and you really don't see the state he's in until he comes home, but there's nothing you can do because, like, he's home for two days, so you just take him right back out again. And he had a lot of pain and he couldn't do surgery because to take time off was unheard of." Vickie said, "he was like, 'I can't get time off.' Yeah [Eddie could lose his spot with the company]."
Check out the podcast here or via the embedded player below. If you use any of the quotations from this article, please credit Talk Is Jericho with an H/T to Wrestling Inc. for the transcription.