CSL
01-21-2011, 11:15 AM
Chris Jericho: The Unedited Press Conference
What follows is the full transcript of the Press Conference Senior Writer Al Castle conducted with Chris Jericho in December. The edited print version appears in the current issue of Pro Wrestling Illustrated, our annual year-end awards special, available now at newsstands and by following the link on the right.
AL CASTLE: Can you talk a bit about what your status is right now with WWE? We obviously haven’t seen you there for a few months, but there have been some indications that you might look forward to working there again.
CHRIS JERICHO: As simple as you can put it, my contract ran out and I’ve moved on. That’s basically it. People are always looking for dirt and ask, “When are you coming back?” and “What happened?” and whatever. My contract ended and I decided to continue on in my life. That’s basically in a nutshell the answer to give you. I’m not working with WWE. I loved the work I was doing. I think it was some of the best of my career. But I never intended to re-sign again after coming back for that three-year period. And that three-year period ran out and there’s other things going on. That’s basically it. There’s no hidden agenda. No hidden secret. People are waiting for the other shoe to drop, and there really isn’t another shoe to drop. I did the job I was signed up to do, and that’s it.
AC: So do you see your wrestling career in the past tense now? Do you think you’ve wrestled your last match?
CJ: Who knows? I’ve never judged my life that way, in terms of, “I’m going to do this and I’m going to do that.” I’ve always kind of gone with my heart. As of right now I don’t see myself returning to WWE any time soon. That’s not to say that I’ll never return, but I have no plans, no schedule, no time line for it. Every fan that I see is like, “Hey when are you coming back? What’s going? What are you doing?” And I’ve never really thought that far ahead. As far as I know right now, I don’t have any plans to come back any time in the near future. Sorry if that disappoints anybody! (laughing)
AC: For WWE, the timing is not ideal, because it comes at the same time that they’ve lost so much other talent. Shawn Michaels and Batista both left several months ago. The Undertaker is on the shelf. Triple-H is on the shelf. And so I could see them taking your loss worse than if it came at another time. Did that put any pressure on you when your contract was coming up?
CJ: No. It may sound selfish, but that’s really none of my concern. That’s how it works man… I don’t have any obligation to the company to stay because they don’t have anybody else. That’s their responsibility. That’s their issue. And I think it’s better for them if they lose a lot of top guys, because then they don’t rely on the same thing over and over again. They’re forced to make changes. They’re forced to use new guys. They’re forced to move forward, which is something they could have done a couple years ago, but they really didn’t. So now they have no choice. The business will be fine without Chris Jericho. It was fine when Shawn Michaels left. It was fine when Bret Hart left. Guys move on. That’s how it works. You can’t stay there forever. Not everybody’s going to be a Ric Flair type of guy or a Hogan type of guy that stays there for years and years and years. I know I’m not. I never planned to be. So if leaving put the company in a lurch, it won’t be in a lurch for long. WWE is going to be just fine without Jericho. They were just fine before I got there, and they’ll be just fine after I’ve left there. It forces them to take a chance with some guys. You know, that’s the bad thing about the business nowadays. Before there were always lots of guys in other countries, and guys climbing up the ranks, and guys that had experience who weren’t with WWE. Now the way that it works is that all your guys are in WWE, and that’s it. And a lot of those guys don’t have a lot of experience, but that’s just the way the business has moved nowadays. So they’re forced to take a chance on guys who they might not have taken a chance on before… So good for them. Like I said, when Steve Austin left, the business was strong. When the Rock was left the business was strong. Me leaving is not going to affect it either way.
AC: I’d say one thing about your departure that maybe is different than some of the other people WWE has lost. It’s something that’s not easily replaced, and made worse since Shawn Michaels left. It’s having that guy who can wrestle. They have a lot of stars and attractions and they’ve done a good job of bringing guys up. But when you think of who is going to deliver that five-star match at WrestleMania and really bring home the wrestling, I don’t see that many guys there who could. There are a lot of good wrestlers, and even very good wrestlers. But maybe not that many great wrestlers. Do you agree with that?
CJ: Well, the one thing you can’t teach is experience. And that’s what made the great wrestlers great. If you look at all the guys over the years who were able to churn out great matches over and over again, they were guys that had years of experience under their belts to be able to do that. They knew a lot of different styles, and had life experiences and lots of different matches they could draw upon to create great matches. Unfortunately, you might never have those guys again, because times have changed. Now you guys who have five, six, seven, eight years experience working at the top of the top, whereas before you had guys who 15 years experience or 20 years experience. You just might never have that anymore. It’s one of those things where the whole game has changed now the curve will now maybe drop. And what used to be a three star match five years ago, just may end up being the five star match of the future, because you just might not be able to replace that ever. You just don’t have guys like with that experience and it’s not built that way anymore. It’s kind of sad in a lot of ways. You can’t just take out a magic wand and say, “This guy’s going to be a five star wrestler.” You either have it or you don’t, and it takes years and years of experience to be able to cultivate those ideas and mindsets. And a lot of guys might never, ever get that, because they don’t have that diversity to fall back on.
AC: What do you think of some of the recruiting tools that you see now, as far as shows like NXT? There’s some talk of bringing back Tough Enough. Obviously, that’s a big difference from the way you broke into the business and how you finally got into WWE. Do you resent at all some of the guys who are coming through those shows and getting big breaks so quickly?
CJ: I don’t resent anyone. They have to do what they have to do. And they have to get new guys. You can’t get stuck on past ways. “They way we used to do things is this.” Well, those days are gone. Guys working in Japan, and Mexico, and ECW, and Smoky Mountain Wrestling and WCW—It’s done. It doesn’t work that way anymore. So you’ve got to get guys where you can. And once in a while you get guys who come through like Sheamus or (Wade) Barrett or Danielson (Daniel Bryan) who have been in the system for years and years and years. But the majority aren’t like that. So you can’t sit on a high horse and say, “Those guys didn’t pay their dues,” because it’s just not like that anymore. So if they can do an NXT or a Tough Enough and find some new guys who can be entertaining and put on a show, then they’re going to have to do that, because the days of the guys traveling worldwide and ending up in WWE are gone. It took me nine years to get to WWE, and when I got there I still wasn’t polished. I still had lots to learn. Now you get guys with nine months of experience who are on TV. But you have to find those guys somewhere. So whichever way they want to do it, go for it.
AC: You responded to a comment Kevin Nash made where he criticized WWE’s youth movement and spoke in favor of having some older, more established guys on top. I wanted to ask you what you thought the right mix was, and what you thought the role of the older, veteran, 40-plus wrestler is in a company that’s trying to get younger.
CJ: It’s like a sports team. You look at a guy like—I know, Brett Favre may be a bad example because he’s having a bad season. But you look at a guy like (recently retired NHL defenseman) Chris Chelios a couple of years ago that was in his mid-40s and was still the best guy in the game. There’s still a place for guys who are older and it’s not necessary to just take care of the young guys. You are who you are. There are guys who are better in their 40s than in their 30s. There are guys who are done by the time they’re 25, 26, 27 years old. So you can’t really say, “Well this guy can work until he’s 45, and this guy can work until he’s 50.” Everybody’s got a certain shelf life. Some guy’s shelf life is longer than others. That’s why you always have to have young guys come in. You always have to have big drafts come in. And you can’t keep guys on top just because they have name value. That’s the dumbest thing I’ve ever heard in my life. You have to be able to entertain and you have to be able to provide the certain quality of work that they’re you’re always used to. Just because a certain somebody had name value in 1999 when wrestling was quote-unquote hot, doesn’t mean they necessarily should be on top in 2010. It’s a case-by-case basis. I remember Eric Bischoff saying when I was in WCW that you have to be on TV seven or eight years before you can really get over. Well, guess what, now 90 percent of the guys you have haven’t been on TV seven or eight years. That’s just a dumb thing to say anyways, because there were guys like the Ultimate Warrior and Bill Goldberg who were on TV for two months and got over huge. So everybody has to be judged individually. You can’t have this blanket statement of “It has to be this” or “It has to be that.” It’s like, well, who’s available at the time? What have we got to do with them? What can we do with them? And what do they bring to the table? And what are their strengths and what are their weaknesses? That was one of the best things about the old ECW. (Paul) Heyman was always good about hiding those weaknesses and focusing on the strengths. We went through a really bad phase in WWE in the 2000s where it was the opposite. People were hung up on people’s weaknesses, and not on their strengths. This business is all show business. We can do whatever we want. So you can mask the things that people don’t do well and focus on their strengths. And that’s what they’re having to do at this point after years and years and years of being spoiled, because there was this huge influx of talent, of all these great performers who had five, 10, 15 years of experience and were fresh. Well, that’s done. So now you have to create a product somehow. And you have to put people on TV somehow. So they’re starting to go back on focusing on the positives and trying to stay away from the negatives, which is something wrestling’s always been built on.
AC: You just criticized some things Kevin Nash and Eric Bischoff have said, and you’ve had other comments about TNA. You calling it a “vanity promotion” was picked up some places. As a whole, how do you see TNA? There’s been some speculation in the past that maybe you’d end up there some day.
CJ: First of all, the “vanity project” thing, you know, you say certain things in interviews. It’s not like I spent hours and hours on end saying that. I might have said it at the end of a long sentence in talking about it. And of course that’s what gets picked up and it becomes “Chris Jericho said this.” As far as going there, I’ll never go there, not because I have any problems with them, but because I’m WWE for life. I always wanted to work with WWE, from when I was a kid. I never cared about WCW when I was growing up. I went to WCW for one reason, and that was to get to WWE. And once I got to WWE, I said I’ll never wrestle another match outside WWE for as long as I’m in the business. And I haven’t. Even when I was off for two years starting in 2005, I never worked anywhere else, in the independents or anything like that. And that will never change. I would love for TNA to get huge. I want them to. And I think there’s glimpses of greatness there. But, to be honest, I don’t watch a lot of what they do to even be able to have an opinion at this point. I don’t have time to watch wrestling as it is. I just think a company with that much talent should be doing better than they are. They’ve had the same ratings for the last three years. It’s just unacceptable with the amount of talent they have there, just as a business. I run my own business as well. I run the business of “Fozzy.” And if somebody’s not performing and we’re not getting bigger, than something has to change. So I just wish they would look at it that way, instead of relying on the same old things and the same old people. They’ve been trying different things and something isn’t clicking. They’ve had the same million and a half viewers for the last three years. Just as an outsider looking in—as any business-owner looking in—if you had the same return or the same results after three years, maybe you might want to try something different to make it grow. But maybe that’s their ceiling. Maybe that’s what they can get. And if they can make a profit with that and have a successful company with one a half million people, they don’t care about doing anything differently. It’s not my concern. I’m just calling it as I see it as a business-owner and as a fan of wrestling. I would love nothing more than for TNA to get 2 million viewers, 3 million viewers, 10 million viewers. Whatever it takes, I’d love to see that happen. I pull for them every time I hear about them.
AC: I want to talk a little bit more about your last few years in WWE before your most recent departure. You took a two-year break from the business and pursued some other ventures. And when you came back there was some speculation about, “Well maybe his heart is not in it as much as before. He wants to do these other things—write books and act and perform with his band.” And then you went on to have what I think a lot of people thought was the three best years of your career, completely reinvented yourself, had some of the best matches, best feuds. Looking back, are you really proud of the work you did over the last three years as a chapter in your entire career?
CJ: Of course. Speculation always makes you laugh, because I never did anything freewheeling. I stepped away from wrestling because my heart wasn’t in it. That’s exactly it. You hit the nail on the head. I didn’t come back with my heart not in it. I came back 100,000 percent committed. That’s why I came back. And that’s why it took me 27 months to come back. I wasn’t messing around when I said I wasn’t going to come back unless I felt I could be better than ever. And that’s what I did. The last three years of my career were the three best of my career, as far as I’m concerned. That’s why I came back. I wouldn’t come back if I didn’t feel like I was in it and could contribute. I’ve always done other things, my whole career. I never sat back and did just one thing. I’m a very diverse person. I have a lot of ideas and I’m very creative. I have been since I was 10 years old. And that’s how I’m wired. And that pisses some people off. And I’m sorry, but I’ve always had other ideas and other things that I’ve wanted to do. I’ve never been 100 percent just a wrestling guy—never, ever, ever. From the day that I had my first match to me talking to you right now. I love wrestling, but I love music and I love acting and I love writing, and I’ve always done all those things. So, then to come back in 2007, I knew that it would take a couple of months to find out what I wanted to do. I thought coming back as a babyface was bit miscast, but you do what you are told to do or are asked to do by the boss of the company. But I still knew that I wanted to change some things, and that’s why I came back the way I did. I didn’t come back with long hair. I remember a friend of mine before I cam back asked, “Are you going to get hair extensions?” And I was like, “Why?” And he said, “Well, Chris Jericho has long hair.” Well, so did Bruce Dickinson in 1987. And now Bruce Dickinson is a better singer than he’s ever been in Iron Maiden, and he’s got short hair. So it’s obviously not the hair that matters. It’s the guy. So, I wanted to change things, and I did that. And then I really got in the groove, after all these years of kind of being in the groove, but not really. I always knew I could be better in wrestling, and I kind of attained that in the last two years. Is it the best that Chris Jericho could ever be? I’m not going to say that, but it’s the best Chris Jericho has ever been over the course of his career.
AC: Was it particularly scary to embark on that radical change in character? You had been doing the Y2J for so long. Before it was even Y2J, it was loud, boisterous, explosive. And it was such a complete 180 to strip it down to the point that you’re not even smiling. You’re just walking out in your suit, a grimace on your face. I’d think that that was a pretty big gamble on your part. “I’ve been doing this one way for so long and now I’m about to become somebody completely different.” How frightening was that?
CJ: It wasn’t frightening at all. It was cool, because it was a captivating thing. I wanted to be completely different from anything I’d ever been before. I wanted to reinvent myself 100 percent. So, that meant getting rid of the fun guy. The countdown was gone. I switched to the short tights, short hair. Everything that I did before I just changed to the opposite, and that’s why I did it. I always believed that when you turn heel, you should change and make people realize that they’re not dealing with the same old guy. I heard, “Well, people want to cheer for you.” Exactly. Of course you do. That’s why I did it—because people love the Y2J character. And when I got rid of it completely, people were like, “You’re going to bring it back, aren’t you?” And I was like, “No. This is what you get. This is a new guy all the way across the board.” I wanted people to see that I wasn’t screwing around. So no countdown. The only thing I kept was my music. I kept that the same because—I hate to use the word iconic—but it is very identifiable to who I am as a performer. But everything else changed, and that was all a calculated call from me. I wasn’t terrified about it at all. I’m always about the future. I never stay in the past ever. People ask, “When are you coming back?” It’s never been that way. It’s: What can I do better and how can I change things? It’s why I did things that way.
AC: Would you recommend the same kind of complete make over to other guys who maybe feel stuck in a rut? One guy who comes to mind is Edge, who has 12 years in the company now. He came back earlier this year and was cast as a babyface, and it never really took hold. And then they turned him heel, and that didn’t really work. And now he’s back as a babyface, and I’m not sure how much momentum he has. It strikes me, why not take the Chris Jericho route and completely reinvent yourself and become something else?
CJ: It’s all individual. I don’t recommend anything at all. All I could so is recommend for myself. But I will say this: The Edge babyface character last year at WrestleMania was getting over. It took a while because Edge was such a hated heel. You can’t just turn into a rah-rah babyface in five or six months. It takes time for people to sort of trust you. And they were behind him, even to the point where we worked a couple of shows after that when he was already a heel, and by proxy became babyface because he was working with me. And people were into him as a babyface. It just took time. For whatever reason Vince got an itchy trigger finger and decided to switch him back heel. But it would have worked. Now people don’t know how to trust. They don’t know if they trust the good guy or the bad guy, the way they’ve changed him. But I said the same thing to Matt Hardy when he was in WWE and turning heel with Jeff Hardy a couple years ago. I said, “Cut your hair, man. Change it up.” It’s all up to the individual guy and where they feel comfortable. For me, I was so over the whole Y2J thing. I just couldn’t even stand it. I just wanted to get completely different and change it. If you look back at that time, nobody was doing that. Nobody was coming out and being serious and not smiling. Nobody was wearing a suit. And that’s why I did it. And now every heel is coached to be that way. Be silent. Be straight. Because it worked. So now it’s the prerequisite for a WWE heel. But if you go back to 2007, nobody did that. And I have no problem saying that. I’m not saying I was the first guy to do it. But I’m saying I was the first guy to do it in that company and at that time. So if I was there now, I’d almost have to change it again, because everybody’s doing it now, you know what I mean? You have to original and do something different. It’s something Brian Pillman told me years ago. If you want to make it in this business you have to do something that nobody’s ever done before. I did that, and that’s why it worked.
AC: You were somebody who really embraced being hated. For so long, there’s been that “cool heel” thing, where even guys who turn heel still play for applause. It was the nWo and to some extent Triple-H when he was a heel. They still did things to try to get over. You didn’t do any of that. You were loathsome. You were just a total jerk. And you’re right. I think now you’re seeing more and more of that kind of thing. I think the Miz is like that. To some extent Wade Barrett is. It’s kind of a return to that heel that embraced being hated.
CJ: Well, at least they think they embrace being hated. But I took it to the next level. There were no catch phrases. There became some by proxy from the stuff that I said. But I never set out to make “I’m the best in the world at what I do” or “shameless pandering” a catch phrase. I mean, who would ever think that “gelatinous parasite” would be a catch phrase?
AC: I like “mucilaginous troglodyte.” You had me look that one up.
CJ: Yeah, I was just saying whatever I could, and when people started repeating it, I didn’t like that. I never wanted to have a catch phrase. I didn’t want merchandise. There’s no Chris Jericho merchandise. There’s no Chris Jericho T-shirt. All that stuff was because of me. They wanted to make a T-shirt, but I said, “Why? Why would I want someone wearing a T-shirt in the crowd that has my name on it? That’s one guy in the crowd that’s not going to boo me.” It’s an art form to be a heel and to stay a heel. Because the best characters of all times are villains. Darth Vader. Terminator. Hannibal Lector. Freddy Kruger. And all those villains turned babyface because they were so entertaining. Each one of those guys I said in the second or third movie became a good guy. If Heath Ledger hadn’t passed away, he would have been a good guy in the next Batman movie, guaranteed, because he was too entertaining. So it’s easier to make people hate you than to make them love you. But it’s very, very difficult to make them stay hating you, and I was able to do that for two and a half years because every time I was going down on a road where people were starting to get into it, I’d turn it, change it, go back and forth. That’s why the Shawn Michaels angle worked and the Rey Mysterio Angle worked—because there was no comedy behind it. And over those last three years there were some comedy bits, and that was fine. There was that whole Bob Barker thing for example. And most of the guest host stuff was done for fun. Once again, you can’t do the same thing all the time. But the crux of it was to be very serious. Like you said, a loathsome jerk, who has no redeeming qualities to him. And that’s why it worked. I did enjoy playing that because it’s a challenge. It’s hard to do. It’s not easy. You can’t just go out there and say, if you’re in New York City, “Ah, I hate the Yankees. The Yankees suck.” Boo! “Well, I’m a great heel.” No, that’s cheap heat. The secret is, how do you get the people in New York to boo you without saying that? Saying you love the Yankees and still get them to boo you. That’s a challenge.
AC: I remember, I was there live for the Great American Bash ’08 when you had a match with Shawn. I thought this was just tremendous heel work. This was the match where I think maybe they stopped it because maybe Shawn was bleeding out of the eye or something. And the next match, or a couple matches later, was the finals of the tournament to crown the first Divas champion. And in the middle of the celebration, you came out and you told all the fans to hold on to their ticket stubs, because they had just witnessed Shawn Michaels’ last match. The place just went nuts. It was just a very, very smarmy thing to say and do.
CJ: It’s funny, you do some of this stuff, and I totally forgot about that. I’ve told people in WWE, “You guys should make a whole DVD set.” There were two great angles at the time. There was Edge and Undertaker and Jericho and Michaels. They both lasted six or eight months. And they were the two last great stories in WWE for a while, I think. You could have put those entire chronicles on DVD—every match, every interview. The whole thing. And it really would be kind of a handbook on now to do a great angle. You had the most evil villain and the long-beloved babyface. Both shows were so hot because you had that cornerstone of Michaels-Jericho on Raw and Edge-Taker on Smackdown. It was kind of a golden time for fans, for sure.
AC: I think you went on to have other angles that had that similar kind of intensity. You mentioned Rey Mysterio. It was maybe a notch below the Shawn Michaels feud, but several notches above almost anything else WWE was doing. What do you think you were bringing to your rivalries that made them more intense, more personal, more compelling than anything else that was going on in WWE?
CJ: First of all, it goes back to the international experience I was talking about before. (Rey and I) had a lot of places we could go, a lot of things we could dip into. The whole Mexican culture of the mask match, and all the spots you do during a mask match. There was just so much stuff that Mysterio and I could do because we had that history there. Not a lot of people know what it’s like to be in Mexico wrestling, and we both did, obviously. And the real thing was the mask. That was the major, major thing. And they had kind of flirted with mask vs. mask matches before, and losing a mask. But this was real. This was not just a one-time thing. This was a three or four-month crusade for Jericho to take his mask. And why did I want to take his mask? Because I could. End of story. I was explaining that to Vince, “I’m a bully and I want your milk money.” “Well, why do you want his milk money?” “Because I want it.” And that’s the reason that I wanted his mask, because I was a bully. It was about giving me that reward. Why can’t everyone wear one? Why does he get to wear one? Just to see this character who had been in WWE for 10 years and wears this mask and was so popular, and yet we had never done anything with that mask. We never explained why he wore it. We never really had anyone try to take it. That was the first time we had really done that, and it really, really worked out well.
AC: Did you think that feud ended a little early? I know a lot of fans thought it did.
CJ: Maybe, but we still ended up having like six matches over or a three-and-a-half or four-month period that were six classic matches. All of them are great. So I don’t think it really ended early. I think a lot of people are just comparing it to the Shawn Michaels thing where there were a lot of twists and turns. Maybe we could have put another twist in it, but for what we had and what was going on, I think three months is long enough. And each match got better than the last. I think the crescendo of that was amazing. So I wasn’t feeling that at all.
AC: After that Rey Mysterio feud, were you disappointed at all where Chris Jericho went in WWE? You went on to main event several more pay per views. But I don’t know if anything you did was as compelling as those two feuds. And toward the end there you were losing a lot on TV and working with some newer, younger guys. Any disappointment or bitterness over the last year or so?
CJ: What was there to be bitter about? I was the World champion at WrestleMania. Some times you have angles that really connect and really work. Other times you try as best you can to do things well. The big thing at the time was that Edge got hurt. We had a lot of plans to do this big tag team that split up and then go from there. And then Edge got hurt and we had to change everything. I think the stuff with Big Show was great. I think it turned out way better than it had reason to. I enjoyed that immensely. And then when Edge came back, we kind of had to start really quickly from scratch almost. And I enjoyed the stuff that I did with Edge. As far as losing, the only guys who were really stuck on the losing were guys who were reporting on it. Most of the losses were my idea. It’s not like there was anything going on behind the scenes. Once again, we’re at a time where you have a lot of young guys and you’ve got to build them up quickly, so you have them win. I could lose every night. I can lose to you. You think anybody’s going to care? Nobody.
What follows is the full transcript of the Press Conference Senior Writer Al Castle conducted with Chris Jericho in December. The edited print version appears in the current issue of Pro Wrestling Illustrated, our annual year-end awards special, available now at newsstands and by following the link on the right.
AL CASTLE: Can you talk a bit about what your status is right now with WWE? We obviously haven’t seen you there for a few months, but there have been some indications that you might look forward to working there again.
CHRIS JERICHO: As simple as you can put it, my contract ran out and I’ve moved on. That’s basically it. People are always looking for dirt and ask, “When are you coming back?” and “What happened?” and whatever. My contract ended and I decided to continue on in my life. That’s basically in a nutshell the answer to give you. I’m not working with WWE. I loved the work I was doing. I think it was some of the best of my career. But I never intended to re-sign again after coming back for that three-year period. And that three-year period ran out and there’s other things going on. That’s basically it. There’s no hidden agenda. No hidden secret. People are waiting for the other shoe to drop, and there really isn’t another shoe to drop. I did the job I was signed up to do, and that’s it.
AC: So do you see your wrestling career in the past tense now? Do you think you’ve wrestled your last match?
CJ: Who knows? I’ve never judged my life that way, in terms of, “I’m going to do this and I’m going to do that.” I’ve always kind of gone with my heart. As of right now I don’t see myself returning to WWE any time soon. That’s not to say that I’ll never return, but I have no plans, no schedule, no time line for it. Every fan that I see is like, “Hey when are you coming back? What’s going? What are you doing?” And I’ve never really thought that far ahead. As far as I know right now, I don’t have any plans to come back any time in the near future. Sorry if that disappoints anybody! (laughing)
AC: For WWE, the timing is not ideal, because it comes at the same time that they’ve lost so much other talent. Shawn Michaels and Batista both left several months ago. The Undertaker is on the shelf. Triple-H is on the shelf. And so I could see them taking your loss worse than if it came at another time. Did that put any pressure on you when your contract was coming up?
CJ: No. It may sound selfish, but that’s really none of my concern. That’s how it works man… I don’t have any obligation to the company to stay because they don’t have anybody else. That’s their responsibility. That’s their issue. And I think it’s better for them if they lose a lot of top guys, because then they don’t rely on the same thing over and over again. They’re forced to make changes. They’re forced to use new guys. They’re forced to move forward, which is something they could have done a couple years ago, but they really didn’t. So now they have no choice. The business will be fine without Chris Jericho. It was fine when Shawn Michaels left. It was fine when Bret Hart left. Guys move on. That’s how it works. You can’t stay there forever. Not everybody’s going to be a Ric Flair type of guy or a Hogan type of guy that stays there for years and years and years. I know I’m not. I never planned to be. So if leaving put the company in a lurch, it won’t be in a lurch for long. WWE is going to be just fine without Jericho. They were just fine before I got there, and they’ll be just fine after I’ve left there. It forces them to take a chance with some guys. You know, that’s the bad thing about the business nowadays. Before there were always lots of guys in other countries, and guys climbing up the ranks, and guys that had experience who weren’t with WWE. Now the way that it works is that all your guys are in WWE, and that’s it. And a lot of those guys don’t have a lot of experience, but that’s just the way the business has moved nowadays. So they’re forced to take a chance on guys who they might not have taken a chance on before… So good for them. Like I said, when Steve Austin left, the business was strong. When the Rock was left the business was strong. Me leaving is not going to affect it either way.
AC: I’d say one thing about your departure that maybe is different than some of the other people WWE has lost. It’s something that’s not easily replaced, and made worse since Shawn Michaels left. It’s having that guy who can wrestle. They have a lot of stars and attractions and they’ve done a good job of bringing guys up. But when you think of who is going to deliver that five-star match at WrestleMania and really bring home the wrestling, I don’t see that many guys there who could. There are a lot of good wrestlers, and even very good wrestlers. But maybe not that many great wrestlers. Do you agree with that?
CJ: Well, the one thing you can’t teach is experience. And that’s what made the great wrestlers great. If you look at all the guys over the years who were able to churn out great matches over and over again, they were guys that had years of experience under their belts to be able to do that. They knew a lot of different styles, and had life experiences and lots of different matches they could draw upon to create great matches. Unfortunately, you might never have those guys again, because times have changed. Now you guys who have five, six, seven, eight years experience working at the top of the top, whereas before you had guys who 15 years experience or 20 years experience. You just might never have that anymore. It’s one of those things where the whole game has changed now the curve will now maybe drop. And what used to be a three star match five years ago, just may end up being the five star match of the future, because you just might not be able to replace that ever. You just don’t have guys like with that experience and it’s not built that way anymore. It’s kind of sad in a lot of ways. You can’t just take out a magic wand and say, “This guy’s going to be a five star wrestler.” You either have it or you don’t, and it takes years and years of experience to be able to cultivate those ideas and mindsets. And a lot of guys might never, ever get that, because they don’t have that diversity to fall back on.
AC: What do you think of some of the recruiting tools that you see now, as far as shows like NXT? There’s some talk of bringing back Tough Enough. Obviously, that’s a big difference from the way you broke into the business and how you finally got into WWE. Do you resent at all some of the guys who are coming through those shows and getting big breaks so quickly?
CJ: I don’t resent anyone. They have to do what they have to do. And they have to get new guys. You can’t get stuck on past ways. “They way we used to do things is this.” Well, those days are gone. Guys working in Japan, and Mexico, and ECW, and Smoky Mountain Wrestling and WCW—It’s done. It doesn’t work that way anymore. So you’ve got to get guys where you can. And once in a while you get guys who come through like Sheamus or (Wade) Barrett or Danielson (Daniel Bryan) who have been in the system for years and years and years. But the majority aren’t like that. So you can’t sit on a high horse and say, “Those guys didn’t pay their dues,” because it’s just not like that anymore. So if they can do an NXT or a Tough Enough and find some new guys who can be entertaining and put on a show, then they’re going to have to do that, because the days of the guys traveling worldwide and ending up in WWE are gone. It took me nine years to get to WWE, and when I got there I still wasn’t polished. I still had lots to learn. Now you get guys with nine months of experience who are on TV. But you have to find those guys somewhere. So whichever way they want to do it, go for it.
AC: You responded to a comment Kevin Nash made where he criticized WWE’s youth movement and spoke in favor of having some older, more established guys on top. I wanted to ask you what you thought the right mix was, and what you thought the role of the older, veteran, 40-plus wrestler is in a company that’s trying to get younger.
CJ: It’s like a sports team. You look at a guy like—I know, Brett Favre may be a bad example because he’s having a bad season. But you look at a guy like (recently retired NHL defenseman) Chris Chelios a couple of years ago that was in his mid-40s and was still the best guy in the game. There’s still a place for guys who are older and it’s not necessary to just take care of the young guys. You are who you are. There are guys who are better in their 40s than in their 30s. There are guys who are done by the time they’re 25, 26, 27 years old. So you can’t really say, “Well this guy can work until he’s 45, and this guy can work until he’s 50.” Everybody’s got a certain shelf life. Some guy’s shelf life is longer than others. That’s why you always have to have young guys come in. You always have to have big drafts come in. And you can’t keep guys on top just because they have name value. That’s the dumbest thing I’ve ever heard in my life. You have to be able to entertain and you have to be able to provide the certain quality of work that they’re you’re always used to. Just because a certain somebody had name value in 1999 when wrestling was quote-unquote hot, doesn’t mean they necessarily should be on top in 2010. It’s a case-by-case basis. I remember Eric Bischoff saying when I was in WCW that you have to be on TV seven or eight years before you can really get over. Well, guess what, now 90 percent of the guys you have haven’t been on TV seven or eight years. That’s just a dumb thing to say anyways, because there were guys like the Ultimate Warrior and Bill Goldberg who were on TV for two months and got over huge. So everybody has to be judged individually. You can’t have this blanket statement of “It has to be this” or “It has to be that.” It’s like, well, who’s available at the time? What have we got to do with them? What can we do with them? And what do they bring to the table? And what are their strengths and what are their weaknesses? That was one of the best things about the old ECW. (Paul) Heyman was always good about hiding those weaknesses and focusing on the strengths. We went through a really bad phase in WWE in the 2000s where it was the opposite. People were hung up on people’s weaknesses, and not on their strengths. This business is all show business. We can do whatever we want. So you can mask the things that people don’t do well and focus on their strengths. And that’s what they’re having to do at this point after years and years and years of being spoiled, because there was this huge influx of talent, of all these great performers who had five, 10, 15 years of experience and were fresh. Well, that’s done. So now you have to create a product somehow. And you have to put people on TV somehow. So they’re starting to go back on focusing on the positives and trying to stay away from the negatives, which is something wrestling’s always been built on.
AC: You just criticized some things Kevin Nash and Eric Bischoff have said, and you’ve had other comments about TNA. You calling it a “vanity promotion” was picked up some places. As a whole, how do you see TNA? There’s been some speculation in the past that maybe you’d end up there some day.
CJ: First of all, the “vanity project” thing, you know, you say certain things in interviews. It’s not like I spent hours and hours on end saying that. I might have said it at the end of a long sentence in talking about it. And of course that’s what gets picked up and it becomes “Chris Jericho said this.” As far as going there, I’ll never go there, not because I have any problems with them, but because I’m WWE for life. I always wanted to work with WWE, from when I was a kid. I never cared about WCW when I was growing up. I went to WCW for one reason, and that was to get to WWE. And once I got to WWE, I said I’ll never wrestle another match outside WWE for as long as I’m in the business. And I haven’t. Even when I was off for two years starting in 2005, I never worked anywhere else, in the independents or anything like that. And that will never change. I would love for TNA to get huge. I want them to. And I think there’s glimpses of greatness there. But, to be honest, I don’t watch a lot of what they do to even be able to have an opinion at this point. I don’t have time to watch wrestling as it is. I just think a company with that much talent should be doing better than they are. They’ve had the same ratings for the last three years. It’s just unacceptable with the amount of talent they have there, just as a business. I run my own business as well. I run the business of “Fozzy.” And if somebody’s not performing and we’re not getting bigger, than something has to change. So I just wish they would look at it that way, instead of relying on the same old things and the same old people. They’ve been trying different things and something isn’t clicking. They’ve had the same million and a half viewers for the last three years. Just as an outsider looking in—as any business-owner looking in—if you had the same return or the same results after three years, maybe you might want to try something different to make it grow. But maybe that’s their ceiling. Maybe that’s what they can get. And if they can make a profit with that and have a successful company with one a half million people, they don’t care about doing anything differently. It’s not my concern. I’m just calling it as I see it as a business-owner and as a fan of wrestling. I would love nothing more than for TNA to get 2 million viewers, 3 million viewers, 10 million viewers. Whatever it takes, I’d love to see that happen. I pull for them every time I hear about them.
AC: I want to talk a little bit more about your last few years in WWE before your most recent departure. You took a two-year break from the business and pursued some other ventures. And when you came back there was some speculation about, “Well maybe his heart is not in it as much as before. He wants to do these other things—write books and act and perform with his band.” And then you went on to have what I think a lot of people thought was the three best years of your career, completely reinvented yourself, had some of the best matches, best feuds. Looking back, are you really proud of the work you did over the last three years as a chapter in your entire career?
CJ: Of course. Speculation always makes you laugh, because I never did anything freewheeling. I stepped away from wrestling because my heart wasn’t in it. That’s exactly it. You hit the nail on the head. I didn’t come back with my heart not in it. I came back 100,000 percent committed. That’s why I came back. And that’s why it took me 27 months to come back. I wasn’t messing around when I said I wasn’t going to come back unless I felt I could be better than ever. And that’s what I did. The last three years of my career were the three best of my career, as far as I’m concerned. That’s why I came back. I wouldn’t come back if I didn’t feel like I was in it and could contribute. I’ve always done other things, my whole career. I never sat back and did just one thing. I’m a very diverse person. I have a lot of ideas and I’m very creative. I have been since I was 10 years old. And that’s how I’m wired. And that pisses some people off. And I’m sorry, but I’ve always had other ideas and other things that I’ve wanted to do. I’ve never been 100 percent just a wrestling guy—never, ever, ever. From the day that I had my first match to me talking to you right now. I love wrestling, but I love music and I love acting and I love writing, and I’ve always done all those things. So, then to come back in 2007, I knew that it would take a couple of months to find out what I wanted to do. I thought coming back as a babyface was bit miscast, but you do what you are told to do or are asked to do by the boss of the company. But I still knew that I wanted to change some things, and that’s why I came back the way I did. I didn’t come back with long hair. I remember a friend of mine before I cam back asked, “Are you going to get hair extensions?” And I was like, “Why?” And he said, “Well, Chris Jericho has long hair.” Well, so did Bruce Dickinson in 1987. And now Bruce Dickinson is a better singer than he’s ever been in Iron Maiden, and he’s got short hair. So it’s obviously not the hair that matters. It’s the guy. So, I wanted to change things, and I did that. And then I really got in the groove, after all these years of kind of being in the groove, but not really. I always knew I could be better in wrestling, and I kind of attained that in the last two years. Is it the best that Chris Jericho could ever be? I’m not going to say that, but it’s the best Chris Jericho has ever been over the course of his career.
AC: Was it particularly scary to embark on that radical change in character? You had been doing the Y2J for so long. Before it was even Y2J, it was loud, boisterous, explosive. And it was such a complete 180 to strip it down to the point that you’re not even smiling. You’re just walking out in your suit, a grimace on your face. I’d think that that was a pretty big gamble on your part. “I’ve been doing this one way for so long and now I’m about to become somebody completely different.” How frightening was that?
CJ: It wasn’t frightening at all. It was cool, because it was a captivating thing. I wanted to be completely different from anything I’d ever been before. I wanted to reinvent myself 100 percent. So, that meant getting rid of the fun guy. The countdown was gone. I switched to the short tights, short hair. Everything that I did before I just changed to the opposite, and that’s why I did it. I always believed that when you turn heel, you should change and make people realize that they’re not dealing with the same old guy. I heard, “Well, people want to cheer for you.” Exactly. Of course you do. That’s why I did it—because people love the Y2J character. And when I got rid of it completely, people were like, “You’re going to bring it back, aren’t you?” And I was like, “No. This is what you get. This is a new guy all the way across the board.” I wanted people to see that I wasn’t screwing around. So no countdown. The only thing I kept was my music. I kept that the same because—I hate to use the word iconic—but it is very identifiable to who I am as a performer. But everything else changed, and that was all a calculated call from me. I wasn’t terrified about it at all. I’m always about the future. I never stay in the past ever. People ask, “When are you coming back?” It’s never been that way. It’s: What can I do better and how can I change things? It’s why I did things that way.
AC: Would you recommend the same kind of complete make over to other guys who maybe feel stuck in a rut? One guy who comes to mind is Edge, who has 12 years in the company now. He came back earlier this year and was cast as a babyface, and it never really took hold. And then they turned him heel, and that didn’t really work. And now he’s back as a babyface, and I’m not sure how much momentum he has. It strikes me, why not take the Chris Jericho route and completely reinvent yourself and become something else?
CJ: It’s all individual. I don’t recommend anything at all. All I could so is recommend for myself. But I will say this: The Edge babyface character last year at WrestleMania was getting over. It took a while because Edge was such a hated heel. You can’t just turn into a rah-rah babyface in five or six months. It takes time for people to sort of trust you. And they were behind him, even to the point where we worked a couple of shows after that when he was already a heel, and by proxy became babyface because he was working with me. And people were into him as a babyface. It just took time. For whatever reason Vince got an itchy trigger finger and decided to switch him back heel. But it would have worked. Now people don’t know how to trust. They don’t know if they trust the good guy or the bad guy, the way they’ve changed him. But I said the same thing to Matt Hardy when he was in WWE and turning heel with Jeff Hardy a couple years ago. I said, “Cut your hair, man. Change it up.” It’s all up to the individual guy and where they feel comfortable. For me, I was so over the whole Y2J thing. I just couldn’t even stand it. I just wanted to get completely different and change it. If you look back at that time, nobody was doing that. Nobody was coming out and being serious and not smiling. Nobody was wearing a suit. And that’s why I did it. And now every heel is coached to be that way. Be silent. Be straight. Because it worked. So now it’s the prerequisite for a WWE heel. But if you go back to 2007, nobody did that. And I have no problem saying that. I’m not saying I was the first guy to do it. But I’m saying I was the first guy to do it in that company and at that time. So if I was there now, I’d almost have to change it again, because everybody’s doing it now, you know what I mean? You have to original and do something different. It’s something Brian Pillman told me years ago. If you want to make it in this business you have to do something that nobody’s ever done before. I did that, and that’s why it worked.
AC: You were somebody who really embraced being hated. For so long, there’s been that “cool heel” thing, where even guys who turn heel still play for applause. It was the nWo and to some extent Triple-H when he was a heel. They still did things to try to get over. You didn’t do any of that. You were loathsome. You were just a total jerk. And you’re right. I think now you’re seeing more and more of that kind of thing. I think the Miz is like that. To some extent Wade Barrett is. It’s kind of a return to that heel that embraced being hated.
CJ: Well, at least they think they embrace being hated. But I took it to the next level. There were no catch phrases. There became some by proxy from the stuff that I said. But I never set out to make “I’m the best in the world at what I do” or “shameless pandering” a catch phrase. I mean, who would ever think that “gelatinous parasite” would be a catch phrase?
AC: I like “mucilaginous troglodyte.” You had me look that one up.
CJ: Yeah, I was just saying whatever I could, and when people started repeating it, I didn’t like that. I never wanted to have a catch phrase. I didn’t want merchandise. There’s no Chris Jericho merchandise. There’s no Chris Jericho T-shirt. All that stuff was because of me. They wanted to make a T-shirt, but I said, “Why? Why would I want someone wearing a T-shirt in the crowd that has my name on it? That’s one guy in the crowd that’s not going to boo me.” It’s an art form to be a heel and to stay a heel. Because the best characters of all times are villains. Darth Vader. Terminator. Hannibal Lector. Freddy Kruger. And all those villains turned babyface because they were so entertaining. Each one of those guys I said in the second or third movie became a good guy. If Heath Ledger hadn’t passed away, he would have been a good guy in the next Batman movie, guaranteed, because he was too entertaining. So it’s easier to make people hate you than to make them love you. But it’s very, very difficult to make them stay hating you, and I was able to do that for two and a half years because every time I was going down on a road where people were starting to get into it, I’d turn it, change it, go back and forth. That’s why the Shawn Michaels angle worked and the Rey Mysterio Angle worked—because there was no comedy behind it. And over those last three years there were some comedy bits, and that was fine. There was that whole Bob Barker thing for example. And most of the guest host stuff was done for fun. Once again, you can’t do the same thing all the time. But the crux of it was to be very serious. Like you said, a loathsome jerk, who has no redeeming qualities to him. And that’s why it worked. I did enjoy playing that because it’s a challenge. It’s hard to do. It’s not easy. You can’t just go out there and say, if you’re in New York City, “Ah, I hate the Yankees. The Yankees suck.” Boo! “Well, I’m a great heel.” No, that’s cheap heat. The secret is, how do you get the people in New York to boo you without saying that? Saying you love the Yankees and still get them to boo you. That’s a challenge.
AC: I remember, I was there live for the Great American Bash ’08 when you had a match with Shawn. I thought this was just tremendous heel work. This was the match where I think maybe they stopped it because maybe Shawn was bleeding out of the eye or something. And the next match, or a couple matches later, was the finals of the tournament to crown the first Divas champion. And in the middle of the celebration, you came out and you told all the fans to hold on to their ticket stubs, because they had just witnessed Shawn Michaels’ last match. The place just went nuts. It was just a very, very smarmy thing to say and do.
CJ: It’s funny, you do some of this stuff, and I totally forgot about that. I’ve told people in WWE, “You guys should make a whole DVD set.” There were two great angles at the time. There was Edge and Undertaker and Jericho and Michaels. They both lasted six or eight months. And they were the two last great stories in WWE for a while, I think. You could have put those entire chronicles on DVD—every match, every interview. The whole thing. And it really would be kind of a handbook on now to do a great angle. You had the most evil villain and the long-beloved babyface. Both shows were so hot because you had that cornerstone of Michaels-Jericho on Raw and Edge-Taker on Smackdown. It was kind of a golden time for fans, for sure.
AC: I think you went on to have other angles that had that similar kind of intensity. You mentioned Rey Mysterio. It was maybe a notch below the Shawn Michaels feud, but several notches above almost anything else WWE was doing. What do you think you were bringing to your rivalries that made them more intense, more personal, more compelling than anything else that was going on in WWE?
CJ: First of all, it goes back to the international experience I was talking about before. (Rey and I) had a lot of places we could go, a lot of things we could dip into. The whole Mexican culture of the mask match, and all the spots you do during a mask match. There was just so much stuff that Mysterio and I could do because we had that history there. Not a lot of people know what it’s like to be in Mexico wrestling, and we both did, obviously. And the real thing was the mask. That was the major, major thing. And they had kind of flirted with mask vs. mask matches before, and losing a mask. But this was real. This was not just a one-time thing. This was a three or four-month crusade for Jericho to take his mask. And why did I want to take his mask? Because I could. End of story. I was explaining that to Vince, “I’m a bully and I want your milk money.” “Well, why do you want his milk money?” “Because I want it.” And that’s the reason that I wanted his mask, because I was a bully. It was about giving me that reward. Why can’t everyone wear one? Why does he get to wear one? Just to see this character who had been in WWE for 10 years and wears this mask and was so popular, and yet we had never done anything with that mask. We never explained why he wore it. We never really had anyone try to take it. That was the first time we had really done that, and it really, really worked out well.
AC: Did you think that feud ended a little early? I know a lot of fans thought it did.
CJ: Maybe, but we still ended up having like six matches over or a three-and-a-half or four-month period that were six classic matches. All of them are great. So I don’t think it really ended early. I think a lot of people are just comparing it to the Shawn Michaels thing where there were a lot of twists and turns. Maybe we could have put another twist in it, but for what we had and what was going on, I think three months is long enough. And each match got better than the last. I think the crescendo of that was amazing. So I wasn’t feeling that at all.
AC: After that Rey Mysterio feud, were you disappointed at all where Chris Jericho went in WWE? You went on to main event several more pay per views. But I don’t know if anything you did was as compelling as those two feuds. And toward the end there you were losing a lot on TV and working with some newer, younger guys. Any disappointment or bitterness over the last year or so?
CJ: What was there to be bitter about? I was the World champion at WrestleMania. Some times you have angles that really connect and really work. Other times you try as best you can to do things well. The big thing at the time was that Edge got hurt. We had a lot of plans to do this big tag team that split up and then go from there. And then Edge got hurt and we had to change everything. I think the stuff with Big Show was great. I think it turned out way better than it had reason to. I enjoyed that immensely. And then when Edge came back, we kind of had to start really quickly from scratch almost. And I enjoyed the stuff that I did with Edge. As far as losing, the only guys who were really stuck on the losing were guys who were reporting on it. Most of the losses were my idea. It’s not like there was anything going on behind the scenes. Once again, we’re at a time where you have a lot of young guys and you’ve got to build them up quickly, so you have them win. I could lose every night. I can lose to you. You think anybody’s going to care? Nobody.