During the latest edition of his “Talk is Jericho” podcast, Chris Jericho commented on the first time he met Vince McMahon at his house, and more. You can check out some highlights from the interview below:
On going to Vince McMahon’s house to meet him while still under contract to WCW: “We had chatted a couple of times over the phone, and I’ve talked to Vince McMahon about this a few times, and he remembers it as plain as day, and it’s one of those things where he said, I said, why did you, I’ll set up the story first. They want you to come to Vince’s house to meet him. Wow, really? I’ve only been to Vince’s house once in my entire life, I worked for him for 20 years, I never got invited to that friggin’ house again, that one time with you. So I flew, we did the United Center Nitro, and then somehow I said I needed the day off to do whatever I was going to do. I flew to New York City, got picked up by Tommy, Vince’s limo driver, had a sign that said Mr. Pink or Mr. Blue or whatever it was, Mr. Robinson. And get in the car and drive to Stanford, and knock on the door, and Shane McMahon opens, and you gotta keep in mind, for us, we know these guys like the back of our hands, now at the time, I had never met Shane McMahon or any McMahon, to have him open the door and go, ‘Hi, I’m Shane McMahon,’ I’m like, ‘Uh, no shit, I’m Chris Jericho.’ And that’s when I went inside and you guys were having a booking meeting. So I sat down, from what I recall, you must have been there, Vince, you, Bruce, whose the guy, Bill Banks, I think Ed was there as well, Shane. I remember, I sat there literally thinking what the hell am I doing here, it’s a booking meeting. And Vince is asking, ‘What do you think of this finish or that,’ and we had lunch, you guys sent out for lunch. And I just remember like, ‘What am I doing here?’ And Vince never asked me if I wanted a job, he never said anything tampering wise. At the end of the meeting, went down, there’s like a little, a lower level thing, and there is a big giant oil painting of Vince, I remember that. And basically, I asked him years later, ‘Why did you do these things?’ ‘Because I wanted to see if I can trust you, I wanted to impress you but see if I can trust you, because I didn’t tell anybody.’”
On what he saw in Chris Jericho that made him want to bring him to WWE: “This is going to sound like the part where Vince Russo is blowing smoke, and I’m not. I’ll tell you exactly what happened. I don’t know if this is an old school thing, I don’t know if this doesn’t exist anymore, but the ‘it’ factor. I was, without a shadow of a doubt, an ‘it’ factor guy. I mean Chris, I’m telling you, I can see guys today and I’ll say, ‘Uh uh.’ You had the ‘it’ factor. And the thing was, there were a couple of things. You had the ‘it’ factor and you were down on the card. So seeing the combination of those two things, like this guy has not even scratched the surface. He’s young. And I gotta tell you Chris, something I think is missing from today’s business. Cool. Cool. You were the guy I wanted to be. And I knew you would be the guy every 14, 15, 16 year old kid would want to be. The cool factor. And I knew bro, I didn’t know what was going on contract wise, stuff like that, but I knew you were under the radar. And that’s when I thought, ‘My God, if we can get him over here, and get the machine behind him, and put him in the right role, he will blow up.’ And that’s what we did.”
On how Vince McMahon didn’t know what talent was out there because he didn’t watch WCW or ECW: “Vince didn’t watch WCW. Vince didn’t watch ECW. He had no idea who was out there. Now he knew the established stars, like Lex, he didn’t know a Chris Jericho, so I’m watching all this other stuff, so when I’d come back to him and say, ‘Vince, we really got to get this guy,’ bro, at that point, he just really trusted me. And if I said, ‘Man, we could skyrocket this guy,’ there wasn’t an argument.”
On some other guys he pushed McMahon to bring in: “A lot of guys at ECW. Probably about four or five guys, and I mean he never, I doubt Vince McMahon ever watched an ECW show. Why would he? There were so many guys I was seeing at ECW saying, ‘Man we gotta get this one in, we gotta get that one in.’ You know, 3D, Taz, we brought Al Snow back when he was doing the Head gimmick. So yeah, we brought a lot of guys back.”
(h/t – 411 Wrestling)
