All Elite Wrestling (AEW) World Champion Chris Jericho recently welcomed Booker T, ‘Diamond’ Dallas Page, Eric Bischoff, and Scott Hall to an episode of “Talk Of Jericho” onboard Chris Jericho’s Rock ‘N’ Wrestling Rager At Sea: Part Deux.
Here are the highlights:
Getting nWo idea from Japan in 1993:
About 1993 or so, I started spending a lot of time in Japan with New Japan Pro-Wrestling really trying to… that was back when Masa Saito was very instrumental in bringing a lot of the Americans over. It was really Brad Riggins was my connection. Brad and I knew each other in high school and when I got the spot in WCW, Brad and I were trying to resurrect the relationship between New Japan and WCW because Bill Watts pretty much had burned it to the ground.
And in that process, I was spending a lot of time over there. I will try to keep this really short because we don’t have a lot of time. But I was studying what was working in Japan because the bsueinss back in ’93, ’94, they were hot as hell. They were putting 60, 80,000, 100,000 people in Tokyo Dome for the big shows and here in the United States, WWF at the time, WWE, and WCW, were having a hard time in the live event side of things.
Unsuccessfully attempting to convince Hulk Hogan to turn heel a year before the nWo:
A year before all this went down, I went down to Tampa [Florida] to meet with Hulk because the red and yellow thing, the babyface thing, the Hulkamania thing, wasn’t working. He knew it wasn’t working. I knew it wasn’t working. The fans knew it wasn’t working. Everybody knew it wasn’t working, so I flew down there and said, ‘okay, I’m going to go down there and take my best shot at convincing Hulk to turn heel.
I’m selling my guts out and I see him doing this, it’s this funky thing he does with his lips. It looks like a fish. And he’s stroking his Fu Manchu and I’m thinking he’s either really loving this or he’s going to f–king punch me. He’s doing this and he goes, ‘brother, I have to pick the kids up from school. Thanks for coming. Bye. You’ll obviously never know what it’s like to walk a mile in these boots. Thanks for coming by.’ He basically threw me out of his house, but he did it very elegantly. Like, I didn’t feel bad, but I was on the way out the door.
Hogan suggesting himself for nWo’s third man:
So Hulk is off doing this movie called Santa With Muscles, right, and while he’s off doing this movie, what’s going on in Atlanta [Georgia] is Scott Hall, Kevin Nash, and the ‘who’s the third guy going to be’, right? I think Kevin just powerbombed me off the stage in Baltimore [Maryland] or something. So the next thing you know, my phone rings and it’s Hulk! He goes, ‘hey brother, can you fly out to California? I’m stuck on location. I can’t leave, but I’d really like to talk to you.’ ‘Sure.’ So I go out to California. So I sat down with him and he goes, ‘so who’s the third man going to be?’
Yeah, he didn’t know and it was going to be Sting because I had been talking to Sting all along. The original third man was going to be Sting because Hulk had already turned me down, right? So the idea of pitching it to Hulk didn’t even occur to me, like, the farthest thing from my mind, and Sting was very tan at the time, so it worked for me. Then, I got the phone call to come out to California. I sit down, smoke a couple of Cuban cigars, my head spinning off my shoulders, I shoot a couple of beers, and he says, ‘who’s the third man going to be?’ I’m thinking, ‘well, I’m not going to tell him because then he’ll tell Jimmy Hart and Jimmy’ll tell everybody.’
So I said, ‘well, who do you think should be the third man?’ I went, ‘oh f–k, here we go again. I’m going back to Atlanta.’ He said, ‘you’re looking at him, brother.’ I went, ‘okay!’ Because he saw the momentum. He saw what was going on with Scott and Kevin. He could feel it and he threw his name into the hat. I said, ‘that makes a lot of sense. Let’s see if that works.’
And once he threw his name into the hat – and I don’t mean to ignore you folks over here, I’m sorry – once he threw his name in the hat – it’s good to meet you guys – I knew that was going to be the answer, but the thing I wasn’t sure of was whether or not he would really follow through because he was a little unpredictable, let’s put it that way, at the time. So I had Sting as my back up and Hulk as my A-choice.
Also Read: Chris Jericho Claims Hulk Hogan Called Him After AEW Match
H/T Wrestling Inc. for the transcriptions
